Crime Issue Becoming Election Battleground : Dukakis Camp Determined to Counter Bush’s Attack on Death-Penalty, Prison-Furlough Stands

Fourteen years have gone by, but tears still come to Donna Cuomo’s eyes when she remembers her kid brother and the man who killed him. “Joey,” she says, “was just a regular kid, he liked to play the drums. He was a happy-go-lucky type kid, always smiling.”

A senior at the vocational high school in their hometown of Lawrence, Mass., Joseph Fournier was learning how to fix auto bodies and working part-time at a gas station. “He was alone,” she says, “when those guys went in” to rob the gas station one night in 1974.

One of them, William Horton Jr., brutally stabbed the 17-year-old to death. Twelve years later, Horton, let out of prison on a 48-hour furlough, fled to Maryland and took a young couple hostage in their suburban home, torturing the man with a knife and beating and raping his fiancee.

Shaping Impressions

Now Horton’s story seems destined to become a presidential election campaign issue. In the war to shape voters’ impressions of Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, who has locked up the Democratic presidential nomination, crime is fast turning into a prime battleground.

Vice President George Bush, Dukakis’ certain Republican adversary, is determined to convince the public, as he told a California audience June 6, that Dukakis is “a Massachusetts liberal of the stripe of George McGovern.”

His favorite weapons have been Dukakis’ opposition to the death penalty and his state’s controversial prison furlough program, which until recently allowed men like Horton--convicted first-degree murderers serving life terms--to leave prison for brief trips into the outside world.

But the Democrats, painfully aware that Republicans have used the crime issue against them at least since Richard M. Nixon ran as the “law and order” candidate in 1968, are determined to turn the issue around this year.

“Let the Republicans try to paint Michael Dukakis as soft on crime,” said Patrick Hamilton, director of Dukakis’ statewide Anti-Crime Council. “I can’t wait.”

In the days before the California primary, the Dukakis campaign unveiled an advertisement touting the Massachusetts governor’s record as a crime fighter. Dukakis plans to devote this entire week to a series of campaign events in his state and on the road designed to highlight his positions on crime and drugs.

Crime has declined steadily during Dukakis’ terms as governor, his aides point out. Massachusetts now has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation and the lowest murder rate of any industrialized state.

Bush, however, will try to concentrate the electorate’s attention, not on those statistics, but on the furlough program. The program was designed in 1972, under a Republican governor, to help integrate rehabilitated inmates back into society. Prison officials say it has reduced recidivism while also providing inmates an incentive to help maintain order in lockups that are among the most crowded in the country.

Whether the program has succeeded remains hotly debated. More than 400 felons, including 11 murderers, have escaped over the years, particularly during the early years of the program. Although most were quickly recaptured, 13 furloughed inmates, including one murderer who escaped in 1974, are still at large.

Prison officials and some outside experts call that a good record. With more than 10,000 furloughs granted, they note, less than 5% have failed to return to prison as required.

Critics See Failure

Opponents look at the same statistics, at cases of sloppy record keeping and poor tracking of inmates on furlough--and at the disastrous Horton case--and say the program has been a failure.

Whatever the verdict, the intense publicity surrounding the Horton case led the state Legislature to pass legislation ending furloughs for murderers serving life terms. Dukakis originally opposed the legislation but, faced this spring with dwindling support in the Legislature and the possibility of a ballot initiative to restrict furloughs, changed his mind.

Political analysts offer mixed assessments about how effective the crime issue may be for Bush. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips believes Bush can use the issue to “raise some doubts” among the socially conservative, ethnic Democrats who so far seem attracted to Dukakis. And Democratic strategist Vic Fingerhut notes that Dukakis may be highly vulnerable because so much of his campaign is built around his own character.

At the same time, analysts in both parties express doubts about how much ground the negative attacks can gain for the Republicans. “If it’s icing on the cake it might work,” Phillips said. “If it’s the whole cake, it’s not going to make a meal.”

Strategy Faces Problems

Even as icing, the strategy on crime faces problems because, pollsters say, public attitudes toward crime have shifted.

For years, voters--particularly white, working-class Democrats who have swung four out of the last five presidential elections to Republicans--have equated crime with permissiveness. Republicans who denounced Democrats for “coddling criminals” could play on many of the same racial and cultural resentments raised by other code words such as “welfare cheats” and “quotas.”

But for the last two years, Republicans have found that set of issues failing.

In 1986, President Reagan tried to use the crime issue in Senate races, asking voters to send Republicans to the Senate who would help him appoint judges who would be “tough on crime.” But the Democrats took control of the Senate anyway.

