Holloway: According to author Lawrence Friedman, crime is embedded in our culture - in this particular culture and in this particular time. The situation is organic to society. It's part of the very cell structure, the nucleus. It's like a virus that seizes control of some part of an organism and its genetic structure and cannot be destroyed with any of our present instruments of cure.

In other words, Friedman says that crime is an intrinsic virus and we have no way to cure it. Are we forever doomed in this ever spiraling increase of crime and violence in our society? Can we develop a strategy to not only reduce crime, but to prevent it? These are critical questions. Let's delve for the answers in this discussion about crime and who pays.

This evening our guests are Tammy Phillips, she's area director of Prison Fellowship for Eastern North Carolina, and our writer/researcher Milton Jordan. Thank you both for being on the program today as we discuss this important topic of crime: who pays? I want to start with Milton because you've done a lot of background and really, in our preparation for this program, you and I have talked a lot about this and you sum it up real well. This eight hundred million dollars - put it in your own words in terms of cost to us.

Jordan: First of all, Jay, it's like this. We keep lying to ourselves, what it does and what we're doing in regard to it. For example, we say that criminals pay their debt to society. Well let me just walk you through a typical scenario and ask ourselves precisely when the criminal pays. Now, remember that in this scenario, the law abiding citizens are the smart ones. We are the ones with the intelligence and the education. So, you go out and you buy some things - a TV set and a VCR and some others things. You put them in your house. Every day when you leave home you create a potential crime scene.

Someone breaks into your house and they steal your stuff. You paid for that. Well, you call the police and who pays for that? You do. You put someone in jail, who pays? You do. When you go into court, you walk in as a crime victim paying the judge, the prosecuting attorney and, chances are, the public defender or the court appointed defense attorney. So, as the intelligent one in this scenario, you are paying one lawyer to send him to prison and another lawyer to make sure he doesn't go.

Then, if he happens to go to prison, and not many really do - about one our of every 100 as a matter of fact - you pay for the prison as well. Now, precisely when did the criminal pay? That's my question. Now, another example of how we lie to ourselves about this problem and about what we're doing about it: a person gets arrested for the first time and what do we call them? A first offender. Now, do you really think that's the first crime that person has committed? Probably not. But what's the me ssage we as society send to criminals? The crime is not the behavior, the crime is getting caught.

So, there are a lot of things we're going to have to do in our thinking if we're going to ever begin to make any inroads to crimes. And that's why we pose the question, "Who really pays for this?" Well, the citizens pay through the nose and it's about time, I think, that the citizens decide to say to their politicians, elected officials and others that, "You've got to do something that works for us."

Holloway: Tammy, you deal with these prisoners once they come to prison. And tell us what the prison fellowship is first and if you have any reactions to Milton said, go right ahead.

Phillips: Number one, I agree with Milton. What prison fellowship does is work with churches and individuals to get them to be involved in the lives on inmates, ex-inmates and their families. We're a Christian organization. I don't believe you every punish anybody into acting right. There has to be a change of heart. Somewhere, some day, somebody has to say, "I am going to be different." What we do is offer all kinds of opportunities for that to happen.

We have several seminars that we do in prison, one is called a life plan seminar. We have men and women who spend time in prison. They do their time. And then it's time to go home and they've done nothing to prepare to go. They haven't thought about what they're going to do as far as getting a job. . . education. . . what are you going to do about your family situation? They haven't done anything.

So what we do is we bring volunteers in to get them to sit down and think about this. "What are you gonna do? You got in trouble in the first place because you weren't making the right choices." One of the things we deal with is leisure time. People sit up here and tell us, "I'm not going to commit the crime again." That's fine, but you spent 12 hours a day dealing drugs, and if you're not doing that, what are you going to be doing in this place?

Holloway: Well, let's back it up. We're talking about crime: who pays? This is Black Issues Forum and why is it such a prevalent problem still in our community? We know, Milton I guess, that the prisons - we make up a disproportionate amount in our prisons in North Carolina and throughout the country I would say. But, why is it such an important discussion in our community?

Jordan: Well, a couple of things we have to deal with, Jay. Number one, the population is not a function of crime itself. Or the make of the population is not a function of crime. What my research shows is that when you begin to look at who gets apprehended, in other words, who gets caught, what happens, who goes to court, who goes on probation and who goes to prison, what you find is a pattern of different kinds of decisions.

In other words, if you're European American in this country and commit a crime - let's say it's not violence, it's a crime against property, you broke into someone's house or you stole a car etc. You are six times less likely to go to prison than an African American committing the same crime.

Holloway: Why is that?

Jordan: The research and the data doesn't clearly say. Because so much discretion is left up to judges it's kind of hard to pin point precisely why that is. It's just that the numbers show that you're least likely to go to prison, you're much more likely to get on probation. In fact, of every 100 crimes committed in this country where someone is actually caught and taken to court, only one actually goes to prison.

Now the other thing that happens that makes up that population - once you are in prison, you are less likely to be paroled if you are African American. So part of the population has to do with those things as opposed - the inference is that African American people are committing more crimes than anyone else and that's not really true. It's a function of the way we're making decisions that make up the prison population. But there is another reason that it is such an important discussion. It's such an important discussion because the way it gets reported and discussed, the whole community carries the brunt of the weight. So no one talks about - for example, let's take Charles Manson. Charles Manson gets convicted of a very brutal crime. Not a white person in the country has claimed any relationship to Charles Manson. I mean, nobody feels bad because Charles Manson is Charles Manson.

Now you take the guy that went up on the Long Island railroad and gunned four or five people down. There is a collective stroke throughout the national African American community because somehow this person's behavior superimposes itself on the race of people. That's the unfortunate thing in our society about the way we're dealing with it.

And it's very difficult for us to come together on what we do about it because in order to solve crime in our society, I assume, I believe, that we have to work as a team. I don't think we can ask the police to do it all, or the courts to do it all, or the prisons to do it all. I think it's very important that citizens take a very active role, which is what groups like prison fellowship are all about.

Holloway: Tell us how you do that?

Phillips: One of the things I do is a lot of church presentations. A lot of presentations with groups explaining their role in corrections. You can't really complain about what's going on if you're not making any contribution to help people when they come back into the community. For example, we have several men that we work with that say, "I'm not going to do it again. I'm going to get my life together." But as soon as they hit the street they can't get a job. Many of them lose everything.

It's very rare that a person can leave the institution and still have a family in tact, still have a job waiting for them, and still have a home. So when they come back, a lot of them don't have anything. And the church does not feel too much obligation to be of assistance to help men and women get back on the path so they go right back to the old friends, right back to the old ways, and we end up seeing them right back in the same institution whether they wanted to be there or not.

So my job is to educate people. You have a role to play. If you own your own business, help somebody get a job. I know several people who own their own businesses and keep like two or three jobs on the side so when men and women come out of prison (they make sure that someone who's been to prison has a record) they have a job. I constantly am encouraging volunteers to get involved with the lives of family members. So many family members fall completely apart once a person is incarcerated.

This time of year we have what we call Angle Tree where we encourage churches to purchase Christmas gifts for the children of inmates but you do it on behalf of the parent. So you call, find out what the children want, and that's what you deliver to remind the children that "your mom or dad didn't forget you." We have Camp Angle Tree that we do in June. So a lot of these children never get to go to camp, but we try and keep our hands on them so they can be involved in something positive that can be a change in their life.

Holloway: In terms of participation, do you have more participation than you can handle from families and churches and communities or are you looking for more? Both of you are laughing.

Phillips: Because this is not popular. This is not Sunday school, this isn't the Red Cross. Folks are not running to us and going, "Please. Sign us up for prison ministry." If anything they look at us and ask, "Why do you care what happens?"

Holloway: And that's why it's such an important discussion. I mean, each of you, give me your strongest case. We've talked about it a little bit now, but tell our audience why it's so important.

Phillips: You want to do as much as you can to facilitate change in a person's life. I'll give you an example. A man kills a couple of people. He spends ten years in prison and there's been no attempt to change. Most people leave the institution. Very few people die in prison. You as a citizen want to be a part of facilitating change in that person's life or he's going to come out far worse than he ever was when he went in and he's moving next door to us. And this continues. That same man who's killed two people spent ten years in prison and this is a cycle. So we're encouraging people. Help people to change. Help people to stay open to go to church, to read the bible, to pray, to study, to make a change in their life so when they come out of the institution they will not continue to commit the same crimes and continue to make us the victims.

Holloway: Are you saying - I'm putting words in your mouth - are you saying the system is really not working as it is right now?

Phillips: It's not working, but I don't think they know what to do. I think things have gotten so out of hand now that the system that's in place - we'll have to understand the system is very profitable. It's not profitable to us, but it's a very profitable system. Construction, uniforms, food, commissary, programs, this is very profitable. So it's not something that people are going to be rushing to dismantle and yet at the same time we're saying it doesn't work.

Holloway: Milton, we opened up the beginning of the show talking about how much we pay as citizens in North Carolina to keep people in prison. So in essence what we were inferring here now is that we pay for all of this but the criminal does not ever pay. What's your strongest case and what does your research show as to why citizens should be more involved now in rehabilitating?

