The Washington Post, by William Raspberry

The death of Thurgood Marshall has me doing something he would have despised: talking out of both sides of my mouth.

I am an unabashed admirer of the former Supreme Court justice. It's impossible to grow up as I did -- as a poor, black Mississippian forced into segregated and third-rate schools -- and not admire the man most responsible for bringing an end to school segregation. There was a lot more to the Marshall legacy than Brown v. Board of Education, of course. His consistency in championing the underdog (and not just African American underdogs, either), his refusal to separate the requirements of fundamental decency from the dictates of the law, his humor, his forgiveness, his celebrated hard work on both sides of the judicial bench -- all these were Marshall's gifts to us.

Still, the thing that will stand out when all else is forgotten is his leadership in bringing the Supreme Court to outlaw school desegregation.

But if the death of Thurgood Marshall prompts these thoughts, the threatened death of a tiny college in the Mississippi delta prompts other, contradictory notions, among them this question: Must integration be the overriding priority for those who care about the education of young African Americans?

The Supreme Court ruled last June (Marshall had retired by then) that Mississippi's colleges and universities were unlawfully segregated, the evidence including the existence of racially isolated institutions with inferior facilities and lower admissions standards.

Alvin Chambliss, lawyer for the successful plaintiff in the case, won what threatens to be a Pyrrhic victory. "We won the case," he told me, "but the court didn't do what we wanted. We wanted them to declare liability and then remand for remedy. … We haven't even had a trial on liability [for differential funding, college attendance rates and governance]. The way the court sent the case back down, with an order for the state to come up with a plan, this thing has taken on a life of its own."

And the life of the plan could be the death of Mississippi Valley State, smallest, newest and physically the worst off of the three black schools in the state's eight-campus system. The plan gets modified from time to time, but every version I've seen calls for Valley's closing, with its students to be transferred to mostly white Delta State.

The scheme, which also includes the improvement of historically black Jackson State -- including the transfer to Jackson of some programs now on predominantly white campuses -- serves admirably the racial integration goal for which Thurgood Marshall struggled so hard. It is of a piece with the merging of white and black public schools (often accomplished by closing the black schools). But some of us who applauded the solution when it was applied to the public schools are having second thoughts at the post-secondary level.

So is Al Chambliss. "People are saying this case is about desegregation," he said. "I don't think so. It's about education."

He rattles off the statistics to make his point: Jackson State graduates 30 percent of its freshmen after six years. Alcorn State (the third historically black campus) graduates 32 percent. Valley -- with all its ramshackle buildings and woebegone facilities, graduates 40 percent.

There's more. Between 1986 and 1992, Delta State awarded an average of 83 degrees per year to black students. The University of Mississippi awarded 74 a year. Mississippi University for Women graduated 44 blacks a year. "Valley," says Chambliss, "awarded an average of 215 degrees a year -- more than Delta, Ole Miss and the W combined." Chambliss's point is not merely to save Valley State but to demonstrate that the small black schools are doing what the white schools are not doing -- and probably would not do no matter how perfect a desegregation plan state officials come up with.

"The bottom line for us is equal educational opportunity," he says, offering what may be the most devastating statistics of all: "For every 10 white Mississippians in the 17 to 24 age group, there are nine blacks. But of the 58,000 students in the state system, only 17,000 are black -- and only 4,000 of these are in predominantly white schools."

Chambliss is no racial separatist. Thurgood Marshall is his hero, too. But he's impatient with the focus on getting the racial mix right. His bottom line, as he says, is education.

"We're very close to equal numbers among college age kids," he says, "but from 1986 to 1992, the state colleges and universities awarded 34,863 degrees to white students and only 9,647 to blacks. According to my numbers, that leaves us 21,729 degrees short."

Whether the shortfall is made up by predominantly white schools or historically black ones interests him only secondarily.

Me too.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Maya Angelou always makes me cry. She also makes me laugh, of course, and sing and think and feel. But the one certainty is that her every performance -- be it at lecture hall, poetry reading, dinner table or presidential inaugural -- will at some point make me cry.

She did it again last week, with readings from her work and others' at a Frederick Douglass birthday celebration.

