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Police and Prisons by A.M. Rosenthal, _New York Times_ Op-Ed, 1/28/94 More and more billions for prisons to lock up more and more Americans who never had a decent chance at life. Are we mad? Why not use those billions to build more schools to give more young people living in poverty the education to climb out of it? It costs as much to keep a convict in prison as to send him to Yale, for Heaven's sake. And despite all the other billions the U.S. spends on the drug war, narcotics still flood the country, users are still being put into prison, crowding out violent criminals. Why not legalize drugs and use the anti-drug money on therapy for addicts and to improve the neighborhoods that create them? And why those long sentences for convicts? Every year behind bars makes them more bitter. They return to the same hard streets. Save money by cutting sentences. Spend the savings to give released convicts training for decent jobs. Those three paragraphs sum up an important belief in American liberal intellectual life -- the belief that war against crime and drugs is largely aimed at and hurts the poor and wastes huge amounts of money that could be used to fight the poverty, discrimination and educational deprivation that are the root causes of crime. The argument is false factually. Worse, it is damaging to people it is supposed to benefit -- Americans, all skin shades, who live in the streets of poverty and killing. Economically, the struggle against crime is the biggest bargain the taxpayer gets. A criminal on the loose costs society twice as much as a criminal in jail -- in stolen good, smashed property and of course the medical care for the victims. The drug war has not yet been won. But it has saved hundreds or thousands of Americans from lives of addiction that would have cost the country scores of billions. Nobody knows exactly how much because drug abuse is the cause of so many other crimes like family violence, robberies and muggings. Most of the crime takes place in poor neighborhoods. Drug addicts gobble up hospital space and time that would have gone to the people of those neighborhoods. Fighting crime and drugs is one tax expenditure that benefits the poor most of all. All those crowded jails are not filled with pot smokers caught by cops on patrol. Prof. John J. DiIulio Jr. of Princeton and Brookins reports that 93 percent of convicts in state prisons are violent criminals, many of them repeat offenders. Yes, a lot of Americans are in jail. A lot more should be. If your house is burgled, there is a 1 in 80 chance the criminal will serve time. The trouble with long sentences is that they turn out not to be all that long. Convicts serve about one-third of their sentences. A rapist can expect to be out in 5 years, a convicted murderer in 10. President Clinton now recognizes the dreadful importance of crime in American life. But if he is to lead, as he should, he ought to make sure his top officers are following on close. About mandatory sentences, his Attorney General is known to law officers as Waffle General. His Surgeon General boosts another study of the much-studied legalization of drugs. Then after he properly says "nothing doing," she boosts it again. Either she does not believe what the President says or just does not care very much. Most of all, he should tell us the hardest truth of all -- how deeply criminals have hurt the already wounded of America, the poor. The President should tell us that criminals who have stayed out of jail and criminals who got out too early have turned large parts of the inner city into war zones. "Build schools, not prisons" -- that's not a choice now, it is a hoax. In war zones the money and energy of government and the people go to surviving, fighting and winning. Sometimes a little extra money and energy are spent to keep up spirits. But was there ever a case where in a war zone under attack there was enough money to make life decent and build for the future? The criminals have deprived other citizens of the greatest civil liberty -- the right to live in peace. They have also deprived citizens of the treasure to build for the future. That is what the President should tell the country, for it is the plain truth and will be so until the winning starts.