Jordan: Well, I think if you just look at the numbers and just look at some very obvious facts. First of all, the only person who can actually contribute to reducing crime is someone who does it. I mean, that's the first salient observation you have to make: if you don't do crime, you can't reduce it. So we have a stake, a vested interest in someone changing their mind and going from being a criminal to something else, to a law abiding citizen. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that the eight hundred million dollar bill in North Carolina is climbing about 17% a year. It will top one billion. The department of corrections budget will be one billion dollars by the year 2005. Now, do we really want to spend a billion dollars to keep people locked up? Now that's another way. Do you really want to do that with money? Another number to look at. There are 150,000 people under court sanction in North Carolina but only 30,000 were in prison. Where are the oth er 120,000? Well they're on probation or intensive probation, they're out in the street in your neighborhood. Seventy percent of the people who get put on probation eventually go to prison.

So it's a vicious cycle and the point is we're losing. It's not working. Why isn't it working? That's the real issue, why isn't it working? I think it's not working because as a society we still see crime as an "us and them" issue. It's us versus them and we want one of us to do something about the rest of them.

Holloway: Now when you say "them," society has made them to look like me and you.

Jordan: Well society generally tends to think that when you say crime you're talking about an "African American phenomenon." That is not specifically true.

Holloway: Specifically male.

Jordan: And specifically male. The fastest growing segment of the prison population is female. That's the fastest growing segment of the population. So the point is that we have got to do something. And I don't think we know exactly what to do. What the research shows, thought, is this: in some states some things are beginning to work. North Carolina is doing some things that are really quite interesting.

First of all, the structure sentencing I think has a lot of potential because what it does is it says, "You will spend this sentence in prison." If you get five years you're going to stay in prison for five years. They're reserving prison for violent and career criminals. That means that more and more people get convicted and won't go to prison. There's a companion law called the criminal justice partnership program that sets up local programs in communities for citizens to get involved. And I think that is the way North Carolina needs to go. It really is a way above the rest of the nation in doing that thing. And I think that we have an opportunity in this state to be on the cutting edge of change. The question is, do we have the will? Are we willing to change our paradigm and consider these people as valuable human beings who can change?

Holloway: And that's part of the paradigm change that you're looking at, Tammy, I guess.

Phillips: One of the things we also do is a lot of programs that give inmates the chance to do something for the community. Just last week we spent the week renovating a home in Raleigh. We do this once a year. We get women out of the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women. Start on Monday, finish on Friday. We renovated an entire house.

The grandmother is 70 and is working a part-time job and she keeps the three grand-children. And two of those children's fathers were in prison which is how we knew about them because they filled out Angle Tree applications last year. The house was so bad that her daughter was thinking about just tearing the thing down. So we got these women out and all week they were so thankful to be able to do something for somebody. It really was a great boost for them. By the time Friday came everybody was cryi ng and the house looked wonderful. And we try to do this once a year.

Again, do something. Give something back to the community. Communicate to people that you are sorry for what you've done and that you want to put something back. So in prison fellowship, we try to come at it from every end that we can think of: education for volunteers, giving inmates the opportunity to do something for the community, we do marriage seminars, we found out 75% of the men and women who are married when they go in are divorced by the time they leave and over half of them are over within the first year of their going back home. So we do a marriage seminar dealing with forgiveness and communication because we've found that when men and women have a stable home situation to go back to, they are least likely to back [to prison].

So trying to find every angle that we can to show up and also at the same time communicating to the church - prison fellowship is a broker. We'll help you do what it is you need to do, but you need to be involved. A lot of men and women don't get mail so we have a major mail call program. Anything to help people from getting hard. Cause once folks get hard then they're not open for change.

Holloway: Are you part of the state government, are you in the middle, are you privately funded?

Phillips: Privately funded. Started twenty years ago this summer. We are funded by contributions and grants.

Holloway: So has it shown - you mentioned that this is a Christian perspective, has that shown, and Milton in your research as well, that this actually makes a strong difference?

Phillips: It makes a difference when people are real and committed. It's no different than in a church. So if folks are real and committed you're going to see change and if they're not, you won't. And the same thing with men and women in prison. When I've seen men and women who are serious and committed to being Christians, then you see the change. Cause you can't be a serious committed Christian and continue to do the things that brought you to prison in the first place, if you're serious a bout it.

Holloway: You may say the same thing for those that are in churches now that are serious but let's say that their church is not doing something but they want to support this effort.

Phillips: Well at this time of year, one of the big things they can do is write to us. Prison fellowship is at P.O. Box 19846, Raleigh, 27619. And they can also call us 781-8116 or if they're out of the area then they can call us at 1-800-445-5244. They can make contributions to Angel Tree, to our community service project. Like I said, we're going to do this once a year hoping that we can do more.

