WHEN GET-TOUGH APPROACHES FAIL TO DETER CRIME

AS THE OWNER of an Audi 5000 during the mid-1980s, I can tell you straight
out I never believed the hoo-haw over "unintended acceleration." I'm
convinced that the reason so many of those cars took off through garage
walls and hedges, often injuring their drivers, is that the drivers (nearly
all of them inexperienced at driving this particular car) were pressing not
on the brake but on the nearby accelerator.

But because they were certain their foot was on the brake, their panicked
response was simply to press harder.

California has been doing it again. Not with Audis, of course, but with
drug incarcerations.

Somehow officials in many parts of the state convinced themselves that
tougher enforcement was the foot on the brake of drug-related crime. And
when the numbers showed otherwise, why they just pressed harder.

Two intriguing artifacts from that error:

California now leads the nation with a drug-offender imprisonment rate of
115 per 100,000. (The national average is 44.6 per 100,000.)

Counties with increased rates of drug arrests and imprisonments tend to
have greater increases in violent crime, or at best smaller decreases in
serious crime.

The numbers behind those findings are from a major study by the Justice
Policy Institute (based in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco), and they
make a compelling case that increased incarceration was the wrong pedal.

Imprisonments for drug possession, for instance, were five times as great
in Riverside County as in Contra Costa County. But Contra Costa's violent
crime rate is 30 percent lower.

Nor is it just with incarceration that the "brake" seems to cause
unintended acceleration. Fresno County had a 131 percent increase in
misdemeanor drug arrests from the early 1980s to the late-1990s, and a 33
percent increase in violent crime. At the other end, Los Angeles County had
a 33 percent reduction in misdemeanor drug arrests during that same period
and a 7 percent decrease in violent crime.

It's one thing to say get-tough approaches don't work, but why should they
increase the rate of violence?

Mike Males, a co-author of the JPI report "Drug Use and Justice," offers
two possibilities. First, he says, small-time drug users who are sent to
prison tend to become more serious users. They also tend to have a tougher
time finding work after their release. A drug habit and joblessness
constitute a pretty good recipe for trouble.

But a more important link, Males believes, is the matter of limited
resources: "The more resources police departments put into arresting
low-level drug-law violators, the less they'll have to deploy against the
sellers, manufacturers, and big-time dealers of illegal drugs."

Before you blow off the findings as obvious and common-sensical, let me say
that the get-tough policy was based on an entirely rational set of
assumptions, including the assumption that targeting low-level users and
first-time offenders would reduce the number of low-level users and
first-time offenders. Moreover, the theory held, failure to move against
petty offenders would simply promote more serious offenses. Indeed, that is
the whole idea behind George Kelling's influential book, "Fixing Broken
Windows" -- that taking care of the small stuff (turnstile jumpers,
graffiti, broken windows) is the best way to prevent the rougher stuff from
happening.

Males said he never found that theory convincing. But what of the
implications of his own? Isn't the logical conclusion that, if attention to
low-level drug offenses produces bad results, we should ignore those offenses?

"We don't say it that way," Males said. "What our findings suggest - and
this is fairly complex stuff - is that the most efficient way of using
drug-enforcement resources is to concentrate on serious offenses. We've got
a couple of presidential candidates right now who, if they had been
arrested and identified and possibly incarcerated as drug offenders, would
not be where they are today. I don't think we'd have been better off
without them."

So is it JPI's conclusion that get-tough enforcement, zero tolerance and
broken-window social therapy are largely worthless at best and may on
occasion be like the misidentified "brake" on that much-maligned Audi 5000?

"If you made me reduce this very complicated matter to a single sentence,"
said Males, "it would be: Don't sweat the small stuff."