FIRlnGLlne. FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL.

Transcription

1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. FIRlnGLlne HOST: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. 0 GUESTS: PETE DU PONT, JOHN GOODMAN, JIM HIGHTOWER, JUDGE BAREFOOT SANDERS, ALVIN BRONSTEIN SUBJECT: "MINISERIES ON CRIME, PART II: IS THE SOLUTION TO CRIME MORE PUNISHMENT?" FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBEL. This is a transcript of the Fjrjng Ljne program (#1026/2416) taped in Dallas, Texas on October 4, 1994 and telecast later on public television stations. copyright 1994 NATIONAL REVIEW

2 FIRING LINE: CRIME & PUNISHMENT PART II (DRAFT ) We pursue our probe into the question: Does punishment deter crime? Is the solution more jails? To explore these matters we have Pete du Pont, former governor of the State of Delaware, whom we can safely classify as a hard-liner. [laughter] We have Dr. John Goodman, an economist by profession, but as president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, active in the discussion of most important policy questions. He is the author of seven widely read books. Alvin Bronstein is with the ACLU, upholding the constitutional rights of prisoners as he understands them. [laughter] He was formerly with the Kennedy Center. Judge Barefoot Sanders is the chief judge in the district court system in Texas, having served as special counsel for LBJ. And Jim Hightower has a three-hour radio program purveying the populist view of state and national questions and dares Rush Limbaugh to discover him. [laughter] We were dealing a moment ago with the problem of apprehension and the question was raised: If you have a black teenager in Washington with no prospects for anything particularly interesting, is there anything that will deter him? Was it you who raised the name of Claude Brown? Yes. Well, in his remarkable autobiography, Claude Brown discusses his life in Harlem, which was nasty and brutish but not short. Now, do I understand you to be saying that there is missing in the ethos that governs even unemployed black children of single-parent families with any guiding light by which they are rescued from the temptations to lead a life of crime? For some significant number of young people in that category, there are no other options. There are no other choices. Some will break out of it, find a job, move, and some cannot do that. The social factors are so heavily weighted against them that they don't see any risk in committing crime because it's better than what they face. 1

3 PAGE 2 Is that a statistical thing or is that just your best guess? they? No, that's a statistical thing. Where are the statistics? Whose statistics are Well, let me give you what is a relevant statistic, and that is to a large extent, our crime problem is very much a race problem. The homicide rate-- That depends on what kind of crime problem you are talking about. That's not borne out by the federal prison population. I'm about to give you some examples. The punishment problem is a race problem. The homicide rate among caucasians in the United states is lower than it is in England and on a par with most European countries. What's taking the United States just literally off the map in these international comparisons is the very high crime rate in our minority communities, mainly in inner cities, where the victims as well as the perpetrators are often black. But I don't think you can explain this by simply reference to poverty. The per capita income in these cities is much higher today than it was 40 years ago, and yet as income keeps going up, so does the crime rate. It's something obviously more basic. I would tend to attribute it to the decline in cultural values that I think is really very, very important. Let me-- It seems to me doesn't that have to be true given that the identical people back a generation ago, i.e., pre civil rights, pre welfare, pre an increase of percent in single-parent marriages, with all those disadvantages did not commit crime in any spectacular sense? You've hit it. I mean, if you look-- The United States represent a remarkable controlled experiment. have 50 states. We can measure incarceration rates, we can We 2

4 PAGE 3 measure crime rates, and compare. What compares is race--not crime rates--race reflects itself in incarceration rates and what has been called the social stress indicators. What drives crime rates in particular states is business failures, unemployment claims, workers on strike, personal bankruptcies, divorces, illegitimate births, infant deaths, state residency of less than five years, new welfare cases. All of those factors-- Those things do what? All of those are the factors which can be identified as resulting in high criminality, high crime rates. But this is a case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. We don't solve that by putting more people in prison. We solve it by addressing those issues. GOV. DU PONT: I think you've got it exactly backwards. Those issues aren't causing crime. Crime is causing those things to happen in communities. And it is a missing moral sense. If you go to the work of-- Crime is causing unemployment? GOV. DU PONT: -- pfijf:)i)~$.mjihhl$.i9f$)~$'. in England I who studied for 100 years the rel'a'ttonshiii'"' = = hetw'e.en religion and crime, and discovered of course that as religion declined--and this is a 100-year study, so there are no little wobbles in it--as Sunday School attendance declined, as church attendance declined, crime went up. And the same is true in America. And I think one thing that has to be factored into this-- I don't know how you make these kind of assessments that poverty is driving everything. Certainly it plays a part in it. There are a lot of things that do. But another factor which we haven't mentioned is, if there is not what is called truth-in-sentencing, it makes a lot of difference. For instance, here in Texas--it is now well known--that except in special situations, one who is sentenced is only going to serve 22 percent or less of the time. In a federal system it's going to be all the time. We think but don't know that that is a deterrent. There is no parole of any 3

