The Article that follows this editorial just came to light! It had the dust blown off of it by a prisoner who has been locked up for 40 years straight and seen every aspect of the Va. D. O. C. When this man approached me with this in the 'yard' and I sat down and read it, I was floored! The quotes from various politicians and renowned professors were taken and printed in the year 2000 by Bill Sizemore of the Virginia Pilot. Every single problem that faces this State and the tax payers today was predicted nine years ago. Either these people were psychic or they put common sense before a money racket that would only cost you as a tax payer. My opinion is that they would not sell out, or had and they eventually confessed their wrong doings which ultimately resulted in political suicide.

Whatever the reason, the few who stood up for you, the people who paid for it all, against the Allen, Gilmore and Kaine Clan are no longer there! I leave you to decide why?

The fact still remains that the predictions were made, ignored, and you were kept in the dark by scare tactics for way to long. The lies and scare tactics imposed on the citizens of Va. are now exposed. It is now time to stop it all. The next Governor of Virginia will most likely be Robert McDonnell who without question is another George Allen and will without a doubt continue on this road simply because for 20 years now the same lies win elections. They would rather go further and further in debt and tax us blind than admit they were wrong! They would rather build prisons instead of schools or provide medical care to those in need than fess up!

The time is now to say enough! These politicians and professors were right, the ones we all voted for were wrong but sold their lies well. After two decades of being in the dark, the light now shines. Virginia residents respond! Stop this vicious cycle in November at the polls, and START NOW by exposing these lies to the ones who told them! After reading the Article below go to How To Help and voice your opinion.

Six years ago, an underdog ex-congressman named George Allen was elected governor of Virginia in a landslide after riding a campaign that portrayed the state in the grip of a violent crime wave.

One of his TV ads depicted the sound of gunfire and scenes of gunshot victims and wailing ambulances. The spot accused Allen's opponent, a former attorney general, of presiding over ``the largest increase in violent crime in history.''

Overlooked in the rhetorical barrage was a salient fact: Crime in Virginia in 1993, already low by national standards, was on the decline.

On taking office, Allen championed a program to ``halt the reign of terror by violent career criminals and make Virginia safe again.''

Republicans and Democrats in the General Assembly obliged, passing sweeping laws that lengthened many criminal sentences, abolished parole and launched Virginia on a $400 million wave of prison construction.

Today Virginia -- a historically low-crime state -- has a criminal justice system that stands out as one of the most punitive in the United States and the world.

It keeps a higher percentage of its residents locked up than 31 other U.S. states, many of which have significantly higher crime rates. Its incarceration rate of 640 per 100,000 residents is twice that of South Africa and not far behind Russia.

It executes more people than any other state except Texas.

And the state keeps a third of its criminals in prison for 20 years to life, more than 40 other states.

This get-tough policy has diverted hundreds of millions in state funds to build prisons, constricting the state's ability to reduce traffic gridlock and move its schoolchildren from trailers to classrooms. Prison spending is growing twice as fast as spending for colleges and universities. It costs Virginia taxpayers nearly $22,000 to imprison one inmate for a year -- more than twice the cost of tuition, room and board at a state university.

It costs up to three times that much to keep the growing number of older prisoners locked up, further escalating the state's prison bill, which soon will reach $1 billion a year.

Prisons have become a growth industry in Virginia.

Over the past five years, the state has built six new prisons containing 8,000 cells. It now incarcerates 31,000 Virginians in more than 50 prisons, detention centers and other lockups from Chesapeake to Big Stone Gap. The Department of Corrections and related agencies employ nearly 17,000 people -- 15 percent of the state government's work force -- which puts it on a par with Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia's largest manufacturer.

Despite Virginia's high incarceration rates, the building boom has far exceeded the number of state inmates. As a result, the state now imports out-of-state criminals to fill 4,000 empty prison beds.

And while violent criminals were said to be the target of the state's get-tough policy, the swelling of Virginia's prison population has come primarily from locking up drug offenders, not violent criminals.

