Pubdate: Sun, 16 Jan 2005
Source: Wisconsin State Journal (WI)
Copyright: 2005 Madison Newspapers, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wisconsinstatejournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/506
Author: Phil Brinkman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

FILLING PRISONS IS NO CURE-ALL

It had been another long, bruising battle, but Tommy Thompson was
beaming as he signed the next two-year state budget surrounded by a
throng of lawmakers and Capitol staff in July 1995.

"This is a glorious day for me," the Republican governor said with
characteristic bluster, noting the budget delivered on his promise to
slash property taxes by shifting more school spending to the state.

Among the 1995-97 budget's other provisions: a 13 percent increase in
spending for the Department of Corrections, including staffing five
expanded prisons. By the next year, Thompson said, Wisconsin planned
to add 900 prison beds, not including a proposed "supermax" prison,
eventually built in Boscobel.

"We've shown we're tough on crime," Thompson said.

Hours later, Benjamin Bryant, an aimless 23-year-old with a spotty
work history who was deeply behind in his rent and car payments,
walked into a convenience store on Madison's East Side where he once
worked, intent on robbing it.

With the help of his brother, Matthew, Bryant tied up the clerk,
19-year-old Ericha Von Hoken, in a back room, pried open the safe and
dumped about $2,000 and some cartons of cigarettes into a duffel bag.

After sending his brother home with the money, he tried to get Von
Hoken to pass out by making her hyperventilate, but it didn't work.
Finally, he grabbed a phone cord and wrapped it four times around her
neck, tying it in a knot at the back of her neck. She died shortly
afterward.

It's impossible to know whether Von Hoken's July 26, 1995, murder
could have been prevented. In hindsight, the warning signs seem
obvious. On probation at the time for a road-rage-related fight,
Bryant failed nearly every condition set for him. He got in more
fights, always where alcohol was involved, was a suspect in a theft
and skipped appointments with his probation officer - indicators,
perhaps, he needed closer supervision.

Convenience store clerks also had been dying at an alarming rate in
Wisconsin and around the country, including five killed in Dane County
alone in recent years. Two months before the murder, an intruder
killed a lone Madison fast-food restaurant employee as she was opening
up. The killings prompted periodic calls to increase store security,
including having two clerks on duty.

This much seems clear, however: None of the anti-crime measures that
the governor and lawmakers said would make the streets safer - longer
sentences, more prisons, new crimes with which to charge offenders -
could have stopped Benjamin Bryant from walking into Von Hoken's store.

"It just didn't click that way," said Bryant, now serving a life
sentence for the murder at Waupun Correctional Institution. "That
particular week, (the punishment) didn't matter. I thought I needed
the money that bad."

The crime, like untold others before and since, points to an inherent
flaw in Wisconsin's almost single-minded approach to protecting the
public over the past 15 years by ratcheting up penalties on
lawbreakers: It puts all the emphasis on the offender, and it tends to
target crime only after the fact.

By focusing on prisons instead of prevention, judges, legal scholars
and others say, Wisconsin has bought a correctional policy that:

. Costs more than just about any other solution, yet whose
effectiveness is open to debate.

. Starves other efforts to combat crime, many of which could be
accomplished at a fraction of the cost.

. Fails to tap into existing networks of people and organizations that
act as society's informal safeguards.

. Rejects the findings and experience of some of the top minds in the
field, most of whom advocate a more balanced approach.

"We've allowed the notion to pervade us that the solution is to catch
all the offenders and incapacitate them," said UW-Madison law
professor and former state Corrections Secretary Walter Dickey. "It's
fruitless."

"If you want to reduce threats to public safety, one of the things you
should be talking about is reducing opportunity" for crime in the
first place, he said.

Doing that, Dickey said, first requires that those in charge of places
where crime is likely to occur take some common-sense precautions.
Landlords, for example, are probably better able to prevent assaults
on tenants by putting locks on exterior doors of apartment buildings
than police are to catch all prowlers.

