CA Braces for Coming Tidal Wave of Released Felons
If on November 6, 2012, you enter the voting booth and remain undecided on how to cast your ballot for president, pause to consider a single Supreme Court decision handed down last week. After weighing the legal reasoning of that decision, and more importantly its consequences, both actual and potential, go ahead and choose your candidate accordingly. But be warned: If you live in California, you may wish to mail in an absentee ballot at the earliest opportunity, as your chances of surviving until Election Day have just been somewhat diminished.
I refer to the case of Brown v. Plata (.pdf), in which Justice Anthony Kennedy joined his more reliably liberal colleagues in upholding a lower court order directing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to reduce the state’s prison population by as many as 46,000 within two years.
It is undeniable that California’s penitentiaries are overcrowded. The state’s prisons are designed to hold 84,000 inmates but currently house about 143,000. There were more than 171,000 state prison inmates in California as recently as 2008, and indeed Justice Kennedy, who authored the opinion, notes that the state’s prisons “had operated at around 200% of design capacity for at least 11 years.”
The effect of this overcrowding, the Court ruled, was to deny some prisoners a constitutionally guaranteed level of medical and/or mental health care, a denial that in the majority’s opinion rose to such a level that it amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. Kennedy cites the fact that California’s prison suicide rate was nearly 80 percent higher than the national average for prison populations and that nearly three-fourths of these suicides involved “some measure of inadequate assessment, treatment, or intervention, and were therefore most probably foreseeable and/or preventable.” He also cites prisoners who died after their medical conditions were improperly addressed. “A prisoner with severe abdominal pain,” he writes of one example, “died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist.”
Kennedy sums up the majority’s exasperation with the state of affairs in California’s prisons thus:
For years the medical and mental health care provided by California’s prisons has fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements and has failed to meet prisoners’ basic health needs. Needless suffering and death have been the well-documented result. Over the whole course of years during which this litigation has been pending, no other remedies have been found to be sufficient. Efforts to remedy the violation have been frustrated by severe overcrowding in California’s prison system. Short-term gains in the provision of care have been eroded by the long-term effects of severe and pervasive overcrowding.
No doubt there are many sad tales to be told about conditions within the walls of California’s prisons, but if it is needless suffering and death the majority truly wishes to avoid, they would not have decided this case as they did. Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissenting opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, makes this point:
In the early 1990s, federal courts enforced a cap on the number of inmates in the Philadelphia prison system, and thousands of inmates were set free. Although efforts were made to release only those prisoners who were least likely to commit violent crimes, that attempt was spectacularly unsuccessful. During an18-month period, the Philadelphia police rearrested thousands of these prisoners for committing 9,732 new crimes. Those defendants were charged with 79 murders, 90 rapes, 1,113 assaults, 959 robberies, 701 burglaries, and 2,748 thefts, not to mention thousands of drug offenses . . . .
The prisoner release ordered in this case is unprecedented, improvident, and contrary to the [Prison Litigation Reform Act]. In largely sustaining the decision below, the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California. Before putting public safety at risk, every reasonable precaution should be taken. The decision below should be reversed, and the case should be remanded for this to be done. I fear that today’s decision, like prior prisoner release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims. I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see.
Residents of Los Angeles and nearby communities should find this most troubling, as the greatest share of the coming tidal wave of released felons will be returning to a neighborhood just an easy drive down the freeway from … you! Following the typical pattern, in 2010 more than two-thirds of all admissions into California prisons came from Southern California. (The San Francisco Bay area’s share was 10 percent, and the entire rest of the state’s was only 22 percent.)
In America our institutions build on failure rather than success and legal pedantry is more important than reality or common sense.
Prisoners are suffering – I don’t care; we must err on the side of the innocent not the guilty and in this case we are talking guilty in the most literal sense.
Don’t like prison? Don’t make a career out of burrowing that system.
Funny James should mention guilt.
There are society-wide crimes that taint the whole society with guilt. The severest of these seems to be human sacrifice.
The Pawnee tribe practiced human sacrifice, and their favorite offering seems to have been teenage Sioux girls. The village would dance around the fire while the girl burned.
This upset the Sioux. They decided to genocide the Pawnee. They raided and raided south into Nebraska, reducing the Pawnee from over 20,000 strong down to a few hundred – before the US Cavalry decided to step in and protect the remnants of the Pawnee tribe.
The only justification for genocide is human sacrifice, which is the point of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, right?
Other societal crimes are genocide itself, slavery, and…abortion on demand. I think, too, that the way we treat our prisoners reflects on society.
American prisons sound insane.
Plaintiff’s attorneys have sued and sued on behalf of prisoners, so the prisoners have all kinds of “rights” now: the right to a law library, which got extended to a right to porn; the right to so many hours of TV watching per day; rights to conjugal visits. You’d think our cons had it real cushy, and I guess some of them do.
But overcrowding means twenty in a cellblock have to line up every morning to defecate in one toilet – and the toughest bullies go first, it would seem. I don’t want my government shoving such a punishment on the weaker cons.
And that’s nothing compared to the opportunities that overcrowding gives to prison rapists. Waterboarding is torture?! I’d rather be waterboarded weekly than raped every five years, thanks.
Really, think about this: the punishment in America for some people convicted of credit card fraud is to be raped every day for 18 months. We should NOT treat our prisoners this way!
Nor should we let them go free. Commit fraud and you should spend 3 years confined in boredom, but not in terror!
But back to guilt – prison rape’s a punchline! And it was a punchline a few years back when the Democrat attorney general of California joked about Ken Lay meeting a big black horny cellmate, ha, ha.
Oh good grief. Mr. May did not deserve that rant!
Yet crime continues to fall while a defensive populace arms itself to the teeth, a wise decision and status.
It is equally undeniable that California’s — and the country’s — rule books are grossly over-legislated and its increasingly confounded or downright feeble-minded courts over-lawyered.
The questions is how to balance those two opposing dynamics. I don’t see any of that in opinion on the matter at hand.
“Crime continues to fall, while a defensive populace arms itself to the teeth”
Perhaps you should consider that the former might be the RESULT of the latter?
this is the first comment I’ve read that even touches upon the basis for California’s overcrowded prisons. In most parts of that state, it is well nigh impossible for a normal citizen to get the Mother May I permit to carry a defensive weapon. Thus, the vast majority of Californians are, by law, disarmed. Somehow, in spits of the laws being amongst the most draconian in the nation against possession of arms, criminals somehow manage to acquire, and regularly carry and use, firearms. When the criminals are armed, the populace disarmed, this sort of scenario is the certain result. The single greatest fear of any criminal is that their putative victim MIGHT be armed. Interesting to note: in many of the more rural areas of that state, the local sheriffs regularly issue concealed handgun licenses to their residents. Guess what? Crime rates in those counties are vastly lower than in metro areas where permits are denied as standard policy. It is NOT the demographic of the various regions, save for one… armed or disarmed. Pass a Shall Issue bill, and recognise carry permits issued by the resident states of visitors, and watch the prison populations decline along with violent crimes against persons and property. And further, watch the costs of law enforcement, “crime prevention”, and “public safety” fall like a rock. This situation has come about because the VOTERS of that state have refused to step up and elect decent lawmakers. I’ve no sympathy for them. They have brought it upon themselves. Oh, they will whine and moan when those criminals are released. Few will realise their complicity in this travesty. Perhaps some will wake up…. but I doubt it.
Perhaps you should consider that my point depended on some correlation between the two, Sarpedon1? Er, duh.
Which, if so, what’s this about overcrowding if not, in some part yet widely considered, discussed, and solved, that we’re as I said we were?
Over-legislated and over-lawyered.
“Overlegislated and overlawyered”? How so? Are you referring to the nearly one-in-five CA inmates who killed someone? The slightly more than one-in-two who committed a serious violent crime? The burglars and car thieves who wreak havoc with other people’s lives and cost everyone in increased insurance and home-protection expenses — many of whom plead down to simply possession charges, as Dunphy attempts to teach here?
You can never assume that even a fraction of that 17% convicted for drug charges didn’t plead down from other, multiple crimes, including violent crimes and serious property crimes. Until we include arrest records in the data, the record is grossly incomplete.
Of course, the activists who litter the universities, Pew, and the Justice Department don’t want us to know the truth about crime and incarceration. They spin out fantasies about prisons stuffed with low-level drug offenders, and those paranoid “war on drug” whiners eat it up, completely fact-free. That’s the problem.
Only a fraction of people arrested for low-level offenses are even prosecuted. And only a fraction of even the most prolific repeat offenders make their way to the state system. So the people being discharged will be among the worst of the worst.
I take it you’re down on both paranoids and war-on-drug types.
