Posted on 05/05/2013 4:03:09 PM PDT by JerseyanExile
Michael Hough, a second-term Republican state legislator from Frederick County, Md., is about as conservative as blue-state legislators come. He played a prominent role in opposing the state’s new gay marriage law, holds an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, and received a 100 percent score from the state’s business lobby.
The major focus of his legislative agenda, however, crushes any stereotypes that might come to mind, given his résumé. Hough wants to reform America’s prisons and help the more than 500,000 people who come home from correctional facilities every year.
In the past few years, he’s successfully pushed programs that offer well-behaved offenders the chance to significantly shorten their time under state supervision and that replace potentially long sentences with “swift and certain” stays in prison for failed drug tests and other slip ups. This year, he’s working to pass mental health reforms and to create a “certificate of rehabilitation” program that allows ex-offenders to present formal evidence that they’ve mended their ways.
“As a fiscal conservative, it just made sense to me. We spend a lot on prisons,” he says. “On a human level, I know that people sometimes just get trapped in addiction.”
Hough isn’t alone. Around the country, dozens of political leaders with rock-solid conservative credentials have begun to take a new line on crime and, particularly, the issue of reintegrating ex-offenders into society. This loose movement represents a sea change in conservative thinking and, arguably, the largest social reform effort to emerge from the right in several decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
American prisons are a disgrace.
We need to end the war on drugs and the prison/industrial complex. There is reason to believe that people are now being put in prisons simply to provide slave labor.
I believe we would have less than 20% of the crime we currently suffer from if we were to actually commit to rehabilitation. Instead we put every criminal, even minor offenders into a brutal gladiator environment where young men are sold into sexual slavery just to survive. Many come out after only a few years as violent offenders who hate everyone.
Our juvenile and foster care systems are just as bad.
You can best judge a society by its prisons...
How many times do we need to try “reform” where we let felons out early and they simply go back to raping and killing?
The ONLY treatment that has been effective is to put bad guys in jail, and keep them there for a time commensurate with their crime.
...and by the way, don’t believe the BS that our jails are filled with otherwise-upstanding gentlemen that happened to get caught having a joint. THEY ARE NOT. Usually it’s a plea-down from something else, or the person has enough priors to fill a phone book. The justice system doesn’t have enough time or resources to worry about the guy smoking a joint in his house. THAT IS ALL PROPAGANDA by the same people that, for whatever reason, enjoy the prospect of felons out on the streets.
There have been two accidental deaths locally, in the last couple of years, where the “criminal” got 20 years. One was a guy who shot his best friend on accident and the other was a woman who ran off the road killing her daughter in the car with her. The guy was intoxicated, the woman was not, she was going 17 miles above the speed limit. Twenty years for something that was an tragic accident? The answer to one lost life is not to ruin another.
Yep, prison is where the state has justifiably total control over a bad or troubled persons life and instead of doing every thing they can to grab them and try to change them for the good, or to reshape them or teach them, we make them worse.
Letting the Fellowship INSIDE prisons? Won’t the left object?
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