Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 28, 1994 TAG: 9404280180
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Huggins is no coddler of criminals. But, testifying before a state commission on ending parole, he took issue with the notion that crooks so fear incarceration that the threat of longer sentences will cause them to go straight.
"We are punishing these folks in a brand-new, clean building ... where they are assured three square meals a day, clean clothes every day, clean bed linen three times a week, free dental, free medical, free educational, free vocational [services] and wonderfully equipped recreational facilities," says Huggins. "While we, the average law-abiding citizen, may think we are punishing, what I really suspect we are doing ... is providing nothing more than a respite from the demands and the rigors of violent street crime." Or, in effect, giving criminals an all-expense-paid "vacation from their jobs."
Huggins, former sheriff of Fairfax County, former director of the National Institute of Corrections for the Justice Department, was appointed to his current post by Republican Gov. George Allen, who made crime-busting and an end to parole the main themes of his 1993 campaign.
Yet Huggins has the audacity to argue that there have to be more alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals. And that there have to be treatment and educational programs for those that the state does incarcerate.
"We have to realize that 98, 99 percent of the people we are incarcerating, whether we incarcerate them for one day or 50 years, are coming out. They're coming back into the communities from which they came, and if we don't try to do something with them," says the state's top cop, the results "are going to be devastating."
For those cases where there is a "glimmer of hope - the youthful offender, the first-time offender, the nonviolent offender," Huggins says the goal should change "from incapacitation to behavior modification ... so that they don't become the type of offender that we have to incapacitate."
He also says this: The belief that long incarceration frightens criminals is "a figment of our own fears and anxieties." The law-abiding equate prisons with the loss of jobs, homes, safety, family and freedom. But many criminals don't have jobs, have never owned a home, don't feel safe, have never been out of their own neighborhoods - have nothing to lose. As for families: "You can walk into the Fairfax County Jail right now and ... find grandfathers, fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, uncles and aunts - every conceivable familial relationship. Believe it or not, going to prison in this country is really nothing more than a government expense-paid family reunion in many cases."
To some, all this may sound like heresy. We have a few problems with some of his arguments as well. (Whether or not long sentences deter many violent criminals, they still serve a useful role by separating the predators from law-abiding citizens.)
But even for the toughest of the toughies-on-crime, Huggins' comments should give pause to the lock-'em-up, throw-away-the-key passions.
by CNB