Pubdate: Mon, 05 Apr 1999 Source: Washington Post (DC) Page: A17 Copyright: 1999 The Washington Post Company Address: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071 Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Author: William Raspberry CONVEYOR-BELT JUSTICE One of the recurring gags on the old "I Love Lucy" show had Lucy working on an assembly line -- boxing candy, wrapping packages, whatever -- when the boss sped up the line. Suddenly there was no way for the frantic Lucy to keep up. She wrapped or boxed as quickly as she could, obviously determined to do her best under the dreadful circumstances, but the packages always overwhelmed her -- until someone thought to pull the stop switch. It was funny when it happened to Lucy. It's not funny when it happens in the criminal justice system. America has been accelerating the flow of inmates into prison cells, and, in state after state, the hapless jailers are overwhelmed. Robert Presley, the state cabinet secretary responsible for California's prison system, knows precisely when somebody will have to pull the switch. "April 2001," he told the Associated Press the other day. "By then, we will have exhausted every cranny and nook." If you're thinking that's the price the state will have to pay for its burgeoning criminality, you're wrong. In California as in most of America, it is the incarceration rate, not the crime rate, that is the problem. The biggest foot on the accelerator: mandatory sentences for drug offenders. A recent report from the Justice Policy Institute says we locked up more than a million nonviolent offenders in 1998. It's madness on a range of counts. First, it's not making us any safer and, in fact, may be making us less safe, with prisoners often returning to society in worse shape than before. Further, since those incarcerated are disproportionately minority men, it perpetuates the male removal that has devastated so many minority communities. Perhaps worst of all, the fiscal scrambling to produce enough prison cells eats up funds urgently needed for other purposes -- including crime prevention. California, with its nation-leading 160,000 inmates, already has crossed that disastrous line that has it spending more on incarceration than on higher education. So guess what: State Assemblyman Bill Leonard has introduced a bill calling for $4 billion in new prison construction. Somebody needs to pull the switch. At the least, we ought to be looking at sentencing alternatives short of prison, particularly for nonviolent offenders. But the best way to slow down this grim assembly line is to reach the children before they go bad. That means money spent on early childhood education, parent training, improved schools and day care. Nor is that as radical an idea as it once was. Listen to these two formulations. First: "Prison should not be the catchall solution to all of the social problems that we have -- to mental illness, to homelessness, to lack of health care, to the lack of education." Then: "Given the abused, neglected and otherwise severely at-risk life circumstances of most youth who go on to become serious offenders . . . it is a profound mistake to think that violent crimes by and against juveniles can be prevented or controlled simply or mainly by increasing the punitiveness of the juvenile justice system." The first quote is from Angela Davis, the '60s radical now working at prison reform. The second is from John DiIulio, who has advocated the tough anti-crime policies -- including incarceration -- that he believes have produced the recent downturn in the rate of violent crime. But the Princeton professor thinks we've gotten about all we can get from tougher sentencing and that we now are looking at a law of "rapidly diminishing returns." DiIulio warns that we shouldn't be misled by the relative lull in youthful violence. Demographic trends, he believes, will "exert strong upward pressure on crime rates in the years ahead unless we take strong steps to prevent juvenile crime." Angela Davis, John DiIulio and thousands of thoughtful, if less famous, observers are coming to the same conclusion Lucy Ricardo reached in the days of black-and-white TV: It's time somebody turned this thing off. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake