Herbst’s ‘law and order’ cry rings hollow

Traditionally, vowing to be tough on crime has proved to be a tried and true method of generating votes for a candidate facing a tough slog in a Republican primary. No shock, then, that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Herbst would try to separate himself in a crowded five-person race last week by announcing in Norwich his “Six-Point Plan to Restore Law and Order to Connecticut.”

The problem for Herbst, the former first selectman of Trumbull, is that there is no crime spree in the state, so his pronouncement to fix it doesn’t seem to have generated much excitement. The bigger priority for many Republican is finding ways to restore the state’s fiscal health and establish a job-friendly tax policy. Herbst’s plan in search of a problem sounds very expensive.

Many conservatives have come to the realization that “three strikes” and other throwaway-the-key approaches to crime and punishment are bad fiscal policy. Imprisoning people for long periods is expensive, hurts societal productivity and boosts human services costs for those left behind. It is why many of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s policies to divert nonviolent offenders into programs intended to address underlying problems, such as substance abuse, and to improve recidivism rates have received bipartisan support.

This does not mean crime should go unpunished, but it should mean focusing on violent crimes and trying to increase the number of prisoners who are actually corrected by the Department of Correction.

In May, the Malloy administration revealed that the state’s prison population had dropped to 13,500 inmates, a year-over-year decline of 1,000 and the lowest level since 1994. The decline in prison population is coupled with the lowest reported crime rates in the state since the 1960s, and the largest reduction in violent crime of any state over the last four years, the administration reported.

The annual total number of reported crimes has dropped 26 percent compared to 2008, with arrests down 29 percent over that period.

This mimics national trends. According to FBI statistics, the violent crime rate fell 48 percent between 1993 and 2016, and so did property crimes.

Yet it is also true that people often have a different perception. They read about murders, watch gang shootings regularly lead the evening news on their local TV, and conclude crime is rampant. As the Pew Research Center noted in a January report, “In 17 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least six-in-10 Americans said there was more crime in the U.S. compared with the year before, despite the generally downward trend in national violent and property crime rates during much of that period.” Herbst seeks to exploit that misperception. He would eliminate the Risk Reduction Earned Credit program that offers a chance for prisoners to modestly reduce their sentences by completing programs aimed at improving their ability to actually be productive citizens when released.

To try to paint the approach as a failure after just a few years, Herbst’s report notes that among prisoners discharged early with risk-reduction credits, nearly 2,000 committed acts of burglary or robbery, 119 murders.

No one should be shocked that some criminals are not reformed despite best efforts and that some will commit terrible crimes. But when you consider there were 48,162 discharges through risk reduction, the success rate is actually good.

Conveniently perhaps, Herbst’s report does not include crime rates for the 20,750 ex-inmates who did not earn or qualify for early release. Unless their crimes rates were lower, and we suspect Herbst would have pointed that out, it makes no sense to end the program.

Herbst would turn local police into an extension of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, establishing “a standard procedure for checking the immigration status for suspects.” Rather than helping crime fighting, making many people fearful of cooperating with police will damage the ability of law enforcement to do its job.

While boosting the number of police in pockets of crime makes sense, Herbst pledges to broadly “work with towns to increase the number of police” and restore state trooper staffing to 1,248, which would mean adding more than 250 troopers. How will he pay for it? Herbst doesn’t say.

And, of course, Herbst wants to restore the death penalty, though there is no evidence it deters murder.

Simply put, expending vast sums and abandoning programs still under assessment to restore something — “law and order” — that doesn’t need restoration does not make sense.