Violent Crime Research Paper

1874 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Does gun control reduce crime essay

Violent Crime Research Paper

Nothing does more to tear our families apart than violent crime, guns, gangs, drugs, and the fear that walks alongside those terrors. Violent crime and victim rights have become a major concern for most citizens in the United States of America. Statistics indicate a decline in violent crimes in our country and an increase in our national prison population. Released prisoners commit most violent crimes. Gun control legislation, reform programs, victim rights awareness, and other programs are abundant in our country, but do little to alleviate violent crime. In this paper I will try to present the liberal and conservative views on this issue as well as my own views.

Violent crime is a complex problem and can only be responded to in complex ways. "Quick fix" solutions to the problem are likely to be misguided.

There was a decline in crime during the 1990s. Our country enjoyed seven years of declining crime for the period 1991-98, the most recent data available. During this period crime declined by 22% and violent crime by 25%. These are welcome developments, particularly following the surge of crime and violence of the late 1980s. This decline occurred during a time when the national prison population has increased substantially, rising from 789,60 in 1991 to 1,252,830, a 59% rise in just seven years and a 47% increase in the rate of incarceration, taking into account changes in the national population (Mauer 21-24).

Many observers have drawn a simple correlation between these two trends. Putting more offenders in prison caused the reduction in crime. The Sentencing project has just completed a study that examines this issue in great detail and concludes that any such correlation is ambiguous at best. In examining the relationship between incarceration and crime in the 1990s the picture is complicated by the seven year period just prior to this, 1984-91. In this period, incarceration also rose substantially, at a rate of 65%. Yet crime rates increased during this time as well, by 17% nationally. Thus we see a continuous rise in incarceration for fourteen years, during which crime rose for seven years, then declined for seven years. This does not suggest that incarceration had no impact on crime, but any such connection is clearly influenced by other factors. A comparison with other nations is instructive in this rega...

... middle of paper ...

... “Megan’s Law” requiring that people should be told if a sex offender lives in their area. (Federal Sentencing Reporter 10).

Statistics indicate that strangers commit only one percent of violent crimes against women (The New American Magazine). I want to be protected, if I am in this small percentage. When a woman awakens and sees a male stranger crawling through her window and heading toward her bed, he is not a small percentage. He is a 100 percent fiend. But, if she had a pistol under her pillow and knew how to use it, she could make him a 100 percent corpse, and the world would be a far better place (The New American Magazine). That is my reason for supporting the second amendment.

Bibliography

Hammer, Marion. “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” American Hunter June 1998

James Dao, New York Times, p. A18 May 3, 2000

Lee, Robert, “Gun Report” The New American Magazine, November 11, 1996

Mauer, Marc. "Preventing and Fighting Crime, What Works?" FDCH Congressional Testimony, 10/02/2000

“Where They Agree: Regarding Guns,” Associated Press. Los Angeles Timesn April 21, 2000

www.AlGore2000.com/issues/crime. May 16, 1999

www.georgebush.com/crime

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of 'The Prisoner's Dilemma'

    1019 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Western cultures imprisonment is the universal method of punishing criminals (Chapman 571). According to criminologists locking up criminals may not even be an effective form of punishment. First, the prison sentences do not serve as an example to deter future criminals, which is indicated, in the increased rates of criminal behavior over the years. Secondly, prisons may protect the average citizen from crimes but the violence is then diverted to prison workers and other inmates. Finally, inmates are locked together which impedes their rehabilitation and exposes them too more criminal

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison

    1347 Words  | 3 Pages

    Through the first chapter of this book the focus was primarily on the notion of controlling crime. The best way to describe crime policy used in this chapter is comparing it to a game of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’. This chapter also addresses the causes for decline in America’s

    Read More

  • Juvenile Offenders Recidivism and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

    2841 Words  | 6 Pages

    Throughout history, it has become very clear that the tough on crime model just does not work. As stated by Drago & Galbiati et al. In their article: Prison Conditions and Recidivism, although it is...

    Read More

  • Assessing the Efficacy of Gun Control Measures

    1546 Words  | 4 Pages

    Guns and crime are two words that people tend to relate, some people say more guns means more crime, and others say less guns is more crime. One thing is for sure, the current gun control measures are not working. Two articles, one by John C Moorhouse and Brent Wanner, another one by William J vizzard, take this topic and convey their own opinion about it. In their article, “Does Gun Control, Reduce Crime Or Does Crime Increase Gun Control”, Moorhouse and Wanner, come to the conclusion that Gun Control doesn’t reduce crime. Moorhouse and Wanner, believe that the current gun control measure fail to make any difference, on the contrary, more crime is increasing gun control. Likewise, “The Current And Future State of Gun Policy In The United

    Read More

  • Race to Incarcerate

    1569 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mass incarceration has caused the prison’s populations to increase dramatically. The reason for this increase in population is because of the sentencing policies that put a lot of men and women in prison for an unjust amount of time. The prison population has be caused by periods of high crime rates, by the medias assembly line approach to the production of news stories that bend the truth of the crimes, and by political figures preying on citizens fear. For example, this fear can be seen in “Richard Nixon’s famous campaign call for “law and order” spoke to those fears, hostilities, and racist underpinnings” (Mauer pg. 52). This causes law enforcement to focus on crimes that involve violent crimes/offenders. Such as, gang members, drive by shootings, drug dealers, and serial killers. Instead of our law agencies focusing their attention on the fundamental causes of crime. Such as, why these crimes are committed, the family, and preventive services. These agencies choose to fight crime by establishing a “War On Drugs” and with “Get Tough” sentencing policies. These policies include “three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and juvenile waives laws which allows kids to be trialed as adults.

