COURT SENTENCING NOT CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

People cannot decide if Frank Melton is grandstanding or if he is
serious about cleaning up the streets of Mississippi.

The new head of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics has made a big
splash in Jackson recently with the multiple arrests in connection
with some high-profile murders.

Grandstanding or not, it's good to see someone step up and take on the
drug problem in the Jackson -- especially when the drug problem is
leading to other crimes, such as murder.

But Melton's actions in Jackson lead to a bigger question: what about
the rest of the state?

Is Melton going to get moving to clean up drug problems in northeast
Mississippi or on the coast? Will he swoop down in those places to
save the day?

The truth be told, Melton probably feels a connection to the
inner-city of Jackson because he has spent so many years working to
improve the area and give children their a shot at a good life.

Still, Jackson is only a slice of the Mississippi pie. For people who
live in Forest, they want drugs in Scott County eradicated.

For those who live in Natchez, it would be nice to see Adams County
get a little more state-sponsored help. Ditto for people in Tupelo and
Lee County.

Eighth District Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon appeared at a Forest
Rotary Club meeting recently and told the story of how he purchased
his first Chevy pickup for $3,500.

A few decades later here recently, Judge Gordon said he bought him a
Ford pickup for $38,000.

In all those many years, everything has gone up, he said, except for
across the board punishments.

The sentence for the theft of that $3,500 truck would have been the
same as the theft for his $38,000 truck: $1,000 fine and five years in
prison.

Judge Gordon said he sees the drug problem in Mississippi getting
worse by the number of drug cases that appear before the courts.

Furthermore, he does not believe the conventional wisdom approach to
solving the drug problem is the end-all answer.

Education, he said, is not the answer. He knows that reaching the
population most at-risk for turning to crime is not an easy thing, and
therefore education will ultimately fail because it will never be
successfully implemented where it needs to be implemented.

Shame and humiliation through community service and tough rhetoric --
even light sentencing to jail -- by judges is not the answer either.

Gordon said when people return to their communities after a short
stint in the pokey, they are viewed as the Big Man on the block, the
guy who has done the time and isn't scared to do the crime ... again.

Gordon said the only real way to curb crime is to put tougher
penalties in place to act as a true deterrent.

"My mother was a good speaker," Gordon said. "When I got in trouble,
she gave me a speech. But my dad, he got a switch. That worked."

Gordon said if people see that criminals will be arrested, prosecuted
and then sentenced harshly, they will think twice before committing
smaller crimes, much less graduating to more serious and heinous activities.

Still, such an ideal is neither new nor easy implemented, Gordon
readily admits. Even truth-in-sentencing laws that require a person to
serve 85 percent of a sentence have a downside: they cost too much.

That cost, in many instances, is borne as a burden by local counties
and municipalities. But Gordon said the answer cannot be to continue
to allow criminals to walk free with just light punishments.

If we know that cannot be the answer, then someone should go about
finding out exactly what the alternative can and should be.

For Melton's part, he is arresting bad guys, no matter how bad they
might be.

Grandstanding or not, we think that is a good start.

But we hope Melton will take his passion and parley it into pushing a
legislative agenda that would expand the reach of the MBN where each
county has at least one agent.

Otherwise, we will see little improvement in our war on drugs and
crime in general.

Editor's note: Sam R. Hall is editor of the Scott County Times. The
opinions expressed in this column are his and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Starkville Daily News.