"They hate us for our freedom," George W. Bush used to bellow, except for that one-in-100 people in jail thing.
Gov. Jim Doyle is calling for a cost-effective and sensible initiative in his state budget that would cut the sentences of non-violent and low-risk Wisconsin inmates, a modest proposal that is bound to draw Republican howls. (see Mark Pitsch, WSJ)
Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau is calling the proposal "alarming".
Writes Adam Liptak in a NYT piece last year:
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. ... (T)he United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.Gov. Doyle should be commended for this first step towards sanity in finding alternatives to the jailing of our fellow citizens.
Let's hope state policy follows the direction that Doyle has set and not the direction of increased criminalization and bashing of civil rights that Dane County Exec Kathleen Falk is proposing in her War on Drinking Culture.
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