Janto is not typical
By Meda Chesney-Lind
of the criminals
behind bars
and David JohnsonWE read with interest Honolulu Prosecutor Peter Carlisle's powerful and disturbing profile of Frank Janto, "Don't feel sorry for this man," in your July 25 Insight section. Carlisle seems to feel that presenting the graphic details of Janto's crimes and his lengthy history with the criminal justice system is an argument for building more prisons and passing tougher laws in Hawaii.
We disagree.
Carlisle begins his essay by stating that the Janto case "is helpful in understanding the nature of crime and the criminal justice system," and ends by asserting that "we must not dismiss the Janto case as simply an extreme example that doesn't represent how the system usually works."
By this reasoning, the prosecutor seems to be arguing that the Janto case is representative of all criminal justice cases, and that we should understand criminal justice and construct criminal justice policy based on this case.
Carlisle further suggests that the Janto case shows that our current criminal justice system is soft on crime and that we should get tougher, by building more prisons and by passing three-strikes laws.
Carlisle's first premise, however, is wrong, for the Janto case is hardly representative of our crime problem.
In 1996, Hawaii had 193,396 total Part I and Part II crimes, of which 40 were murders. Thus, for every murder there were 4,835 crimes.
Happily, the vast majority of crime in Hawaii is not like the crime that Janto committed, and the vast majority of offenders are not like Janto.
We know this is no comfort to the victims who suffered horribly at Janto's hands, but it is an important truth that needs to be said. If anything, Janto's case suggests that imprisonment as the principal response to crime is problematic.
Janto has spent more than half of his adult life in prison; he also did time as a juvenile. If prisons work to prevent crime and violence, as Carlisle implies, why didn't imprisonment stop Janto?
In fact, prisons are unlikely settings for rehabilitation and drug treatment. Certainly with the few offenders who are as dangerous and disturbed as Janto, focused efforts at drug treatment and anger management are necessary.
But the Frank Jantos tend to get lost in overcrowded and overused prisons. They return to the community more angry and disturbed than when they first entered prison. This is another realization from Janto's story.
Now the taxpayers will spend, according to Carlisle, more than a million dollars to keep Janto behind bars for the rest of his life. Clearly, we as a community cannot afford to do the same with many offenders. Prison should be reserved for serious criminals whose problems make them a threat to community safety.
In well-run youth facilities and prisons, intensive programs can be focused on the few offenders who present a significant danger to the community, like Janto.
Unfortunately, since Hawaii's imprisonment boom has left little money or space for such programs, the costly warehousing of inmates continues.
In sum, building a sentencing system and punishment regime, as Carlisle advocates, on the basis of cases like Janto's is akin to building a health-care system on the premise that all illness should be treated like cancer or the plague.
Thus the question that remains is this: Just who is in our prisons? At this point, we have only imprecise data. Figures produced by the Department of Public Safety for 1996 indicate that, on any given day, fewer than half the inmates in prison are doing time for a violent offense.
Most of the rest are in for property or drug offenses or for technical violations of probation and parole. These figures suggest that serious criminals may be mixed in with offenders who could likely benefit from less secure and less costly options.
The truth is we don't know how many Frank Jantos are in our prisons, but we need to know. Before lawmakers race to pass new laws and build new prisons, we need a more adequate answer to this question, an answer that can only come through careful research on the characteristics of Hawaii's inmate population.
Good crime policy emerges from a careful review of the facts or the crime problem rather than through emotional responses to horrifying crimes.
Meda Chesney-Lind is a professor in the women's studies program and David Johnson is an assistant professor in sociology at the University of Hawaii.
