TRYING TO PUNISH OUR WAY OUT OF CRIME WILL FAIL

As you sit there drinking your Monday coffee, here's how some other Americans are spending the morning.

About 500,000 people are sitting in 4,000 local jails today. Los Angeles and New York City each have about 22,000 people confined in their jails. Fifteen years ago, there would have been 160,000 jail confinees. Our jails are operating at 115 percent of capacity.

There are roughly 850,000 penitentiary inmates (91 percent state; 9 percent federal) doing time. Fifteen years ago, the figure would have been 300,000.

As with jails, we increased our prison capacity enormously over 15 years, but we couldn't (or wouldn't) keep up with the need. Our prisons are generally operating at 125 percent of capacity. The 50 states would have to go on a penitentiary building binge of unparalleled proportions simply to accommodate the prison population already behind bars. Currently 38 states are over capacity with some of the severest overcrowding in states like California (183 percent), Massachusetts (160 percent), New Jersey (155 percent), Missouri (151 percent) and Pennsylvania (147 percent). There are practical limits to overcrowded prisons. The next shipment of a couple of hundred inmates means an equal number have to be let out -- regardless of their fitness to return to society.

What a depressing mess. What should we do? The Congress thinks it knows what to do: More of the same.

* More police on the streets. Every candidate for mayor comes up with this solution. The federal government has played this card before. President Gerald Nixon had his "war on crime" in the early 70s and provided some substantial funds to local law enforcement. But when the budget deficit grew, the federal government declared a unilateral truce. How long will we wage this latest war on crime?

* Build 10 new high security prisons for violent inmates. These prisons won't even solve the anticipated overcrowding by the time they are operational. We've built a lot of prisons before, so we will build some more -- at an average annual operating cost of $20,000 per convict in the federal system.

* Expand the federal death penalty to all sorts of crimes committed on government property. This is, by and large, a public relations exercise. Most crimes of violence -- murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery -- are state offenses prosecuted within the state systems. (There are 2,737 people on death row -- only four are federal cases.) Expanding the death penalty to federal crimes of very limited application just creates a 30 second TV re-election spot for senators ("I'm tough as hell on crime!").

All of these proposals working their way through Congress, like the previous legislation during the Nixon years, attempt to deal with the back end of the problem: arrest, conviction and punishment. No wonder.

Congress doesn't know what to do about the front end. Truthfully, no one has a handle on narcotics-driven ghetto crime. Close to 70 percet of those 850,000 prisoners in penitentiaries today were using or dealing in narcotics close to the time of the crime for which they were convicted. You can incarcerate all the runners and intermediate level drug dealers you want and there will be hundreds of eager apprentices waiting with loaded guns to move into the monied world of drugs, crime and violence.

As columnist William Raspberry puts it, "We can't punish our way out of our crime problem." With the types of crime that sweeps our big cities, "severity of sentence is of little consequence."

For years and years, we have built more penitentiaries, hired more policemen and prosecutors, made more arrests and what did we get? The murder rate has skyrocketed by 19 percent since 1988. Our nation's capital becomes a world symbol of the land of the free and the home of the murdered. As President Clinton said from the pulpit, government alone is not going to solve the problem.

Jesse Jackson, often the epitome of self-confidence, despairs of the incredible violence in the black community. Jackson preaches self-help and wants students to turn in their fellow students who traffic in drugs or carry guns. Jackson had this exchange with a high school student in Washington, D.C.

Student: "Mr. Jackson, you're in your old age about what it takes to survive in the streets. You need some kind of protection because nobody else is going to stop a bullet for you. Most everyone I know carries a gun or a knife to school, including some teachers. I will not snitch. I'm sorry, sir, this is 1993, not 1963. I don't know where you've been."

Jackson: "I've been to a lot of teen-age funerals."

With the congressional crime bill we will build lots of new prison cells, and we will hold lots of teen-age funerals.