Hearsay

“McGlynn has cash advantage in 5th District race” – a Chicago Daily Law Bulletin headline that says it all – once again typifies news media coverage of judicial elections.

And once more, the focus on who raises the most money, rather than who is the most qualified candidate, will generate renewed interest in the possibility of creating a better means of acquiring an independent judiciary.

In another version, “Judicial finances disclosed: Top contributors named in Madison, St. Clair Counties,” the Belleville News-Democrat envisions “Campaign workers hunched over their adding machines” at the deadline for filing financial disclosures.

Reporters and editors love this biennial exercise. One doesn't often see good news about elected officials and political candidates because the things that make news are the aberrations, deviations and eccentricities. Normality and propriety seem humdrum.

Judicial candidates are relative models of propriety, in the main, due partly to the canons but also to the semblance of integrity that each hopes to bring to the austerity of the bench.

An appointive system could be better, but that concept is not likely ever to be endorsed by the folks in Springfield who owe their livelihoods to political campaigns. Talk is cheap, but power costs money.

The eruption of brimstone and blather in the incessant television ads peaked over Halloween weekend, surged past All Saints Day, and didn't subside until the polls closed. Most candidates concentrated on the shortcomings of opponents; few squandered funds on personal qualifications.

Chicago's major metropolitan dailies studiously pondered the merits and demerits of two candidates for the state's highest office. An eager electorate awaited any pronouncement that one was of higher caliber than the other.

The Tribune endorsed the incumbent governor, but the Sun-Times opted for his challenger. The decisions were based ostensibly on which would be less worse. One might as well have flipped a wooden nickel.

Letters to the editors indicated a growing preference for that elusive fellow of Celtic persuasion, “Nunn O'Them.” That seems to have been the choice a majority of the registered voters in Illinois last week.

If all the analysts of low voter turnout were to congregate, would even one be likely to suggest a merit-based system for filling the seats in all three branches of government?

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Retention results may not be tallied for a few more days, so it's not known yet whether editorial ratification of bar association evaluations was effective. Two Cook County judges were rated unanimously for expulsion.

It's unfortunate that they were found lacking in judicial acumen, but perhaps more unfortunate is that such is the product of the elective process that confronts a largely uninformed public.

Recidivism. A great word: an 1886 coinage in criminal parlance, derived from the French “recidiver” (relapse) and Latin “recidivus” (recurring).

“Recidivist,” an earlier derivation, was codified by Black's Law Dictionary in 1891 as not only “a habitual criminal,” but “One who makes a trade of crime.”

That is rather severe for the occasional misdemeanant who runs afoul of the county mounties more than once, but multiple felonies might easily convince a tribunal that an individual has chosen a dishonest trade.

Law enforcement intelligentsia and concerned social savants wring their hands over the plague of financial expense and wasted resources that habitual criminals wreak on municipal facilities. A practical solution, until now, has evaded the experts.

Along came Sheriff Clint Low of rural Mason County, Texas, with an effective deterrent. If you spend time in his jail, you wear a pink jumpsuit and pink slippers, sit behind pink bars, stare at pink walls, and sleep between pink sheets.

Granted, this works only on male prisoners, but that includes most transient residents of the five cells in Mason's 1894 jail. The community of 3,800 can't afford the estimated $6 million cost of building a bigger prison, so the effectiveness of thinking pink is vital.

Low admits he got the idea from Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who provides pink underpants so inmates won't steal them and employs fluorescent pink handcuffs.

The dye in Mason County jumpsuits has bled by now to almost everything else that has been laundered, but recidivism is down 70 percent since Low's clink was decorated in pink nine months ago.

And there have been no reported fights among the humiliated prisoners. One incarceration is enough, say the pink-clad inmates, safe from public derision in their pink bunks.