PROBLEM ISN'T PAROLE; IT'S DRUG CRIMINALIZATION

Connecticut apparently was supposed to consider it a revelation when a
newspaper reported the other day that, to prevent prison overcrowding,
the Correction Department has been giving probationary release to some
higher-risk prisoners, including some with records of violence.

These releases are getting scrutiny, of course, because of the arrest
of two parolees in the mass murder in Cheshire in July. But while
those parolees had long records, their crimes had not been violent;
the mistake of releasing them was simply the failure to recognize
their incorrigibility, their having 21 and 17 felony convictions,
mostly burglaries, their having long since demonstrated that only life
sentences could protect the public from them.

Indeed, Connecticut will continue to fail with criminal justice if it
tries merely to remedy supposed negligence at the Correction
Department or the Board of Pardons and Parole, the latter agency
having failed to review the sentencing transcripts of the parolees
charged in the Cheshire case -- as, until recently, the board had
failed for 10 years, with the General Assembly's knowledge, to review
sentencing transcripts for all parole applicants.

The Cheshire case has actually disclosed little about parole and
probation. For state government has been wrestling with prison
crowding and parole standards for decades. Its studies have found that
between 47 and 70 percent of released prisoners are arrested again in
a few years -- and this does not count released prisoners who commit
new crimes but are not apprehended.

That is, it long has been known that the Correction Department fails
as a correctional system, instead turning the criminal-justice system
into a revolving door. Parole board Chairman Robert Farr acknowledged
this the other day when he cited the large number of what he called
"frequent fliers" doing "life on the installment plan."

Connecticut strives to keep offenders out of prison -- not just out of
pity and to avoid expense but because prison tends overwhelmingly to
destroy the small chance of salvaging lives that are often already
largely wrecked. While a few people somehow straighten themselves out
there, prison doesn't just punish and deter. It also erodes whatever
honest skills prisoners have, demolishes their ability to earn an
honest living, and profoundly demoralizes, embitters, and engenders
contempt for everything. (This is how mere career burglars become mass
murderers.) By the time they reach prison, most offenders already long
have stopped deserving another chance -- and then prison confirms this
by making them unfit to live anywhere else.

This, and not any supposed failures of parole and probation, is why
Connecticut should impose mandatory life prison terms at a certain
level of incorrigibility -- if not "three strikes" (even two
convictions for violence could justify a life term), then four, five,
or six strikes of specified severity. While California's "three
strikes" law, the toughest in the country, may have had a few cruel
results, it has diminished violent crime. Connecticut could adopt a
threshold of incorrigibility too -- if its prisons had room for the
incorrigibles.

The Correction Department wants to increase capacity by 758 prisoners
but would need $30 million more per year, $40,000 per prisoner. This
has been endorsed by state Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, House
chairman of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee, which soon
will hold hearings on the parole and probation system. But prison
expansion is not the only way to ensure that incorrigibles are locked
up forever. Connecticut also could be more selective with what it
criminalizes -- because most violent crime, most robberies, most
burglaries, and thus most imprisonments (about 75 percent) involve
contraband drugs.

So the big question of criminal justice in Connecticut isn't whether
the probation and parole systems could do better, nor whether prison
capacity should be expanded, nor even whether the state needs an
incorrigibility standard for life imprisonment, though the necessity
of the latter has been shown by the Cheshire case.

No, the big question is how much Connecticut wants to keep paying and
suffering just to continue trying to compel people not to take drugs.

Turning the drug problem into a criminal-justice problem has not only
failed to solve the drug problem. It has overwhelmed and incapacitated
the entire criminal-justice system. Unless the Judiciary Committee
examines this failure at its forthcoming hearings, it probably will be
wasting its time.