THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 17, 1994 TAG: 9408170409
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Analysis
SOURCE: BY BOB EVANS, NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
Gov. George F. Allen's plan to abolish parole and increase prison terms probably won't do much to stop bloodshed from violent crime, according to judges and criminologists from states where similar tactics have been tried.
More imprisonment, even by targeting violent offenders, doesn't always lead to less crime, they say.
Parole abolition and sentencing guidelines for judges can reduce racial bias and geographical disparities in sentencing, these experts say. Such measures also can help states better predict how many prison beds will be needed and can increase public confidence in the justice system.
But those steps have their costs, these and other experts say. Virginians will have to pay millions of dollars to build new prisons. And without a parole board, the state loses its discretion to make individualized judgments about whom to keep behind bars longer.
On Tuesday, Allen's Commissionon Parole Abolition and Sentencing Reform announced the basics of a crime-fighting plan that includes about $850 million for new prisons. The cost is about $250 million more than the state already had planned to spend on new prisons. The proposal calls for eliminating discretionary parole for new offenders, increasing the actual time violent criminals serve by 100 percent to 700 percent, and continuing the use of statewide sentencing guidelines by judges.
The panel's co-chairmen, former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and former federal prosecutor Richard Cullen, say their no-parole, truth-in-sentencing approach is similar to federal reforms under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Coupled with longer sentences for violent criminals, the strategy can deter crime, Barr and Cullen say. Because of the disparity between state and federal sentencing guidelines, state court prosecutors in Virginia and elsewhere often look for ways to take cases to federal courts instead of state courts, they say.
But Timothy Matthews, staff director of the American Probation and Parole Association, disagreed. ``If you want to see an example of a screwed-up system, look at the federal government,'' said Matthews.
Critics of federal crime policy say the best place to see the federal system at work is Washington, where prosecutors and courts adhere to the federal system alone. In most states, the vast majority of criminal cases are brought in state courts.
Washington led the nation in incarceration in 1992, with 1.3 percent of its population in prison. The district also led the nation in violent and nonviolent crime that year, according to the FBI.
The federal government and Washington aren't unique, Matthews and others say.
Louisiana in 1992 had the highest incarceration rate of any state, 478 per 100,000 residents. It also ranked sixth nationally in total crime that year. South Carolina had the second-highest incarceration rate that year and the sixth-highest violent-crime rate.
Barr said Tuesday that those states failed to stem crime with incarceration because they didn't target violent offenders for dramatically longer sentences, as Allen's commission recommends. Instead, he said, those states simply increased the sentences of all criminals.
But in 1984, the state of Washington enacted reforms very similar to the steps Allen, Cullen and Barr advocate. Discretionary parole for new offenders was abolished, judges used sentencing guidelines, and actual prison time for violent offenders increased 50 percent.
In a decade under this system, Washington state has increased some penalties even further, but the overall crime rate has not declined. The violent-crime rate has increased 43 percent during that period, more than the national average.
Barr said he was not familiar with Washington state's record. He said it is obvious that confining violent criminals longer will keep them from committing new crimes and therefore will at least reduce the crime rate compared with what it would have been had the criminals remained free.
Locking more people up for longer periods has a minimal effect on crime, the bipartisan National Academy of Sciences concluded after studying crime statistics from 1960 to 1982. It concluded in the mid-1980s that doubling the nation's 1982 prison population might reduce the crime rate 10 percent to 20 percent at best.
Since 1982 the nation's incarceration rate has more than doubled, while violent crime had increased 32 percent by 1992, according to the FBI.
There is little reason to believe that eliminating parole curbs crime, say more than a dozen judges, prosecutors and criminologists interviewed in recent months.
Aggravated assaults are the most common violent crimes, according to FBI statistics. Paul Lipscomb, a Circuit Court judge in Oregon, said the typical aggravated assault involves someone who gets drunk.
``If they're drunk and they're in a fight, they're not going to think, `I'm going to get 15 years' or whatever, much less when they'll be eligible for parole,'' Lipscomb said.
Policy-makers tend to assume everyone thinks just as they do - in a rational, deliberate manner, Lipscomb said. But an unemployed, high school dropout with a transient lifestyle and few close friends or family members has a different outlook on life.
``There are a lot fewer social disincentives operating on them to keep them on the straight and narrow,'' he said.
Only 13 states and the federal government do not have discretionary parole for newly convicted felons, according to the Association of Paroling Authorities International. Instead, most states have responded to criticisms of parole by restricting the authority of their parole boards, eliminating mandatory parole or increasing the time an inmate must serve before becoming eligible for parole, said M. Kay Harris, associate professor of criminal justice at Temple University in Philadelphia.
David L. Fallen, executive director of the Washington State Sentencing Commission, said that when his state and others eliminated parole and established sentencing guidelines 20 to 25 years ago, they were responding to problems such as public criticism of parole boards and judges, bias in sentencing, and overcrowded prisons.
He and others from states that have adopted this approach say states can better predict and plan for future prison populations because the guidelines remove the uncertainties of unrestrained discretion for judges and parole boards.
But they caution that states should go beyond the simplistic approach of locking up more people and get to the causes of crime, because each year a new group of criminals comes of age. MEMO: This report will be followed in September by a five-part series on
crime, parole and prisons in Virginia. That project is a combined effort
of The Associated Press, the Daily Press in Newport News, the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, The Roanoke Times and World-News and The
Virginian-Pilot.
KEYWORDS: PRISON SYSTEM CRIME PAROLE SENTENCING
GOVERNOR'S COMMISSION ON PAROLE ABOLITION AND SENTENCING REFORM
by CNB