Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Criminal Justice



Johnny Adams asked, “If winning is the goal of the libertarian party, then what about liberty? It seems spreading liberty is no longer the end, winning is.”
Then I went and bitched about those who prefer the state running some parts of our society as if I know it all. Well there is one thing I don’t think the private sector should run and that’s our prison system.
I figure if I we want to take away someone freedom then for whatever reason we need to find a way to do it without handing the person over to a profit making group that has ever reason to push for more laws so that more people will then become subjects in private prisons.
For one thing there are far too many laws on the books and it is too easy to break one or more every day.
Prosecuting attorneys love to throw the book at people and pile on the violations. This is especially true of low income violators where they can get someone to plead to a lesser charge and avoid a trail. The prosecutor then gets to claim a conviction whereas some well to do guy will hire some good legal help and fight the charges. Poor people too often don’t have a chance in our legal system.
Then there are a lot of alternatives to jail that we are not even trying. We definitely need to find a way to hold mentally ill people who have offended others without using our prison system. There are also a lot of ways to deal with those who have committed non violent offenses without locking them up that we haven’t tried.
And our juvenile justice system, if you can call it that, needs to be over hauled instead of locking people up. I recall reading a few years ago about one of the Native tribes who sent their young violators out to an island off shore for a year to think about what they had done.
I suggest we work on these solutions before we take away someone’s civil liberties. Then maybe we won’t have so many bad apples to toss.

This was originally posted on FB as a reply.
Thank you.