ar more odious than the George W. Bush who cannot speak proper English is the one who cannot count. In the second presidential debate, Bush hid from his silence on hate crime laws by bragging how the killers of James Byrd Jr. would get the ultimate penalty. ''Guess what's going to happen to them,'' Bush said. ''They're going to be put to death.''
Bush declared this with the gleeful, volcanic, glow you see in the eyes of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or Secret Agent 007 before they pull the trigger. Those vigilantes aren't much for official body counts, and neither is Bush. As it turned out, only two of the three murderers were sentenced to death.
The lava bubbled with such steam out of Bush's eyes that it flowed into the third debate. In the town hall-style forum in St. Louis, an operating room technician, Leo Anderson, asked Bush:
''You seemed to overly enjoy ... that Texas leads the nation in execution of prisoners. Sir, did I misread your response, and are you really, really proud of the fact that Texas is number one in executions?''
Bush said, ''No I'm not proud of that.... If you think I was proud of it, I think you misread me.''
Anderson did not misread Bush at all. It is hard to misread a volcano. Bush is forcing 4 million schoolchildren in Texas to prove they can count on standardized tests. On prisons and the death penalty, Bush figures, why count when you have lost count? Bush may not be much for the Pythagorean theorem, but he knows his prisonography: the square of the length of barbed wire and syringes of pantrimonium bromide at the Huntsville death house equals the sum of votes in the South and battleground states.
If running the gulag of the developed world qualifies one to be president, this race is over. Texas has the most prisoners in the United States. The United States has 2 million prisoners. If its incarceration rate were the same as that of Texas, we would have nearly 3 million prisoners. If it were its own nation, Texas would have the world's highest incarceration rate, according to federal statistics analyzed by the Justice Policy Institute, a criminal justice think tank that pushes for rehabilitation.
In the third debate, as Gore forced Bush to hide again, this time over Bush's opposition to affirmative action, Bush claimed he was for something called ''affirmative access.'' Bush was absolutely telling the truth. The prison system is Texas's most affirmative program of access for black people.
African-Americans are seven times more likely to be jailed in Texas and are imprisoned at a rate 63 percent higher than the national average. This is not just because black folks do more crime. It is because Bush has reserved his ''compassionate conservatism'' for white prisoners. African-Americans are 44 percent of the prisoners in Texas but only 21 percent of those on probation and 27 percent in drug treatment programs.
White, or Anglo prisoners, as they call them in Texas, are 30 percent of the inmates but 45 percent of those on probation and 43 percent of those in drug treatment programs.
In Texas, rehabilitation is such a dirty word that 55 percent of prisoners are locked up for nonviolent crimes. The estimated number of nonviolent offenders, 89,000, would alone be the second-largest prisoner population in the United States. The number of nonviolent offenders is more than all the prisoners in Great Britain, which has 60 million people to the 20 million in Texas.
The lockups have little relationship to crime. Federal statistics from 1995 through 1998 show that even though Texas has imprisoned five times more people than New York state in the 1990s - 98,000 to 18,000 - the 21 percent drop in crime in New York was four times higher than the 5 percent drop in Texas.
This is before even discussing the death penalty, which I will next week. Up to now, except for Leo Anderson's question, Bush's enthusiam for running a gulag, an enthusiasm that far surpasses his interest in hate crimes, health policy, and the environment, has barely been touched on the campaign trail.
The vigilante volcano bubbled so hot in the debates that Bush wished himself three executions when there were only two. If his mind so fails him over a gruesome case of worldwide import, his attention to detail and fairness for nameless prisoners should be of grave concern. It is one thing if Bush cannot speak English. It is another if he can't count in matters of life and death. It is not too late to consider the prisonography of George Bush. He hopes Huntsville will lead to the White House. Americans must ask whether the White House should lead to Huntsville.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