Apparently I was wrong about the paranoids.
In the final analysis it is the view of liberalism that society in general should be punished for the failure of liberalism.
That the punishment for crime is not a sufficient deterrent to prevent more crime tells us that the punishment is not severe enough. Liberals cannot accept the idea that the severity of the sentence should cause repentance in the heart of the criminal.
Take for example the crime of “graffiti tagging”. Some where between the slap on the wrist and dismembering the hand should be a punishment close to deterring further tagging . Perhaps the loss of a finger would be effective. Particularly the forefinger of the hand the culprit used for spraying the target. Maybe that sounds a touch too cruel but it would serve as a forceful reminder if the tagger was ever tempted to spray again.
A less dramatic punishment would be to spray the offenders hands and face a nasty color like purple or green . Unfortunately too many youths today would find that”cool” and it would become a badge of honor in the graffiti ” community”.
A good compromise would be amputate the offenders opposite finger so there could be no liberal “outrage ” over excessive ,unconstitutional punishment.
Well, there’s that word Constitution again . Protecting criminals and convicts everywhere,but rarely used to protect the people from left wing liberal judges.
How did we ever get into this mess?
Let the punishment fit the crime. If I were in charge, people who do graffiti would have to clean up the property that they defaced with their “art”. That means painting over their “work”, on their own time and at their own expense, to the property owner’s satisfaction.
Didn’t Fidel Castro once reduce his expenses and foist his his prison population on us? Fidel’s intention was malicious. How could we do this to ourselves?
I have a solution that won’t cost much and keep law abiding citizens safe from murderers and marauders incubated in the California penal system. You can find it in a film called Escape From LA.
CA should make relocating to DC a condition for early release.
Then, hopefully, the justices can make the first hand acquaintance of their handiwork.
This is the age of outsourcing. We can easily lighten the load on our prisons by simply outsourcing their incarceration. My suggestion would be to send them to places like Singapore, China or the former Soviet Union. It would lower the cost and we would be guaranteed the same level of care as provided in those countries for their own prisoners. Why let them lose, when you can send them away, save money, and meet the requirements as set by the Supreme Court.
A five week wait? In Canada and England it’s a five months wait to see a specialist. No one gets upset when law abiding citizens die in Canada and England. It’s called rationing health care! Come on! Where’s that old American stiff upper lip–must have died with the greatest generation. Oh, silly me, I forgot, the cannuks and limeys don’t have a living constitution with judges that keep moving the goal posts of life. Well here’s a suggestion. Release all those illegal aliens with immigrations holds doing time in CDC to the Feds for deportation, all twenty six thousand of them. Let the feds provide their health care.
I read a recent article here or one of the other conservative sites that went into detail on public service employees in the criminal justice system CA.
Lest we overlook the problem at its core: When you pay prison guards over $100k for a skill set that has a real economic value of just barely over minimun wage, it stands to reason that your not going to have a whole lot of money available to build the necessary facilities.
It would also be prudent to purge the illegal convict population back to their native countries.
Yeah, but those pampered prison guards don’t get a paid years leave of absence to do “research” every seven years like the 100k tenured Ca. University Professors with three months off each year with pay and maybe three classes to teach. No wonder no one can afford to go to college in Californian and graduate in four years anymore, unless you’re an illegal alien getting cheaper in state tuition, on welfare, and living on a grant from a liberal foundation banking the income tax offsets for the scholarships.
I think you are over stating. Economic value of just over minimum wage to manage violent felons? Put down riots? You won’t be getting me to do it. Maybe a 100K is rich. Not saying they have to get rich but lets be fair. Imagine what someone like me would do at the first sign of trouble. It would be me running backward firing as rapidly as I could , until I got to the front door.
Prison guards have a very dangerous job, some even carry the same powers as police officers. Sure you could get someone to do the job for 10.00 per hour, but that would lead to just hiring anyone. I live in Texas and the guards here start at 26k per year. The state of Tx also fires alot of guards for being on the take, why? because you get what you pay for.
In light of this decision, and before the hordes start their marauding, setting up businesses selling a wide array of home security products, including weapons–no matter how difficult that might be in California–would seem to be one of the few sure fire (no pun intended) business opportunities available in our current “economic difficulties.”
To quote Heinlein, “The right to buy weapons is the right to be free,” and also to stay alive and reasonably intact and in possession of your valuables.
