Stir Crazy

Loved the Super Bowl but couldn't help noticing that most of the top players were black and that the fans were white. Then, as football season gave way to basketball and the Gulf war dragged on. I switched to old movies and caught Spartacus. Great flick. Slaves picked from Rome's colonies revolt under the leadership of gladiators, the only role models the slaves had back then.

Something gnawed at me, some connection, and I switched back to ESPN and CNN. That's one nice thing about sports mania and war---black men are allowed to become positive role models. Which is what George Bush must have been thinking when he vetoed the civil rights act last year---there's no further need to redress the historic wrongs of slavery, segregation and racism when black men seem to be doing so well.

So I mused until a report that had a stark statistic landed on my desk: "Nearly one in four black men in the age group 20--29 is under the control of the criminal-justice system---in prison or jail. on probation or parole." Which means the good old U.S. of A. incarcerates black men at four times the rate of racist South Africa.

Now, what's going on here? We cheer for our black guys on the playing field, we wave American flags for them in combat, but we send every fourth one off to prison. It's not just blacks, of course, who are being jailed at an unprecedented rate. The report, prepared by the reliable Washington-based research group The Sentencing Project, says we now have a higher percentage of our entire population in prison than any other country on earth. It documents that in the past few years, the U.S. has pulled past South Africa, which is now number two, while the Soviet Union struggles to keep its hold on third place in the Jail Your Own sweepstakes. More than 1,000,000 Americans are currently incarcerated, double the figure of ten years ago. During a decade in which politicians of every political stripe attempted to outdo themselves in talking tough on crime, we have managed to place an entire colony of our population behind bars, without any serious public debate and with no appreciable impact on the crime rate.

The craze to jail has little to do with stopping the hard crime that frightens people. The evidence is overwhelming that there is no demonstrable correlation between having lots of people in jail and having a safe society. As the Sentencing Project report notes, "American murder rates are at least seven times as high as [those of] most [European countries]," which average less than one quarter our rate of incarceration.

At a cost of at least $50,000 to build a cell and $20,000 annually to house each prisoner, we have managed to spend tens of billions on this approach to crime busting, while starving any and all alternative programs that might prevent crime. Most people are in jail for crimes so petty that if the criminals had held even the most minimal of jobs, the crime wouldn't have been cost effective. Yet we've all but abandoned job-training programs, other than the military, and have pulled the plug on inner-city schools, unleashing instead vast firepower against the ghetto.

The pathetic truth is that it is mostly crime committed by poor people that gets punished, and much of it, in dollar terms, is paltry. Incompetent criminals with inferior lawyers or overworked public defenders are the ones who go to jail. Only 20 percent of reported crimes end in arrest, and the bigger the fish, the less likelihood of his being caught. "The vast majority of inmates," reports the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, "are sentenced for petty crimes that pose little danger to public safety or significant economic loss to victims."

This is particularly true on the Federal level, despite the scary invocation of the Willie Horton example in the past Presidential race. As Time magazine---not a bastion of bleeding hearts---concluded in evaluating President Bush's ballyhooed crime-fighting proposals of a couple of years ago. "The President's proposals would have virtually no impact on the kinds of crime that Americans most fear: assault, robbery and rape, as well as virtually all murders and most drug offenses." Why? Because those crimes fall outside the Federal purview. Time noted that of 47,700 inmates held in Federal penitentiaries that year, "a mere 118" had been convicted of murder.

After taking a swipe at Bush for failing to move against assault weapons. Time pointed out the underlying practical problem: The money is just not there to build and maintain the prisons to accommodate ever larger numbers of convicts. Instead, prisoners are simply recycled through the system more quickly and in larger numbers, with little done to rehabilitate them while they are there. "Prison gates have become more like revolving doors: Nearly two thirds of all convicts are rearrested within three years of their release." Noting the six percent imprisonment rate, Time concluded. "Even doubling the current prison population, which would cost more than 43 billion dollars, would leave the chance of a prospective criminal's facing imprisonment at no more than ten percent."

