Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409120087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Dale Pennell does carjacking drills with her family. ``I try to be businesslike, confident,'' says Pennell, an assistant middle school principal who lives in Newport News. But she wants her children to know the rules: When you get into a car, lock the doors first, fasten your seat belts second.
In more sheltered Southampton County, life isn't much different. Susan Vaughan, a fitness instructor and substitute teacher, doesn't go grocery shopping at night, doesn't use automated teller machines, doesn't drive down certain streets in the city of Franklin and often leaves her pocketbook at home.
``I've changed my lifestyle in the last year,'' she says.
Only one of the women has been a victim of violent crime. But they and thousands of their fellow Virginians are held hostage by a psychology of fear that limits mobility, turns homes into arsenals and mocks our national promise as a land of the free.
By several measures, crime has stabilized both in Virginia and nationally in recent years. But as the nightly news churns out chilling stories - a child snatched from a slumber party in California, a murder spree in the Midwest, children killing and being killed in Chicago - states nationwide are rushing to toughen penalties for crime.
So massive is the prison construction program in Texas, for instance, that officials estimate one out of every nine adult black males in that state will be behind bars by the year 2,000.
On Sept. 19, Virginia will step into the maelstrom. Delivering on a tough-on-crime platform that helped elect him, Gov. George Allen will convene a special legislative session to overhaul the way Virginia punishes criminals.
Topping the agenda is the elimination of parole, a program that often results in convicts' going free before their full sentences are served and which, to many, is a code word for laxity and confusion in the criminal justice system.
But the complete package is larger: a major prison building program; a redesign of penalties so that murderers, rapists, robbers and other violent criminals stay behind bars as much as seven times longer than they do now; and a ``truth in sentencing'' plan that means convicts will serve at least 85 percent of their time.
To make the plan more palatable politically, it includes new drug treatment centers for about 700 of the almost 20,000 state prison inmates, plus 10 prison-based "work camps" for up to a few thousand others.
It pays only token tribute to "community-based alternatives" to prison, an idea favored by those who think prisons savage rather than salvage their clientele.
What's being contemplated is easily the commonwealth's most sweeping focus on crime and punishment since the 1970s.
But how much the proposal will curb crime - and whether tougher punishment is the key to defusing violence - is far less certain than Allen suggests.
With his plan, ``we take a major step forward in making mothers feel safe when they let their children outside to play, a major step toward making store owners feel safe regardless of what neighborhood their business is located in, and a major step toward making everyone - especially victims of violent crime - know that we will have a system of truth and justice in Virginia,'' the governor promised at a town hall meeting in June.
Contradictions abound
Reality may not be that simple. Consider just a few of the contradictions clouding the public policy debate on crime:
In a public opinion survey last month, Virginians targeted crime as the state's No. 1 problem. But despite rampant fear, Virginia is a relatively low-crime state that already spends more per capita on prisons than most other states.
According to the most recent FBI figures, Virginia has a lower violent crime rate than all but 15 states, and a lower overall crime rate than all but 11. Every other Southern or neighboring state except West Virginia fared worse.
Meanwhile, Virginia spent more per capita on corrections - $90.26 - than all but 14 states, according to the U.S. Justice Department's most recent ranking. Twenty states with higher crime rates spent less.
In contrast, since 1987 Virginia has slipped from 20th to 35th in per capita spending for education, and ranks 44th in social services spending, according to a Virginia Tech study.
All is not good on the crime front in Virginia, however.
While property crime remained relatively stable in the past decade, the state's violent crime rate - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - soared 29 percent to a level not experienced since 1975.
Most of the escalation in violence occurred from 1989 to 1991. The rate has stabilized since then, but at the higher level. Odds that a Virginian would become a victim of violent crime were about 1 in 342 in 1983; they were 1 in 265 last year.
Moreover, violent crime committed by juveniles is skyrocketing, despite a dip in the number of youths in the crime-prone 15-to-24 age group. With that population due to begin rising steeply next year, Virginia officials predict that serious juvenile crime will nearly double by 2002.
Despite the sense that crime has become more random, it remains largely a function of who you are and where you live.
If you live in a metropolitan area of Virginia, you're about three times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than if you live in the country.
But even within population centers, there are differences. Through the first week of September, Richmond recorded 121 homicides; Roanoke had none. Eighty-three percent of the Richmond victims were black, 91 percent male, and most homicides occurred in low-income neighborhoods with high drug activity.