5 PAGE 4 kind. At least someone knows if they're going in, this is what the sentence is going to be. In the state system, which is where 95 percent of the prison population is, I think there are more and more like Texas and I think that is probably antithetical to any criminal deterrent. GOV. DU PONT: But even the most-- But Judge, we have five times as many people in prison today in the United States than all of Western Europe. Shouldn't our crime rates be lower than most of those countries? No, no-- Shouldn't they be substantially lower? No. A drug-related, okay? Europe hasn't done. system that destroys huge amount But we have And that is the family, of the difference is, again, done something that Western we have set up a welfare okay? More so than the Scandinavian countries? More so than the Scandinavian countries. Oh, come on. We have the worst welfare system among all industrialized countries. I mean, we really subsidize out-ofwedlock children and families that are not together. So what has that done? So-- And in Sweden as well? What has that done? It has in a very unfortunate way had a very unfortunate impact upon the culture of the inner city. Cultural values that were there 40 years ago are no longer there. And that is reflected in the crime rate. But they are no longer in our society, John. I mean, Michael Milken-- I mean, not all crime is down on the street. I'm not saying that. 4

6 PAGE 5 Wall Street. A lot of it is up in the suites. I'm not saying all-- And that little level, in the Congress and on Let me just finish the social thing. Our incarceration rate is 519 per 100, per 100,000. In Denmark it's 66. In Sweden it is 69 per 100,000. Those are the classic social welfare states. They don't have the kinds of serious crime problems-- I just told you we have the worst welfare system among industrialized countries. Well, just accept what he says. We are subsidizing the breakup of families. I don't know why you would question my answer. But that's not what it means. GOV. DU PONT: Let me see if we can-- Let me just see if we can come into this issue-- Governor du Pont has the floor. GOV. DU PONT: Let me just see if we can focus this issue for a minute. Let me put a statistic on the table that I think you are going to agree with: 60 percent of all the rapists, 72 percent of--of-- I can't read all my writing (lauqhter]--60 percent of all the rapists, 70 percent of the long-term prison inmates, are boys who grew up in homes without fathers. No question it would have helped if fathers had been in those homes. However, each of those felons is responsible for his conduct. The fact that there wasn't a father there may have made the odds worse, but each of those is a person responsible morally for what they do and the problem doesn't really lie in lack of fatherhood; the problem lies in lack of a moral framework within those individuals. But how are we solving the crime problem, the general crime problem, which threatens you and me and our 5

7 PAGE 6 children, how are we solving that by just punishing these people, which does not deter crime-- problems-- Fundamentally-- --and do nothing about solving the social Well, what are you going to do to them if they do something wrong? I want to do something about the family. Fundamentally-- I have a line into the moderator. He says that I can have the floor to answer your question. You have a situation-- We're trying to contrast how it was then and how it is now when more and more people turn to crime, notwithstanding that there is affluence, civil rights, opportunities, and so forth. Now you get a situation in which let's say you have two grumpy brothers who don't much like their parents. And on the whole they conclude that life would be better if their parents weren't around. Okay now, if you and I had that feeling, well, we would be grumpy about it and wait for them to go away, right? But in the case of the Menendez brothers, they just killed them. Now isn't it worth our time to ask the question, What is it that happened in the course of their moral education that led them to think of that as an alternative? Now a thousand years ago people were discussing in the times of Thomas Aquinas whether it was moral to steal a piece of bread if that piece of bread was absolutely needed for the nourishment of your child. Answer: No, it is not immoral. It is immoral to steal to any extent that exceeds that. To go from an age or an epoch in which questions were discussed with that kind of attention given to moral niceties on over to a question in which one simply offhandedly kills one's parents because they are in the way suggests an enormous change in the ethos. What happened? Well. You were a New Dealer. You tell us, Judge. [laughter] 6

