MANCHESTER, Conn.

APPARENTLY the weekend of April 5-6 was to be considered just another weekend in Hartford — two carjackings, a bank robbed by two men with handguns, a stabbing that apparently involved drugs, and two shooting incidents, one on the street and the other in a bar, in which nine people were wounded.

Though the city is the state capital, nobody in authority seems to have taken much notice, including the city’s own mayor, who emerged from the weekend to undertake something having nothing to do with the mayhem: the convening, in secret, of a committee that will study replacing the arena at the former Hartford Civic Center, now the XL Center, with something that might revive the city’s old pipe dream, major-league hockey and basketball.

It’s not as if the people at the Capitol were indifferent to crime during and after that weekend of mayhem. Of course, lately they have been practically obsessed with being seen to respond to Connecticut’s recent home-invasion atrocities, proposing legislation meant to seem tough — “three strikes,” “persistent offender,” monitoring bracelets — while having little application to the actual circumstances of the crimes that have horrified the public.

Indeed, that is usually the objective in state government — to generate the greatest possible attention for the least possible action, since action that might be effective usually requires hard choices and large appropriations, or the shifting of appropriations.

But if, as seems generally agreed, Connecticut cannot afford financially to build more prisons and state government cannot afford politically to reconsider its failed but lucrative policies on poverty and drug criminalization, Hartford may not look so bad after all.

After all, Hartford is itself more or less a prison without walls, a concentration camp for the poor, the fatherless, the dysfunctional and the criminal or the recently criminal.

While the politically correct often complain that the Hartford area lacks mass transit, they overlook the convenient van service among the city’s courthouses, shelters and halfway houses and the state’s prisons 15 miles to the north, in Enfield, Somers and Suffield. The occasional forays made by recently released prisoners into the suburbs for burglaries and robberies are annoying or scary or sometimes even deadly, but they impose on suburbanites a small fraction of the risk incurred every day by those who live in the city.

And of course if they work hard enough, those who live in the city can move to the suburbs, or at least to the inner suburbs, even if that leaves the city even more disproportionately dysfunctional.

That is, while ordinary people reading the newspapers or listening to the news on radio and or watching it on television could consider Hartford a problem, those in charge of public policy in Connecticut well may consider it the solution — and much more besides. The poor, as the Good Book says, are always with you, but at least state government has turned them into the rationale for thousands of well-paying state criminal-justice and social-work jobs with great insurance and pension benefits.

Last summer a couple of nooses were found at the Coast Guard Academy, in New London — first, in July, in the bag of a black cadet on the training ship Eagle, and then, in August, in the office of a white officer who had been conducting race-relations training at the academy.

This was construed as racially motivated harassment and threats and even as “terrorism,” and the Coast Guard commissioned a massive investigation. While the Coast Guard announced the other week that the perpetrator of the noose incidents could not be found, it added that 50 agents from its own Criminal Investigation Service, the Navy’s Criminal Investigation Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had spent 2,500 hours on the case, conducting 226 interviews and reviewing thousands of documents. No more such incidents at the academy have been reported.

Maybe the nooses were indeed threats. Or maybe they were mere staged political provocations by their supposed victims, as such incidents often are. But political correctness today demands that such incidents be taken as seriously as murder — taken more seriously, actually. For Connecticut has a few dozen cold murder cases, many of them city cases in which the victims were black, cases that might benefit from 2,500 hours of work by 50 investigators.

Unfortunately there was nothing politically incorrect about murdering those folks. By definition, as city residents in Connecticut they must have been nobodies.

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.