There's no point in trying to recreate for you the words that evoked my tears this time. It cannot be done. An Angelou performance is such a blend of words, delivery, acting and feeling -- so much involved with her whole being -- that to try to tell someone else about it is like trying to summarize love.

Besides, I don't want to talk about Angelou. I want to talk about Douglass -- about his hard life, his determination, his success and, most of all, his dreams.

It's a talk my wife and I often have. We'll be driving along an inner-city street and happen past a group or rowdy teenagers, or a blond-wigged prostitute, or some derelict talking to himself, and one of us will say: "What would Frederick Douglass say if he saw that?"

Last week's program, at Ford's Theater, had me thinking those thoughts again. Douglass, born into slavery, made his mark as gifted orator and committed abolitionist. He lived long enough to see the end of slavery. But he knew, his own uncommon success notwithstanding, that abolition alone would not ensure justice.

"Though slavery was abolished," he sadly declared after the Civil War, "the wrongs perpetrated against my people were not ended." That unfinished business became his new mission, and by the time of his death, 98 years ago this week, he had reason to be hopeful -- not just for himself but for his people.

What would Frederick Douglass say … now? Wouldn't he be overjoyed to see college attendance rates for blacks approaching those of whites? Wouldn't he smile in satisfaction to see the growth of the black middle class, in affluence and influence? Wouldn't he delight in knowing that the top military man in America is Colin Powell, a black man, or that another black man, the late Reginald Lewis, could put together an international conglomerate capable of doing $ 1.5 billion in annual sales? Might he not marvel at the idea that the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed blacks the right to vote, had by now produced an estimated 8,000 black elected officials across America? Or that three of his people now sit in the Cabinet of the president of the United States?

Don't you think he might find delightful irony in recalling the words of his old slave master, that "learning would spoil the best nigger in the world"? He might be moved to say: Thanks for the advice; my people have learned, and now they are no longer fit to be niggers.

But of course, we'd have to tell him the bad news too. I think he might, on hearing that black people were disproportionately involved in criminal activity, swallow hard and try to understand. Didn't he say, over a century ago, that "where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is organized in a conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."?

What would Frederick Douglass say if you seated him in the parlor of the Executive Mansion in Virginia -- Virginia! -- and bade him sit while you fetched the governor, and then you walked in with Doug Wilder?

And suppose you sat there and told him of the progress, individual and societal, we've made in extending opportunity to the descendants of slaves. Suppose you told this man, who had to risk severe punishment for daring to learn to read, that education is now not just free but mandatory; that books are plentiful and can be borrowed at no cost from public libraries; that educators, civil rights leaders, the government and private industry are co-conspirators in a scheme to get our children to learn.

Suppose you ticked off the academic and political accomplishments of the grandchildren of slaves, even while informing him that there were still in America those who were indifferent, even hostile, to the advancement of his people.

Could he suppress his delight?

And then suppose you put him in the governor's limousine and drove him through the slums of Richmond, or Washington or Los Angeles and let him see what my wife and I have seen too many times: the aimless drifters, the homeless in their cardboard shelters, the bullet-riddled walls, the vandalized schools, the pitifully undereducated children, the drug dealers and their prey.

What would Frederick Douglass say?

I think he would say nothing at all. I think that, with no need for an assist from the brilliant Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass would simply cry.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Two ideas die hard: That you can manipulate people into self-sufficiency and that you can punish them into good citizenship.

The first manifests itself in our tireless search for the magical level at which welfare grants are big enough to meet basic needs but small enough to make low-paid work attractive. The second has us looking to the criminal justice system to cure behavior that is as much as anything the result of despair.

The welfare example is well known. We don't want poor people to live in squalor or for their children to be malnourished. But we also don't want to subsidize the indolence of people who are too lazy to work. The first impulse leads us to provide housing, food stamps, medical care and a cash stipend for families in need. The second gets us thinking about "workfare."

We've been thinking about it of late for two reasons: the "nanny" problems of two prospective attorneys general (who hired undocumented aliens as household help, presumably because they couldn't find Americans to do the work) and President Clinton's proposal to put a two-year limit on welfare.

