Pubdate: Fri, 05 Jan 2001
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378
Feedback: http://extranet.globe.com/LettersEditor/default.asp
Website: http://www.boston.com/globe/
Author: David Nyhan

IT'S BAD NEWS FOR JUSTICE

WHY DO WE keep calling it ''the war on drugs?'' It's not a war when 
you lose every battle; it's a rout. Why do we think we're winning 
''the war on crime'' when 600,000 inmates return to our streets every 
year, their behavior ''modified'' by whatever they encountered behind 
bars?

The lock-'em-up theory of criminal justice is criminal, but it's not 
justice when we confine tens of thousands of poorly educated, 
generally low-IQ individuals for nonviolent offenses that hurt 
themselves more than anyone else.

The voters' fear of wrongdoers, exacerbated by show-business 
exploitation on film, gives politicians a lever with which to pry 
loose a vote on Election Day. But every other day between elections, 
we pay the price of incarcerating two million of our fellow 
Americans, far more prisoners than need to be behind bars. We let 
fear of drug crime prompt us to vote $1.7 billion for a doomed ''war 
on drugs'' in Colombia that will turn that place into South America's 
Vietnam.

We can't even keep drugs out of our highest-security cell blocks. You 
cannot pay every prison guard the price he'd put on smuggling 
contraband in to caged men and women desperate for chemical release 
from the living hell of prison life. Even if 99 out of 100 guards are 
honest - undoubtedly a far higher quotient than is present in every 
other occupation - there's always one who will deal for the right 
price.

The craving for intoxicants, stimulants is insatiable. Only through 
education, support, discipline, or faith can a susceptible individual 
master the appetite for alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, or drugs.

So many prosecutors and legislators pad their stat sheets with 
arrests, convictions, Draconian laws that the system has careened out 
of control. We pay $30,000 a year to confine a prisoner. One out of 
four black males between 20 and 30 is ensnared in the penal system. 
We keep doing more of the same-old and think we're making progress. 
But it all comes around in a circle. The overwhelming majority of the 
boys we send away come back as hardened men. Police departments learn 
to work the system, confiscating cars, boats, and caches of cash that 
somehow become the property of the confiscating department, turning 
law enforcement into a lottery that encourages set-ups, stings, 
entrapment, and over-zealous prosecutions.

The election result handing the GOP the White House, Senate, and 
House presages a harder time for those already doing hard time and 
those who will fall into the dysfunctional system over the next four 
years. Former Senator John Ashcroft is a conservative zealot, a 
right-winger defeated by the people of his own state, but persuasive 
enough to get George W. Bush to name him attorney general.

The chief law enforcement officer of the land, if confirmed, will 
take the Justice Department in a whole other direction. Ashcroft, 
while in the Senate, derailed the confirmation of one respected black 
judge by traducing him as ''pro-criminal.''

Perhaps the most vociferous of the antiabortion claque in the Senate, 
Ashcroft would be called upon to prosecute those who harass and 
intimidate abortion seekers and providers. An honorary degree 
recipient at Bob Jones University, he is anti-gun-control 
''big-time,'' as Dick Cheney would say, as well as hostile to civil 
rights laws and affirmative action. He'll be in a position to yank 
the Justice Department far to the right once confirmed.

Bush appears to have tossed the right wing and the fundamentalist 
faction of his conservative coalition the biggest bone in the Cabinet 
cupboard by picking Ashcroft to be the nation's top law enforcer. The 
president-barely-elect was convinced by his staff that Ashcroft would 
survive the confirmation process. While blacks, labor, and liberals 
are fulminating, the Senate is considered likely to confirm a retired 
colleague who is not only known to most of the members, but who is 
going to be the politician who decides whom to prosecute for what, 
all over the country.

As the choice of the incoming president, and with the backing of the 
barest-of-majorities in the Senate from which he was recently 
ejected, it will take more to lick Ashcroft than seems apparent right 
now. To the unions and blacks and other minorities, as well as 
pro-choice women, Ashcroft's unexpected return to the Senate as a 
nominee awaiting confirmation is a disheartening development.

To those groups that opposed Bush's election, Ashcroft comes back 
like a vengeful pharoah, with a cross in one hand and a whip in the 
other, vowing vengeance on those who pushed through laws on abortion, 
guns, drugs, and crime that he and his fundamentalist fellows 
opposed. Off the cards showing on the table, I don't think the 
liberals can stop him. Ultimately, Bush will take whatever heat 
Ashcroft generates. It'll be a long four years for liberals. If 
Ashcroft has a sense of irony, he'd let Ralph Nader present him for 
confirmation, because Ralph's the man who made it possible.
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