COMMENTARY: Rhetoric and reality on crime

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.) (UNDATED) One of the more sustained cloudbursts of […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.)

(UNDATED) One of the more sustained cloudbursts of cheers during Bob Dole’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention came when he promised to get tough on criminals.


Among other things, Dole pledged to work with states to repeal parole, crack down on drug law violators, and, in general, make life”hell”for offenders great and small. One would have thought that President Clinton had suspended the practice of punishing criminals, and that the answer to our crime problem is to simply get the jailers out of their hammocks and back to work locking up the bad guys.

Interestingly enough, a few days after Dole’s speech the Justice Department released a report on the number of Americans now in prison. The jailers, it turns out, have been quite busy. So have builders of prisons. As the number of prisons has expanded, so have the number of criminals. The crime rate, particularly among young offenders _ the ones with their careers still ahead of them _ has risen. All of which reminds us that our crime problem will not be solved by building more prisons or talking tough at political conventions because, at its heart, crime is a moral issue that requires a moral response.

Anyone who believes America is a coddling ground for criminals should listen closely to the Associated Press’ summation of the Department of Justice’s stunning report:”The number of men and women in the nation’s prisons and jails climbed to nearly 1.6 million last year, culminating a decade in which the U.S. rate of incarceration nearly doubled. … By the end of 1995, one out of every 167 Americans was in prison or jail, compared to 1 out of every 320 a decade earlier, according to the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.” I would not for a second suggest that we not lock up criminals, especially violent ones. Prison is necessary to segregate from society dangerous offenders, who constitute about half of those in prison today. If we desire to double the prison population yet again _ and double it quite quickly _ we should take Dole’s advice and end parole.

Dole’s pledge in San Diego to”end parole as we know it”won applause. But this is no solution. As the bipartisan Council on Crime in America reported in its landmark study,”80 percent of the most serious and frequent offenders escape detention and arrest.” Sociologist John DiIulio, who agrees that jailing some types of criminals has played a meaningful societal role, adds this heart-stopping statistic:”The justice system imprisons barely one criminal for every 100 violent crimes.”The lesson is clear: We should not put our faith in incarceration.

None of this is meant to suggest that tough talk doesn’t have profound effects. Quite the contrary. It has created the environment in which civil liberties are disposed of”for the common good.”Some 1,100 jurisdictions have curfews, for example, and one poll tells us that 90 percent of Americans support the idea. Curfews may sound harmless, but they are a form of martial law.

Meanwhile, in Dade County, Florida, a poll found that 74 percent of the adult population is willing to allow random roadblocks for the purpose of apprehending criminal suspects, thus tossing away Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Heated rhetoric only adds to this sense of panic. More importantly, it obscures the moral basis of this crisis.


In his highly praised speech, Dole informed America that the root cause of crime is criminals, which imparted little wisdom while reaping enormous applause. What is most disheartening about this glib statement is not only its superficiality, but that Dole could have, without fear of much protest, embraced the consensus that we are in cultural and moral decline, which is reflected in our crime statistics.

Dole himself is fond of blaming Hollywood for its negative influence on youth, and welfare reform is largely based on the belief that subsidies encourage illegitimacy, which in turn results in increased crime, especially juvenile violence.

Why didn’t Dole make the moral case? Because the Republicans, frightened senseless by charges that they have been”taken over”by the religious right, are running from any discussion of morality. The GOP leadership clearly fears that any discussion of morality will, sooner than later, lead to a discussion of abortion, and the Republicans would clearly rather talk about anything else.

There is hope for reducing crime. It means not taking cheap political shots or pandering to policies that restrict the lives of law-abiding citizens. Instead, we must become directly involved with at-risk populations. And this requires that we restate, unambiguously and unashamedly, that we have brought on our crime epidemic by destroying belief in objective moral truth.

Such proclamations are not risk-free, of course. Politicians can expect to face media ridicule should they explain the correlation between declining Sunday School attendance and rising juvenile crime. Likewise, some degree of howling will greet those who point out that when morality becomes merely a matter of”personal conscience”it becomes yet one more preference, no more worthy of allegiance or respect than a preference for stripes over plaid.

If we refuse to acknowledge that crime is a moral issue, however, we will be left with more tough talk, more prisons, and dwindling liberties _ hardly ingredients of a successful anti-crime policy.


MJP END COLSON

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