The scandal of grossly inflated city council and top manager salaries in Bell, Calif. — and a similar story about its neighbor Vernon, Calif. — has touched a nerve. It’s being used as the poster child for public sector excess and arrogance.

What’s missing from the outrage, though, is a focus on the underlying causes — or the real cost. We’ve always known that unchecked power is prone to abuse, whether in the private or public sector — even in sacred institutions of faith. But why was such blatant abuse allowed to bloom — and why was it so long ignored? Who really pays the price for official corruption? Most urgently of all, what sensible steps should be take to ensure it is not repeated?

Without that, we may see misguided “reforms” duck the specific solutions to the real problem. Corruption is like cancer — it comes in different forms and is best curbed with specific treatments. Arbitrary new rules aimed at “reforming” every city government would be a ridiculous over-reaction. It would only further hamstring the effectiveness of local government at a time when we need more efficiency, not less. The same goes for generic and toothless reforms that simply sound good.

Lots of causes have been pinpointed. There was a genuine failure of essentially all of the gatekeepers of public integrity. The professional managers, meant to be insulated from political corruption, were instead the source of it. The elected officials, meant to keep an eye on the administrators, co-conspired with them so everyone could participate in the plunder. The city attorney, sworn to uphold the law, signed off on its evasion. Local law enforcement was part of the game. The media, the county grand jury, the district attorney and community leaders and residents were asleep at the wheel.

There are specific, clear-cut and fixable causes for the why these gatekeepers failed — and these risk being lost in the babble and finger pointing.

Bell is one of a dozen inner ring suburbs that prospered on Southern California’s great post-war industrial boom. When others think of Los Angeles, the images evoked are beaches, palm trees, freeways and movies, with perhaps some dark urban dystopia thrown in. Forgotten is that beginning with the shipyards of World War II, the vast tract of flat land between the port and downtown became the second largest industrial concentration in the world, behind the bombed-out German Ruhr. Aerospace, tires, steel, cars, industrial tools, electronics and the other booming industries of postwar America provided opportunity and jobs to the children of the Oakies and Arkies that had streamed into California during the Depression.

Fifty years later, the big plants are closed. The white working class has moved up and on. What remains is a landscape of struggling industries and a half million largely immigrant workers in the remaining manufacturing and service industries at the heart of Southern California, divided up into a dozen municipal jurisdictions that are ripe for corruption.

Three adjacent towns illustrate the problem. Vernon is a 2.5 square mile commercial powerhouse of factories and warehouses. It has a population of just 96 residents. There are no houses or apartments to buy or rent — all the residential real estate is occupied by members of the city council or city employees and their families. It is essentially a financial printing press disguised as a municipality. It’s gusher of tax and utility revenue allows it to support a police force of 54 officers for 96 residents, while it’s next door neighbor struggles with just 38 officers for a population of 40,000. Vernon’s tax base allowed it to pay Bruce Malkenhorst Sr. the highest salary for a city manager in California. But it didn’t keep him from stealing at least another $60,000 to pay for personal massages, golf trips and lavish meals, for which he was eventually indicted. Unconvicted, to this day he collects the highest public pension in the state — more than half a million dollars a year.

On the other side of Bell is Maywood, which is virtually bereft of industry or commerce. Thirty thousand people live there. After years of scandal and political wrangling, It recently found itself in such a fiscal hole that it took the unprecedented step of firing its entire workforce, including disbanding its police force. The county sheriffs took over policing the city (and the adjacent community of Cudahy) and City Hall and other municipal functions were turned over to … Bell.

Three cities. All systematically victimized by corruption. But its not the water, its not the dark side of human nature — it’s the artificial boundaries that determine their common fate.

None of the three cities should be organized as a separate city. The only sensible solution is to consolidate them through receivership, probably as part of a larger redrawing of lines of the dozen cities in the area. New borders should reflect today’s economic and demographic realities, not arbitrary lines drawn by real estate speculators a century ago. A half a million low-income residents are systematically short-changed from getting honest, effective local government and the services it provides because they live in a patchwork of artificial “cities” that hamstring effective governance.

Receivership and re-organization are systematic solutions to the problems in Southeast Los Angeles. “Feel good” statewide legislation is just knee-jerk reaction. Yes, posting city salaries on websites is good for every town in California — or America. But it won’t fix the problem in Bell, Vernon, Maywood and the nearby communities. Having the California state legislature turn its attention from passing a budget to establishing formulas for management pay in every California town is problematic — and also won’t solve the problem in Bell, Vernon, Maywood and the nearby communities.