An uncertain preventive
As Allen says, a criminal behind bars is a criminal not committing other crimes. But predicting how many crimes will be averted by keeping certain violent criminals locked up is, at best, an inexact science.
Under the Allen plan, violent criminals will be locked up longer. Many others will spend no more time in prison than they do now. But just 18 percent of those convicted of violent crime had an adult history of criminal violence, a recent three-year state study shows.
Most of those in prison for a violent crime either had no felony record as an adult or had been convicted previously of only a nonviolent crime.
Under the Allen plan, violent crimes committed as juveniles would count against offenders when authorities calculate their criminal history. That would increase the pool of violent repeat offenders, but state officials can't say by how much.
Much of the public focus in the debate is on parole. But simply eliminating parole for violent offenders, without increasing sentences, apparently would do little to curb violent crime. Between 1990 and 1992, parolees who had previously done time for a violent crime accounted for just 2.5 percent of the felons convicted of a violent offense, according to a state study.
Those who say locking up a few bad cases can substantially reduce crime are persuaded by highly publicized studies such as one conducted by the Rand Corp. a decade ago.
The survey of prisoners in California, Texas and Michigan led researchers to conclude that a small pool of repeat offenders commit as many as 600 crimes per year each when they are on the streets. Keeping them confined would have obvious benefits.
Nationwide, though, there's little proof that building more prisons makes streets safer. Both Virginia's prison population and the nation's have more than doubled in the past decade without a corresponding dip in the crime rate. The United States already imprisons at a higher rate than any other industrialized country.
At the first meeting of Allen's parole commission, the staff released a Time magazine report on violence in America. But they failed to distribute a companion piece highlighting these words: ``... building more of them [prisons] and imposing longer sentences may only increase the crime rate.''
The Allen administration counters that the time served for some crimes has gone down in recent decades, even though the overall prison population has grown, reducing the deterrent effect of prison.
Virginians face the trauma
Many Virginians who have been traumatized by brutality say even a single averted crime is worth any effort. Allen's parole commission has calculated that more than 1,600 violent crimes would have been prevented over the past eight years had Allen's plan been in effect.
"It's not going to affect the man who destroyed my life," said Mark Klavuhn, whose brain was partially destroyed by a hollow-point bullet fired at point-blank range during a 1992 robbery attempt at a McDonald's restaurant in Henrico County.
But if abolishing parole could save someone else from the trauma he's faced, Klavuhn would be for it.
The 34-year-old restaurant manager now lives in Pennsylvania and only recently returned to work after two years of therapy. He says his life remains scarred. He lost his job because of his disability. His wife was so frightened by the prospect of life with an invalid that she left him soon after the shooting, taking their two young daughters, he said.
"They said I'd never be the same," Klavuhn said.
Michael Starr, the man convicted of that shooting, had been released on parole a year earlier after serving about six years of a 22-year sentence for the 1984 murder of a 19-year-old Richmonder.
Three years before that, Starr was convicted of robbery and given a five-year suspended sentence with supervised probation.
Had Allen's plan been in effect, the recommended sentence when Starr was convicted of second-degree murder in 1985 would have been 35 years and 8 months. He would not have been eligible for release until at least the year 2003.
The only way the Allen proposal could have prevented some other crimes would have been to make the perpetrator think twice before acting.
When 21-year-old Lonnie Weeks Jr. fired the gun that killed Virginia State Trooper Jose Cavazos in Dale City in February 1993, Weeks had one conviction on his record - a drug possession charge for which he had served three years on probation in North Carolina.
"He'd had an uneventful childhood," including stardom on the high school basketball team, recalled Paul Ebert, the Prince William commonwealth's attorney who prosecuted the murder case. ``I don't think it [the Allen plan] would have come into play.''
Nor would the changes likely have stopped the brutal bedroom slaying of Dawn Rachelle Bruce, a 22-year-old Henrico County woman who was stabbed to death in March 1990, five months after moving into her first apartment. Her slayer was Robert Douglas Knight, a neighbor whose advances she'd spurned.
Knight's criminal record consisted of four misdemeanor assault convictions. Even under the Allen plan, Knight would have been free to murder Bruce, because the recommendations don't include tougher penalties for misdemeanors.
Bruce's mother, who serves on Allen's parole commission, said eliminating parole would at least relieve her of the agony she expects to feel when Knight comes up for parole in 2016.
"She suffocated in her own juices," Bruce said of her daughter. ``I've never hated before ..., but we need to make people responsible for what they do.''
