 On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com. |
Carroll: A reformer's nightmare
Robert Amos is every prison reformer’s nightmare, a reminder of what can happen when you give felons a chance to redeem themselves with a fresh start in life. Some go out and commit the same sort of crime that got them convicted in the first place.
In Amos’ case, he’s suspected of strangling a 24-year-old woman to death last week in the San Isabel National Forest. Which is the method he used to help kill a man in Kansas in 1981.
Ironically, last week’s murder occurred at roughly the same time the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics was announcing that the national inmate population had hit a record, with more than 2.2 million people locked up in a federal, state or local cell. That’s about 1 of 133 U.S. residents, in case you’re counting — a far higher lockup rate than exists in any other advanced country.
The reformers consider this a scandal, and they might even have a point. They’re also probably on target when they say we need to explore wider use of alternative sentences for some crimes, particularly nonviolent drug offenses, and that mandatory minimum sentences have sometimes overshot their mark.
But the arrest of Amos is a timely reminder that not all sentences are too harsh and that not all states throw away the key once the prison gate clangs shut. Incredibly, Amos was first up for parole just eight years after helping to strangle an elderly music teacher, and was granted parole after 18 years despite repeated incidents in prison that confirmed him to be dangerously violent.
Amos was originally sentenced to 15 years to life, but it was obvious by the early 1990s which end of that range he belonged on. Now another trial might return Amos to the home he never should have been allowed to leave.
The American ‘gulag’
One of the great advantages of the Internet is the ease with which you can see how journalists in various nations interpret the same news. Take that U.S. prison population story mentioned above. The anti-American writers at The New Zealand Herald put a uniquely ham-handed spin on it with the following headline: “Inside America’s packed gulags.”
The miscue of a lone headline writer? Hardly. The body of the story reinforced the theme: “This grotesquely swollen prison population evokes the Soviet gulags, or even the 18th century British penal system.”
Well, now: At least a couple of million people, and probably many more, died in the Soviet gulag from overwork, lack of food, exposure, or psychotic cruelty. Many inmates were guilty only of “counterrevolutionary” activities, which is to say not guilty at all. Even many children were swept into the various camps with their mothers, or born there; in either case they were brutalized beyond belief.
The gulag was an extensive system of slave labor camps used by the state to terrorize society, consolidate power and force-feed industrial development. It resembles the American penal system only in the same sense that a rabidly biased news story resembles a balanced one.
Which is to say there is no serious resemblance.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
We can thank our stupid drug laws for creating an overcrowded prison system. As a result, we end up releasing people like Robert Amos when we shouldn't. That poor woman ran into a cold blooded killer but at least it wasn't someone smoking pot!!
Posted by just sayin' on July 3, 2007 09:18 AM