Advocates of the policy claim success from the drop in the state's crime rate, but fail to note that violent crime has dropped even more nationwide.

Virginia's tough law-and-order stance shows no signs of abating. Gov. Jim Gilmore fully supports the Allen initiatives and believes that Virginia still isn't tough enough on drug offenders. Last fall, with the support of Lt. Gov. John Hager, Attorney General Mark Earley and key General Assembly leaders, he proposed a $41.5 million anti-drug program that would include hiring 210 new state troopers to help catch offenders.

Then-Gov. George Allen tries out a bed in a new work camp at James River Correctional Center in 1995. Allen's anti-crime initiatives accelerated a punitive trend that was already under way. AP file photo.

Fear, Not Facts, Fueled Get-Tough Policy:

Fighting crime was a popular political theme in the 1980s and 1990s. Allen capitalized on that sentiment, and his anti-crime initiatives accelerated a punitive trend that was already under way in Virginia. Counting out-of-state inmates, the state's prison population has nearly quadrupled since 1981, placing Virginia in the forefront of a national movement to put more and more people behind bars.

``We were coming out of a period of social turbulence -- Vietnam, racial tension, riots in the streets, drugs,'' said Charles Thomas, a criminologist at the University of Florida. ``Once they detected that there was this broad fear of criminal victimization, even though the actual statistical risk of criminal victimization was declining, the politicians on both sides of the aisle really began working it. There was competition between Democrats and Republicans, each claiming to be tougher on crime than the other.''

Crime in Virginia, which already was well below the national average, has declined 25 percent since 1981.

The rate spiked upward for a few years in the late 1980s, but it never again reached the 1981 level. It peaked in 1991 and was already on its way back down when Allen, a Republican, proposed his get-tough policies and the Assembly enacted them with the support of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Violent crime in Virginia -- the primary focus of the anti-crime campaign -- stood at about half the national average in 1993, the year Allen was elected.

Larry Sabato, a government professor at the University of Virginia, said the overwhelming legislative support for Allen's get-tough program was a matter of political survival.

``It was the main plank in the campaign, and he was elected in one of the largest landslides in modern Virginia history,'' Sabato said. ``The Democrats, who already had been reduced to a small majority, were in no position to oppose him. . . . To vote against that was potentially political suicide.

``Even delegates and senators who privately opposed this change voted for it,'' Sabato said. ``They would tell me off the record they had no choice. And they were right.''

When Allen was elected, Sen. J. Randy Forbes of Chesapeake served in the House of Delegates, where he led the governor's drive for parole reform. Forbes, who is now state Republican chairman, said there was more than politics behind the initiative.

Prisons were so overcrowded when Allen took office that state inmates were backlogged in local jails. Seven sheriffs sued to force removal of the state prisoners.

``If you look at where we were in the late '80s when the prisons were overcrowded, I think what we did was a very rational approach,'' Forbes said.

Forbes said legislators feared the overcrowding might prompt a federal court takeover of the state prison system, as had happened in many other states.

``Most of the increase in cost would have been occasioned anyway, even without the abolition of parole,'' Allen said.

Forbes said the empty beds in Virginia's prisons are only temporary. The get-tough program is still relatively new. As it takes hold, those cells will be filled by Virginia lawbreakers, Forbes said.

The problem of backlogged state inmates has been alleviated, said Maj. William T. Mann, commanding officer of correctional operations in Virginia Beach, one of the cities that sued the state.

State law requires that state inmates be moved out of local jails within 60 days of sentencing. At the height of the overcrowding, Virginia Beach had as many as 200 state inmates in custody past that deadline, Mann said. Now there is only a handful.

``The state has been very responsive to our needs,'' Mann said.

Prevention Takes a Back Seat:

Beyond practical concerns about relieving prison overcrowding, the Allen initiatives were driven by a philosophical conviction that efforts at crime prevention and rehabilitation are futile -- that the only way to deal with violent criminals is to lock them away in prison and keep them there.

