Pubdate: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 Source: Daily Press (VA) Copyright: 2002 The Daily Press Contact: http://www.dailypress.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/585 PAROLE, AGAIN What Happens When The Convicts Come Home? "But," said Alice to the Cheshire Cat, "I don't want to go among mad people." "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the mischievous cat, "or you wouldn't have come here." That pretty well describes the conditions of debate in Virginia when it comes to forming correctional policy. It's all a tad nuts. Republicans could not believe their luck after "ending" parole in 1995. The violent crime rate, already declining in Virginia at that point, kept heading south. Opportunity had come knockin'. So, the GOP -- George Allen, Jim Gilmore, et al. -- went right out and claimed that parole abolition made the difference. Many Republicans still do. Some may actually believe it. They belong with Alice and The Grin. Then, maybe, so do the rest of us. Ending parole, in toto, was never possible. Not for those who had already been sentenced by 1995. That's in the U.S. Constitution. You cannot alter punishment beyond what the law provided at the time of conviction. The law could be changed for those convicted after 1995 -- and it was. But that still left a huge number of incarcerated bad people -- roughly 19,000 of the state's 28,250 inmates today -- eligible for parole. Accordingly, parole rolls on, as administered by the Virginia State Parole Board -- only the parole board will be looking different soon. Four of the five members have resigned, three of them doing so after Gov. Mark Warner said he planned to fire the entire lot. No question, the current board embroiled itself in a controversy when it recently paroled a couple of convicted murderers. And, yes, former Gov. Jim Gilmore threw a snit (though only after it hit the press), so Warner may have felt obliged to do something. But the present board has rendered more than 4,000 decisions and, by all accounts, in conservative fashion. The rate of parole has declined significantly. How five inexperienced people will do better than five experienced people remains unclear. Of course, neither Gilmore nor Warner has apparently bothered to ask why the current board did what it did. But that's typical. A sensible discussion on parole never occurs. Virginia needs to have one -- and soon. We can abolish parole, but we cannot throw away the key. Our system of justice renders such an arrangement unacceptable. And the bill would be unswallowable. In other words, the vast majority of those now taking up space in the correctional system -- at no small cost -- will eventually get out. And when they do, they will come to live in our communities. In what condition they arrive should be a matter of some concern. As it is, little or no attention, in Virginia or elsewhere, gets spent on "prisoner re-entry" -- despite the fact that the number of state and federal prisoners rose four-fold to 1.3 million during the past 25 years. It's not that incarceration doesn't work. Keeping young felons locked up until they hit their 30s, research shows, much reduces the likelihood of a return to crime. But more going in leads to more coming out. According to published reports, America released more than 600,000 inmates last year -- up from 170,000 in 1980. Virginia followed the trend. Further, as writer David Plotz pointed out in Slate last year, longer sentences also mean less contact with family and fewer employable skills. We don't do rehabilitation anymore, remember. As for the social network of an ex-con, that mostly consists of other ex-cons. So, should we push the debate past the hubbub of parole board missteps and start worrying about the larger issues of ex-cons -- many of whom went in for violent offenses -- when they reappear in public? We better. Not because anyone particularly cares about ex-cons, but because we care about the law-abiding and the relative safety of our communities. To think and act otherwise is to plunge even further down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth