Editorial “Crowded prisons: Inflexible sentences hit the taxpayers, too” opines:
“Now that Pennsylvania is in a legislative election year, no lawmaker wants to be seen as soft on crime or ready to raise taxes. But both of those political tags loom, unfortunately, over a public issue that has been neglected for too long — prison overcrowding….
“In October the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing released a 490-page study, ordered by the Legislature, on the effects of mandatory minimum sentences.
“The report made three major recommendations: repeal the mandatory minimum sentence of two years for selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school, raise the amount of cocaine (from 2 grams to 5 grams) needed to trigger higher penalties for trafficking and let more drug offenders be routed through boot-camp programs rather than prisons.
“The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by state Rep. Tom Caltagirone, is taking a look at the role played by throw-away-the-key drug laws on the burgeoning prison population. It is one thing to imprison true criminals and threats to public safety, but it is another to warehouse inmates, at a high cost to taxpayers, over relatively small offenses….
“Let’s hope that enough legislators are willing to make changes, even in an election year, that will relieve not only overcrowded prisons but the public purse as well.”
WATCHDOG: Three wags of the tail! The USA has the highest rate of per capita incarceration in the world. If we taxed, regulated, and controlled marijuana as we do alcoholic beverages and switched our emphasis concerning hard drugs to treatment, we would immediately eliminate at least 60% of the War on Drugs, eliminate prison overcrowding, and greatly reduce government expenditures. But that would go against powerful interest groups making up the criminal justice system.
