The title of this Tucson Citizen article kills me: Bush tells Arizona crowd he'll help tame border. As if the border was some wild animal that needs to be brought under control with the civilizing influence of the United States government.

I'm fed up with politicians taking the easy way out on border issues. Rather than address the underlying issues, they do what they always do with just about every issue: they look for the most convenient band-aid to put over the festering sore and hope the patient will just not notice an arm falling off.

More people, detention space and resources will be made available in border areas, Bush said.

The call for detention space calls to mind an eerie episode of COPS I had the misfortune of flipping through a couple of weeks ago. It featured Maricopa's own Sherriff Joe, taking the cameras on a tour of a tent city he had constructed out in the desert to house county jail inmates as a cheaper alternative to building more jails.

Look, if you commit a crime you should pay an appropriate, proportionate penalty. I don't have a problem with that at all. That's how a society is supposed to function.

But there is also often an underlying cause when a crime is committed. This doesn't justify or excuse the crime, but it does help us understand why crimes are being committed so we can work more effectively to prevent them. Maybe we do need more resources on the border, but the efforts of the federal, state and local governments can't be limited to punishing the transgressors.

These politicians have to take the blinders off, look at the big picture, and start addressing some of the underlying corruption and poverty issues that are driving people over the border in the first place.