Cramming Our Prisons Till They Pop
That is the title of my last FourStory article. What’s it about, you inquire precariously?
When you break the law, you get treated like a naughty child and given a timeout. At least, that was the original intention of jail. These days, it’s a timeout that’s overcrowded to the point of being a septic tank, where all walks of naughty live in constant fear of being murdered, beaten or raped. Adults on the Supreme Court decided that it just wasn’t right (or unconstitutional), and ordered that over 33,000 offenders be transferred out.
But where? And how? Even if California weren’t so pathetically broke from years of pulling out loans to pay for debts and vice versa, this would still be a problem. The California penal system tends to sentence offenders of all sorts for longer periods of time than most other states, and California offenders also tend to have a higher recidivism rate due to violations of technical parole rules. If parolees don’t read all the fine print, there’s not a slap on the wrist. Even nonviolent, nonsexual offenders (see: potheads). They go right back into jail to rot or whatever … most people don’t care, as long as they’re not walking around free.
