The Republican anti-crime program is such an ugly puppy it makes the Clinton administration's look almost lovable. Almost.
Republicans won't hear of gun control (they can't; the National Rifle Association has its hands over their ears) and they want more mandatory prison sentences and another prison-building spree, both failed policies.We already have a larger percentage of our people behind bars than any other country, and there's $2 billion in the pipeline now for more prisons. The number of federal inmates grew from 24,000 in 1980 to 80,000 last year. Crime rose.
Mandatory sentences just distort the system by filling the prisons with often minor drug offenders - a 600 percent increase since 1980, now 60-plus percent of federal inmates.
Treatment and education do more to straighten out nonviolent offenders than prison does and at a fraction of the cost, but prison is about it for the GOP plan, except for wanting, like Clinton, to kill more prisoners and do it faster.
The president at least supports a short cooling-off period and background checks for handgun purchases, and he is tightening the rules a bit for gun dealers, in hopes of stopping the ones whose "stores" are car trunks.
The administration plans to use abandoned military bases as boot camps for brief, tough stays by young offenders. State camps haven't been around long enough to allow conclusions about them, but they don't seem to do much harm.
Most helpfully, Clinton would use a variety of funding grants to put 50,000 more police officers into play in high-crime areas, especially in communities with credible plans for boosting the officers' crime-prevention effectiveness.
The administration wants to extend the death penalty to 47 crimes. This is pretty much the same silly list President Bush was pushing, too, though the Clintniks have dropped murder of a U.S. poultry inspector as a specific crime, to stop the chicken jokes.
They have added, however, drive-by shootings, unwisely extending the trend to federalizing the crime-of-the-year. Last year it was carjackings.
The death list only panders to a nasty national blood lust. Our murder rate was 8.8 per 100,000 in 1976, the year before we resumed executions. By '91 - the FBI's most recent figures - it was 9.8.