Pubdate: Fri, 28 Jul 2000
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2000 Houston Chronicle
Contact:  Viewpoints Editor, P.O. Box 4260 Houston, Texas 77210-4260
Fax: (713) 220-3575
Website: http://www.chron.com/
Forum: http://www.chron.com/content/hcitalk/index.html
Author: Thom Marshall
Bookmark: MAP's link to Texas articles is: http://www.mapinc.org/states/tx

A FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH JUSTICE SYSTEM

He looked forward to the week of sailing every summer when he spent some
real quality time with his kids who live in another state with their
mother.

When one of these excursions was coming up not many summers ago, it seemed
like an ideal opportunity for the kids to get to know the woman their
divorced father was "very much involved with" at the time.

She was pleased with the invitation and agreed with him that it would do
her good to get away. Her answer was yes, at first, but then she had to
change it when her probation officer refused to grant the necessary travel
permission.

The two of them had known each other for awhile, and it had come as a
surprise to him when she got arrested. However, he knew her as a fine
person with many good qualities, and he wanted to help her deal with her
drug habit and legal problem.

He had never had any experience with the criminal-justice system and didn't
know the fine points about how it worked. If he had, he might simply have
given up when the judge sentenced her to prison.

But he did not give up. He felt the judge had acted with a "turn-the-crank"
mentality and had failed to weigh important individual circumstances. There
had to be some way to convince the judge to reconsider.

Figuring out the paperwork

"I found an attorney who was a personal friend of the judge, as they had
both been prosecutors together," he said. "For a $5,000 fee, the attorney
had lunch with the judge, the judge changed his order, and my friend was on
probation in a treatment center. This was considered so unusual that her
release from Harris County Jail was delayed for a few days because they
couldn't figure out the paperwork to use to handle her situation."

So he knew that it had been hard for her to break the habit and knew that
it wasn't easy for her to stay off drugs. He also understood that their
relationship helped her to combat the urges and temptations.

"She would have been far safer on a sailboat with me and my two daughters,
rather than at home by herself," he said.

When he first learned of the glitch in their plans, he figured that if he
just explained to the right official about himself, and about the
relationship, and about the sailing trip, they could get that travel
permission.

"I tried repeatedly to discuss this with her probation officer," he said,
"but was told that this was strictly an administrative matter, and to butt
out."

He hated to leave her, but he couldn't cancel the trip and disappoint the
kids.

When he returned home and learned what had happened, it would have been
only natural for him to blame himself in part. Maybe if he'd stayed there
to provide support and encouragement ... . Maybe if he'd tried a little
harder to convince the probation officer ... .

But in telling the story now, he abbreviates the ending to: She relapsed
and wound up in prison.

Life went on. He met and married someone else. His efforts at helping
someone deal with a drug habit and with the justice system are history. But
he hasn't forgotten the experience and said that when thinking about it
only recently, he had a flash of understanding about why things are like
they are:

"Far too many people equate being against crime with being super hard on
criminals."

Big stick solution to crime

He said it is as if "the solution is simply to get a big enough stick to
scare people out of being criminals, and the problem is just that we as
society have not yet found the stick which is big enough."

However, this way of thinking "totally ignores the societal causes of
crime," he said, "and the fact that in most instances, the person
committing a crime does not do a rational cost-benefit analysis."

He believes we surely will come up with a more effective criminal-justice
equation before long, because if we were to continue building more prisons
to fill with more inmates, "pretty soon half the population of Texas would
be in prison, one quarter would be employed guarding, and there would be
only a quarter left to do anything productive, pay taxes and support the
whole enterprise."

Thom Marshall's e-mail address is  ---
MAP posted-by: Eric Ernst