While I agree (and Heinlein probably agreed) that “the right to buy weapons is the right to be free”, that was the motto of The Weapon Shops of Isher, by A. E. Van Vogt.
Just a bit of unsolicited pedantry ….
Except Obama admitted “I’m working on gun control UNDER THE RADAR.” Obama? Gun control? UNDER THE RADAR? Avoid Obama’s upcoming attempt to do an end-run around the 2nd Amendment & “get ‘em while ya still can”!
Yeah, Obama has been so honest with everyone. How do you know he wasn’t just saying this to placate his anti-gun folks on the left?
everybody w/ good ideas for solving the problem. and yet, we all know cali’s
problems are just beginning; and, we also know that liberals will never do
anything that will solve the problem. the fact is that illegal hispanics and other handout leeches are sucking at uncle sugarbaby’s teat until it is streched … well, you get the pix, i’m sure. and it’s not just the prison system that is broken. the
entire state gov. is regularly borrowing billion$ from uncle sugar just to make ends meet. i guess as long as they have all those electoral votes they can steal from the rest of us and we should just learn to like it.
a fine example of socialism in amerika, iyam.
Here we go again. Mark your calendar’s folk’s,and get ready for more crime !!!!
If you don’t already have them, buy a few guns and go practice at the range. If you can afford to do so, get a concealed carry permit (I would imagine California is not an easy place to get this).
Clearly even when the police and prosecutors do their jobs right, the state is still woefully out of touch. Those of you in neighboring states, stay vigilant.
“If you can afford to do so, get a concealed carry permit (I would imagine California is not an easy place to get this).”
And for those who “choose” not to get a concealed carry permit, the State of California will do what? Find room for YOU in jail?
I live in Fresno, a California city with a real crime problem, though our new jail is 3/4 empty because county can’t afford to guard them. Last month a gang type guy was in the act of pulling a gun out on the police when the police fired two shots at him (missing him but hitting an apartment building) and the guy dropped his gun and was arrested and taken to jail.
After booking him, he was released because of over crowding.
That California is so bankrupt that we have gotten to the point where a guy pulling a gun on the police can not be locked up shows government mismanagement is simply staggering. I fear what the stories will be when the Federal Government goes bankrupt.
Police in Fresno need marksmanship training. Police in Tucson need greater disgression.
The shame here is that I doubt that any of the, no doubt, well-protected dodderers on the U.S. Supreme Court, located here in the East, are likely to have any of these felons they have just ordered released visit them by breaking down their door, climbing in their second story windows, knocking them down and rifling their pockets, or just beating the hell out of them just for the Hell of it.
I suspect that if there were some increased chance of this happening, their decision might have been different.
Immediate deportation of all illegals incarcerated to Mexico or to whatever rock they crawled will take care of one half the problem. California has two years to comply. They might go hat in hand to AZ to Governor Brewer who is in need of chain gangs to build her fence. They can be housed in spacious desert camps in pink underwear watching the Weather Channel as designed by Sheriff Joe. This would probably be cheaper than keeping them in CA watched over by $100K plus union prison guards. By that time the liberal judge in Sacramento who blocked contracting out can either be overturned or legislated out of the picture.
This can be a win-win for AZ unemployment, CA taxpayers and AZ which gets its fence built with CA labor….ironic. The only real losers will be the libs on the court and the unionized prison guards. Maybe the NLRB will intervene.
Dang. Beat me to it.
Far be it from me to defend any union member but the $100K salary for prison guards being bounced around in these comments is pretty misleading. The average guard salary in California is a little over $57K. The $100K number comes from the roughly 2400 guards (about 10% of the prison guard total) being at the top of the pay scale and getting huge amounts of overtime (or gaming the system for overtime, it depends on what you read). Frankly, that number (2400) is bad but let’s remember that if the average is $57K then there are a lot of guards making a lot less then that average.
Want to stop the maddness of the left on the bench? Hold them accountable for any harm done to a citizen by a released felon.
They could afford to house the criminals, if they were not spending so much money on other things. It’s a matter of spending priorities. You can buy votes, or you can have enough prisons, but you cannot do both.
Ed O’Shea will catch ‘em all, not to worry, super cop is on patrol.
Two words.
Chinese Consultants
It is notable that the sub-head here reads to think about this when you cast your 2012 vote. While the article elaborates…. “because this is how Supreme Court justices will be chosen”…. I had not even thought about that. I was sure the point being made was… “because this is where Blue State thinking will inevitably lead”. Both are equally true of course.
