IF YOU DO THE CRIME, YOU DO THE TIME

Last week I read a headline that said, "Senate committee approves
death penalty for sex assaults on kids." The senate committee said in
effect that anyone who sexually assaults a child under the age of 12
should be executed. I think that the committee that passed that bill
needs to rethink what they did.

I was a police officer for most of the time from 1964 to 1995. I will
assure the committee and anyone else that the seriousness of the
sentence has little or no impact on whether or not a criminal will
commit a crime. They just never think about it. If it were true then
there would be very few crimes committed.

I worked in the Fifth Judicial District Office of the District
Attorney in 1976, 1977 and 1978. Even the district attorney at the
time did not know what the sentence was for any particular crime. The
DA, his deputies, the complaint clerk and I as chief investigator did
not know the penalty was for any crime. We always had to look it up. I
am sure that the judges do the same thing. I doubt if any criminal
ever looks up the penalty for his or her crime before he or she
commits the crime.

Yet there are some people who delude themselves into believing that
criminals are deterred by a severe punishment for doing a crime.

Colorado does remain as one of 36 states with the death penalty. That
is also a major waste of time and money. I am sure that in the
remaining 14 states without the death penalty that their murder rates
are not necessarily higher.

I have interviewed several criminals who had been convicted of murder,
and I will assure you that none of them ever considered the degree of
the punishment when they committed the crime of murder. None of them
ever thought that they could or would be executed for murder.

Colorado today only has one person on death row. Nathan Dunlap killed
several people in a pizza restaurant many years ago and his case
remains under appeal.

Another issue of course is that the appeal process takes 15 to 20
years. Fifteen to 20 years of very expensive legal process eating up
valuable resources. Fifteen to 20 years of housing the convicted
criminal at considerable expense on death row.

A major issue for government is always the costs associated with
running a prison system. Right now the annual bill for our prisons in
Colorado is $743,815,793 and is the fifth largest expenditure in
Colorado State Government. Corrections has the second largest number
of employees just after Higher Education. Twelve percent of our state
employees work for Corrections. Just who is being punished? It looks
like the taxpayer to me.

There is no data to support putting a lot of people in prison and a
reduction in the crime rate. Most recently they have been able to
correlate the sale of crack cocaine and the supply of crack cocaine to
crime rates. Not how many people we are warehousing in our prisons but
the availability of some types of drugs.

I am a strong advocate for the punishment of criminals but the death
penalty does not work and prison does not always work.

In the past 20 years a new monster has emerged in sentencing. It is a
mandatory minimum sentence that can be imposed for certain crimes.
Judges cannot reduce the sentence in these instances and must sentence
the offender to the mandatory minimum stated it the law.

This has created some other problems where first offenders must go to
prison in certain cases. Recently sentence reform groups have
recognized that some drug cases should not have received prison
sentences and now some jails and prisons are releasing first time
offenders if possible.

In the case of the sick degenerate men and women who molest children
under the age of 12 the correct response is to incarcerate them. Not
in prison but in a mental health facility. They are the sickest of the
sick people in this world and need to be removed from society but they
will never change their behavior in prison. Prison will probably only
make their behavior worse.

Criminals seriously do not believe they will ever get caught so
therefore they never consider the punishment for their crime. However
they do know that if they get caught doing the crime, they will have
to do the time.