Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.
The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, 'Let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,' and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections.
No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.
Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.
If we were really tough on crime, we'd do more to stop it from happening in the first place.
We already spend too few days in Congress working on meaningful legislation; we simply can't afford to waste more time on legislation that doesn't move the needle to improve the lives of everyday Americans.
We've seen more reform in the last year than we've seen in decades, and we haven't spent a dime yet. It's staggering how the Recovery Act is driving change.
We should triple the amount we spend on defense and quadruple what we spend on prisons. Why do we pay for food stamps? Welfare? Medicare? They don't keep us safe. If anything, they nurture the most dangerous elements of society.