[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                   PRISON CELLS AND TEEN-AGE FUNERALS

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, our former colleague, Senator Thomas 
Eagleton, writes a column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
  Just as I found he had common sense when he served in this body, he 
continues to show that as a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
  At the end of this statement, I will place his column of November 21, 
1993, into the Record.
  He questions whether we are seriously dealing with the crime problem.
  I join in that assessment.
  Recently, I placed in the Record a statement by a Roman Catholic 
priest, who is a chaplain at a California State Prison, who asked 40 
prisoners in a class of his what could be done about crime. Their 
answers differed significantly from the answers we provided. And they 
are the experts.
  Their number one point was to create jobs for people. My assessment 
is that they are telling us the truth on that. We have 510 people in 
our prisons and jails per 100,000 population, and South Africa is 
second with 411.
  Something is dramatically wrong with that kind of a record.
  As Tom Eagleton quotes William Raspberry in his column, ``We can't 
punish our way out of our crime problem.''
  Yes, those who commit violent crimes have to be imprisoned, and those 
who are career criminals have to be imprisoned, but we are being tough 
on crime and not smart on crime, and the end result is a growing crime 
problem.
  I ask to insert the Tom Eagleton column into the Record at this 
point.
  The column follows:

                   [From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

                   Prison Cells and Teenage Funerals

                          (By Thomas Eagleton)

       As you sit there drinking your Sunday coffee, here's how 
     some other Americans are spending the morning. About 500,000 
     people are sitting in 4,000 local jails today. Los Angeles 
     and New York City each has about 22,000 people confined in 
     its jails. Fifteen years ago, there would have been 160,000 
     jail confinees nationally. Our jails are operating at 115 
     percent of capacity.
       There are roughly 850,000 penitentiary inmates (91 percent 
     state; 9 percent federal) doing time. Fifteen years ago, the 
     figure would have been 300,000. As with jails, we increased 
     our prison capacity enormously over 15 years, but we couldn't 
     (or wouldn't) keep up with the need. Our prisons are 
     generally operating at 125 percent of capacity. The 50 states 
     would have to go on a penitentiary building binge of 
     unparalleled proportions simply to accommodate the prison 
     population already behind bars. Currently 38 states are over 
     capacity, including Missouri (151 percent). There are 
     practical limits to overcrowded prisons. The next shipment of 
     a couple of hundred inmates means an equal number have to be 
     let out--regardless of their fitness to return to society.
       What a depressing mess. What should we do? Congress thinks 
     it knows what to do: more of the same.
       More police on the streets. Every candidate for mayor comes 
     up with this solution. The federal government has played this 
     card before. President Richard Nixon had his ``war on crime'' 
     in the early '70s and provided some substantial funds to 
     local law enforcement. But when the budget grew, the federal 
     government declared a unilateral truce. How long will we wage 
     this latest war on crime?
       Build 10 new high-security prisons for violent inmates. 
     These prisons won't even solve the anticipated overcrowding 
     by the time they are operational. We've built a lot of 
     prisons before, so we will build some more--at an average 
     annual operating cost of $20,000 per convict in the federal 
     system.
       Expand the federal death penalty to all sorts of crimes 
     committed on government property. This is, by and large, a 
     public-relations exercise. Most crimes of violence--murder, 
     rape, aggravated assault, robbery--are state offenses 
     prosecuted within the state systems. (There are 2,737 people 
     on death row--only four are federal cases.) Expanding the 
     death penalty to federal crimes of very limited application 
     just creates a 30-second TV re-election spot for senators 
     (``I'm tough as hell on crime!'').
       All of these proposals working their way through Congress, 
     like the previous legislation during the Nixon years, attempt 
     to deal with the back end of the problem: arrest, conviction 
     and punishment. No wonder.
       Congress doesn't know what to do about the front end. 
     Truthfully, no one has a handle on narcotics-driven ghetto 
     crime. Close to 70 percent of those 850,000 prisoners in 
     penitentiaries today were using or dealing in narcotics close 
     to the time of the crime for which they were convicted. You 
     can incarcerate all the runners and intermediate-level drug 
     dealers you want, and there will be hundreds of eager 
     apprentices waiting with loaded guns to move into the monied 
     world of drugs, crime and violence. As columnist William 
     Raspberry puts it, ``We can't punish our way out of our crime 
     problem.'' With the types of crime that sweep our big cities, 
     ``severity of sentence is of little consequence.''
       For years and years, we have built more penitentiaries, 
     hired more policemen and prosecutors, made more arrests--and 
     what did we get? The murder rate has skyrocketed by 19 
     percent since 1988. Our nation's capital becomes a world 
     symbol of the land of the free and the home of the murdered. 
     As President Bill Clinton said from the pulpit, government 
     alone is not going to solve the problem.
       Jesse Jackson, often the epitome of self-confidence, 
     despairs of the incredible violence in the black community. 
     Jackson preaches self-help and wants students to turn in 
     their fellow students who traffic in drugs or carry guns. 
     Jackson had this exchange with a high-school student in 
     Washington, D.C.
       Student: ``Mr. Jackson, you're in your old age about what 
     it takes to survive in the streets. You need some kind of 
     protection because nobody else is going to stop a bullet for 
     you. Most everyone I know carries a gun or a knife to school, 
     including some teachers. I will not snitch. I'm sorry, sir, 
     this is 1993, not 1963. I don't know where you've been.''
       Jackson: ``I've been to a lot of teen-age funerals.''
       With the congressional crime bill, we will build lots of 
     new prison cells, and we will hold lots of teen-age 
     funerals.

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