Bush Proposes Turning Bases Into Prisons

Vice President George Bush, stepping into a potential political thicket, Sunday proposed closing “domestic military bases we don’t need” and converting some of them into state-run prisons as part of the Administration’swar on drugs.

In a campaign day that focused on crime and drug abuse, Bush also sought to squelch speculation that he was moving toward asking Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas--his final, unsuccessful rival for the Republican presidential nomination--to be the party’s vice presidential candidate.

“Literally, we have not begun the process. There isn’t a long list or short list,” he said at a news conference. Warning reporters not to heed anyone who claims to have an inside track on who the nominee will be, he said:”Nobody is authorized to be speaking on my behalf.”

The vice president made the prison proposal in an address to the executive board of the Fraternal Order of Police, an organization said to represent 190,000 police officers in 44 states. Bush’s remarks represented one more step in his effort to draw a distinction between himself and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee--in this case seeking to portray himself as the tougher on drug issues.

But in doing so, the vice president was raising one of the thorniest issues to face Congress in recent decades--that of closing military bases on which local economies often depend--and suggesting that at least some of them be replaced by prisons, which are rarely facilities that local communities accept without a fight.

Indeed, questions about the siting of a state prison in New Braintree, Mass., dogged the Dukakis campaign over the weekend, after it was disclosed that the FBI was looking into whether someone in the Massachusetts state Administration leaked information useful to land investors. The FBI has said that Dukakis is not the target of the inquiry.

“The single most important thing Congress could do in the war on drugs is alleviate the shortage of state prison space, responsible for the premature release of countless criminals,” Bush said.

Calls It a Top Priority

Stating that the United States is spending from $2 billion to $5 billion a year on unnecessary military bases, he said that one of his priorities as President would be to eliminate them. “Where needed, we should convert the bases to minimum-security prisons for use by the states,” he said.

In some cases, he said later at the news conference, the bases could be turned into prisons of greater than minimum security.

He acknowledged the political difficulty of eliminating the military installations, and said: “I don’t have a specific list of bases to close.”

Drawing up such a list would be a task for his secretary of defense, the vice president said, adding: “A look should be taken at every single state.”

The most recent major effort at closing military bases occurred during the Jimmy Carter Administration, when several sizable facilities were targeted. But the White House and Pentagon rolled back under congressional pressure from their original plan for extensive closings. The Reagan Administration generally avoided the political mine field.

Talk of Closings Stepped Up

Recently, however, talk of closing military bases has increased, with Congress seeking ways to redirect defense spending under pressures imposed by the approximately $150-billion federal budget deficit.

In his address, Bush said Congress had cut the Drug Enforcement Administration’s budget by $28 million, FBI spending by $10 million, the U.S. Marshals Service by $11 million and funds for U.S. attorneys by $22 million.

Bush also criticized the portrayal of drug use in motion pictures--singling out a scene in which cocaine is sniffed in the movie “Crocodile Dundee”--and said: “The entertainment industry better shape up because in a scene like that they might be adding to the problem.”

Asked later whether he was suggesting censorship, he replied:

“I hate to think of that. I think it has to be exhortation. . . . The industry has to take a new look. This isn’t very funny. Kids are losing their lives.”

Dukakis turned down an invitation to address the group, spending a long weekend off the campaign trail on Nantucket Island, a Massachusetts beach resort. He dispatched Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) in his place.

‘Pulled Plug on Budget’

DeConcini said in remarks prepared for delivery after Bush departed that the Reagan Administration “tried to cut 60% of the money for drug prevention and education programs” and “pulled the plug on the budget for state and local law enforcement.”

Asked in an interview about Bush’s allegation that Congress had cut funds from the federal law enforcement agencies, DeConcini, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the money was trimmed as part of a budget-cutting compromise reached by the Administration and Congress in the wake of the Oct. 19 stock market crash.

He also accused the Administration of cutting $900 million from the $2 billion it had originally proposed for federal drug programs in fiscal 1988 and said that Congress restored $700 million.

Asserting that there was no public objection on the part of the vice president to the Administration’s budget cuts, DeConcini said: “I didn’t hear him speaking out.”