Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409210053
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He has followed through. The governor's plan, an effective effort to get tough with the worst predators, is to be considered by a special General Assembly session that opens Monday. Allen is willing to issue bonds for the $850 million that would be needed in coming years for prison construction alone.
Opposition Democrats, gasping for air, have come up with some reasonable worries about cost estimates, and some absurd arguments. The most absurd, joined to his discredit by Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, is that the proposed changes should be applied retroactively to prisoners already sentenced under the old system.
This effort to seem tougher than Allen, besides being ridiculous, is a non-starter. To the extent the retroactivity would be based on new laws, it would be unconstitutional. To the extent it would be based on a hardening of discretionary parole policies under existing law, it already has been done by the Allen-appointed Parole Board.
The argument that is worth bringing against the plan is that, as a crime-fighting measure, it's incomplete.
It will help protect Virginians from violent convicts. But note that Allen and his Commission on Parole Abolition and Sentencing Reform have not pledged to reduce crime. Their goal is more timid: to reduce the increase in crime expected to occur with the growth in Virginia's population of young adult males, the demographic group likeliest to commit crimes.
That's not good enough. Billions are to be spent on Allen's plan. Capital outlay is just a start. Corrections operating costs - and Virginia already has among the highest per offender in the nation - will rise by tens of millions each year for the foreseeable future. And none of the administration's cost estimates takes into account the higher court costs that will result from removal of a chief incentive for plea-bargaining to avoid costly jury trials.
That kind of taxpayer money should buy something better - something like slashing the state's annual crime rate to below 4,000, and then 3,500 and then 3,000 crimes per 100,000 residents, say, or moving Virginia from 16th to 10th then fifth on the list of states with the lowest violent-crime rates.
Doing so will require a both/and rather than an either/or approach to the old debate over prevention vs. punishment.
As the Allen administration argues, punishment - longer sentences for those who already have committed violent crimes and are thus likelier than most to commit them again - can also be prevention. (As it happens, Virginia's parole laws are now such a hodge-podge that their simplification would be an improvement even if it did nothing to alter average time served.)
But apart from a proposal for 700 beds for drug rehabilitation (for an estimated 20,000 drug-dependent prisoners), the plan does not incorporate other measures, such as community-based sentences and successful non-profit transitional programs, that would help nonviolent offenders get back on the right track. Nor does it include any incentives for community policing, which has proved such a success in Roanoke and other cities. Plus, while the plan's segregation of violent from nonviolent prisoners is good, inclusion of burglary and some drug offenses makes the definition of violent crime too broad.
Allen would spend a lot of money after crimes already are committed, at a time when the commonwealth already is 15th in the nation in per-capita spending on corrections but only 35th in education spending and 44th in social-services spending.
Truth in sentencing and a crack-down on violent offenders are, in themselves, overdue reforms. But the larger goal should be to cut crime, rather than simply outbid the political competition in the illusion of toughness.
by CNB