In the "May revise" of the budget, the governor has backed off.Counties, already struggling with an influx of adult prisoners shifted to their watch under other state budget reforms, simply couldn't handle these most-difficult youths, they argued. Prosecutors warned that without state-run youth lockups, more juveniles would be sent to adult prisons.
"Often the ones going to DJJ are the most significant risk to public safety," said Karen Pank, executive director of the Chief Probation Officers of California.
But that decision to reverse course has left some lamenting the missed opportunity.
"Counties could do this better, even though it would take time and planning," said Sumayyah Waheed, who directs the Books Not Bars campaign for the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. "It was just a matter of having the courage to go for something better."
"Courage" and "something better" meaning, apparently, deciding it's okay to put the most violent thugs in county juvenile hall where they can prey upon kids who are in for far lesser delinquency? Or perhaps put them in the "big house"? Refreshingly, there are some people on the other side of the aisle who recognize the problem.
]]>Surprisingly, the new plan is acceptable to some of the state's most ardent prison critics.
"Some say shut DJJ down, but it's just not clear to me where these youth would go," said attorney Sara Norman of the Prison Law Office, which is monitoring a 2004 legal settlement over conditions of youth confinement. "It would be far better if there were small regionally run centers where kids could be close to their homes and families, but that doesn't seem to be in the stars."
Norman and others concede that counties are mostly unequipped to provide both the security and the intensive treatment that the most disturbed young offenders require.
The Connecticut killer who once called himself one of the most hated men in America said in a death row interview that he tries not to think about the murder of a suburban mother and her two daughters, suffers no nightmares and has nothing to say to the only survivor of the brutal 2007 attack.Joshua Komisarjevsky told The Associated Press in his first interview since he was convicted that there isn't anything he could say to Dr. William Petit "that will restore the lives lost."
He also declined an opportunity to express remorse for the killings.
"I guess my reaction is not the reaction society expected," Komisarjevsky said.
It's exactly the reaction I expected.
Crime has not fallen in the United States--it's been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country's crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie--but as the single most shameful lie in American life.Now if Mr. Glazek is willing to limit his claim to the prevalence of sexual assault, it might be credible. It is easily conceivable that sexual assault is both frequent and under-reported in correctional facilities. But his claim is broader: Crime has not fallen despite large increases in incarceration - rather it's merely been transferred to the world of "hyperhell" prison cells.
Wilson's idea [Broken Windows, with George Kelling] was a revelation and a reversal of the conventional wisdom up to that point. The dominant liberal theories told us that if we provided more social services to the poor, perhaps crime would get better. But Wilson suggested that instead we turn our attention to providing a better and cleaner place to live, raising the expectations of the community by improving the quality of life--and that then crime would decline.And it did.