Commentary –

… And Throw Away The Key!

Shoot them if,

They disobey;

They’re not human,

Anyway.

Crime victims, and their survivors, have long been the forgotten players in our justice system. Only recently have they gotten any kind of voice in proceedings. Thus it seemed only fair when the parents of a strangled 19-year-old girl showed some glee that her murderer was among the 500 Connecticut prisoners shipped off to Wallens Ridge, Virginia, to complete his 60-year term. Since he isn’t to be executed, you could hardly blame them if they wanted to throw in periodic floggings too.

But most Nutmeg offenders aren’t murderers. Indeed, only a few have been seriously violent. The biggest chunk have sold drugs, and the next biggest chunk are mentally ill. Virtually all have families who, despite everything, still love them. Some are even innocent. And perhaps most important, all but the tiniest fraction will one day be released.

That’s where it gets scary. Nationally, as reported by Janet Reno, two-thirds of those who get out will return within three years. Any policy-maker with even a faint grasp of human nature might identify that release point as a golden opportunity for investment. Instead of viewing each departing inmate as a persistent criminal, for whom we might as well build a permanent cell, why not offer the option of change?

That offer has not been made in Connecticut. Lawmakers are too fearful of being tagged as soft on crime. We prefer to throw away the key and to build even more prisons. And if we don’t have room here, we’ll send them to Virginia, where the keepers flaunt Confederate flags and don’t speak Spanish.

Such a system, unfortunately, levies a price beyond just building more cells and paying $25,000 per year for room and board. It means that the mentally ill will stay that way, at ever increasing cost to themselves, their families, and society. The same with drug addicts. The same also with the unskilled and illiterate. And for those offenders who enter prison as amateur criminals, we continue the unsurpassed opportunity to emerge as professionals.

By now it should require no more columns or speeches to convince the public to restore our closed mental health beds. Most newspapers are screaming for it. So far, however, the governor and the General Assembly haven’t acted.

The same goes for drug treatment. There is precious little of it available, either inside or outside the walls, and no methadone at all for prisoners. These shortages, combined with our cockamamie mandatory drug sentences, virtually assure that released inmates will one day return. We might as well assign them a permanent locker to store their prison effects. But lawmakers, as you might expect, are deathly afraid to suggest change. They might be accused of being “soft on drugs.”

Meanwhile, prisoners, surprisingly, are still people with very human emotions. So are their families. Most are minorities, often wondering why suburban whites arrested for similar offenses don’t get jail time, too. They also wonder why corporate leaders who are caught cheating only get fined. They seethe at racial profiling. Do corporate cheaters lose their right to vote too?

It’s no secret that excessive jail time breaks up families, destabilizes communities, and builds a permanent economic underclass. A society that cared about such things would jump into prisons with health and addiction care, with education, with job training, with aid to families, and with a raft of social services. Connecticut’s not into that. Thus we sentence ourselves to outlandish recidivism, higher taxes, and a longing for gated communities. So far we’re giving democracy a bad name.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)