In many ways, the Allen program repudiated a report produced in 1989 by a blue-ribbon commission that studied prison and jail overcrowding in Virginia. That was the last year of the term of Gov. Gerald Baliles, a Democrat.

That report contrasted Virginia's low crime rate with its incarceration policies, which even then were among the toughest in the nation, and warned of the resulting strain on the state budget. ``One thing is clear,'' the commission declared: ``To lower the risk to the community through incarceration alone, the community will continue to pay higher and higher costs.''

Saying the state needed to address the root causes of crime, the commission recommended an array of non-punitive measures such as drug treatment, education, vocational training and expanded use of probation and parole.

A new, Allen-appointed commission revisited the subject in 1994 and found ``no unequivocal evidence that prevention programs had a crime-reduction effect,'' said Richard P. Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.

The Allen initiatives took the state farther down the punitive road that the 1989 commission warned about, said the Rev. Joseph N. Green Jr., a former Norfolk vice mayor who served on that panel.

``They went for the overkill,'' Green said.

The state's punitive stance extends beyond incarceration to the ultimate sanction. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, Virginia has put 75 prisoners to death by electrocution or lethal injection -- second only to Texas.

The pace of executions quickened dramatically in the 1990s. Last year there were 14, a modern-day record.

The state's restrictions on death-row appeals are the toughest in the nation. New evidence of innocence becomes inadmissible in the trial court three weeks after a death sentence is imposed. A legislative effort to ease that rule is pending in a Senate committee.

Backers: Virginia is a National Model:

Allen, who is preparing a run for the U.S. Senate, staunchly defends his program. ``It has actually worked very, very well and as we predicted,'' Allen said.
As a result of his initiatives, Allen said, ``Virginia is much safer for people to live or to work or to raise their families.''

Many Allen supporters in the legislature echo that view.

``Virginia is the model for the nation when it comes to criminal justice reform now,'' said Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission.

Stolle, Forbes and others say Allen and the legislature succeeded in their primary goal: to change the focus of Virginia's incarceration policies from nonviolent to violent offenders.

``Many of us are absolutely convinced that the policies we put in are right,'' Forbes said.

Sentences for violent crimes in Virginia today are probably the toughest in the country, Kern said, and sentences for drug offenses are among the toughest.

The tougher sentences sprang from Allen's 1994 ``truth in sentencing'' initiative, which lengthened sentences for some offenses up to six times what they were before.

Despite the falling crime rate, the number of Virginians in prison increased 5.9 percent from 1998 to 1999, reflecting the lengthened sentences and the virtual disappearance of parole.

The Allen program abolished parole for all new sentencings after Jan. 1, 1995. Prisoners now must serve at least 85 percent of the sentence imposed; the average is more than 90 percent. Since parole was abolished, 75,000 felons have been sentenced. Of these, 15,000 got ``dramatically longer'' sentences than they otherwise would have, Kern said.

In addition, the percentage of prisoners paroled has plummeted from 41 percent a decade ago to 6.5 percent today.

That was by design, Allen said. Since parole couldn't be abolished retroactively, he said, ``I appointed people to the parole board who shared our philosophy.'' The result: The board cracked down on the earlier offenders.

Critics: Prison Focus Hurts Other Institutions:

Critics say Virginia's anti-crime policies have been off target, unnecessary and a colossal waste of money. Funding that could have gone toward improving Virginia schools and roads has been poured into unneeded prisons, they say.
Virginia Forward, a group that includes some of Virginia's most prominent business leaders, issued a report in December predicting that state and local revenues will fall at least $3 billion short of needs every year for the next decade. The options facing the state are all painful, the study concluded: Raise taxes, cut services or let schools and roads deteriorate.

Among those throwing darts at the state's incarceration practices has been Lucien X. Lombardo, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University. His concern has been as much economic as social.

``In my opinion, building the prison infrastructure that Gov. Allen proposes will pour billions of dollars down a black hole never to be seen again,'' Lombardo told a General Assembly committee in September 1994. ``Other, more productive uses for tax dollars and opportunities for improving the quality of life of Virginians will of necessity be ignored.''

