Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 28, 1993 TAG: 9401150022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THOMAS F. EAGLETON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
About 500,000 people are sitting in 4,000 local jails. Fifteen years ago, there would have been 160,000. Los Angeles and New York City each have about 22,000 people confined in their jails. Our jails are now operating at 115 percent of capacity.
There are roughly 850,000 penitentiary inmates: 91 percent state, 9 percent federal. Fifteen years ago, the figure would have been 300,000. Our prisons are generally operating at 125 percent of capacity.
We have increased our prison capacity enormously over 15 years, but we couldn't (or wouldn't) keep up with the need. The 50 states would have to go on a penitentiary-building binge of unparalleled proportions simply to accommodate the prison population already behind bars. Currently, 38 states are over capacity, with some of the severest overcrowding in states such as California (183 percent), Massachusetts (160 percent), New Jersey (155 percent), Missouri (151 percent), and Pennsylvania (147 percent).
There are practical limits to overcrowded prisons. The next shipment in of a couple of hundred inmates means an equal number have to be let out - regardless of their fitness to return to society.
The Congress thinks it knows what to do: more of the same.
More police on the streets.
Every candidate for mayor comes up with this solution. The federal government has played this card before. President Nixon had his "war on crime" in the early '70s and provided substantial funds to local law enforcement. But when the budget deficit grew, the federal government declared a unilateral truce.
Build 10 new high-security prisons for violent inmates.
We've built a lot of prisons before, so we will build some more - at an average annual operating cost, in the federal system, of $20,000 per convict. But these prisons won't even solve the anticipated overcrowding by the time they are operational.
Expand the federal death penalty to all sorts of crimes committed on government property.
This is, by and large, a public-relations exercise. Most crimes of violence - murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery - are state offenses prosecuted within the state systems. Of 2,737 people on death row, only four are federal cases. Expanding the death penalty to federal crimes of very limited application just creates a 30-second TV re-election "tough on crime" spot for senators.("I'm tough as hell on crime!")
All these proposals, like the previous legislation during the Nixon years, attempt to deal with the back end of the problem: arrest, conviction and punishment. No wonder. Congress doesn't know what to do about the front end.
No one has a handle on narcotics-driven ghetto crime. Close to 70 percent of the 850,000 prisoners in penitentiaries today were using or dealing in narcotics close to the time of the crime for which they were convicted. You can incarcerate all the runners and intermediate level drug dealers you want, and there will be hundreds of eager apprentices waiting with loaded guns to move into the monied world of drugs, crime and violence.
For years and years, we have built more penitentiaries, hired more policemen and prosecutors, made more arrests. What did we get? The murder rate has skyrocketed by 19 percent since 1988. Our nation's capital becomes a world symbol of the land of the free and the home of the murdered. As President Clinton said from the pulpit, government alone is not going to solve the problem.
Jesse Jackson, often the epitome of self-confidence, despairs of the incredible violence in the black community. Jackson, who preaches self-help and wants students to turn in their fellow students who traffic in drugs or carry guns, had this exchange with a high-school student in Washington, D.C.:
Student: "Mr. Jackson, you're in your old age about what it takes to survive in the streets. You need some kind of protection because nobody else is going to stop a bullet for you. Most everyone I know carries a gun or a knife to school, including some teachers. I will not snitch. I'm sorry, sir, this is 1993, not 1963. I don't know where you've been."
Jackson: "I've been to a lot of teen-age funerals."
With the congressional crime bill, we will build lots of new prison cells and we will hold lots of teen-age funerals.
\ Thomas F. Eagleton, a U.S. senator from Missouri from 1968 to 1987, is University Professor of Public Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis.
by CNB