The usual outside experts who seem impervious to Arkansas' hard-won lessons about crime and its prevention now have suggested a way to reduce the chronic overcrowding in the state's prisons: Just let those parolees who've violated the terms of their parole go. And wait for them to commit another crime.
To quote Alan Clark, a state senator from Lonsdale, at a legislative hearing the other day: "Two years ago, it was the Legislature saying, 'Are you kidding me, you're not putting these guys back in jail?' " The good news is that Senator Clark's interest in keeping the innocent safe and the guilty locked up has not abated. Not since the state cracked down on those parolees who were violating the terms of their parole. For what may begin as "only" a technical violation of the law can soon become a major one if ignored long enough.
One of the outside experts who had recommended going easy on these perps issued this not very assuring assurance: "People that are going to mess up, they do it pretty quickly. It's not common to see someone spending two and three years on supervision, doing everything that's expected of them . . . and all of a sudden going sideways." With awful consequences for their victims, we should add. In addition, ignoring these parole violators' violations eliminates any incentive for them to straighten up and fly right. So that a policy that was sold as a win-win proposition becomes another lose-lose deal all around.
We're all assured that by setting up just one more comprehensive and expensive network of what are billed as reforms, all will be well. We'd all pay for a number of facilities across the state staffed by nurses and other professionals who know how to treat problems like substance abuse and mental disorders. Then these parole offenders wouldn't become dangers to themselves or anybody else. These tigers would be turned into sheep by some magical transformation. This isn't so much a debate over prison policy as a feat of what literary critics call magical realism.
And where would all these safe houses for parole violators be? Oh, in now vacant buildings that are already county property, like maybe one in your neighborhood or even next door. Their estimated cost? Between $400,000 and $3 million a year. Wave enough money around, and--poof!--problems are solved.
The hard-working taxpayers of Arkansas may be forgiven for thinking this all sounds less like a universal panacea than the same old snake oil. Except that the medicine men who traveled across the old West with their show seldom if ever risked putting their public at grave risk.
Yes, the probability of these repeat offenders proving to be repeat offenders may be small, but when it's you or your family they turn on, probabilities scarcely matter. Those who blithely dismiss this danger can afford to do so--until it explodes in their faces.
Political calculations also enter into this calculus of complacency. State Senator Joyce Elliott, Democrat from Little Rock, doesn't seem to trust the state's Republican governor and long-time crime fighter Asa Hutchinson to do the right thing. Says she: "My optimism is going to be informed by the position the leadership takes in making this a priority, because we have a road map of some very serious things we can do and should do."
But as any experienced traveler knows, the map isn't the road. There's quite a difference between the theoretical and the real. And the chances of this theoretical danger becoming all too real are scarcely negligible. For one sure way to risk turning many of these parole violators into a clear and present danger is to ignore that possibility until it becomes a probability for you and yours.
Editorial on 08/31/2016