Research on convenience store safety has found robberies declined
after stores adopted measures such as limiting employee access to
cash, improving lighting, clearing the windows to make the register
visible from the street and limiting escape routes. Similarly, car
theft in this country started to go down in 1992 not after all the car
thieves were arrested but after manufacturers made vehicles harder to
steal.

Imperfect options But preventing crime also requires far better
supervision of known offenders in the communities where they live, and
the ability to intervene quickly and decisively before they can prey
on more victims, criminal justice experts say. In some cases, that
means jail; in others, it's help finding a job or a place to live,
drug or alcohol counseling or treatment for a mental illness.

"Violence in our society is really a public health issue," said Gerald
Nichol, who retired in October after 16 years as a Dane County circuit
judge. "If we addressed it like we did smoking or car seats or safety
belts, we might be able to make a difference."

Yet, with very few exceptions, the state allows just two options for
controlling felony offenders: probation or prison, followed by some
period of parole or, as it's been known for the past four years,
extended supervision. Both are imperfect.

With typical caseloads of about 60 people, probation and parole
officers say they are hard-pressed to provide the kind of active
supervision judges expect. When clients miss a meeting or fail a drug
test, it often leads to one of two extremes: The conduct is either
ignored or the person's supervision is revoked and he or she is sent
to prison.

As a means of changing behavior, incarceration has proved to be an
even blunter instrument, but one Wisconsin embraced with gusto
following a sharp increase in violent crime during the 1980s and early
1990s.

Fueled mostly by the crack cocaine epidemic, but impelled further by a
host of other factors - including a mushrooming young male population,
economic recession and urban decay - the crime wave made a mockery of
the more compassionate corrections policies implemented in the 1960s
and 1970s that emphasized rehabilitation.

Angry that judges weren't giving longer sentences and the parole board
seemed to be letting offenders out too soon, legislators tried to take
over the job of both. Penalties were increased and parole was
eliminated. Juveniles could be tried as adults. Chain gangs,
"three-strikes-and-you're-out" and life without parole were introduced.

Spending has quadrupled Largely as a result of those policies, the
state's inmate population tripled in 15 years, from less than 7,000 in
1989 to more than 22,000 today. The incarceration rate - the
percentage of people in prison compared to the overall population,
also nearly tripled, from 138 inmates for every 100,000 people in 1989
to 392 in 2003.

Spending on corrections has nearly quadrupled since it was split off
from the Department of Health and Family Services and made its own
department in 1990. At around $852 million a year today, corrections
consumes more than 7 percent of all state spending, nearly equal to
what the state invests in the entire 26-campus University of Wisconsin
System.

That's more than $150 for every man, woman and child in Wisconsin; in
Madison, that's more than what taxpayers pay to run the city's Fire
Department.

Despite the enormous cost, lawmakers who routinely ask for
accountability on other programs have shown a surprising indifference
to whether the emphasis on tougher punishment is working.

No one can recall the Legislature ever asking for an audit of its
correctional system. From 1983 to 1999, lawmakers specifically
exempted bills adjusting criminal penalties from having to include an
estimate of their fiscal impact. A special Joint Review Committee on
Criminal Penalties, established in 2002 to evaluate the cost of crime
bills, has never met and could be abolished this session.

Nor does the Department of Corrections track what happens to offenders
once they're released from custody: How many find jobs, how many
re-offend? National studies suggest as many as 60 percent remain
unemployed one year after release, while two in three are re-arrested
within three years.

Some advocates of tougher penalties accept as an article of faith that
crime has gone down because the prison population has gone up. For
them, no other test is required.

"When you see violent crime is on the decline, why would you change
your policy?" Assembly Speaker John Gard said. "Our costs have leveled
off. Violent criminals are staying behind bars. That actually saves
communities quite a bit of money."

But the question of how much crime prison prevents is far from settled
(see related story).

What is known is that nearly half of the people entering Wisconsin
prisons each year are there because they've had their probation or
parole revoked; they were not "corrected."

