CUT CRIME'S HUGE COST: JUST REPEAL FUTILE LAWS

When Connecticut's new governor and state legislators, contemplating
state government's financial collapse, remark that "everything is on
the table" for economizing, they're probably not thinking about the
criminal law, since there are no line items in the budget for
criminal laws. But criminal laws are as much an expense as anything
else state government pays for, even as criminal law may have less to
do with protecting the public than with keeping people employed in
law enforcement.

The other day the state police announced with fanfare that they had
arrested 13 people, including a radio personality and a Wolcott town
councilman, and had seized some fancy cars in connection with an
illegal sports betting ring in the Hartford area that had been
investigated for more than a year not only by the state police but
also by the FBI, IRS, and the chief state's attorney's office. The
charges include racketeering, professional gambling, and conspiracy.

Does anyone in Connecticut feel safer because of these arrests?

Of course the crimes alleged are less matters of gambling in itself
than infringement of a government monopoly that is rented out to
casino operators affecting to be oppressed Indian tribes deserving of
perpetual reparations from the state. How is the "professional
gambling" allegedly undertaken by the sports betting ring any
different from the gambling undertaken by the state lottery, those
casinos, and now the horse and dog race and jai-alai betting parlors
being licensed around the state by the Division of Special Revenue?

And while all those detectives and agents were spending a year
tailing those 13 gamblers, how many people were murdered or maimed in
Connecticut's anarchic cities? Does anyone in authority in the state
count the bodies anymore, or even care?

As for the tax evasion implicit in the sports betting ring, it likely
would not be committed if such gambling operations could function in
the open. Then the bookies likely would pay tribute to the state just
as the lottery, the casinos, and the betting parlors do.

Not that gambling adds much to Connecticut's quality of life and not
that the state should want more of it, but thanks to the lottery, the
casinos, and the betting parlors, the legal manifestations of
gambling, it couldn't be much more pervasive.

Neither could illegal drugs be much more pervasive. The other day a
young junkie robbed a pharmacy in Vernon in the middle of the night,
shooting a gun at the pharmacist before diving out the drive-through
window, running off with hundreds of narcotic prescription bills, and
being apprehended by police nearby. The pharmacist or an officer
could have been killed. Was that risk worth taking just to prevent a
junkie from getting a fix, to prevent him from buying, at a
reasonable cost and without endangering anyone but himself, the pills
to slake his craving?

Indeed, most fatalities involving illegal drugs are caused not by the
drugs themselves but by the crimes committed to obtain them.

Drug criminalization is estimated to be the underlying cause of as
much as 75 percent of Connecticut's imprisonments and yet the law
appears to have had little impact against drug abuse. Add the direct
costs of those imprisonments to their indirect costs -- the
destruction of the employability of convicts along with the
destruction of their ability to pay taxes and support their children
- -- and the total cost of drug criminalization may be more than a
third of the projected annual state budget deficit of $3.4 billion.

Meanwhile half the work of municipal police departments in
Connecticut consists of chasing dopeheads around as if they're as
much of a threat to the public as sports bettors are. Every other day
for decades now one Connecticut police department or another has been
summoning the news media to show off a big haul of marijuana or
cocaine and cash taken in a drug raid as if this has been some
triumph for civilization. But even as the cops boast about their
work, the dope is being replaced somewhere else.

Half the state's cost of criminal justice might be saved if
Connecticut gave up trying to police how people intoxicate themselves
in the privacy of their own homes. Prosecution of that victimless
crime could be left to the federal government, which, unlike state
government, can just print infinite amounts of money to pursue any
sort of bloat or futility and call it "economic stimulus."

As Connecticut draws up a state budget full of unprecedented
sacrifice, it might remember that it will have only as much crime as
it wants to have, only as much crime as it wants to pay for, only as
much crime as it legislates.