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DANGEROUS BY DESIGN?

As the owner of an Audi 5000 during the mid-'80s, I can tell you
straight out I never believed the hoo-haw over "unintended
acceleration." I'm convinced that the reason so many of those cars
took off through garage walls and hedges, often injuring their
drivers, is that the drivers (nearly all of them inexperienced at
driving this particular car) were pressing not on the brake but on the
nearby accelerator.

But because they were certain their foot was on the brake, their
panicked response was simply to press harder.

California has been doing it again. Not with Audis, of course, but
with drug incarcerations.

Somehow officials in many parts of the state convinced themselves that
tougher enforcement was the foot on the brake of drug-related crime.
And when the numbers showed otherwise, why they just pressed harder.

Two intriguing artifacts from that error:

* California now leads the nation with a drug-offender imprisonment
rate of 115 per 100,000. (The national average is 44.6 per 100,000.)

* Counties with increased rates of drug arrests and imprisonments tend
to have greater increases in violent crime--or at best smaller
decreases in serious crime.

The numbers behind those findings are from a major study by the
Justice Policy Institute (based in Washington, D.C., and San
Francisco), and they make a compelling case that increased
incarceration was the wrong pedal.

Imprisonments for drug possession, for instance, were five times as
great in Riverside County as in Contra Costa County. But Contra
Costa's violent crime rate is 30 percent lower.

Nor is it just with incarceration that the "brake" seems to cause
unintended acceleration. Fresno County had a 131 percent increase in
misdemeanor drug arrests from the early 1980s to the late-1990s, and a
33 percent increase in violent crime. At the other end, Los Angeles
County had a 33 percent reduction in misdemeanor drug arrests during
that same period and a 7 percent decrease in violent crime.

It's one thing to say get-tough approaches don't work, but why should
they increase the rate of violence?

Mike Males, a co-author of the JPI report "Drug Use and Justice,"
offers two possibilities. First, he says, small-time drug users who
are sent to prison tend to become more serious users. They also tend
to have a tougher time finding work after their release. A drug habit
and joblessness constitute a pretty good recipe for trouble.

But a more important link, Males believes, is the matter of limited
resources: "The more resources police departments put into arresting
low-level drug-law violators, the less they'll have to deploy against
the sellers, manufacturers and big-time dealers of illegal drugs."

Before you blow off the findings as obvious and common-sensical, let
me say that the get-tough policy was based on an entirely rational set
of assumptions, including the assumption that targeting low-level
users and first-time offenders would reduce the number of low-level
users and first-time offenders. Moreover, the theory held, failure to
move against petty offenders would simply promote more serious
offenses. Indeed, that is the whole idea behind George Kelling's
influential book, "Fixing Broken Windows"--that taking care of the
small stuff (turnstile jumpers, graffiti, broken windows) is the best
way to prevent the rougher stuff from happening.

Males said he never found that theory convincing. But what of the
implications of his own? Isn't the logical conclusion that, if
attention to low-level drug offenses produces bad results, we should
ignore those offenses?

"We don't say it that way," Males said. "What our findings
suggest--and this is fairly complex stuff--is that the most efficient
way of using drug-enforcement resources is to concentrate on serious
offenses. We've got a couple of presidential candidates right now who,
if they had been arrested and identified and possibly incarcerated as
drug offenders, would not be where they are today. I don't think we'd
have been better off without them."

So is it JPI's conclusion that get-tough enforcement, zero tolerance
and broken-window social therapy are largely worthless at best and may
on occasion be like the misidentified "brake" on that much-maligned
Audi 5000?

"If you made me reduce this very complicated matter to a single
sentence," said Males, "it would be: Don't sweat the small stuff."