Bumped. GO BRUINS. -N

From the same Duarte article I blogged on below :

Q: Have you been frustrated by the tone of coverage in the O.J. Mayo case? (Mayo, who is entering the NBA after one season at USC, is said to have received cash and other impro-
per gifts from a promoter with whom he has since signed.)

A: I understand the provocative nature of those kinds of cases and the interest of the public in it. I think the part I don't like and find frustrating is that the next step to generalizing is, "Oh, that shows there's something wrong with men's basketball."

So let's see if I get this one right -- the problem is the "provocative nature" of those cases and the public's interest in them? Not the underlying facts and the fact that sc continues to cheat and the NCAA is making a mockery of its status and rules by not enforcing them.

When asked by another Chronicle columnist, Jerome Solomon, why the NCAA, which has an enforcement division staffed to people who have been prosecutors, doesn't go after more of these violators, Brand said something like "People go to prison for robbing banks, yet people keep robbing banks."

So, might as well look away?

I don't think so. The values that underly our criminal justice system also underly the prosecution of NCAA violations. Why do we enforce laws like those that protect banks -- even though people still rob banks?

The underlying policy values are simple:

1. Deterrence: We believe that if people know they run the risk of being punished, they will refrain from doing bad things. There is a corollary to this: Bad people, if they think they can get away, unpunished, will commit bad acts.
2. Retribution: Retribution is an odd value -- some see it as making people feel better to see wrong doers suffer and others see it as essential to allowing the convict to "pay" the price of his bad acts to reinforce the fact that he did wrong.
3. Isolation: When people do bad enough things, they are taken out of society -- both to protect us from them and to make a clear statement that their behavior does not fit our norms. 
4. Rehabilitation: In the criminal justice system, there is more punishment than rehabilitation. In an ideal system, a person would come out of prison a better person rather than a better convict.
5. Making Our Standards Clear: Enforcement is critical to letting society know that these are our rules and that we take them seriously. Winking and nodding diminishes respect for authority.

All of these values apply to what is going on at sc. I've never heard a criminal prosecutor say "I won't prosecute bank robberies because people will continue to rob banks."

Yet, Miles Brand continues to look the other way on Bushgate and OJII (not to mention the criminal docket amassed by sc in the past few years.)

Sorry, Miles, you cannot justify not going after sc on the grounds that "schools will continue to cheat". By not prosecuting, you are undercutting the policy values that we, as a society, have adopted in support of prosecutions of all kind.

Finally, maybe I'm taking this all too seriously. But, I can't stand when people make statements that rationalize the failure to act using arguments like "it won't do any good" or "everyone is doing bad things, anyway".

By not acting, the NCAA is punishing the programs who take the 350 page manual seriously.

I, for one, have no respect for the NCAA. I'd not shed a tear if someone figured a way to take the honest schools and form another organization. In my mind, I believe the good schools far outweigh the bad and that a competitive group would render the NCAA meaningless.
sjh

PS. I think I've got it. Decided to do 2 long FanPosts to see if I could handle the new formatting. I'm most of the way there.