smooth

wow, thanks for clearing up California's crime issue. I'll be sure and let everyone know on my floor first thing in the morning...

...we can all go home now, I bet if we had just kept him in jail for the whole four more months he skated without serving, he wouldn't have committed any more crimes.

Of course, maybe you meant we should have kept him in prison for life for possession of a sawed-off shotgun?

The irony is that you post thread after thread about firearms rights, yet call this person an "obviously dangerous felon" due to the fact that he possessed a shotgun in violation of current laws. Where does legitimate flouting of the law begin and end in your mind? Does one have an inherent (god-given, is the word I believe you used in discussion with me earlier) right to possess weapons or only those the state allows him or her to possess?


EDIT:
If you make it to the end of the article, the author provides some objective data:
The first thing you'll notice is that, while pre-releases rose considerably, the percent of people who served their full sentence ALSO increased. Presumably, this indicates that low-risk offenders were released while enabling the jail to house more eggregious offenders who would otherwise have been released early.
*perhaps we can discuss the profile of these various offenders in another thread before making sweeping assertions regarding the "crime" problem in Cali and the US, generally.*

the second chart indicates that in 3.5 years only 16 people committed murder after they were released early. While any murder is a murder too many, the fact that nearly 150,000 inmates were released in that same time indicates that the stories employed to make the point that potential murderers were being released wholesale is not only inaccurate, it's so far from the norm that it's not even on the map (run the numbers on a calculator just to get a sense of how ridiculous it'd be to make conclusions by using early-released murderers as a policy guide).

All of the offenses listed COMBINED only comprise 1% of the inmates released. And only 10% of the total population were re-arrrested at all (for what, we're not privy to in this data set). However, you're arguing, based on this, that a better solution would be to house 90% of the released population (which was never re-arrested) and 99% of the population (which didn't commit a violent crime again)?


The only thing we can conclude policy-wise from this data-set is that if we were to implement the changes you seem to be implying, our jails would EXPLODE! And we wouldn't even obtain a significant reduction in the crimes committed for our troubles and expense.

The other clear point is that roughly 1 out of 100 inmates will reoffend in a violent crime. 1 out of 100,000 will commit a murder. The problem then becomes how we determine which one?

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman