If there were no laws, there would be no crimes. Crimes are created by laws made in Congress, so crime is a wholly political construct.

If everybody was locked up in solitary, there would be no criminals. Crime is a side-effect of living in a free society where opportunities to abuse freedom abound.

Crime is natural, an expression of human tendencies. If there were no full moon, no appetites, no blind drives, if babies' brains were not altered by neglect and abuse, people would not do criminal things.

So preventing crime is easy in theory: All you have to do is make everything legal, lock everybody up and ban the full moon. So much for theory. In reality fighting crime is a VAGUE endeavor because there are several competing ways to do it.

Policy wonks push laws with proven positive outcomes. Moral leaders push laws that express our common values. It would be nice if our best values produced the best outcomes, but oh so sorry: They often don't. The death penalty, for example, expresses the strongest possible aversion to murder, but is far from a strong deterrent.

While we like to think of crime-fighting as a war between bad guys and good guys, it's often a battle between good guys and other good guys over whose crime-stopping measures are going to be funded.

The real-life complexity of crime prevention puts ideologues through mental contortions.

The Christian Right has long claimed that the crime rate is a result of our growing moral degeneracy. But while crime rates have been dropping nationally for years, the Christian Right claims that our degeneracy is still increasing. Has moral degeneracy now begun to prevent crime?

The Liberal Left says that we can't blame poor young people who go bad—they go bad because our culture and our system rob them of all self-esteem. But if they aren't responsible for their choices, what sort of "self" do they have to esteem?

The Right says that degenerate social values, not poverty, cause crime, and they're right— only the social values that corrupt aren't the ones they obsess about. Forget sexual promiscuity, irreligiosity and fatherless homes—it's the cult of honor—the insult-me-and-I-shoot-you syndrome —that produces the most killers. White, small-town Scots-Irish enclaves of the old slave-lynching South are one of the most socially traditional sub-groups in the nation—and statistically one of the most murderous.

Left, Right or Elsewhere, the strong feelings we have about crime, coupled with its frustrating VAGUEness make us yearn for oversimplified answers. These, politicians have been only too happy to supply.

But a growing collection of studies show that the three most effective ways to fight crime are neither simple nor amusing. They are:

• Staying informed
• Financing better programs for children, neighborhoods and some prisoners
• Getting personally involved

Sad news, this, for those of us who prefer danger, adventure and watching The Comedy Channel to civic responsibility. But, while VAGUE can't always make politics rock, we can make your online perusal of crime issues (relatively) interesting.