Hope you didn’t think I was criticizing you. I was criticizing our “leadership” in this state

Here’s an old article but informative

… Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom—like old Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system—now operates at roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future. …

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199812/prisons

To me, being tough on criminals means making sure that they don’t get to commit crimes. Criminals are bullies that like the perceived power they have over others. To fight crime, you have to deprive them of that sort of “power”, show them how pathetic it is, and make them behave like regular people in the community.

Properly funded, intensive community supervision at least has a plausible hope of achieving this sort of change.

Putting criminals in a giant, largely unsupervised crime ghetto and letting them practice drug dealing, fighting, raping, and murdering on each other for several years–while bulking up in a weight room–does not. It would be a joke if it weren’t so awful.

Up until now there was too much money involved. Everybody won. The CCPOA, the legislators and the govs (including Gray Davis). Prisons got built which meant jobs. And maintained – which meant more jobs. Most of which were built in rural areas. The legs got to look tough, plus they got jobs for their districts – the govs got to look tough, plus they let out the contracts to build the prisons – and the CCPOA got more jobs. California has a more stringent probation and parole system than even Tx. The prison hospital system is descrepit (sp?) Three Strikes was not very well thought out …

I could go on

The California Criminal Justice system needs serious reform

L8r

They’re a huge part of the California Prison Industrial Complex, along with “get tough on crime” legislators and of course the worst gov. south of Alaska and west of SC, Herr Gropenfuhrer