Vengeance

The Weekly Standard (via Sully's) has an eye opening story on the California prison system here.

It's a mess of over-crowding and violence.

The main tool prosecutors use is a "Three Strikes" law that mandates lifetime incarceration for people convicted of three felonies. It's a great law. Since its adoption in 1994, thousands of the state's most violent offenders have been locked away for good. Unfortunately, these sociopaths all too often are joined behind bars by nonviolent drug offenders, technical parole violators, and people who are more mentally ill than criminal.

I don't understand how the author can call "Three Strikes" a great law when he immediately follows it up by describing a huge flaw. In fact, the entire article describes the horrors that the law has created in the system, and the ruin is has brought on countless lives.

Projections indicate that 23,000 additional inmates will be added within five years, which could prompt a corresponding jump in a suicide rate that already is twice the national average for prisoners.

The idea in California, and I'd guess most states, is to just incarcerate as many people as possible for as long as possible regardless of what that does to individual lives or society in general. Then, couple that with a total unwillingness to pay the money it takes to fund the entire system, leaving human beings to wallow in a hell on earth.

Thirty years ago, California prisons stressed rehabilitation. Inmates received indeterminate sentences that could be whittled down with good behavior, academic study, and work in a prison industry. In 1976, after courts throughout the United States mandated more specificity in sentencing, California abolished indeterminate sentencing and discretionary parole release. Henceforth, the severity of the offense, not the character of the offender, would determine the length of a sentence. Determinate sentences that allowed a prisoner to know exactly how much time he had to serve were seen as a victory for inmates. They weren't. Prevented from getting out early, inmates had no incentives for good behavior. Neither did prison officials see the need to rehabilitate convicts who would be staying for longer periods of time.

This is what the right wing society has done. It de-humanized those convicted of committing crimes by appealing to the natural hatred inherent in most unthinking human beings.

No longer would a judge be able to weigh mitigating circumstances. No longer would character matter. No longer would there be any hope for thousands of human beings.

We all know that there are violent criminals that we need to be protected from. Does that include a 3 time drug offender? Does that include a parole violator, or a white collar criminal?

Every person, criminal or not, needs to have a hope for a better future, otherwise, what's the point? If you tell somebody, particularly non-violent offenders, that they are going to hell on earth (prison) for the rest of their natural lives, and nothing they do will change that, what does that do to a human being? Wouldn't it be better just to line them all up and shoot them now? I'm sure a lot of "conservatives" would find that to be a sensible solution.

Faced with the specter of prisoners being released, California's legislature finally seems ready to reform parole, establish rational sentencing guidelines, and move low-risk offenders to community detention facilities instead of massive state prisons.

"What has been lacking is the political will to solve the problem," the state's Little Hoover Commission noted in a recent report. "Lawmakers afraid of being labeled 'soft on crime' have allowed the correctional system to decay and as a result of their negligence, California spends more on corrections than most countries in the world, and reaps fewer public safety benefits."

Again, it's all the same issue I talk about so often. It's my disgust with the American society in general.

Most people don't want to think of a prisoner as a human being. If you polled the public, what they want is harsher and harsher sentences that are clearly at odds with the character of the convicted. It's a natural result of the new media culture. We are exposed to images of violence in the media, day after day after day. Something must be done, right? Hell.. make it a mandatory 10 year prison sentence for a 3rd speeding ticket? Why not?

Nobody in their right mind would advocate for the release or lenient treatment of repeat violent offenders. Clearly there are people who cannot function in society. However, it makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever to have these ridiculous mandatory sentences, and total lack of rehabilitation. All it has done is create a mess of a penal system that not only ruins good people's lives, but also costs tax payers a hell of a lot more money.

And regardless of what a person has done, they should be treated with humanity even if they never treated anyone else with humanity. It's time for society to say enough with the killing. Enough with the abuse. Enough with the de-humanization.

The state of society truly is reflected by how it treats it's prisoners. In America, fear and ignorance feeds upon itself until it becomes an ugly mess of injustice. In America, Republicans regurgitate "soft on crime" as a weapon if a politician dares to suggest anything less than total ruin for every criminal. It isn't until those same Republican politicians get out of prison that they see what they've done, and then all of a sudden, they become "soft on crime" themselves.

It's all so depressing.