The Boston Globe - 30.08.2019

FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019 The Boston Globe Opinion A

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TheKennedyquestion:

Willhe,won’the,

shouldhe?

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She sees Kennedy as sincerely

working for greater good

Scot Lehigh’s column “Prince Joseph Kennedy wants what’s

properly his” (Opinion, Aug. 28) was unfair to the man I

know Joseph P. Kennedy III to be. When he initiated his

first campaign for the House of Representatives, my hus-

band and I invited him to our home to meet potential vot-

ers in our district. We found him to be unassuming, hum-

ble, and completely sincere. He was nervous about public

speaking but passionate about government’s role in meet-

ing the needs of people for housing and health care, decent

jobs, and a fair deal in life. He cared deeply about the envi-

ronment. He was intent on earning his own reputation and

not trading on the Kennedy name. He was the opposite of

the entitled, arrogant person Lehigh paints him to be.

Since Kennedy has been in Congress, I have seen him a

number of times. He pays close attention to our district and

its needs, and listens carefully to the stories of people who

want his attention. I still see him as the genuine article.

There are people who go into politics because it fills an

ego need, but I believe that for Kennedy, politics is a call-

ing, a way to do his part in making the world a better place.

I think Lehigh owes him an apology.

JEAN K. SOUTHARD

Mansfield

In eyeing Markey, Kennedy puts his

own interests ahead of electorate’s

Joseph P. Kennedy III’s consideration of a challenge to Ed-

ward Markey for his Senate seat is another example of the

Kennedy clan’s incessant lust for political power. Markey

has represented Massachusetts loyally and effectively, and

he faces no serious Republican challenger for his seat. So,

what’s the point of this challenge from Kennedy? Pure and

simple, putting one’s personal ambition ahead of the inter-

ests of the Massachusetts electorate.

BERGE TATIAN

Stoneham

On Saturday there will be a Straight Pride Parade, where

people will be marching many of the same streets as the

Boston Pride Parade. The proponents of this parade won-

der: If LGBTQ people have a parade, why don’t straight

people get one too?

This logic reveals a disregard for LGBTQ history. For

centuries, gay and lesbian people have been killed for sim-

ply being who they are. They have been legally denied the

right to marry, fired from their jobs, denied access to health

care, and denied the right to keep their child if their part-

ner dies, among other travesties.

We march in (real) pride parades to celebrate the ac-

complishments that move our society toward equality, such

as same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) and an-

tidiscrimination laws. We march in pride parades to honor

those who have sacrificed so much for this progress. We

march in pride parades to gird ourselves for the work that

remains, for there are many who continue to harbor hate in

their hearts.

It is misguided to wonder why we straight people don’t

get our own Straight Pride Parade. Instead, we should be

grateful we’ve never needed one in the first place.

MICHAEL SEYMOUR

Boston

It’sbeenlongmarchforLGBTQrights—

StraightPrideboostersskipoverthat

That was a sweet piece about photographer Barry Schneier

and how his Bruce Springsteen photos became such a nice

part of rock history (“Bruce, before the future was written,”

Weekend, Aug. 23). It was, though, also a sad reminder of

the decline, if not disappearance, of the type of lively, cool

arts and music scene that made that moment happen.

While Cambridge has held up fairly well compared with

other cities, indie music venues of the kind described in

James Sullivan’s article, where potential “futures” still

mostly get their start, have been fading from public view

throughout North America and Europe (although Britain

has been trying to do something about it), and for the usual

reasons: gentrification, nonsensical development (where

the word “vibrant” seems to substitute for “soulless”), and

generally poor or nonexistent urban planning.

While “rock is dead” has become a cliche, indie rock

mostly just has been driven underground or to more ob-

scure venues, out of sight of the general public and media,

and by a music industry increasingly focused on more pre-

dictable, established acts and formulaic songs.

So if the next future of rock and roll comes into the area,

that artist could well be playing a word-of-mouth basement

show somewhere in Allston, with nobody outside the music

community the wiser.

