Washington. -- Has the intrusive, bossy Democratic Congress, cavalierly handing off orders to states and localities, turned into an equally intrusive, bossy, cavalier Republican Congress?
Check out the Republicans' new $21 billion crime bill, the so-called "Take Back Our Streets Act." The legislation sweeps aside the delicate balance between punishment and prevention achieved in the laboriously negotiated 1994 crime act.
Gutted are outlays for such prevention-oriented programs as special drug courts, after-school activities, midnight basketball and the Community Oriented Policing Services program to hire 100,000 street police officers over five years.
Instead, the Republicans are moving to add $2.5 billion to the $8 billion for state prison subsidies voted last year. And then they pile on conditions. To qualify for half the prison money, states would have to increase the percentage of violent criminals sentenced to prison. For the other half, they'd have to guarantee that violent offenders serve at least 85 percent their sentences.
Why, one wonders, would the new Congress go in for this micromanagement when the states are already seized by a frenzy of prison-building and sentence toughening that's given us (after Russia) the world's highest incarceration rate?
And if one accepts the Republican doctrine of federalist experimentation, of letting states and localities make their own decisions, then why force them into a paroxysm of state law change to get the federal money? The Justice Department reports only three states -- North Carolina, Arizona and Delaware -- currently meet the sentencing requirements of the GOP's new bill.
If one asks people at the front line of the crime war -- local officials -- the thrust of the Republican crime bill is all wrong anyway. The National League of Cities has just surveyed 382 officials in cities of 10,000 or more people, asking them to name the public-safety measures most likely to reduce crime.
The top responses -- named by 64 and 48 percent respectively -- were prevention-oriented: supporting family stability and jobs/targeted economic development.
The next preferred strategies (named by 30 to 40 percent) were more police officers, after-school programs, neighborhood watch programs, more police foot patrols, school-to-work programs, recreation and early-childhood education.
Mandatory sentencing (18 percent) and building more prisons (8 percent) were way down a list that included court/bail reform, boot camps, funding drug treatment, gun control and elimination of parole.
Yet the Republican crime measure marches off in precisely the opposite direction. Except that it was included in the campaign season "Contract With America," what's the justification for it?
Detroit's Mayor Dennis Archer accuses House leaders of ignoring Speaker Newt Gingrich's promise to consult with local officials about the law changes that affect them.
"They have deprived us of the opportunity to be heard," the mayor said. "They act as if by osmosis they know better what needs to be done in Detroit or New York than those who live there. If they listened, they might learn that it's less expensive, in Michigan for example, to do things that keep someone out of prison than to pay the $30,000 a year per-capita cost of keeping that person in a prison cell."
A provision in the House crime bill, written by Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., would set up a $10 billion anti-crime block grant that would bypass the state governments and go directly to cities, giving them freedom in how to spend the money.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, is readying a provision to give block grants to the state governments instead. But that worries local officials, who fear the money will reach them slowly, after state legislators have garnered political credit.
On balance, the whole idea of having a crime act was probably a bad idea. Why should federal taxpayers be footing the bill for local safe streets, or prisons that local officials say won't achieve much anyway? Why send money looping through the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department when it might better be raised and spent at home? What's a more fundamental state and local responsibility?
In the Reagan era, that was the Republicans' incessant argument. It still makes sense.
But if the Washington crowd can't restrain itself, it ought to give -- as Detroit's Mayor Archer so eloquently suggests -- maximum discretion to the officials who have to cope with crime first-hand, in their own cities and counties.
Neal R. Peirce writes a column on state and urban affairs.