Criminal Justice

At the end of a tattered, sunbaked runway dotted with large green tents here is a building aptly called the Expeditionary Legal Complex Courtroom, surrounded by coils of concertina wire, where the most notorious alleged terrorists in U.S. custody are supposed to face charges related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Nearly seven years later, however, not one of the approximately 775 terrorism suspects who have been held on this island has faced a jury trial inside the new complex, and U.S. officials think it is highly unlikely that any of the Sept. 11 suspects will before the Bush administration ends.

Many parts of the nation have tilted severely toward harsh, unyielding policies to catch and punish illegal immigrants, but not everyone has gone over the edge. Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona on Monday pushed back, vetoing a bill that would have required all police and sheriff’s departments in the state to join the federal immigration posse. Governor Napolitano dismissed the bill as impractical and expensive. She also could have called it dangerous. The bill would have turned practically every level of law enforcement in Arizona into some form of the feared la migra. Police chiefs across the country warn that would cripple their ability to investigate crime in immigrant communities.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. The U.S. leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and distinctively American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

As the Supreme Court considers whether the death penalty should be imposed for the crime of child rape, Justice John Paul Stevens announced he has changed his mind about capital punishment's constitutionality. While not of immediate impact, his opinion points the way to a reconsideration of this unjust, unnecessary punishment. The death penalty is irreversible, so the court will be hearing appeals as long as inmates linger on death row. If state legislatures won't abolish it, the court ought to stop what Stevens condemns, quoting an earlier justice, as "the pointless and needless extinction of life."

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the most common method of lethal injection used to execute condemned prisoners is constitutional, a decision sure to restart the nation's dormant death chambers. But the court's splintered reasoning seems likely to result in more challenges to the way capital punishment is administered in the United States. In a 7 to 2 vote, the justices said the three-drug combination used by Kentucky, similar to that used by the federal government and 34 other states, does not carry a risk of substantial pain so great as to violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the 1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two societies: one incarcerated and one not. The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department, 7 million people - or one in every 32 adults - are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision.

I almost died for someone else's crime. Had the jury listened to the prosecutor, I would have been sent to death row, and even might have been executed by now. Instead, I spent nearly 20 years in prison before new evidence proved my innocence and I was able to walk away a free man. We have an alternative. Sentencing people to die in prison of old age and illness punishes without pretending that we have a foolproof legal system. I'm a living example that we don't.

When there are fewer crimes, cops get the credit, and when there are more, they are held accountable. It is a winning attitude -- but one based on a myth. The police have no more control over the economic and social forces that drive crime than doctors and nurses have over fluctuations in disease. No one holds the local hospital director responsible when rates of heart disease or diabetes increase. We understand that these conditions are influenced by lifestyle, nutrition, environment -- factors that transcend local boundaries. Crime is no different. So if Los Angeles is worried about this uptick in homicides, it should also brace itself for more crime to come. Why? In a word, the economy.

After three decades of explosive growth, the nation’s prison population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men. Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987.

Prison treats men as failures whose violent behavior nullifies their right to make decisions. That model leaves them ill-equipped to do anything but repeat that behavior outside the Insight Prison Project was started, which run 18 programs for 300 men at one of America's most notorious prisons. The classes teach men to do things American culture discourages, like sharing feelings.