Paddling Bill Puts Conroy in Hot Seat of National Debate : Legislature: O.C. assemblyman’s measure to fight graffiti given little chance, but many in public approve.

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

Half a century ago in his hometown among the coal fields of western Pennsylvania, Conroy was 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 good whacks.

Prompted by the controversial caning last spring of an American teen-ager convicted 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.

While the measure may face long odds in the Democrat-dominated California Legislature, it has already catapulted the conservative lawmaker to a position of national notoriety.

In recent weeks, television and radio stations around 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,” “60 Minutes” and Newsweek.

“I’ve been on probably every 50,000-watt radio station in the United States,” Conroy reports in his no-brag-just-the-facts 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 the British Isles. 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, Calif., 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 next Tuesday, Conroy will need all the help he can muster. 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,” says Franklin Zimring, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt 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, which will have first crack at Conroy’s legislation, calls the bill “a sadistic joke.”

“He wants to deal out punishment, but it’s just so extreme,” Bates says. “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 laments. “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 in Sacramento has been relatively placid.

An avuncular, amiable sort well liked by Capitol staff as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the 66-year-old conservative is the sort who goes to political fund-raisers for Democratic opponents--and stays to the end good-naturedly pumping hands and working the crowd.

He is consistently hard-working--last year he sponsored more bills than anyone else in Sacramento--and 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,” observes 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.”

The vintage example of that persistence has been his unending effort to have state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), the liberal former anti-war activist, thrown out of the Legislature for what Conroy contends is traitorous behavior during the Vietnam War. Conroy, a Vietnam veteran, began his fight against Hayden in the mid-1980s while Conroy was a veteran affairs official. He hasn’t given up yet.

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; $1.2 million was spent to clean graffiti in Santa Ana alone 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 with a sense of political irony.

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 (it would be of 3/4-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 that the names of juvenile offenders who get the paddle be made public, a tactic designed to heighten the humiliation and deter other would-be taggers.

Despite the uproar over his bill, Conroy sees lots of precedents that support paddling in juvenile court. Although paddling is outlawed in California schools, the practice remains legal in public schools in nearly two dozen other 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--opined in a recent talk that caning, a far more extreme form of punishment than paddling, could pass the high court’s muster.

As for arguments that paddling could harm the psyches of juvenile taggers brought to justice, Conroy scoffs. He sees paddling as a long-practiced punishment that would persuade errant youths to straighten up. It would also act as a deterrent for those who haven’t strayed, he says.

In the current anti-crime climate, Conroy believes he is on the right side of the issue--especially in an election year. With that in mind, the assemblyman is convinced that his 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 says. “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 has driven him.

He recalls days as a Marine Corps officer stationed in North Carolina hearing about parents ordered to paddle their children in court as punishment for juvenile crimes. It quickly changed a child’s errant attitude, he says. Conroy’s experience with his own children only reinforces his bedrock belief that the mere specter of the paddle is enough.

“I never really had to paddle mine,” Conroy says. “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

* District: 71st Assembly (Irvine, Mission Viejo, Orange)

* Party affiliation: Republican

* Hometown: Footedale, Pa.

* Residence: Orange

* Age: 66

* Family: Wife, Ann, and two grown children

* Military background: Retired Marine Corps major; veterans affairs activist

* First elected: September, 1991, in special election to replace John Lewis

* Assembly committees: Health; Insurance; vice chairman, Utilities and Commerce

* Quotable: “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.”

* Legislative rankings

How Conroy ranks with special-interest groups. (Scale 100% to 0% or grade of A to F unless otherwise noted) California Chamber of Commerce: 100% California Labor Federation: 8% California League of Conservation Voters: 8% California NOW (National Organization for Women): 53% Planned Parenthood: 37% California Pro Life Council: 100% California Abortion Rights Action League: Anti-choice Children Now: 59% California Journal ranking (overall of 80 Assembly members): 66th Sources: California Assembly; Times staff reports

Researched by ERIC BAILEY / Los Angeles Times