Tip O’Neill famously observed: “All politics is local.” In this case, the problem in Southeast Los Angeles is also local. It is not confined to a single city, but its cure lies in redrawing lines to create cities that make sense. Then the people there can have a shot at ensuring they get the government they deserve — and the shot at the American dream they strive for.

Rick Cole is City Manager of Ventura, Calif.

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It’s tough to underestimate the peril to impartial American justice that’s been highlighted in a new report on the big-time campaign money flowing into elections for justices on state supreme courts.

Total spending on the campaigns doubled in the past decade, from $83 million in the 1990s to $207 million in 2000-2009, according the report from three nonpartisan groups — the Justice at Stake Campaign, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Equally alarming, those pushing the spending — corporations on one side, trial lawyers on the other — are using shell organizations such as the American Justice Partnership and the Alabama Civil Justice Reform Committee to keep their involvement hidden.

Increasingly, the special interest groups are using questionnaires to pressure judges into signaling, during campaigns, how they’ll make courtroom decisions. And there’s been a surge of nasty and costly television ads, mimicking the ugliness that pollutes so much television political advertising today.

The situation has become so serious that recently retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a preface to the new report, counsels Americans to remember the imperative of a “fair impartial and independent” judicial system. “Partisan infighting and hardball politics,” she notes, could well “erode the essential function of our judicial system as a safe place where every citizen stands equal before the law.”

Political operative Karl Rove was an early player in pushing big-time money into judicial races, the new report indicates, noting that he acted as the “mastermind” of a political turnaround in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the Texas Supreme Court, from a Democratic body with cozy relationships with trial lawyers to an all-Republican panel that took a hard line on injury and product liability cases.

Between 2000 and 2008, business and conservative groups funding and organizing state supreme court races succeeded in shifting the makeup of previously of trial lawyer- and union-friendly supreme courts in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Key players in the effort have been top leaders of such firms as Home Depot, insurance giant AIG, Chrysler and big tobacco, plus such leading business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. One political supporter, the report notes, has been Bob Perry, the real estate magnate who financed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Campaign in the 2004 presidential election.

Trial lawyers and unions have responded by funneling money into state-level interest groups and Democratic party organizations, “gradually clawing back a little of their lost turf,” the new report indicates.

But the Supreme Court’s recent decision in “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” overruling longstanding bans on election spending from corporate and union treasuries, will loosen restraints on judicial elections and likely benefit the corporate world with its superior and immense financial resources.

We face a “perilous time for fair courts,” says Bert Brandenburg of the Justice at Stake Campaign, as special interests work to dismantle spending limits, eliminate merit selection of judges, and strive to keep campaign spending secret by assaulting disclosure laws.

The “good news,” as it were, is that the very worst abuses have been concentrated in a handful of states, especially Alabama, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Michigan and Mississippi. Polling shows strong public support for such reforms as public financing of judicial races and obliging judges to recuse themselves in cases where they have any personal stake. Judicial election reform efforts have picked up recently in North Carolina, New Mexico and West Virginia, with Wisconsin enacting public financing of state supreme court elections.

Lurking behind all this is the thorny question: Why (as 22 states do) elect judges at all? Why not nonpartisan panels or other forms of merit selection? How many of us, as voters, have any idea of the real qualifications of judges?

For that matter, what are we ordinary citizens doing electing — as we do in many states — auditors, coroners, surveyors, sheriffs, insurance commissioners, school superintendents, controllers, probate judges, tax assessors, orphans’ court judges, recorders of deeds and wills?

What were our ancestors ever thinking of when they made those posts elective? Faced by yard-long ballots for these miscellaneous posts, we mark ballots blindly or not at all.

It’s essential in our democracy to have popular elections for president, Congress, governors, mayors, city and county councils. One can even argue it’s a good idea to elect state attorneys general or secretaries of state (both good “step-up” jobs to governor).

But government functions best with a limited number of clearly accountable, top officials. And each of us wants to know that if we, or groups or causes we believe in, are in trouble with the law, that the justice meted will be objective, fair, and free of taint of monied influence. Popular election of judges undermines that most fundamental right.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

SALT LAKE CITY — In the current economic climate it is not unusual to find local governments “tightening the belt” by curtailing activities not considered essential services. All too often this can mean the slashing of planning projects and departmental staff.

There is a certain amount of logic to cuts: After all if a community isn’t growing, if there are no new developments to be reviewed, what is the point?

