Since this is not the kind of record anyone wants on their résumé, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s outrage about this city’s record setting murder rate is easily understandable.

Last year Philadelphia logged 324 murders — lower than the 391 in 2007 when Nutter won election to the mayor’s office but not the fifty percent reduction in homicides that Nutter sought to achieve during his first four-year term in City Hall.

This month Philadelphia logged 32 murders, according to a Philadelphia Police Department posting just two days ago — a rate higher than the 26 in January 2011 and the 24 murders in January 2007.

“To every criminal out there, I just put a $20,000 bounty on your head,” an angry Nutter lashed last week when announcing new initiatives to attack Philadelphia’s murder epidemic.

“We’re coming for you,” Nutter sternly promised murderers. “We will find you. …”

Nutter and many across the city are rightfully outraged at the public policy implications of gun related murders, non-fatal shootings and other crimes.

Crime-related expenditures for police, prosecutors, prisons, public defenders and courts consumes over a billion dollars annually, nearly one-third of the City’s entire yearly operating budget. Money spent on public safety is money siphoned from other areas like jobs-creating economic development and crime-impulse cutting education.

Companion to violence spawned public expenditures is the heartfelt concern carried by Mayor Nutter and others regarding how the chaos from crime ignites fear that saps the sense of safety that undergirds “quality-of-life.”

The reality is rampant murder rates make many Philly residents fearful on both the streets and inside their own homes because the gunfire producing murders often slams into the houses of the innocent.

The recent murder of corner-store worker Reyna Aguirre Alonso, in an execution reportedly related to her providing police with information about a previous murder, again underscores the need for an assault on both the killings and the conditions creating the climate where some care so little about snatching another life.

Mayor Nutter’s announcement last week of a reward fund to capture killers, a reward to recovering illegal firearms and more funding for witness protection is a good step towards addressing a part of the symptom — catching killers.

While a law enforcement crackdown on violent criminals is appropriate — especially murderers — an arrest-imprison dominated approach just recycles an already ineffective strategy, comparable to conservatives constantly saying tax cuts for the wealthy increases income and employment for the middle-class.

Philadelphia already sends more people to state prison than any other county in Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia is a city and a county.)

Courts in Philadelphia sent 2,420 people to state prisons in 2010 according to Pa Department of Corrections data. Allegheny County, which contains Pennsylvania’s second largest city of Pittsburgh, ranked second in sending people to state prisons in 2010 with 769.

Mayor Nutter, in his remarks last week, said “We have to send a message to every punk and every criminal … carrying a gun…”

Apparently shipping tons of people off to state prisons annually isn’t sending a message to STOP! — at least a message that violent criminals are heeding.

Incidentally, Philadelphians comprise 51.9 percent of the state prison inmates serving life sentences, and Philadelphians are 47 percent of those on death row in Pennsylvania.

If life in prison or death row isn’t curtailing persons from committing fatal crimes that “message” officials have been screaming with law-&-order policies of the past three decades is missing the mark. Murders in Philadelphia have exceeded 300 in each of the past five years.

Nutter is not naïve, nor does he like to hear himself talk tough. He knows, for example, that improving education and increasing employment can do more to root out crime at its cause than doubling the size of the Police Department or DA’s Office.

But that education-employment “message” is one persistently dismissed by conservative legislators in Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., who willfully cut funding for education and jobs development programs in urban areas while willingly spending more on police, prosecutors and prisons.

Pennsylvania, during the past two decades, spent six times more on its prison system that on spending for higher education according to the findings of a NAACP report released in April 2011.

That NAACP report entitled “Misplaced Priorities” stated that in 2008 Pennsylvania taxpayers spent “nearly $290 million to imprison residents sentenced from just 11 Philadelphia neighborhoods…”

This NAACP report, that received little mainstream media coverage, also noted that 66 percent of Philadelphia’s “lowest performing” schools are located in those 11 neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration.

Suggestions in that report include shortening prison terms as incentive for prisoners to complete schooling and diverting drug addicts from prisons to treatment.

Obviously criminals are not the only persons needing to get a “message.”

It’s a crime for conservative Pennsylvania’s elected officials to spend over $30,000 to keep one inmate in one cell for a year, more than eight times the amount allocated for spending on college students.

That crime of inmate-not-education funding compounds the felonious fact of massive prison spending primarily providing jobs for whites in rural area. Placing prisons in rural areas increases governmental allocations (and electoral representation) in rural areas because of the presence of those incarcerated bodies — pick-pocketing urban needs.

Until conservative leaders get the “message” about the dire need for increasing education/employment-creation funding, mayors like Michael Nutter will find themselves handcuffed in cutting homicides.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program.