Within living memory, Meridian Hill Park, which is a two minute walk from where I live, was safe enough that on hot days, children would sleep outside there. Admittedly, there were many bad things about Washington, DC, during the Great Depression, but despite it being a poorer era, it was undoubtedly safer. I’m not a child, but I wouldn’t think of going there after dark. Yes, this area has gentrified, but not that much yet.
The 1960s began the notion that we were jailing too many people, so we relaxed the laws, which lead to a surge in crime during the 70s and 80s. It took tough on crime politicians in the 90s to bring crime rates down. Thanks to Brown v. Plata, the state of California is being forced to release 30,000 odd criminals. The Last Psychiatrist quipped, “You can have bilateral retinal cancer and be able to point to which Justices voted for or against this.”
One of the most knowledgeable writer on crime rates and prison, Heather MacDonald, had this to say:
There is already reason to doubt that the rosy future of a lowered prison population and a lowered crime rate predicted by anti-prison activists will come to pass, since some of their premises are incorrect. First, it is not the case that we’re sending innocuous bumblers to prison. In fact, prison remains in most places a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. The JFA Institute, an anti-incarceration advocacy group, estimated in 2007 that offenders ended up in prison in just 3 percent of violent victimizations and property crimes. In 2004, only 1.6 percent of burglars were in prison, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. It can be unsettling for a layman to hear a big-city prosecutor’s typology of crime: “non-serious crimes” consist of basically everything you can do criminally without a gun or other use of force. Steal a car and you get probation; hijack a car with a driver in it, however, and you’re going to prison. The person who just lost a car, even if fortunate enough not to have been threatened while in it, probably doesn’t regard the theft of his vehicle as “non-serious.”
Second, parole violations are not trivial. If a criminal is missing his appointments without a valid excuse—such as a job interview or medical appointment—and without notifying his parole officer, it’s likely that he is up to no good.
Most Californians are undoubtedly feeling dread today reading about the Supreme Court’s decision. My guess is that the state will find a way to avoid a mass prisoner release, whether by quickly commissioning new prisons, relocating state prisoners to already overcrowded county jails, or sending prisoners out of state. Though it is too late now to make any difference in the immediate prison budget, it remains imperative to restore sanity to the state’s public-pension system. If the state weren’t obligated to pay its corrections officers such high salaries and pensions, it could have built more prison capacity. Unfortunately, Governor Jerry Brown just struck another sweetheart deal with the corrections union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.
Mark Krikorian, as always, manages to tie things to immigration:
The GAO reported in March that in FY 2008, there were 27,000 illegal aliens in the state prison system for whom California was receiving partial (very partial) reimbursement from the feds. (See here, p. 30.) That’s close to the total number our black-robed rulers have ordered released. And that’s not counting the legal immigrants who’ve made themselves deportable by committing crimes.
Obviously, the federal government is complicit because of its longstanding refusal to get serious about enforcing immigration laws. But California’s state and local governments and the state’s delegation in Congress have contributed to this, through sanctuary-city policies, promotion of amnesty, resistance to mandatory E-Verify, in-state tuition for illegals, etc.
But in dealing with the immediate problem of complying with the Supreme Court’s latest ukase, immigration law can be useful. You certainly don’t want to let criminal aliens get off with less punishment than Americans, but in deciding whom to release, it would be better to release a criminal onto the streets of Mexico or El Salvador than the streets of California. And if they come back, they’re then guilty of the federal felony of re-entry after deportation, which means California’s prisons don’t have to deal with him any more (assuming Eric Holder’s Justice Department will prosecute re-entry cases, which can’t be assumed).
Oddly, Conor Friedersdorf proposes a wave of ankle bracelets, which seems expensive and worthy of a police state. Further, once the ankle bracelets got started on nonviolent offenders released from prison, they would almost certainly be extended to nonviolent offenders who never actually went there in the first place, rather like the cameras in high crime places that are now ubiquitous. More likely than ankle bracelets, but equally as worthy of a totalitarian state, is that the released prisoners will be outsourced to psychiatry. The Last Psychiatrist asks:
Where do you think all of these released prisoners will go? Home? To work?
They are being offloaded to psychiatry. To rehabs, to “involuntary outpatient,” to probation and their weekly/monthly drug tests and verification of medication compliance; to SSI.
I will grant you that it is much better than prison for those individuals. But this process justifies, institutionalizes, government control of individuals while in the public realm. It becomes that much easier to justify X or Y in the service of monitoring. Psychiatry becomes a willing (happy) tool of the government, because it pays.
If we want to talk about the things that can be done about prison overcrowding, or about changing the reasons for such high incarceration rates, we can do that. But to offload the entire mess to the psychiatrists is the kind of madness that will destroy everything that America was supposed to have been standing for.
My own prediction: nothing good is coming of this. Either California gets a surge in crime, or government, in the name of preventing crime, grows and insinuates itself through surveillance, using either high technology or questionable psychotherapy.
Posted by Hubbard in The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot, We're all DOOMED
