Dig deeper for solutions, ideas to safeguard Austin’s qualities

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman August 19, 1997

Each of you and I share a commitment to the quality of life in our community.

Quality of life takes many forms: the environment, traffic and development density, to mention only a few.

But perhaps the most basic element of quality of life is safety.

If people don’t feel safe, they will retreat behind locked doors and high walls and cede the streets and parks to those who can survive there. Read More…

Reweaving tapestry of ethics infrastructure

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman April 7, 1997

The crime rate all across the country is down - for now - and Austin’s crime rate has for years been consistently below that in other cities and the nation as a whole.

But indicators abound that our future will see more blood in the streets unless we do something now. We can catch some offenders, and we can prosecute and punish all we catch, but unless we stop making more of them, we’ll never be safe.

The crime rate of the future is in the hands of our children, and they are in our hands now. Read More…

Texas needs a ‘new posse’ to tackle crime

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman, April 10, 1993

Crime stalks the days and haunts the nights of Texans.

Our anxieties have sharpened lately. The Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council has released data that provide hard evidence of the increasingly violent future that we have all known intuitively was coming but didn’t want to believe.

Our criminal justice system has for years lurched from crisis to crisis like a homeless drunk looking for shelter. But there is no shelter from crime, and like a drunk looking to start down the road to recovery, we are beginning to understand that if we are going to get better we have to change. Read More…

It’s time to confront the rising price of punishment

By Ronnie Earle, Austin American-Statesman, January 22, 1989

People used to say that crime doesn’t pay. You don’t hear that much anymore, maybe because the way things are these days we’re not sure that it doesn’t.

But whether or not crime pays, it sure does cost, and the price keeps going up. It costs $30,000 to build one bed in a maximum-security prison, and it costs $37.49 a day to keep an inmate in that prison. These figures make 2,000 person units and 10-year sentences look a little different to the taxpayer. Prison space is becoming, like any other scarce commodity, increasingly precious. As it dwindles, our attention is increasingly focused on how we use this resource.

We put a lot of people in prison because we don’t have anything else to do with them. We customarily deal with those convicted for the first time of a felony either by putting them on probation or by sending them to prison. Both are supposed to make the offender change his behavior. Too often, neither works. Read More…