Truth in sentencing
If there's dispute about the impact of prisons on violence, there is little disagreement about the need to demystify sentencing. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, both of which oppose some other parts of Allen's plan, don't quarrel with the concept of "truth in sentencing."
Through a combination of parole and "good time" allotments, sentences in Virginia usually bear no resemblance to time served. In 1992, according to state data, first-time offenders who committed first-degree murder were sentenced on average to 37 years and served 11; rapists averaged an 81/2-year sentence and served about four; marijuana sales typically netted sentences of 41/2 years and prison time of about one year.
"The system is perpetuating the problem," said Mike Riddle, general manager of an auto parts store in Franklin and the brother of a convict serving time for drug distribution. ``My brother, he's a three-time loser, and he has the mentality that he can beat the system.''
In dozens of interviews, Virginians said they want a variety of results from their prisons, with punishment and removal from society heading the list. Most people also would like to see inmates go home from prison better equipped to live productively, but there's deep disagreement that goal can be achieved.
``It's in our own personal, selfish best interest to be doing something to try to increase the likelihood that they'll be able to get a meaningful job,'' said Dale Pennell, the Newport News assistant principal who offers perspectives both as an educator and as the sister of a woman who was murdered in her Norfolk apartment in 1987.
``Rehabilitation is great in its place ..., but maybe it should be a progressional thing,'' countered John Voss, a Hampton retiree. First, ``you did the crime, now we're going to punish you.''
The Allen plan addresses rehabilitation in two ways, additional drug treatment and ``work camps'' that theoretically might promote a work ethic or encourage useful skills. The rationale behind the camps, however, has mostly to do with cost savings and a public demand to see convicts working.
More at stake for blacks
Nowhere is the debate over prison policy more poignant than in the black community, where there are disproportionate numbers of victims and inmates.
Two-thirds of Virginia's prison population is black, even though only 19 percent of state residents are black.
Blacks also live in far greater danger, according to an annual Justice Department survey of crime victims. Chances of becoming a victim of violent crime are almost twice as high for black males as white males, and almost three times as high for black males as white females. Black females become victims at a slightly higher rate than white males.
The Allen administration has tried to curb black opposition by arguing that the greatest beneficiaries of their plan will be residents of crime-prone neighborhoods in the inner city.
This approach appears to draw a mixed response.
Some black Virginians echo Allen's tough crime message. ``If you kill somebody, you [should] get killed,'' said Cheryl Johnston, a Richmonder who once was abducted and raped. ``If you rob, you get a finger cut off. Rob again, we cut off two fingers until you don't have a hand.''
But other blacks say government should concentrate resources on education, jobs and similar front-end answers to crime. Some suggest their mistrust of government outweighs a desire for protection.
``I think Allen is using the parole issue the same way Bush used the Willie Horton issue - to get elected,'' said Jeff Artis, an in-school suspension officer at Roanoke's Patrick Henry High School and the publisher of the ``Black Conservative'' newsletter. Artis was referring to a television ad in which former President George Bush highlighted the case of a black prison inmate who committed crimes while on parole.
``Crime within the black community is something the black community is going to have to address ourselves,'' Artis said. ``For whatever reason, certain behaviors are tolerated that were not tolerated when I was growing up.''
That is a theme in neighborhoods across Virginia, regardless of race, region or income. Citizens lament a breakdown of family, a loss of responsibility.
Brendan McCormack, a supervisor at a Philip Morris plant in south Richmond, and his wife, Catherine, have lived for a decade with the debilitating consequences of her rape. But when asked to ponder the causes of crime, they are as likely to recall a small incident involving their oldest son.
As a teen-ager, the boy and a group of friends vandalized a neighbor's mailbox. The McCormacks were the only parents who insisted that their son apologize face-to-face, take over tools and rebuild the structure.
``It takes care of a very short-term need,'' Brendan McCormack said of prison-building proposals. ``You can fill up the jails, and guess what, you're going to need more. ... But we've got to start somewhere.''
In 1986, seeking to explain why some states have more crime, violence, and mental illness than others, researchers Arnold Linsky and Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire hinted at the complexity of the alternatives.
They found that states and regions with the most crime also scored highest on these measures: business failures, unemployment claims, workers on strike, personal bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures, divorces, abortions, illegitimate births, infant deaths, fetal deaths, disaster assistance, state residency of less than five years, new houses authorized, new welfare cases and high school dropouts.
``Put differently,'' wrote California criminologist James Austin in describing the study, ``the best predictor of crime rates are these factors and not imprisonment rates.''
by CNB