Excessive incarceration is an American problem. The country has about 5% of the world’s population but almost 25% of its prisoners, with the world’s largest number of inmates and highest per capita rate of incarceration.California eagerly participated in this trend of locking up ever more people. During Mr Brown’s previous stint as governor in the 1970s the state switched to more inflexible sentencing. It then spent another two decades adding “tough-on-crime” laws that kept extending sentences even for minor crimes.
The resulting prison-building boom, and rapacious bargaining by the prison-guards union, meant that state penitentiaries became the fastest-growing major cost in the state budget. California’s 33 prisons and associated camps therefore bear no small responsibility for the state’s recurring budget crises, and the resultant crunch on school and university funding.
Is the solution worse than the problem?
More
DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
$$$$$$$. It's sad most taxpayers buy into this scheme.
ReplyDeleteThe US prison system (in general) is the worlds largest business.It's also the worlds largest employer.The actual # of correctional employees from top to bottom is staggering.
ReplyDeleteMore criminals than any other country. Many more should be in prison, not less.
ReplyDeleteThe ones that should be in prison sit in the White House.
ReplyDeleteClean out the prisons and send them to North Carolina they are leaving the union anyway.
ReplyDelete