CRIME AND PUNISHMENT AND PREVENTION

This week's report of a continued decline in crime in America supports a
multifaceted approach to a multifaceted problem, with a focus on early
intervention and redirection.

Preventing cancer through lifestyle changes - diet, exercise, smoking
cessation - is a lot cheaper than treating cancer with chemotherapy,
radiation or surgery.

The former approach won't eradicate cancer, but it can reduce the need for
so much high-cost treatment.

Common sense says a similar approach to crime is in order.

Locking up criminals and throwing away the key has an undeniable appeal as
public policy. Sooner or later, it helps reduce crime by taking ever larger
numbers of the criminally inclined off the streets while inflicting
deserved punishment on perpetrators.

However, it's the most expensive response. Despite falling crime rates,
some rethinking is appropriate in this period of budget crisis in a state
tilted heavily toward the punishment option.

The 2001 National Crime Victimization Survey, taken by the federal Bureau
of Justice Statistics, found a 9 percent decline in violent crimes other
than murder, while property crimes were down 6 percent. (Murder was not
included because the survey is based on interviews with victims.)

Experts cite two key reasons for the falloff: a strong economy in the last
decade and tougher sentencing laws. Other reports and studies over the
years have found strong connections between violent crime and poverty,
substance abuse, family instability, teen pregnancy and other social maladies.

That strongly indicates there are places to attack crime before it ever
gets committed. Resources properly invested in those areas could steer onto
a law-abiding path lives that might otherwise plunge into the sort of
behavior that results in long and expensive prison terms.

The need for prisons, both as a deterrent and a way to remove the dangerous
and incorrigible from society, will not disappear. But as a Milton S.
Eisenhower Foundation report noted, "if incarceration was as much a
deterrent to crime as some assert, the nation would not have such a high
incarceration rate and persistent high levels of crime, violence and fear."

Meanwhile, an ounce of prevention through education, job training and
creation, drug treatment, mental health care, pregnancy prevention and
interventions with at-risk children would be worth a pound - make that 10
to 20 years - of incarceration at $26,000 or more per year.