Politics & Policy

TEXAS GOV. BUSH RECEIVED HELP ON TOUGH-ON-CRIME STATISTICS

WASHINGTON -- Talk about tough on crime. In George W. Bush's first eight
months as Texas governor, about 30,000 more people were thrown into prison,
boosting the state's already huge criminal population by nearly a third.

The Republican front-runner for president does indeed talk tough on crime.
But the startling lock-'em-up statistic from his first year is misleading
- -- and only dramatizes how difficult it is to gauge the actual Bush record
since 1995.

As on a range of state issues, Mr. Bush's boasts on crime owe much to
policies that his predecessor and state legislators set in motion.
"Whatever one might contend George Bush did, in our prison system you will
find no trace of anything, period," says Glen Castlebury, the system's
director of public information.

At the same time, Mr. Bush has both continued and toughened those policies,
and expanded them to the juvenile system as well. The number locked in
juvenile facilities is set to triple in his second term to nearly 6,300,
while more teenagers can be tried and imprisoned as adults; a Bush law
lowered the age to 14, from 15 to 17, and broadened the list of crimes for
which youthful suspects can be tried -- and punished -- as adults.

Stoked by Admissions

The question of squaring Mr. Bush's crime record with his proclaimed
compassionate conservatism has been stoked by the governor's own admissions
of unspecified misdeeds in his own "young and irresponsible" years. He has
been specific in ruling out marital infidelity and divulging that he quit
drinking the day after a boozy 40th-birthday bash. But the 53-year-old baby
boomer has refused to say whether he did drugs, specifically cocaine,
before 1974 -- when he was 28.

"I have learned from the mistakes I may or may not have made," he said in
Akron, Ohio, this month, "and I'd like to share some wisdom with you: Don't
do drugs."

First campaigning for governor in 1994 against Democratic Gov. Ann
Richards, Mr. Bush made a big issue of juvenile justice. "The bottom line
is young people need to understand there'll be severe consequences for bad
behavior," he said.

As for adult offenders, candidate Bush zeroed in on a provision in a
landmark 1993 rewrite of the state's criminal laws that mandated probation
for a range of nonviolent offenses, including possession or sale of small
quantities of illegal drugs -- less than a gram of cocaine, for instance.
For candidate Bush, "mandatory probation" proved a good target for
depicting his opponent as softer on crime and drugs, though the law's
supporters note that offenders still could be given as much as six months
in a county jail and other penalties.

"What we had was tough, and it was also a smarter program," argues state
Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who participated in the penal-code
rewrite. At the time in Texas, he says, "our overcrowding was creating a
revolving door. We were letting out murderers and rapists earlier to make
room" for new, lesser offenders.

But many prosecutors and local judges liked the jail option; once in
office, Mr. Bush got the legislature to restore judges' discretion to
impose it. By then, too, Texas had built more jails. Now, as before, judges
give probation to 83% of the first-time offenders in this category,
according to Tony Fabelo, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice
Policy Council, an independent state agency.

Limited Options

Mr. Bush's focus on the mandatory-probation law as an anticrime issue
reflected that little else was left to him: The new penal code that Mrs.
Richards and the legislature had enacted greatly toughened other sentences
for violent crimes. They had begun a massive construction program to more
than double state prisons by 100,000 beds. And, under her pressure, the
parole board's approval rate plummeted to 20% from nearly 80%.

"Bush couldn't do anything quite as dramatically because it had already
been done," says Ken Anderson, Williamson County district attorney and
author of "Crime in Texas." But, he adds, "he did some things that needed
to be fixed" and shifted the focus then to juvenile justice and drug laws.

The prison population has grown on Mr. Bush's watch, and crime has gone
down, but both trends were significantly underway. That prison spurt of his
first months, to more than 128,000 from about 98,000, marked the opening of
nearly half of the newly built space. And 40% of the inmates had been
warehoused in county jails. Meanwhile, with a stream of new beds coming
available, law enforcers from the police to the parole board more eagerly
went after parole and probation violators, sending them back to the slammer.

Work of Cops and Judges

The prison growth "happened when George Bush was governor, but it was the
cops on the street who were pulling these guys in and the district judges
who were thumping them in jail," says Mr. Castlebury. "It would've happened
if I'd been sitting there as governor."

Today, the state prisons hold about 148,000 people -- a system that Mr.
Anderson's book puts at the world's third largest, behind Russia and China.
Close to a quarter are drug offenders, and past studies have indicated that
drugs were a factor in crimes of about 85% of all prisoners.

Under Mrs. Richards and the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, both recovering
alcoholics, drug treatment in prisons became a priority for the first time.
The initial goal was to treat 14,000 of the new inmates. The number of
spaces for drug treatment is now less than half of that early goal, but it
had been whittled to about 5,800 by the time Mr. Bush took over. Cost is a
big factor, but so is a lack of counselors and facilities, says Mr.
Castlebury: "If you gave us all of Bill Gates's money, we could not use it
all."

Mr. Bush's biggest imprint has been on juvenile justice. The changes he won
in his first legislative session in 1995 toughened penalties both for those
under 17 who committed violent crimes and for repeat offenders of any
crimes, as well as lowering to 14 the potential age for trial as an adult.
Mr. Bush also got more funds to supervise juvenile probations, which in
turn increased the numbers of violators being caught and reincarcerated.

"Texas is a tough state on crime. You may or may not like that," says Mr.
Fabelo. "But out of that premise, we have a very comprehensive policy in
place to take care of juvenile crime."

Diminishing Returns

That said, Mr. Fabelo has warned the governor and the legislature about
reaching a point of diminishing returns: "A dollar spent building a prison
is a dollar less that's spent on something else" -- such as treatment and
prevention programs. Bush aides say the governor does advocate those
approaches as well, in particular by his call for government support of
"faith-based" groups that work with prison and disadvantaged groups.

Earlier this year, appearing in Austin with the governor, conservative
William Bennett recalled that he first met Mr. Bush after his father,
then-President Bush, had made Mr. Bennett the nation's antidrug czar. The
younger Bush's advice, Mr. Bennett recalls: "Kick butt."

That stance, however, is now at the heart of the issue of whether Mr. Bush
should admit to doing anything when he was under 28 that today would make
him liable for the very state penalties he now enforces, and toughens.

An earlier article in The Wall Street Journal noted rumors of drug use by
Mr. Bush but found that people spreading the rumors had no evidence and
that dozens of people who knew him well doubted the veracity of such rumors.

While Mr. Bush still continues to insist he won't buckle to what he calls
the press and political foes' "politics of personal destruction," the
pressure grows from among Republicans. Even Mr. Bennett, who has said Mr.
Bush's youthful acts shouldn't haunt him, just last week wrote an opinion
piece for the Journal headlined, "Answer the Question."