BERNIE CONNEELY

Somerville

Intoday’sfadedartsscene,early

Springsteenmighthavegonenowhere

Re “Trump is the problem” (Opinion, Aug. 29): If Donald

Trump’s notoriously thin skin is the problem, I would love

to hear Leonard Glass’s thoughts on why Trump’s support

in this country is so sizable and constant.

JANA HOWE

Merrimack, N.H.

Theproblem’snotTrump—

it’shismillionsofminions

T

wenty years ago, it was a common belief

that reducing crime and increasing incar-

ceration went hand in hand. When he was

running for governor in 1998, Paul Cellucci

told The Globe he was puzzled by a headline

that asked “If crime is down, why are the prisons still

overcrowded?” To Cellucci, and to many policymakers at

the time, the question contained its own answer: Crime

was downbecausethe prisons were crowded. Locking

up lots of bad guys for a long time was seen as the surest

path to crime reduction. Nascent efforts at sentencing

reform or alternatives to prison would only make crime

worse.

Now a new national report suggests otherwise. The

Brennan Center for Justice found that 34 states, across

all regions of the country, reduced both their prison pop-

ulations and their crime rates over the decade between

2007 and 2017. The data “show clearly that reducing

mass incarceration does not come at the cost of public

safety,” the report concludes.

The state with the steepest declines in both crime

(roughly 40 percent) and incarceration (51 percent)?

Massachusetts.

This is undeniably good news, but the raw numbers

need to be dissected in order to learn the right lessons.

As with medical studies, it’s important to control for

other factors, such as education, health care, and eco-

nomic opportunity, which are all related to criminal be-

havior. Massachusetts has made progress on those indi-

cators too, so the state’s plummeting crime rate can’t all

be attributed to new criminal justice philosophies. Some

of the sentencing reforms the state has adopted, includ-

ing those in the comprehensive bill Governor Baker

signed in April 2018, are too new to show up in the

Brennan Center’s figures.

Still, in many cases the virtuous cycle of lower crime

and fewer prisoners is clearly linked to smarter policies:

eliminating harsh sentences and focusing police and

community resources on a relatively few “high-impact”

offenders. In 2006, the state decriminalized the posses-

sion of hypodermic needles. In 2012, it reduced the

length of mandatory minimum sentences for a raft of

drug crimes, including shrinking the size of “drug-free

school zones” that imposed enhanced penalties, even for

crimes committed well outside school hours.

Ben Forman is research director at the think tank

MassINC, which has done pioneering work in criminal

justice issues. He points especially to changes in juvenile

sentencing as key to both the state’s smaller prison pop-

ulation and lowered crime overall. That’s partly due to

what Forman calls the “criminogenic” effects of incar-

ceration: The prison environment itself hardens crimi-

nal behaviors and increases the likelihood of recidivism.

“We have moved away dramatically from the incarcera-

tion of youth,” he says, and towards alternative services

and probation. “You prevent the formation of a career

criminal.”

Given the dizzying annual cost of incarceration — at

least $55,000 per inmate — you would think that state

Department of Corrections budgets would be falling

along with the prison population. But no: MassINC

found that combined prison and sheriff department

budgets have increased 25 percent since 2011.

Forman and other advocates want to see not just

criminal justice reform, but reinvestment. One example:

The current fiscal year budget includes $25 million for

community corrections centers operated by the once-

tarnished department of probation. With new leader-

ship, these 18 centers are now offering intensive services

from education and employment counseling to behav-

ioral therapy, substance abuse treatment, and domestic

violence prevention. Given that 500 people come home

from prison every year in the city of Lawrence alone, the

need for constructive re-entry programs seems obvious.

More, please.

The positive trends outlined in the Brennan Center

report are hardly the last word. The United States still

has the largest incarcerated population — 1.5 million

souls — in the world. Even in Massachusetts, there are

still three times as many people in prison as in 1980. But

beyond the sheer numbers, what’s encouraging about

the Brennan Center’s report is the way it shows that

cocksure conventional wisdom can change. It’s taken a

generation, but all the hard work of advocates — com-

munity policing approaches like Boston’s Safe Neighbor-

hood Initiative, local prison intervention programs like

Roca, even books about criminal justice disparities like

“The New Jim Crow” — have steadily chipped away at

the old lock’ em up verities. We are only now beginning

to see the dividends.

