Causes, Solutions

Since the pandemic, there's been an increase in some kinds of crime, fairly consistently across the country.* (Note that other kinds of crime are flat or ignored, like wage theft and crime by police themselves.) We hear a lot about car-jacking, homicide, and organized smash-and-grabs, for instance. Some people blame "defund the police," even though police funding is at an all-time high.

Over the last week, the Star Tribune has had an op-ed and some letters in response, attempting to address the "root causes" of all this. The initial op-ed was by a retired judge and it was all too typical, blaming single-parent households. Well hey, judge, has there been a big increase in the number of single-parent households since 2020? 

I don't think so. 

The solution offered by writers like this is always to lock ’em up. After my many years, it's really tiresome to read that again as if it's thoughtful, because it's not. 

Finally, today there were several letters in response that brought a helpful perspective to the discussion. The best was from Richard DeBeau of Northfield:

I am a retired independent clinical social worker, family therapist and drug and alcohol counselor with 40 years' experience working with emotionally and behaviorally disturbed adolescents and their families.

For 20 years I was active in the development of a more than 40,000-case database measuring effectiveness of residential treatment programs (RTC) for adolescents placed in them. The Minnesota Legislative Auditor made use of it in a study about adolescent treatment needs. Annual copies of updates were sent to these departments, each legislator and county social service and court services administrator for more than 20 years.

Among our observations:

1. Nearly all the teens had been manifesting symptoms of disturbance for several years before placement. Home communities lacked therapy resources and prevention programs (and still do) for children, adolescents and families experiencing physical and emotional trauma that later led to serious behavior problems.

2. The county and state and nonprofit agencies charged with providing residential services very often lacked the resources to adequately assess, diagnose and treat of psychological trauma. [gives an example]

3. In a large percentage of the lives of adolescents in this study, there was either no father involved or contact with him was toxic to healthy psychological development. No aftercare was provided for most adolescents and families.

Most of my practice was in rural Minnesota, and most referrals were from court service departments or child mental health social workers and were also characterized by father absence.

The "lock them up for a long time and they will learn to behave properly" dogma has always failed, resulting in high rates of recidivism and cost of serial imprisonments. Over the past 30 years we have become more devoid of resources nationally, not just in Minnesota, that might have moved us toward the goal of enhancing moral decency.

A common argument in favor of eliminating supportive services is that it saves taxpayers money. There are scores of studies showing that hoping to save money by withholding support ends up costing many times more than the services would have cost. The costs associated with gang violence, carjacking, mugging, robberies and theft is an alternate form of taxation.

It is not for want of information that we are experiencing the current crime wave. We have a least 50 years of research and the examples of more successful jurisdictions to inform our decisionmaking. Continued failure to provide timely support guarantees more trouble. (emphasis added)

People need services. Just as the new research on the effect of direct payments to low-income parents of infants showed, and other research on universal basic income has indicated, helping poor people directly with money (instead of or in addition to means-tested "benefits") makes a difference for children. If the outcome society wants is safety and stability for everyone, we know how to get it.

Letter-writer DeBeau doesn't mention the ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) framework, but he clearly worked with it in his career. In his letter he didn't get into why the increase in these particular crimes is happening now, exactly, but it seems obvious that we had a significant number of people who were just barely managing to exist in a socially acceptable way before the pandemic, and since its upheaval, an increasing number of them have given up on that acceptability.

It's not that hard to understand; hard to deal with, yes, in the short term. But not hard to understand, especially given the increasing number of guns in society.

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* Also in extremely dangerous driving, resulting in a notable increase in injuries and deaths.