Bucher angling for Willie Horton help

This week Attorney General candidate Paul Bucher revealed just how scared he is to run against Kathleen Falk for Attorney General. He is so scared of a Falk race that he is reviving the ghost of Willie Horton with a new website full of scary pictures of criminals he says Kathleen Falk will release. He knows this is not true, but he is hoping that the people of Wisconsin will be foolish enough to believe it. History says they won't.

Willie Horton you may remember is a hardened criminal that was used to attack Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election. The Republicans used a scary picture of an African-American criminal in commercials to frighten them into voting against Dukakis. They used the crime that they believed would frighten the white, suburban voters the most - a minority raping a white woman.

And what crime is Bucher highlighting on his website? A rape committed by a minority. There are a few Caucasian criminals on there too but the one they highlight is based on the Bush campaign's use of Willie Horton.

It may have worked for President Bush overall, but there is something the Bucher team might want to keep in mind. It did not work in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin voted for Dukakis despite weeks of the horrible and racist ads. Ads so vile that the architect of those ads apologized for them on his death bed. They didn't vote for him because they always voted Democratic either. When they voted against Bush and his attack ads, they were coming off voting for Ronald Reagan twice, barely voting for Carter in 1976, and voting for Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

Clearly, the people of Wisconsin overall consider the candidate and then the party. In fact, Wisconsin has one of the highest split ticket voting rates in the country. That means they are willing to vote Democratic for one race on the ballot and Republican for another race on the ballot.

So what does this mean for Bucher? It means the people of Wisconsin are not going to fall for his "look at the scary criminals" trick. They know that a decade of locking up every criminal regardless of whether they are violent or not just isn't working for our state. They know because they have been paying the bill for this unsuccessful strategy.

Bucher's recycled "tough on crime" mantra is tough on taxpayers, not on crime. Wisconsin's prison population has doubled since 1995 because politicians like Bucher have failed to address crime effectively in our state. Locking up non-violent criminals is locking up too many tax dollars in our corrections system, but not producing better results. In 1993 our state spent about $278 million on the state's corrections budget. Last year, we spent over $1 billion.

We could save about $20,000 each year per prisoner if we put the non-violent offenders with substance abuse problems through a treatment program instead of jail. By some estimates, we could save as much as $43 million a year. We would also gain extra savings down the road since people going through treatment programs are a lot less likely to end up in trouble again compared to those sent to jail.

This is what Kathleen Falk has been advocating for and our state should follow her lead on this issue. Bucher doesn't have any new ideas on how to effectively deal with crime in our state so he is repeating a tired, worn-out message. The voters of Wisconsin are smarter than him and smarter than he gives them credit for with this sleazy attack designed to instill racial fear in white voters.