The Bond Passed─So What Now?

By now, everybody knows the so-called public safety bond question passed earlier this month.  Its supporters “won.”  I use the word “won” deliberately, for the people of Clark County, especially all of those who have been and will be the victims of crime, were the losers.  I believe they were subjected to a finely-tuned “sales” job which simplified the complex issue of crime down to a few misleading advertisements.

            We are now assured that adding the new jail, the new court complex and the renovations to the juvenile system will result in a lower crime rate.  Based upon history, this will not happen.  I do not believe that women who are abused by husbands, lovers and boyfriends will feel any more protected knowing that there will be room for 1,500 more inmates downtown.  I don’t think elderly people with bars on their doors and windows will feel any safer after the new jail is built.  I don’t think that young offenders (especially gang members) are going to be deterred by the “get tough” message being sent their way─they’ve heard it before, time and time again.

            We have reached the time where our crime-control policies have run into a brick wall.  There is nowhere for us to go, or so we are led to believe.  We have constructed more prisons and more jails than any other nation in the history of the world. And we have also incarcerated more offenders than any nation in the world; we have executed more offenders than anyone else in the world; we have passed more laws than anyone else in the world, and with the harshest sentences.  Yet crime continues.

            Such policies may tell us more about ourselves than anything else.  Have we become just as wicked as the offenders we fear the most?  Have we become so desperate that we will think nothing of giving in to our most horrible instincts?  Have we given up asking, “Why”?  Why do we have so much crime?  Why are so many of our young people using dangerous substances and why are so many of them killing themselves and each other?  And why are growing numbers of these young people feeling little hope, with many believing they will not live past the age of 25?  Do we fail to seriously ask such questions because if we search where we need to search for the answers we may find something is terribly wrong with us, with our most basic institutions, our values, and our way of life?  Do we therefore try to isolate those who break our laws, to place them “out of sight and out of mind”?

            Our problems here in Clark County are not much different than elsewhere.  Politicians and those in charge of the criminal justice system might be compared to an army in the old West that is holed up in a fort waiting for reinforcements─more men to man the barricades, more ammunition, more supplies and a stronger fort─or better yet, another, even larger fort.  It is as if those in charge have simply given up and are waiting for the next onslaught of crime to come!

            We suffer from I have called the “Edifice Complex.”  We think that by building edifices─jails, police departments, prisons, courthouses, etc.─we will “send a message” to all the criminals out there that “we mean business.”

            This same argument has been used over and over again during the past 200 years─and we still have the worst crime problem in the world. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries we built “workhouses” and “poorhouses” along with “mental asylums.”  In the 19^th and 20^th centuries it has been “jails,” “penitentiaries,” “reform schools,” “prisons” and “industrial schools,” along with courthouses, police stations and so many more.  These edifices outlived their designers and have nearly always functioned to contain and control the most disadvantaged segments of the population─those labeled as the “dangerous classes” and “riff-raff” in the 19^th century, and those today labeled variously as the “underclass” or the “rabble.”  Very rarely do we lock up Wall Street lawyers who steal millions, or corporate executives who cause the deaths of thousands through various law violations, or tobacco executives who traffic the most dangerous drug in the world to unsuspecting Third World people and our youth at home.

            And today the picture of this “underclass” all too often has a black or brown face.  Thus, our edifices are, in effect if not by design, more bricks and mortar to contain minorities.  Nationally, one out of three African-American males in his 20s is either in jail, in prison, on probation or on parole, up from about 25 percent in 1989.  The current population of our local detention center is about 45 percent minority on any given day, with about one-third being black (while African-Americans constitute a mere 7 or 8 percent of the population in Clark County).

            Who will benefit from these new “edifices”?  Certainly not the average citizen and most crime victims.  But there will be many who will benefit a great deal: the mortgage company that will provide the financing, the various suppliers of services, bail bondsmen, and those who fill the many new job openings.  The “crime-control industry” is the fastest growing industry in the country!

            Supporters of this bond told us that it will not cost the taxpayers any more money (nor result in an increase in taxes) because most of the bond will be paid for by a current bond that is about to expire.  But, of course, this interpretation is only from a very narrow perspective.  As I see it, the bond will cost all of us dearly.  This will be money that we won’t have to spend on prevention.  To be honest with you, I just don’t trust the estimates and the promises about costs, given the history of “cost overruns” by the government in this country.

            Besides the “edifice complex” as also suffer from what I call the “Field of Dreams” syndrome:  if you build it they will come.  In this case, if you build jails and courthouses (or “regional justice centers”), they will fill them up and keep on filling them until there are, once again, “overcrowded.”

            We have only recent history here in Clark County to support this─politicians and criminal justice officials made the same arguments in support of the building of the current jail, which was opened in 1984.  Lo and behold, it was built and the criminals came, just like the Indians kept on attacking the army forts during the 19^th century.  Let’s wait for about five years after the new “edifices” are built and see what has happened.  I want to be on record in predicting that the crime problem here in Las Vegas in 2005 will be no better, and might be worse, than it is today. 

Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 29, 1996.