cook county budget statement 2007

COOK COUNTY BUDGET STATEMENT January 29, 2007

How much justice can you afford? If you are not a professional athlete beating a rape case with
$12 million, or a politician getting $10 or $20 million in criminal defense from a politically potent
law firm, or a student at an expensive university flimsily charged with rape in a nationally publicized case, probably not too much.

How much justice can Cook County afford? Or, rather, how much injustice?

Now that irresistable payrolling has met immovable tax resistance, it is high time indeed county budget cutters wrap themselves around the numbers the previous sheriff gave on Channel 11 recently, that the average stay in Cook County jail is 190 days, in New York, 45 days. If the Cook County stay could be cut to the New York figure, the jail population would be cut by three-fourths, at least those not actually serving sentences. That alone comes to beaucoup buckoes.

From a more bleeding heart standpoint, let’s figure Cook County jail is not a wholesome place to be, as Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302, makes abundantly clear, if anyone still needs that. Let’s reasonably figure the poor slobs coming out, by and large, are hardly less disposed to commit crime than when they went in. Let’s also figure, in a country with 6% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners, a lot of them should not be in jail to begin with. And all this punishment is no deterrent when the prospective criminal figures, get it if I do, get it if I don’t.

Protection of the innocent is not an idle, idealistic luxury. Even the legal profession does not realize this, however, judging by the special lawyers’ advertising section in the January 2007 Chicago magazine. In a brief article appropriate for a supermarket tabloid, it describes criminal defense work as defending the deplorable and barely gets beyond the personal satisfactions of prominent defense attorneys.

Any responsible description of criminal defense is lacking without quoting Blackstone, that by the ancient wisdom of the law it is better to let ten guilty go free than imprison one innocent, and that it is the surety of punishment, not the severity, that deters crime. Let’s update that to include non-punishment of the innocent. Let’s send them a message, keep your nose clean and everything’s cool.

Let’s figure too, that a proper public defender investigative staff would have caught Burge years earlier, likewise the papers proving Anthony Porter’s innocence.

A state senator said that DuPage county expenses are one-third those of Cook on a per capita basis. That raw, simple figure ought to have considerable shock value. Cook County has a generations-old morass to work its way out of, something beyond meat-ax quotas. But figure
each make-work job destroys several real jobs, when we figure it destroys the returns on capital, capital that could create several real jobs.

Figure, too, it takes 80 hours a week to support a family in recent decades, not 40, because of the increased cost of living, in turn, because of excessive government spending. Figure, also, the problems of youth, the drugs, sex, violence, etc., are due largely to absent parents, per Mary Eberstadt, Home Alone America. Let’s call it jurogenic crime, then, that is, crime caused by the system, directly and indirectly. And while Chicago Metropolis 2020 can issue quite an erudite analysis of excessive punishment, the excessive spending it advocates elsewhere, especially in transportation, is a big part of the problem.

Just as precision-guided warheads need less explosive, the closer they get to the target, public bodies ought to precision-guide their spending and punishment.

I can hear it already, that Cook County does not have the cash for even this much analysis, much less for beefing up the public defender’s office. "Revenue enhancement," however, need not be a euphemism for increased taxes, not when TIFs are just a slush fund for cutesy pie urban renewal. The County might sue the City of Chicago over TIFs as violating the appropriation power. Taxpayer lawsuits have a tough row to hoe in the courts, but a taxspender action might have a bit more clout.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

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