PAROLE, AGAIN

What Happens When The Convicts Come Home?

"But," said Alice to the Cheshire Cat, "I don't want to go among mad people."

"Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here. I'm mad.
You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the mischievous cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

That pretty well describes the conditions of debate in Virginia when it
comes to forming correctional policy. It's all a tad nuts.

Republicans could not believe their luck after "ending" parole in 1995. The
violent crime rate, already declining in Virginia at that point, kept
heading south. Opportunity had come knockin'.

So, the GOP -- George Allen, Jim Gilmore, et al. -- went right out and
claimed that parole abolition made the difference. Many Republicans still
do. Some may actually believe it. They belong with Alice and The Grin.

Then, maybe, so do the rest of us.

Ending parole, in toto, was never possible. Not for those who had already
been sentenced by 1995. That's in the U.S. Constitution. You cannot alter
punishment beyond what the law provided at the time of conviction.

The law could be changed for those convicted after 1995 -- and it was. But
that still left a huge number of incarcerated bad people -- roughly 19,000
of the state's 28,250 inmates today -- eligible for parole.

Accordingly, parole rolls on, as administered by the Virginia State Parole
Board -- only the parole board will be looking different soon. Four of the
five members have resigned, three of them doing so after Gov. Mark Warner
said he planned to fire the entire lot.

No question, the current board embroiled itself in a controversy when it
recently paroled a couple of convicted murderers. And, yes, former Gov. Jim
Gilmore threw a snit (though only after it hit the press), so Warner may
have felt obliged to do something.

But the present board has rendered more than 4,000 decisions and, by all
accounts, in conservative fashion. The rate of parole has declined
significantly. How five inexperienced people will do better than five
experienced people remains unclear.

Of course, neither Gilmore nor Warner has apparently bothered to ask why
the current board did what it did. But that's typical. A sensible
discussion on parole never occurs.

Virginia needs to have one -- and soon. We can abolish parole, but we
cannot throw away the key. Our system of justice renders such an
arrangement unacceptable. And the bill would be unswallowable.

In other words, the vast majority of those now taking up space in the
correctional system -- at no small cost -- will eventually get out. And
when they do, they will come to live in our communities.

In what condition they arrive should be a matter of some concern. As it is,
little or no attention, in Virginia or elsewhere, gets spent on "prisoner
re-entry" -- despite the fact that the number of state and federal
prisoners rose four-fold to 1.3 million during the past 25 years.

It's not that incarceration doesn't work. Keeping young felons locked up
until they hit their 30s, research shows, much reduces the likelihood of a
return to crime. But more going in leads to more coming out. According to
published reports, America released more than 600,000 inmates last year --
up from 170,000 in 1980. Virginia followed the trend.

Further, as writer David Plotz pointed out in Slate last year, longer
sentences also mean less contact with family and fewer employable skills.
We don't do rehabilitation anymore, remember. As for the social network of
an ex-con, that mostly consists of other ex-cons.

So, should we push the debate past the hubbub of parole board missteps and
start worrying about the larger issues of ex-cons -- many of whom went in
for violent offenses -- when they reappear in public?

We better. Not because anyone particularly cares about ex-cons, but because
we care about the law-abiding and the relative safety of our communities.
To think and act otherwise is to plunge even further down the rabbit hole
into Wonderland.