Was it – The Man Who Will Never Govern California, But Damn Sure Ought To – Victor David Hanson, who wrote that “California is now officially a failed state. Any state that produces more criminals than it can afford to deal with can not be called anything but.”
Decades ago, the California Assembly (legislature) bought into the “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” view of state mental hospitals, a tale of horror, Thorazine-drugged patients and Nurse Ratchet caregivers. The legislators ordered the mental hospitals closed and the care to be taken up on a community level. The lawmakers, sanguine in the belief they had done their service to humanity, and seeing that expense imvolved, never followed through wuth community-level care. So we have thousands of mentally ill people living on the street (even the most severely ill person cannot be hospitalized against his or her will) and a prison system that is expected to serve the needs of the mentally ill. Now the same thing is happening with prisons — the counties will be obliged to handle a prison population that it cannot and should not be required to handle.
The Governor who released all the mental patients was Ronald Reagan.
Why not introduce sharia law ? Floggings are a good deterrant and a thief without hands cannot reoffend.
Because our constitution protects us from that crazy raghead monstrosity called sharia.
When the problem is liberal religious doctrine gone amok, the solution is not moo-ham’n'ed religious doctrine, also amok. “IHS”
CA should ignore the court’s ruling. Why should the state enforce a law when the Feds won’t. The Feds lack of border enforcement produced a high percentage of those incarcerated.
Have them work digging tracks for the new high speed rail between LA and San Francisco. Honest wages and productive jobs. What could possibly go wrong?
I would advise forcing them all to ride on the first train, but I’m probably just paranoid. I’m sure it will be OK, and no, I won’t be visiting California again anytime soon.
Nearly every state prison system in the union is anywhere from fifteen to one hundred percent above “maximum capacity.” It costs anywhere from $15,000 to $26,000 to keep one prisoner in one bed for one year. The number of persons held in state and federal prisons (and local jails) has ballooned from less than one million in 1980 to 2.8 million today. Ever since the early 1970′s there has been a general expansion in the “civil rights” of prisoners via the U.S. Supreme Court. The combination of burgeoning populations with constitutionally protected prisoner rights to medical care, mental health care, personal safety, rights of appeal etc. has resulted in budgetary black holes in almost every state in the Union.
In the thirty years since 1980 all categories of reported crime, with one exception, have DECREASED by nearly 50%. (I know it doesn’t feel like it but UCR and NIBRS figures confirm this.) That one category concerns drugs. Drug offense convictions account for over 50% of the prisoners held in the federal system and about 40% of the prisoners held in the different state systems. About 25% of state prisoners are in custody for marijuana-related offenses only.
We are in this awful position because of the illegal narcotics business and the violence that accompanies that trade. Unless we re-think our four decade committment to the “War on Drugs” we will all be facing regular mass releases of state prisoners as the one shaping up in California. Every state will now be looking to Brown v. Plata to justify a wholesale release of prisoners to reduce costs and liabilities.
Where do you get these numbers?
1988 was around the time when states began actually enforcing their laws regarding minimum mandatories, truth-in-sentencing, and enhancements for recidivists, so of course violent crime began to drop (the drop wasn’t as precipitous as you claim prior to that).
DNA enabled us to identify the most prolific serial rapists, which had an enormous impact on forcible rape cases. Other crime rates dropped because violent criminals, who are very prolific, saw a few revolving doors slow.
And the crack cocaine epidemic (now also meth) in the 80′s was so destructive that urban politicians and community activists demanded the crackdown on crack that many now loudly deplore. The cost of crack — to neighborhoods and communities — has to be counted in healthcare, security, child protection/care, and decreased property values outside prison walls, too, if the choice is against incarcerating anyone.
The federal system, of course, involves a higher percentage of drug trafficking cases because that is where the interstate cases go. And pleading to drug-only charges when there are other offenses on the table is common there are well.
As Dunphy notes, many offenders agree to plead only to drug charges in exchange for dropping violent and property crimes. DAs like this because they’re very easy to prove, and offenders like it because they get access to all sorts of intangible resources after release, including the sympathy of ill-informed activists obsessed with the “war on drugs.”
All arguments about the cost of imprisonment are deeply flawed if they do not include analysis of the price of victimization — all costs, not just immediate ones: policing, courts, personal security expenses, insurance increases, and direct losses.
