Jeff Jacoby is a fine writer/essayist for the Boston Globe–one of their only worthwhile columnists, since they are a leftist sinkhole.
However, Jacoby is an east coast conservative so he has his feel sorry antennae out all the time.
Here it ends up coming to some reasonable and realistic conclusions.
In a civilized society with some bad boys–incarceration makes life better for the rest, and, for some reason, recidivism is a major factor in the prison population. Major.
I recently made a report on an inmate and found that he had been incarcerated more than 20 times in less than 15 years. Now he goes away for a long stretch at the Texas Department of Corrections. Drugs and domestic violence are the major factors–so would you have him as a neighbor or as the scout master?
Should he be out on the street on a lenient sentencing regime?
Can someone convince me he is a good candidate for rehab and changing his life for the better?
a major reason for recidivism is that people with a criminal record can’t get jobs.
Therefore the only thing for them to do when they get out of jail is to commit more crimes, which brings them right back to jail…
That’s what you get when you demand criminal background checks on everyone for everything, you create an entire underclass in society of people who’d probably want to change their lives but are prevented from doing so.
Now, there are some who indeed are hardened criminals and will never voluntarily better themselves, but by now this system has extended to where people who get convicted to a few days or weeks for a traffic violation end up unemployable for the rest of their lives.
“Rehab” is not in governments’ charter. The governments’ job is to keep such people away from us.
Rehab is a job they invented for themselves, for multiple reasons, mostly not for the benefit of the people who chartered the governments and pay for them.
Keep them in prison until they are too old and crippled to do further damage. One of the reasons for a drop in the crime rate is longer sentences.