But — what we are seeing is that smart communities, like smart businesses, are using the laggard pace of the present economic downturn to lay the foundation for a high functioning and successful future. By engaging in highly participatory and increasingly regional-scale planning initiatives, these communities are developing the civic infrastructure necessary to succeed in the 21st century.

A prime example is the Greater Wasatch Area of Utah. It includes 10 counties and over 90 cities and towns, sandwiched between the Wasatch Mountain Range and the Great Salt Lake — a 100-plus mile linear oasis bordered by rugged mountain terrain and desert, home to over 80 percent of Utah’s residents. It was settled in the 1840′s by Mormons who conceived a plan for the area composed of one-mile square blocks with wide streets and interconnected villages limited to no more than 20,000 residents. These ideas were later implemented by Brigham Young, creating the pattern of development that today dominates Salt Lake City and its environs.

In the late 1980s, a group of concerned civic leaders coalesced around the issues of environmental protection, economic development, and maintenance of quality of life. This group, the Coalition for Utah’s Future, would later forge the foundation for the organization known today as Envision Utah. Created in 1997, it brought together key public and private stakeholders to help to overcome the jurisdictional fragmentation and “bunker mentality” held among units of local government. A key element: giving local residents, by the power of scenarios and choice, the ability to shape planning and growth management issues within the region.

Envision Utah’s first chairman was Robert Grow, a local business leader with strong collaborative leader skills. He explains:

“The Envision Utah Approach has become a way of life in Utah with its special blend of discovering and seeking to satisfy community values in all our planning and visioning, using scenarios of the future to show the public and officials the consequences of our collective choices, and leading change with diverse and trusted stakeholders and champions. This approach to problem solving and focusing precious civic and financial resources on highly leveraged strategies to preserve and enhance Utah’s quality of life is finding great acceptance as the best way to meet the challenges of tomorrow.”

Indeed, with regional population projected to grow from 1.7 million to roughly 2.7 million by 2020 and to 5 million by 2050, there will be plenty of challenges in the years ahead.

Today, Envision Utah continues its work to forge regional agreement over projects such as Blueprint Jordan River, a corridor plan spanning three counties and 15 cities. It has been instrumental in working with the Utah Transit Authority, the region’s two metropolitan planning organizations, and numerous cities to plan and develop an extensive system of light rail and bus rapid transit including incentives for transit oriented development efforts along the routes.

Most critically, the now tried and true Envision Utah “model” of fostering stakeholder involvement around scenario development and evaluation has helped to build a capacity for civic engagement that enables further community planning initiatives. “Envision Utah struck a chord when they recognized that many people cared about what they were leaving behind for their children”, says Brenda Scheer, Dean of the College of Architecture & Planning at the University of Utah. “The magic of Envision Utah is that everybody collaborates for common good, even though we may disagree on methods.”

But having a 13-year history with a unique organization such as Envision Utah is just part of the story. Today in the region, there is a palpable buzz in the air when it comes to planning.

For example, the University of Utah has recently attracted two of the planning profession’s “rock stars”, Reid Ewing and Arthur “Chris” Nelson, helping to build the reputation and influence of the university’s Department of City & Metropolitan Planning. As noted authors, researchers, and advisors to numerous governmental agencies, Ewing and Nelson present formidable intellectual and academic horsepower. “The university has a strong capacity for interdisciplinary work — energy, environmental, water — and we are building this in an environment of holistic thinking,” says Michael K. Young, President of the University. “We’re really knee deep into it now,” he adds.

Planning has also become part of Salt Lake City’s way of life. Ralph Becker, elected mayor in 2007, is a trained city planner. He and his staff have taken an aggressive approach to aligning public policy with sustainability. As evidence Becker cites a multi-modal transportation system, mixed and denser land-use policies, and a recognition that shifting times require strong government-business-neighborhood partnerships. The city has taken on such issues as zoning codes that accommodate solar and wind energy devices, and creating incentives for compact and mixed-use development.

The net result: a vibrancy that is lacking in so many other regions of our nation today. As a practicing professional planner, I’ve found it refreshing to visit a region that is so intently focused on moving forward with high value placed on the quality of civic engagement, and with leaders so committed to to the value of place — and collaborative decision making. In the words of Alan Matheson, executive director of Envision Utah: “There is a growing willingness to collaborate — among agencies, jurisdictions, organizations. Broad participation and collaboration are now the default mode for making significant regional decisions.”