Arguments about the cost of health-care for prisoners are risible if they are based on the belief (as they are) that even a small percentage of released ill and aged offenders will pay for their own healthcare outside of prison, rather than continuing to rely on the public dime. And you also have to factor in the enormous costs for medical care outside the prison system whenever new crimes occur due to lenience for lesser offenses, like drug possession. Look at the cost of emergency care in Chicago, for example, for gunshot wounds occurring in relation to illegal drugs.
Considering the true records of those who commit enough crime to land in the state system, spending 26K per offender per year to prevent more crimes is likely cost-efficient.
We should note that the alleged drop in the crime rate is heavily influenced by the refusal of police agencies to make and file crime reports. Just try to report a theft, in many jurisdictions, of less than $1,000. Ain’t gonna’ happen. If a victim is unwilling to prosecute, officers are motivated to “kiss off” the call, without reporting the crime.Many crimes are unreported because the victims are illegal aliens, or because the perps are feared by an ethnic population conditioned to roll over As minority numbers grow rapidly, minority police officers are often reluctant to enforce against “their own”.
In California one must be an animal to be sent to state prison. There are no nice guys in the slam. When Kennedy and Company let 46,000 felons out of custody to kill, rape, rob again, they invoked the Divine pronouncement that they w.ould be among the first to reap what they have sown.
As some perceptive person observed, “…the Constitution is not a suicide pact”.
If California cannot afford to provide proper medical care for its criminals then they must be loosed again on the communities they terrorized?
Or, must they suffer the consequences of their awful behavior? Which makes sense?
A reasonable solution to part of the problem: Let’s start by getting the Feds to agree to a program that allows us to deport illegal alien criminals to their home country. We would then pay that country, say, $5,000 – 10,000 a year to incarcerate that criminal, subject to unannounced, unlimited inspections by our people – to be sure they are, in fact, behind bars with all the other prisoners. Prison conditions in countries South of the boarder are pretty bad with a cost to the home country probably around a few thousand dollars a year. They would welcome the opportunity to earn a nice profit while holding our trash. Savings to us along with the deterent value would be enormous!
I find it hard to believe that CA prisoners were denied medical attention since they seemed to have time to get sex-change operations on the taxpayers back.
They won’t release a quadriplegic who can’t even wipe his own nose…but they have no problem kicking loose a bunch of hardcore violent felons who are for sure even in the best of times not very employable. You don’t have to have a Doctorate in Criminology to know they will go back to what they know best…stealing, robbing and mayhem. Am I the only one who see’s something wrong with this “obviously” broken Parole system…
And when the corpses start turning up, what then?
Not just solid citizens, either. Count on some of the released orcs pushing their luck too far and ending up in a ditch somewhere.
What a stupid bunch of idiots those Supreme Court Justices are! Don’t they understand that overcrowding and all the other prisoner service failures they’ve enumerated are part of our state’s well thought out superduper glorious crime prevention program? Prison is a bitch!. That’s our message. Don’t do the crime, so you won’t do the time. That’s what we citizens are selling to our brothers and sisters who are less ethically aware than seems wise.
What spoilsports! Those justices are taking away the best tool we citizens had left to spread the message of staying honest and avoiding crime. Now the neighborhood will really go downhill.
With the way things are going we are all probably going to die from tornadoes and earthquakes, than from Giovanni Ramirez-type beatings (which, in my humble opinion, was mutual combat ONLY, 4 whites against 2 hispanics? c’mon).
Also, I’d bet my LAST month’s salary that we’ll see more crime wave from those that have given up on working, and have run out of time and unemployment–between a rock and a hard balance, they will turn to robberies and other violent crime.
This is a non-issue once again, Jack, you need to address what’s important, which you’ve skirted for the past 10 posts now.
So the potential release of tens of thousands of felons is a “non-issue”? What, then, is this important issue you claim I’ve been skirting?
You can’t imprison or shoot your way out of a societal issue, Jack. Think of this as the re-adjusting of the corrections/law enforcement bubble (like the housing or dot com bubble).
Police and Correction officers who are only HS graduates average 90K/year because there’s money in incarceration, period. Tax payers pay for sex operations, and other unnecessary medical costs, because this is part and parcel of the prison industry (they also enrich private medicine, as well as others), which the police industry (YOUR industry!) directly contributes. Why not write about that?