Maybe something useful will come of Clinton's idea, but I'm not all that hopeful. It looks to me like one more example of trying to manipulate people into taking care of themselves.

On the criminal justice side, we hope to make punishment tough enough to discourage crime but not so tough as to clog our prisons with relatively minor offenders. Too short a sentence, we fear, will create contempt for the law. Too long a sentence will take up costly space better used for the violent and unremorseful.

Not only can we never find the "perfect" punishment, our search for optimum penalties is complicated by our desire for fairness: to let the punishment fit the crime. The problem is that almost any punishment -- even the ignominy of being charged with a crime -- is sufficient to deter the middle class, while for members of the underclass, probation may be translated as "I beat it."

So how can you use the system -- welfare or criminal justice -- to produce the behavior we want? The answer, I suspect is: You can't.

We keep trying to use welfare and prison to change people -- to make them think and behave the way we do -- when the truth is the incentives work only for those who already think the way we do: who view today's action with an eye on the future.

We will take lowly work (if that is all that's available) because we believe we can make bad jobs work for us. We avoid crime not because we are better people but because we see getting caught as a future-wrecking disaster. We are guided by a belief that good things will happen for us in the future if we take proper care of the present. Even under the worst of circumstances, we believe we are in control of our lives.

And we have trouble understanding that not everybody believes as we believe. The welfare rolls, the prisons and the mean streets of our cities are full of people who have given up on their future. Without hope for the future, hard work at a low-paid job makes no sense. Putting a high premium on avoiding a police record makes no sense. Working hard in school, or pleasing a boss, or avoiding pregnancy make no sense. The deadly disease is hopelessness. The lawlessness and poverty are only the obvious symptoms.

I'm not advocating that we stop looking for incentives to move poor people toward self-sufficiency or that we stop punishing people for criminal behavior. There will always be some people who need help and some who deserve to be in jail.

All I'm saying is that the long-term answer both to welfare and the crime that plagues our communities is not to fine tune the welfare and criminal justice systems but to inoculate our children against the disease of despair.

If we encourage our young people to believe in the future, and give them solid evidence for believing, we'll find both crime, poverty and the whole range of social pathologies shrinking to manageable proportions.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

I missed the Ral Def Jam Slam Censorship Party the other night. I also missed the debate (heated, I'm told) on the topic "Rappers: Our Unelected Leaders."

It isn't just that I knew the music would be too loud for my aging ears or that the invitation put the starting time at 11 p.m. The real reason is that the whole debate over the right of rap, hip-hop and thrash artists to utter their foul, violence-packed and degrading lyrics seems to me to miss the point.

Several points, actually.

To start with, "right" is the wrong word. I'm a First Amendment guy who believes that there's very little that, under the Constitution, may not be said. But I'm also a civility nut to whom it seems obvious that not everything that may be said ought to be said. The more useful discussion is not about censorship but about such quainter concepts as taste, restraint, aesthetics and, oh yes, volume.

A second missed point is the question of whether violent and disrespectful lyrics ("Cop Killer" and "Bitches Ain't S---" come to mind) breed violence and disrespect, or merely reflect the reality of the 1990s world.

"Violence in the African American community clearly predates the rise in popularity of rap music," Russell Simmons and David Harleston, the top two executives of Def Jam Recordings, argued last week, in defense of the lyrics that are making them rich. "Moreover, whether we like it or not, violence is something that our urban youth must confront regularly. As a dimension of their experience, violent themes will obviously find their way into the music."

I don't disagree with that, either. In fact, it comes closer to what I think we ought to be talking about.

Let me (as they say) tell you where I'm coming from. I'm coming from Martin Orrid's generation.

The name (leaving aside members of his family) won't mean much except to a couple hundred middle-aged, college-educated black folk who spent their late teens and early twenties in Indianapolis. Orrid was a college kid when we were college kids. I recently mentioned his name to a couple of pals from those days, just to see what the reaction would be.

It was what I expected. Martin Orrid? Oh, sure. He's the kid who was killed in a motorcycle accident.

