[Durham INC] how to make cities safer

[Pat Carstensen]

I just finished reading an article on prisons and crime, and found the part on the review of The City That Became Safe -- an analysis of why New York City improved in safety way more than the average city in the last 30 years.
The Review starts at about the middle of this page:http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=4 
Conclusion:  Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.
Regards, pat

 		 	   		  
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