Webb leads prison breakout
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
U.S. Sen. James H. Webb just might not be in his right mind.
The Virginia Democrat was awarded the Navy Cross for valor in Vietnam. The citation notes that during a “search-and-destroy operation deep in enemy territory,” Mr. Webb apprehended three enemy soldiers by “brandishing his .45-caliber pistol.”
Soon thereafter, he pushed a Marine out of the way when an enemy soldier threw a grenade from a bunker and, “although sustaining painful fragmentation wounds from the explosion, he managed to throw a grenade into the aperture and completely destroy the remaining bunker.”
The senator has taken the same headlong approach to what some might see as a political suicide mission:
Mr. Webb is aggressively challenging the nation’s “tough on crime” culture. He is questioning everything that goes into a system of justice that incarcerates far more people than any other nation in the world.
He calls it a “national shame” that is driven by “political fear and ideology,” rather than by fairness and reason. He argues that the nation must “come to grips with how costly, unfair and impractical the entire approach to crime has become.”
As a point of comparison, Mr. Webb holds up the Japanese prison system, which he covered as a journalist 25 years ago. He explains how highly-skilled guards maintain strict discipline while convicts receive intensive vocational training so they can productively rejoin society when they are released.
He contrasts this to what he calls the “multitude of living ghosts walking among us today, largely unseen and unnoticed,” offered few ways out and little chance of redemption, people doomed to lives of poverty, drug addiction, continued crime and imprisonment — often because of foolish choices they made when they were young.
Since coming to the Senate in 2007, Mr. Webb has organized congressional hearings and participated in academic symposia at which top scholars have presented convincing evidence of the waste and futility in a system that has seen incarcerations rise ten-fold over the past 30 years.
Nationally, more than $60 billion a year in public funds is spent to support incarceration, not including the costs of police and courts. (The current budget for Missouri’s Department of Corrections tops $650 million per year for a system with more than 11,000 full-time employees; Illinois is projecting a corrections budget of about $1.4 billion this fiscal year.)
Mr. Webb’s fact-finding also has focused on human costs, examining how prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill and how they hold more than one-third of the black male high school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 40 (up from 11.7 percent in 1980).
The Virginia senator has wondered aloud whether “we are home to the most evil population on earth, or we are locking up a lot of people who really don’t need to be in jail for actions that other countries seem to handle in more constructive ways.”
He believes it’s the latter. Moreover, he’s optimistic that lawmakers from both parties may be willing to rethink “the conditions under which Americans are incarcerated” and the “reentry procedures and programs we make available once their incarceration is completed.”
He believes that an approach using an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission offers the best opportunity for a breakthrough, and he expects to introduce legislation to create such a panel early this year.
Here’s hoping Mr. Webb’s campaign leads lawmakers to take serious look at existing drug laws, sentencing practices and alternatives to incarceration. Because its not really Mr. Webb’s sanity that’s in question. It’s the sanity of the criminal justice system.
Eddie Roth writes about education, social justice, public safety, transportation, legal affairs and historic preservation. He joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page in 2008 after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm, and was active in civic affairs, including serving a term on the St. Louis Police Board. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, live in the Shaw Neighborhood.
When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
Nice peice, Eddie. We need to take a serious look at our drug policies and how we handle drug convictions in this country. It is obvious that the “war on Drugs” is a complete failure, so it is time to look for a new strategy. To keep locking people up has not been the answer.
“Mr. Webb’s fact-finding also has focused on human costs, examining how prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill and how they hold more than one-third of the black male high school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 40 (up from 11.7 percent in 1980).”
What an indictment on our schools and communities this statistic is! Perhaps a GED and vocational training as a requirement for release would help.
We released the mentally ill on our streets for budget cuts years ago and have been treating them as criminals ever since. It can’t be any more expensive to get them treatment at a state hospital or home than to house them in prison.
Our policy of trying children as adult offenders is something that needs to be looked at too. We want to put a fourteen year old on trial as an adult, but claim the same child is not responsible enough to buy a beer until he is twenty-one. I’m not saying it should go back to the days when the Juvenile system was a joke. But putting kids in jail with adults just corrupts them more, if there were any chance of turning them around it is lost. I don’t know the answers, but it is time we started having the conversation.