John Petro

A New Compton

A web-only Newsweek article “Straight Into Compton” gives us a cursory look at how Compton, California has changed since the early 1990’s when the city was synonymous with urban decay and gang criminality.

The community is still poor, and unemployment is more than twice the national average. But the number of homicides is at a 25-year low, slashed in half from 2005. There are fewer gunshots and more places for kids to go after school. Alongside the liquor stores and check-cashing stands are signs of middle-class aspiration: a T.G.I. Fridays, an outbreak of Starbucks and a natural-food store. Along the way, blacks became a minority in Compton, which is 60 percent Latino today.

The article is a good reminder of the long-ranging impact that the riots of the mid-to-late 1960s had on the communities in which they took place. The decline of Compton can be traced to the riots that occurred in nearby Watts in 1965. This should serve as a reminder that cities should take rising levels of inequality seriously.

The author takes a guess as to what has brought Compton’s murder rate down:

The drop in killing was due in large part to the decline of crack, hastened by harsh sentencing laws that put many people away for minimal possession. But there are other factors that may have contributed, as well: California's semiautomatic-weapons ban, which took effect in mid-1989, and, arguably, Proposition 184, or the three-strikes law, which has put away 3,186 offenders in L.A. County since it took effect in 1994, according to the California Department of Corrections.

I have to question whether putting individuals behind bars for “minimal possession” really had much of an effect on murder rates. It seems that those more likely to be committing drug-related violence are those who are selling larger quantities of drugs, rather than those consuming small quantities. And if the goal is to prevent criminal behavior from those that consume drugs, based on the idea that it is drug addiction that drives these individuals to commit crimes, wouldn’t drug rehabilitation be a better answer? It certainly would be less expensive than a revolving door approach.

As for the drug dealers and the three-strikes law, see this Rand Corporation research brief for a look at the costs and benefits of California’s three-strikes law. The brief suggests that an alternative called “guaranteed full-term” might be a more effective approach to violent offenders.

[Guaranteed full-term] would be just as effective as the [three-strikes] law at substantially lower cost. The advantages of this alternative point up the shortcomings of the new law: The full-term alternative would increase sentences for all serious offenders — even first-timers who are near the beginning of their criminal careers — and pay for it by not imprisoning many minor felons.

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Posted at 4:53 PM, Mar 30, 2009 in Urban Affairs
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