Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 28, 1994 TAG: 9411090021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
However, as some legislators have suggested, and as some Virginians in public hearings this week have argued, the administration's actual plan needs to be considered in all its detail, with realistic appraisal of long-term costs, and in the context of available resources and appropriate spending priorities for the entire state government.
The debate is giving all of us an education in criminal justice, a good thing. It has been informed, poignantly, by the anguished pleas of crime victims and their families. But it also needs to be informed by the sentencing-reform experience of other states, and by an understanding of crime as a social pathology.
Instructive, in this latter category, is a story that rightly outraged and frightened Americans some weeks ago - the tale of an 11-year-old Chicago kid, a suspect in the death of a 14-year-old, who in turn was shot by two alleged gangsters, ages 14 and 16.
It turns out this kid was not spared the rod. On the contrary, by the age of 3 he had been beaten, bruised and burned enough to prompt social workers to remove him from his mother's care. He was already pathological and vicious. The value of keeping his family intact was not high. And he is the product of a crime problem that none of Gov. Allen's new prisons will correct.
In the words of psychologist David Lykken: "Across the land, but mainly in the inner cities, thousands of children aren't being brought up but only domiciled with parents who are indifferent, incompetent or unsocialized themselves. We're running a crime factory that turns out little sociopaths."
Allen's insistence that criminals be held accountable for their actions is entirely justified. A sociology of crime that removes individual responsibility is a pathway to madness. Plenty of kids from impoverished and broken homes become decent, law-abiding citizens.
But a large proportion of criminals grew up in abusive home environments, and failed in school. To ignore this fact - to put more resources into prisons than into early childhood education, for example - is to consign all of us to a race against crime in which prison construction can never catch up with the advancing mayhem.
by CNB