The Specter initiative.

• Author: Gourley, Jay
• Position: Arlen Specter - Scams, Hustles, and Boondoggles

The Specter Initiative

It was a $48 million government initiative. Its chief proponent in Congress wanted to demonstrate once and for all that, despite the dismal record of America's prison systems, criminals in fact could be rehabilitated. The money--all of it--went to the District of Columbia. That much we know. Exactly where it ended up is a mystery, the ending yet to be written by the United States Justice Department.

The story begins in 1983 with Senator Arlen Specter. The Pennsylvania Republican wanted to spend $100 billion to rehabilitate salvageable lives now lost in America's prisons. One hundred billion dollars is an enormous sum. It's five times what NASA spent over the 10 years of the Apollo program that took man to the moon. It's equal to the budget of a government agency called the United States Air Force. So Specter's idea was not easy to sell in 1983, while Reagan and the Congress were liquidating national assets to minimize already record deficits. But Specter seemed determined to have his way. And as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, which helps control the District's large federal payment, he had the clout to make a start.

What could make a Republican senator (and a former district attorney to boot) want to spend $100 billion on the kind of crime measure usually preceded by the word "coddling?" Bold programs tend to attract the kind of publicity to which Specter's career has demonstrated he is not averse. A graduate of Yale law school, the former prosecutor from Philadelphia had served for eight years until voters turned him out in 1974. But he had learned to enjoy public life, and in the years that followed he sought statewide office three times before winning a United States Senate seat in 1980. Specter's first chairmanship was the Juvenile Justice subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. From that perch, he held hearings on, of all things, Joseph Mengele, Hitler's so-called "Angel of Death." His hearings entitled, "Pornography and its Effect on Women and Children," which ran from August to November of 1984, brought porn stars to the Senate and headlines to Specter.

Whatever the motives for Specter's ideas on rehabilitation, his aide on the Appropriations Committee, Tim Leeth, tried to make them a reality. Leeth says he doesn't remember, but the General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that in July 1983 he placed a call to the D.C. Department of Corrections (DCDC). He spoke to William D. Golightly, a career administrator at DCDC, then in charge of Administrative Services. The GAO says Leeth raised the possibility of a special appropriation for prison education.

Golightly called back a few weeks later to say that DCDC did in fact need an extra $750,000 for that purpose. Leeth said that the Appropriations Committee was considering a much larger sum. Golightly called back to say the department had reexamined its requirements, and--whaddya know?--discovered it could use $8 million to "substantially expand" its prison education program.

But Golightly and others at DCDC were not ready for what came next: A few weeks later, Specter dwarfed DCDC's wildest dreams by reporting out an appropriation of $22 million with a promise of more to come--$48 million in all--for teachers, classrooms, books, equipment, and job placement counselors. By November 1983, with only four months to plan, the spigot opened and the unexpected money began to flow into a bureaucracy woefully incapable of handling it.

Two years later, in 1985, Specter explained his actions:

"I have urged, as you know, that there be a national commitment for $10 billion a year for 10 years to deal with this problem of violent crime....As chairman of this subcommittee, I have tried to add funds to Washington, D.C., which, on a pro-rata basis, would be the equivalent of that kind of a massive federal attack, and if we are able to show success here...we can show a track record on results."

Like most of what we know about the program, the quote is from a document, in this case the transcript of a three-year-old subcommittee hearing. Nowadays, the senator uncharacteristically shies away from interviews on this subject. So do several key participants in the program. Why? Perhaps because the hopeful program that proudly came to bear his name, the "Specter Initiative," produced a "track record" of little more than waste and incompetence, providing a classic illustration of how a bureaucracy responds when Congress tries to get it to do too much too fast.

Tumbling down

Of the $48 million, $12 million went to the D.C. Department of Public Works (DPW) to build seven new prison school buildings by October 1985. None were finished on time, three were finished late, and to this day four are not finished at all.

According to a report by the GAO, the project ground to a halt when the new foundations didn't match the architectural plans. DPW had originally planned to pay the architects to oversee the construction, then it decided to supervise the construction itself. That might have saved the taxpayers the $45,000 originally allotted for the supervision. However, the one full-time city inspector assigned to the seven projects, reports the GAO, was absent when much of the work was done. The contractor who laid the foundations tried to correct the problem at one site by laying a good foundation on top of the bad one. But the combined weight was too great for the soil, and the whole mess had to be pulverized and hauled away.

More than three years after the original design contracts were awarded, DPW had spent more than half of its $12 million for...