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A U. S. Senator, James Webb of Virginia, who is kind of new in Congress -- he ranks 77th in seniority -- has decided that he needs a cause to associate himself with if he wants to get any attention from the public, not to mention the other Senators. All the better known causes are already taken, the Tibetans, the baby seals, the Special Olympics, the lame, the halt and the blind, they’re all someone else’s hobby and get the hobbyist lots of fine publicity and annual testimonials along with commencement addresses.
What was there left for Senator Jim to choose? Not much, you’d say, but he’s found a way around that. Instead of repping the orphans or some other such deserving minority he has chosen the least deserving candidates for public support that it was possible to find. The proteges that he’s advocating for are none other than the criminals of the United States.
A strange choice, you might say, and yes it is. But how many of us ever stop to think that these people, or rather that number of them now confined in prisons and jails around the country are the first charge on the budget of the federal government, which is the same as saying “on the taxpayers“. They come before the army, the navy, the forest service, the Public Health Service, anyone you want to name. The reason is that prisoners are wholly dependent on the government for their continued existence. Their food and drink, their clothes, their medical care, their beds, their books, everything comes from Uncle Sam or his state equivalent. They’re the only people in the country of whom we can say, if the government falls, they die.
The government’s responsibility is heavy indeed, And usually when anyone assumes responsibility for an important job someone else can be found to denounce him for the way he’s doing it. In this case it’s Senator Webb who has assumed the role of critic of the country’s penal system and found it wanting and in need of reformation “from top to bottom”.
Well, criticism is the most agreeable of all amusements, as someone once said, but it’s unlikely that the prison guards of this country would find it either amusing or agreeable, even from a senator. They are the men in the arena, literally with their lives on the line and they don’t appreciate catcalls from the sidelines.
The senator doesn’t confine himself to criticism, but has a positive program for the kind of reform he wants. He’s provided a seven-point outline of it in a magazine article lately which goes roughly as follows:
1. Find out why we have so many people in jail as compared to other countries.
2. Find out how much this is costing us.
3. Reshape our nation’s drug policies.
4. Improve diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
5. Control violence in prisons and get better administrators.
6. Do a better job of rehabilitating prisoners upon release.
7. Find ways to defend ourselves better against the growing violence of internationally based gangs.
Looking at our rates of incarceration -- the highest in the world by far -- the senator says that there are only two possibilities that explain this. Either we’re home to the most evil people on earth or we’re doing something wrong. Obviously, the answer is the latter.
So he says. If your motto is see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, then you can’t make a case for the first alternative. If you believe in looking at things as they really are instead of through rose-colored glasses, then you can. The best you can say for a lot of our people is that they wouldn’t be so evil as they are if we didn’t let them get away with it until they’re incorrigible. But that would mean more people in jail for longer terms at an earlier age and the senator can’t accept that. After all he’s the guy who says first let’s reduce the number of people in jail and, later, let’s defend ourselves better against criminal gangs.
Some people would call this cognizant dissonance -- the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at one time. Other people would say it’s just confusion. There’s another condition called invincible ignorance. Senator Webb has seen the world and he still can’t understand why Japan, with a population half of ours, can get along with a prison population that’s less than 3% of ours.
The senator doesn’t note that for one thing, everyone in Japan is Japanese. There is no racial tension and there are no hate crimes. Japanese families are strong and united. There is no welfare class assiduous in producing children but uninterested in raising them. Japanese children go to school in uniform. They behave themselves in class, listen to their teachers, study hard and easily find employment when they leave school. Most of this is also true about children in Scandinavia, in Europe generally, in India and China and in most parts of the civilized or even semi-civilized world.
Senator Webb thinks we have too many people in jail. I think we have too few. In a shooting that shocked New York some days ago one of the perpetrators had four previous arrests, one for shooting at police, another had two arrests, one for assaulting police, a third had two arrests for a loaded gun, and more for other crimes. The fourth participant had only beaten up his girl friend in front of her children. Last week I wrote about a case I once had of an attempted rape of a blind woman by a man on bail for a prior rape.
It never changes. If I come back to this subject I’ll try to deal with the key part of Senator Webb’s charge, that our imprisonment costs are completely unjustified for the results we are getting for our incarcerations. He doesn’t deal with the cost of ending said sentences. I will. Mr. Webb has had a great career as a soldier, a lawyer, a writer, an administrator and now a politician. Not so good as a husband, though; he’s had three marriages. But nobody’s perfect. Especially when they get out of their depth dealing with subjects they don’t quite understand.
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