I N T R O D U C T I O N
According to the FBI's annual survey, violent crime in the largest U.S. cities fell 8% last year, a trend that also saw the lowest murder rate in a decade and the nation's lowest overall violent crime rate since 1989. In California, Attorney General, Dan Lungren announced the state's lowest crime rate since 1967, thirty years ago. Even as the crime rate is dropping, the nation's prison population is continuing to grow. Across the country, four prisons a month are opening. The U.S. prison and jail population, now 1.7 million, has tripled since 1980 and has grown so fast that one in every 155 Americans is incarcerated. U. S. Department of Justice statistics predict that if recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, one in every twenty persons will serve time in a prison during their lifetime.
And yet with more and more people behind bars, do we feel safer in our personal lives, homes and community? Has the penal system addressed the root causes of crime? Is the cycle of crime and poverty continuing to be perpetuated within the community at large? How can we expect inmates, upon release, to avoid returning to prison when the trend is to remove all education and rehabilitative programs from prisons? Every night local news leads off with stories of crime & random violence, provoking a general state of paranoia. Residents respond by installing gates, barriers, alarm systems. Dangers, real and imagined, make us fear neighbors as well as strangers. Thus, citizens avoid the contact with people that, through their participation, would improve the state of their communities. In response to these dilemmas, the Arroyo Arts Collective has organized artists for Without Alarm II: Public and Private security. The Collective hopes that the artworks in this exhibition and their presentation in this powerful atmosphere will cause viewers to consider new strategies of urban existence and join together to build the safe, just, and peaceful society we dream of for ourselves and our families.