Why hasn’t the Dukakis campaign accepted author Robert James Bidinotto’s challenge to debate the controversial Massachusetts program of giving furloughs to murderers who had been sentenced to life-without-parole? The media have been urging us to deal with the real issues in this presidential campaign, and this is not only a real issue, but one of the most important.
Why has there been so much comment about one-liners and remarks of minor importance by Bush and Dukakis during their first TB debate, but little or no comment about the most embarrassing moment of those 90 minutes on national television? That was when the audience laughed out loud at Michael Dukakis’s assertion that he is “very tough on violent crime.” The audience instinctively knew that claim was false.
The liberal mindset is that every criminal can be rehabilitated, that all convicted criminals should eventually be released from prison, and that their innocent victims are simply acceptable losses in a liberal social program to integrate hardened killers back into society. The American people should take a good look at this peculiar liberal illusion and consider how dangerous it would be to have a doctrinaire liberal in the White House.
The Dukakis furlough program has been a festering issue in Massachusetts for years, but it broke into the national consciousness with an article in the July 1988 Reader’s Digest called “Getting Away With Murder” by the award-winning writer Robert James Bidinotto. His investigation revealed that Michael Dukakis is an enthusiastic supporter of the program to release killers whom juries never meant to be let out of prison under any circumstances, and who would have been given the death penalty in states that allow it.
Since Governor Dukakis vetoed the death penalty for Massachusetts, “life with no possibility of parole” was the toughest sentence that could be given in that state. Yet, under Dukakis, the policy was followed that all prisoners would be scheduled eventually for commutation of their sentence by the Governor, and unsupervised weekend passes were routinely issued after a few years.
While he was Governor, Dukakis gave unsupervised furloughs to hundreds of convicted murderers sentenced to life-without-parole. Of these, eleven escaped while on furlough, including the now-famous Willie Horton who terrorized a Maryland couple and is now locked up for good in that state.
Although the Massachusetts furlough program has been the subject of media coverage on the CBS-TV Evening News, Fox Broadcasting, and the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Bidinotto contends that the media are being “conned by doctored statistics about escaping prisoners, false statements, and deceptive comparisons with other furlough programs” put out by Dukakis’s supporters.
Bidinotto’s 50-state survey concluded that Massachusetts was the only state whose prison system granted routine weekend passes to murderers sentenced to “life with no possibility of parole.” Dukakis defended that unique policy in the face of overwhelming public opposition and finally allowed it to be stopped only after a successful petition drive had placed the issue on the ballot in the November 1988 election.
Bidinotto contends that this is a much bigger issue that has been realized, and that the real focus should be on the victims of the furlough policy. “Many furloughed killers have gone on to commit other terrible crimes,” Bidinotto says. “Somebody has to speak out on behalf of the victims of this indefensible policy.”
The winner of the 1985 Mencken Award for Best Feature Story, Bidinotto spent seven months investigating the Massachusetts furlough system. He is a registered Independent voter in Pennsylvania who bristles at charges of partisan motives.
He says that such charges are simply attempts to muddy the water. “The real issue,” he says, “is whether or not innocent citizens should be sacrificed like guinea pigs in a loony liberal experiment to let convicted killers out in society.”
Bidinotto issued his debate challenge in a series of recent public speeches and media appearances. Dukakis himself, or his campaign surrogates, should answer Bidinotto’s charges. Otherwise, we are left to conclude that everything Bidinotto says is accurate.
The furlough issue is crucial to the 1988 presidential campaign because it exposes the fraud of the liberals’ claim that they are “compassionate.” The furlough issue makes it clear that liberals are, indeed, compassionate about killers and rapists, but are implacably heartless about their victims.
