“We’ve been waiting for someone to notice that,” said one of the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers who wrote the bill. “We figured this was the only piece of social legislation we’d pass this year, so we threw everything in.” Some of the stuff “thrown in” is solid, worthy and honorable. There is $300 million for prison drug-treatment programs (recent studies show that jail may be the only place such regimes have significant success rates). There is about $600 million for after-school recreation programs, which only the heartless would oppose. There’s another billion or two, also worth spending, in various pilot programs, especially those dealing with youthful offenders. But there is a garbage barge full of dubious liberal fantasies in this bill, too. “Crime pork,” says a White House aide. “It would be nice to strip it out, but that isn’t going to happen.”
Although there is nonsense and irrelevance sprinkled throughout – a drug-free truck-stop provision; $3 million to find lost Alzheimer’s victims; $23.5 million to prosecute telemarketing fraud; $40 million for community-development loans and on and on – the more questionable aspects of this bill can be summarized in two broad subcategories. The first might be called the Community College Criminologist Employment Act of 1994: there are seven national commissions (including one presidential “summit”), six task forces, 16 reports, four studies and four assessments, advisory boards or councils established in this bill. I may have missed a few, but there’s enough work here to keep midlevel bureaucrats and mediocre academics busy well into the next century. They can study “the nature and prevalence of mental illness” among youthful offenders. They can make an assessment of “crime against senior citizens.” They can vie for $10 million in grants to study racial bias in the justice system. They can join the “Economic Terrorism Task Force” or get a “family unity” study grant to see if there should be family jails for women with children. Most, however, will find themselves studying the war between the sexes, which – in this crime bill – assumes bizarre, Armageddonic proportions. There are 12 commissions, studies and reports dealing with domestic violence or “gender” crimes, including the inevitable “national baseline study” of campus sexual assaults.
This leads to the second broad subcategory of questionable expenditures, which might be titled the Catharine MacKinnon Omnibus Obsession Act. And here the money really begins to flow: $610 million for spousal-violence prevention, $960 million to address crimes against women, $195 million for rape-prevention education, $20 million for safe campuses for women, $30 million to combat rural domestic violence, $30 million to reduce the sexual abuse of runaway homeless children. There is even $600,000 to educate judges in how to handle gender crimes.
Now, no one would dispute that violence against women is a serious problem. No doubt, rape crisis centers and domestic-abuse hot lines are worthy enterprises (which is why so many exist, funded by local governments and contributions from activists). But one wonders why college campuses should be singled out as particularly unsafe, and how much government can do about preventing the abuse of runaway children – or stop men from brutalizing their wives. The most plausible rape-prevention program would be to put more cops on the street and more rapists in jail (although one of Florida’s proposed solutions – castration – does have intriguing deterrent possibilities).
One wonders about the haphazard sense of priorities here: if we’re going to spend $9 billion on social work, why not address the real root causes of crime, like a welfare system that encourages family disintegration? Better still, why not just have a nice clean crime bill? A clean bill would address the basic problem: local governments have been overwhelmed by violence. It would provide more cops, with one simple requirement: that they actually work the streets, especially in the evenings and on weekends (in New York – and probably in some other cities – “community” policing is a 9-to-5 weekday job). It would provide more money for states to build jails, but only if they stipulated that violent criminals would receive very long mandatory sentences. It would provide some money for prevention programs-both proven and (a few) speculative – as well. As for the rest, how about a deal? Conservatives abandon their grandstanding about sentencing if liberals abandon their studies, commissions and gazillions for “counseling.” A small drug-free truck-stop pilot project might, however, be worth the money: I’m curious about what one would look like.
