THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 30, 1994 TAG: 9408300395
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: MARC TIBBS
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
Criminals beware:
Last week's passage of the federal crime bill and Gov. George F. Allen's special legislative session next month on abolishing parole make for dim horizons on a life of crime.
Just think, all you ne'er-do-wells; state government could wind up spending more than $16,000 a year on you, including room and board, and the feds want to either teach you to play basketball after midnight or lock you up for life in newly built prison cells.
Shudder the thought!
Meanwhile colleges and universities nationwide are struggling to get by on less and less funding.
Old Dominion University stands to be the latest victim in the battle of misplaced priorities. ODU could lose up to $5 million in state aid and be forced to eliminate entire departments.
Norfolk State University stands to lose $800,000 - a fortune for a small, historically black college - and schools like Mary Washington College and George Mason University also will suffer huge cuts.
Yet our politicians are passionately and blindly devoted to getting tough on crime. It makes for good campaign fodder come election time.
Getting tough on crime is a good proposition on its face, but let's look at what we've already done.
Already, Virginia - with 16,500 inmates as of last year - ranks ninth in the country in the number of prisoners per capita. The state's rate of incarceration rose 130 percent in the past decade.
The United States jails more lawbreakers than any other country - nearly a million inmates were in state and federal prisons last year.
Yet none of these measures seems to have been enough. Violent crime still is on the rise, up 28 percent in Virginia in the past decade. Either we're not tough enough, or our resources are being misspent.
Take midnight basketball, for example.
Norfolk Parks and Recreation Director Stanley Stein says the city's version of the sport, ``Nighthawk Basketball,'' has had some impact on reducing crime. No statistics are available to back him up, but programs like this have been successful in other cities across the country.
So, while would-be juvenile delinquents and ``young adults'' are shooting hoops until the wee hours of the morning, some student who aspires to be a schoolteacher is cramming for a psych test on which hinges his or her financial aid.
Something's very wrong with this picture.
Clinton's crime bill (a holdover from the Bush administration) also will provide nearly $8 billion for new state and federal prison cells, almost $9 billion for new police officers, a billion for drug courts, a billion in law enforcement grants, and $240 million for rural drug grants.
That's a lot of money for measures that already have proven marginal, at best, in reducing crime.
Locking up more people just hasn't worked as a deterrent. There are no easy answers, but filling minds with knowledge is bound to be a lot more effective than filling new prisons. by CNB