More than 30,000 California prisoners to be released?

Here in California, we already have enough problems. A crippled State economy, unemployment over 12%, a budget deficit of $9.6 billion and more than $100 billion in long term financial obligations.

As if things couldn’t be any worse, on Monday the Supreme Court upheld a decision from a State Court that California prisons are increasingly becoming overcrowded and over 30,000 prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights are being violated.

As far as I’m concerned they shouldn’t have any rights.

The court order is forcing California to address this problem within two years by either releasing prisoners onto the streets or to build new prison systems. Both of those bright ideas have problems though.

If inmates are released out onto the streets, more than likely they will do the same thing they were incarcerated for and crime will skyrocket. According to the Department of Justice, in 2010 the homicide rate alone in California fell to its lowest level since 1996. It declined 9.6% from 2009. This should be some kind of evidence that keeping these dirt-bags incarcerated shows that crime in California has declined.

And build new prison systems? Where will this money going to come from? California is fundamentally bankrupt.

While the State is currently looking into alternatives such as transferring some of these tens of thousands of prisoners to other States and perhaps even countries, there is a very real possibility that a good percentage of them will indeed be released onto the streets again. As usual, there will be some press release that these are prisoners with “good reputations” and “non-violent”. Yeah right.

I’m not sure exactly why our legislators and our courts are committed to supporting criminals and endorsing crime in general when they should be on the side of the innocent American.