Paddling Bill Puts Conroy in Hot Seat of National Debate : Legislature: Critics call it barbaric, but assemblyman says it’s common sense. Measure faces first test Tuesday.

Few can forget a painful childhood paddling, and Mickey Conroy is no exception.

A half-century ago in his hometown among the coal fields of western Pennsylvania, Conroy got dragged to the principal’s office for mouthing off in his sixth-grade classroom. The school kept two wooden paddles for meting out discipline--a solid model, and another with holes bored through it.

“If you did something really bad you got the one with the holes,” Conroy recalls, noting the relativity of air resistance and paddle speed. “I never graduated to that one. But the experience made an impression on me. Those were lessons learned.”

Now a white-haired Republican assemblyman from Orange County, Conroy figures there are more than a few California youths out there in need of a couple of good whacks.

Prompted by the controversial caning recently of an American teen-ager accused of spray-painting cars in Singapore, Conroy has introduced a bill to make young graffiti vandals subject to as many as 10 paddle strokes in juvenile court.

Although the measure may face long odds in the Democrat-dominated California Legislature, as well as questions about whether it meets the tests of constitutional interpretation, it has already catapulted the conservative lawmaker to a position of national notoriety.

In recent weeks, television and radio stations throughout the country have been clamoring for a chunk of his time. He has appeared on more than 20 talk radio shows. The BBC has done a segment on his proposal, and so has CNN. Oprah and Donahue have come calling, as have “20/20” and “60 Minutes.” Newsweek has done an item.

“I’ve been on probably every 50,000-watt radio station in the United States,” Conroy says in his no-brag, just-fact style. “CNN, Pat Robertson’s ‘700 Club.’ You name it, I’ve been on it.”

In Conroy’s fourth-floor office overlooking leafy Capitol Park, staff members have sifted through more than 400 letters mailed from spots as far-flung as Hawaii, Illinois and Britain. Much to their delight, the letters run 40 to 1 in favor of the paddling bill.

“Good work,” wrote Larry Manning of Granbury, Tex. “We the people of Texas are on your side.” Blanchard E. Roth of Mt. Morris, Mich., advised Conroy that “these punks need to be publicly embarrassed as well as their parents.” Robert Lerner of Valley Center gushed: “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! This liberal Democrat from San Diego County applauds you, as do most Californians who have had it up to here with the coddling of graffiti vandals.”

With the bill facing its first hearing Tuesday, Conroy will need all the help he can get. Crime may be the hot-button issue of this election year, but critics of the bill are already lining up in opposition, saying Conroy’s paddling proposal is atavistic, barbaric, the sort of shallow blathering that exemplifies the pathology of media politics.

“It’s penal law by press release,” said Franklin Zimring, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. “The bill’s author succeeds when you write the story. He’s looking for the same thing that the kid scratching graffiti on the wall is looking for--that is, attention.”

Assemblyman Tom Bates, a liberal Democrat from Berkeley who sits on the Public Safety Committee that will have first crack at Conroy’s legislation, called the bill “a sadistic joke.”

“He wants to deal out punishment, but it’s just so extreme,” Bates said. “I think this whole thing is an example of publicity-seeking and there’s no real chance the bill will survive.”

Irwin Hyman, a Temple University psychology professor who heads a center for the study of corporal punishment, worries that Conroy’s proposal and similar ideas circulating in Florida, Maryland and Texas could begin to yank the country back toward a style of punishment largely abandoned decades ago.

As Hyman sees it, paddling of juveniles could spread to the adult penal system and hence to the military, where the flogging of U.S. sailors on the high seas was practiced through the mid-1800s. He also worries about the potential for sadistic abuse when society gives people power to inflict pain on others.

Moreover, he cites research showing that corporal punishment can lead to embitterment, anger and post-traumatic stress while teaching impressionable youths the contradictory lesson that violence is the way to solve problems.

“We fought these battles in the 1800s,” Hyman lamented. “Unfortunately, we have some Neanderthal lawmakers who want to go back to the days of the slave owners.”

That a bill authored by Conroy has become the vortex of such opposition and adulation is somewhat remarkable. Until now, the lawmaker’s three-year stint has been relatively placid.

An avuncular sort, the 66-year-old Conroy had a variety of experiences before coming to the Capitol. He quit school at 16 to join the merchant marine during World War II and went on to a 21-year career in the Marine Corps, retiring as a major. He moved on to private enterprise, working as regional distribution manager for a printing company. More recently, Conroy was at the helm of the nonprofit Veterans Charities of Orange County and served as president of California’s Armed Forces Retirees Assn.

