CONVEYOR-BELT JUSTICE

One of the recurring gags on the old "I Love Lucy" show had Lucy
working on an assembly line -- boxing candy, wrapping packages,
whatever -- when the boss sped up the line. Suddenly there was no way
for the frantic Lucy to keep up. She wrapped or boxed as quickly as
she could, obviously determined to do her best under the dreadful
circumstances, but the packages always overwhelmed her -- until
someone thought to pull the stop switch.

It was funny when it happened to Lucy. It's not funny when it happens
in the criminal justice system.

America has been accelerating the flow of inmates into prison cells,
and, in state after state, the hapless jailers are overwhelmed. Robert
Presley, the state cabinet secretary responsible for California's
prison system, knows precisely when somebody will have to pull the
switch. "April 2001," he told the Associated Press the other day. "By
then, we will have exhausted every cranny and nook."

If you're thinking that's the price the state will have to pay for its
burgeoning criminality, you're wrong. In California as in most of
America, it is the incarceration rate, not the crime rate, that is the
problem. The biggest foot on the accelerator: mandatory sentences for
drug offenders.

A recent report from the Justice Policy Institute says we locked up
more than a million nonviolent offenders in 1998.

It's madness on a range of counts. First, it's not making us any safer
and, in fact, may be making us less safe, with prisoners often
returning to society in worse shape than before. Further, since those
incarcerated are disproportionately minority men, it perpetuates the
male removal that has devastated so many minority communities. Perhaps
worst of all, the fiscal scrambling to produce enough prison cells
eats up funds urgently needed for other purposes -- including crime
prevention. California, with its nation-leading 160,000 inmates,
already has crossed that disastrous line that has it spending more on
incarceration than on higher education.

So guess what: State Assemblyman Bill Leonard has introduced a bill
calling for $4 billion in new prison construction. Somebody needs to
pull the switch.

At the least, we ought to be looking at sentencing alternatives short
of prison, particularly for nonviolent offenders. But the best way to
slow down this grim assembly line is to reach the children before they
go bad. That means money spent on early childhood education, parent
training, improved schools and day care.

Nor is that as radical an idea as it once was. Listen to these two
formulations. First:

"Prison should not be the catchall solution to all of the social
problems that we have -- to mental illness, to homelessness, to lack
of health care, to the lack of education."

Then: "Given the abused, neglected and otherwise severely at-risk life
circumstances of most youth who go on to become serious offenders . . . it
is a profound mistake to think that violent crimes by and against juveniles
can be prevented or controlled simply or mainly by increasing the
punitiveness of the juvenile justice system."

The first quote is from Angela Davis, the '60s radical now working at
prison reform. The second is from John DiIulio, who has advocated the
tough anti-crime policies -- including incarceration -- that he
believes have produced the recent downturn in the rate of violent
crime. But the Princeton professor thinks we've gotten about all we
can get from tougher sentencing and that we now are looking at a law
of "rapidly diminishing returns."

DiIulio warns that we shouldn't be misled by the relative lull in
youthful violence. Demographic trends, he believes, will "exert strong
upward pressure on crime rates in the years ahead unless we take
strong steps to prevent juvenile crime."

Angela Davis, John DiIulio and thousands of thoughtful, if less
famous, observers are coming to the same conclusion Lucy Ricardo
reached in the days of black-and-white TV: It's time somebody turned
this thing off.