Is that a book?
When actions have little true consequences, people do stupid shit. OD as many times as you like cause some poor schmuck will have to shoot you up with narcan and save your ass. Hmmm why stop doing stupid shit? Rape someone bad you can safely roll the dice and get off easy; why stop doing stupid shit.
We don’t have an under incarnation problem or an over incarceration of wrong crimes problem. We have a problem of being too efficient at protecting stupid folks from the co sequences of their stupid acts. Be that narcan or self defense laws that make defense a legal nightmare for the victim or selling the tale of government will keep you safe... pick your poison.
A predictable problem. Locking up bad people and throwing away the key is politically unacceptable. Include localized corruption between higher level offenders and city governments, and here we are.
It'll of course vary from state to state, but here the big legislative trend is against incarceration. "Smart on crime" is the buzzword.
To start, our felonies are graded E-A, with C and below being presumed to be eligible for probation. Each class of felony has a term of years it's punishable by: for E it's 1-6, for C it's 3-15, etc. etc. etc. The idea is sound: the more severe the crime, the worse the potential exposure.
But, as part of our getting smart on crime, we also consider an offender's criminal history in their sentencing, using ranges. Again, this is a pretty sound idea -- more felonious people ought to get more time. We range them I-IV, and prior felonies range you up in general. However, there's a caveat: the ranging felony must, in general, be the same classification as the convicting offense, a higher classification, or within two classifications lower. So, a guy convicted of a B felony with five convictions for E felonies but no Ds, Cs, Bs, or As will still be a Range I and only be looking at eight to twelve years.
But wait: there's more. Each range also has a release eligibility date -- how much of a sentence must be served before being paroled. For a Range I, it's 30%; Range II is 35%; Range III is 45%; and Range IV is 60%. The parole people like to ensure they have room for the really bad people, so many people get paroled at their RED date, and if they don't, they'll get another hearing in a year or so where they'll likely get it. It's like stacking coupon codes on an online sale: take an additional 50% off on top of the 30% discount we're already giving you.
In English, what this means is this: Friday I sent somebody to prison for eight years. He'll actually be out in around 2.8-3.5 years, because even though he's a range II offender with a few prior felonies, he's a "nonviolent" offender (and thus prioritized for getting out of prison) and his release eligibility date is 35% of that eight years.
Over these next few legislative sessions, we expect our legislature to get even smarter on crime. But hey -- at least there's room in prison for the Really Bad People...
One of my guys responded to a call this morning where the "victim" was convicted of murder in 2014. Not manslaughter, but murder. He was out roaming the streets after about four years. I don't think people realize this is how the system actually works.