BALANCING JUSTICE, EXAMINING FICTION

Our good friends in the League of Women Voters recently issued an interesting newsletter to their membership, part of a statewide effort to address what they consider to be issues in the criminal justice system.

The newsletter, called "Balancing Justice," makes some interesting points, but we have to question some of the views that the group bases some of its premises upon.

We appplaud the League of Women Voters for taking an interest in the state's criminal justice system, but we have to question their decision to take the arguments of several special interest advocacy groups as gospel without examining them against the reality of the North Country's experience with the criminal justice system.

New York State is a big and very diverse state.  Blindly accepting the arguments of New York City-based groups could have very real and very unintended consequences for those of us who like living in a region where big city crime problems are only beginning to encroach on what has traditionally been a safe place to live and raise a family.

First off, anyone in the North Country who has worked in corrections or spent anytime observing the workings of the state prison system is aware of the real reason why the state has been pushing in recent years to build new maximum security prisons.

The propagandists that the League quotes in its newsletter would have the public believe that the state has no real reason for building the maximum security prisons.  The reality, if the League had bothered to talk to any of the hundreds of people who work in corrections in the North Country, is that our state prison system became a very dangerous place over the past in medium security prisons.  Anyone who worked at the Gouverneur Correctional Facility or any of the other prisons could have told the League that tougher state sentencing rules on violent criminals filled the maximum security prisons to capacity and created an overflow problem that put violent troublemakers in medium security prison dormitories that were never designed to house them.

For awhile, the state's medium security prisons found themselves forced to ship these violent thugs from medium security prison to medium security prison where they immediately formented trouble with corrections officials all but powerless to retaliate against them because the maximum security prisons were already filled.

At Gouverneur, during the short-lived uprising, we saw up close the consequences of listening to the propagandists who consistently lobby against building new maximim security prisons.  Contrary to the image of the correctional system painted by the League, New York's prisons are not filled to overflowing with "non-violent drug addicts." Anyone who attends St.  Lawrence County's court on Mondays quickly notices an alarming reality.  Criminals really have to work at it to earn the right to go to prison.  Most recntly, one individual had been arrested 24 times in seven years and still did not get sent to prison.  He was sent to shock incarceration.

Contrary to the image portrayed by the League, non-violent criminals currently really have to try and try before they earn the right to be sent to prison.  They are given chance after chance to straighten out their lives, opportunities to enroll in drug and substance rehab, and only end up in prison if they commit a violent crime or show such utter disregard for the chances they have been given that the judges have no choice but to send them to prison or lose any credibility what so ever.

Despite the claims of the League, they might have spent a little time tracking what happened to the 20 or so drug dealers who were recently arrested during a county-wide drug sweep, Many of the drug dealers arrested were indeed low level addicts.  And in almost every case, the ended up in treatment or on probation.

Crack dealers who were trafficking in commercial quantities were prosecuted in federal courts where they can expect to do time in a federal penitentiary.

Frankly, we think the League's board ought to spend some time on Mondays in Judge Eugene Nicandri's court to get a dose of reality about the criminal justice system.  What they would find is that St.  Lawrence County's criminal justice system is very busy with its primarily white criminal element that reflects the overall population of St.  Lawrence County.  We have no doubt that the majority of offenders in the state prison system are from eight communities in New York City.  But we suspect that they reflect the racial and ethnic make up of those neighborhoods where they were arrested.

Earlier this spring, we had the opportunity to walk the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan and spend time in a New York City public school in Brooklyn.

We found New York City a far different place that it was just a decade ago.  Thanks to the get tough policies that the League seems to deplore so much, we found the city a much friendlier and vibrant place.  We felt safe walking the streets and using the subway system.  It would be a shame if the League's lack of first hand research and relying on propagandists allowed New York to fall back into the bad old days that so many have fought to put behind us.