MISSOURI'S MISSING CRIME WEAPON

It has been more than a quarter of a century that a state senator from Northwest Missouri warned his colleagues about the results of continued legislative neglect of the Missouri Department of Corrections. As an experienced trial lawyer as well as legislator, the senator knew of what he spoke, warning his colleagues that if they persisted in underfunding Missouri's penal system, crime rates would increase and citizens would be at greater risk in their homes and neighborhoods.

"I ask you to remember, senators, that voting more money for convicted felons is not the most popular act you could take, but it is certainly the most prudent," the senator said. "The legislature has paid scant attention to this problem. After all, there is no alumni association for corrections," he concluded.

More than 25 years later, Missourians are paying a high price for the General Assembly's deaf ear to an eloquent plea. The budget requests for the state's Department of Corrections were reduced then, as they have continued to be in the intervening years, and even today there is great difficulty making legislators comprehend the wisdom of supporting a system that is not generally understood and certainly not fully appreciated.

It is important for Missourians to better understand, and more fully appreciate the role of their state prison system. Society attempts to protect its members with a triage of services that includes law enforcement officers at every jurisdictional level -- -local, county, state and federal -- -and a criminal justice system that includes prosecuting attorneys and courts administered by trained judges. These services, under normal circumstances in the past, have been sufficient to make our homes and communities reasonably safe from most illegal aggression.

Unfortunately, we are not living under normal circumstances in 1994. We find ourselves in an age clouded by the wholesale commerce of illegal drugs so pervasive that sales occur on street corners in virtually every city and town in Missouri and the United States. Illegal drugs have so flooded our homes, neighborhoods, communities, counties and states that the traditional protective agencies can no longer guarantee the safety citizens in earlier times took for granted.

In addition to this monumental threat to domestic tranquility, we have witnessed a rapid proliferation of all kinds of weapons, from hand-held revolvers to rapid-fire assault weapons, on our streets and in our neighborhoods. The manufacturers of these weapons have grown rich in their abundance and their legality under the Bill of Rights. What restrictions we have placed on the purchase and possession of firearms, such as mental illness, age and previous criminal records, have proved virtually meaningless, thanks to inadequate supervision of gun sales. And our politicians have winked at these loopholes, while stuffing their pockets with money from a very powerful weapons industry.

The usual and traditional response to increased crime has been to add more enforcement officers and more courts of law, and we have been doing exactly this for the past two decades even as the crime rates continued to increase. We have even escalated our spending for these enhanced services at rates disproportionately higher than the increases in criminal activity. But the additional money has been for naught. For every increase in enforcement outlay, crime increases continue to outpace it.

There is a logical answer to this crime puzzle. As more and more police arrest more and more armed criminals, the majority of them under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, and as more and more judges sentence these felons, the institutions that must imprison them remain totally inadequate, and the personnel charged with supervising them, and rehabilitating as many as possible, has not incrementally increased. As a matter of fact, in Missouri and most other states, the ratio of corrections officers, including parole and probation personnel, to the number of criminals assigned to them has diminished rather than increased.

Missouri's corrections system has experienced phenomenal growth since the senator from Buchanan warned his colleagues in the state Capitol. In less than 15 years, the state's prison population has more than tripled, and in less than six years it will reach 25,000 men and women. Since the state is under five separate court orders not to increase its prison population because of overcrowding and personnel understaffing, one does not have to be a rocket scientist to correlate these two facts. The Department of Corrections is receiving 10,000 new prisoners every year from counties around the state, but because of consent decrees in existence, the agency is forced to release the same number that it receives. This receipt-release ratio might not create a crisis if the department had sufficient numbers of trained parole officers, but it is far from achieving a proper ratio.

The state's probation and parole unit was inadequately staffed 25 years ago, 15 years ago and it remains so today. Parole officers are overworked beyond belief and find it humanely impossible even to keep track of their released charges, much less supervise their activities. The job is so overwhelming that many good officers have left for safer, higher paying jobs. We are fortunate to have those who have remained, even at great personal sacrifice, because they believe in their work and do their utmost to fulfill their assignments.

As citizens, we hope that our criminal justice system will serve as a deterrent to crime. The public expectation is that the mere presence of jails and prisons will deter the criminals in society. We hope further that those who experience jail or prison will find it so onerous that they will never commit a crime again. Unfortunately, the recidivism rate shows that these are merely wishful thoughts, little connected to reality.

Missourians will find no relief from crime until they support a corrections system that is capable of handling the increases in crime. For more than 25 years, too many elected officials have remained indifferent to this obvious need.