Neither my pals nor I knew Martin all that well. Our paths crossed at fraternity affairs, house parties and dances -- that sort of thing. But we all remember him, and for this reason: He was the only contemporary of ours to die of any cause during that whole six- or eight-year period that constituted our good old days. We were pretty much traumatized by this reminder of our mortality.

My children, now roughly the age we were then, easily tick off four, five, six friends who have died in the past few years. Accidents or illness claimed a couple. Another one or two succumbed to drug overdoses. Three were homicides -- shot down either over drugs or over some offense that would have cost a member of my generation a bloody nose at most.

And these are the relatively protected children of middle-class families. It's infinitely worse for the children of the inner cities, the barrios and the projects. Deadly violence is a commonplace in the big cities and is coming to be so in the small towns and suburbs.

And we worry about song lyrics?

My generation, not exactly "Earth Angels," had our raunchy songs -- mostly about good lovin' and stuff like that. "Annie Had a Baby" was about as far as it went. My kids know about (may even own) songs like "Gangsta Bitch."

My generation worried about racial segregation, mean southern sheriffs and the lynching of Emmett Till, but we sang about young love. My children's generation worries about being "dissed" and sings about killing cops.

And, yes, words matter. They may reflect reality, but they also have the power to change reality -- the power to uplift and to abase. And because I know words matter, I wish my children, and kids younger than my children, would get back to innocent, hopeful lyrics. I wish their music was more about love and less graphically about intercourse. I wish their songs could be less angry and "victimized" and more about building a better world. I wish their songs could be more like ours.

But I think about Martin Orrid, and I wish their world could be more like ours -- that we could come together across the generations to reduce the amount of violence and despair in their lives. It'll take a lot more than censorship to get us there.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

President Clinton, who knows Lani Guinier and who thought enough of her to nominate her as assistant attorney for civil rights, reportedly is prepared now to dump her.

I've never met this law school classmate and political "friend" of both Bill and Hillary Clinton -- never heard of her before her nomination -- and I'm prepared to say she deserves to be heard on her reputedly "controversial" views.

But, then, my concern is to get a bright and decent and competent candidate into an important administration post (and to give this much-maligned nominee a chance to defend herself). Clinton's concern is that he may lose a Senate confirmation fight.

One more thing: I've read those controversial writings, and while I pretend no particular fluency in lawyerese, I do recognize in them an intelligent mind willing to wrestle with important and intensely difficult questions.

To take one of those questions: What is the right thing to do in conflicts between two vaunted American principles, minority rights and majority rule?

In some -- perhaps most -- instances, it's reasonable to let a voting majority carry the day. Indeed, Lani Guinier has been "Krobed." The magic of the system is that since a member of today's majority can easily be a part of tomorrow's minority, political compromise is in everybody's interest. The winning side will want friends among the losers, to ensure future victories. Prospective losers will seek compromise or make factional deals in an attempt to cobble together 51 percent.

The general assumption is that votes are interchangeable, subject to change from one issue to the next.

But it takes little imagination to come up with instances where votes are nonfungible, where majorities and minorities are permanent and based not just on issues but also on race. What is the right thing to do when, say, a 55 percent white majority conspires to deny all political power to a 45 percent black minority? Bargaining and trade-offs go out the window; why should the ruling majority bargain?

Guinier, in a series of law journal articles, has wrestled with such questions, and the possible answers she has offered are at the heart of her "controversial" reputation. Cumulative voting, for instance. Under this electoral scheme (as I understand it) each voter would have as many votes as vacancies to be filled. If the purpose of the election was to fill nine seats on a county council, for instance, voters would have nine votes each and be free to distribute them in any way they chose. Some might cast one vote for nine different candidates. A minority group might persuade its members to cast all nine votes for the single candidate from their group, thus enhancing that candidate's chances of victory. (The method already is in use in some countries and is used by many U.S. corporations to elect boards of directors.)

