Pubdate: Wed, 03 May 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Section: Politics
Author: James Dao

A GET-TOUGH GORE FOCUSES ON DRUG TESTS

ATLANTA, - In a speech pungent with tough talk about criminals,
drug abusers and his Republican rival for president, Vice President Al
Gore called today for a broad array of anticrime measures, among them
mandatory drug testing of all prisoners and parolees.

Choosing a Southern state as the backdrop for one of his most
conservative speeches of the presidential campaign, Mr. Gore proposed
federal spending of $500 million a year to help states test, treat and
counsel prisoners and parolees for drug use.

Under the plan, inmates in state prisons -- mandatory drug testing
already applies in federal prisons -- would not be released until they
could pass drug tests. Further, parolees could be returned to prison
if they failed the tests, which would be administered to them twice a
week. Parolees would also be subjected to stricter supervision, to
ensure that they paid child support, stayed off drugs and found jobs.

"When inmates are sent back to the streets unrehabilitated,
unrepentant and unskilled, then they are just going to commit more
crime and go right back into prison," Mr. Gore said to a crowd filled
with uniformed police officers.

As in all his recent policy speeches, the vice president used a harsh
tone to attack Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the apparent Republican
presidential nominee, this time for cutting state financing of drug
treatment by half.

As a result of such policies, Mr. Gore said, Texas under Mr. Bush has
experienced a 25 percent increase in the number of former inmates
returned to prison for new crimes within three years of release.

Mr. Gore did not suggest that Mr. Bush had been soft on crime, a
position that would be hard to defend: in Mr. Bush's five and a half
years as governor, Texas has undertaken the nation's largest
prison-building program, executed a record number of criminals,
lengthened sentences for many crimes and incarcerated a rising number
of juveniles.

But the vice president did say: "I believe that we should demand that
criminals get clean before they get out of jail. Governor Bush seems
content to keep pushing them out of the same revolving door."

Aides to Mr. Bush disputed Mr. Gore's statistic on Texas recidivism
and said violent crime in the state had fallen 20 percent, to a
20-year low, during the Bush administration. They also asserted that
the availability of drug treatment in federal prisons had declined
during the Clinton-Gore administration, even as drug use among
adolescents had risen (an assertion disputed in turn by the Gore campaign).

"If Al Gore is willing to attack Texas, where violent crime is at a
20-year low and the largest prison drug-treatment program in the
country is located, we're also expecting attacks on Texans for
defending the Alamo," said Dan Bartlett, a Bush aide.

Just as Mr. Bush has tried to move further to the center of the
political spectrum with education and health care proposals, Mr.
Gore's crime speech today provided him an opportunity to reach out to
centrist Republicans and conservative Democrats. And he seized it with
gusto.

He cited the Bible several times, illustrating the problem of violence
among young men by retelling the story of Cain and Abel. He argued
that no amount of anticrime legislation would work unless people took
greater responsibility for their actions. And he castigated both
conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats for failing to
compromise on crime-fighting plans, casting himself as the purveyor of
a third way who could rise above "old orthodoxies."

"We can't go back to the finger-pointing and failed strategies that
led to that steep increase in crime in the Bush-Quayle
administration," he said.

"And we can't go back to the old Democratic approach, which was tough
on the causes of crime but not tough enough on crime itself, again
when people in both political parties wanted us to do more."

Mr. Gore's effort to outflank Governor Bush on crime recalls Bill
Clinton's drive in the 1992 campaign to neutralize what had been a
potent Republican issue by advocating tough anticrime measures,
including the death penalty.

The vice president's speech today, typifying the administration's
approach to policy making, offered a mixture of ideas -- some new,
some old, many small-bore.

Several of the ideas were first discussed by Mr. Gore in a crime
speech last July in Boston, where he called for longer sentences for
all crimes committed with guns and for requiring photo-bearing
licenses for people who buy new handguns.

Today Mr. Gore restated his support for a proposal that federal money
help local governments hire 50,000 new police officers in the coming
decade. The Clinton administration has already helped finance the
hiring of 60,000 new police officers, with 40,000 more in the pipeline.

The vice president also proposed federal aid to help state and local
governments buy new computers for crime-fighting purposes, hire new
prosecutors and expand after-school programs.

And in addition to mandatory drug testing of prisoners and parolees,
he called for expanding drug treatment programs for noncriminals,
though he offered no details. "I believe we should build a country in
which every single addict who finds the power to reach out and say,
'Now is the time I want help and I want treatment' gets an immediate
response," he said.

Mr. Gore also jumped into what has become a contentious debate in
Congress by endorsing a proposal for a constitutional amendment
intended to expand the rights of crime victims. The amendment would
grant victims and their families the right to reasonable notice of
court proceedings involving their cases, the right to have a voice in
those proceedings, and the right to notice of an offender's release or
escape from prison.

Opponents of the amendment, including many Democrats, assert that
those rights can be ensured without amending the Constitution. In
addition, some liberals argue that the measure would violate the civil
rights of the accused. 
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