The criminal justice system in California is rapidly approaching a breaking point:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A special panel of federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that California must release tens of thousands of inmates to relieve overcrowding.
The judges said no other solution will improve conditions so poor that inmates die regularly of suicides or lack of proper care.
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"There are simply too many prisoners for the existing capacity," they wrote. "Evidence offered at trial was overwhelmingly to the effect that overcrowding is the primary cause of the unconstitutional conditions that have been found to exist in the California prisons." [AP]
Passing harsh laws, capturing offenders and convicting people of crimes is the easy part. What a lot of people donât get is that the process doesnât end there. You have to actually do something with the people youâve decided to remove from society. Keeping massive populations behind bars for years at a time is phenomenally expensive, even if you do an appallingly poor job of it.
Itâs utterly disgusting that our drug laws condemn these people to a living hell, all because drugs are supposedly bad for your physical and emotional health. The treatment of our prisoners is disgraceful and the legions of prison-state profiteers who lobby for more jails and tougher laws seldom receive the recognition they deserve in the hierarchy of scum-sucking subspecies destroying our society.
The prison industry will not stop. These people have already created an unbelievable mess and they will fight for more laws and funding no matter how much worse it gets. When human beings start getting sick and dying in our jails, someone outside the criminal justice industry has to intervene, otherwise nothing will be done about it. It shouldnât even be necessary for judges to compel better prison conditions, but of course it is.
Fortunately, the one inevitable boundary that exists here is the fact that there is simply nothing left to spend on keeping more people in prison. The incarceration industry canât print its own money. Itâs a shame that we couldnât stall the escalation of our massive prison population with appeals to logic and compassion, but if it takes bankruptcy to abate this then so be it.