WAITING FOR ANSWER ON JUVENILE JUSTICE

The most haunting--but frustrating--moment of George W. Bush's acceptance
speech to the Republican convention came when he related the question posed
to him by a 15-year-old inmate of the juvenile jail in Marlin, Texas. "What
do you think of me?" the boy asked the white, business-suited governor. Bush
used the quote to make a solid, sensitive observation: "If that boy in
Marlin believes he is trapped and worthless and hopeless, if he believes his
life has no value, then other lives have no value to him, and we are all
diminished."

Yet as a focus group of voters in suburban Seattle noted, Bush never told
the listening nation whether he had any answer at all to the boy's question.
Which is the precisely the problem, not just with Bush but with most of
today's politicos. Whether the issue is throwing the book at juvenile
offenders, or America's incredible total of 2 million people in jail and
prison, or sentencing hundreds of thousands of minor drug offenders to years
behind bars, political leaders are afraid to give an honest answer. Some
politicians are wary of suggesting alternatives that could get them labeled
as "soft" on crime. Others, thumping their chests as crime fighters, benefit
from the hypocrisy of a system tilted wildly in favor of punishment over
rehabilitation. So we end up throwing away troubled people's lives rather
than admit that big chunks of America's justice system are a glaring and
dangerous failure.

It's a safe bet most of the juveniles Bush met in the jail at Marlin are
turning into lifelong jailbirds, because no one's focused on their
day-to-day rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Texas now
imprisons a total of 150,000 people. Next to Louisiana it's the highest per
capita rate in America. Bush himself led Texas to reduce to 14 the age at
which juveniles can be sent to adult court for serious crimes. Maximum
sentences for those youth are 40 years.

Smart politics, maybe. But smart policy? It's true Texas has some serious
juvenile offender rehabilitation programs. But juveniles tried as adults,
reports David Doi, executive director of the national Coalition for Juvenile
Justice, "are eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more
likely to be a victim of sexual assault, and twice as likely to be assaulted
by either an inmate or a guard." And not only that--once released they
re-offend or commit subsequent crimes much sooner than their counterparts
who are kept in the regular juvenile system.

If George W. Bush or any of his fellow governors would convene the leading
experts in their states on social issues and penology, challenging them to
reach consensus on the most effective long-term solutions to problems of
juvenile crime, they'd hear that most of the solutions lie in prevention, in
intensive work with families outside the criminal justice system. And they'd
learn that overly harsh sentences end up triggering far more crime and
misery than they prevent.

The drug issue is closely interrelated, because the chief impact of long
sentences for minor possession or selling is to break up families and
introduce rather ordinary, generally young and confused people, to a dark
world of violence and criminality.

Just before the national conventions opened, the Justice Policy Institute, a
lead research organization on drug issues, released a report that 458,131
Americans--close to a quarter of our jail and prison inmates--are now being
held for drug offenses.

Even more startling, the Institute found that the numbers of people entering
state prisons for drug-related incidents had gone up 1,040 percent, or
almost eleven-fold, between 1980 and 1997. By contrast, the number of
incarcerations for violent offenses, the type we fear the most, rose only a
fraction as much, 82 percent, over the same years.

Today this country is imprisoning almost as many people for drug offenses as
its total jail population (474,368) in 1980. Some 100,000 more persons are
in American jails on drug charges than all prisoners, for all offenses, in
the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more citizens than
has the United States.

Talk about "diminished" lives -- millions of them when you count family
members! Write about this tragedy, as I do from time to time, and letters
pour in from prisoners, parents, spouses, children across the country --
stories of lives broken by lengthy sentences.

The racist implications are clear. From 1986 to 1996, while numbers of
whites imprisoned on drug charges doubled, the number of blacks locked up
for drug offenses increased nearly five times -- even though there's no
evidence that actual drug use is heavier among blacks than whites. In the
face of such injustice, the question Bush heard -- "What do you think of
me?" -- is even more haunting and poignant.

When will he -- or we -- answer?