This will be our fifth year coming up in '97. I'd like to do two houses and I'd like to do it for two weeks. And we'd like to do more than we're doing and give more people the opportunity. Because the other thing that we're finding out is that when volunteers work alongside men and women who are in prison, attitudes change. You know, they're not so afraid anymore: "This man looks like my son, this woman looks like my daughter." And then when people begin to make those kinds of changes they can go b ack to their churches and be more open to men and women when they come back. I spend a lot of time talking to pastors and saying, "You don't know who's in your church and you don't know how difficult you make it for people to get back involved when you are being closed and negative about people who have a record."

Jordan: Let me make one other point. There are two groups in this community that I think have to be very actively involved in coming forward. One is the business community. They have a vested interest in this and they have to get involved at several levels. Most importantly, they have to learn to correctly evaluate both the quality of change and its depth so that they can make good hiring decisions because a job is absolutely essential if you're going to continue to change.

Now, another group that's almost invisible and has to be absolutely a part of this are what I have come to call post-crime achievers. Those are the people that have changed. They have stopped doing crime - because they are the actually the only ones that know how to do it. We all know it can be done, but they're the only ones that really know how. And those two groups have to step forward and be a little bit more involved, or a great deal more involved actually, and be a great deal more vocal about t he fact that this can happen.

I think if we can put that stakeholder group together and put a team together, we can really make some major inroads. Again, the question becomes, do we have the will to do it?

Holloway: There's certainly so much we could discuss. We've got about three more minutes here. And maybe we can talk a little bit more about the whole aspect of the citizen understanding that the criminal really hasn't paid but that what we're talking about now is that the criminal can pay, I guess, through rehabilitation.

Phillips: Yes.

Jordan: Yeah, I think what society ought to do is say, "Look. Here is when you pay your debt to society, you change. You change and begin contributing. We should accept nothing less than change. We should not allow people to bum rap their parents or their grand-parents and say this is genetic. We should not allow people to bum rap society and say it's because society was racist or sexist or this or that. We shouldn't allow people to blame this on drugs or alcohol." Crime is a conscious dec ision. Now, if doing is a conscious decision, not doing it is a conscious decision.

Holloway: Milton, what do you say to the people in the audience who have family members or friends who they know are criminal but they don't know the words to say to them?

Jordan: Well, they probably need to get some help. There are groups like Tammy's group, there are some other groups around that have been working in this business for a long time. I would recommend two books that I think are absolutely seminal in helping people understand. One is Inside the Criminal Mind and the other is Before it's too Late which focuses on children who are headed toward crime. They both are by Dr. Stanton Samenow and I think that these two book would be the best thing that any person could read to try and understand what they need to do to work with friends or family members and relatives who either are in crime or in prison.

Holloway: Just in case people are running for their pen or pencil, we'll give you our web address and how to contact us and we'll give you that information at the end of the program. You have any comments related to that, Tammy?

Phillips: I did have one comment again. We were talking about the children and one of the things that we try to do with our Angel Tree program is again to follow up because so many of the children who have parents in prison follow. Again, we found statistics that say close to 80% of the children who are now in prison had a brother or a father who were in prison. So the scripture "train up a child" becomes alive. And when we get our hands on Angel Tree children through our gift giving program, this is a great opportunity for us to follow up with them. So we're looking to expand the program, also to send more to camp and find more ways to get churches involved. Because if we can stop the children from following in these foot steps then we will not continue to see so many in the adult system.

Holloway: Well we have less than a minute here. And are there any concluding comments either of you would like to say?

Jordan: One of the things that I wanted to say is just talk about that team that I mentioned. I think that there are probably what I call five groups of stakeholders who have something to do with crime. One is criminals themselves. They have to learn to change. Second are criminal justice professionals. They've got to be a part of the team as well. Citizens who pay the bill have got to start insisting that their money go to things that work. People who make hiring decisions have to be on t he team in the business community and of course what I call post crime achiever - those people who have gone from crime to contribution. I think those five groups of people need to sit at the table and develop a strategy and set a mission to reduce crime in our state and set a significant number. I mean let's reduce it by 50% by the year 2010. I think it's doable, I think we can do it, we can find the will.

Holloway: Milton Jordan, thank you so much again for your information and Tammy, thank you for being with us. Good luck to your program.

Phillips: Thank you.

Holloway: Well, the challenge remains ours. Can we take this stakeholder approach that Milton and Tammy just talked about that we've discussed? Can we gather the criminals? The criminal justice professionals, the citizens, the people with hiring decisions, and the post crime achievers, as Milton mentioned, as members of the same team in a new strategy? A new approach to reducing, even eliminating crime in our society? We can and should do it. Have a blest evening and a good night.