This article originally appeared in the Beacon Hill Paper, November 3, 1998.

This is the group — the innocent — that the Boston City Council has now decided to blame for the scourge of drugs in the city.

The Council recently voted to require that the names and faces of those arrested for drug dealing be broadcast on cable television. The idea was that the public humiliation of being exposed to friends, family and neighbors would deter drug dealing.

The problem, of course, is that an arrest is not a conviction. An arrest is an accusation that someone has committed a crime. But those accusations are sometimes wrong. Indeed, the principle of justice is well-known and quite clear:  the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those in opposition tried to narrow the proposal so that it would apply only to the convicted. That amendment failed. The intention here was to go after those who had been arrested; to punish them before they had ever had their day in court.

What is it about the City Council that makes it think it should upend centuries of jurisprudence? One councilor spoke for many when he argued that it was fine by him if one innocent man went to jail as long as 99 guilty men went with him. (Benjamin Franklin's version of the old maxim is, of course, exactly the reverse: "It is better one hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.")

Others were simply contemptuous of the justice system itself. They pushed forward hoary old ideas — judges always let the guilty off, it takes years before anyone is ever convicted — or argued that those arrested must be guilty of something.

Perhaps it is too much to expect that political bodies let constitutional niceties interrupt their work. Politicians know that the war on drugs is one of those political hot buttons. No sensible politician dares to seem soft on drugs.

Still in this case, the Council's proposal has the twin flaws of not only being wrong but also ineffective. Drug dealers right now face the prospect of years in jail if they are convicted (and, by the way, they are convicted — it's the reason our nation's jails are running out of space). Does the Council seriously believe that drug dealers, undeterred by the prospect of jail time, will be deterred because their picture might appear on cable television?

The notion itself is ludicrous, and it shows the Council's proposal to be nothing but an empty political stunt, one that tramples on individuals' rights and does nothing to address the real harm of drugs in Boston.