If a mugger is caught, I'm very much in favor of giving him a hefty prison sentence. However, if you want a sustained decline in the violent crime rate in a who

If a mugger is caught, I'm very much in favor of giving him a hefty prison sentence. However, if you want a sustained decline in the violent crime rate in a whole society, law enforcement is only part of the picture. You absolutely do have to do something about the root causes, the socio-economic factors that were giving a generation of young men the feeling that they had nothing better to do than mug people. It's not about sympathy for criminals. It's about doing things that actually work, not just things that feel righteous.