"Supermajorities," another Gunier recommendation, make it more difficult for a bloc of 50 percent plus one to wield absolute power. (The Senate, before which Guinier hopes to make her case, routinely requires various "supermajorities" for certain purposes -- for instance, a 60 percent vote to end a filibuster.) Nowhere have I found in her writings any basis for Clint Bolick's "quota queen" epithet; her supporters say it simply isn't there. Nowhere have I found anything suggesting that she opposes the basic tenets of the American system. Nowhere have I found the evidence that she would, given the authority to do so, chop the country up into tiny, self-centered electoral pieces.

I can't even find the part where she supposedly declares Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder "inauthentic" because a majority of those who elected him are white.

What I do find is an all-out conservative effort to "Krob" (a reverse "Bork") the nominee -- to do to her what liberals scouring the papers of Robert Bork did to that conservative nominee to the Supreme Court.

Thus, many of those conservatives who are aghast at Guinier's concern for protecting minority rights from the tyranny of the majority see nothing at all wrong with guaranteeing white political power -- by setting aside whites-only seats in the parliament, for instance -- in Zimbabwe or in a democratized South Africa.

Something other than principle is at stake in the get-Guinier campaign. And something besides newly discovered information has led Clinton to confide that he doesn't agree with "all" of her writings. Of course he doesn't. I don't either. I doubt that she does, no matter how serious she may have been when she wrote them.

There are some things I'd like to hear her on. I'd like to know, for instance, how many of the proposals she made in her various law journal pieces would require new legislation and which, in her view, are doable under the voting rights legislation she would interpret and administer as assistant attorney general.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee are the place to get these matters cleared up. She wants the hearings, and though her sponsor is getting cold feet, Clinton needs to let the hearings proceed.

Bork may have added a new verb ("to Bork") to our vocabulary. But at least Bork had his hearing. Ronald Reagan insisted upon it.

Can't Clinton muster the guts to do as much for his nominee?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

At the beginning of last week, Jesse Jackson was predicting that the historic peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization would open the way for improved relations among a whole variety of erstwhile disputants: Arabs and Israelis, Israelis and black South Africans, African Americans and American Jews.

By week's end, Jackson and other black leaders were scrambling to control the consequences of a domestic peace accord that took them by surprise: the widely reported rapprochement between the black leadership mainstream and the Nation of Islam.

It isn't that they don't want better relations with Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the group known as the Black Muslims. They do. Their nervousness is over the fact that this tentative peace, unlike the Israeli-PLO accord, is not the result of careful negotiation, tactical concession and mutually altered priorities. This one fell out of the sky during a Thursday afternoon Congressional Black Caucus forum on race in America.

Participants in the forum included Jackson, Farrakhan, Reps. Kweisi Mfume and Maxine Waters and Ben Chavis, head of the NAACP. Much of the afternoon featured attempts by the panelists to promote their particular takes on the problems of black people in America. The exchanges were, from time to time, somewhat pointed, but the theme was unity without the necessity of uniformity.

Then Chavis, the new head of the NAACP, broached a subject that the others had studiously avoided: the exclusion of Farrakhan from the recent 30th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington and Farrakhan's subsequent blast, in the Nation of Islam's newspaper, Final Call, charging the march's leadership with knuckling under to outside forces.

"It was a mistake not to have Minister Farrakhan speak at the march on Washington," said Chavis, clearly entranced by the calls for unity. "Somebody needs to have the courage to say that. It was also a mistake, Minister Farrakhan, for your publication to denounce brothers who did not present you to speak. But I would like to discuss that with you in private, because I love you and respect you."

The audience loved it. They loved it even more when Farrakhan, thanking Chavis for his statement, offered a definitional clarification.

"A mistake," he chided, "is an unintentional departure from right. An error is an intentional departure from that which is correct. It was more than a mistake. It was an error. I've never [before] used my words, my pen or my speech to attack other black leaders, but I believe it was necessary to write what I wrote. If that disturbed us to the point where we will go in the back room and iron out our differences, then black people will be all the better for my exclusion from the march on Washington and my rebuke in the Final Call…

"When we have this meeting in closed session, may we iron out whatever differences we may have and make a pledge to each other that we can say in public that we will never let somebody outside of our family determine what goes on inside our family. And we will tell those who wish to exclude a member of the family from participating with the family to keep their mouth out of our family business."