Renée Loth's column appears regularly in the Globe.

RENÉELOTH

Fewer prisoners,

lower crime

F

ormer secretary of defense Jim
Mattis has it wrong.
Or so I hope.
The general who spent two
honorable years trying to keep
things together in a dysfunctional national
administration says the country is at a
breaking point.
Until recently, it’s been easy to share
that pessimistic view, but as summer
wanes, there are promising signs that the
country has instead reached a turning
point when it comes to President Trump.
Voters are increasingly looking askance at
a president whose erraticism, divisiveness,
and tenuous tether on reality are growing
worse, not better. Not the hard-core Trump
base, mind you, on whom he retains a cult
leader’s hold. They are a distinct minority,
though.
Trump has long been underwater, poll-
ing wise, with a national majority of voters
on a wide range of matters. The one issue
keeping him politically viable has been the
economy. That’s now changing. The latest
evidence comes in a new Quinnipiac poll.
With warning lights flashing, more voters
see the economy getting worse (37 percent)
than better (31 percent). And by 41 percent
to 37 percent, they say Trump’s policies are
hurting rather than helping. That hardly
looks like an electorate receptive to
Trump’s emerging reelection message:
that, like him or not, voters must back him
if they want to keep the economic good
times rolling.
Meanwhile, the full Donald has been on
prominent display. It’s easy to shrug your
shoulders about his tantrum at Denmark
or to roll your eyes over his crazy notion of
detonating a nuclear bomb to fend off ap-

proaching hurricanes, which thankfully

seems to have encountered a containment

vessel of bureaucratic sanity.

Not so on global warming, however. At

a time when the public is waking up to the

gravity of the problem, Trump has made it

unmistakably clear that he himself won’t

take any action. He did that first by skip-

ping a G-7 meeting on the subject, with the

White House claiming, in a Mobius strip of

mendacity, that he hadn’t attended because

he was meeting with two leaders who...

were actually at the very climate forum

Trump snubbed.

Pressed at a later news conference

about whether he believed in climate

change, Trump made his indifference even

plainer, saying the United States had a “tre-

mendous wealth” of fossil fuels and that

“I’m not going to lose that wealth... on

dreams, on windmills, which frankly aren’t

working too well.”

He has also continued his muddled

message on international matters. Despite

bluffing and blustering, the president

blinked on his trade war with China, delay-

ing the tariffs his administration had an-

nounced. (Further, he took a half-step

back and sideways on his attempt to force

more nuclear and military concessions

from Iran.) Trump later maintained that all

his jawing, yawing, and seesawing on Chi-

na was merely his negotiating style. The

problem there is that both adversaries and

putative allies seem to have concluded it’s

easier to wait the president out than to fig-

ure him out. Or deal with him on his

terms.

All in all, it was quite a show, framing in

a few short days long evident maladies of

an ill-ordered mind: petulance, hare-

brained notions, myopia, and wild incon-

sistency, to name a few.

Increasingly, all that seems to be sinking

in. As several recent national polls have

shown, the top-tier Democratic candidates

all beat Trump, who is stuck in the 39 to 40

percent range, and in some cases handily.

When those Trump-trouncing Democratic

aspirants range from center-left Joe Biden

to hard-left Bernie Sanders, voters are sig-

naling they are so tired of Trump that they

are willing to accept a broad range of alter-

natives.

That’s not to say the national mood

won’t shift again. Or that Trump couldn’t

successfully draw to another Electoral Col-

lege inside straight. My view: That risk be-

comes more acute if Democrats run on im-

posing a single-payer health plan on all

Americans, whether they want it or not.

Still, as the campaign moves toward fall,

the nation clearly wants a change. And for

all the unknowns ahead, one thing can be

said with near-certainty: Trump himself

simply can’t change.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at

[email protected]. Follow him on Twitter

at @GlobeScotLehigh.

SCOTLEHIGH

A breaking point? No, a turning point

FILE 2011/JESSEY DEARING FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

An inmate at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole.

Thenationclearlywants

achangefromthis

erratic,divisive,recovery-

riskingpresident.