Daily News of Los Angeles, Sunday, May 1, 1994

There's something really screwy about this country these days. We used to be the can-do society - practical, brimming with common sense, able to look past ideology to boldly do whatever needed to be done. But starting in the '60s, we've gradually become the can't-do society. If it works, we can't do it - a bureaucrat will torpedo it; a politician will object; a judge will say it's discriminatory; and the American Civil Liberties Union will file suit.

Consider the coyote trapping ban. There are people in this town who will pack public hearings and burst into tears at the idea of trapping renegade coyotes who invade patios and back yards. And if you point out that these coyotes aren't just out taking in the night air - they're eating cats, dogs and (on occasion) small children - their defenders smugly answer that it's our own fault for not knowing how to live with wild animals: "The coyotes were here first."

Well, forget that. Mosquitoes, flies, rattlesnakes and skunks were here first, too. Does that mean we also have to live with them? It's not as if coyotes are some rare, delicate endangered species. They're the roaches of the canine family -- tough, wily, bold.

If anyone thinks we're in danger of wiping out the coyote gene pool, he can sleep easy tonight -- coyotes are so adaptable that I've seen them casually walking across four lanes of traffic in Silver Lake in broad daylight. At night, they come down from the hills above the freeway to the dead end just up the street to yip and howl in the moonlight. In the last 12 years, we've lost half-a-dozen cats to coyotes. They eat them like hors d'oeuvres. One of our current cats has a 3-inch stub for a tail, thanks to coyotes.

I'm not saying we blast every coyote in sight but I don't see any reason either to grant them more rights than we do to ourselves. We currently have the right to shoot human intruders who threaten our family. Why anyone would think we don't have a comparable right to shoot threatening coyotes is totally beyond me, unless people are against shooting because they know it works -- and in certain circles people just aren't used to that.

I'll tell you another thing that's effective, too -- expelling kids who bring guns to class. Up until two high school students were shot in Los Angeles classrooms early last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District rarely expelled anyone. Then when the public outrage at the killings forced the school board to (reluctantly) start expelling gun-toting street toughs, the ACLU charged that mandatory expulsions was "academic capital punishment," a violation of due process and a form of racial bigotry -- "black students account for 15 percent of the LAUSD high school enrollment, but 33 percent of the expulsions . . . Race bias in expulsions must be eliminated."

No wonder our schools are so screwed up. The ACLU thinks that if you expel a black kid for carrying a gun, the problem is that you're a bigot, and not the fact that some gang member was packing.

Or consider the folks who harp on the need for gun control. They complain about guns in the streets, guns in the home, guns in the hands of members of the National Rifle Association. But when it comes to guns in school, all of a sudden they're the soul of moderation -- kids who carry guns aren't thugs; they're disadvantaged sweethearts who never had a chance; we shouldn't so much be punishing them as finding a way to save them (besides, as school board member Jackie Goldberg once announced during a meeting, some kids need guns to "protect" themselves from gang members).

Ms. Goldberg, I got a flash for you. A kid who brings a gun to school is a gang member. And what's all this misplaced concern for keeping gang members in the classroom? Even when he leaves his guns at home a gang member is still a thug, forever acting tough, intimidating other students (not to mention the teacher) and making it impossible for any learning to take place.

When you allow a gang member to talk his talk and walk his walk in the classroom, the academic atmosphere doesn't just deteriorate -- it spirals down a rathole. And yet who does the school board spend more time fretting about? -- not good kids who go to school to learn but semi-literate street toughs who go to intimidate.

Our natural preference for solutions that don't work showed itself again in the opposition of the intellectual elite to the caning of Michael Peter Fay, the spoiled American teen-ager who went on a spray-painting expedition in Singapore and ended up with his ass in a sling.

Jerome Skolnick, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor who recently wrote on the subject in the Los Angeles Times, took the position that caning is brutal, ineffective and racially inflammatory -- most of the people caned will be "disproportionately young, male and black and possibly Latino. Aren't racial tensions in this country high enough as it is?"

This is one defense of criminality I hadn't heard of yet -- we can't use effective punishment on minority offenders because it might make them mad.

Well, guess what, Professor Skolnick? People are already mad -- they're mad at gang members who spray the walls with graffiti, hijack cars, shoot people in the streets and then spend at most a year or two in prison where they eat good food, exercise regularly and get to hang out with all their friends. Caning at least would be an embarrassment, a humiliation and a little corporal terror directed at people who spend their lives terrorizing everyone else. I have often thought the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments has been misinterpreted by our courts to mean we can't use unusually effective punishments either. How often do we hear stories about convicted rapists getting out of jail one day and then turning right around and pulling the same stunt all over again? Jail isn't a deterrent to these guys. It's less a punishment than a tour of duty with your buddies, like having your unit activated in the National Guard.

If we really want to cut crimes like rape, what we ought to do is try humiliating the offender on top of everything else. Putting people in stocks wasn't considered cruel and unusual in early New England. Well, perhaps we can learn something from our ancestors.

The next time someone is convicted of rape, what we ought to do is put him in stocks on a flat-bed truck and ride him around the town naked so people can tell him what they think of him. And when it finally dawns on him that people consider him a worthless thug, then we cart him off to jail to contemplate the issue for the next dozen years.

As to the notion that public nudity wouldn't be an effective punishment, I cite an example given by the historian Will Durant. He said that once in ancient Greece, young women began killing themselves in a rash of copycat suicides. The solution to the problem was simple. The city elders decreed that any woman who killed herself would be carried naked through the marketplace on the way to the cemetery. And the suicide fad disappeared overnight.

No one is advocating a return to cruel and unusual punishments, but a return to an unusual and embarrassing punishments might not be a bad idea.