Cal Thomas, Soft on Crime

In case you are wondering, Cal Thomas never did respond to my question.

But today he takes the dangerous tack of actually making sense when talking about our system of criminal justice. "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the U.S. prison and jail population exceeded 2 million for the first time in June, 2002. By the end of last year, 33,000 more inmates had been added to the total. That means one out of every 142 residents is incarcerated in this country. The average cost to states per inmate per day is $57.92, according to the 2000 Corrections Yearbook. In Georgia, where about 35,000 citizens are behind bars, it costs taxpayers more than $20,000 per year per inmate and each jail cell costs $60,000 to build.

What are taxpayers getting for their money? They get a false sense of security, as if putting current criminals behind bars insures there won't be future criminals. If locking up everyone now committing crimes would eliminate crime, I'd be all for it, but new criminals are born, or made, every day. Something is wrong with the system.

Violent and dangerous offenders should be locked up and, in capital cases, executed. But violent offenders are just 49 percent of the prison population. Again, according to BJS, the rest of the prisoners are behind bars for property crimes (19 percent), drug crimes (20 percent) and crimes affecting the "public order" (11 percent). This half of the prison population ought to be doing something else besides sitting in prison and costing the law-abiding money."

I don't know what his plan is exactly, but it seems to be that those charged with destruction or theft of property would have to repay those they have wronged. Restore that which was lost. Nice idea, but there's a bit from Matthew (Matt. 5:25-26) I'm reminded of. "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing."

I guess what I'm saying is I don't know if Cal Thomas is talking about them working off their debt from prison or under some sort of house arrest or what? Certainly there are those who would love a stable prison work force for certain types of work. But I'm going to be charitable and assume he meant that the convict should work out of his community to repay his debt.