IT'S BAD NEWS FOR JUSTICE

WHY DO WE keep calling it ''the war on drugs?'' It's not a war when
you lose every battle; it's a rout. Why do we think we're winning
''the war on crime'' when 600,000 inmates return to our streets every
year, their behavior ''modified'' by whatever they encountered behind
bars?

The lock-'em-up theory of criminal justice is criminal, but it's not
justice when we confine tens of thousands of poorly educated,
generally low-IQ individuals for nonviolent offenses that hurt
themselves more than anyone else.

The voters' fear of wrongdoers, exacerbated by show-business
exploitation on film, gives politicians a lever with which to pry
loose a vote on Election Day. But every other day between elections,
we pay the price of incarcerating two million of our fellow
Americans, far more prisoners than need to be behind bars. We let
fear of drug crime prompt us to vote $1.7 billion for a doomed ''war
on drugs'' in Colombia that will turn that place into South America's
Vietnam.

We can't even keep drugs out of our highest-security cell blocks. You
cannot pay every prison guard the price he'd put on smuggling
contraband in to caged men and women desperate for chemical release
from the living hell of prison life. Even if 99 out of 100 guards are
honest - undoubtedly a far higher quotient than is present in every
other occupation - there's always one who will deal for the right
price.

The craving for intoxicants, stimulants is insatiable. Only through
education, support, discipline, or faith can a susceptible individual
master the appetite for alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, or drugs.

So many prosecutors and legislators pad their stat sheets with
arrests, convictions, Draconian laws that the system has careened out
of control. We pay $30,000 a year to confine a prisoner. One out of
four black males between 20 and 30 is ensnared in the penal system.
We keep doing more of the same-old and think we're making progress.
But it all comes around in a circle. The overwhelming majority of the
boys we send away come back as hardened men. Police departments learn
to work the system, confiscating cars, boats, and caches of cash that
somehow become the property of the confiscating department, turning
law enforcement into a lottery that encourages set-ups, stings,
entrapment, and over-zealous prosecutions.

The election result handing the GOP the White House, Senate, and
House presages a harder time for those already doing hard time and
those who will fall into the dysfunctional system over the next four
years. Former Senator John Ashcroft is a conservative zealot, a
right-winger defeated by the people of his own state, but persuasive
enough to get George W. Bush to name him attorney general.

The chief law enforcement officer of the land, if confirmed, will
take the Justice Department in a whole other direction. Ashcroft,
while in the Senate, derailed the confirmation of one respected black
judge by traducing him as ''pro-criminal.''

Perhaps the most vociferous of the antiabortion claque in the Senate,
Ashcroft would be called upon to prosecute those who harass and
intimidate abortion seekers and providers. An honorary degree
recipient at Bob Jones University, he is anti-gun-control
''big-time,'' as Dick Cheney would say, as well as hostile to civil
rights laws and affirmative action. He'll be in a position to yank
the Justice Department far to the right once confirmed.

Bush appears to have tossed the right wing and the fundamentalist
faction of his conservative coalition the biggest bone in the Cabinet
cupboard by picking Ashcroft to be the nation's top law enforcer. The
president-barely-elect was convinced by his staff that Ashcroft would
survive the confirmation process. While blacks, labor, and liberals
are fulminating, the Senate is considered likely to confirm a retired
colleague who is not only known to most of the members, but who is
going to be the politician who decides whom to prosecute for what,
all over the country.

As the choice of the incoming president, and with the backing of the
barest-of-majorities in the Senate from which he was recently
ejected, it will take more to lick Ashcroft than seems apparent right
now. To the unions and blacks and other minorities, as well as
pro-choice women, Ashcroft's unexpected return to the Senate as a
nominee awaiting confirmation is a disheartening development.

To those groups that opposed Bush's election, Ashcroft comes back
like a vengeful pharoah, with a cross in one hand and a whip in the
other, vowing vengeance on those who pushed through laws on abortion,
guns, drugs, and crime that he and his fundamentalist fellows
opposed. Off the cards showing on the table, I don't think the
liberals can stop him. Ultimately, Bush will take whatever heat
Ashcroft generates. It'll be a long four years for liberals. If
Ashcroft has a sense of irony, he'd let Ralph Nader present him for
confirmation, because Ralph's the man who made it possible.