100
Thousand More Violent Crimes Ahead
Why is
Congress hell-bent on releasing thousands of dangerous criminals from federal
prison early? By Rick Manning, 1/8/16
Watching Congressional Republicans
bemoan President Obama’s executive actions on gun control reminds me of the
Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore movie “50
First Dates.”
The Sandler, Barrymore comedy is based on the premise that a woman
suffers from a malady which causes her to forget everything that transpired for
most of her life every time she goes to sleep at night. When she wakes up the next day, she has to
start over from scratch. Sandler meets
Barrymore and falls for her and hilarity ensues.
The only question is whether
Congressional Republicans think that the public has fallen prey to Barrymore’s
ailment or are they unknowing sufferers?
As Republicans posture en masse
claiming that they are going to use the power of the purse to rein in Obama one
month after giving him a virtual blank check for most of the remainder of his
time in office through the omnibus spending bill, they either think the
collective memory is so dim or the eggnog so thick that few will remember their
recent catastrophic failure.
What is worse however, is that while
they are talking about President Obama enforcing the laws against criminal
misuse of firearms that are on the books, Congressional Republicans are moving
forward with plans to pass legislation reducing sentencing guidelines for those
caught possessing a gun while committing a drug offense.
That’s right. At a time when Baltimore broke its annual homicide record and Chicago has returned to the days of Capone with eleven murders in
the first week of the new year, a bi-partisan supported criminal justice reform
measure would put a Republican rubber stamp on the release of thousands of
major drug dealers back onto the streets from which they were forcibly removed.
What could go wrong?
On top of this Republican proposed
release program, President Obama is drastically increasing Justice Department
staff to handle the expected massive
increase in pardons and clemency that the
President is expected to issue beyond the 40,000 plus convicts he began
releasing starting in Oct. 2015.
And into this mix, Congress is
trying to pass legislation, which the President will sign, that retroactively
cuts mandatory sentences of those still serving time in the federal
penitentiary.
This might make sense if federal
prisons were overrun with people who were caught up, arrested and convicted of
simple possession of drugs charges. But
that is not the case, in fact, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission as
of the end of 2014, only 15 U.S. citizens were serving in federal prison for
“simple possession,” and most were likely plead down from more serious charges.
The federal mandatory minimums are
reserved for high-level traffickers. To
earn a 10-year mandatory minimum, a person must possess at least one kilogram
of heroin, the equivalent of 10,000 individual fixes and countless lives
destroyed. Possession of five kilos of
cocaine will get you the same 10-year mandatory minimum with a street value of
almost $150,000. If you possess a ton of
marijuana, you are 204 pounds short of what is needed to qualify for the
10-year mandatory.
People in federal prison under the
mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession are not the kid in
high school who sells his buddy a joint.
Republicans would be releasing, on a bi-partisan basis as if that
absolves them of culpability, the kingpin who is running a distribution network
that is claiming the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people who fall into
the snare of drug addiction.
Anyone who with a lick of sense and
is paying attention would consider it lunacy to flood the streets of America with
high-level drug dealers, many of whom are guaranteed to want to reclaim their
place in the drug distribution system.
Dealing illegal drugs is a dangerous
business. Gangs fight over neighborhoods and street corners and murder is the
inevitable outcome. Passage of the
proposed criminal justice early release bill in Congress will result in even
higher homicide rates.
How do I know? A 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics study
tracked 404,638 state prisoners from 30 states released in 2005, 76.9 percent
of drug offenders were re-arrested within 5 years (78 percent of possession
offenders and 75 percent of trafficking offenders), with 25 percent of the
recidivating offenses (for which they were arrested) being violent crimes. That’s a minimum of 100,000 more violent
crimes.
Does this mean that our nation
should lock them up and throw away the key? No, but it does mean that Congress
would be foolish to proceed with retroactively lowering the sentences of those
already in prison for high-level drug trafficking or having a gun in their
possession while they were engaged in the crime.
It means that before swinging the
prison doors wide, Congress needs to consider that President Obama’s response
to Ferguson and elsewhere has created a climate where police are unable to
safely do the same job they did a few years ago. What’s more this creates the added problem
that the law-abiding in the community are less likely to cooperate with the
police out of fear of retaliation for collaborating with the enemy.
It is the wrong time for Congress to
proceed with its dangerous and ill-advised criminal justice reform plan. This is one bi-partisan bill that
Congressional Republicans should just say no to.
When a pre-released violent offender
inevitably murders someone, the American public will not be suffering from
daily amnesia like in the Sandler, Barrymore movie. And if they did, political consultants would
be putting the
thirty second Willie Horton-style ad
assigning culpability on a continual loop to remind them.
Rick Manning is the President of
Americans for Limited Government.
Comments
Prison
for drug users should be one long drug treatment experience that might have
worked to 100,000 of 400,000 released prisoners, but not for the other 300,000,
who should not have been released. So,
we’re doing this again ?
We are
also allowing about the same number of Muslim “refugees” into the US. And HUD is heading to the suburbs to trash
your home values. We will have more
cases of acute Alinskyites occurring with our citizens. When will US voters raise enough hell to stop
the Obamakrieg.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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