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

DATE: THURSDAY, February 9, 1995                   TAG: 9502090058
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-17   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHARLES L. BURWELL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LOCK 'EM UP

THERE'S THE oft-told tale of a mental-health hospital in a very poor country where funds for psychiatrists were scarce. In making a general diagnosis, patients were placed in large concrete rooms having several water faucets on the walls.

The attendants gave each patient a mop, turned on the faucets and left, locking the doors from the outside. Those in charge, observing through one-way windows, then, made a general diagnosis of the patients' mental health:

The lunatics kept on using the mops. The sane people turned off the faucets.

The parallel to divergent strategies for reducing violent crime today is obvious. There are those who put the primary emphasis on a social policy of apprehension, prosecution and incarceration; in effect, a policy of mopping and mopping and mopping. On the other hand, there are those who, to win the war against crime, put the greater emphasis on a social policy of prevention.

Prevention programs, beginning with variations of Head Start, utilize mentoring, educating, apprenticing and the like to save those of our children who are most at risk of losing their way. These programs reflect Gen. George C. Marshall's belief that "The only way that human beings can win a war is to prevent it."

It is clear that, to reduce the number of criminals at large, we have to do both. We have both to mop up those criminals now on our streets and to turn off the faucets, or conditions which continue to produce them. Nonetheless, it is positively "insane" to put the greater emphasis on building prisons and incarceration, when it means providing less help, less hope and less appropriate values to those of our children who cannot find them at home.

We do, in fact, know how to turn off the faucet (although, given the human condition, the faucet undoubtedly will always drip). We know that some 80 percent of the nearly 1 million inmates of our jails and prisons are high-school dropouts. Eighty percent! That being the case, by appreciably reducing the dropout rate, we can appreciably reduce the violently criminal elements loose in our society.

Furthermore, successful programs have shown us how to reduce substantially the dropout rate in our schools: namely, by giving learning preparedness and hope through personal mentoring to the disadvantaged children most at risk, from preschool for as many years as necessary.

It obviously helps, down the road, if there is not only training for a job but also the prospect of a job. Not easy and not inexpensive; but far, far less expensive and less wasteful than incarceration.

We know that there are by these standards a number of "insane" policymakers out there who, unfortunately, just keep mopping and mopping and mopping - without turning off the faucets. It appears that they may have to keep mopping in Virginia for a long, long time.

To top off this insane contradiction in policy, the proponents of this apparent indifference toward prevention refuse to pay as you go, but instead plan to fund the balance of prison construction through a bond issue to be paid tomorrow by the children whom they plan to shortchange today.

It's crazy!

Charles L. Burwell of Millwood is a retired international businessman who lectures in Asian studies.

by CNB