Stay Tough On Crime, Lance Urges Attorney General Responds To Fbi Statistics

Idaho shouldn’t use falling crime rates or education funding needs as reasons to go soft on crime, Attorney General Al Lance warned Monday.

“A quality education is absolutely essential,” Lance said. “But the best education is worth nothing to a child who is kidnapped, molested and murdered on the way to school.”

Lance’s strongly worded statement came in response to two things: (1) the release of FBI statistics showing Idaho’s violent crime rate dropped 12.5 percent in 1996 and overall crimes decreased 9 percent and (2) a Boise talk by Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Nancy Keenan last week.

Keenan, who spoke at the JFK Dinner, a Democratic fund-raiser in Boise last Tuesday, said she believes prevention works better than incarceration in fighting crime.

“The question becomes, for states: Where do we spend our money?” Keenan said. “That’s the No. 1 question in legislative bodies: What is the priority? And what we have seen across the country is the priority of spending very limited tax dollars is going to prisons.”

Lance, in his statement, said, “Discussion seeking to pit Idaho’s public safety against Idaho’s public education is unproductive.”

He called Keenan’s comments at the Democratic dinner “divisive” and said her state has higher crime rates than Idaho does.

Keenan, a Democrat, has been Montana’s state school superintendent for the past nine years and previously served in the Legislature there.

Headed “Don’t surrender when you are winning the war,” Lance’s statement tied Idaho’s falling crime rates to get-tough laws that have caused Idaho’s prison population to double in the past seven years.

The state now has about 1,000 prisoners housed out of state or backed up in county jails for lack of state prison space. A large private prison is in the works with ground breaking expected next month and a price tag of more than $100 million for the state.

Idaho Gov. Phil Batt appointed himself a “committee of one” this year to look at Idaho’s ballooning prisons. After several months of study and consulting with experts, Batt proposed a package of reforms, including lifting felony penalties for driving without a license and for writing small-time bad checks - crimes that most states treat as misdemeanors or less.

Seventy-eight percent of those sent to prison in Idaho in fiscal year 1996-97 were nonviolent offenders, according to research by The Spokesman-Review. Four nonviolent crimes - simple drug possession, drunken driving, driving without a license and writing bad checks - account for nearly a quarter of Idaho’s prison population.

Batt’s spokesman, Lindsay Nothern, said Monday that the governor’s position has not changed. He said he believes Lance mainly was referring to continuing to be tough on violent crime and Batt agrees with that.

As for education, Nothern said, “I think Idahoans are pretty anti-crime, but kids come first.”

Lance called the falling crime figures “evidence that the state’s get-tough approach continues to work.”

He noted that 1996 was only the second year in the past 10 in which crime rates had fallen.

“Tougher sentencing laws, diligent investigations, vigorous prosecutions and longer prison sentences have all contributed to our lower crime rate,” Lance said. “We are taking criminals out of circulation during their prime crime years.”

He added, “Public safety demands that we continue this course.”

State Sen. Stan Hawkins, R-Ucon, who came within one vote in the state Senate last year of passing a resolution demanding a top-to-bottom review of Idaho’s criminal sentencing laws, disagreed.

“We need to take a comprehensive look at what we’re doing and make sure that this inflammatory public safety argument doesn’t move us away from common sense,” Hawkins said.

“It seems like whenever we see the crime rate’s high, we throw more money at Corrections. Whenever we see the crime rate’s low, we throw more money at Corrections.”

With Corrections growing faster than any other part of the state budget, “the time is coming very soon when, in fact, there will not be enough money to provide for the necessary increases in the other budget areas,” including education, Hawkins said. Idaho spends 68 percent of its state budget on education.

The FBI report, released earlier this month, showed that crime nationwide had dropped 4 percent from 1995 to 1996.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo