Did you read my comment wherein I specifically reject the notion that we need to perpetuate in Prison Industrial Complex? It's an incredible burden on our civilization and must be dismantled.
I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody.
The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.
I didn't say they were universally more common across the country. I am talking about my experience with living in New York. I am talking about seeing people constantly masturbating in the subway, having not seen that 10 years ago when I moved to New York. I am sure I would have noticed that.
If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself.
As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.
You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted).
Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year.
Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution.
If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse.
I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.
I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody.
The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.