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America’s public libraries, fast turning themselves into “one-stop shops” for digital job searches, appear to be staging one of their great historic transformations.

Responding to a rush of recession-time visitors, 88 percent of our libraries now offer access to job databases. And at least two-thirds of library staffs are helping applicants complete online job applications, according to a national survey by the American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As for access to free wireless services, 82 percent of libraries now provide it — up from just 37 percent four years ago. In two-thirds of cases, the libraries are the only source of free Internet service in their communities.

What’s amazing is that many libraries are able to maintain the bulk of their services and adapt to growing needs during a recession, even in the face of snowballing funding cuts by their local governments. More than 55 percent of urban libraries are reporting budget cuts, and a quarter have felt obliged to cut hours or close branches. Fifteen percent of libraries reduced their hours of operation in 2009 — three times the number reported in 2008. And 50 percent report they have insufficient staff to met their patrons’ job-seeking needs.

But they’re not taking it quietly. In Indianapolis, neighborhoods around the branches facing possible closure became very active, holding read-ins, marches and letter-writing campaigns. In Camden, N.J., one of America’s poorest cities, a fierce public outcry has followed the threat to close the entire library system.

And when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed 37 percent cuts to his city’s library budgets, advocates argued it would be the first time in the system’s 138-year history that libraries would be open just five days a week. And they came up with a strong productivity argument. In 1978, when there were 61 L.A. libraries (there are now 72), 1,459 staff librarians served 6 million visitors. Under Villaraigosa’s budget, they noted, there’d only be 848 staff slots — to serve 18 million visitors.

The silver lining for communities, note library sources, is that threats of actual branch closures create such a strong pushback that most communities compromise with cuts that go no further than constriction in staff or branches.

The reality, says Audra Caplan, director of the Harford County (Md.) Public Library and president of the Public Library Association, is that the role of public libraries has changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. And computers and job-search assistance, while highly significant, aren’t the whole story.

“We’ve turned ourselves into community centers,” notes Caplan. “We have meeting rooms that get booked by community agencies, chess clubs, any not-for-profit. We bring in authors, we sponsor civic engagement-type programs. And we’re attracting a larger share of the population — even teens, or parents with toddlers.”

So what about serious research? “It’s still healthy,” Caplan insists. She acknowledges Google and Wikipedia are popular on the available computers. But libraries also subscribe to specialized and sometimes costly subscription databases — business, legal, health and other — and electronically extend the access to even their smallest branches. As for books (remember them!), libraries’ per capita circulation has increased roughly 20 percent over the last decade.

And in a sense the libraries are as varied as America. Many provide specialized services, including translation and English instruction, to America’s large populations of new immigrants. Some let patrons check out not just books but fishing poles, backpacks and garden tools.

And central libraries, notes Robert McNulty of Partners for Livable Communities, can be “the great good place in the city” — as a literacy, Internet and special film center, or as a place for lectures, for local performing arts and exhibitions. Or as a coffee house. Or as an information center for visiting tourists, or a safe place for kids.

Andrew Carnegie’s original idea in founding his string of free public libraries, McNulty notes, was that they’d be gathering places for young people — that once drawn there, they’d learn to read. So Carnegie built a boxing gymnasium into one of his Pittsburgh libraries, a swimming pool into another.

But right now, it’s computer access that leads the library parade. “Beginning computer skills are especially important for dislocated workers,” says Brian Clark of the Nashville (Tenn.) Career Advancement Center. “Having computer skills” he suggests, “won’t necessarily get a person a job. But it means the door won’t be slammed in their face” — in other words, before they can even state their case.

Opening doors? It’s true that funds saved or restored to libraries may mean deeper, sometimes very painful cuts in other parts of city and county budgets.

But what’s more American than open doors? Seen that way, libraries have been enablers of generations of Americans’ dreams. And with a little luck, they’ll help pull us out of our current economic morass too.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

As the son of a geography teacher, who spent endless hours of my youth poring over maps, I’ve always been fascinated with border lines. As a kid I imagined that crossing from, say, Nevada into California, would offer an immediate change of scenery from desert to Redwood trees.

I later discovered that off the map, the world is not so dramatic. At least that’s what I thought until recently when I visited Detroit with a team of seasoned urban observers from the Citistates Group. We were meeting with the Kresge Foundation about its ambitious plans for revitalizing the city, and two Kresge program officers — Wendy Jackson and Benjamin Kennedy — graciously offered to give us a tour. Despite big hopes for the Detroit, the two of them — who both live right in the city — did not spare us the sight of utterly devastated neighborhoods where most of the houses and people are long gone.

