Word: crimed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...against this dismaying backdrop that George Bush last week outlined a $1.2 billion federal anticrime package he promised would help put a dent in the rampant crime rate. Speaking in a driving rainstorm in Washington to an audience of uniformed police and the families of slain officers, he ticked off a series of tough-sounding proposals...
Though the President vowed that his proposals would help "take back the streets by taking criminals off the streets," they stand as much chance of curbing crime as a schoolmarm pleading with Jesse James to just say no to bank robbery. For starters, Bush backed away from converting a temporary ban on the importation of assault-style rifles into a prohibition on the domestic manufacture of such weapons. Three-quarters of these lethal firearms are made in the U.S. Instead, Bush would outlaw only the manufacture of magazines that hold 15 or more rounds. Gun-control advocates and many police...
...judges have shaved sentences to help make room for more prisoners, the length of the average prison term has declined from 18 months to one year. Criminals, quickly recycled back to the streets, bring the deadly code of prison conduct with them. "Prison works to reduce crime only if you don't let the inmates out -- ever," says Jerry Miller, a former corrections official who directs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Arlington...
Many law-enforcement experts point to the drug war as an example of the hopelessness of curing crime by locking up an ever larger number of criminals. In September, New York City unleashed a tactical narcotics team to make | undercover drug buys, allowing police to slap dealers with felony charges for selling narcotics. The result: a 30% upswing in drug arrests. And the ripple effect: severe overcrowding at the city's squalid holding pen on Rikers Island. Prisoners often sleep on the floor in receiving areas where 90 men may share a single toilet...
...year the figure was $500 million. Yet the system is still so crowded that Texas has already closed its prison doors to new inmates six times this year. "Corrections used to be a trivial amount of a state's budget," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. "Now states are facing severe choices between more prisons or schools and public services...