Editorials
Tuesday, March 16, 1999

Gephardt endorsement
should boost Gore

DICK Gephardt's endorsement of Al Gore is clear evidence that the Democratic establishment is lining up behind the vice president in his bid to succeed President Clinton. The House minority leader was in past years a critic of some Clinton policies, notably the North American Free Trade Agreement, and appeared to be positioning himself to challenge Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination.

However, the prospect that the Democrats might regain control of the lower house, which would mean he could become speaker, seemed to persuade him to back off from a presidential bid. He decided last month against making the race but had not made an endorsement until yesterday.

Gephardt's support doesn't guarantee Gore the Democratic nomination, of course, but it's impressive nonetheless. Former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey is the only announced challenger but could be a formidable opponent, especially if Gore stumbles. Jesse Jackson is contemplating making the race, which would be his third, but is not likely to be a factor except for the black votes he might siphon off. However, on the Republican side, Texas Gov. George W. Bush is faring better in the polls than Gore.

As an unabashed supporter of Bill Clinton, Gore hopes that the president's popularity will rub off on him, but that is not assured. Moreover, if the public's enthusiasm for Clinton fades and negative opinions about Clinton generated by the Lewinsky affair and other scandals gain strength, Gore could be the victim.

Alternatives to prison

THE United States may soon achieve an unwanted distinction: the world's highest rate of incarceration. The number of American adults in prison has more than doubled over the last 12 years. The Justice Department reports that at mid-1998 U.S. jails and prisons held about 1.8 million people. In 1985 the figure was 744,208. That means last year there were 668 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents, compared with 313 per 100,000 in 1985. The U.S. may soon overtake Russia, the current world leader with 685 people imprisoned for every 100,000 residents.

This is great for the prison industry, but the rest of us have to wonder. Prisons are a heavy burden for the taxpayers. Hawaii residents know what this is about as the state wrestles with the need to build a major prison to handle the increase in inmates.

But prison isn't the only alternative and may not be the best. Government has to work harder at finding better answers.

In a column on this page yesterday, Neil R. Peirce described a program in Portland, Ore., that is aimed at finding the best sentence for each criminal offender. It could be prison, drug or alcohol abuse counseling, mental health services, remedial education, work opportunities, or some combination. The point is to find the most effective way to reduce the offender's probability of committing more crimes.

Portland's Multnomah County has approved a bond issue to enhance its criminal justice information technology. The idea is to assemble the data on how past offenders responded to each kind of punishment or treatment the criminal justice system has provided. When an offender was awaiting sentencing, the court would be able to feed data on his background and offense into the computer and receive a prediction of how the defendant would respond to a specific sentence.

Something like this is needed everywhere to assist judges in imposing sentences that make sense. It's safe to say that prison often isn't the answer.

Bosnia and Kosovo

WHILE NATO -- and in particular the United States -- are preparing to impose a peace settlement in Kosovo and send in peacekeeping forces to enforce it, the precedent of the Bosnian intervention is worth considering. And it is not encouraging. After four years of war and nearly four years of an internationally enforced peace, NATO's intervention has been a military success but a political failure. The presence of U.S. and European troops prevents Bosnia's three ethnic groups -- Muslims, Croats and Serbs -- from killing each other, but cannot make them reconcile. All three have made it clear they do not want to live together in a multiethnic state.

Gary Dempsey, an analyst for the Cato Institute, describes Bosnia today as "not a nation rebuilding and healing itself but a Potemkin state, a monumental facade erected and maintained by the international community."

Split in two between a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation, Bosnia is more ethnically segregated now than it was when the Dayton accord was signed. The Clinton administration's "uncritical devotion to the agreement is compromising U.S. national security and saddling the United States with an expensive yet futile nation-building operation of unknown duration," Dempsey says.

The few war refugees who have returned have moved from areas where they were in the minority to areas in which they are the majority. Ultranationalist parties continue to dominate the political arena, and 85 percent of Bosnians polled still will not vote for a candidate from another ethnic group.

Dempsey points out that "international reconstruction aid has been plagued by corruption, and Western dollars often end up in the coffers of the very nationalist political parties that are considered the chief obstacles to peace. Economic growth is artificial, privatization has stalled and the West has resorted to increasingly high-handed measures to force Bosnian Croats, Serbs and Muslims to live under the fiction of one government."

In short, the Bosnian venture has turned into a quagmire from which it will be difficult for the United States to extricate itself in the foreseeable future. Kosovo could be similar.

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John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher

David Shapiro, Managing Editor

Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor

Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors

A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor