Let's just say you're in the octopus business.
You send out your octo wranglers and they bring back a steady supply.
Problem is, your factory isn't the best. It is based on a design dreamed up in England in the year 1215, with a retrofit in about 1776.
So when you shove your catch into the octo machine, you get problems.
Your conveyor belt is too narrow, so right off, some of the octos plop on the floor.
And then your octo workers tend to snatch and toss the smaller ones.
And the octo chipper is slow and the blades are dull. Many octos come through unscathed.
And even for the processed octos, there aren't enough cans.
In the interest of efficiency, you tell the unprocessed octos to consider themselves lucky, to hit the road and go behave themselves. But for many of them, it's just not in their nature.
Pretty soon, people are complaining about their goldfish ponds being looted by marauding cephalopods, their sense of well-being threatened by sessile suckers. They march on city hall and demand something be done.
It's a problem.
It's also the state of our justice system -- clogged, antiquated and inefficient.
Riding a crime wave
We seem to be in the midst of a crime surge -- home burglaries, robberies, assaults all up 15 percent or more this year.Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's the moon. Doesn't matter. People want action.
At Monday's city council meeting, folks in law enforcement didn't deny there is a problem. They just pointed at someone else for a solution.
Police say they harvest plenty of criminals. But they wiggle free in the courts. Problem's in the courthouse.
District Attorney Peter Gilchrist says the state doesn't give him enough prosecutors to do the job. And his data-processing system is stuck in an abacus age. Problem's in Raleigh.
Police Chief Darrel Stephens, retiring in June, has been big on community policing to attack crime's roots. But at the same time, the number of cops on the street hasn't kept pace with population. Problem's in growth.
Problem's on the street
Fact is, the problem's in all of the above. And one other place -- in perception.
Criminals have the perception that they won't suffer the consequences of their actions. Fact is, many don't.
Let's fix that.
When Florida went on a prison-building binge in the 1990s, something odd happened: Crime went down.
That was a costly solution. New York tried something else a decade ago. It started using its prisons more for real bad guys by pulling drug offenders and other nonviolent offenders into alternate programs. Same thing: Crime went down.
Maybe it was the economy, maybe it was the moon. Or maybe the real criminals were where they belonged: behind bars.
Let's call it an octopus solution -- one we can get our arms around.
IN MY OPINION Mark Washburn
