DEBATE

More prisons do not address gang problem

Wichita Police Chief Norman Williams is asking legislators for a new weapon in the war against youth gangs. The proposal, Senate Bill 458, would make it a crime for gangs to recruit at schools, make it easier to keep gang members locked up after an arrest, and define the term "gang member" in state law. I'm not opposed to such a plan. Some schools are like daily gang-recruiting conventions. We have to do something to stem gang influence there. If this measure proves as effective at locking up gang members as law enforcement has been in reducing crime generally, it's going to mean more gang members arrested, charged and jailed.

Crime has been dropping for the past 10 years. If there's anything we do well, it's lock people up. But when will we start choking off the pipeline of people filling prison cells? How long can we continue building and filling prisons? "You can do it as long as you want to continue to pay for it," said Brian Withrow, director of the Midwest Criminal Justice Institute at Wichita State University. "But the reality is, you reach a point where you can't do that anymore." Society has come full circle to a realization that rehabilitation programs make the most sense, he said. During the 1960s, the country invested a lot of money in programming, but because the programs were expensive and the short-term results somewhat mixed, critics labeled them ineffective, Withrow said. It became cheap and chic for politicians to just build more prisons. It got to the point that anything short of locking up criminals got you labeled soft on crime. What we're figuring out again, though, is that community-based programs are actually tough on crime, he said. In prison, an offender could divorce himself from the social system that created him. He wouldn't have to confront any of the issues that complicated or frustrated his life.

But in a community program, offenders have people checking on them, pushing them to complete the program. Asking something of them. Forcing them to confront situations they ran from, like responsibility. "It's harder for them to complete it," Withrow said, adding that many offenders would rather just do the time. Withrow is right. We need a plan that makes crime prevention more than a platitude. For every person we jail, there seem to be a dozen more we didn't. We'll not only deal with these convicts when they're released, but chances are, we'll deal with the sons, younger brothers and nephews influenced into following these men to prison. Doubt me? The Sedgwick County jail opened nearly full. We have so many people in state prisons that corrections officials have had to hatch programs to slow recidivism rates because a jail bed has become one of the agency's most prized commodities.

Our nation has more than 2 million people incarcerated, more people than almost any other nation in the world. Withrow says we need more effective rehabilitation, an immense commitment from policy makers to stay the course and research-based programs. "You can do it," Withrow said. "There are some really quality programs that are available that can be implemented." In 1903, Harvard sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: "The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime." We'd better get cracking here. We may not have another 100 years to figure this one out.

15 February 2006

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/local/13873543.htm

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