DRUG CRIMES LEAD TO OTHERS, INCLUDING MURDER

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

The recently 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 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?

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 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 that they will think twice before
committing smaller crimes, much less graduating to more serious activities.

Still, such an ideal is neither new nor easily 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. Grandstanding or not, we
think that is a good start. But I 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.