Completing the War on Crime

...However, in order for a state to "opt in" and avail itself of these habeas deadlines, the state must be certified as having provided "competent" counsel for indigent prisoners...

...Republicans should steadfastly defend Section 3501— which was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson—and dare Democrats to explain their opposition...

...This law, signed by President Clinton, set firm deadlines for inmates to file their habeas corpus petitions—petitions under which federal judges review state death sentences top to bottom...

...Federal judges throughout the country have interpreted the term "competent" so narrowly that states are having trouble even finding, much less employing, attorneys who meet the courts' standards...

...Big-city crime trends in the 1990s proved a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the country...

...For the first time since crime rates began their nosedive in 1992, there are hard signs that this great decline may be bottoming out...

...And Republicans should not be afraid to direct the bureau to pay 100 percent of the cost, including salaries...

...Crime control also has become a very expensive endeavor, in both money and wasted lives...

...In Texas, an average of 50 percent, and nationwide, an average of 33 percent, of inmates are rear-rested within three years of release...

...Even so, it is odd that the nation's leading politicians are treating the crime problem as an anachronism on the order of the Warsaw Pact...

...Convicted murderers executed in 1998 spent only 90 days less on death row than did killers executed in 1997...

...The following are a few common-sense crime-control initiatives that are properly the preserve of federal policymakers, and that deserve discussion in the coming electoral campaign: Miranda...

...This policy is fully constitutional and consistent with traditional notions of federalism...

...Even after this decade's stunning success—attributable mostly to a 200 percent increase in the incarceration rate and the shrinking of the crime-prone demographic group, young males—America still suffers from a substantial crime problem...

...In 1996, Congress sought to unclog the courts by passing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act...

...A run-in with the federal courts over prisons and the "separation of church and state" would provide an occasion to remind the public that prisons came into being in this country in the late 18th century in a state-sponsored effort to spark the religious reformation of convicts...

...To streamline this process, Congress should simply repeal the law's opt-in requirements and allow states to use its habeas deadlines without further micromanagement from the federal courts...

...To reduce the number of prisoners while remaining true to the tough incarceration policies that have driven down crime rates, our penal institutions must seek to change the hearts of the incarcerated...

...Miranda rights are likely to become a major issue in the presidential campaign...

...They may sincerely believe that crime is no longer a timely issue, but the public begs to differ...

...Predictably, they have been in no hurry to certify states as in compliance with these opt-in provisions...

...In 1999, New York's homicide rate increased by 8 percent...

...It permits confessions to be admitted into trial when the suspect was not read his Miranda rights, as long as the judge finds that the confession was voluntary...

...Although the trial court found the confession voluntary, the court suppressed most of his confession because the agents did not read him his Miranda rights soon enough...

...Prison Fellowship Ministries pays the staff...

...But it is an imposing goal for another day, as America's individualism historically has bred relatively high crime rates...

...The U.S...

...In 1998, even after nearly a decade of declining crime rates, that number was 41 percent...

...The law, known as Section 3501, was part of the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968...

...In Texas, governor George W. Bush has sought to do this by authorizing the InnerChange program...

...In Los Angeles, the growth was 2.5 percent...

...Indeed, a band of Quakers ran the first proto-prison in America, Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail, which opened for business only five years after the Framers convened in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution...

...If we aspire to remain a just and humane society, we cannot incarcerate with equanimity the millions of our fellow citizens who are so lacking in self-control and decency that they cannot be trusted to obey the law...

...Juvenile arrest rates in the United States remain 24 percent higher than they were in 1969, and a new increase in the population of males between the ages of 15 and 24 is upon us...

...The act also established deadlines for federal judges to rule on these petitions...

...Bureau of Prisons should establish similar model projects throughout the country...

...In 1967, after the first wave of violent crime had hit the country, 31 percent of Americans polled said there was an area within a mile of their residence where they would be afraid to walk alone at night...

...The Fourth Circuit reversed this ruling, citing Section 3501, and remanded the case for further proceedings...

...But at a minimum, the federal courts should cease leading us into temptation by inventing frivolous rights that reward our worst instincts and embolden the least responsible among us...

...Cassell estimated that Miranda results in an annual loss of 28,000 cases against violent criminals and 79,000 cases against property-crime offenders...

...Last year, the Fourth Circuit resurrected this overlooked law...

...This silence is welcome evidence of national renewal...

...Circuit Court of Appeals) and to chief justice Warren Burger, Cassell is the author of a seminal 1996 article in the Northwestern Law Review concerning the social costs of Miranda...

...The defendant in the case, Charles T. Dicker-son, confessed to FBI agents to robbing several banks in Maryland and Virginia...

...These public-policy proposals would be popular, and the Republicans would have them all to themselves...

...Faith in prisons...

...Reaching parity with other industrialized nations is a laudable and uplifting challenge that could mark the next phase of a national anti-crime effort...

...The New York Times noted in December that in some of the city's neighborhoods, robbery and burglary have risen in tandem with a resurgence of open, street-corner drug trafficking...

...Circuit Court of Appeals dusted off and upheld a law enacted in 1968 that effectively trumps the most unreasonable aspects of Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case...

