A couple of days ago, the Visalia Times-Delta, which is apparently a newspaper intended as a local daily equivalent to the National Enquirer, or some other piece-of-crap rag, trumpeted the complaint that a new “[l]aw frees some violent inmates.” Of course, you can’t completely blame the Times-Delta for the sensationalism on this story: it’s a slight modification of the headline accompanying the online version of the yellow journalism of the AP story.  Like the Bee story, by the way, the online AP story is dated one day earlier than the print version.

Both stories demonstrate the effects of budgetary meltdown; both hint, at least inchoately, at the cause: too many crimes (thus too many criminals) and all our money is being spent on prisons instead of providing education so people will be less likely to commit these crimes.  This is a non-sustainable path to anyone’s idea of a better society.  We simply cannot keep building and staffing prisons, no matter how badly we want to create new jobs.

The big problem is that the Slashbucklers, who aim to deal with the problem by increasing spending on law enforcement, crime labs and prisons (but not lawyers for the indigent or more judges) instead of schools and other “social” programs, are only going to make it worse.  Inevitably — and this is why I’m calling them Slashbucklers — they will bring all our systems crashing down.

Ironically, the Slashbucklers who will destroy us and our justice system are readily identifiable primarily because of their alleged “Law & Order” stance.  And, no, I’m not talking about the television show, although, perhaps not coincidentally, studies have shown frequent watchers of forensic and crime dramas “are more likely to overestimate the frequency of serious crimes” and “misperceive important facts about crime.”  (Amy Patterson Neubert, “Researchers rest their case: TV consumption predicts opinions about criminal justice system” (October 28, 2009) Purdue University News.)

“This kind of television viewing can lead to ‘mean world syndrome,’ where people start to think about the world as a scary place,” Sparks says. “Some people develop a fear of victimization, and this belief can affect their feelings of comfort and security.”  (Neubert, supra.)

The people I’m talking about are those who think the problem is that we need more funding for law enforcement, more funding for crime labs and then, just to make sure the cycle remains unbroken, more funding for prisons.  Like swashbucklers, slashbucklers see themselves as saviors, “rescuing society from the clutches of a dastardly villain,” the criminally-minded and “wasters” of government resources.

Forgive me, but I have to let myself be sidetracked here.  I can’t get over the irony of referring to forensic laboratories as “crime labs.”  If the Fresno Bee story is to be believed — and for a change it appears that perhaps it could be –

The stress and strain of trying to meet the demands of court has resulted in sacrificing quality for quanity…. This is evident throughout … and possibly provided the opportunity for evidence tampering and abuse of the evidence control system.

In other words, it really is a crime lab.  Just as pharmaceutical labs create more new drugs for the market, the crime lab creates more new crimes and criminals.

Meanwhile, at any rate, a little education would ameliorate all these problems.  But our society seems less and less willing to provide that.

I suppose there’s no surprise there: the less education people have, the less use they have for education.  And while I do not subscribe to the belief that all poor people are stupid, being stupid does predispose one to difficulties making a living wage.  It also makes one a crappy citizen, less able to participate — intelligently — in the democratic process.  (Unfortunately, it won’t stop them from voting.)

The less money people have, the less willing they are to see it taxed, even to improve educational systems.  Besides, locking people up creates more jobs (police officers, correctional officers, lawyers, judges, clerks, builders of prisons, planners, paper-makers, etc.), while simultaneously removing large numbers — almost two-and-one-half million in the United States — from the job market in which other stupid people compete.

So the circle is simultaneously completed and sustained.

One of these days, though — I’ll cling fervently to this hope until the day I die — we’re going to realize, as a society, that funding education is more productive than funding prisons and courts.  We’re going to stop the criminalization of normal primate behaviors that, left alone, would harm fewer people than they do when we criminalize them.  We’re going to find that this will reduce the need for crime labs, correctional officers, judges, lawyers and other wasted resources.

I want to see the day when teachers are paid more than police officers.  Where kids are taught to value learning and provided with the tools to learn.  Where we recognize that “Law & Order” are the natural consequence of producing people who can actually believe that they have something to lose by not committing crimes instead of creating situations in our communities, our prisons and in our ‘crime labs” that encourage their commission.

I’m looking forward to the day Slashbucklers are seen for what they are: poseurs who, rather than “rescuing society from the clutches of a dastardly villain,” are more often the villains from whom society needs rescuing.

“Corrections,” an ironic misnomer, has jumped from less than $5 billion a year to more than $10 billion [a year] in the last decade, more than twice as fast as school spending, the biggest budget item.  It now costs about $45,000 a year to feed, clothe and medicate each of the state’s 170,000-plus inmates, or roughly five times what taxpayers spend on a typical public school student.  And that doesn’t count what it costs to supervise tens of thousands of parolees.

Frankly, this is ludicrous.

Walters goes on to recommend “shedding some low-intensity inmates” such as drug users and drunk drivers by transferring them to locally-run treatment programs.  Those programs would be funded by raising taxes, because Californians don’t pay enough already.

I have a better idea.  How about we recognize that our draconian system of rules — particularly our beloved Three Strikes legislation — is not only a bad way to approach the treatment of human beings with problems, but is also bankrupting us?

One woman I know of, for example, has (had?) an addiction to methamphetamine.  “Debra” was once the victim of domestic violence, yet somehow ended up being convicted of assault with a deadly weapon on the spouse who used to abuse her.  Under California’s law, this is a “strike.”

After she was found to have three-hundredths of a gram of metamphetamine on her during a probation search, she ended up being convicted of possession of a controlled substance and was subsequently sentenced to thirty-two months in prison.  Thirty-two months.  For three-hundredths of a gram.  Do you know how much that is?  You can hardly see it, it’s such a small amount!

The actual sentence for the three-hundredths of a gram of which the court handed down was 16 months; what used to be called “the mitigated term.”  However, because of her prior strike, the sentence was doubled; in this case, 16 months became 32 months.

Meanwhile, I have no idea if the Debra’s addiction will be helped by prison.  After all, our system isn’t about rehabilitation.  And prison guards smuggle the stuff in, because they’re so grossly underpaid.

The Three Strikes law has resulted in an explosion in California’s prison population.  “Since 1994, the courts have sent over 80,000 second strikers and 7,500 third strikers to state prison.”  California now houses more prisoners than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined.

California’s Three Strikes legislation basically says that someone with a “strike” — serious and violent felonies — who gets any felony after that will have the sentence for the new felony doubled; someone with two prior strikes will go to prison for life if they commit any felony.  By “any” felony, this means even those that are not violent or serious.  For example, Debra with the three-hundredths of a gram of meth would have gotten life in prison if she had two prior strikes instead of just the one.

And so, as noted above, the numbers of California citizens in prison has dramatically increased.  But the numbers at any given point in time only tell part of the story.

Remember, someone with two strikes goes to prison for life, no matter how small the felony.  Also remember, the original sentence for the three-hundredths-of-a-gram case was a mitigated term of two years.  But someone with three-hundredths of a gram of meth and two strikes could — and sometimes does — get life in prison.  (Judges can “strike the strike,” making it “not count” for a particular case, but they don’t have to and many, like the one who sentenced Debra, refuse.)

As Dan Walters noted, it costs an average of $45,000 per year to keep someone in prison.  So a two-year sentence costs $90,000.  But when that person is in their twenties, has two strikes and the judge refuses to strike the strike, now we’re talking some real money.  Assuming she lives “only” 20 more years in prison and assuming the costs of keeping her there never go up, the price tag goes from $90,000 to ten times as much, or $900,000.  That’s nearly one-million dollars to lock someone up for what is basically a minor crime.

Meanwhile, California, “off the charts compared with other states in corrections spending,” is cutting school spending.

It’s not just our prison and justice systems which are out of whack here.  Californians’ priorities are in need of a major correction.