Are Street Crimes Prostitution and Drugs Related?
In Philadelphia, PA alone, as at February 7, 2012, Thirty-eight homicides have been reported, which makes it an average of one homicide each day. Crimes doesn't affect only certain families or citizens, it affects everyone and the nation at large. It causes great grief, pain and suffering on individuals and families. It puts a tremendous amount of burden on healthcare businesses and the overall healthcare system. It causes cities across the nation to experience an increase in yearly budgets, in an effort to maintain law and order.
Hospitals' emergency rooms across the nation have to increase their budgets to beef up staff in order to deal with an increase in the number of stab wounds, gunshot wounds, and other street crime related emergencies. Police and other law enforcement officers have to work overtime in some cases.
Drugs, prostitution and street crimes are all somewhat directly related. As the price of street drugs such as marijuana, heroine, crack, cocaine and others rise, so does the number of prostitution and street crimes. With an increase in unemployment, this will certainly cause the rate of all illegal activities and crimes to escalate.
Because much of the income which addicts spend on drugs usually comes from shoplifting, burglary, prostitution, and muggings, a rise in the value of these drugs along with an increase in unemployment will force them to find either a substitute drug, a less expensive means of achieving that "high" they are already accustomed to, or force them to find other means of obtaining the cash needed to purchase those drugs thy are already addicted to.
When there is an increase in the price of those drugs they are already addicted to, this means they will have to spend more money to come up with the same quantity of those drugs they were using in the past to give them that "high" they are already accustomed to. Also, it may may even take more of the cheaper alternatives to give them that level of high they are already used to. This means in any of these cases, they will have to spend more money. Based on the above premise, we may infer that the number of all the above crimes are very likely to increase as addicts are forced to increase their total expenditure for drugs.
Although the creation of more youth job training programs and jobs in general could help a lot to decrease the rate of crimes in cities across the nation, this by itself is simply not enough to dramatically reduce the crime rate in every city. Due to the direct relationship between drugs and street crimes, one of the best approach to fight street crime is for citizens, cities and law enforcement officers to come up with a strategic approach in eradicating or cutting down on the sale and usage of street drugs.
Some people have suggested legalizing drugs, such as marijuana, as one approach to solving the problem. However, they seems to be missing the point here! What about the high rate of violence, aggression, absenteeism, domestic abuse and so on or even the health issues that already known to be associated with drug use? Thus legalizing drugs is definitely not the answer to solving street crimes or cracking down on prostitution.