by Ann Coulter
COST OF A NEW JAIL WITH ALTERNATIVES TO INCARCERATION
Newsday (New York)
PRISONS EAT UP TAX DOLLARS
Wisconsin State Journal (Madison)
MORE SERVING TIME AS TAXPAYERS FOOT BILL
Kansas City Star’
How about some newspaper describing an actually useless government program in terms of the cost to taxpayers? What does the federal Department of Education cost? How about the EPA? The Commerce Department? The Bureau of Land Management? Chuck Schumer’s office?
An alarmist article in the New York Times in 1991 reported that in New Jersey, the Corrections Department “consumes 7 percent of all state spending.” (The remainder of the state budget is dedicated to paper for publishing the state’s sexual harassment guidelines and payroll expenses for any married governor’s gay lovers.) Besides enforcing the law, what other crucial functions does state government have? Keeping marauding predators off the streets is the most basic function of any government. Liberals think the government should be responsible for things like establishing a national “Earth Day,” determining how much water we can have in our toilets, and sending mammoth delegations on taxpayer-funded sightseeing trips to Africa because Clinton has just been caught with an intern and needs to shore up his black support. They view keeping killers and rapists off the streets as a crazy luxury for times when government coffers are flush. Democrats aren’t worried about the cost of prison; they are worried that if there are more prisons, criminals might be sent there.
The second major factor in reducing crime in the nineties was Rudy Giuliani, Republican mayor of New York City. By pursuing policies that were relentlessly opposed by liberals throughout his tenure in office, Giuliani reduced the murder rate in New York City from about 2,000 murders a year under Democratic mayor David Dinkins to 714 the year Giuliani left office. Giuliani cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent his first year in office. Major crimes dropped by 16 percent his first year in office and another 14 percent the next year. (And the amazing thing is that he did all this without midnight basketball, which was replaced by a Giuliani program known as “midnight rounding up of armed suspects.”) New York became one of the safest cities in America. The New York Times noted the remarkable development in an article headlined “New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery”—which it was, at least to liberals, who spent most of the Giuliani years calling him a fascist.
Lives were saved when Giuliani cut the murder rate—mostly black lives—but liberals weren’t praising Giuliani for the miraculous reduction in crime; they were attacking him as a stormtrooper every single year he was in office. But by the end of Giuliani’s administration, the Reverend Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who “brought order, peace, the law back to the land.” The black minister told the Times, “I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun.”
Even after Giuliani’s triumphant success, liberals demean his accomplishment. Those who won’t believe will never believe. They say the crime rate was already falling, as if the drop in the number of murders during the Dinkins administration from 2,154 murders in 1991 to 1,995 murders in 1992 was the equivalent of the Battle of Midway. It was probably a bookkeeping error. Or they attribute the plummeting crime rate under Giuliani to the end of the crack epidemic, the economy, and, most charmingly, the increase in abortions among the “poor” beginning in the seventies. (Just wait until Bill Bennett hears about that!) What’s striking about the factors liberals stress is that they never involve catching and punishing criminals. Under no circumstances are we to fall for the canard about the reduction in crime being caused by obvious explanations like enforcing the law, issuing longer sentences, or supporting the police.
Saying the end of the crack epidemic ended the crime wave merely begs the question, What ended the crack epidemic? It’s like saying the end of the crime wave ended the crime wave.
And that must have been one hell of an abortion rate in the first half of the century for the nation to have enjoyed such low crime rates up until the sixties. In any event, I believe we’re already aborting as many babies as NARAL’s Kate Michelman can get her hands on.
The “Clinton economy”—which only became something to brag about sometime after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994—provably had nothing to do with declining crime rates. Under the “Clinton economy,” the crime rate went up in cities all over America—Baltimore, Charlotte, Columbus, Las Vegas, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Contrary to liberal ideas about improving criminals’ self-esteem, it turned out that raising the cost of committing crime worked even better. In the midst of a terrible national economy in Clinton’s first years in office (the real “Clinton economy”), Giuliani cut crime dramatically in New York City. And of course, New York’s economy was booming throughout the eighties, when the crime rate was exploding.
Few opposed Giuliani more aggressively than Bill Clinton. Even before Giuliani took office, Clinton had campaigned against him in ugly racial terms. When Giuliani was running against Dinkins in 1993, Clinton publicly bemoaned the fact that some New Yorkers would not vote for Dinkins solely because he was black. Not make-believe black, like me, Clinton added. You know, black-black. “Too many of us,” Clinton said, “are still too unwilling to vote for people who are different than we are.” In case that was too subtle, Clinton added, “[This is not as simple as overt racism,” but a “deep-seated reluctance we have, against all our better judgment, to reach out across those lines.” Then again, maybe it was a deep-seated reluctance to reinstall a mayor under whose watch about 8,000 New Yorkers had been murdered.
Once Giuliani was elected, Clinton opposed him every step of the way, but then he turned around and claimed credit for Giuliani’s crime policies. Even the New York Times was shocked by Clinton’s shamelessness in using crime as a “bragging point” during his 1996 reelection campaign—without once mentioning Giuliani. Giuliani’s policies on crime, the Times said, would do “as much to reelect [Clinton] as any Democratic mayor.” Thirty-five percent of the reduction in the national crime rate from 1993 to 1995 was attributable solely to the reduction of crime in New York City during Giuliani’s first years in office. As the New York Times admitted in one of the rare articles during the nineties not calling Giuliani an “authoritarian,” “[W]hile constituting less than 3 percent of the country’s population,” New York City alone “was responsible for 155,558 of the 432,952 fewer reported crimes over the three years.”
But according to Clinton, it was Democratic policies like “community policing” that had caused the massive reductions in crime in the nineties. Campaigning for reelection in 1996, Clinton said, “I’m telling you, folks, we can prevent crime and catch criminals if we have more people serving their communities out there, visible, who know the kids on the streets, who know the neighbors, who know the law-abiding folks.” David Dinkins had been a big proponent of “community policing,” too. Giuliani jettisoned the policy and reduced the crime rate of the Dinkins era by nearly 70 percent.
Far from crediting Giuliani, Clinton’s Justice Department repeatedly investigated the New York City police for alleged civil rights violations—investigations that became suspiciously frequent about the time it appeared that Clinton’s wife would be running against Giuliani for Senate. Inasmuch as New York police shot fewer civilians than any other big-city police department, New York was an odd place for the Clinton administration to concentrate its investigative efforts. In Washington, D.C., for example, the police were seven times more likely to shoot civilians than New York police. Washington was also conveniently located in the same city as the U.S. Department of Justice that was sending investigators up to New York.
To this day, Democrats demand that we credit Clinton for the plunging crime rate in the nineties—which did not begin to plunge until Giuliani became mayor of New York. Clinton may have tried to social
ize health care, presided over a phony Internet bubble, spurned Sudan when it offered him Osama bin Laden on a silver platter, sold a burial plot in Arlington cemetery to a campaign contributor, engaged in sex romps in the Oval Office, been credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, obstructed justice, had his law license suspended and gotten himself permanently disbarred from the U.S. Supreme Court, and pardoned a lot of sleazy crooks in return for political donations on his way out of office—but, we’re told, at least he was terrific on crime! Everything Clinton actually did himself was a failure or a felony, so he has to claim credit for the successes of Republicans like Giuliani.
After 9/11, when the Clinton presidency looked even more ridiculous than it did when he was still in office, Clinton convened a group of his former advisers to create a PR strategy to burnish his legacy. (You know, just as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan did. Great presidents always do this after they leave office, right? Hello? Is there anybody there? Hello?) Prominent among the Clinton flacks’ talking points was one about how Clinton cut the crime rate. Campaigning for John Kerry in 2004, Clinton told a Philadelphia audience that when Democrat Ed Rendell had been the mayor, “we worked together to bring down the crime rate. We did it with more cops on the street and assault weapons off the street.” According to the New York Times, Philadelphia was one of nine major cities where the crime rate went up in the years following the enactment of Clinton’s crime bill.
Democrats are not interested in restoring order. They will never abandon their deranged sentimentality about violent criminals. Now it’s just a matter of catching them when they forget to lie. Or finding the liberals who don’t know they’re supposed to lie. On MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice: “In the history of New York, did you have safe streets till Giuliani came along?”
Goldstein said, “Chris, I lived in New York all my life, okay? I was safe, I was safe, I did not see cops pulling down the pants of black kids in the streets. I feel less safe today in New York City than I did twenty years ago. Now, you know, you, you, your class of people did very well under Giuliani. Mazel tov. But a lot of people really suffered under him. The police practices in this city were reprehensible. They were—the federal government called him on this.”
It was like watching an interview of an insane person. I can’t seem to find any documentation of cops-pulling-down-the-pants-of-black kids rates under Dinkins versus those rates under Giuliani, so I am unable to address that very important point that Goldstein raised. But we do know that a lot fewer blacks were murdered during the Giuliani years. Indeed, Goldstein was claiming to feel less safe in Giuliani’s New York just a few months after the Reverend Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah of the Bible. What does he know? He’s just a black man in Harlem.
One by one, a stumped and bewildered panel responded to Goldstein, saying New York sure seemed a lot safer to them:
MATTHEWS: … when I go to New York, it’s not funny, when I go to New York, it’s safe to walk around… . I feel a lot better in New York. And I’ll tell you something, the subways, everything, has changed about New York. And one guy’s responsible for it that I can see. And I’m not loving the guy. I’m just admitting it. Go ahead.
TERRY JEFFREY, Human Events: Yes, I’m not a New Yorker; I do visit there. It’s stark when you go there how much nicer it is in New York City than it was twenty years ago.
To this, Goldstein said, “Well, you like South Carolina. What do you expect?” What a stunning rhetorical riposte, sir! I say, you’ve cut me to the quick! The incisive thrust of your logical cutlass has struck me to the bone! Alas, I fear the wound is fatal! Oh, untimely death!
But back to the point—which was it? Was New York safer before Giuliani or did Goldstein simply prefer it when there were three times as many murders per year and it was less like South Carolina? Or—and this is the theory I’m favoring—is Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice mentally retarded?
Most Democrats have at least learned they’re supposed to lie about their ideas on crime. Now liberals are forced to sit around thinking, Can we get away with this? It is a striking fact that, after Giuliani, in order to be mayor of New York even liberal politicians have to claim to be Republicans. After Giuliani’s success, crime control in places like New York City could run on autopilot forevermore—if there were no liberals. But the moment Republicans leave the room, the ACLU will come back in and reset the controls.
While elected Democrats have learned not to have their careers dependent on the good behavior of criminals they release from prison, their constituents are still holding candlelight vigils for every heinous murderer on death row. It is a liberal ritual to turn palpably guilty criminals into causes celebres. Among the most famous liberal martyrs are executed Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Soviet spy and convicted perjurer Alger Hiss, the Central Park rapists, gang leader and multiple murderer Tookie Williams, cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, violent multiple murderer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, executed Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti—all provably guilty. With liberals’ track record, it may be time to reopen the Scottsboro Boys’ case.
Only recently have we learned not only that Sacco and Vanzetti were absolutely guilty of cold-blooded murder—which is no surprise—but also that their liberal defenders knew the truth all along. Their lawyer knew it and cooked up an alibi for them. Phony progressive Upton Sinclair knew it, even as he denounced the American justice system for framing two innocent immigrants because of their unconventional political views.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were ruthless anarchists who killed a couple of payroll carriers for a Boston shoe factory in 1920 in order to bankroll their bombings of government buildings. After their arrest, they repeatedly lied to investigators. Police found a loaded gun on Sacco that matched the crime weapon, almost literally giving prosecutors a smoking gun. Sacco and Vanzetti were tried by jury and sentenced to death. In the U.S. justice system’s typical “rush to justice” fashion, seven years passed between Sacco and Vanzetti’s murder spree and their eventual execution. Among the appeals was one you will see whenever liberals start weeping for some criminal: They produced an eleventh-hour “confession” from someone who would face no additional punishment for confessing (in this case, because he was already in prison).
But Sinclair wrote a groaning 750-page tome called Boston, a historical novel in the James Frey style, suggesting that Sacco and Vanzetti had been sentenced to die for a crime they didn’t commit. According to Sinclair’s novel, these two poor immigrants had been framed by the rich and powerful in Boston—despite the fact that their victims were hardly corporate chieftains but payroll carriers, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, the latter an Italian immigrant himself. Nonetheless, Sinclair insisted it was the social conservatism of the day that led to the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti simply because they were immigrants with socialist and anarchist views.
Thanks to recently unearthed letters from Sinclair to his lawyer, we now know that Sinclair was aware all along that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. He also knew that the only perjured testimony at trial came from the defendants’ alibi witnesses. In private letters to his lawyer, Sinclair admitted that while researching his book, he had met with the anarchists’ defense attorney in a hotel room and asked for the truth. In Sinclair’s own words, the defense lawyer said “the men were guilty,” and even told Sinclair “in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”
Facing what he called “the most difficult ethical problem” of his life, Sinclair decided to lie in his book, his moral indignation undimmed. As Sinclair explained in his letters, “It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public.” (In the article about the Sinclair letters that exposed him as a fraud, the Los Angeles Times reporter still insisted on referring to Sinclair as “one of America’s most strident truth tellers.” It’s nice to be a
liberal.) In one letter, Sinclair admonishes his lawyer, “This letter is for yourself alone. Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter.” But not while there was money to be made from the America-hating Left.
Sinclair accused Hollywood of “blacklisting” movies about Sacco and Vanzetti, apparently because no one turned his book into a movie. Liberal claims of “blacklisting,” like sex tapes, always appear at the ideal time to advance the liberal’s career goals. The Internet Movie Database lists seven films made about Sacco and Vanzetti, three made in Hollywood, including a TV movie by Sidney Lumet, which was nominated for four Emmys. The 1971 Italian film Sacco e Vanzetti— with music by Joan Baez—was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. I guess the two payroll carriers murdered in cold blood by Sacco and Vanzetti will have to wait another day for their movie.
Ginned up by liberal frauds like Upton Sinclair, 250,000 protesters marched in Boston the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, and another 200,000 engaged in a violent march the day of their funeral. There were protests in Switzerland, Germany, Argentina, England, and Mexico and violent riots in France, where thousands fought with the police in Paris. Liberals would not have this much fun again until the Rosenbergs were executed.
In some cases, it was literally the same people defending Sacco and Vanzetti who would later be defending Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In 1927, Felix Frankfurter—Harvard Law School professor and future character witness for Alger Hiss—wrote a book purporting to exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas referred to Frankfurter’s book as his “bible.” Edward R. Murrow championed Sacco and Vanzetti on his See it Now broadcasts for CBS News on one of the rare nights he wasn’t scoffing at Soviet espionage. Liberals produced books, paintings, songs, even an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti, the last featuring Sacco’s aria “The Whole Shoe.” In 1977, on the fiftieth anniversary of their executions, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis cleared their names and proclaimed August 23, 1977, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Day in Massachusetts.