CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE

The combination of miscommunication, ignored warnings and general hubris --
all in a culture that discouraged internal criticism -- virtually
guaranteed disaster.

No, this is not a follow-up on NASA and the Columbia space shuttle tragedy.
It is a commentary on criminal justice in America.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, after months of painstaking
investigation of the Feb. 1 space calamity, has issued a scathing report of
those in charge. A similarly independent body ought to take a look at our
criminal justice system.

It would find, as the NASA investigators found, not so much a lack of
information but rather an almost willful failure to connect the dots. For
example, the Department of Justice recently issued its annual report on
crime which contained this wonderful news: Violent crimes and crimes
against property declined last year to the lowest levels since the
department started compiling such records in 1973.

That's from the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics' August report,
"Criminal Victimization 2002." This is from BJS' July report titled
"Prisoners in 2002": America's prison and jail population increased by 3.7
percent from 2001 to 2002 -- three times the rate of increase recorded a
year earlier.

An independent board of inquiry might wonder at the logic of increasing
levels of incarceration at a time of significant decreases in crime.

Perhaps someone would raise the possibility that the increased
incarceration rates produced the decreases in crime. Well, that someone
ought to talk to Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Washington-based
Justice Policy Institute.

JPI looked at the FBI Uniform Crime Report's homicide data and found this
interesting tidbit: The regions of the country with the slower growth in
prison population from 2001 to 2002 (the Northeast and the Midwest) had
declines in homicides, while those regions with the greater increases in
incarceration (the West and the South) had increases in homicides.
Schiraldi's point is not that incarceration causes violence; it is that
there is no credible link between crime rates and incarceration rates.

OK, you say. That's incompetence, but disaster? Try this: According to
another BJS report released last month, one out of every 37 adults living
in the United States at the end of 2001 had been to prison at some time
during his or her life. That's about 2.7 percent. But for adult black
males, the been-incarcerated rate was 16.6 percent (compared to 7.7 percent
for Hispanic males and 2.6 percent for white males).

By the Justice Department's projections, 32 percent of black males born in
2001 will spend some time in prison, unless something is done to change the
trend.

And what might change it? Well, education might. As Schiraldi notes, there
is a very strong correlation between educational failure and incarceration
- -- especially among African American males.

So why are we cutting funds for education -- both K-12 and higher ed? It
is, says Schiraldi, our failure to connect the dots.

"Look, I'm not saying people in jail are all innocent. I grew up in a
blue-collar family in Brooklyn. Members of my family got in trouble from
time to time -- but none ever went to prison. If a third of my (white)
nephews were looking at prison, we wouldn't have this policy. The president
would declare a state of emergency, bring the best minds together to talk
about education and treatment. Mandatory sentencing wouldn't even be on the
table."

In other words, like the Columbia investigators, we'd connect the dots.

William Raspberry is a columnist for The Washington Post.