Editor"s Notes : Crime, crime & crime: Marc Dann, too many inmates, local police
By Terry Smith
May 8, 2008
Today we’ve got just three mini-columns, all dealing with crime one way or another.
MONDAY, I PREDICTED THAT embattled Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann would be gone by Friday. As of yesterday, he was hanging on, despite calls for his resignation by Republicans and Democrats, including the governor, other state officeholders, top legislators and party officials. A real threat of impeachment also hangs over Dann’s head.
For now, my Friday prediction stands, since the immense pressure on Dann will only get more difficult for him to withstand.
Meanwhile, Gov. Ted Strickland had no choice but to drag Dann under the bus. The longer this situation persisted, with any sense that Ohio’s other Democratic leaders were giving Dann a free pass, the more damaging it was becoming for all Democrats. With the state’s economy tanking, it wouldn’t take much for mass opinion in Ohio to shift from “these Democratic office-holders seem to be trying” to “throw the bums out.”
This is already happening to some extent, simply because Ohio seems to have a surplus of simpleminded folks who assume that if one person does something wrong, everybody in his party must be guilty, too.
THE NEW YORK TIMES ran an article April 23 that ought to shame every American.
The piece, by Adam Liptak, led off, stating, “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 article reports that the U.S. leads the world in producing prisoners, with 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other nation. The next highest number can be found in China, with 1.6 million people in jail and four times as many people as the U.S.
In percentages, according to the Times article, the U.S. also leads, with 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. Russia is next up with 627. England’s rate, the article reported, is 151 per 100,000; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median number among all nations is 125.
The article notes that the United States routinely jails people for minor crimes — e.g., writing bad checks and using drugs — that only rarely would result in jail time in other countries. “Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences,” Liptak wrote.
One source quoted in the article, Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, said America’s high imprisonment rate makes the U.S. “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”
Aside from all the complicated issues involved here, I would argue that it’s never a good thing to be listed as “the very most” in comparisons with all the countries of the world, unless the category is inarguably positive (most libraries, most attractive women, most lottery winnings for Terry Smith). But in a punitive category like incarceration rates, it’s just bloody embarrassing, and puts us in the lowest class when it comes to how we treat people. It undermines our moral authority in the world, and just reinforces our recent international reputation as a nation of bullies.
Of course, we, the American public, are largely responsible for this. It’s been many years since a politician running for office in this country has been able to safely argue that such and such a criminal penalty should be reduced. The result has been a steady ratcheting up of sentences, even for victimless crimes. No politician ever wants to be the subject of the hysterical campaign ad, accusing him or her of being SOFT ON CRIME!
Here’s hoping that the report in the New York Times leads to a new era in which American politicians can successfully run ads against their get-tough-on-crime opponents, calling them CRUEL AND SADISTIC.
AW, CRAP, NOW I’VE gone and gotten the Athens Police all mad at me.
Over the weekend, frustrated by the APD’s sluggish cooperation with the news media in the tragic case of the two dead students found at Riverpark Towers, I blasted the police chief and his department over how they handled the case. My criticism was included in an e-mail copied to various media outlets, police and city officials.
The police found the bodies shortly after 6 a.m. on Saturday, and did not release their identities till past 7 Sunday evening, more than 36 hours later. At one point, police told the OU Post that the information wouldn’t be available till Monday morning.
In my 27 years in this business, I’ve covered a lot of police departments, and can’t recall ever having to wait that long for the basic information in a crime investigation with such high public interest. Yet, nearly the only thing the media had to go on for all of Saturday and most of Sunday was a one-paragraph press release that failed to identify the two students or give any hint of what happened to them, or more importantly, what didn’t.
This would be important information to impart, since if a person didn’t know otherwise, one of the possible explanations for the deaths would have been murder. (It wasn’t.)
Various police sources took questions, though their answers boiled down to “can’t comment on that” or cryptic statements about community members not being in any danger (why not just say “we don’t suspect third-party involvement or murder”?).
Unfortunately, this sort of weekend news brown-out — unheard of in most jurisdictions — is business as usual with the APD under Chief Rick Mayer.
In the situation over the weekend, the police officer in charge of the case explained that public release of the names of the deceased was delayed while police tried to contact the next of kin. This is right and proper, though I suspect the delay mainly resulted from the staffing, scheduling and management structure at the police department.
In point of fact, judging by memorial messages that appeared on one of the victims’ Facebook.com page as early as Saturday afternoon, much of the Western world knew the identities of the two dead students before the police released the information Sunday evening.
I don’t want to be unfair about this. Police are understandably reluctant about releasing crime-scene details, when an investigation is still underway or autopsies are awaited. Most media members understand this. The APD has actually improved its media relations in some areas, especially with regularly e-mailed police reports. Most of the top-level officers are professional and cordial with the media.
But this department needs someone at the top who prioritizes media and public relations, and who will take over handling the press during times of high public interest. If lack of funds is part of the problem, then city officials need to address that situation, too.
Someone handling the message could have officially confirmed that murder wasn’t suspected much earlier, thereby halting rumors and calming the community. And sooner is always better than later with identifying the deceased, since we all worry that it’s someone we know or love.
Comments
Please log in to post a comment.