It was, in fact, a stirring rhetorical moment. The problem, as black leaders acknowledged over the weekend, is that apart from differences in emphasis and approach for solving common problems, Farrakhan brings with him the baggage of antisemitism. He denies that he is antisemitic; most Jews take it as a matter of fact. And their perception has plagued both Jackson's political ambitions (they wanted him to publicly distance himself from Farrakhan) and the attempts of mainstream blacks and Jews to repair their traditional alliance.

For Farrakhan, all this may be a sign of wimpishness among black leaders who, if they were real men and women, would refuse to "allow an enemy to both of us to get between us." For the black political-civil rights establishment, on the other hand, Jewish support is critical. Moreover, such pragmatic considerations aside, most of them simply don't subscribe to Farrakhan's notions about Jews, and they are troubled by his apparent fixation with Jews.

But they are also intrigued by the prospect of a unity that could link mainstream activists with the disaffected masses that Farrakhan can, on short notice, turn out by the thousands. Can they bring Farrakhan into the camp without triggering the defection of other critical allies?

My guess is that they can't -- unless the controversial minister can get over his obsession with Jews and, like Arafat and Rabin, make the clear-cut and public utterance that can suspend disbelief. If he insists on going his own unreformed way, taking his occasional shot at Jews and equating black discomfiture with wimpishness, it's hard to see how last week's shining show of unity can turn out to be more than just another flash in the pan.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The civil authorities have lost control of this city's streets. It's time to bring out the troops. Somebody has got to stop the killing.

When I wrote those words -- in February 1989 -- I was not alone in my alarm about Washington's escalating violence. But the cynics said we should just cool it. After all, it was mostly dope dealers killing each other. It would be over as soon as the turf claims got settled. Meanwhile … well, good riddance to bad rubbish.

My call for the National Guard came after a year that had seen a record 372 homicides and during a year that had already seen 75 killings by Feb. 17, when the column appeared -- "13 shootings on Tuesday alone." A lot of us were afraid the deadly trend would escalate to include our own relatively safe neighborhoods.

Well, the escalation has happened -- and not only in the direction we feared. The violence once reserved primarily for settling disputes over drug trafficking soon came to be used to settle ordinary traffic disputes. What we used to call "gangland style" killings escalated into drive-by shootings by gunmen heedless of the presence of uninvolved bystanders. Semiautomatic weapons once used to guarantee the collection of dope-related debts started to be used in "ordinary" robberies, gunmen frequently killing their compliant victims seemingly just for the hell of it.

We started to get murders on schoolyards, at public pools, at football games; murders because someone felt "dissed," murders because some armed idiot just "felt like killing someone."

Now there's this latest thing I've heard about. It's rumored that there are people who drive around at night with their headlights off, determined (reportedly as some bizarre and barbarous initiation ritual) to shoot the first motorist who blinks his lights at them.

I'm not pretending to have seen this sort of escalation coming, though maybe I should have. The likelihood of getting away with it always tempts the violence-prone to violence. And the increase in their violence changes the prevailing norm and thereby tempts others to violence. Internal constraints disappear, and finally you and I half-wish we were armed so we could dispatch the next young thug who messes with us.

In certain parts of Washington -- and in other cities around the nation -- the threat of violence is more than just another unpleasant fact of life.It is for some people the fact of life. I mean men and women who will no longer take jobs that require them to work at night. I mean neighborhoods that are certain to be abandoned by all but the most foolhardy and desperate shopkeepers, thanks to a recent spate of killings of merchants, many of them Asian Americans. I mean children who cannot go to the local playgrounds or corner stores -- who often cannot even go outside to play -- for fear of random gunfire.

Is it time for the National Guard? In all honesty, I cannot tell you precisely what I'd have the National Guard do -- although it's a certainty I would not have them standing around shouldering unloaded rifles.

I believe we need to deal with the depression and despair of our young people -- their joblessness, their hopelessness, their empty vision of the future. But I also believe that none of this is possible unless our children's homes and schools and playgrounds are safe places. We've got to do what it takes to make our cities safe again: with federal help and with federal troops, if necessary.

