SHARP UNVEILS WIDE-RANGING ANTI-CRIME PLAN

AUSTIN -- Democratic lieutenant governor candidate John Sharp unveiled a
wide-ranging anti-crime plan Wednesday that looked like it was partly
tailored to appeal to voters in the North Texas Republican stronghold of
Plano.

Sharp's plan includes expanding the death penalty to drug traffickers and
repeat child molesters.

Plano recently has been rocked by reports that 11 teen-agers died in the
Dallas suburb during 1997 due to heroin overdoses. Five years ago, a repeat
sex offender snatched a 7-year-old girl out from under her parents'
supervision in a Plano city park and strangled her.

Sharp likened drug trafficking to cold-blooded murder.

"This is not a crime of passion that you just woke up one morning and
decided to do," Sharp said. "You made a deliberate decision that you're
going to sell a lot of heroin and you're going to bring a lot of drugs into
the state of Texas, and it's going to kill kids."

Sharp so far in his campaign has tried to distance himself from his own
Democratic Party by portraying himself as above partisan politics. He also
has declined to endorse Democratic gubernatorial candidate Garry Mauro.

But by getting in the first lick on crime against GOP lieutenant governor
candidate Rick Perry, Sharp was moving into traditional Republican
territory in more ways than one. Democratic Gov. Ann Richards lost her 1994
re-election, many political consultants say, because Republican George W.
Bush beat her on the crime issue in suburbs.

Sharp said Texas should pass a law that ends retroactively a system called
mandatory supervision. Mandatory supervision allows automatic parole for
prison inmates whose time served and good time equals their sentence.

Mauro has criticized Bush for not pushing such a law to keep his 1994
campaign promise to end mandatory supervision retroactively. Bush dropped
his effort to do so last year, saying the U.S. Supreme Court would rule it
to be unconstitutional.

Sharp, the state comptroller, said he also wants to use prison inmates on
public works projects across Texas.

"The public would feel a lot better about what they're paying into the
prison system if every driver who drove down I-35 saw a bunch of folks in
orange jackets picking up trash on the side of the highway," Sharp said.

"The people of the state of Texas expect something to be put back into the
community, whether it's chain gangs or painting public schools," Sharp
said.

Sharp said almost half the state's prison inmates do not work full time. He
said he would take away televisions and weight- lifting machines.

Sharp's plan also included a proposal to keep sexual predators under state
control after their prison sentence has been completed by having them
transferred to a state psychiatric facility.

Perry's campaign manager said much of Sharp's crime plan is stolen from
proposals made by either Perry or Bush.

"Many of the ideas announced today are so good they have already been
proposed," said Perry manager Jim Arnold.

Arnold noted that Sharp proposed using inmates to chop down cedars over the
Edwards Aquifer to help solve San Antonio's water problems. He said Perry,
as state agriculture commissioner, already has made arrangements with the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice to do that.

Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau