As I come out of the recent deep-freeze to return from a longer-than-anticipated holiday hiatus (for no other reason than I didn't stay particularly connected to my laptop while I was eating Christmas dinner and ringing in 2014), I read in That Sioux Falls Paper that South Dakota is awash in criminal activity—and I don't even mean the kind people try to explain away as economic development or humanitarian fundraisers!
John Hult tells us—in the lead-story position of Sunday's edition—that the Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project finds a whopping 20% crime rate increase in our fair state from 2007 to 2012. Over the same period, incarcerations rates in South Dakota increased by 5% (tied with Arizona and Louisiana for 4th biggest increase), to a level where 484 of every 100,000 South Dakotans are imprisoned.
Pew presented the statistics in support of the idea that states can decrease crime without increasing incarceration, and the data indeed seems to back up that idea. The comparisons Pew provides, in fact, seem to deny any clear connection between incarceration rate and crime rate; there are places (like Hawaii and Colorado) where both went down steeply in the five-year span, places (like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania) where the rates went in opposite directions, and places (like South Dakota and ... well, I guess just us) where both rates increased.
Now, Pew's not scolding South Dakota. In fact, the Public Safety Performance Project highlights a package of reforms from last year's legislative session (and, remember, 2013 falls outside the longitudinal statistics of the Pew report) as being in line with its objectives. In the words of Sunday's article:
Reforms adopted last year shifted the focus of the criminal justice system away from prison time through an array of alternative programs, some of which are just starting to kick in. [John Hult, "S.D. had fastest-rising crime rate in 5-year period," That Sioux Falls Paper, 2014.01.05]
We clearly need some of those efforts to kick in if we don't want to keep making headlines for our rising crime rate.
And, for as long as South Dakota's crime rate increases are the highest in the nation, Dusty Johnson should probably stop trying to malign our neighbors to the north over their crime situation. If we continue to minimize North Dakota's more robust economic development by pointing out its crime rates while our own long-term crime stats indicate some problems, state officials could end up looking like an example of the pot calling the kettle crime-infested.
After all, the Pew statistics tell us that, while North Dakota's Bakken Oil Boom may be wreaking all kinds of short-term havoc, when it comes to long-term crime increases, South Dakota is the state that has to say, "We're Number One."
The bastages. Maybe we should use some of that pile of one time money to fix this crime problem.
Who wants to be the devil's advocate? Pick me,pick me. That's all baloney. The Pew Charitable Trusts is a liberal,pinko outfit that hates dubya bush and everything rethuglicans do. That should take care of it.
We're number one! We're number one!
The BLindman
I'd be really curious to get a breakdown of those crime statistics.
Is it better reporting (like with the sex trafficking articles on SDPB), or more actual crime?
Is it more violent crime or more property crime?
Who's doing the crime, and where? (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/sd/crime/)
Without knowing that, it's hard to actually make any targeted programs. If, for instance, a sizeable portion is coming from the immigrant population, we could target our social programs to help them out.
It looks as though Pew just put raw scores up, rather than adjusting for growth through a per capita normalization.
If it's just better reporting, wouldn't we see a similar up trend everywhere? Or could South Dakota's reporting have improved in some unique way?
It's possible South Dakotans are getting better at reporting crimes (reports of rape are up according to SFPD, but there's speculation the rate of rape has remained relatively flat - the message to report it has been more effective).
However, we're a growing state. More people are moving to "urban" areas. They're struggling economically (40% of children in Sioux Falls schools qualify for free/reduced lunches), so it makes sense crime is going to increase, especially property crimes.
The problem is Pew doesn't tell us much - just crime & incarceration. We need more to tease out policy solutions.
I wonder if you laid the crime ranking map (http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/sd/crime/) over a map of showing poverty rates, how closely they'd match.
Another potentially interesting comparison: Crime in an area compared to income disparity in an area.
There is a potential pitfall in looking at crime as a problem to solve, when it may well be just a symptom of a different problem--we could waste a lot of resources that way and do no good.
The report lacks substance, that being said, some of the largest, darkest dollars in SD flow in that arena.
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Some bits from: http://www.dlncoalition.org/dln_issues/gaglaw.htm
"denied information by the governor's office regarding the house building project at Mike Durfee State"
"My last attempt was to go through the legislature and that effort was blocked by Mike Rounds and Steve Cutler."
"I told Mercer about that because at the time he was a reporter for the Rapid City Journal and I was hoping the newspaper would make inquiries of their own." Haley alleged that he was never contacted back by Mercer and that within a few months Mercer became the Press Secretary for the Governor. He was hired at around $60,000.00 his first year."
"Secretary of Corrections Jeff Bloomberg appeared before that committee after I did and was faced with my requests. His response was, I was sitting behind him in the audience and he swiveled around in his chair and said to me, "If you want that information sue me."
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Now why would we want to mess with that economic development?
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Your story should read,"tourism up 25% followed closely by criminal justice at 20% with real income hanging in there at 2%ver the last five years."
The legislature keeps making behaviors illegal to generate income for the law enforcement and 'corrections' industries often for lawyers of the Democrat persuasion: is this a great country or what?
Wayne B., Les, and others thinking the same thing: you're absolutely right that the Pew data, especially as presented, is very surface-level. To be fair to them, however, they're not offering the data with any other purpose than to trouble the idea that increasing incarceration rates is an effective way to decrease crime rates. The questions brought up here are excellent ones for moving the conversation forward about (per Heidi Marttila-Losure) whether crime is a problem to solve or a symptom of other issues, and the answers to the questions are indeed necessary (per Wayne B.) before turning this post or the data that supports it into a policy initiative of any sort.