VOICES OF REASON ON HARD TIME

A well-known American told a large national audience last week that jail
time provides no cure for a drug addict. A well-known columnist wrote, on
our Commentary Page a few days earlier, that the nation needs to reduce the
number of inmates crowding our strained prison system by easing
minimum-sentencing requirements for non-violent offenders. Neither of these
observations came from the political left. The man who said jail's no answer
for drug addiction was Rush Limbaugh, whose conservative talk show
transformed not only American radio but American politics. The man who wrote
that mandatory sentencing of non-violent offenders is a disservice both to
law-breakers and the law-abiding was Cal Thomas, a conservative columnist
whose opinions appear in newspapers across the nation. Neither man has ever
been a likely suspect for being soft on crime.

Some of Mr. Limbaugh's critics, and perhaps even a few longtime fans, might
link his warning on the limited benefits of imprisoning addicts to recent
revelations about personal -- and possibly legal -- problems. Yet Mr.
Limbaugh, since returning to his show last week, sounded convincing enough
while telling listeners that he learned new realities about himself -- and
about addiction in general -- during the previous five weeks in a treatment
center trying to beat his prescription-drug habit. As he said on the air a
week ago today:

"For people who are truly addicted, I mean hard-core, really addicted,
putting them in jail doesn't do any good. There's no way. I mean the penalty
may be what society thinks is just. It's not going to fix anything."

And as Mr. Thomas wrote in the column that ran in this newspaper: "Violent
offenders are just 49 percent of the prison population. Again, according to
BJS [the Bureau of Justice Statistics], the rest of the prisoners are behind
bars for property crimes (19 percent), drug crimes (20 percent) and crimes
affecting the 'public order' (11 percent). This half of the prison
population ought to be doing something else besides sitting in prison and
costing the law-abiding money."

Many Americans are wisely recognizing the ultimate consequences of locking
up so many non-violent offenders for so long -- consequences felt at
overcrowded corrections facilities across the nation. Mr. Limbaugh and Mr.
Thomas have shown that such recognition need not be confined to the left.