8 PAGE 7 If we knew the answer to that, we would know the answer to a lot of things besides crime. As far as the Menendez brothers are concerned, I would like to think that that is an aberration. I would hate to think that that is setting off a plague of parenticide. Well, we now know it's judicially safe to do. What? We now know it's judicially safe to do. Well, you know, that's going to happen in the kind of adversary system we have, and I just don't know of any better system. There are going to be those things that happen that we're not going to have 100 percent perfect justice as some of us might see it. It's going to vary according to the quality of the lawyer, the type of the jury you get, and sometimes the kind of judge. That's just going to happen. I would just say that 95-plus or 99 percent of the time, from all I've seen, I feel like the right answer comes. But there are these aberrations. GOV. DU PONT: Bill, isn't it-- I think-- As far as the change, as to what's caused it, I think that what's caused it-- You know, you've got more people in these areas where they didn't commit crime--the same in this city here. There was no crime in the minority areas, but there were not that many people in the minority areas. They're crowded into the areas this time. kind we want? There's not much crime in Singapore. Well-- Let me see if we can-- And what kind of society is that? I think not. Is that the I think you are right. There has been a change in the morality of this country and I think-- From the top down. 7

9 . PAGE 8 From the top down. And I just look around this audience-- [laughter] You see quite a lot of criminals. I read through some of the materials of the group sponsoring this thing, and I am just a little frightened by some OI the things they say: Let free enterprise and money take care of everything. I look around this audience; there must be a thousand people who were invited by our host, Mr. Goodman. And I don't see a single black face in this audience, when crime impacts the black community. I mean, those are the kind of things that have changed in this country. I mean, we have big business, you know, eliminating morality-- Well, wait a minute there. Dr. Johnson said, "Don't be the preacher who scolds the people who have come to church about the people who didn't come to church." [applause] Touche. [laughter/applause] GOV. DU PONT: Bill, coming back to your question, isn't the problem that in contemporary America we have divorced morality from public policy? Yes, I think so. GOV. DU PONT: We don't require artists, welfare mothers, schools, to have any moral values in order to get-- Members of Congress, governors. [laughter] GOV. DU PONT: Members of the administration. We don't require in public policy any moral compass. yes. We forbid them from professing moral competency, GOV. DU PONT: Indeed. A federal judge in Denver requires the mayor to disavow, put out a press release, saying he was sorry he sponsored--was going to be a co-sponsor--of a day for prayer against youth violence and a federal judge said-- 8

10 PAGE 9 I guess that was creative sentencing for some reason, I don't know. It was creationism sentencing. GOV. DU PONT: The judge says, you know, you can't do that. We have--my favorite-- I have to tell my favorite story. My favorite story is a man in Wisconsin, a flasher, who had been convicted 30 times of exposing himself. And he was brought up on a charge--he was fired from his job for exposing himself in a laundromat. And he argued before the Wisconsin Unemployment Commission that he had never exposed himself in a laundromat before, only in libraries and parks, and therefore he was being unfairly discriminated against this time, and they agreed there was probable cause for discrimination. [laughter] Now that kind of nonsense-- Is that your favorite story? [laughter] GOV. DU PONT: serious. That kind of nonsense-- I don't know how you-- Obviously this discussion is getting very I don't know how you're going to draw any rule from that, Pete. I mean, that's-- GOV. DU PONT: The rule is you have to have some moral compass in everything from unemployment benefits to National Endowment for the Arts grants. There has to be some morality. And downsizing of corporations, profits being made at the top, people-- You talk about that with people who don't have bread for their table or people who don't have-- You know-- GOV. DU PONT: That's not an excuse for absence of morality. That's not an excuse for absence of morality. Excuse me. Are you alleging that much crime is committed in America because there is not bread on the table? Because if so, you run smack in the face of overwhelming 9

