March 11, 2008
More cons, less crime?
Defense attorneys often bemoan the lengthy sentences prosecutors seek, decrying the too-punitive nature of the system, the perceived uselessness of locking up a presumably salvageable person for years, perhaps decades.
Prosecutors, not too surprisingly have a different take on the utility of time-machine worthy stays in the pen: Years spent in prison are sparing the public years of violence, theft, victimization.
Cops and DAs will tell you that the cast of crooked characters in the criminal justice system is a rogues gallery of familiar faces and names. A set of police reports cross my desk for review and I think to myself, "This name looks familiar .... Ah, it's Tector Gorch, barely on parole 48 hours and already on his way back to prison...."
The fact that the Tector Gorch's are doing life, 16 months at a time (low-term in California) is greatly distressing to many liberals.
The geniuses at the New York Times recently (re)joined the chorus of nattering nabobs bemoaning the large numbers of potential Democratic voters felons languishing in prisons, all while crime rates seem to be dropping across the U.S., seemingly unable to make the cognitive leap connecting the two phenomena.
Fortunately, columnist Thomas Sowell connects the dots for the 'tards at the Times.
For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals.
So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that "incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen."
Back in 1997, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield expressed the same lament under the headline, "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling." Then, as now, liberals seemed to find it puzzling that crime rates go down when more criminals are put behind bars.
Nor is it surprising that the left uses an old and irrelevant comparison -- between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars versus the cost of higher education. According to the Times, "Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education."
The relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society. But neither the New York Times nor others on the left show any interest in that comparison.
In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be £1.9 billion, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at £60 billion.
The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts. The cost of locking up criminals has to be paid out of government budgets that politicians would prefer to spend on giveaway programs that are more likely to get them re-elected. But the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence.
The net result is that both politicians and ideologues of the left are forever pushing "alternatives to incarceration." These include programs with lovely names like "community supervision" and high-tech stuff like electronic devices to keep track of released criminals' locations.
Just how do you "supervise" a criminal who is turned loose in the community? Assigning someone to be with him, one on one and 24/7, would probably be a lot more expensive than locking him up.
But of course no one is proposing any such thing. Having the released criminal reporting to some official from time to time may be enough to allow the soothing word "supervision" to be used. But it hardly restricts what a criminal does with the other nine-tenths of his time when he is not reporting
Part of doing "complaint review" is scanning the defendants' rap sheets, looking for serious and violent felonies, prior stays in prison, and other aggravating factors, all of which can be used to allege "special allegations." In California, every prison prior is good for an additional year in the Big House, provided the defendant didn't have a five-year break between visits. And those serious and violent felonies? They're what we use to allege "Strikes."
You've heard of the Three Strikes laws, haven't you? One, two, three strikes and yer outta here.
Forever.
Anyhow, what's interesting as you read the rap sheets is how the gaps, the periods where no new crimes are committed, are almost always preceded by a sentence sending the crook to prison.
He gets paroled and Voila!, new crimes, new arrests, new convictions, new victims start showing up again.
Folks, this ain't rocket science. Getting criminals off the streets is a lot less expensive then the cost they inflict on society. Using Sowell's numbers out of the U.K., there's a 30-1 return on dollars spent incarcerating crooks.
Seems like a pretty good return on the pound -- er, dollar.
Posted by Mike Lief at March 11, 2008 11:34 PM
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AMEN!
Posted by: abunker805 at April 23, 2008 09:02 PM