Making Punishment Fit the Crime
WASHINGTON (INA) — Sixty-five-year-old Victorian Theoret, a retired Catholic priest and a former philosophy and humanities professor, was recently sentenced to a year in jail by Dade County, Fla., Judge James Rainwater. The crime: He drowned five stray cats so they would not starve to death.
It’s true that TheoRet broke the law. But he is neither violent nor a danger tp the rest of society — yet it will cost the taxpayers between $10,000 and $25,000 to feed, clothe and house him in an overcrowded prison for one year.
Many judges, attorneys and others in the U.S. criminal justice system agree with Randolph C. Berg Jr., director of the private Florida Justice Institute.
“Putting a person in a cage doesn’t reduce the crime,” says Berg. “Therefore, you’ve got to work in some sort of beneficial payment to the community and to the victim.”
Those who favor practical alternatives to jail for nonviolent offenders might agree that the cat killer should have been been sentenced to work in the county animal shelter for a designated period, rather than be jailed.
Washington, D.C., attorney Ira Lowe also feels that prison terms are often counterproductive. Lowe is the founder of the nonprofit organization Creative Alternatives to Prison, which hopes to cut the prison population in half by providing restitution to the victim, rehabilitation to the offender and savings to the taxpayer. Lowe estimates the potential savings to be about three-quarters of a billion dollars, noting that each state could save the $15 million to $20 million cost of a new 500-bed prison if it didn’t incarcerate 500 of its least-dangerous offenders.
On April 23, Creative Alternatives to Prison will hold a Washington conference for lawyers who are involved in sentencing; the group sponsored a judges’ conference two-and-a-half years ago.
Lowe hopes that, after the conference, every lawyer “will feel obligated to talk about non-prison punishment.’
“Artists and lawyers are the most creative groups in the country,” he says. “The lawyers will come up with tough non-sentence alternatives.”
Lowe practices what he preaches: When his client John Ehrlichman was sentenced in the Watergate case, Lowe asked Judge John J. Sirica to sentence Ehrlichman to a supervised term of public service, rather than straight probation.
More than half of the half-million people incarcerated in the United States have committed victimless crimes or crimes against property. The overcrowded prison conditions tend to encourage antisocial behavior; marriages break up, often adding women and children to the welfare rolls and placing an additional burden on the taxpayer. Therefore, practical alternatives to imprisonment are gaining public acceptance.