REASON HAS BEEN LOST IN THE WAR ON CRIME

Sometime while you're waiting for your laundry to dry, check out the
December issue of The Atlantic Monthly. There's a good article on what
has come to be called the prison-industrial complex.

It turns out crime does pay, not necessarily for the criminal, but for
companies alert to the profit potential of a booming industry. Hey,
why invest in an Internet stock that's bound to tank sooner or later
when you know that crime has legs?

You and I put slop in the trough and the hogs come running. The thing
is that as taxpayers and citizens we are not getting our money's
worth, and I suspect most of us know that. We just haven't been
interested enough to do anything about it.

Crime and punishment is one of those areas where quick and easy beats
out reason.

Take California, which has the biggest prison system in the Western
world. In 1977, California had 19,000 people in prison and was
respected for its drug treatment and education programs.

Today, it has 159,000 prisoners, and has become, the article shows, a
"revolving door" for poor people, illiterate people, substance abusers
and people with severe mental problems.

As California goes, so go the rest of us.

Simply no room

Last year, the California system took in 140,000 prisoners and
released 132,000. A revolving door. Because of ever tougher sentences,
there's just no room despite a huge growth in the number of prisons
over the past decade.

A couple of months ago, I was part of a small group that heard Angela
Davis speak about the prison problem in California and around the
country. Davis is well-known as an activist.

She now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is
crusading to change the way we deal with crime.

"The expansion of prisons has nothing to do with the crime rate," she
says.

She speaks of prisons as institutions of social control. "Prisons are
the place where we put all of the people we don't want to deal with.

"Some people are under scrutiny constantly. If a white woman and a
black woman go into a boutique, who is watched? Who has the
opportunity to get away with crime?"

According to a U.S. Sentencing Commission report from 1995, 52 percent
of all crack users are white, 38 percent black. But 88 percent of
those sentenced for crack offenses are black, 4.1 percent white.

One in four black men is likely to wind up in prison at some point in
his life.

Prisons are for people most of us don't care about. The overwhelming
majority of people in prison are illiterate. Most of them are messed
up by alcohol or other drugs and many have significant mental trouble.
We don't deal with those underlying causes.

Doesn't it make sense to try to prevent people from committing crimes
in the first place and to screen those who have committed crimes to

determine whether they and we might benefit from remedial education
and drug treatment? Of course it does, and we know it.

Last fall Davis was part of a national conference that drew more than
3,000 people to discuss alternatives to imprisonment.

A 1997 report, "Seeking Justice: Crime and Punishment in America," included
several opinion polls in which the majority of voters offered alternatives
to imprisonment opted for those alternatives.

But we don't change.

An easy way out

The Atlantic article traced the current emphasis on prisons as the
only answer to crime back to liberal politicians who needed a shield
against conservative claims that they were soft on crime. They found
that building prisons was an easy retort. And now everyone is afraid
to stop for fear of seeming weak.

We know we are walking down the wrong path, but we keep
walking.

We have gotten so tough that often we no longer make many distinctions
between nonviolent and violent crimes.

What does it say about our nation that we imprison a higher percentage
of our population than any other nation?

Do we aspire to be the world's leader in everything, including the
production of illiterate, drug-addicted criminals?

A couple of weeks ago, Times reporter Jim Lynch wrote a piece about
Washington's prison problem, and, in it, he found some hope for change.

Rep. Ida Ballasiotes, R-Mercer Island, whose daughter was murdered by
a convicted sex offender, has introduced a bill to save taxpayers
money by reducing sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.

She is a fitting person to begin putting on the brakes because her
interest in crime goes beyond posturing.

Being tough on crime needn't be tough on us.

You can reach Jerry Large c/o The Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.
Phone: 206-464-3346. Fax: 206-464-2261. E-mail: jlarge@seattletimes.com.