Since 1960, violent crime has increased 500 percent. A 1987 Justice Department study found that eight out of 10 Americans will be victims of violent crime in their lifetimes. Six million violent crimes were measured by the Justice Department in 1990.
Based on what we know about the criminal histories of the two young men who allegedly killed Mr. Jordan, this crime should never have happened. We have a right to be outraged that they were not in jail or prison, instead of staking out a roadside spot in Robeson County, N.C., like modern-day highwaymen. According to county Sheriff Hubert Stone, “Mr. Jordan would be alive now if the [legal] system worked the way it should.”
Both of these 18-year-olds already had extensive criminal histories at the time of the Jordan killing. Daniel Green was on parole after serving just two years of a six-year sentence for attempting to kill Robert Ellison by smashing him in the head with an ax and putting him in a coma for three months. Larry Demery was awaiting trial for bashing Mrs. Wilma Dial, a 61-year-old convenience-store clerk, in the head with a cinder block during a robbery, fracturing her skull and causing a brain hemorrhage.
There are lots of theories about which mix of family background and environmental conditions might influence a person to become a criminal. However, these theories always run headlong into the stubborn fact that most of the kids with similar backgrounds and similar environments do not become criminals themselves. What we do know is that year in and year out our society, for whatever reasons, does produce a new crop of hard-core criminals. The government’s paramount obligation is to protect law-abiding citizens like Mr. Jordan from becoming their victims.
Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang compiled arrest records for every male born-and raised in Philadelphia-in 1945 and in 1958. just 7 percent of each age group committed two thirds of all violent crime, including three fourths of the rapes and robberies, and virtually all of the murders. This 7 percent not only had five or more arrests by the age of 18, but, for every arrest made, got away with about a dozen crimes. In an article based on Wolfgang’s studies, it has been suggested that about 75,000 new, young, persistent criminal predators are added to our population every year.
When I was at the Justice Department in the early ’80s, we funded projects in 20 cities where police, prosecutors, schools, and welfare and probation workers pooled information to focus on these “serious habitual offenders.” As part of this program, Oxnard, Calif., worked to get the city’s 30 active, serious habitual offenders behind bars. As a direct result, in 1987 violent crimes dropped 38 percent, more than double the drop in any other California city. By 1989, when all 30 active, serious habitual offenders were behind bars, murders declined by 60 percent, robberies by 41 percent and burglaries by 29 percent.
From a distance, the two young men accused of killing Mr. Jordan look an awful lot like part of Professor Wolfgang’s 7 percent. So why were they on the streets of Robeson County and not in jail or prison?
The case of Daniel Green is particularly troubling. When questioned about Green’s early release from prison, Robeson County Prosecutor Richard Townsend replied that most state prisoners serve an average of 20 percent of their sentences before parole, and that Green had served more than
That claim is consistent with recent findings that although violent offenders received an average sentence of seven years and 11 months, they actually served an average of only two years and 11 months-37 percent of their imposed sentences. Overall, 51 percent of the violent offenders were, like Mr. Green, discharged from prison in two years or less.
Audiences are shocked when they are told that violent criminals serve only 5.5 years for murder, 3.0 years for rape, 2.25 years for robbery and 1.28 years for assault. We have to ask the question, is 5.5 years long enough to serve in prison for intentionally taking another human being’s life?
The debate about whether we are imprisoning the right people is currently heating up, but of inmates incarcerated in state prisons in 1986, almost 55 percent were serving time for a violent offense. Twenty-nine percent were nonviolent recidivists. In sum, 95 percent of all state inmates were either violent or repeat offenders.
The wanton murder of Mr. Jordan by two proven criminals who belonged in jail or prison should convince us that it is time to make some changes. The one change that would have the greatest impact is the passage by states of truth-in-sentencing laws, which require convicted violent criminals like Mr. Green to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. The U.S. Congress enacted this kind of requirement for federal crimes in the mid-1980s, and Arizona passed similar legislation this year.
Ironically, the beneficiaries of this change will never be known. They are the young black men who live to adulthood, the women who are not raped, the store clerks who are not robbed, the children who are not molested. They are the nonvictims of crimes that did not happen because the violent criminal who might have attacked them was behind bars. We only wish Mr. James Jordan could have been among them.