If we can deploy American soldiers in Mogadishu to protect the Somali people from violent "war lords," is it beyond reason to deploy a few hundred troops here, at least until the streets are calm enough for ordinary law-enforcement to take over?

I had nearly finished this piece when, just minutes ago, I got a call from an acquaintance who was nearly crazy with fear. There had just been a shooting at J. F. Cook Elementary -- her grandson's school.

"These children are scared to death," Barbara Metcalf said. "I feel that I need to take my children, my little grandkids, out of school and just keep them home, if necessary. The mayor's not doing her job, nobody seems to be doing anything. What we need to do is call out the National Guard."

She gets no argument here.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The stiffer sentences and mandatory minimum prison terms of recent years were supposed to reduce crime and make us feel safer. What they have done is to fill our prisons to the point where we are letting unreformed inmates out the back door in order to make room for the newly convicted. Our jails and prisons are full, our budgets strained to the breaking point -- and our streets as unsafe as they've ever been.

So here comes the Clinton administration with a crime bill that would -- what else? -- provide stiffer sentences -- including longer terms, limitations on appeal rights, easier transfer of juvenile suspects to adult courts and greatly expanded recourse to the death penalty.

The proposal calls to mind the homespun wisdom I've heard repeated several times this year: If you find yourself in a hole and you're wondering what to do about it, the first thing to do is stop digging.

The administration bill and a Republican alternative both fail to grasp what should by now be obvious: that we can't punish our way out of our crime problem and that efforts to do so amount to trying to dig our way out of a hole.

The people who propose these things are not stupid. They just keep learning the wrong thing. What they learn is that for many offenses -- and many offenders -- increased punishment does work. Put a few overcharging cab drivers in jail and overcharging will be greatly diminished. Hike the charge for overtime parking from $3 to $25 and we'll keep a closer eye on our watch.

But for some offenses -- notably crimes of passion and crimes of despair -- severity of sentence is of little consequence. America's middle class understands the first. Thus we are not surprised to learn that doubling the minimum sentence for manslaughter is likely to leave the manslaughter rate unchanged.

We don't understand the second. We don't begin to understand that the threat of jail, or of an increased prison term, doesn't mean much to a youngster who is convinced that (a) he won't get caught, (b) he could get lucky and beat the system and (c) his life was headed nowhere to begin with. Yet because we ourselves respond to such threats, we keep imagining that the solution is to make the threats stronger: jail time instead of probation for the fledgling crook; mandatory terms for drug dealers (including those who deal primarily to supply their own addictions), longer and more certain terms for violent offenders and, as the administration bill proposes, a broader schedule of crimes for which the penalty can be death.

Surely, we reason, the threat of death must deter.

Really? To what extent would it deter the gangbangers, who take it for granted that long life is not in the cards for them? Would a federally enacted death sentence deter the drug dealers for whom the threat of death -- quickly meted out by a rival dealer, with no clemency or appeal -- is a fact of daily life?

The American Civil Liberties Union has attacked the crime bill, a huge chunk of which is a carry-over from legislation that failed last year, on the expected grounds: its broadening of the death penalty without protection against its racially biased application, its limitations on legal appeals (especially of capital cases) and its lengthening of sentences with no showing that longer sentences reduce crime.

My objections are closer to those voiced by Malcolm C. Young, executive director of the Washington-based Sentencing Project -- principally that the legislation has nothing to do with crime prevention.

The crime that may lead a frightened America to take a chance on this flawed bill has its roots not in inadequate punishment but in unformed consciences. The rest of us may violate societal rules whose validity we nonetheless accept. The youngsters we so fear are not backsliders from an accepted faith; they are social infidels. Our values are not their values, our expectations are not their expectations, our fears are not their fears.

None of this means that we shouldn't punish -- even severely -- those who violate the law. It means only that the problem -- and any hope for solution -- begins much, much earlier.

We need to undertake the painstaking work of promoting our values, our unquestioned hope for the future, our taken-for-granted belief in mutuality. We need to give our young people both hope and a conscience.

That takes attention and resources at the front end. The crime bill would make the principal investment at the back end -- in the criminal justice system -- where it's already too late.

And who can doubt that if this misguided approach becomes law and fails (as it must) the response will be a demand for still tougher punishment? As some wise person put it, one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing the same way and expect different results.

Maybe it's too much to expect a nation petrified by crime to do different things a different way -- by undertaking serious prevention and, yes, redemption.

But can't we at least stop digging?

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The condom ads were so risque that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority didn't want to accept them. I don't mean the risque-ness inherent in public discussions of the mechanics of AIDS prevention. I mean risque as in: "One of these will make you 1/1,000th of an inch larger," or "Tell him you don't know how it will ever fit."

Not precisely the sort of thing you'd wish on innocent school kids, even if you've decided it's never too soon to teach them about AIDS.

But when the Boston transit agency asked the AIDS Action Committee to tone down or withdraw what it called "indecent sexual images," the AIDS Action people decided to sue instead. This week U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel ruled that subways and trolleys are public forums and that the MBTA is required, under the First Amendment, to run the ads unaltered.

The salutary effect, according to Larry Kessler, executive director of the AIDS Action Committee, is the removal of "yet another barrier erected by government officials more concerned about public relations than about public health."

That's one way of looking at it. There's another: as the removal of yet another barrier between the society and its degradation.

The AIDS warriors don't see it as degradation, of course, only as frankness. But I think -- as transit authority deputy James E. Rooney thought -- that these particular ads needlessly cross the lines of taste. He would like, he said, to "maintain the MBTA as a G-rated transit system."

This is not a contest between good guys and bad. Nobody opposes efforts to contain the spread of AIDS. Nobody seeks the pollution of the civic atmosphere. The problem is what to do when virtues collide.

It happens.

Consider (to take a very different matter) the case of a pregnant high school girl in, say, the 1950s. She is embarrassed and confused, even disgraced. Her hopes of college and a professional career are likely dashed and, since she will of course have to leave school, she is cut off from her friends and peers. That's awful.

This isn't. Her friends and peers are reminded again of what they already knew: teenage pregnancy is a disaster. This knowledge, reinforced by the plight of a schoolmate, sparks new caution -- abstinence, perhaps, or less-frequent sex, or no unprotected sex, or no sex with anybody you wouldn't think of marrying. What is a disaster for one may be the salvation of dozens.

Now take the same girl in the '80s and '90s. Pregnancy is still an inconvenience -- maybe a major inconvenience. But it is no longer a disgrace. No way will we kick her out of school now that she needs an education as never before. We may even try to accelerate her education, or help her learn a skill with which she can support herself and her child. We can all take pride in having done the best we could to soften the penalty for a moment's indiscretion.

But what of friends and peers? Certainly no one in school would get pregnant in order to get an accelerated education or job training. The point is that the more successful we are at softening the sanctions against indiscretion -- at reducing an erstwhile life sentence to a more manageable penalty -- the more indiscretion we're likely to get.

Doing the best we can to help one unfortunate child entails the risk of removing yet another barrier to the behavior that produced the problem in the first place.

The dilemma crops up in other ways. No-fault divorce and other changes to make it easier to dissolve disastrous marriages were a blessing for countless individuals trapped in those disastrous marriages. But they have also (I believe) had the effect of weakening the institution of marriage. What was unarguably good for a large number of individuals has been bad for the society.

The conflict is between particular good and general good. To return to the Boston transit affair: AIDS is both deadly and incurable, and halting its spread is a virtue beyond arguing. But at a time when the public is exercised about the "indecent sexual images" that bombard our children from cable television (which we have to invite into our homes and pay for) is it unreasonable to hope that we can combat AIDS without increasing the ubiquity of these images?

This is not to trivialize AIDS. Given a choice between stamping out this killer disease and stamping out risque signboards, the decision is easy.

But the "indecent sexual images" permitted now in order to sell health will be used to sell everything from cosmetics to cars, and the pollution will have its own deleterious effects.

I've lost enough friends to AIDS to take the disease with utter seriousness. But I've witnessed enough moral and spiritual decline to know that AIDS isn't our only deadly threat.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)