Crime and Punishment

It is far past time for me to speak out about an issue we need to address as a society and nation. It’s been my observation that social issues have pendulums that swing from left to right, from liberal to conservative, or from lenient to unyielding depending upon your point of view.

There are, however, social pendulums which, despite physical laws otherwise, never seem to cross over the desired balance of mid-point and remain ever swinging in the more unyielding direction. These social pendulums, which never seem to balance, have to do with crime and punishment.

Early yesterday morning, my troubled and hopeless son tried to take his own life with the anti-depressants that were recently prescribed to keep just such a thing from taking place. The attempt came at the end of one of the most hopeful periods of his adult life. Step by step he was cleaning things up and had more to look forward to than ever before.

From an early age, after involvement with a crummy crowd, he began a lifestyle that brought him in direct and frequent confrontation with the law. The skirmishes were pretty one-sided, and before he was twenty he owed in excess of forty thousand dollars in fines and restitution.

The High School diploma he barely earned in two serious years of class work (mostly because Grandpa took two years out of his life to tutor, mentor and monitor him) qualified him for jobs ranging from $5.50/hour to $8.00/hour. Even without any additional interest, minimal living expenses, and no family or auto, he was facing more than a decade to repay all his fines.

Now let me note that while some may think that the fines were in lieu of prison time, such is not the case. He’d done the allotted time. Upon release, he faced the second of the two punishments for his crime.

Those crushing fines with little opportunity for repayment got suddenly bigger when he was released from parole and the state then added interest to the debts. Suddenly, a young man who could not qualify for a loan that big found himself buried in debt.

He is not alone. There are far too many in that position. And most of them won’t even try, as he has, to be a productive member of society. They will just join with others who have the same problems, drop out of civilized society, and stay ahead of the law until they finally get caught and return to prison.

Well, if you’ve suspended your judgment long enough to read this far, here is the problem: A system that provides unintended consequences! In our zeal as a community to deter crime with stiff punishments, steep fines and hefty restitution, we’ve unwittingly developed a system of justice that makes it impossible for released criminals to join our civilized society and become reformed and productive citizens.

Forget, for just a moment, the fact that our jails and prisons are institutions of advanced criminal learning and have nothing to do with either reformation or deterrence. Forget that our aggressive prosecutors (often looking for a political career) pile on charges so that one offense can equal a dozen charges. Forget that those prosecutors in our system have no motivation to seek the truth. And forget too that public defenders are often overworked, underpaid, and also often not the top of their law class at a less than stellar name law school.

Forget that we turn a blind eye to the violence perpetrated by the inmates on one another because after all, we don’t really care what one criminal does to another as long as they aren’t doing it to us.

Lets just look at what happens to us when our young men (mostly black and Hispanic, but of European descent too) come out of those earthly versions of Dante’s Inferno. And lets pretend one of them comes out with real, sincere intent to rejoin civilized society and become a productive part of it.

They have girlfriends. They have family. They get jobs – but not the one’s which disallow felons. They have debts. They live in what they can afford – mostly pigsties. They work hard – harder than almost anyone in American except our immigrants, because that is the kind of job a felon gets (well, unless he has a celebrity clause or wrote a book and can go on the speaking circuit.)

They make very little. They never dent the debts. They sink into desperation. Some drink to escape. Some get angry. Some do drugs. And when the desperation is overwhelming, and they realize that the deck is stacked against them, they return to crime. And they feel absolutely justified.

And the charges begin to rack up. And the fines increase. If they aren’t violent, or a white-collar criminal, or a child molester, then they aren’t going back inside. A lot of times, it is just DUIs. And until you’ve killed someone or had many multiples of those, you just add fines.

So the debt increases. And social workers utter words of hope that both the released felon and the social worker know to be untrue. The young man started it by being anti-social but now an unforgiving system and society finished it by ensuring that he never re-enters society.

And politicians and talk-show hosts continue to talk about crime and how we need to get tougher on criminals – especially the habitual criminals, when we built the system that creates habitual criminals out of wild young men.

I am not arguing for leniency. I am not arguing for punishments that are hardly more than a slap on the wrist. I am not arguing for the release of any felon before he “pays his debt to society” (now there is a phrase I grew up with that you never hear any more.)

At the root of all this is the feeling that those of us in civilized society are somehow superior to those we characterize as Darwinian animals in the prisons. (Another phrase I grew up with that I never hear anymore is, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”)

What I am arguing for is an end to it all when the time has been completed, for reasonable fines that are not impossible to repay, and that we impose fines or impose jail time, but not both. I am arguing that it is time to clean up prisons and provide the same level of protection for all citizens, incarcerated or at liberty. I am asking for the opportunity for those to go astray to come back and be a part of polite society if they so choose.

I am calling for a reformation of the whole system.

What we are doing isn't working. And the experts seem smart, well-educated and well-intentioned, but they aren't getting the results we need (and the proof, after all, of how smart they really are is in the pudding!")

I am asking that we at least try to reclaim some of those lost 2 billion who sit today in prison in this country, and millions more who are currently out, but may soon be re-incarcerated because they have no hope.

In short, I am asking that you consider that there is another side to the “crime and punishment pendulum” - that pendulum marked justice on one side and mercy on the other, and do something to balance that pendulum so that our entire society can benefit.

After all is said, do you think prison is free or that inmates pay for it? What is the worth to our society of a reformed and productive human being? It is much more than the price of that prison bed, my friend. It is life itself.