Will Crime Be an Issue in November?

David Broder says that statistics and popular opinion suggest that crime will become a major issue in the presidential election:

WASHINGTON -- From Pakistan to Serbia, and recurrently in Iraq, the headlines point to the dangers of the world -- most notably the threat of terrorism. And yet when the polling firm Cooper & Secrest Associates asked 1,139 Americans in December which threat they took most seriously, 69 percent chose violent crime and only 19 percent named terrorist attack.

The survey was part of a striking report released Saturday (Feb. 23) by Third Way, a liberal think tank, and several governors, warning that the crime issue, which has slipped off the political agenda since its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, is about to return.

"Four new and dangerous sociological trends are converging to disturb the peace and are threatening a crisis of crime, if not addressed," says the report.

The trends it cites include a huge increase in the number of criminals due to leave prison in the next five years, the infiltration of criminal gangs into the surge of illegal immigrants, the bulge in numbers of young people entering the highest-crime years and the technology revolution that has made the Internet a place of danger for unsupervised youths.

The underlying numbers are startling. Twenty years ago, the total prison population of the country was 700,000. Next year alone, that many will be released from prison and, if past trends hold, nearly two-thirds will be rearrested.

In the next five years, the number of young adults and teenagers will have increased by 1 million, and, if past patterns hold, that will boost the crime numbers by 2 1/2 million.

Of course, crime as an issue would have been a Godsend to Rudy Giuliani who could tout his success in cleaning up New York City. However, I'm not sure any of these issues will benefit the candidates from either party except for terrorism, though everybody wants to close Club Gitmo. McCain and the Democrats all pretty much agree on illegal immigration, and the other issues will be secondary at best.

Although crime may become an issue, I don't see where it will benefit or hurt either party in any tangible ways.