That is exactly what happened, Lombardo said in a recent interview.

``It's the politics of fear,'' he said. ``You can't get elected by being `soft on crime.' ''

One area of state spending that has suffered is higher education. Spending for state colleges and universities already was reeling from severe cuts in state aid during the recession of the early 1990s. Virginia had plummeted to 43rd in the nation in per-student funding by 1994. In-state tuition for Virginia students consequently spiked to among the highest in the nation.

``The major budget drivers of the early 1990s were Medicaid and prisons,'' said Donald Finley, who was Baliles' secretary of education in the late 1980s and now directs the Virginia Business Higher Education Council, a nonprofit business coalition that promotes public investment in higher education.

``Unfortunately, a major casualty of that, which we're still trying to recoup from, was funding for higher education,'' Finley said. ``State funding went down and tuitions went up. There just wasn't any money left to invest in higher education.''

In recent General Assembly sessions, lawmakers have raised the state's per-student funding to 33rd in the nation -- $5,645, which is $200 below the national average.

Transportation also has fallen behind. Recent national studies have found that gridlock in Northern Virginia is second only to Los Angeles. Recently there has been talk of imposing tolls or a regional gas tax to ease growing congestion in Hampton Roads.

By several estimates, the state is falling at least $1 billion a year behind on meeting its transportation needs. Gov. Gilmore, a Republican, has proposed $2.5 billion in new spending over the next six years, which works out to just over $400 million a year -- less than half of what's needed.

Harsher Sentences Don't Mean Fewer Crimes:

Allen and his supporters say there is a cause-and-effect relationship between his initiatives and the decline in crime since 1994.

But there is little hard evidence to back up the argument that locking up more people longer results in fewer crimes.

Allen and others point to a recent analysis by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which found that violent crime is 2.4 times more prevalent in Montgomery County, Md., than in its demographically similar neighbor, Fairfax County, Va. The best explanation for the disparity, the authors suggested, is Virginia's toughened sentencing policies.

``While Virginia's crime rate may have been better than the national average, that's good, but it was still unacceptably high to me,'' Allen said. ``. . . If Virginia had continued the lenient early-release system, the crime rate clearly, in my view, would be worse.

``It's just logic. You have these people in prison; they're not out committing crimes. It's just common sense.''

But crime has dropped across the country -- in states that kept parole as well as those that didn't. In fact, the decline in violent crime from 1994 to 1998 was steeper nationwide (21 percent) than in Virginia (13 percent).

Kern, the Sentencing Commission director, said there are positive indicators that Virginia's get-tough policies are having the desired effect, but stopped short of claiming a cause-and-effect link to falling crime.

``I can't say A caused B,'' he said.

There is ample research suggesting that a strong economy and low unemployment rate may do more to cut crime than denying parole or sending increasing numbers of people to jail.

``The issue of whether the drop in crime rates is largely attributable to the sentencing reforms or some other combination of events and/or initiatives is complex,'' the Sentencing Commission acknowledged in 1999, noting that Virginia's booming economy and record-low unemployment rates are important factors.

The National Criminal Justice Commission, a group that advocates alternatives to incarceration, declared in 1996: ``Overall, high rates of incarceration have little or no correlation to rates of crime. . . . The best that can be said is that the enormous increase in law enforcement caused a marginal decrease in crime. The worst that can be said is that the expansion did nothing for crime but caused terrible collateral harm on society by draining money and ruining lives.''

A National Academy of Sciences report in 1993 posed the issue this way: ``What effect has increasing the prison population had on levels of violent crime? Apparently very little.''

One study by criminologists John Irwin and James Austin found that states that were slowest to increase their prison populations in the 1980s were more likely to see a decrease in crime than the states that increased imprisonment the most.

Even a scholar cited by Allen's supporters as providing philosophical backing for Virginia's get-tough program is having second thoughts.

