California believes that it can save as much as $1 billion by releasing non-violent inmates from prison. Santa Clara County DA Dolores Carr admits that, but says that in practice it amounts to decriminalizing property crimes—such as car theft, grand theft, commercial burglary, and writing bad checks—by reducing them to misdemeanors.
To protest this decision, Carr joined DAs from across the state in signing a letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger and state representatives, asking them to think twice before they let convicted criminals out on the streets.
“This is really going to cause an increase in crime in our local communities,” she wrote, adding that in this economy the communities are too cash-strapped to add more police to handle the upsurge.
The State Senate recently passed a bill that would release as many as 27,000 prisoners this year and 10,000 more next year. The bill is now headed for the Assembly, where it is expected to face stiff Republican opposition, as well as opposition from many key Democrats.
Read More at KLIV.
Read More at ABC 7.
We are at the mercy of federal judges who seem to have forgotten that prison is supposed to be punishment. It’s not supposed to be a place where people want to be. So, if the felons don’t like it, all they have to do is not re-offend once they are let out.
What does this have to do with judges? It’s an action taken by the Gov. and Legislature.
The Governator and the Legislature are only taking this action because a federal judge has said that he may hold the Governator in contempt if the jail population isn’t reduced drastically. The judge feels for the felons who are “overcrowded” in our various state prisons. Read the newspaper Judge Judy.
If extra-tough sentencing actually reduced crime rates, the US would have a much lower crime rate than anywhere else in the world, since the US imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html
Do people seriously believe that criminals make some kind of statistical calculation of the expected value of punishment before deciding whether or not to commit a crime?
Convicted criminals are let out on the street all the time—when their sentence is up. If it happens a month or two earlier, how much difference is it going to make?
I am fairly sure that these DAs are rational and intelligent people, so this amounts to no more than political posturing.
10 MHz Days,
I don’t expect “extra-tough sentencing” to do anything but keep criminals behind bars and away from the people they would otherwise be victimizing. There may be many who don’t know, and certainly many more who would like for us to forget, that California has already experimented with the liberal approach to prison sentencing, and the result was, forty years ago, a horrific surge in violent crime coupled with unprecedented recidivism. With professional burglars (hard to catch) doing less than two years per conviction (no matter how many charges), each paroled burglar would, if he could avoid arrest for just half a year, make victims of hundreds of citizens. Armed robbers, the guys who shove guns at minimum-wage store clerks (and occasionally shoot them), were doing less than three years, and murder sentences were averaging (if I remember) seven years.
In San Jose at that time, a piece of paroled garbage was enjoying a full-boat ride at SJS as part of a pilot program (demonstrating how much better it is to spend money sending sociopaths to college rather than prison) when he raped his way through a number of innocent women, until captured after raping and murdering (with a broken broom handle) an elderly Naglee Park lady. Somehow, I think his early release from prison did make a difference.
Another example of how bad it got: a young baseball fan by the name of Quakenbush, whose car broke down after a Giants’ game, was beaten to death by a gang of Hunter’s Point thugs who liked his car but hated his skin color, all of whom did three years or less.
The crime wave led an outraged public to push for a series of get-tough measures that became progressively tougher and drove down the serious crime rate by keeping career criminals behind bars for longer periods of time. The overloaded system in place today is the result of that outrage, plus the three-pronged societal disaster caused by the rise of fatherless neighborhoods, minority street gangs, and illegal immigrant criminality. That liberals target only public outrage makes it seem as though they cherish diversity more than innocence.
There are born only so many criminally defective men, and the quicker and longer these criminals are locked up, the safer the streets. Though I’m sure Adam Liptak, the author of the Times report, is a fine journalist—one no doubt devoid of agenda, I notice that of the many statistics included in his America-damning report he forgot one that was quite contrary to his attempt to indict American jurisprudence (by comparing its prison rate to those of England, Germany, Japan, or Russia). Yes, though America might imprison 751 people per 100,000 (versus Russia’s 627, England’s 151, Germany’s 88, and Japan’s 63), our prison population rate is seriously impacted by minority crime. Remove minorities from America’s statistics* and it comes in with a respectable 393/100k. But with blacks being imprisoned at an astounding rate of 2531/100k, and Latinos at 957/100k, the problem is not America’s justice system but its diversity/100k.
*http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim04.htm
Very well said Fin Fan. Criminals who know that the crimes they commit won’t carry tough sentences will continue to offend. I agree with the DA, this is just ridiculous. Our Police force is so understaffed I don’t have a clue how they are going to cope with this explosion of new criminals on the street. This just proves yet again that victim’s rights don’t matter one dam bit. We should sue the State for cutting Police!