By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Now that the state is making plans to release more than 20,000 prisoners as a cost-saving measure, some policy wonks are calling for sentencing laws to be changed, and for those laws to be more lenient, so that fewer people would wind up in prison.

That seems wrong to me.

Tougher sentencing laws, enacted over the past two decades, have been followed by lower crime rates. Here is the logic behind that: crimes are committed by criminals; if you get criminals off the streets, you have fewer crimes.

We don’t need more-lenient sentencing laws, which would lead to more criminals among us. We need more and better prisons.

When tough sentencing laws were enacted, legislators went into denial about the need for prison-building. Yes, more were built, but not nearly enough to house the criminals being taken off the streets.

The result has been overcrowding in California’s prisons, which is both dangerous and costly.

This has invited lawsuits, and the state has been faced with having to get some 40,000 prisoners out of state prisons. Some of these prisoners are being moved to facilities in other states, which can save money, because most other states are able to operate prisons at lower cost than California seems able to do.

But the 20,000-plus prisoners being let loose to save money will for the most part be sent back to civilian life.
A lot of them will wind up back in local jails, where they will become the problem of the state’s counties.

Many California prison inmates are illegal aliens. It might be a good idea to send them back to wherever they came from, which wouldn’t be cheap, but would be less expensive than turning them loose in California, where they likely would reoffend. That sounds almost too easy, though.

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