Friday, August 30, 2013

Conservatism.........Saving liberals from themselves

So you decide that for whatever reason your average criminal is a good guy who's just had some hard knocks in life.

As a result, you show some compassion and don't put this clown away like you should but let him back on the streets.

Question. who do you think this guy is going to victimize first; a bunch of conservatives who live in the nice cushy environs of "Redville" or the liberal residents of "Progress" City?

You won't need a lot of studies to figure it out. We can witness it in California..........

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, was it? In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California must reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons, overcrowding so severe that the Court — or five members of it, anyway — found that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the Eighth Amendment. The “Brown” of the case is California Governor Jerry Brown, who when faced with the predictably grim prospects demanded by the decision, saw through the legislation and implementation of what has been labeled “Public Safety Realignment.” This innocuous term is of course government-speak for “realigning” people out of prison where they belong and onto the streets of California’s cities, with the greatest share of them coming to roost in and around Los Angeles.

It’s impolite to say “I told you so,” but sometimes good manners must give way to good sense. I’ve visited this topic on three previous occasions here on PJ Media, in each case referring to the predictable consequences of failing to punish people for proscribed conduct. Today, fewer felons are in California’s prisons, perhaps making life a bit more tolerable for those who are so confined, but making life all the more intolerable for the rest of us. In 2011, 50,678 people were sent to state prison in California. The following year, after all that “realignment” started happening, the number fell to 33,990.

Though Governor Brown and the lesser lights of California politics have sought to put a glad face on what has happened since, the inescapable truth is that crime in California, after years of decline, is on the rise once again.

For just one example, look at the website of the California State Department of Justice, on which appears a chart depicting trends in violent and property crimes for the last 30 years (a period that happens to roughly coincide with my career as a police officer). Both lines on the graph indicate a fairly consistent downward trend in crime — that is, until one looks at 2012, when both lines ticked upward.

What could have happened in 2011 that explains this? Puzzling.

Read the rest.




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