BOOKS:A System of Revenge
Harvey, Miles
BOOKS A System of Revenge Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice by David C. Anderson Times Books. 291 pages. $25.00. by Miles Harvey Afew...
...Then, as Barnes listened to the muffled sounds coming from upstairs, Horton brutally raped Miller twice...
...This new ethos is based on the assumption that "evildoers are evil for life, that bad people may not be converted to good, that lost souls may never be reclaimed...
...Like so many "new Democrats," when the going got tough, he quoted statistics, then waffled, then flip-flopped...
...In 1987, Hermann testified that during the 1974 murder of a white teenager, "Horton cut off the boy's genitals, put them in his mouth, and then spit them out...
...But reading Anderson's detailed account of the campaign, you get the idea that Dukakis's real problem was not that he didn't have a clue but that he didn't have a political soul...
...As recently as 1992, Rush Limbaugh wrote in his best-selling book that "Horton was in prison for murdering a \ man after castrating him and I stuffing his genitals in his mouth...
...Moreover, because they offer inmates a structured reintroduction to life outside prison, furloughs "sharply [reduce] recidivism, producing a net prevention of crime," according to studies cited by Anderson...
...Yet the Democratic Presidential nominee let himself become the fall guy—in part because of his arrogance (he initially refused to express any sort of regret to the rape victim), and in part because of his political stupidity (he and his aides grossly underestimated the symbolic power of the case until it was far too late...
...He advocates better funding for police forces and a stronger emphasis on drug treatment instead of incarceration...
...In fact, there was no evidence of sexual mutilation—let alone necrophilia—in that crime (for which Horton was serving a life sentence when he escaped...
...There are no more liberals," James Q. Wilson, the conservative author of Thinking About Crime, once quipped...
...Anderson notes that Dukakis did not create the furlough program...
...If anything, the incident made me more adamant about some progressive positions...
...There was Joe Hermann, for example, a Democratic state representative from North Andover, Massachusetts, who helped plant many of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune stories that brought the case to broad public attention...
...As I fumbled for my wallet that night, I had only one coherent thought: i there are too many damn guns...
...I did not enjoy it...
...The prospects for crime-control may remain uncertain," he writes, "but that doesn't mean it is time to give up on them altogether...
...In the wake of the 1988 election, of course, states all over the country have scrambled to scale back their furlough programs...
...Anderson's detailed autopsy of the Horton case, gracefully written and forcefully argued, is one of the most useful looks at criminal justice in years...
...Anderson shows how such programs have helped create discipline within prisons, giving inmates a strong incentive for good behavior, hard work, and self-improvement...
...it was, in fact, the result of legislation passed under the administration of a Republican governor...
...But Anderson believes the impact of the Horton case was much broader, laying the emotional groundwork for the recent wave of death-penalty and mandatory-sentencing legislation...
...Well, my knee still jerks just fine, thank you...
...I got away with my life...
...Horton's escape, he writes, was not due to a fundamentally flawed system but to a relatively correctable breakdown in one part of that system—the program that finds people to house and monitor fur-loughed inmates...
...But most importantly, Anderson calls for a broad government initiative to provide counseling, medical assistance, and financial aid to crime victims...
...For a few moments after those kids ran off, I felt like one of those angry white men I'm always reading about...
...The public joined in, expanding the therapeutic use of the case nationwide...
...There were plenty of victims in the Willie Horton tragedy, but Michael Dukakis was not one of them, no matter how shamelessly his opponents manipulated the country's racial anxieties...
...Cliff Barnes was "haunted by the helpless impotence he had felt while tied up in the basement," writes Anderson, a former staffer for The New York Times and TTie Watt Street Journal...
...It certainly did much to cure my little case of white-man's paranoia...
...Yet I must also concede that the ? experience introduced me to a feeling which, as a middle-class male, I was almost completely unfamiliar with—total powerlessness...
...They've all been mugged...
...Nonetheless, the rumor was widely repeated as fact by journalists, talk-show hosts, and prominent Republicans such as Lee Atwater...
...by Miles Harvey Afew days after I was assigned to write this review, I had my own little encounter with crime and hysteria...
...As I walked home through a well-lit area of my affluent Chicago neighborhood late on Friday night, two teenagers ran up to me, one of them nervously pointing an automatic pistol at my stomach...
...But Crime and the Politics of Hysteria aptly demonstrates the ineptitude of Michael Dukakis and the Democratic Party...
...Anderson doesn't buy it...
...A "politics of fear," he concludes, is "turning Americans away from the principles that [have] governed their approach to law enforcement and penology for two centuries...
...From the start, the public's lust for revenge was stoked by political opportunists who understood that the Horton story was a perfect symbol for middle-class America's sense of lost manhood...
...Yet, ironically, Dukakis was fundamentally correct in his initial defense of furloughs...
...Brandishing a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol that the couple kept for protection, Horton ambushed the couple one at a time as they returned home...
...Bames fought back in the media, "using politics as personal therapy...
...Miles Harvey, the former managing editor of In These Times, is the book critic for Outside magazine...
...He blindfolded Barnes and tied him up with telephone cords in the cellar...
...On April 3, 1987 Horton—a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Massachusetts prison while on a forty-eight-hour furlough—broke into the suburban Maryland home of Angela Miller and Clifford Barnes...
...Worse, he argues, the fiasco has helped lead to "a corrosion of faith" in government itself...
...They got away with about $40...
...And as David C. Anderson demonstrates in his illuminating and valuable new book, white-guy angst was central to the Willie Horton case—making it grow from an obscure tragedy to a na tional obsession that sank the Presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis and fundamentally altered the American political landscape...
...With that kind of psychological subtext, "Republicans didn't have to acknowledge the case's racial aspect in order for it to have an effect," Anderson concludes...
Vol. 59 • October 1995 • No. 10
