12/02/00 4:05 p.m.
The Times’ Criminal Logic
Another alternative lifestyle.

By James Morrow, senior editor at Ironminds.com

ongtime residents of New York know that when it comes to crime, the New York Times marches to its own drum. Whereas the other local papers cheer the apprehension of criminals ("GOTCHA!" is a favorite front-page tabloid headline), the Times tends towards a more restrained approach, preferring to look at the root causes rather than the sin itself. And with big-trend crime stories, the approach is the same: In fact, reporter Fox Butterfield is famous for recycling his annual head-scratcher, in which he can't quite make the connection between increased incarceration rates and dropping crime.

So it was a bit of a surprise Wednesday morning to read, on the front page and above-the-fold, the headline on the latest Butterfield opus: "Often, Parole Is One Stop On the Way Back to Prison." Could it be? An honest critique of revolving-door justice and an acknowledgment that maybe, just maybe, some criminals are bad people that would be better off behind bars than roaming the streets? Not quite.

Instead, the fact that many parolees wind up recidivist menaces to society is not a result of their own criminality, but rather, according to Butterfield, "an unexpected consequence of the get-tough-on-crime philosophy that created the prison-building boom." Butterfield goes on to smack his forehead at the revelation that "more prisoners in prison means that, eventually, more prisoners will be let out," and that many of them will return to the streets and their old ways. Of course, all one has to do is substitute the word "criminals" for "prisoners" in the above sentence to realize that the Times has stumbled onto a major-league non-story, or at least not one that requires the dozens of column-inches it's been given.

Butterfield goes on to blame a lack of programs for those behind bars — education, job training, rehabilitation, and the like — for the fact that many people come out prison less able to re-adapt to society. To be fair, a case could be made either way on that issue, but the article continues to bury such semi-legitimate concerns by lamenting policy changes that have clearly cut the crime rate by keeping more prisoners incarcerated, including "abolishing early release for early behavior" and "parole officers [who] are quicker to revoke a newly released inmate's parole for minor violations, like failing a drug test, meaning more inmates are returned to prison time and time again." Now, personally, I think the government should have ended the "war on drugs" yesterday, but, for the moment, one's failing a drug test is pretty good evidence of one's having committed what's currently a crime.

In the rest of the story, Butterfield offers a panoply of hard-luck stories of criminals who left jail only to be re-arrested, blaming policy changes that began in California in the 1970s as a result of the spike in violent crime over the previous decade or so — when, of course, the sort of rehabilitation the Times champions was in full swing. As a result, Butterfield says, the recently-released only earn half as much money as those who have not been incarcerated (being in jail kind of makes it hard to get to those annual review meetings where raises are handed out) and a tougher time supervising their kids. But none of this is the criminal's — er, prisoner's — fault, according to Butterfield and the Times. Rather, one almost gets the sense, it's just yet another illustration of the systematic discrimination against those with yet another alternate lifestyle.