COMMENT

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 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 elevenfold, 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?