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The incredible shrinking John Street
Street's horrendoous reign
The mayorality of John Street didn't seem so hot while it was going on, but it's looking even worse in hindsight. Two stories today point the way.
This one is a direct assault on his legacy:
Barely out of office, former Mayor John F. Street has seen his legacy fade fast in the early days of the Nutter administration.
The citywide wireless Internet network he championed appears doomed. Safe and Sound - the city-funded child-welfare organization his wife once ran - is disbanding amid withering criticism from the Nutter administration.
And Street's signature program, the blight-fighting Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, has been suspended on Nutter's orders until a team of forensic auditors can review part of the program.
But the bigger picture is worse:
The criminal division heard 15,000 felony cases last year, 80 percent of them related to drugs.
"We're not doing the things that would prevent the market from growing," says Judge Pamela P. Dembe, chief of the criminal trial division. "We operate a justice system that is based on a very old model, a punitive model."
Punishment is not where we should put money or manpower.
This spring, Philadelphia's prisons made history - by having more prisoners in jail than at any time in the last three centuries, 9,334 prisoners, at an annual cost of $30,000 each. The facilities were designed to hold 6,433.
By and large, I think Mayor Nutter's hitting all the right notes. But it's one thing to clean up a program like Safe and Sound or NTI, and another thing to overhaul a broken system of crime and punishment. So it's too bad that he's starting eight years in the hole.