Stretches of Detroit look like an urban ghost town, with only two or three houses remaining on a block. But we also saw neighborhoods alive with people and well-kept businesses or homes: downtown, the midtown area around Wayne State University, the Indian Village historic district, Northwest Detroit, Lafayette Park and others.

What really astonished us was the city line between Detroit and the adjoining town of Grosse Pointe Park, where America’s poster child for urban decline runs directly up against a suburb whose name has long been synonymous with wealth.

Along Kercheval Street, as you approach from the Detroit side, the last structure is a St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop that collects cast-off household goods and clothes for poor families. It’s reminiscent of so many of the streets of today’s Detroit, gap-toothed scenes with rundown remnants of elegant homes and apartment buildings looking marooned in a tide of vacant lots.

But there’s the line — not to be missed, as the sidewalk turns from scruffy concrete to picturesque brick, accompanied by a soothing row of locust trees. And cheek-by-jowl with the thrift store, the Grosse Pointe side offers an antiquarian bookshop that looks straight out of London with displays of leather-bound classics in its windows

This kind of city-suburban divide raises disturbing questions, not only about urban decline but also about our shrinking sense of the common good. Through years of travel, the only comparable experience was crossing from East to West Berlin in the days before Germany reunited. But the Detroit-Grosse Pointe boundary poses an even more stark contrast between deprivation and prosperity — all within the boundaries of the same nation.

One wonders how much longer one would wait for an ambulance or police car to answer a 911 call in Detroit. What are the schools like in suburban Grosse Pointe compared to the city? Matters of life and death, your children’s hope for the future or their despair, can depend upon on which side of the line you live.

A society dedicated to the common good — to the ideal of the commons — would not accept such disparities with a simple shrug. The whole region would share public services and social responsibilities. No community would be allowed to sink so deep into devastation — no matter how profound its problems.

In Copenhagen, for instance, the wealthy northern suburbs long supported revitalization efforts in the inner city through tax revenues. Now that the central city is thriving — a remarkable comeback that’s being emulated in other metropolitan regions around the world — it’s now urban dwellers’ turn to help revive the region’s poorer suburbs.

Even in the U.S., this kind of tax sharing goes on across city lines. In the Twin Cities, each of the 180 local municipalities contributes a portion of its commercial-industrial property tax revenues — 37 percent on average across the region, amounting to $424 million this year. The fund are then apportioned to communities on the basis of financial need. The center cities and lower income suburbs in Twin Cities region draw on these funds to bolster schools and public services, which explains why you don’t see any shocking differences passing from a blue-collar community to an upscale one.

These kind of policies acknowledge the obvious fact that a metropolitan area is a single organism — and municipal boundaries are mere abstractions, arbitrary lines sketched on a piece of paper. But in the current anti-tax, anti-commons political climate, when the idea of the common good can’t be heard above the shouting, regionalist policies like those found in Copenhagen or even the Twin Cities are not going to be enacted any time soon. That’s where the Kresge Foundation comes in.

Kresge, based in suburban Troy, along with a number of other foundations in the Detroit region and around the country, is dedicated to helping revive the city through an initiative called Re-imagining Detroit 2020. The ambitious goals include improvements for public schools, major sustainability initiatives, cultural programs, a light rail line along the city’s spine (Woodward Avenue), and local business development. The thrust of this effort is the conviction that Detroit is not a basket case, even if it has sometimes suffered corrupt and inept political leadership. It’s still vital community, even if it is caught up in a complicated tangle of economic disinvestment, racial mistrust, crime concerns and overdependence on automobiles.

And it’s important to note that inner-city residents will not be the only beneficiaries if Re-imagining Detroit’s plans bear fruit. No metropolitan area can thrive with a withering city at its core. Even before the near-collapse of the auto industry in 2008, the Detroit area — studded with wealthy suburbs that are worlds apart from the problems of the inner city — was not keeping pace economically with other regions where the central cities were prospering.

On two recent visits I’ve seen evidence that Detroit’s famously feisty residents have not given up on their hometown. Some neighborhoods show signs of reversing urban blight, largely through the indomitable spirit of entrepreneurs and grassroots organizations — sources of positive energy that Kresge and other foundations want to join forces with to revive the city.

I see credible signs of hope that some day in the not-too-distant future strolling from Detroit into Grosse Pointe Park will be no more eventful than traveling from Kansas to Nebraska.

