THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409160025
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
Debate begins this week on Gov. George Allen's ``Proposal X'' to abolish parole; and, as during the recent debate over the federal crime bill, the familiar chorus of voices about ``the root causes of crime'' is swelling once more. The public, however, seems to be demanding that the politicians spend less time worrying about root causes and put more effort into dealing with the symp-toms.
Gov. Allen's proposal has come under attack from the NAACP, the ACLU and a consortium of clergy, who have condemned it as vengeful, expensive and probably ineffective.
General Assembly Democrats seem confused. Some say it's too tough. Lt. Gov. Don Beyer says it's not tough enough. Many Democrats have attacked Proposal X as expensive and unfunded (as are these Democrats' alternatives). Abolishing parole has been tested and has failed, many charge. (The same is rarely heard about the social programs often offered up as alternatives, however.)
``Now it is time,'' wrote Speaker of the House Tom Moss in this newspaper Thurs-day, ``for the less glamorous and more serious job of making reform work and finding a way to pay for it.'' No: It's past time. And for the past 30 years, Mr. Moss' Democrats have controlled the legislature which, he notes, has the constitutional ``responsibility of setting criminal penalties and overseeing the financial security of the commonwealth'' - and of appointing the judges who impose most of those pen-al-ties.
Where Speaker Moss was all that time isn't as important now as where he and fellow Democrats stand in this week's special session. Right now they stand in disarray. It is to be hoped they will work constructively with the governor, in the forefront of reform and in cooperation with Republican colleagues.
Lt. Gov. Don Beyer, re-elected to that office in 1993 and the only Democrat to win statewide that year, has been presiding over commissions on various aspects of crime that toughened his stance toward criminals, particularly sex offenders. The politics of the '97 governor's race may color Beyer's call for toughness, but the Republican governor and the Democratic legislature could benefit from the lieutenant governor's experience.
The public is clearly fed up with a system that seems to put almost everything ahead of their safety. It's not that anyone doubts there are ``root causes'' of crime; there are. It's just that no one has come up with a convincing formula for addressing them.
President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, remember, was in many ways justified as a crime-control measure. Anyone who objected to its huge expenditures on social programs was met with the stock answer, ``It's cheaper than building prisons.'' The public is rightly wary of calls for more social programs, since the trillions of dollars expended on them by all levels of government in the last generation have not produced the promised victory over poverty and crime. People have concluded that the best solution to crime is to lock up and incapacitate criminals - and the studies back them up.
John DiIulio is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, director of the Brookings Institution's Center for Public Management and an expert on criminal justice. His findings disputing various bits of conventional wisdom about crime and punishment are in-struc-tive:
More social programs are needed:
``The public, including solid majorities of black Americans, knows the answer to crime-induced, inner-city blight: Imprison criminals. . . . Moreover, virtually every study shows that they are absolutely right about the efficacy of imprisonment.''
Prisons are expensive:
``(B)arely a half cent of every government dollar (federal, state and local) goes to keeping convicted crimninals behind bars, and just over three cents goes to all criminal-justice activities (cops, courts and corrections). Indeed, American taxpayers spend about seven times more on transportation, 12 times more on public welfare programs and 27 times more on education and libraries than they do on prison and jails.''
``(I)t costs society about twice as much to let a criminal roam the streets as it does to keep him behind bars. . . . (T)he typical street criminal commits more than a dozen serious crimes a year when free, excluding all drug crimes.''
Too many people are locked up already:
``In relation to the country's total residential population, the rate of incarceration in the U.S. has been going up. . . . The relevant measure is the rate of incarceration relative to the number of serious crimes being committed. Today only 7 percent of burglaries in the U.S. ever result in an arrest, and barely 1.2 percent ever result in imprisonment. And the probability that a violent criminal, or violent repeat criminal, will go to prison and serve most of his time behind bars in the U.S. is today only about one-fifth what it was in the early 1960s.''
Mostly, Americans want today's violent criminals off today's streets and in prisons that are the first step to a law-abiding life for offenders who choose to take it and the last stop for offenders who don't. That's not their only goal, nor the governor's; and it doesn't address every possible aspect of crime. But common sense, empirical data and the governor's proposal support it. And the proof is in putting it on the statute books, and testing it in real life. by CNB