The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [2]
Whenever one group uses fear to manipulate another, someone benefits and someone pays, as Brzezinski observed. The war on terror had the effect of making us more paranoid not only about terrorists but also about homegrown crime. After sponsoring a survey in 2003 to gauge just how frightened Americans were, the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies introduced Masterpiece Family Protection. “Home invasion. Child abduction. Carjacking. Stalking threats. Road rage. Air rage. Even hijacking. It’s hard to think that these things could happen to you and your family. Yet, these unthinkable crimes punctuate television news coverage and highlight the pages of newspapers, magazines and websites every day,” declared the company’s website—as if the hyping of these rare events warranted a special insurance policy against them. “Each year, 58,000 children are victims of stranger/non-family abductions,” the site continued, referring to a U.S. Department of Justice study. (Never mind that the study itself made clear that of the 58,000 abductions, only about 115 a year were “stereotypical kidnappings” like that of Polly Klaas or Adam Walsh: “Most children’s nonfamily abduction episodes do not involve elements of the extremely alarming kind of crime that parents and reporters have in mind ... when they think about a kidnapping by a stranger.”)4
Emotional reactions to rare but disturbing events also lead to expensive and ineffective public policy. Child abductions, for example, inspire passionate advocates (typically grief-stricken families) to push for legislation they hope will solve the problem. Jessica’s Law, which was passed in California in 2006, is a case in point. It was drafted in response to the murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford, who was raped and killed by a sex offender who had completed his parole. Jessica’s Law stipulates that all sex offenders convicted of a crime in any of thirty-five categories be evaluated by a psychologist before being paroled, even if they had only committed one offense and were juveniles when they committed it. Prior to the legislation, parolees were evaluated if they had committed at least two offenses in any of nine categories. The goal of the parolee evaluations pre—and post—Jessica’s Law was to identify people who were most likely to commit a sex crime again, and in some cases, to confine them indefinitely to a state mental-health facility instead of paroling them.5
Two years after Jessica’s Law was implemented, as California was reeling from a $42 billion budget deficit, investigative reporters at the Los Angeles Times looked into its cost. They discovered that more than $24 million had been paid to private psychologists in 2007 to evaluate the sex offenders. The state didn’t have enough staff psychologists or psychiatrists to meet the demand, so it had to hire outside evaluators. A few of them made more than a million dollars a year in their part-time gigs for the state. The result? Essentially no change in the number of sex offenders sent to mental hospitals. There were forty-one such cases in the eighteen months prior to Jessica’s Law, and forty-two in the eighteen months after it was implemented.6
Fear-driven legislation is good for politicians looking to arouse voters, for advocacy groups looking to attract donations, for ratings-hungry media, and for social scientists, attorneys, and other professionals who choose to cash in on them. Taxpayers foot the bill. And there is another, unintended consequence of fear-based legislation for the public: rather than reassure us, these laws further underscore the already-overhyped danger.
Seriously Scary
Before September 11, 2001, the toll taken by the culture of fear was not always obvious. Contrivances such as the “war on drugs” (which I deal with in chapter 6), specious