By: Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
Let's be clear. I have no tolerance for crime. I want America's neighborhoods and the people who live in them to be safe. I want predators, violent criminal gangs and one-man and woman crime waves, and drug dealers who prey on children off the streets-as of yesterday.
But we must also be clear-headed, and smart, about how to fight crime.
For years our politicians have scrambled to upstage one another in showing how tough they could talk about revenging crime. The trouble is they've squandered billions of taxpayers' money in this macho game. They've boasted about passing lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, sentences which have produced the two-decade-long explosion of new prison construction in state after state. California was the biggest offender in that regard, building twenty new prisons in twenty or so years.
Now, that spending spree has proved a drag on the fiscal health of numerous state budgets, and on the economic development of the larger society. We've locked people up in greater numbers than ever before, while eliminating prison rehabilitation, education and job-training programs.
No wonder the ability of ex-offenders to even be in a position to pursue legitimate work when they are released can be summed up, as Paul Street, of the Chicago Urban League, writes in the current issue of Opportunity Journal, as bad and dismal.
"No wonder, then"he goes on to say,"that U.S. recidivism rates hover around 60 percent for ex-offenders."
It makes no sense to pretend that the large majority of those sent to prison will not be released from prison someday. Nor to pretend that the various"three strikes and you're out"laws are nothing but idiotic public policy that have needlessly locked up tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders who'd be better off in community-based treatment programs and supporting their families-as some states are beginning to realize.
Equally important, the nation's wrongheaded approach to criminal justice has far too often compounded the tragedy of a crime being committed with the tragedy of a person innocent of the crime being nonetheless swept up in the criminal justice system. And, needless to say, the further tragedy of the actual perpetrator of the crime not being brought to justice at all.
Two recent incidents, one in Detroit, the other in New York City, starkly illustrate some of the things wrong with America's criminal justice system.
In Detroit, after having spent 17 years in prison for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, 54-year-old Eddie Joe Lloyd was set free on August 26-because DNA testing had proved that he couldn't have committed the crime.
In New York over the weekend, 23-year-old Bradley Gumbel, a son of Bryant Gumbel, the television personality, was set free after spending 20 hours in custody under suspicion of snatching a woman's purse.
The wrong done to Eddie Joe Lloyd is by far the more egregious. Lloyd, who has long suffered from mental instability, was in a mental hospital and on medication when, he"confessed"to a crime that had horrified Detroit. However, his attorneys, Saul Green, a former United States Attorney for Michigan's Eastern District, and Barry C, Scheck, co-director of The Innocence Project, which seeks to use DNA testing to determine the innocence of inmates, have charged that police detectives fed Lloyd details of the gruesome crime in order to entrap him and have called for a U.S. Justice Department probe of the case.
Bradley Gumbel was arrested because of mistaken identity. The victim was tackled by a mugger late at night on New York's Upper East Side who snatched her purse and ran in one direction while she ran in another. Seeing him from the back, she described to the police who soon arrived a tall, thin black man with close-cropped hair and a white t-shirt. A short time later, while canvassing the area in a police squad car, she pointed to Gumbel, who was walking down the street.
Fortunately, Bradley Gumbel had an alibi. He had just dropped off his date for the evening, and she could vouch for his whereabouts. Fortunately, Bradley Gumbel's home was on the Upper East Side, too, and he was heading directly there. Fortunately, Bradley Gumbel's family attorney is one of the city's best. Fortunately, Bradley Gumbel has a good job, and has never been even remotely in trouble with the law.
As for his matching that description of the mugger, Newsday columnist Ellis Henican put it best, writing,"Sure he did-he and a few hundred thousand other innocent individuals in the general vicinity of New York."
With his resources, Henican went on to note, Bradley Gumbel was out of jail and trouble quickly. "But the question still needs to be asked,"he reminded us: How often do people, especially young black men, get swept up in one of these one-witness identifications, then end up in prison for crimes they didn't commit? What role do the police play in facilitating injustices like these? It was a close call this time, disaster narrowly averted. It ought to trouble us all."
In fact, it's just one of many questions that ought to trouble those who want an effective-and fair-criminal justice system, one truly based on justice for all.
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