...York, Los Angeles, and other cities with populations larger than one million, homicide rates are starting to rise...

...Of the 95 InnerChange alumni released over the last two years, only 16 had been rearrested as of November 1999...

...Moreover, anyone hoping that crime rates will indefinitely follow a downward trajectory should take note of the most recent crime statistics...

...The Clinton administration has come down squarely on the side of Miranda and against Section 3501...

...Miranda bars the admission into evidence of all confessions obtained when a suspect in custody was not read his Miranda rights—even confessions given freely and knowingly...

...the Texas Department of Corrections picks up the cost of the inmates' housing, food, correctional officers, and other institutional expenses...

...As a result, the Court was constrained to ask Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, to present argument on behalf of the statute...

...This is far below the rate of recidivism both in Texas and in the nation...

...Crime was second, with 17 percent...

...Democrats would not go along with such rebukes to the judiciary, a great wellspring of their political power...

...Homicide rates, for example, have fallen to their 1967 level...

...Last February, the Fourth U.S...

...Accordingly, the greatest service a president or congressman can render the cause of domestic tranquillity is to check, or preferably reverse, these ill-begotten rulings...

...Later this year, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case...

...Federal elected officials also can authorize experimental projects in the federal criminal justice system to serve as models for criminal justice reforms around the country...

...Sound statecraft and prudent politics require that our national leaders continue to address the nation's refractory crime problem...

...When those who cited "guns/gun control" (10 percent) and "drugs" (5 percent)—terms that are often substitutes for crime—are included, crime dwarfs every other problem...

...In New Andrew Peyton Thomas is an attorney in Phoenix...

...There was a time—not so long ago—when Americans did not live this way...

...Capital appeals in the federal courts, many of them frivolous, account for a little more than half of this delay...

...If the Court strikes down the law on bogus constitutional grounds, Congress should pass a constitutional amendment superseding Miranda once and for all...

...Inmates who choose to participate follow a strict daily regimen of Bible classes and prayer-centered living designed to reform them into God-fearing, and hence law-abiding, citizens...

...The death penalty...

...Even allowing for occasional statistical fudging by police departments in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the tumbling crime rates of the last seven and a half years are a phenomenal and undeniable public-policy success...

...Unfortunately, the federal courts have not adhered to this vision...

...These upturns are small but significant...

...Moreover, it was the downturn in urban homicide rates, in particular, that presaged the decline in overall national crime rates...

...Run by Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, InnerChange works to reduce recidivism through religious instruction and inspiration...

...A former law clerk to justice Antonin Scalia (while he served on the D.C...

...It is likely to be a salient national issue through the 2000 election...

...Our new national goal in the fight against crime should be nothing less than to drive our crime rates down to their level in the late 1950s, before the crime surge of the 1960s transformed us into what we have become...

...But that is still 42 percent higher than the homicide rate in 1958, when the rate began to creep upward...

...Federal judges are notoriously ill-disposed toward both deadlines binding on themselves and perceived congressional meddling regarding habeas corpus...

...It is estimated that on February 15, 2000, the number of Americans in prison or jail will reach 2 million...

...The current contest, however, is shaping up as the first in 40 years in which crime does not figure prominently in the national debate...

...The solution to crime, of course, ultimately lies within our culture and our souls...

...As a result, federal judges annually fatten the nation's law books with new or annotated criminals' rights that deprive our society of critical tools for law enforcement...

...When the Gallup organization asked Americans in May 1999 what "the most important problem facing this country" is, the most common response was "ethics/ moral/family decline," at 18 percent...

...Unfortunately, Congress left the job of determining whether states have met this ambiguous standard to federal judges, who have a glaring conflict of interest...

...As a result, not a single state has been certified as complying with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act...

...This coast-to-coast decline—a drop just as historic, if not as steep, as the upward spike in the sixties—has ushered the crime issue off the national stage and focused the attention of politicians and journalists on other domestic concerns...

...The federal courts' continuing obstruction of the death penalty remains a potent and largely untapped national issue...

...BY ANDREW PEYTON THOMAS Is crime dead as a national issue...

...True, the Framers of the Constitution intended crime control to be mostly the province of state and local governments, not federal policymakers...

...Even with all our recent success at combating crime, we have become a nation of locks and gates, where many parents are wary of letting their children ride their bicycles unattended down public streets...

...The Montreal Gazette noted recently that in 1998, there were 700 homicides in Chicago but only 42 in Montreal, whose population is two-thirds that of the Windy City...

...Over the last 20 years, the average time that a condemned prisoner has sat on death row has almost tripled, to over 11 years...

...Previously sanguine police chiefs and criminologists are beginning to predict the end of the law-and-order boom...

...In an extraordinary departure from its long-standing practice of defending acts of Congress in court, the Justice Department actually asserted that Section 3501 is unconstitutional and urged the Supreme Court to overturn the Fourth Circuit's decision...

...Ever since the nation's crime rates began their historic surge in the 1960s, crime has been one of a handful of social problems that have reliably dominated presidential campaigns...

...A decision is expected this summer, just as Democrats and Republicans are assembling at their respective conventions...