Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 12, 1994 TAG: 9401130020
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cal Thomas
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Kelly's question ought not to be considered rhetorical, because those of her liberal political persuasion have done a great deal to create the climate in which crime is rapidly becoming the No. 1 concern of everyone.
Liberals have offered excuses for crime, ignoring the need to redeem the soul of the criminal. They often think that improving a criminal's living conditions will make him less likely to break the law.
Conservatives, on the other hand, aren't much better at crime-busting. They've locked up more criminals but have not reduced their number. Nor has the number of crimes declined in proportion to the number of people going to prison.
There are three times as many people in prison today as there were in the 1960s, but violent crime has also increased 560 percent, according to Justice Department figures. Will building more prisons and sentencing violent offenders to longer terms reduce crime? No more than sex education taught without values has reduced unwanted pregnancies, abortions and sexually transmitted diseases.
Despite evidence that programs and posturing of the past by both left and right have not gotten to the root of crime, we're hearing more of the same voices we've heard before. After a meeting organized by Jesse Jackson that discussed black-on-black crime, many participants, including those associated with the Congressional Black Caucus, trotted out the old canard that poverty is the major cause of crime. If that were true, everyone who is poor would be a criminal. But most poor people, black and white, are law-abiding.
Some conservatives are suggesting tougher and longer sentences. But the threat of punishment has been a poor deterrent. Most people in prison thought they would not get caught. It seems the more criminals we take off the streets and put in prison, the more there are to replace them. America has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, so prison clearly is not the answer, even if we make sure violent offenders serve more than the often-shortened sentences they are now serving. That simply raises the prison population and the cost and delays the new crimes many will commit when they are released from institutions that do little to rehabilitate.
Because the root cause of crime is a matter of attitude and the spirit, solutions must first be tried there. Volunteer organizations like Prison Fellowship have demonstrated a high success rate in transforming the lives of prisoners. Convicts involved with the organization have a recidivism rate in single digits, compared to the 70 percent-and-above recidivism rate for most government programs that fail to transform lives for the better. Government should encourage more groups like this instead of looking for new ways to fail.
Prison Fellowship's Charles Colson thinks penal policy should require inmates to attend school, undergo drug treatment and work in prison-based industry that would give them the opportunity to produce something instead of preying on others.
Most important, we need to approach nonviolent criminals differently from violent ones. Why do we lock up check forgers, petty thieves and low-level drug offenders at great cost to the taxpayers? Often the nonviolent, nondangerous offenders become violent and dangerous as a result of the prison ``training ground.'' Requiring restitution is the answer for this category of criminal. It provides double relief to society.
First, restitution doesn't burden the taxpayers by warehousing people who are not dangerous. Second, the victim is repaid, something that often does not occur when a criminal is locked up. We forget that most crimes are not against the state but against people. The state seeks to satisfy itself, but the victim rarely gets relief.
If conservatives and liberals, Congress and the president are interested in truly taking a bite out of crime, they will resist the predictable and failed ideas and rhetoric of the past and do what works. But in an election year when demagoguery often makes it difficult for men and women of principle to be heard, it will take considerable courage to propose programs like this and even more courage to vote for them.
\ Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB