WBUR reports on a proposed three-strikes law that critics say would unfairly hit minorities and force a cash-strapped state to chose between other programs and paying for a rapidly expanding prison population.
California has had a "three strikes" law (passed by ballot measure, I believe) for over a decade. Their budget deficit every year is larger than MA's entire budget; they spend over $10 billion a year on their corrections system, and a federal court still forced the state to release prisoners because of severe overcrowding.
So, in the end, billions of dollars were spent, judges hands were tied, and "career criminals" are still on the streets.
California's prison guards are grossly overcompensated and that has directly caused costs to go up while siphoning monies away from building adequate facilities. There's also the significant illegal immigration problem in California where most prisoners locked up should have been deported long ago, but are instead being held in limbo in our prison systems.
Yes, there are many reasons why incarceration costs are high in California. However, I would argue that increasing the number and percentage of "three strikers" from under 5% to almost 30% in ten years *might* have something to do with it.
The US prison system holds 8 times as many prisoners, per capita, as anywhere else on earth, including just over 1 in 9 adult black men. California specifically has 170,000 prisoners (in facilities designed to hold 100K at the very outside), 1/6 of whom are serving life sentences for such crimes as "possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana" or "failure to report to parole officer." And you've decided to take issue with the benefits of the prison guards and those dirty foreigners taking our jobsprison cells?
Out of curiosity, are there seminars you people go to to keep your talking points straight? Or have you just reached the point where your natural reaction to any negative event is to assign blame in the proper order: minorities, unions, liberals, welfare, women, then taxes?
So you think that all the people in prison which committed crimes, were tried, and convicted by a jury, before being sentenced by a judge, on multiple occasions, have absolutely nothing to do with their own incarceration and didn't have due process?
"1/6 of whom are serving life sentences for such crimes as "possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana" or "failure to report to parole officer."
Though shit, we all have to obey the law and these people whom have often already been in prison should know better than to break it by now.
And somebody please explain to me how three strikes and you're out is unfair to minorities. Being a scumbag is not exclusive to your race, your ancestry, or your language. Don't point guns and knives at unarmed people and don't get caught taking things that aren't yours. It's not difficult. I live my life without doing any of those things. Being a minority is not an excuse for doing those things.
Will, for many crimes, it isn't necessarily the doing of the crimes that's the differentiating factor. It's the rate at which people with certain skin colors are sentenced. For instance, convictions for drug crimes are extremely disproportionate to overall use of drugs and arrests for same.
Because the problem is that whites do drugs and whites are caught, but they are far less likely to do time for felonies EVEN when circumstances of arrest are similar.
Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A Review of the Literature (PDF)
The key findings in this regard include:
Young, black and Latino males (especially if unemployed) are subject to particularly harsh sentencing compared to other offender populations;
Black and Latino defendants are disadvantaged compared to whites with regard to legal-process related factors such as the “trial penalty,” sentence reductions for substantial assistance, criminal history, pretrial detention, and type of attorney;
Black defendants convicted of harming white victims suffer harsher penalties than blacks who commit crimes against other blacks or white defendants who harm whites;
Black and Latino defendants tend to be sentenced more severely than comparably situated white defendants for less serious crimes, especially drug and property crimes.
don't believe the hype. not all black men want to harm/rob you.
Yeah, I get it. Nobody wants to see habitual a-holes on the street. But the reason why we have judges is to listen to the circumstances involved in the commission of a crime and then decide on some reasonable level of punishment and/or rehabilitation, whether it be incarceration or some form of treatment. Shit like this wipes out any vestige of real thought being applied.
How about we instead try to understand the real problems? Maybe it isn't that there aren't enough laws, but maybe that there are some laws that are ridiculous to begin with? This is a quick-fix reaction by people too lazy to do the work that truly needs to be done, which is to discover why certain laws are not working and what needs to be done to either eliminate them or make them more effective. Or, if you come down on another side of it, and you believe that certain judges are too lenient, try to exert greater oversight on judicial appointments, rather than just peremptorily dismissing the input of any of them currently sitting.
One point the critics could make is that we already have a reasonable three-strikes law on the books: Get sentenced to prison on a felony twice and get the maximum on your third conviction. That's double-digits on violent felonies and life for some.
Three strikes laws are a response to weak or downright lazy judges and prosecutors allowing career thugs to roam the streets with rap sheets longer than the New Testament.
Implying the whole "this affects minorities" complaint is highly offensive too. 3 strike laws affect criminals regardless of color or creed. If a jury of your peers found you guilty three times in a row for felonies, odds are you aren't some little poor misunderstood angel that just needs a hug and some expensive government programs to turn you into a productive model citizen.
I also highly question the "increased" costs of higher incarceration rates versus the drop on crime from habitual thugs being locked up. There's a lot of money which goes into feeding, housing, policing, countless court hearings, if the thugs produce more thug children like themselves, and otherwise providing social services to thugs outside of prison. Not to mention the various costs to their victims. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost to society as a whole were less keeping repeated offenders locked up.
As incarceration rates have gone up the last twenty years crime rates have plummeted to historic lows. Do we really want to reverse that out of some misplaced notion of "fairness", as if three trial by jury convictions weren't fair enough?
As incarceration rates have gone up the last twenty years crime rates have plummeted to historic lows. Do we really want to reverse that out of some misplaced notion of "fairness", as if three trial by jury convictions weren't fair enough?
Thanks for making your opponents' argument for them. If crime is at historic lows, why do we need a new law that takes judges out of the equation?
"Increasing incarceration while ignoring more effective approaches will impose s heavy burden upon courts, corrections and communities, while providing a marginal impact on crime"
"About 25% of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to increased incarceration. While one-quarter of the crime drop is not insubstantial, we then know that most of the decline — three-quarters — was due to factors other than incarceration.”
from The Sentencing Project's 2005 report (PDF), Incarceration & Crime: A Complex Relationship.
3 strike laws affect criminals regardless of color or creed. If a jury of your peers found you guilty three times in a row for felonies, odds are you aren't some little poor misunderstood angel that just needs a hug and some expensive government programs to turn you into a productive model citizen.
As incarceration rates have gone up the last twenty years crime rates have plummeted to historic lows.
You know what else has gone down in the last 20 years? The number of states that let homosexuals marry. Therefore gay marriage = lower crime rates.
People have also made causal claims that legalized abortion and even the use/clean-up of lead paint have effected the crime rate. They had more evidence than you do though.
With less temptation to commit a crime in the first place. Probably less likely to get caught for committing crimes. Definitely more likely to hire a good lawyer and get off if caught.
And I'm sure you will feel the same way when you have the misadventure of being attacked by cops wanting to start a fight and charged with three felonies as a result of walking down the street.
(check out the NYC cop who was constantly taping while others talked or while he was told to do exactly this on the This American Life series on NPR if you want a good brain opener on that common but never spoken about practice - hear it in their own words!)
Why are there 3 times as many minorities in prison as in 1983? 1)in Mass.sentences are longer and mandatory if you sin within 1000 feet of a school. Most minorities live in inner cities, where you are almost ALWAYS that close to a school.2) Mandatory minimum sentences for drugs also lead to young people caught with drugs being given mandatory 3-year sentences;the judge can see it's not fair but his hands are tied by "tough on crime" laws. This is a class thing, too. If you can't make bail of say, $500 then you stay in jail till trial and enter the court in an orange suit and chains. Chance of conviction, thus dressed:close to 80% If you make bail and come in a suit and tie - chance of conviction, 38%. Bails are getting higher and higher - somebody is making money that way. After you wait 2 months in jail awaiting trial, the DA offers to let you off for time served if you say you are guilty. Your crumby court-appointed lawyer forgets to tell you this means you'll never get a job again, and your crumby inner-city school didn't teach you to research stuff, you are 19 and preyed on by older prisoners, so you say OK to go home.
This system costs taxpayers millions! Want to learn more facts? Come to JP Forum on 3Strikes, 1/27 at 7pm: www.jamaicaplainforum.com.
Comments
Failed experiment
California has had a "three strikes" law (passed by ballot measure, I believe) for over a decade. Their budget deficit every year is larger than MA's entire budget; they spend over $10 billion a year on their corrections system, and a federal court still forced the state to release prisoners because of severe overcrowding.
So, in the end, billions of dollars were spent, judges hands were tied, and "career criminals" are still on the streets.
Remind us again why this is a good idea?
California's prison guards
California's prison guards are grossly overcompensated and that has directly caused costs to go up while siphoning monies away from building adequate facilities. There's also the significant illegal immigration problem in California where most prisoners locked up should have been deported long ago, but are instead being held in limbo in our prison systems.
One of the costs
Yes, there are many reasons why incarceration costs are high in California. However, I would argue that increasing the number and percentage of "three strikers" from under 5% to almost 30% in ten years *might* have something to do with it.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_StrikesAccessories._/3_StrikesAccessories._/3_Strikes%20Accessories/media/pageitemD8A.gif
We could hire 30 kids for the
We could hire 30 kids for the cost of one grown-up prison guard in Cali.
Wow.
The US prison system holds 8 times as many prisoners, per capita, as anywhere else on earth, including just over 1 in 9 adult black men. California specifically has 170,000 prisoners (in facilities designed to hold 100K at the very outside), 1/6 of whom are serving life sentences for such crimes as "possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana" or "failure to report to parole officer." And you've decided to take issue with the benefits of the prison guards and those dirty foreigners taking our
jobsprison cells?Out of curiosity, are there seminars you people go to to keep your talking points straight? Or have you just reached the point where your natural reaction to any negative event is to assign blame in the proper order: minorities, unions, liberals, welfare, women, then taxes?
So you think that all the
So you think that all the people in prison which committed crimes, were tried, and convicted by a jury, before being sentenced by a judge, on multiple occasions, have absolutely nothing to do with their own incarceration and didn't have due process?
"1/6 of whom are serving life sentences for such crimes as "possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana" or "failure to report to parole officer."
Though shit, we all have to obey the law and these people whom have often already been in prison should know better than to break it by now.
Come on, Will LaTulippe!
I can't wait to hear you weigh in on these "scumbags who should die" and whatnot. I also can't wait for your next city council
failurerun.Yeah, I didn't run
BFD. I'm still alive and I still like my life.
And somebody please explain to me how three strikes and you're out is unfair to minorities. Being a scumbag is not exclusive to your race, your ancestry, or your language. Don't point guns and knives at unarmed people and don't get caught taking things that aren't yours. It's not difficult. I live my life without doing any of those things. Being a minority is not an excuse for doing those things.
Not The Doing
Will, for many crimes, it isn't necessarily the doing of the crimes that's the differentiating factor. It's the rate at which people with certain skin colors are sentenced. For instance, convictions for drug crimes are extremely disproportionate to overall use of drugs and arrests for same.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
There's a way to stop that
Stop getting caught using and selling drugs.
Anybody ever seen "Liar Liar?" "Stop breaking the law, (expletive!)"
By stop getting caught ...
You mean "make yourself white already"?
Because the problem is that whites do drugs and whites are caught, but they are far less likely to do time for felonies EVEN when circumstances of arrest are similar.
If that's true
Then I'd say that needs to be corrected.
Racial Disparity in Sentencing
Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A Review of the Literature (PDF)
The key findings in this regard include:
don't believe the hype. not all black men want to harm/rob you.
Hideous
Yeah, I get it. Nobody wants to see habitual a-holes on the street. But the reason why we have judges is to listen to the circumstances involved in the commission of a crime and then decide on some reasonable level of punishment and/or rehabilitation, whether it be incarceration or some form of treatment. Shit like this wipes out any vestige of real thought being applied.
How about we instead try to understand the real problems? Maybe it isn't that there aren't enough laws, but maybe that there are some laws that are ridiculous to begin with? This is a quick-fix reaction by people too lazy to do the work that truly needs to be done, which is to discover why certain laws are not working and what needs to be done to either eliminate them or make them more effective. Or, if you come down on another side of it, and you believe that certain judges are too lenient, try to exert greater oversight on judicial appointments, rather than just peremptorily dismissing the input of any of them currently sitting.
Band-Aid for a sucking chest wound.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Three Strikes
One point the critics could make is that we already have a reasonable three-strikes law on the books: Get sentenced to prison on a felony twice and get the maximum on your third conviction. That's double-digits on violent felonies and life for some.
http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleII/Chapter279/Section25
Three strikes laws are a
Three strikes laws are a response to weak or downright lazy judges and prosecutors allowing career thugs to roam the streets with rap sheets longer than the New Testament.
Implying the whole "this affects minorities" complaint is highly offensive too. 3 strike laws affect criminals regardless of color or creed. If a jury of your peers found you guilty three times in a row for felonies, odds are you aren't some little poor misunderstood angel that just needs a hug and some expensive government programs to turn you into a productive model citizen.
I also highly question the "increased" costs of higher incarceration rates versus the drop on crime from habitual thugs being locked up. There's a lot of money which goes into feeding, housing, policing, countless court hearings, if the thugs produce more thug children like themselves, and otherwise providing social services to thugs outside of prison. Not to mention the various costs to their victims. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost to society as a whole were less keeping repeated offenders locked up.
As incarceration rates have gone up the last twenty years crime rates have plummeted to historic lows. Do we really want to reverse that out of some misplaced notion of "fairness", as if three trial by jury convictions weren't fair enough?
As incarceration rates have
Thanks for making your opponents' argument for them. If crime is at historic lows, why do we need a new law that takes judges out of the equation?
How hard is to understand
How hard is to understand that crime is at historic lows because we have been locking up repeat offenders with three strike laws?
What you have here
Is a completely unsubstantiated claim, with no supporting evidence.
Incarceration & Crime
"Increasing incarceration while ignoring more effective approaches will impose s heavy burden upon courts, corrections and communities, while providing a marginal impact on crime"
"About 25% of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to increased incarceration. While one-quarter of the crime drop is not insubstantial, we then know that most of the decline — three-quarters — was due to factors other than incarceration.”
from The Sentencing Project's 2005 report (PDF), Incarceration & Crime: A Complex Relationship.
Bootstraps, I tells ya
...wrote the white guy.
And you assume the race of a
And you assume the race of a random poster on UHub how?
You know what else?
You know what else has gone down in the last 20 years? The number of states that let homosexuals marry. Therefore gay marriage = lower crime rates.
People have also made causal claims that legalized abortion and even the use/clean-up of lead paint have effected the crime rate. They had more evidence than you do though.
Race?
I'm no fan of 3-strikes laws, but: What is the race angle with this? Do white people commit 2 felonies, then stop?
Drug Convictions
Drug convictions are disproportionately handed out to non-whites. That's one angle.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
More likely to be born richer
With less temptation to commit a crime in the first place. Probably less likely to get caught for committing crimes. Definitely more likely to hire a good lawyer and get off if caught.
Solution to fix the prison population problem:
Three Strikes and you're Soylent Green.
"So nutritious, it should be illegal!"
The Prison Industrial Complex
They agree with you.
And I'm sure you will feel the same way when you have the misadventure of being attacked by cops wanting to start a fight and charged with three felonies as a result of walking down the street.
(check out the NYC cop who was constantly taping while others talked or while he was told to do exactly this on the This American Life series on NPR if you want a good brain opener on that common but never spoken about practice - hear it in their own words!)
3-Strikes
Why are there 3 times as many minorities in prison as in 1983? 1)in Mass.sentences are longer and mandatory if you sin within 1000 feet of a school. Most minorities live in inner cities, where you are almost ALWAYS that close to a school.2) Mandatory minimum sentences for drugs also lead to young people caught with drugs being given mandatory 3-year sentences;the judge can see it's not fair but his hands are tied by "tough on crime" laws. This is a class thing, too. If you can't make bail of say, $500 then you stay in jail till trial and enter the court in an orange suit and chains. Chance of conviction, thus dressed:close to 80% If you make bail and come in a suit and tie - chance of conviction, 38%. Bails are getting higher and higher - somebody is making money that way. After you wait 2 months in jail awaiting trial, the DA offers to let you off for time served if you say you are guilty. Your crumby court-appointed lawyer forgets to tell you this means you'll never get a job again, and your crumby inner-city school didn't teach you to research stuff, you are 19 and preyed on by older prisoners, so you say OK to go home.
This system costs taxpayers millions! Want to learn more facts? Come to JP Forum on 3Strikes, 1/27 at 7pm: www.jamaicaplainforum.com.