I am demanding more bang for our buck. On Tuesday, New York City agreed to pay $10 million to settle the wrongful conviction suit filed by Jabbar Collins. The deal with Collins, who spent 15 years in prison for the 1994 murder of a Brooklyn rabbi, is the Big Apple’s third multi-million dollar mea culpa this year: The City has struck similar deals with the Central Park five ($40 million) and wrongful murder-convictee David Ranta ($6.4 million). With a series of such exonerations forcing open governmental pocketbooks of late – Connecticut’s included – perhaps we are ready, at last, to shift our focus from a pound of cure to a pinch of prevention.
The definition of insanity, Einstein supposedly quipped, is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. By that standard, our nation’s criminal justice strategy belongs in Bellevue. We have spent the past four decades locking up millions and spending hundreds of billions – mostly casualties of our failed war on drugs – because we stubbornly believed that mass incarceration was the answer to crime. And it now seems likely that we will shell out hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars to compensate the innocents whom we locked up alongside the guilty.