Instead you complain because less bodies means lessening of justification for corrections’ pay, which means police officers will also suffer. Like I said, you cannot imprison or shoot your way out of this one, Jack. You’re only writing about superfluous fluff. Dig deeper.
A REPORTER AT LARGE about the recruitment and treatment of foreign workers employed as support staff on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tells about Vinnie Tuivaga and Lydia Qeraniu, two women from Fiji who were recruited in 2007 by a local firm called Meridian Services Agency, which promised them jobs in Dubai. Once they reached Dubai, however, they were told that they were actually bound for jobs on U.S. military bases in Iraq. Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops, beauty salons, and fast-food courts (to include massage parlors). The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases. A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/06/110606fa_fact_stillman
and here’s a photo:
http://images-kitup.military.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/afghanistan-individual-expe.jpg
America’s falling crime rate
Good news is no news
Americans are committing fewer crimes, though nobody seems to know quite why
Jun 2nd 2011 | ATLANTA | from the print edition
INTUITIVE theories are often easier to believe in than to prove. For instance: conventional wisdom says that the crime rate should rise during a recession. When people are out of work and out of money, the thinking goes, they turn to crime. But the evidence backing this theory is at best equivocal. There seem to be some links between crime and economic conditions, but they are neither as direct nor clear as one might assume. Crime rose during the Roaring Twenties then fell in the Depression. America’s economy expanded and crime rates rose in the 1960s. Rates fell throughout the 1990s, when America’s economy was healthy, but they kept falling during the recession in the early 2000s (see chart).
And during the current downturn, the unemployment rate rose as the crime rate fell. Between 2008 and 2009 violent crime fell by 5.3% and property crime by 4.6%; between 2009 and 2010, according to the preliminary Uniform Crime Report released by the FBI on May 23rd, violent crime fell by another 5.5% and property crime by 2.8%. Robberies—precisely the crime one might expect to rise during tough economic times—fell by 9.5% between 2009 to 2010. The decline in violent crimes was sharpest in small towns, where the rate dropped by more than 25%, and among regions sharpest in the South, which saw a 7.5% decline. Only two cities with more than 1m people—San Antonio and New York—saw their crime rates rise. And some perspective is warranted there: in 1991 around 2,200 people were murdered in New York. Last year just 536 were. Overall, America’s violent-crime rate is at its lowest level in around 40 years, and its murder rate at its lowest in almost 50.
According to the social scientists, this was not supposed to happen. In 1995 James Wilson, who came up with the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention widely credited with making New York safer, warned that by 2000 there would be “30,000 more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready.” One year later John DiLulio, another political scientist who studies crime, warned of a wave of “juvenile super-predators” wreaking havoc by 2010. Yet even as they wrote, the violent-crime rate had already begun to fall. Except for a bit of a rise from 2004 to 2006, it has fallen every year since 1991.
Although nobody predicted the striking decline in crime during the 1990s, in hindsight theories explaining it abound. Some give credit to smarter police tactics: particularly quantitative methods and “broken windows” policing. Others point to the increased availability of legal abortion in the 1970s, resulting in fewer children born to teenage, unwed and poor mothers: precisely the sorts of children who commit crimes at high rates during adolescence. There is also the waning of violence associated with the crack market, and the increased incarceration rate, which keeps more criminals off the street for longer (though at tremendous cost).
Although these factors explain the drop since the late 1980s, they do not explain the sharp drop in the past two years. For that Al Blumstein, a criminologist who heads the National Consortium on Violence Research, posits an “Obama effect”, in which the election of America’s first black president inspires a significant number of young black men away from violence. And indeed between 2008 and 2009, the numbers of blacks arrested for murder and robbery each declined by over 2%, though this theory has more narrative than evidentiary appeal.
Another theory concerns lead. Exposure to lead in childhood has been linked to aggression and criminal behaviour in adults. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, argues that the decline in American children’s exposure to lead since it was phased out of gasoline in the 1970s and removed almost entirely by 1985, accounts for much of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. It may account for even more, as more of America’s unleaded children enter adolescence and their early 20s. And then there are those perennial bogeymen, video games and the internet, affordable forms of entertainment that keep people inside, and away from real crime and drugs.
I’m sure this article would justify the exuberant salaries of law enforcement personnel in CA. Privatize!
PUT THEM IN TENTS, ”GOVERNMENT GONE WILD” ITS THE CITIZENS WHO WILL PAY FOR THIS………..DEATH, RAPE, DRUGS, ETC.
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