Jay Walljasper, author of The Great Neighborhood Book and the forthcoming All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, is an associate of the Citistates Group, Contributing Editor of National Geographic Traveler and Fellow of On The Commons. This is expanded from a blog for OnTheCommons.org. His website: JayWalljasper.com.

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The rest of the world is starting to notice the United States’ incarceration follies.

Case in point: “Why America locks up so many people,” the cover story of the British-based Economist magazine, showing the face of a forlorn Statue of Liberty behind bars.

The grim statistics noted: some 2.3 million people, more than the population of 15 of our states, are now incarcerated — one in 100 Americans. That’s quadruple our 1970 imprisonment rate. For hard-to-defend reasons, and at staggering fiscal cost, we incarcerate people at a rate five times Great Britain’s, nine times Germany’s, 12 times Japan’s.

Congress is on the brink of our first national reassessment in many decades. Sen. James Webb of Virginia is proposing a National Criminal Justice Commission instructed to take an 18-month, stem-to-stern look at the system, its shortcomings and alternatives. The bill recently passed the House without opposition; now the question is whether the Senate (where the measure has a 38 cosponsors) can avoid a procedural objection by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and bring it to a vote.

The Economist notes that along with truly dangerous serial rapists and murderers, as well as Bernie Madoff-like white collar criminals we want to punish severely, the United States incarcerates astounding numbers of low-level blue and white collar offenders.

Among them are street-level drug dealers (generally quickly replaced), people accused of such violations as embezzling, driving without an operator’s license or transgressing environmental laws. In addition to voluminous state laws, there are some 4,000 federally-defined offenses backed up by thousands more regulations — many virtually impossible for any layman to comprehend.

The Economist tells the story of George Norris, a 65-year old Texan who imported orchids. He was suddenly accosted in his home by armed police in flak jackets, frisked, held incommunicado for four hours as officers ransacked his home, and eventually charged with smuggling flowers into America, a violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Norris, who believed himself innocent though he admitted some of his Latin American flower suppliers might have been sloppy in their paperwork, had never made more than $20,000 a year in his importing business. But he was thrown into prison with suspected murderers and drug dealers, accused of being the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring, ultimately sentenced to 17 months — and then, despite his condition with Parkinson’s disease, put in solitary confinement for 71 days for bringing prescription sleeping pills with him to prison.

The tough question raised by the Norris case and others likes it: are some prosecutors going overboard, using their extraordinary powers beyond clear justice requirements? Under threat from prosecutors, it’s claimed, even defendants who are convinced they’re innocent may enter guilty pleas to shorten their potential sentences. Example: a prosecutor might threaten a middle-aged man that he’ll receive such a long sentence he’ll likely will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss.

And then there’s the incarceration youth-aging syndrome. Americans seem anxious to get their youthful violent offenders behind bars, and it’s happening (with especially huge numbers among minorities). But in reality, there are few muggers over 30.

Why long sentences when classic penology says swift and certain punishment is what works? We already have over 200,000 prisoners over 50, often in failing health (with vast medical costs). Yet if released, they’re unlikely to offend again. When imprisonment costs vary from Mississippi’s $18,000 a year to roughly $50,000 in California, when schools and critical social services are being cut to the bone, do long sentences into middle- and late-age serve the public interest?

Webb acknowledges that when he started discussions on today’s criminal system, “we heard a lot of unease, particularly from law enforcement’s side.” But he then met with over 100 organizations, explaining the need and balance of his commission proposal — to include every relevant issue from arrest, prosecution, incarceration and prison administration to prisoner reentry. Now, he claims, the idea of his proposed commission has been “scrubbed through the entire philosophical spectrum with great support,” ranging from the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union to leading national police officers’ groups.

There’s emerging evidence, developed by such organizations as the Pew Center for the States and the Vera Institute of Justice, that we’ve reached a point of diminishing if any public safety returns from cascading levels of imprisonment. Some states — even toughly conservative South Carolina and Mississippi — have begun to reform their practices, reduce incarceration, without impairing public safety. A typical measure: make non-violent drug offenders eligible for parole or probation instead of incarceration.

Reform’s potential net effect? Saving billions of public dollars, for sure. But also fewer deeply disrupted families, fewer deeply embittered ex-cons, and fewer communities impacted by high percentages of their youth imprisoned. And fewer, as the Economist puts it, decades-long sentences “watching hairs go white, and lifetimes ebb away.”

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.