JUST FILLING PRISONS WON'T MAKE US SAFER

In several speeches, Barack Obama has used an easy, if imprecise,
formulation to express his despair over the high incarceration rate
of young black men. "I don't want to wake up four years from now and
discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in
college," he said at a rally last year, repeating, more or less, a
line used frequently by critics of the criminal justice system.

But it's not accurate. If you were to check with academic and
criminal justice sources, you'd find, happily, that there are far
more young black men in college -- about 530,000, ages 18 to 24 --
than in prison -- about 106,000 in the same age group.

Still, Obama's count expresses a larger truth. If you counted black
men under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system -- on
probation, in prison or on parole -- you'd find that their numbers
are higher than those pursuing a college degree. And, on any given
day, about one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 (more
than 475,000) are locked up in city or county jails or state or
federal prisons, according to The Sentencing Project, a
Washington-based group that advocates alternatives to incarceration.

Not all those black men behind bars are hardened criminals. Many have
done something dumb -- written a bad check, failed to pay child
support, bought a $5 bag of crack. But they haven't robbed or maimed
or murdered. Still, they've ended up with criminal records that are
likely to haunt them for the rest of their lives, limiting their
chances at decent employment.

Unfortunately, Obama hasn't made the nation's soaring prison
population -- more than one in a hundred American adults is behind
bars -- a major theme of his campaign. He probably believes he can't
afford to. Democrats have long been burdened by the perception that
they are "soft on crime," so a black Democrat would be even less
likely than a white Democrat to linger on the subject of black men in prison.

John McCain is not going to make an issue of it, either. And that's too bad.

The harsh sentences imposed over the past few decades, especially for
drug offenses, have contributed to the much-discussed decline of the
black family, taking black men away from their children, stigmatizing
them with criminal records and locking them up with hard-core lifers.
It's no wonder many of them remain marginalized -- indeed, commit
other crimes -- after they are released.

Certainly, many offenders belong behind bars, especially those who
are violent. I hold no brief for those who have chosen to live
outside the bounds of civilized society, whether gangbangers who rape
girls in savage "initiations" or carjackers who stick a gun in your
face to steal your SUV. Research suggests that most violent crimes
are committed by a small group of predators. And law-abiding black
Americans are disproportionately the victims of those thugs.

But we don't keep streets safer with draconian policies that lock up
petty offenders. While many Americans believe that the stark decline
in crime during the past decade is a result of harsh sentencing laws,
experts say the evidence doesn't bear that out. "About 25 percent of
the decline in violent crime can be attributed to increased
incarceration," according to The Sentencing Project.

Of all the misguided criminal justice policies, the failed "war on
drugs" has been the most destructive. It has swept up legions of
black men whose biggest crime was being poor and buying their drugs
on ghetto street corners, making them easy targets of police officers
who swoop down and make busts to boost their arrest numbers. If the
same drug users were more affluent, they could buy their drugs
discreetly and avoid arrest. And if they were caught, they'd likely
serve a sentence in a pricey drug rehab unit rather than a prison cell.

No one wants to see violent crime climb back to the levels of the
1970s and '80s, when many urban neighborhoods were under siege. The
drop in crime has eased tensions between black and white Americans
and fostered the revitalization of inner cities.

But not every dumb kid with dope in his car will become a career
criminal. Most of them won't. Unless we lock them up with career
criminals for 10 years and give them an advanced degree in villainy.