The One That Got Away

By Jacob V. Lamar

Willie Horton was supposed to be serving time for murder in Massachusetts in April 1986 when he invaded a home in Oxon Hill, Md., raped a woman and stabbed her companion. Horton had not broken out of prison. He had walked away from it ten months earlier while on a weekend furlough, an experiment that has been a cornerstone of Governor Michael Dukakis' criminal-justice program.

Now the Horton case is being used to paint Dukakis with that most damaging ) liberal stereotype: soft on crime. George Bush has taken to citing his differences with the Governor by saying, "I don't like the idea of letting murderers out of jail." One G.O.P. strategist has proposed a bumper sticker reading, DUKAKIS TO RAPIST: HAVE A NICE WEEKEND.

Responding to public outrage over the Horton incident, Dukakis signed a new law last April banning furloughs for first-degree murderers. Explaining his turnaround, Dukakis said simply, "I try to listen, I try to learn." But the Governor still becomes testy when confronted with the question. During a debate in San Francisco, conservative Journalist John McLaughlin charged that Massachusetts' program allowed convicts to commit more violent crimes. "That's not true," Dukakis exclaimed. "That happened on one occasion."

Although Dukakis was considered too liberal on crime during his first term, he has worked hard to reverse that image. In the past four years, the violent- crime rate in Massachusetts has dropped 13.4% while the national rate has risen 1.8%. Today the state has the lowest homicide rate of any major industrial state in the country. In 1983 Dukakis formed a special anticrime task council, and he has chaired every one of the group's 58 meetings. "His record against crime now can't be disputed," says Ned Merrick, legislative representative of the state's police association. "It's too good."

Yet the furlough furor threatens to overshadow these impressive achievements. Massachusetts is among 45 states that allow prison leaves. Last fall state legislators published a report lambasting the supervision of the program by the Dukakis administration. Authorities had not properly screened Horton before his leaves, investigators found, and they did not keep thorough records of his behavior in the prison.

Defenders of furlough programs point out that weekend leaves offer relief at a time when prisons around the country are dangerously overcrowded. Behavior during furloughs can help determine how an inmate up for parole might function in society. According to John Larivee, executive director of Boston's Crime and Justice Foundation, the recidivism rate since 1972 has been just 10% for prisoners paroled after taking part in such a program. Among other prisoners, it was 25%.

Moreover, there were only 426 escapees among the 117,786 furloughs during the same period, and Horton's escape was the first among first-degree murderers from the program in nearly five years. "The failure was not the program," says Massachusetts Corrections Commissioner Michael Fair. "Willie Horton was the failure. Our evidence is the program was successful."

With reporting by Robert Ajemian/Boston and Michael Riley with Dukakis