11 PAGE 10 statistics that say that everybody who goes hungry in America goes hungry for simply lack of availing themselves of opportunities that are there. I don't know where you get your data, Mr. Buckley, but I see people on the streets of every city in this country who are hungry and who have no choices-- Why don't they get food stamps? There are fewer of them today than there were 50 years ago, but we have a lot more crime. Why don't they get the food stamps? Because they are not registered and they can't get the food stamps unless they go through this bureaucracy. to help them. Why aren't they registered? Well, because there are no social workers there There aren't enough to help them get it. So therefore they kill somebody, huh? No. Well, that's-- May I suggest there is a consensus on this here among the group: that there are two ways to deter crime. If I don't commit a crime it's either because I have an internal moral compass that tells me I will feel guilty if I commit the crime or I just shouldn't do it. No. Have you never committed any crime? Not even income tax fudging? No, here let me just finish. Or there has got to be an external deterrent that even if I don't have any moral compass that invites me to do sort of a cost-benefit comparison--if the benefits exceed the cost then I commit the crime, and if the costs are higher, then I don't. If you take away the moral compass and you rely only on punishment, then 10

12 PAGE 11 you've got to have a lot of it. And I'll certainly agree with that. And I don't think that's the sole answer. We've got to have the punishment. But if there were some way to put the moral compass back in people's heads, that would do a lot as well. But there is a third thing that you didn't-- But isn't prevention a part of that thought? It's not just moral compass. It is also opportunities, it is also job possibilities, it is also boys' clubs and just the simple things. Oh, absolutely, right. I grew up in Denison, Texas. We had Little League, we had a boys' club that we could go shoot pool and that sort of stuff under supervision. Inner cities now, it's not there. There is no infrastructure. It's not just the father that's missing in the family, Pete. There is no community, there is no infrastructure that's there. There is no sense of community. What has been insidious about the growth of the welfare state-- And yet Congress made fun of the midnight basketball leagues, when in fact, they work. Well, Dr. Goodman, in bringing up the black-white business, were you pursuing a particular point that bears on an understanding of the sociological problem? Are there distinctive problems faced by black people that account for these runaway rates? Well, the black sociologists tell us that years ago the black community was a stronger community in many ways than the white community. They built social institutions. A lot of what was going on revolved around the church. And I think that what's been insidious about the growth of the welfare state is that we are paying people not to work, paying teenagers to have children. At the same time we are closing off job opportunities. You can't become a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, without jumping high hurdles erected by 11

13 PAGE 12 government. So we're closing off the opportunities for economic advancement and we're encouraging people to become wards of government. Oh, I think that is such a general statement, and I agree with you in part. I agree with it in part. Well, we only have a few minutes, so I am required to make short, general statements. [laughter] Well, I know, and you want to boil down all these platitudes into just a couple of minutes. But the fact of the matter is, people have been trying to straighten out the welfare system for about 30 years, and I don't care which party it is, whatever it is, everyone agrees there are problems with it. No one can seem to come up with the answer to it. You are not suggesting, are you, that we would go back to 50 years ago in the black community? No, but I would radically change the welfare state if I could. Charles Murray is. Charles Murray is. Well, maybe you'd better be heard from in Washington, because for years people have been trying but haven't figured it out. Let's talk about economics for a moment. The National Council of State Legislatures has just released a state budget and tax actions report which summarizes all state budgets throughout the country for the last 10 years, and by category gives us what the percentage increase each year is over the prior year in education K-12, higher education, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and corrections. corrections expenditures as a percentage of the budget have increased greater than any other category over the last 10 years--twice as much as Aid to Dependent Children, twice as much as education-- Well, what does that tell you? What that tells me is that we are putting our dollars in the wrong pot, if you will. 12

14 PAGE 13 No, no, no, no, that doesn't follow at all. No, maybe it isn't catching up. It's trying to catch up. GOV. DU PONT: It's telling you that there are less people on AFDC than there were at the beginning of that period-- GOV. DU PONT: GOV. DU PONT: No, it's not. --that the caseloads went down, which they did. No, they haven't. Yes, they have. What we're doing is we're cutting expenditures in those important social program areas-- GOV. DU PONT: No-- --to pay for them in prisons. They'll tell you whatever you want to find. GOV. DU PONT: No-- I promise you that no state has cut the budget for any social program in the last 10 years. You would know. GOV. DU PONT: They have reduced the size of the increases. There is not a smaller dollar expenditure on social programs than there was. capita. GOV. DU PONT: GOV. DU PONT: There is a smaller dollar expenditure per No, I don't believe that either. There may not be in net dollars but there is-- I don't believe that either. No, no, no. You're just singling out one program. He's talking about the total social welfare budget. 13