Again in 1987, the White House tried to use the crime issue to rally support for Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork. Again, the public seemed unmoved.

Moves Beyond Issues

Polling at that time indicated overwhelmingly that after seven years of a conservative presidency, the public “had moved beyond those issues,” said pollster John Marttila, who performed surveys for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.).

Polls consistently show that the public regards drugs as today’s key crime issue. And Bush, who once bragged about leading the Administration’s drug-fighting efforts, faces serious problems from public perceptions that those efforts have failed.

Bush has begun to play down his role in forming Administration anti-drug policy. “I am not ‘the point man,’ ” he said in a television interview after the California primary.

Dukakis, meanwhile, has hammered away at statistics bolstering the perception that the Republicans--and Bush--have failed.

Current federal anti-drug policy is “chaos,” Dukakis said in a speech Sunday in Salt Lake City to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Criticizes Budget Cuts

The country, he said, faces “drug gangs and crack gangs that are more vicious and more violent than any we have seen in our history.” Meanwhile, he charged, the Administration had cut “federal aid to state and local drug law enforcement efforts by two-thirds” and “Coast Guard drug patrols by 55%.”

He reiterated a call for a national “drug czar” to coordinate anti-drug efforts and pledged to find money to “provide treatment for every IV drug user who asks for help,” a goal not yet achieved in Massachusetts, which, like all other urban states, still has long waiting lines for drug treatment programs.

At an airport press conference in Salt Lake City, Dukakis declined to say how much he thought his anti-drug programs would cost, but suggested that as part of the peace process in Central America, the United States could cut military aid to El Salvador and Honduras to free funds for drug law enforcement.

“This nation has 6% of the world’s population, we’re consuming 60% of the world’s drugs,” Dukakis tells audiences. While the Administration has tried to cut funds for the Coast Guard, he says, “the quality of cocaine on the street has gone up and the price has gone down from $50,000 a kilo to $10,000” because of increased supplies.

And he has accused the Administration of allowing its anti-drug efforts to be compromised by ties to corrupt Latin American leaders, ranging from Panama’s Manuel A. Noriega to factions of Nicaragua’s Contras. “You can’t be serious about a war on drugs if you’re doing business with drug-running Panamanian dictators,” he says, invariably to applause.

Vows to Sign Order

Adding a new twist to his assault on the Administration’s Noriega connection, Dukakis said in Sunday’s speech that he would “sign an executive order to prohibit the payment of CIA or other federal funds to any person engaged in drug-trafficking” with an exception for sting operations.

Even had public attitudes not changed during the Reagan years, Dukakis would have some strong defenses against the expected GOP assaults. While he was widely perceived as “soft on crime” during his first term as governor in 1975 to 1979, he has worked hard to eradicate that image since his return to the Statehouse in 1983.

Activists in the campaign to end all prison furloughs still oppose Dukakis. But he draws praise from police, prosecutors and even some Republican law enforcement officials for tough stands on such issues as drugs and drunk driving and for the support he has given to law enforcement needs.

“I know that he’s changed, I’ve seen the change personally, I’ve lived through it,” said John McHugh, a veteran officer who heads the police force in suburban Winchester. Shortly after his comeback election in 1982, McHugh said, Dukakis sat down with police groups “and more or less admitted that he kind of missed the boat the first time, that things were going to change, and they did.”

Since then, Dukakis has been far more responsive to police requests for bigger budgets. He has backed strong legislation against drunk driving and a new “victims’ bill of rights,” which increased fines on criminals to help pay victims for their injuries.

Commutes Fewer Sentences

He has also substantially changed his practice in commuting sentences for serious crimes. During his first four-year term, Dukakis commuted sentences for 20 men convicted of first-degree murder, keeping them in prison but making them eligible for parole. By contrast, in 5 1/2 years since his election in 1982, he has issued only eight such orders.

On other criminal justice issues, Dukakis has received substantial praise. The Anti-Crime Council, which he established soon after his 1982 election and which he personally chairs each month, wins high marks for effectively coordinating the often-conflicting demands of police, prosecutors, judges, prison officials and advocates for victims.

And his drug education programs in Massachusetts schools have been praised as a possible national model by federal Drug Enforcement Administration officials.

Northeastern University criminologist James Fox gives Dukakis good marks for “intelligent” crime policies, although he doubts that any governor, much less a President, can have much impact on crime rates.

Nearly all violent crime, Fox notes, is the responsibility of state and local, not federal, officials. And demographics--particularly the incidence of men in their late teens and young adult years--goes much further than public policy toward accounting for crime rates.