Media hype and political quick fixes have swelled California's inmate population with non-violent criminals and used up countless tax dollars in the process, wrote Joe Domanick, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, in a Jan. 6 Los Angeles Times op-ed.
"How much more folly, absurdity, fiscal irresponsibility and human tragedy will we endure before we stop tolerating the political pandering that has dictated our criminal justice law and policy over the last two decades?" Domanick asked.
He said legislative mistakes such as making tough minimum sentences for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine, allowing prosecutors to decide when juveniles can be tried as adults, and California's three-strikes law, which can send three-time convicts to prison for 25 or more years for sometimes petty offenses.
"Today, Californians are still paying the price for that folly and other like-minded laws, not just in the ruined and wasted lives of people sentenced under these laws, but in other ways," he wrote. "There are now tens of thousands of inmates in California convicted of nonviolent crimes and serving out long second- and third-strike sentences, as well as thousands more behind bars because minor crimes were turned into felonies with mandatory minimum sentences."
