California to release 57,000 from prisons overcrowded with innocents
I think that headline pretty much says it all. California has one of the world’s worst overcrowding problems in its prisons, with facilities running at twice intended maximum capacity. As a result:
Federal judges on Monday tentatively ordered California to release tens of thousands of inmates, up to a third of all prisoners, in the next three years to stop dangerous overcrowding. As many as 57,000 could be let go if the current population were cut by the maximum percentage considered by a three-judge panel. Judges said the move could be done without threatening public safety — and might improve a public safety hazard.
Holy crap. They want to release fifty-seven *thousand* prisoners? That’s approximately the entire prison population of the UK. Released. Anyone that thinks that will eradicate a public safety hazard is insane. After all, what about the rights of innocent people?
A lot of people that use that very line will also say that prisoners have no rights, that they’re scum that deserve to rot in overcrowded dungeons, and all that nonsense. They’re human beings, ergo, they have rights. People are locked up to stop them harming the public and to provide a disincentive to abuse others’ rights, but that disincentive surely cannot involve shoving them into modern Black Holes of Calcutta. Thus, it is right to ensure that prisoners are kept in reasonable conditions.
But the ‘rights of the innocent people’ is still the key factor. Not innocent people threatened by swarms of prisoners released onto the streets, but the innocents that are currently rotting in California’s sardine-can jails. California is the leader in the US, and therefore the world, in locking up innocent people. I am talking, of course, about drug users.
I don’t really want to rehash the arguments about drugs (geddit?). If you think treating like a criminal someone that consumes something oneself, of one’s one volition, that one has bought oneself, without harming anyone else, is correct, you have a very different idea of ‘freedom’ to me, philosophers, or the dictionary.
California has 30,000 prisoners incarcerated for non-violent drug-related ‘offences’. Probably the same again are imprisoned for violent offences related to the drugs trade that one suspects would not be committed if that trade were legalised and done by more upstanding drugs gangs, like GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, or Pfizer. If the Constitution says California has to reduce its prison population by 57,000, there’s a pretty simple way of doing that.
But, of course, they won’t be the ones that will be released. Under its absurd so-called ‘War on Drugs’ - which, like all wars, is actually waged against people, not an abstract noun - both the US government and ours treat drug users as scum. They will not be first on the list of people to be released just because they’re harmless. In fact, they will probably be the last to be released. The first will be the true criminals: the street criminals that terrorise South Central LA to the home invaders of Oakland. Coming to a home near you. Maybe even yours.
California’s voters had a chance to free 18,000 of their falsely-imprisoned fellow citizens in November under Proposition 5: the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. Going against the tide of the rest of the country, they rejected it by 60% to 40%. One can’t help but feel that, if they were presciently aware, or perhaps just not so myopic not to realise, that judges would rule that they had a choice between letting out 18,000 non-violent people and letting out 57,000 violent offenders, they’d have voted differently.
Britain and America waste too much taxpayers’ money, tens of billions a year, fighting a losing moralistic crusade against people that simply have a different hobby to the ruling elite. Now, with 57,000 real criminals about to hit the streets because of it, it’s time once again to ask: can this insanity really continue?
