CONNECTING THE INCARCERATION DOTS

The combination of miscommunication, ignored warnings and general
hubris - all in a culture that discouraged internal criticism -
virtually guaranteed disaster.

No, this is not a follow-up on NASA and the Columbia space shuttle
tragedy. It is a commentary on criminal justice in America.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, after months of painstaking
investigation of the Feb. 1 space calamity, has issued a scathing
report of those in charge. A similarly independent body ought to take
a look at our criminal justice system.

It would find, as the NASA investigators found, not so much a lack of
information but rather an almost willful failure to connect the dots.

For example, the Department of Justice recently issued its annual
report on crime which contained this wonderful news: Violent crimes
and crimes against property declined last year to the lowest levels
since the department started compiling such records in 1973.

That's from the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics' August
report, "Criminal Victimization 2002." This is from BJS' July report
titled "Prisoners in 2002": America's prison and jail population
increased by 3.7 percent from 2001 to 2002 - three times the rate of
increase recorded a year earlier.

An independent board of inquiry might wonder at the logic of
increasing levels of incarceration at a time of significant decreases
in crime.

Perhaps someone would raise the possibility that the increased
incarceration rates produced the decreases in crime. Well, that
someone ought to talk to Vincent Schiraldi, president of the
Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. It was Schiraldi who called
my attention to the inconsistency between the crime statistics and the
policy.

JPI looked at the FBI Uniform Crime Report's homicide data and found
this interesting tidbit: The regions of the country with the slower
growth in prison population from 2001 to 2002 (the Northeast and the
Midwest) had declines in homicides, while those regions with the
greater increases in incarceration (the West and the South) had
increases in homicides. Schiraldi's point is not that incarceration
causes violence; it is that there is no credible link between crime
rates and incarceration rates.

OK, you say. That's incompetence, but disaster?

Try this: According to another BJS report released last month -
"Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Populations, 1974-2001" - one
out of every 37 adults living in the United States at the end of 2001
had been to prison at some time during his or her life. That's about
2.7 percent. But for adult black males, the been-incarcerated rate was
16.6 percent (compared to 7.7 percent for Hispanic males and 2.6
percent for white males).

And it gets worse. By the Justice Department's projections, 32 percent
of black males born in 2001 will spend some time in prison, unless
something is done to change the trend.

And what might change it? Well, education might. As Schiraldi notes,
there is a very strong correlation between educational failure and
incarceration - especially among African-American males. But according
to a report the Justice Policy Institute released on Thursday, by the
time they reach their 30s, nearly twice as many black men will have
been to prison as will have earned bachelor's degrees. Slightly more
than half of black male dropouts will spend time in jail in their lifetime.

So why are we cutting money for education - both K-12 and higher
ed?

It is, says Schiraldi, our failure to connect the dots. "Schools are
facing the largest budget shortfalls since World War II," he says.
"And the decreases in state spending for schools is occurring at a
time when drops in crime would allow the states to sensibly re-examine
their prison policies.

"Look, I'm not saying people in jail are all innocent. I grew up in a
blue-collar family in Brooklyn. Members of my family got in trouble
from time to time - but none ever went to prison. If a third of my
(white) nephews were looking at prison, we wouldn't have this policy.
The president would declare a state of emergency, bring the best minds
together to talk about education and treatment. Mandatory sentencing
wouldn't even be on the table."

In other words, like the Columbia investigators, we'd connect the
dots.