Princeton professor John J. DiIulio Jr., who argued for years that increasing incarceration cuts crime, wrote last spring in The Wall Street Journal that ``the nation has `maxed out' on the public-safety value of incarceration.''

``Until recently, increased incarceration has improved public safety,'' he wrote. ``But as America's incarcerated population approaches 2 million, the value of imprisonment is a portrait in the law of rapidly diminishing returns.''

Redefining Violent Offenders:

For the get-tough program to work, Allen and his supporters say the state had to shift its priority from nonviolent to violent lawbreakers. And they say they are well down the road to success.

But fewer than three in 10 people locked up in Virginia prisons from July 1997 through June 1998, the last year for which there are Department of Corrections records, were incarcerated for violent crimes. The proportion was exactly the same as in 1993, five years before.

Nearly one in four was imprisoned for using or selling drugs, the 1998 records showed.

``Nonviolent drug offenders are driving the increase in the prison population,'' said Monica Pratt, a spokeswoman for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington-based drug-law reform group.

The most recent statistical snapshot of the state prison population from the Department of Corrections shows that the proportion serving time for violent crimes has changed little in 15 years. It has remained at about half the state's inmates.

``When you see a state with a high incarceration rate, what that tells me is that that state has a greater tendency than states with lower incarceration rates to put property and drug offenders in prison,'' said Kern, the Sentencing Commission director.

``In our case, it's the policy for the low-level drug guy, the guy with the small amount of crack cocaine -- that's what's going to drive our incarceration rate.''

To some extent, Allen and his backers reframed the debate over violent crime and criminals by redefining its terms.

The 1994 ``truth in sentencing'' law defines a long list of crimes as ``violent,'' including such acts as murder, rape and robbery. But it also includes offenses not traditionally considered violent, like burglary, child pornography and computer crime.

And any prior conviction of an offense on that list, either as an adult or as a juvenile, gets an offender classified as ``violent'' under the 1994 law and therefore potentially subject to more prison time.

Using that definition, two-thirds of Virginians who went to prison in fiscal year 1998 were violent, Kern said.

Defenders of the Allen program say that this statistic is more meaningful than the Department of Corrections records.

By basing sentences on the totality of an offender's record, they argue, the Allen program has succeeded in targeting violent criminals and preventing them from committing more crimes.

Skeptics' Vindication is Bittersweet:

Skeptics of Allen's lock-'em-up initiatives were few. Republicans and Democrats alike supported his program. Some did, however, protest.

In September 1994, Del. Jay W. DeBoer, D-Petersburg, one of a tiny minority of state lawmakers who voted against Allen's parole abolition plan, warned his colleagues on the House floor: ``This bill won't make Virginia one bit safer. It's futile and expensive. . . . It's going to cost taxpayers a lot of money, and I predict that, 10 years from now, the legislature will look back and say it was a big mistake.''

In a recent interview, DeBoer said his warnings have been borne out by the facts.

The Allen strategy, DeBoer said, was to ``create a crisis and then solve it.''

``The crisis that George Allen had us all believe we had to solve was a crime wave and liberal parole laws, neither of which Virginia was necessarily known for,'' he said. ``Virginia by all statistics was and is a low-crime state with tough laws.''

Some who supported Allen's plan, like Del. Clifton Woodrum, D-Roanoke, are troubled by misgivings five years later. The funding of prisons and law enforcement was a public policy choice, a spending priority that wound up siphoning public money from other areas.

Woodrum said he voted for the Allen plan on the assurance that prison-building would be accompanied by crime prevention programs, but he has been disappointed. ``The prevention programs, in my estimation, have not been sufficient,'' he said in an interview. ``We may end up paying a very terrible price at some point when we do start releasing these people that we put away without any attempt to modify or change their behavior,'' Woodrum said.

``It's ironic,'' Woodrum said. ``We're now in the position where we have an excess of prison cells but a deficit of classroom space. We have people being educated in trailers. I think somehow we've had our priorities get out of whack.''

Reach Bill Sizemore at 757-446-2276 or size@pilotonline.com