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GOV. JAMES R. THOMPSON has compiled an aggressive record in the first months of his second term of office. Already in 1979 he has successfuly advocated and pushed through the General Assembly a $5.1 million funding expansion for fighting child abuse. He has bravely called for a significant gas tax increase, from 7 cents per gallon to 9 cents per gallon, which, coupled with his proposal to raise license fees, would help pump an additional $2.3 billion in state and federal money into Illinois road construction and repair over the next four years.

Gov. Thompson is the first Illinois governor to ask for an end to road fund diversion, and the first to map out a four-year strategy for roads -- an important initiative now that the state's road system is in such utter disrepair.

But Thompson has been even more aggressive in his efforts to stabilize and reform the state's penal system. He has supported major new funding initiatives for state prisons to relieve serious overcrowding; he has accomplished a thorough disarming of prisoners at Stateville through a successful, but very risky, surprise shakedown search on February 24, which essentially regained state control of the most dangerous of Illinois penal institutions; and he has named a new director of corrections, Gayle Franzen, a trusted aide and administrator, to personally oversee sweeping changes in archaic, anarchic Illinois prisons. Franzen administered the coordination of state, federal and local law enforcement personnel in the shakedown of Stateville. It was a project that even the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group, now admits to have been "a step in the right direction."

Thompson seems aware that a federal court intervention in the operation of state prisons, similar to that which occurred in Alabama several years ago and which had been threatened in Illinois only last year, would be a black eye for the state and for his political ambitions. And he seems to have understood that unruly inmates in prison gangs had gained too much power over fellow prisoners and were, perhaps, a threat to the Thompson administration.

Gov. Thompson's Class X sentencing law guarantees that Illinois prisons will be crowded for the next decade, despite plans for several new facilities and for expansion of others. This projected increase in the prison population will require great improvements in the treatment of prisoners and safety of prisoners and guards in order to prevent descent into a brutal medievalism behind bars. The governor's answer is to get tighter control now and begin long-term prison building projects so that more room will be available in the future. As the system expands, Thompson wants to establish precedents for firm and efficient control.

His prison response is typical of Thompson's law-and-order conservatism. While not questioning the need for more prisons, or for an enlightened approach to reducing the causes of crime, he is aggressively pushing an old-fashioned response to crime through a crackdown on convicted criminals.

On most other problems facing state government, Gov. Thompson has been prone to form study commissions to advise him on solutions and alternatives. The most recent examples include: the nine-member committee named to work out changes in the state's workmen's compensation and unemployment insurance systems which are under attack by business leaders; a 15-member group chosen to study a replacement for the business personal property tax; and the panel of state officials he named to look into the threat of Illinois nuclear accidents, after the near-disaster at Three Mile Island, Pa.

But Thompson's aggressive corrections approach seems to be based upon his former successful career as a law-and-order prosecutor. Even before his days as chief U.S. prosecutor in Chicago, he was a prolific advocate of less regulation of police power, more efficient pornography legislation, more control of street gangs and easier access to warrants for arrests and searches.

Typical of Thompson's hard-line stance toward crime control was his role in a 1964 case before the Earl Warren Supreme Court (Escobedo v. Illinois), wherein he argued in favor of restricting the right of suspects to counsel during police investigations. In Escobedo, Thompson argued unsuccessfully against the principle, later expanded by the 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, that an accused person must be advised of all legal rights by police during an arrest.

Another early example of Thompson's advocacy of wide police power was his part in helping to prosecute comedian Lenny Bruce on obscenity charges, for the use of profanities in Bruce's night club act.

Gov. Thompson's background as a tough federal prosecutor is consistent with that of other Republicans who have won their party's presidential nomination in recent decades. Thomas E. Dewey and Richard M. Nixon were both former prosecuting attorneys who gained attention as winners of controversial, highly publicized scandal prosecutions.

Given that tradition, Thompson would be seemingly well-qualified for the Republican nomination on his record as a prosecutor, especially if he adds to it a record of equal success as governor of Illinois. He is, after all, the governor of the largest state now in the hands of a Republican chief executive.

June 1979 / Illinois Issues / 2

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