Take It From Insiders: Get Smarter, Not Tougher : Crime: Instead of spending more billions on punishment, convicts say, invest in positive deterrents, like jobs.

My “Theological Issues in Short Fiction” class at Folsom prison took a detour the other day. We got sidetracked by a discussion of the various crime bills coming out of the nation’s capital. My students, virtually all life-termers, many without the possibility of parole, were amazingly informed about the bills.

They were aware of the Senate’s huge five-year, $22.2-billion “crime-fighting” package that included regional prisons for violent offenders and 100,000 more police. They knew also of President Clinton’s hope to extend the death penalty to include 50 more offenses and to cut back on the number of appeals of those sentences. I was impressed by how well-versed they were on the impetus to try more juveniles, charged with violent crimes, as adults. They were up to speed, as well, on the recent passage of the “Three strikes and you’re out” measures in Washington state.

These inmates know the issue of crime better than just about anybody. As disparate as they are in their opinions on most things, they were of one voice on the current “get-tough” urge that grips the land. To them, it is all absolutely meaningless and insignificant in reducing crime.

Not a single one thought that longer sentences stop crime. Not one juvenile, they insisted, will be deterred by the fear of being tried as an adult. We could triple the number of prisons in this state (already a growth industry in California) and not one of my 40 students believes that it would make a criminal think twice.

The men at Folsom know what the Senate doesn’t. These aren’t “crime” bills--they are “punishment” bills. They don’t seek to make prisons obsolete by reducing crime, they merely address how we’ll deal with criminals when they’re caught. Does anyone feel safer now than they did before?

My students know that there exists in this country no real will to stop crime. Legislators herniate themselves to be seen as “tough” on crime while sidestepping every conceivable approach that would be “smart” on crime.

Most inmates I know accept full responsibility for what they’ve done. In fact, they bristle if they think you’re apt to blame society or the economy or their upbringing for their crimes. And yet, ask them to brainstorm on a crime bill and this is what they say:

* Address the pervasive hopelessness among the inner-city poor. Money spent on jobs for the unemployed will make the streets safer than all the prisons in California.

* Promote mentoring programs to tackle the issue of so many fatherless sons (70% of all juveniles detained in the United States know no father).

* Convert prisons from punishment warehouses to rehabilitation centers, for one day, these inmates will walk free.

* Actively support entrepreneurship in urban areas.

* Get all the guns off the street.

* Conceive ways to offer meaning to inner-city poor youth who have lost the ability to imagine a future.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) called the $22.2-billion crime bill “the most significant effort to deal with violent crime in America ever undertaken by the U.S. Senate.” It is not just this hyperbole that strikes my class at Folsom as profoundly sad. This country and its legislators, for its lack of will to deal with crime, has missed yet another opportunity.