Crime in Britian

As always, City Journal has an excellent article up on the state of affairs in Great Britain - a topic near and dear to our hearts - this time on crime. It is a terrifying situation.

The situation in Britain, then, resembles that of 1980s New York, whose crime problems were routinely called insoluble. What the British government fails to understand is that the majority of serious crimes are committed by a small cadre of criminals, who are also, disproportionately, the authors of minor crimes. If you lock these criminals up—reliably, and for a long time—crime will drop precipitously. The reason Broken Windows policing works is not that it is inherently important to jail every petty thug who breaks a window; it is that the window-breakers tend to be muggers, rapists, burglars, and murderers as well. If you get them off the streets, the rate of serious crime will fall. To dismiss as “true but trivial” the finding that “an astronomical amount of crime is committed” in Britain is only half right. The British people know this full well, even if their government does not.