BALANCING JUSTICE, EXAMINING FICTION

Our good friends in the League of Women Voters recently issued an
interesting newsletter to their membership, part of a statewide effort to
address what they consider to be issues in the criminal justice system.

The newsletter, called "Balancing Justice," makes some interesting points,
but we have to question some of the views that the group bases some of its
premises upon.

We appplaud the League of Women Voters for taking an interest in the state's
criminal justice system, but we have to question their decision to take the
arguments of several special interest advocacy groups as gospel without
examining them against the reality of the North Country's experience with
the criminal justice system.

New York State is a big and very diverse state. Blindly accepting the
arguments of New York City-based groups could have very real and very
unintended consequences for those of us who like living in a region where
big city crime problems are only beginning to encroach on what has
traditionally been a safe place to live and raise a family.

First off, anyone in the North Country who has worked in corrections or
spent anytime observing the workings of the state prison system is aware of
the real reason why the state has been pushing in recent years to build new
maximum security prisons.

The propagandists that the League quotes in its newsletter would have the
public believe that the state has no real reason for building the maximum
security prisons. The reality, if the League had bothered to talk to any of
the hundreds of people who work in corrections in the North Country, is that
our state prison system became a very dangerous place over the past in
medium security prisons. Anyone who worked at the Gouverneur Correctional
Facility or any of the other prisons could have told the League that tougher
state sentencing rules on violent criminals filled the maximum security
prisons to capacity and created an overflow problem that put violent
troublemakers in medium security prison dormitories that were never designed
to house them.

For awhile, the state's medium security prisons found themselves forced to
ship these violent thugs from medium security prison to medium security
prison where they immediately formented trouble with corrections officials
all but powerless to retaliate against them because the maximum security
prisons were already filled.

At Gouverneur, during the short-lived uprising, we saw up close the
consequences of listening to the propagandists who consistently lobby
against building new maximim security prisons. Contrary to the image of the
correctional system painted by the League, New York's prisons are not filled
to overflowing with "non-violent drug addicts." Anyone who attends St.
Lawrence County's court on Mondays quickly notices an alarming reality.
Criminals really have to work at it to earn the right to go to prison. Most
recntly, one individual had been arrested 24 times in seven years and still
did not get sent to prison. He was sent to shock incarceration.

Contrary to the image portrayed by the League, non-violent criminals
currently really have to try and try before they earn the right to be sent
to prison. They are given chance after chance to straighten out their
lives, opportunities to enroll in drug and substance rehab, and only end up
in prison if they commit a violent crime or show such utter disregard for
the chances they have been given that the judges have no choice but to send
them to prison or lose any credibility what so ever.

Despite the claims of the League, they might have spent a little time
tracking what happened to the 20 or so drug dealers who were recently
arrested during a county-wide drug sweep, Many of the drug dealers arrested
were indeed low level addicts. And in almost every case, the ended up in
treatment or on probation.

Crack dealers who were trafficking in commercial quantities were prosecuted
in federal courts where they can expect to do time in a federal
penitentiary.

Frankly, we think the League's board ought to spend some time on Mondays in
Judge Eugene Nicandri's court to get a dose of reality about the criminal
justice system. What they would find is that St. Lawrence County's criminal
justice system is very busy with its primarily white criminal element that
reflects the overall population of St. Lawrence County. We have no doubt
that the majority of offenders in the state prison system are from eight
communities in New York City. But we suspect that they reflect the racial
and ethnic make up of those neighborhoods where they were arrested.

Earlier this spring, we had the opportunity to walk the streets of Brooklyn
and Manhattan and spend time in a New York City public school in Brooklyn.

We found New York City a far different place that it was just a decade ago.
Thanks to the get tough policies that the League seems to deplore so much,
we found the city a much friendlier and vibrant place. We felt safe walking
the streets and using the subway system. It would be a shame if the League's
lack of first hand research and relying on propagandists allowed New York to
fall back into the bad old days that so many have fought to put behind us.