Corrections Secretary Matt Frank said recent budget constraints are
forcing lawmakers and the department to take a fresh look at
alternatives that both protect the public and are cost effective.

"The basic mission of Corrections has always included this component
of rehabilitation (but) I do think there was a lot more public focus
in the '90s on locking people up," Frank said. "We're at a point now
where we're seeing a slowing of the growth and we're trying to control
that growth. It really gives us a chance to say, 'What is the most
effective way to deal with these problems?' "

Truth in sentencing Nothing illustrates the direction of the last
decade like truth in sentencing, which abolished early release on
parole, required offenders to serve every day of their sentences and
mandated that judges set a fixed period of community supervision to
follow any prison sentence.

Formerly, a parole board would review an inmate's attitude and
behavior and decide when the person could safely be released. Now,
judges must decide that at the outset.

That creates a dilemma for judges, who can't know whether the person
before them will take advantage of treatment programs offered in
prison and can safely be let out in two years or will still be a risk
10 years later, said Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser. So they
err on the side of longer sentences, Moeser said.

It's impossible to predict the effect truth in sentencing will have on
the prison population, but most agree it could be profound. A
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel analysis conservatively estimated the
increased cost at $1.8 billion over 25 years.

A bigger prison population means longer waiting lists for educational,
vocational and treatment programs, with the ironic result that judges
sometimes feel compelled to issue a longer sentence just to give an
offender a chance to get in those programs, Moeser said.

"I know if I put somebody in prison for 18 months, they probably won't
get any treatment," Moeser said. "Generally, the agents will tell us,
'Judge, if you really want them to get treatment, you'd better make it
four years.' "

Few would argue Benjamin Bryant is not where he belongs today.
Although it was a big departure from his previous conduct, Von Hoken's
murder capped a long career of petty crime, starting with chronic
truancy and shoplifting after his father killed himself when Bryant
was 11. That was followed by more serious offenses he won't discuss -
and which are protected from disclosure because of his age at the time
- - that sent him to juvenile prison for two years.

But this was also true: At the time he hatched the robbery plan with
his brother in the summer of 1995, Bryant was pretty sure it would be
easy, and that he could get away with it. (He says the murder was
unintended, a claim Von Hoken's family and friends refuse to accept.)

"They don't have the money to put everybody on a (electronic)
bracelet. That's probably the only thing that would have kept me and
whoever else from going out and doing what they did," Bryant said,
adding that a better safe also would have deterred him.

Spending on the front end Most of those who study crime and
punishment, including lawmakers, agree on one thing: The opportunity
to prevent someone from committing a crime probably passed long before
that person appeared before a judge. At its most basic, the explosion
in the prison population reflects the failure of other social controls
along the way.

"Quite frankly, if money were spent on the front end (in schools and
early childhood programs), perhaps we wouldn't have people coming into
the system," said Milwaukee County Judge John DiMotto. "But there's no
way people are going spend money on an unknown at the front end."

The search for solutions isn't helped by the fact that the
Legislature's two political parties barely tolerate one another.
Longtime observers say the parties have become obsessed with
embarrassing one another for electoral gain. Such an environment
hardly fosters the kind of trust needed to try something innovative.

"The entire debate over criminal justice policy has been 'Willie
Hortonized,' " said Rep. Spencer Black, D-Madison. "Many politicians
live in fear of the postcard that comes in the mail accusing them of
letting criminals be on the street and being responsible for it."

Yet, recent opinion polls suggest the public mainly wants value for
their corrections dollars: They want legislators to attack the root
causes of crime, and they favor treatment and rehabilitation over
harsher sentences.

"I haven't found anybody, even on the conservative side, who doesn't
think we can do a better job and save money," said Barron County
Circuit Court Judge Ed Brunner. "I think if the Legislature had the
courage to talk about it honestly with their constituents . . . you'd
find the vast majority of people would favor some sensible changes
that would save the system money."
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MAP posted-by: Derek