    Read More

  • The Scared Straight Program

    1537 Words  | 4 Pages

    9. Sherman L., Gottfredson D., MacKenzie D., Eck J., Reuter P., Bushway S. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. A Report to the United States Congress. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1997.

    Read More

  • Persuasive Essay On Mass Incarceration

    1168 Words  | 3 Pages

    Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad

    Read More

  • Social Harm And Criminology Essay

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    As some criminologists have debated, the methods and approaches to crime control have failed miserably. They are of the opinion that the criminal justice system fails in achieving its aims in rehabilitating criminal offenders. For example, a report made in the U.K claimed that 58 per cent of the prisoners released in 1997 were convicted of another crime (SEU, 2000). Some argue that it seems for the criminal justice system there is only one answer to crime control, a prison sentence. Nevertheless, some question how accurate this method is for some crimes in society. That is to say, that for certain crimes, taking the consumption of marijuana as an example, a prison sentence is not the solution, rehabilitating individuals should be the main priority and in certain cases if not the only

    Read More

  • Gun Control: Good Idea Or Bad Idea?

    1872 Words  | 4 Pages

    The US Department of Justice reported 6,842,590 violent crime incidents in the year 2012 or 26.1 per 1,000 incidents. (Jennifer Truman) With such high rates of violence, we need some sort of protection. The police provide safety, yes, but on average, their response time is several minutes. If you’re not lucky enough to have a crime committed against you next to a police officer, you will need a more immediate solution. I propose a firearm. A survey of felons revealed the following: Seventy-four percent of felons agreed that, “one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime.” Also, fifty-seven percent of felons polled agreed, “criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about running into the police.” (James D.

    Read More

  • The Right to Own a Gun

    1075 Words  | 3 Pages

    Guns, Crime, and Freedom states that, no gun law which restricts the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns has been proven to reduce crime or homicides, not even the Brady Law and the “Clinton Crime Bill.” These two laws st...

    Read More

  • Strict Gun Control Laws

    1502 Words  | 4 Pages

    Gun rights and gun control have long been the topics of popular debate here in US. Strict gun control laws that ban guns/ make them difficult to obtain for law abiding citizens in New York City are not the solution to the problem of violent gun crime. These laws do more harm than good by infringing the rights of and criminalizing law abiding citizens. By not allowing law abiding citizens to defend themselves efficiently, these laws make them ideal targets for the outlaws (Journal of Business and Economic Research). Banning or restricting firearms has no correlation with the number of deaths or suicide (Harvard Journal Of Law and Public Policy). One of the main arguments for strict gun control is that violence should not be met by violence; doing so would only increase it (Civil Liberties Review). They also argue that strict gun control is something that the majority of the population wants hence it is beneficial (New Labor Forum of Murphy Institute). My paper is going to focus mainly on New York, with some discussion of other places.

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Gun Control

    1192 Words  | 3 Pages

    A poll was conducted by the Southern States Police Benevolent Association to find the leading cause of crime. They found out that sixty-five percent didn’t think that gun control was an effective method to combat crime (Bejlefeld). Only one percent thought that guns caused crime while forty-eight percent said drug abuse was one of the leading causes of crime (Bejlefeld). Twenty-one percent believed that one of the main causes of crime has to do with the failure of the criminal justice systems (Bejlefeld). This report proves that gun is not the leader in crime and the failure of the justice system is the leading cause of

    Read More

  • Recidivism of Sex Offenders

    2497 Words  | 5 Pages

    Martin, R. (1996). Pursuing Public Protection Through Mandatory Community Notification of Convicted Sex Offenders: The Trials and Tribulations of Megan's Law. The Boston Public Interest Law Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 29

    Read More

  • Rehabilitation Will Reduce Crime

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    All over America, crime is on the rise. Every day, every minute, and even every second someone will commit a crime. Now, I invite you to consider that a crime is taking place as you read this paper. "The fraction of the population in the State and Federal prison has increased in every single year for the last 34 years and the rate for imprisonment today is now five times higher than in 1972"(Russell, 2009). Considering that rate along crime is a serious act. These crimes range from robbery, rape, kidnapping, identity theft, abuse, trafficking, assault, and murder. Crime is a major social problem in the United States. While the correctional system was designed to protect society from offenders it also serves two specific functions. First it can serve as a tool for punishing the offender. This involves making the offender pay for his/her crime while serving time in a correctional facility. On the other hand it can serve as a place to rehabilitate the offender as preparation to be successful as they renter society. The U.S correctional system is a quite controversial subject that leads to questions such as how does our correctional system punish offenders? How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders? Which method is more effective in reducing crime punishment or rehabilitation? Our correctional system has several ways to punish and rehabilitate offenders.

    Read More

  • The Relationship between Unemployment and Crime

    588 Words  | 2 Pages

    The U.S. Department of Labor (2011) reported the national average of unemployment for 2008 was 5.8 percent. The rate dramatically increased in 2009 with an average of 9.3 percent and 9.6 percent for 2010. While unemployment rates have increased, the FBI’s preliminary reports for 2010 show that law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported a decrease of 6.2 percent in the number of violent crimes for the first 6 months of 2010 when compared to figures reported for the same time in 2009. The violent crime category includes rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated result. The number of property crimes also decreased 2.8 percent when compared to the same time last year. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson decreased 14.6 percent when compared to the same time periods of 2009 (FBI, 2011).

    Read More

More about Violent Crime Research Paper

Open Document