Posted on 11/27/2007 5:20:37 AM PST by JRochelle
Choosing judges is really high on the Presidential list for the next President - Romney doesn’t have “strict constructionist” in his vocabulary...That means we get another Ruth Bader Ginsburg if he’s picking...no thanks.
How Romney chose judges:
1. Created a system that ignored political affiliation (stupid)
2. Put DIVERSITY as a priority over belief and qualification
3. Allowed himself to be pressured into choosing women
I do not want his philosophy picking Supreme Court Nominees
Lousy lack of conservative leadership and thinking.
ampu
Get serious about incarcerating people? We lock up more people now than we ever have, in total and on a per capita basis. We hit a new all time high record back in 1979 for the most people behind bars ever, per capita and in total. Throughout the 20th century before that our incarceration rate had remained relatively flat. Since then our incarceration rate as multiplied to several times what it ever was before 1979. We now lock up more people than any other nation on the planet, even those with far larger populations than us. We only make up around 5% of the world population, but about 25% of all people behind bars are behind bars right here in the land of the free.
Prison is a limited resource. We can’t keep building them as fast as we’ve been building them. States can’t keep increasing their prison budgets. That’s one of the reasons why we have so many early release programs. The legislators keep keep trying to look tough passing more and more laws, criminalizing more conduct, turning what were misdemeanor crimes into felony crimes, increasing punishments on crimes, upping the classification of felonies such that they are in categories that require longer prison sentences, adding new sentence enhancements, etc. These same legislators end up having to pass all sorts of emergency resolutions to let people out sooner. They do that with much less fanfare than the laws they pass that are adding to our prison burden. In my state it used to be that if someone was convicted of a felony on Wednesday and sentenced to prison he’d be transported from the county jail to a prison by Friday. Now there is no room in the prisons or in the county jails so almost all of these people get to go home on reporting bonds, often signature bonds, and then they just call in every night until a prison bed opens up and they are supposed to turn themselves in the next day to be transported to the big house. It usually takes several months for a prison bed to open up. The parole board is doing all it can to free up bed space. Out of necessity they have to be more concerned with freeing bed space than with public safety. They push for more early release programs and they parole almost everyone out the first time they come before the board, even habitual offenders. Those released now have to practically kill someone before their parole will be revoked. It has to be this way because there is just no room at the inn.
“No matter which state it is our prison systems are not designed to punish criminals, they are supposed to “rehab” them...”
Things may have been that way in the past, but now rehabilitation isn’t nearly the focus as it used to be. Now it is about punishment, and just warehousing bodies, lots and lots of them. In my state at least we spend very little money on rehabilitation programs and really what these are in my state are short classes people can take to get released even earlier. It’s more about clearing bed space than it is about trying to give these people skills they can use to make it in society as law abiding citizens.
Crime rates did drop some as we started on our nearly three decade march to lock up as many people as possible, but in recent years crime rates have actually been on the rise, despite the fact that we keep hitting new record years for total number and per capita number of people incarcerated. It’s been decades since we actually locked up less people one year than we had locked up the year before. Just from 2004 to 2006 we added more than 100,000 people locked up in our prisons and jails. A few more billion dollars a year? No problem. We’re made of money.
On average I believe that people sentenced to prison these days spend an average of about two and a half years in before being released. That includes those who serve really long sentences, even lifers, and those serving much shorter sentences. Probably most do a good bit less than two years, often just a few months. If you want to lock people up longer on average, bring it on up to an average of 10 years or so rather than 2.5 years, we’d have to add several million more prison beds. It would end up costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Personally, I think we need to get a lot smarter about how we use our limited prison bed space. Prison isn’t much good for anything but keeping the really bad people away from the rest of us, at least until they are released. Ideally we’d keep the really dangerous ones locked up so they can’t cause us any harm. In order to do that without adding a lot of beds we can’t afford, we need to do a lot better job of prioritizing. There are a lot of people we currently send to prison that we wouldn’t be able to send if we are really trying to keep the more dangerous people locked up longer.
I think communities should take a much more active roll in deciding which people need to be locked up and for how long. The best way to do that in my mind is to require communities to shoulder more of the costs of incarceration. As it is, a county my pay for it’s county jails, but in most if not all states prison is an expense covered entirely by the state government. Prosecutors and judges in in your county can send as many people to prison as long as they want and it won’t cost them or your county a dime. The state with its massive budget pays for all that. When I see a judge send someone to prison for a couple of years because he’s $50 behind on his fine payments, and I’ve seen a judge do that over $30 before, I think the $60 grand or whatever it’s going to cost to incarcerate that prisoner ought to come out of the judges salary. We already keep statistics on state incarceration numbers. We have the data on where all the prisoners are coming from, which counties. Now we need to start rationing the prison space. The state could continue to pay for everyone sent to prisons, except when a county exceeds the state’s incarceration rate. If a county is using up more than its share of prison beds, than it ought to have to pay for those beds. Why should people in county “B” have to pay for the excesses of the judges and prosecutors in county “A”? People don’t think about any of that now because prison is basically free. The rich state government off in the capital pays for all of that out its seemingly endless budget. When people start complaining about potholes in their roads not being fixed and so on and then realize it’s because their elected prosecutor and judges are locking up too many people they’ll start taking a lot more interest in who is being locked up and for how long. Then communities will become involved in the process more than ever, deciding how they’ll use their limited prison resources.
He’s terrible.
I can’t believe any conservative would fall for Romney’s lies, but he’s spread a lot of money around and is very pretty.
Lots of people are that shallow.
No way should anybody who has been elected by Massachusetts ever be considered a viable candidate for President.
Now, it’s Mitt Romney, wanting to be in position to nominate federal judges. No thanks!
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