Solving the Root Causes of Crime

In order to eradicate crime, we need to address the root causes.  These include, but are not limited to, greed, inadequate corporate oversight, poverty, lack of education, homelessness, drug addiction, racial hatred, and lax gun laws.  Education is one of the biggest factors that plays a role in what becomes of an individual in their adulthood.  Those who have an education possess the training and skills needed to make them marketable to potential employers.  Indeed, even for jobs that pay only a minimum wage, employers likely will prefer interviewing candidates with a decent education over those without.  Thus, many of the uneducated may find themselves unemployed, living in sub-standard housing and in impoverished conditions.  And as money becomes scarce, many of them might be tempted to engage in criminal activities.  At Grassroots.org, we encourage everyone to pursue formal education and stress the importance of governments and universities helping make it accessible to all.  We strongly believe that every American citizen deserves an education and it’s especially important to make it more available to those families who are not able to readily afford it. Education can help eradicate poverty, which will in turn reduce the crime rate.
Poverty often pushes children to drop out of school.  Those children who do not attend school may end up roaming the streets, exposing themselves to criminal elements and activities.  This is why it is imperative that communities provide safe places where children can gather inside, away from street life.  These include school clubs, youth clubs, and sports and recreational centers where children and youth are given support and supervision through educational and developmental programs.  Without alternatives to schools, children can easily get involved in petty crimes such as shoplifting, residential break-ins, car theft and vandalism.  After the petty crimes, these children may graduate into the more serious crimes of drug trafficking, sexual offences and gang violence.
Crime can also be related to the probability of being caught and the extent of possible sentencing.  On our web site Sexual Abuse, we present information showing that most rapes and most acts of sexual abuse are committed by individuals with whom the victims are related or otherwise acquainted.  Such relationships can discourage victims from reporting incidents to law enforcement agencies, thus failing to bring the culprits to justice.  Part of the underreporting problem is the social stigma that is attached to these victims.  Although they are victims, they are often blamed for the crime, labelled as being promiscuous and loose.  This allows the real offenders to get away unpunished, leaving them free to offend again.  As citizens, we need to adopt laws and reporting procedures that will give full physical and psychological protection to victims who report crime.  Let us not allow offenders to get away with their crimes, giving them an opportunity to repeat.
Corporate crime is becoming increasingly global and its consequences can be devastating.  Consumers are defrauded.  Our environment (soil, air and water) is often compromised.  Our personal safety can be placed at risk by lobbyists who buy influence but do not have the interest of the greater majority at heart.  A case in point is theFederal Ban on Assault Weapons.  The National Rifle Association, a powerful lobbyist organization that opposes the federal ban, including background checks at gun shows, has been a very large donor of money to political parties since 1989.  Although the federal ban and background checks help to ensure our safety, these two issues remain unresolved today.  Visit our web siteLobbyists for a more thorough discussion on influence buying.  Scandals such as the Enron accounting fraud have resulted in job loss, pension loss, investment loss, a negative impact on the confidence of the American public on the corporate system, loss of taxes due to the Treasury and more.  Today, as reported byCitizen Works, there are many other corporations today being investigated for irregular accounting practices.  A few examples are K-Mart, Qwest Communications, WorldCom and Xerox.
We must work to curtail corporate greed.  The practice of “influence buying” needs to be stopped.  Corporations must have tighter controls over their accounting reporting procedures.  We call for greater transparency as well so that irregularities in accounting practices can be detected early to mitigate any damages.  The practice of corporate disclosure needs to be widened.  This will allow consumers and shareholders to become fully aware of corporate records on the environment, human rights, worker safety and financial matters.  It will also allow us to know about corporate criminal records and litigation records.  Multiple functions within consulting firms need to be severed and made independent from each other to prevent conflicts of interest.  The Arthur Andersen firm was caught in such a conflict in the Enron scandal, as the firm served both as the accountants and consultants for Enron.  Arthur Andersen was later found guilty of obstruction of justice.  The company was essentially shut down by that and other accounting scandals.
Our prison rehabilitation and prison systems need reform.  Areport published by the Urban Institute confirms that although the number of parolees regularly being released from our prison system is large, the number of them going back into prison is alarming.  In 1980, as many as 27,000 parolee violators returned to prisons. By 2000, this number increased to 203,000.  This amount represents a 652 percent increase.  There are a number of reasons for this:
Continuing social problems drive parolees back to crime.  The number of parole officers is not enough to handle the demand of case loads.  Educational and vocational programs for inmates in prisons need improvement. Prison personnel need more training in prison based inmate rehabilitation.  This will ensure a higher success rate of inmate re-integration in to society.  Many private prisons have high staff turnover, chronic understaffing and inexperienced correctional officers.  These private prisons are focused primarily on profit, with the inmates being secondary concerns.
If those in charge of our prison system give priority first and foremost to the rehabilitation and re-integration of inmates, this in turn will have a positive effect on the reduction of crime.