In Sacramento, the amiable conservative is well liked by Capitol staff as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. He is the rare politician who goes to political fund-raisers for partisan opponents--and stays to the end, good-naturedly pumping hands and working the crowd.

An exception to Conroy’s collegiality has been his quixotic quest to have state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), the liberal former anti-war activist, thrown out of the Legislature for what the Republican considers traitorous behavior during the Vietnam War. Conroy, a Vietnam veteran, began his fight against Hayden in the mid-1980s and hasn’t given up yet.

Conroy is equally persistent on more prosaic legislative matters. Last year he sponsored more bills than any other Republican in Sacramento, and he generally seems driven more by the desires of constituents than headlines or politics. Probably the biggest stir Conroy has caused among his colleagues was when he formed an “on-time committee” last year to prod tardy lawmakers to be more punctual for floor sessions and committee hearings.

“Most everyone loves him,” observed Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), Conroy’s closest ally in the Legislature. “He’s a throwback to that Irishman who might not agree with you, but he’ll drink with you. He’ll joke and be friendly, but don’t cross his basic beliefs because he won’t budge.”

Such bulldog perseverance will come in handy as Conroy begins the battle for his paddling bill. Characteristically, he has boned up on the subject, studying court briefs and consulting with legal experts. In his interviews, Conroy tosses out alarming statistics: 118,000 juveniles were arrested for vandalism in 1992 nationwide, $1.2 million was spent to clean up graffiti in Santa Ana last year, another $500,000 was spent thwarting taggers along Orange County’s network of flood control channels.

As if to underline the need, Conroy himself was recently the victim of a tagger. His district office in Orange was spray-painted with the words “Spank Me” by a wry vandal.

Conroy’s legislative solution to graffiti is anything but voluminous. Three short pages spell out all the particulars of his paddling proposal: the size of the paddle (three-quarter-inch-thick hardwood, 18 inches long and six inches wide with a six-inch handle); who wields the paddle (a parent, but the judge can order a bailiff to take over if the parent declines or doesn’t deliver “a satisfactory paddling”), and how many strokes (four to 10 administered through clothing).

In addition, the bill would require the public naming of juvenile offenders who are paddled, a tactic designed to heighten humiliation and deter other would-be taggers.

Despite the uproar over his bill, Conroy sees lots of precedents supporting paddling in juvenile court. Although paddling is outlawed in California schools, the practice remains legal in public schools in nearly two dozen states.

Legal scholars such as Zimring say the constitutionality of school paddlings is a decidedly different issue than corporal punishment for juvenile offenders, but Conroy argues that youngsters would be guaranteed more solid protections in a court of law than in a schoolroom.

“If it is valid and constitutional to paddle a child in school, why would it be unconstitutional to have a parent paddle the child in front of a judge?” wonders Conroy, who says traditional forms of punishment, such as putting juvenile offenders in California Youth Authority facilities, are seen by hardened teen-agers as a “badge of honor.”

Conroy’s resolve was further buttressed when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia--the intellectual leader of the court’s conservative wing--predicted in a recent talk that caning, a far more brutal form of punishment than paddling, could pass the high court’s muster.

As for arguments that paddling could harm the psyche of juvenile taggers brought to justice, Conroy scoffs.

In the current anti-crime climate, Conroy feels he is on the right side of the issue--especially in an election year. With that in mind, the assemblyman is convinced that the bill has a 50-50 chance of becoming law. Indeed, even some Democrats--most notably Assemblyman Bob Epple (D-Cerritos), chairman of the Public Safety Committee--have already embraced the bill.

“I wouldn’t want to be a legislator making all those touchy-feely psychologist arguments about why paddling is wrong,” Conroy said. “Those arguments won’t work. People are going to just look at those lawmakers like they don’t have any common sense.”

Common sense is big in Conroy’s list of virtues. It is largely his own life experiences, his own sense of what’s right and wrong, that have driven Conroy forward.

Conroy’s experiences with his own children only reinforce his bedrock belief that the mere specter of the paddle is enough.

“I never really had to paddle mine,” Conroy recalled. “I had a belt that hung on the back of the door. There was the full understanding that if I asked them something, I wanted an answer. I never had to use that belt.”

Profile: Mickey Conroy

* Age: 66

* Residence: Orange

* Career highlights: Republican assemblyman representing the 71st Assembly District, which includes Irvine, Mission Viejo and Orange; first elected to the Assembly in September, 1991, in special election to replace John Lewis; retired Marine Corps major; veterans’ affairs activist.

* Family: Wife, Ann, and two grown children

* Quote: “I wouldn’t want to be a legislator making all those touchy-feely psychologist arguments about why paddling is wrong. Those arguments won’t work. People are going to just look at them like they don’t have any common sense.”