Here we go, again – from the AP:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that California must drastically reduce its prison population to relieve severe overcrowding that has exposed inmates to increased violence, disease and death.
The decision, however, doesn’t mean the prison gates will swing open in an uncontrolled release.
The high court’s decision calls on the state to cut the population to no more than 110,000 inmates, meaning California will have to shed some 33,000 inmates to comply over the next two years. State officials can accomplish that by transferring inmates to local jails or releasing them…
I hate to break it to the Supreme Court, but prison is supposed to be an exceptionally unpleasant experience. It is supposed to be crowded and uncomfortable and rather risky to your health. It is supposed to be something you never want to have happen to you. To say that it is wrong that prisoners are suffering is to say that it is wrong to punish anyone, at all. Needlessly cruel suffering is something, of course, which cannot be allowed…but as long as something isn’t falling in to sadism, its just part of the price a person has to pay for breaking the law.
In addition to the idiocy of saying that prisoners must not suffer there is the sheer stupidity of ordering their release because they don’t live in some pie-in-the-sky ideal conditions. If the conditions are really so bad that they have become inhuman, then releasing the prisoners does nothing to the people who created the inhuman conditions. All such releases accomplish is the punishment of innocent non-criminals, as well as punishing the criminals, themselves…the innocent victims we immediately see: the released offenders are very likely to offend, again. People will be robbed, raped and murdered by these people (yes, even by “non-violent offenders”…some of whom are quite violent but simply weren’t convicted for such acts). Less easy to see – but just as real – is the punishment being inflicted upon the released prisoners…by putting them back in to society, we are putting them at risk of not only of dying in the acts of crime, but of so badly ruining themselves by a criminal life as to be nearly beyond redemption (redemption is always possible…but the further one walks down the road of sin the less likely one is to turn aside from it).
Things like this are the actions of people who will never suffer the least inconvenience for their actions. The Justices who have so ruled will live out the rest of their lives in carefully guarded communities, never to meet the people the ordered released, nor their victims. It is the kind of action you can take only when you are so removed from the reality of life that the affairs of men and women have become remote and academic.
The corrective, on the other hand, is in in the legislative power. Built in to the Constitution – as a check and curb upon judicial tyranny – is the power of Congress, working with the President, to ensure that judges don’t get above themselves. Laws can be passed which ensure against something inane as releasing a criminal to “punish” an incompetent prison administrator. The trouble is that all our Constitutional powers have been atrophied – in this area by the eager desire of Congress and Executive to have un-elected judges make the rules…much easier to let judges solve the thorny issues as that means no vote is on record at election time.
But we must correct this – we must reduce the judiciary to its proper, Constitutional function. It is not there to make everyone dance to a judge’s tune, but just to ensure that the laws are carried out faithfully and in accordance with the Constitution – and I find no warrant in the Constitution for the release of prisoners because they are crowded in cells, nor receiving what some judge thinks is proper health care. The judges have for too long held themselves to be superiors to all of us – holders of knowledge we cannot obtain and issuers of rulings we are not to question. Time to let them know who really runs the United States of America.
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