Amazingly Dems and Reps passed a bill together (not the budget though)
 

I'm still amazed at this one, that both Dems and Reps passed a criminal justice reform bill 87 to 12 in the Senate and Trump is expected to sign it as well..


It's basicly undoing a lot of the ridiculious sentencing for non violent crimes. Considering the prision lobby Im amazed this was passed with such high suppport.. must have a bunch of hidden shit in it..


In other news... Trump has refused to sign the Senate's budget bill, meaning partial govt shutdown starts Sat if they don't get shit done tomorrow unless tney do a week extension

I haven't looked over the bill, but right out of the gate I don't think it's a good idea.

It sounds like something similar we passed here in California. The goal was reduce the amount of money law enforcement spent on arresting people and keeping them in prison. Sounds like a good idea. So they reduced the amount of time criminals are spending in jail / prison, and also made some crimes minor crimes so they don't get arrested. The results have been horrible.

Now if someone smashes the window of your car to take something from it.... In the event they get caught they do not get arrested but instead get a "court summons" to appear in court. Most of the people doing these crimes are homeless or drug addicts, so they never show up... So the end result is instead of arresting someone and holding them, they let them go, the courts go through the process of declaring them a no show, then they have to issue a warrant for the person, then arrest them... So the end result is it costs law enforcement MORE money and in the mean time the victim doesn't get any help.

Then.... We are now letting people out earlier. There is less incentive to not commit crimes.... If someone is thinking of breaking in and robbing a house they might not doing it knowing the punishment is four years in prison... but if the punishment is only four months in prison they might be wiling to do it.

Criminals need to go to jail. They need to stay in jail. If someone breaks a window of a car and do thousands of dollars in damage to steal $10, they need to go prison - not get out in a few months to do it again.

You want people to go to prison for years for breaking a car window?

My kid was dating a "bad girl". When he was at work she took his convertible mustang and rear-ended a new Mercedes SUV, then fled the scene in his car. I found out a few days later when I got a letter from the sheriff. The cops refused to arrest her. I was shocked to find out it takes a lot to be arrested, at least here anyway. I googled her name and she had a few mugshot pics :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Are you serious?

Yes. Of course.

Let's say you break into someone's car and steal a cell phone. If caught you would most likely be charge with trespassing, vandalism, auto burglary, and grand larceny. Then lump in possession of stolen property and of course drugs will be involved.... In some states it's considered burglary, and if you have a firearm and or threaten someone during the crime it's first degree burglary... You can go to jail for up to twenty-five years for that. (I looked it up.)

What you want to happen if someone broke into your car and you had to replace the window and perhaps repair other damage, and they took your cell phone which you never get a back.... A few weeks in jail and $200 fine?

I have zero tolerance for this kind of bullshit. Through them in prison. And when I say prison I don't mean "let them watch tv in a dorm room" or play tennis or work on a farm.... If it was up to me they would never leave their cell and get nothing but bread and water. I am so not joking here either.

For starters, you make a lot of assumptions in the first paragraph. If a person breaks into a car and if they steal your cellphone and if they have drugs and gun on them and if and if and if. Let's look at reality. Reality is that a guy is going to smash your window and take your phone (if you left it in the car) or something else. This has happened to me twice. Once they took the $3 in change I had in the ashtray and the other time they stole my stereo and the car battery. Were drugs involved, I don't doubt it. Were these hardened criminals with guns? Probably not. They were just desperate junkies or stupid kids. Do I want someone who broke into my car to be punished? Certainly. Do I want them to go to jail for 10 years? Fuck no.

Sending a junkie away for behaving like a junkie isn't helping anyone. That person is just going to get out of jail and return to a life a crime. The facts show that people who serve more than 18 months in jail will have a 83% recidivism rate. Clearly, the system isn't working. I would suggest if a junkie breaks into a car and steals a cell phone they first go to rehab then they do some kind of community service and/or volunteer work. We work to help them get some training so they can get a job and become a productive member of society.

When we just throw everyone in jail nothing comes of it. All we are doing is creating better criminals. If you lock people up and you treat them like animals with shitty living conditions and bread and water they will become animals. If you want to throw people into the clink and create monsters then let them out to roam the quiet countryside, get your torches ready because no good comes of that.

This is actually a fascinating problem. In rats for example, you can demonstrate the addictive nature of cocaine as they'll choose coke over food and water until they lose consciousness and die. This is the very problem with addition... that the problem is not at all about decision making, its about an inability to make quality decisions. And the benefit of the high will always outweigh the negative in the moment.

However, if you put the junkie into prison who stole a car stereo and he's not used for 6 months, then there is no addiction. He then has to make the conscious choice to go back to using drugs.

The other problem is that you can't treat addiction when the addicted person isn't ready to quit and desperately wanting treatment. Even then, the success rates for successfully treating addiction under ideal circumstances are very low.

Treating addiction is never easy and is often a long, frustrating problem for all involved. Here's the issue with just putting them in jail. First, people can get drugs in jail. Second, let's assume they don't and they serve their six months and are clean and sober when they are released. That's great, but without treatment they don't have any skills or knowledge of how to stay sober. Half of sobriety is figuring out the things that trigger you and learning how to deal with or avoid them. I would argue the person who is clean after 6 months will be back to using drugs very soon. With no job, a prison record, and an addiction issue, it's going to be hard for them to get a job. Most of them just fall right back in with the crowd they were with before when they got in trouble. Hence, the reason most people who go to jail end up back in jail because we don't teach them how to stay out of jail.

I'm not suggesting we just everyone do whatever they want and punish nobody. I am suggesting that we look at people who break the law and try to decide what is causing them behave that way then while we punish them we also teach them to be better people.