cook county budget statement January 6, 2006

COOK COUNTY BUDGET STATEMENT January 6, 2006

I sat through some three and a half hours of public meeting on September 15 about a management audit for the juvenile detention center. I heard Commissioner Peraica ask the Public Defender if one of his lawyers misses a hearing, it is a thirty-day continuance and at $70 a day. The answer was yes and the Public Defender himself said he was just beginning to understand some things in his own office with the reports coming out. There was some discussion of increased staffing for the office and including the Public Defender in upcoming budget discussions.

In my little three minute moment of glory I said a staffer in the state auditor’s office told me some twenty-five years ago they do not check to see if commuter train crews put in their full 150 mile days. That’s cost accounting, he said, seeing how well the money is spent. We only do compliance auditing, to see if it is spent according to law. That’s exactly what has been missing heretofore in government, up to that management audit, I said, something unthinkable for private business to go without.

Also, that the foregoing discussion vindicated what I had been trying to tell this Board for the past ten years, on the most nitty-gritty level. Spend a bit more on the public defender and a lot less elsewhere. So I was expecting at least an increase in non-lawyer staffers in the proposed budget, but such was not to be. I counted 430 non-administrative criminal lawyers to settle some 380,000 cases a year, or 3.5 per lawyer per business day. 75 investigators are supposed to conduct 160,000 criminal investigations or 2100 each. This is exceedingly weak-kneed protection of the innocent. Maybe the scorching last week by a federal judge for overcrowding at the jail will help county budget-makers see the light.

Unfortunately protection of the innocent is viewed in this day and age as an idle, idealistic luxury. Punishment is seen as therapy, the more the better. That is why we have so many prospective criminals who figure, "Get it if I do, get it if I don’t." It is high time to send them a message, "Keep your nose clean and everything’s cool." For this discussion, Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302, p52, the recent definitive work on Cook County justice, such as it is, makes two points. First:

"(The) larger point, about the need to study the causes of crime. was soon forgotten. The county’s power brokers had little incentive to do anything that might reduce the number of defendants; by the 1920s ward bosses were already hopelessly hooked on courthouse and jail patronage. Judges, prosecutors, bailiffs, clerks, probation officers, and jail guards owed their jobs to the ward bosses- and showed them their thanks by knocking on doors on election dsy."

If we have to spend that much, let’s give everyone a trial and eliminate plea bargaining. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton call it "Reinventing Torture" in a chapter of their book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Second, that real estate and political machinations put the criminal courts at 26th and California instead of near the downtown. That problem has the same solution as parking problems at a rehabbed Cool County hospital, an early application of a little tried monorail technology. Since the suburban commissioners appoint Metra and RTA board members, it is high time they do some cost accounting on these agencies, which blow hundreds of billions each year on obsolete technologies and give the suburbs suburban service for city sales taxes. Figure excessive government spending is why it takes two incomes to support a family in recent decades, in turn why the detention center has so much clientele to begin with.

The military has been buying precision-guided warheads for several decades on the proposition of physics that the closer an explosion is to the target, the less explosive is needed to destroy it. With that in mind, precision-guided public spending and precision-guided criminal punishment are long overdue. If we could only figure out precision-guided health care.

William F. Wendt, Jr.