Rooting out root causes

Well, Jimmy Jones won't be around the 'hood for a while.
News4Jax.com reports that the 38-year-old Jacksonville man will spend 15 years in a federal prison after being convicted on charges of possessing a firearm by a convicted felon.
Citizen Jones is considered a career criminal for multiple prior felony convictions, including armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.
Jones might be poor, since he probably never had a job, but that isn't the reason for crime. Heather MacDonald wrote an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal that pretty much knocked that old liberal mantra "poverty causes crime" silly.
As she noted, the actual trend is that crime decreases during recessions such as the current one and the one in the 1960s. More poor people should have the opposite effect.
But, guess what? If you put criminals in jail and use effective police techniques, crime goes down. Can you believe it?
The prisons are bulging and crime is down. Liberals simply can't wrap their minds around this. Nor could they accept the facts reported by Ann Coulter showing that the most likely cause of both crime and poverty is single motherhood, which robs a child of a family that will keep him in line, push him to get an education and help him land a job.
Lastly, police know that crime increases when the population of males 15-24 is larger. From 1990 to today, that cohort has dropped relative to the overall population.
Mayor John Peyton is boasting that murders are down 22 percent in Jacksonville, and no doubt would like to ascribe it to the $30 million the city spent on the Jacksonville Journey. But murders are down 25 percent in Los Angeles. Unless Los Angeles spent a like amount for a Journey, Peyton may need to look elsewhere.
Peyton might look at the fact that there are fewer criminals like Jones and many of them are in prison, where they can't commit crimes.