Meaning that the zealots' drive to jail more people has little connection with a program to curtail crime. First, what is required, most experts in the field agree, is to sort out serious crime from all the junk charges that are now clogging the courts. In particular, the war on drugs has diverted our crime-fighting priorities from assaults on people and toward social engineering of the most myopic kind. It's amazing that we have the resources to hound casual drug users but can't make a serious dent in violent crimes against innocent by-standers.

Second, say many of these experts, we need to devote the same energies and finances to improving the lot of the people who commit the chicken-coop burglaries and holdups that land them in the can. If 43 percent of prisoners are black and another huge chunk is Latino and poor white, it ought to tell us something about the social causes of crime.

Uh-oh. Sounds like the old bleeding heart, doesn't it? But what's so hard-headed and realistic about telling a kid in Bedford-Stuyvesant that his only three choices in life are making the Knicks, joining the Army or committing crimes that have only a six percent chance of landing him in jail? And then the hardheads make the choice even niftier by unleashing a jihad against drugs, which, of course, just increases the huge profits of the narcotics trade, which, in turn, makes drugs far and away the best ghetto job opportunity.

What I think, Romans and countrymen, is that the demagogs who started this lock-'em-up craze should be held accountable. They've helped destroy almost half a generation of black youth in a mindless thrashing out at a problem requiring a calibrated response. It's time to stop hamming it up with showy theatrics. Enough with the circus barkers.

"Although the tragedy was real, the infamous Horton anecdote was hollow," John J. Dilulio, Jr., a leading criminal-justice expert, pointed out in a recent Brookings Institution study. "[More than] 99.5 percent of prison furloughs result neither in a violation of the terms of the furlough nor in a new crime."

On the other hand, parolees have a shockingly high recidivism rate. The point is that there is not a good "liberal" alternative to prison. In fact, the debate is not one of conservative or liberal ideology. Liberal governor Mario Cuomo of New York has built more prisons and put more people in jail than his Republican predecessors. And conservative governor George Deukmejian of California presided over a system that had more than 200,000 convicted criminals released on probation to ease the pressure on its overcrowded prisons. The point is not political but practical: We must stop making cheap theater out of the evidence and begin to think clearly about what works and what doesn't as an alternative to hard time.

Why? Try this hardheaded reason: because we just don't have the money to keep expanding the prison population at the rate of the past ten years. Ten years ago, the total cost of all jail construction, services and operations was 2.5 billion dollars. Now it is 25 billion dollars, and no one knows where to easily find more.

The fact is, we are already forced by overcrowded prisons and limited Government budgets to use many alternatives to straight time. About 2,500,000 Americans are now walking the streets on parole or probation. Despite all the laws passed mandating stiffer sentences, actual time served has not increased over the past decade, because there is no room at the inn and early release is required to make room for fresh convicts. Bottom line, ma'am.

States such as Minnesota have excellent programs that sentence nonviolent criminals to probation at home, with close supervision, while the "prisoner" studies or holds a job. The alternative---locking up all of those people, and the millions coming after them, and throwing away the key---has been tried and doesn't work. Even the South Africans and the Soviets, heavy-handed though they are, are coming to their senses and accepting limits to just how many people they can lock up. We're not there yet.

What we seem to believe in is this neoapartheid society, where the inner city is abandoned and its black youth are ignored and shunned until they make enough noise to attract our attention either on football fields or in Arabia. Or, for one out of four, by committing crimes and getting thrown into jail.

Something is nagging at me again. What does it all remind me of? Colonies of black guys as gladiators, facing more or less the same choices: Go for the illegal bread or join the circuses. And, meanwhile, the Romans figure that if they keep cracking down on the misbegotten and keep cheering for the few who become heroes, it will all be Ok. They never pause to consider, using hardheaded accounting, that it would be cheaper to send a kid to college than to gladiator school. Or to prison.

Roll Spartacus.