Time for tough-on-crime lawmakers to pay the piper

The chickens hatched during the General Assembly's crime-fighting spree of the 1990s have come home to roost. If you listen closely, you can hear them calling "cheap, cheap, cheap."

Back when lawmakers were adopting mandatory minimum sentences, the state was running annual budget surpluses of hundreds of millions of dollars. That made it easy to ignore warnings about the eventual fiscal consequences of their decisions.

Now, in the cash-strapped 2000s, the dire predictions have started to come true. Remember last year's embarrassment of Delaware's chief justice begging for more operating money for the state's vaunted court system? It seems like a quaint oversight compared with conditions that erupted in the last few days.

The epidemic of "blue flu" running through the Wilmington Police Department has its roots in the city's precarious financial condition. The union has gone three years without a new contract, but the state seems minimally concerned. Mayor Jim Baker can't even accept New Castle County's offer of $10 million for raises because they'd be unsustainable once that money ran out.

Even worse was Monday's incident at Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna, in which a female counselor was assaulted and taken hostage before her attacker was killed. Allan J. Deal, the head of the state prison guards' union, is laying blame on lawmakers who have failed for years to deal with staffing shortages in the corrections system.

Delaware's 2,500-bed prison expansion, completed in 2002, worsened an existing problem - the state's pay scale is lower than any surrounding state's, making it difficult to retain experienced guards. Chronic short-staffing has led to widespread use of mandatory overtime, adding to the stress of an already grueling job.

As a result, the union said, 79 correction officers quit during the first four months of 2004.

Prison officials and the governor's office are trying to downplay any role short-staffing might have played in the incident. Corrections chief Stan Taylor said "staffing was not an issue," because the unit where the attack took place was "only" one officer short.

That won't wash. If the unit could do without one officer, the staffing level would long ago have been reduced. The response itself indicates that officials have become so accustomed to the situation they no longer recognize it as a problem.

Deal, naturally, has had few kind words for the lawmakers whose stinginess has made the job so much harder for his union's members. While he pleaded in vain for higher pay, some of the General Assembly's toughest-talking crime fighters instead spent their political capital lobbying for $100 million in tax cuts.

As Deal acidly noted to reporters, "You don't have money ... but then you buy a golf course and a marina." Prison guards, meanwhile, had to settle for a hike in hazard pay, with no thought given to spending enough to reduce the hazards.

There is another possible solution to the staffing problems: reduce the number of inmates by undoing some of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws. But that option would require a level of political courage rarely exhibited in Dover - especially by a bunch of legislators who pretend to be roosters but act like hens, clucking their war cry: Cheap, cheap, cheap.