Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994                   TAG: 9409270058
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: TONY WHARTON THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HOW WE TOOK THE PULSE OF VIRGINIA ON CRIME

We decided to ask you. For six weeks, reporters crisscrossed the state to talk to Virginia's citizens about crime and punishment.

These weren't conventional interviews, with reporters grilling residents under hot lights. Nor were they surveys, which do a great job of getting a lot of people's opinions but don't always help understand the reasons behind them.

Instead, we organized local conversations, in libraries, community centers and even a bingo hall. Virginians sat around tables and talked to us. More importantly, they talked to each other.

All told, more than 90 people took part, including whites, blacks and Asian-Americans, retirees and teen-agers, blue-collar workers and executives in suits.

There were eight conversations, in Newport News, Franklin, Roanoke, Richmond, Prince William County and Arlington. The ground rules were simple: Don't debate statistics, just tell us what you think; argue about it, but don't fight; and try to imagine we're sitting around your kitchen table.

Our notion was to learn what people understood and didn't understand about a complex topic - and what they discovered together. Sometimes, we think about things as a group differently than we do individually.

We found people were eager to talk, opening up to us with their fears and frustrations. Over 16 hours, we heard about education, religion, raising children and a host of other subjects that were closely linked to crime and parole.

For the most part, people didn't talk as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. They spoke to us as parents, children, voters, victims of crime, volunteers and neighbors.

In short, they spoke to us as citizens.

To test voters' attitudes about the same topic, the newspapers also conducted a traditional, random telephone survey.

The results, incorporated in today's articles and the one to appear Thursday, were based on interviews with 539 registered voters, whose sex and race generally mirrored Virginia as a whole. The margin of error was 4.3 percentage points.

The survey was conducted during the period July 29 through Aug. 8.