From the Editor: Getting tough (real tough) on crime

Wouldn’t it be odd if Gov. Jeff Landry did more to fight crime by simply signing his name than by calling the contentious special crime session?
Landry may have done just that, admittedly in a small way, when he declared a police officer shortage emergency Feb. 16. That declaration frees police agencies, mostly sheriff’s offices, from rules forbidding most hiring within six months either way of an election.
Lifting those rules, designed to prevented elected law enforcement officers from putting campaign workers on the public dime, gives sheriff’s offices a couple of months’ head start in hiring at a time when recruits are hard to come by.
That might seem like seem like a very small step. But you have to wonder how big the strides being taken in the get-tough special session really are.
The bills being pushed by Landry and other conservatives would, for example, make parole and “good time” release from prison harder to get. Good time is the system in which inmates can reduce their sentences by behaving themselves in prison.
For a long time, nearly all Louisiana inmates not serving life sentences could knock a day off their time for each day they followed the rules. The Legislature began to restrict good time for violent offenders in the 1980s.
There can be no reasonable question that an inmate behind bars at Hunt or Angola or wherever is no threat to the public.
Whatever the proper good time formula is, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys should quit pretending that a 20-year prison sentence is actually a 20-year sentence.
Like Louie in “Casablanca,” they’re always shocked, shocked, to find out later that an inmate got released after 17 years. Or 10.
But you have to ask how far down the lock-‘em-up road we’re willing to go.
The United States incarcerates a bigger percentage of its population than any other western country. And there at the top or near the top of the per-capita state incarceration rankings is Louisiana. Different sources figure the rates in different ways, but Louisiana ranks in the top three in all of them.
And by the way, Louisiana spends $700 million a year to run its penal system.
Yet at the same time, Louisiana ranks fourth among the states in the rate of violent crime, according to FBI statistics. At least in Louisiana, tough prison sentences don’t appear to do much for deterrence.
Speaking of deterrents, the governor would also like to see more executions. And, to help the process along, he’d like to keep the methods of execution secret to avoid the stink that death-penalty chemicals put on the companies that make and sell them. The unwillingness that some companies have expressed for being part of capital punishment has delayed executions all over the country.
Again, you can’t doubt that an execution ends an inmate’s ability to kill again.
You may feel that justice demands an eye for an eye on a biblical basis. The Old Testament, at least.
Or you may feel the state owes a murder victim’s family the closure that an execution provides.
Those are matters of individual conscience and belief. On an empirical level, the death penalty doesn’t do much to discourage killing.
Remember that the greatest explosion of violent crime in recent history, the crack cocaine epidemic, came soon after many states resumed the death penalty in the 1970s.
And when you get down to it, we just don’t seem to be good at executing people.
We’ve tailored death penalty laws and courtroom procedures to take inequality out of capital punishment. We offer lengthy appeals. We’ve embraced execution methods that are supposed to be humane, such as lethal injection.
Despite all that, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, states have managed to pass death sentences on 194 people who were later exonerated, all since 1973. That’s almost four wrongful death sentences each year for half a century.
Twelve of those exonerations were in Louisiana cases.
If executions aren’t a certain punishment for committing murder, but more like something that just happens sometimes, the death penalty isn’t a deterrent. It’s Russian roulette.
And we botch a lot of executions. That list includes 14 names in U.S. cases since 2000. Most were inmates whose deaths were painfully prolonged by one kind of bungling or another.
So we come back to deterrence, and how to do it, and what it means.
A long-ago interview with Richard Stalder, then the head of Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections, coincided with some relevant headlines. The 1994 crime bill was being debated in Washington. And in Lafayette, a young boy had been molested in a city park by a man who had been released on good time from his sentence for an earlier sex crime.
Harsh prison sentences don’t deter crime, Stalder said. Deterrence comes from the likelihood of getting caught.
And that’s why Landry’s emergency declaration might do more good than his special session, if it puts more law enforcement on the streets.
Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.