15 PAGE 14 No. No, that's not what he said, but if you say that, that's fine. That's not what he said though. Well, let me ask the judge. You talk about 50 years ago as though it was kind of a black age, and I see your point. Fifty years ago, for instance, Mrs. Bergman--what's her first name? Ingrid? Ingrid Bergman--came over. She was invited by the Ed Sullivan Show. There was such an uproar that he couldn't invite her on, and the reason was that she was living with her Italian lover-boy-- Rossellini. That's right, Rossellini.. Okay, 50 years go by and every time Elizabeth Taylor marries, it's a national holiday. [laughter] Somewhere between our treatment of the two, at least might reflect a generic feeling we have about people who are utterly unconcerned about the implications of marriage, right? I think that is certainly true. I think that you don't even have to have figures to see that. Right. Now ought there to be some effort to revive a social ethos, and if so, how might it express itself? I do not think it is a function of government to get into that. I think there ought to be-- No, Jefferson told us that laws are much less important than opinion, because all laws do is codify opinion. So in terms of society, what is our job as opinion-makers to do to stress our disapproval of adultery, for instance? Just to stress the disapproval of it. And I don't think it calls for penalties. How? Refuse to have them on the show? No, no. I think it's not only-- You know, when you get into the morals question, one man's morality is another man's immorality, as you well know. But there are certain basic standards we could put down. I think it's just an expression of opinion that develops in society, which is a long-range type of thing. I don't think you say don't get on 14

16 PAGE 15 the show and don't be recognized here, go back to the way they treated Ingrid Bergman because she lived in sin. I don't think that would cut it. You're not suggesting that the government get involved in deciding what morality is. ago. No, he's not suggesting that. You talked about Big Brother a little while He's not suggesting that. Suppose there were somebody here who wouldn't shake hands with somebody because he was black. Now I have a feeling that probably all of us would react pretty much the same way. We wouldn't want to shake his hand, right? black. First you'd have to have somebody here who is That's a show--that's some sort of a gesture to people who do that kind of thing. Right. What is an appropriate gesture for somebody who mocks marriage? government. But that's got nothing to do with the The government can be instructed by this. No, he's not saying the government. What is an appropriate private gesture is what you're asking. Yes. Right, right. May I suggest a different way of approaching this, and that is simply to recognize that what the welfare state has done is say to young women, You don't need a husband; it's said to people, You don't need a f~mily; it's said to people who are drawing welfare, You don't need the church, you 15

17 PAGE 16 don't need the social institutions that were so important decades ago. But this is not just welfare people, John. And that's why those institutions are gone. But these are not just welfare people that Bill is talking about. first? It's like the chicken and egg; which came Pete's dealt with this on a first-hand basis. GOV. DU PONT: One thing we might do is treat everyone the same. The woman who is married who has an additional child doesn't get more benefits from government. She's married and she's working in the factory. She gets a deduction. GOV. DU PONT: She gets a deduction, but she doesn't get an additional AFDC check like the single mother who is on welfare. But she wouldn't change places. But our society doesn't. treat people the same. GOV. DU PONT: But a message from society would be to the welfare mother: Look, we don't want you as a society to have additional children out of wedlock, and therefore we are not going to increase your monthly allotment when you do. Now there is a very clear message that a lot of people would understand very quickly. In many places--and I am not going to take up for what seems to me to be the chaos of the welfare system--but in many states, of which this is one, the amount of money that is added for an extra child is practically nothing. And I want to ask you, Pete-- And it is no incentive. Now it may be different up East, but it's not true here. 16

18 PAGE 17 Would you do that also to corporations that take welfare from the government yet violate the law through contract fraud or whatever? You're going to have bastard corporations? Would you disallow them from getting additional government contracts? GOV. DU PONT: Oh, absolutely. If they-- GOV. DU PONT: But that's not happening. If they commit fraud, absolutely. But that's not happening. But remember you are criminalizing almost everything businesses do in their relationship with government. But I'm getting to the point about this social relationship here--let me have a point here-- [laughter] Is this what you call a populist, Mr. Bronstein? It is. It is in fact. Yes, it is. It is, exactly. This is an important point, because you are saying what's wrong with our society. I'm sorry to say-- It's not just black people not getting married. I didn't say that. [laughter] It's this highly social-- But that's the tone. He denies it. Goodnight. [laughter] Thank you. Sorry. Sorry about that. 17