By Chris Powell
Seldom does the New York Times pay attention to Connecticut unless it involves something edible, and so it was again the other day when the newspaper identified New Haven as one of 52 places around the world that everyone should visit this year for “food, culture, adventure, and natural beauty.”
Certainly for adventure, since in the first eight days of the new year New Haven endured four shootings, three of them fatal, which didn’t make the national newspaper of record even as the city’s pizza did. Nor, for that matter, were the shootings noted at the state Capitol. They never are.
Yes, go out to a great dinner in one of New Haven’s many wonderful restaurants and then keep your head down as you return home to the suburbs, putting safe distance between yourself and the social disintegration that long has afflicted that city and others and now is creeping out into the rest of the state.
But as reported by the New Haven Register, at least a flicker of insight about the shootings came from Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson. Acknowledging the city’s spike in violent crime, the mayor and the chief said a small group of repeat offenders is responsible for most of the trouble and that the city will ask the General Assembly to legislate higher bonds or longer sentences for them.
This may have been the first official acknowledgment of what Connecticut long has most needed in criminal justice: an incorrigibility law, whereby repeat offenders, upon a sufficient number of convictions, would be sentenced to life terms. Instead for years now Governor Lamont and other leading Democrats in the state have boasted about the decline in the state’s prison population even as repeat offenders have run wild.
Also while New Haven’s mayor and police chief were recognizing the necessity of putting repeat offenders away for good and readers of the Times were deliberating whether to pursue Italian, Spanish, or Thai dinner in the city, the Register reported the 48th arrest of a particular New Haven resident, this time for robbing a bank in Fairfield.
The accused already has three convictions for bank robbery and many encounters with the law for burglary, theft, and drug crimes.
The heck with a “three strikes” law. Even a “20 strikes” law might have put this criminal away by now.
Will Connecticut let him get to 50 arrests? If he does, will he win a prize? Why was he still on the loose?
As the Times, the governor, state legislators, judges, and prosecutors might say: Who cares? Let’s eat!
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Connecticut’s high school students may be pretty dumb, insofar as half never master high school math and English before being given their diplomas and encouraged to apply to a state college. But the students probably aren’t as dumb as state Rep. Holly Cheeseman, R-East Lyme, seems to think they are.
Cheeseman has introduced legislation to require teen-agers applying for a driver’s license to take a course of at least four hours’ duration about the dangers of driving while intoxicated from marijuana, which state government has just purported to legalize, though its possession remains a violation of federal law. State law already requires young license applicants to take a similar course on the dangers of driving after consuming alcohol or other drugs.
But even high school students who have failed math and English already know perfectly well that they can get intoxicated from marijuana.
For of course that’s exactly [ITALICS] why [END ITALICS] they smoke or eat the stuff — to get intoxicated. It’s the same with everyone else who indulges.
Cheeseman’s legislation may forestall intoxicated driving by the kids by all of four hours, the time it takes them to complete the marijuana class. To her credit, she opposed putting state government into the marijuana business.
But the only deterrent to driving while intoxicated from [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] is more serious criminal prosecution than what Connecticut imposes for first offenders — a few hours taking a “drug and alcohol education course” in which people also are told what they already knew but chose to disregard. Such a light penalty doesn’t deter many people, but so many people drive while intoxicated that most legislators don’t want much punishment.
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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 