AMERICAN JUSTICE COMES UP SHORT

AMNESTY International's recent rip on the U.S. criminal justice system
has put American backs up. Don't we provide legal counsel, civil
liberties, open trials, appeals? Wouldn't the world's criminal-justice
average rise if no nation did worse at it than we do?

Yes. But even so, Amnesty has caught our not inconsiderable shortfalls
and lapses. Many are now built into what passes for the system,
secured there by a crude politics that, claiming to protect us from
crime, in fact wastes money on practices that in their injustice and
inhumanity actually produce more crime -- at the willful neglect of
policies that would be less pricey and more effective.

Much of what is amiss in the U.S. system came together in the
execution in Virginia this month of Dwayne Allen Wright.

First, we executed. No other industrialized nation still does that.
The death penalty deters no crime, is hugely expensive and sets a
state-sanctioned example that killing is an OK way to solve problems.
It is borne in gross disproportion by the poor, compounding class angers.

Second, Wright was black, and the residue of racial prejudice that
fouls every level of the criminal justice system piles up on our death
rows in a final grotesque racial disparity and rankling social irritant.

Third, Wright committed the murder for which he was killed at 17. Few
nations permit executions for juvenile crime -- at last count, only
Yemen, Saudi Arabia, lran and Pakistan.

Fourth, Wright was borderline retarded and was diagnosed at 13 with
severe mental illness and brain damage. He never received the
treatment doctors recommended for him in juvenile facilities.

And finally, Wright's attorney failed to mention those mitigations at
the sentencing hearing, leading two jurors to swear later they would
have voted for life imprisonment if they had known.

We are building ever more prisons to house mainly non-violent
offenders, most sentenced for drug crimes. Alternative sentencing is
both cheaper and less likely to create repeat offenders. And those who
must be incarcerated are now largely denied the jailhouse education
programs that also cut recidivism.

We emphasize imprisonment and cruelty -- and cruelty it is: We leave
all other prisoners pretty much at the mercy of any prison's worst --
and disdain crime prevention.

We stint on drug treatment. We fail to provide most new, poor mothers
the home visits by parenting counselors that pay off in far lower
eventual crime. We fund few after-school programs -- when most
juvenile crime occurs, not at night as curfews assume. We wink at
police and prison excesses and abuses.

Once the enlightened standard, our justice system now puts us in the
world's backwater with some very sorry company. We'll stay stuck there
until we stop punishing thoughtful counsel and rewarding, in the name
of some ever meaner ``toughness,'' the political bidding war for more
of what we know doesn't work.

Tom Teepen is national correspondent for Cox Newspapers.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry