Today I continue into my series of going back in time and selecting past postings to re-feature. These are picked to be very interesting, original ideas I've had, significance in my efforts to save Planet Earth and Humanity, and so forth. Today a thought I had about preventing crime, which turned out to be too provocative for pursuit.However, first, more on Donald Trump and what is happening in the U.S. Congress.
- Want to better know what President Donald Trump will do on Inauguration Day, January 20?
- Pardon many, many attackers of the U.S. Capitol, and establish a committee to do the same for the rest.
- Essentially shut down the U.S.-Mexican border, with mass deportation to come.
Undo the Biden priorities, as for example the Green New Deal and EV mandate. Return fossil and nuclear programs.- Reduce Biden regulations.
- Ban transgender individuals from women't sports and the military.
- Ban critical race theory in schools.
- Announce a plan to settle the Russia-Ukraine War, with Ukraine losing a lot.
- Read what TIME says.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced the Senate Armed Services Committee for four hours today.
- Democrats brought up allegations of sexual misconduct excessive drinking, financial mismanagement and lack of experience, which he denied. Compared to incoming Commander in Chief Donald Trump, these peccadilloes are almost trivial. Mind you, if Hegseth was a nominee from a Democratic president, every Republican Senator would vote no, and also a few Democrats. But our nation will change on January 20, and this will just be another step towards a dictatorship.
- At this early stage, Hegseth almost surely will pass through this committee to the Senate floor.
- He is the most prominent and shaky of the present nominees, but most likely will be confirmed by the Senate if nothing more serious surfaces, and become your Secretary of Defense.
- As a Fox news host, he is polished and presentable, and Trump likes to have others around him who are somewhat flawed.
- His greatest asset to Trump is that Hegseth will spend the next few years totally dismantling the DOD leadership to only loyalists. This was the weak link in his coup attempt on 6January2021, and that will not be a problem in 2029.
- The Trump factor should uncomfortably ease Hegseth into office. If he fails, big deal, for then Trump will find someone else, but woe to the Senate Republicans who embarrassed him. Any chance for Democrats to vote in confirmation? Sure, for there are a few vulnerable Democrats running for re-election 2026. But Democrats have shown extreme loyalty recently, and this should continue.
One more important matter is that the 137-page final report on Donald Trump's coup attempt on 6January2021 from the Department Justice was released.
- There is sufficient evidence provided to have convicted Trump.
- However, tardiness by the Merrick Garland office, a full-court press defense by Trump lawyers, efforts of the Supreme Court, presidential election of November 5 and the judicial system in the country combined to delay the actual trial.
- Huge victory for incoming President Donald Trump.
- Yet, this report is now out and can't be whitewashed, so there will be serious long-term repercussions for The Donald.
Now, on to my topic of the day: three strikes and you're out (this is a term used in baseball) laws. Currently, 28 states have a TSAYO policy. In short, if a person has two previous serious enough convictions (called felony....note, Donald Trump is now a convicted felon), and commits a third, that individual is automatically sentenced to life in prison. The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders has been ongoing through much of history, but the original Three Strikes and You're Out" campaign was launched by the father of an 18-year-old young women who was murdered in 1993.
One problem facing the U.S. is that we have too many people in jail. One in five prisoners in the world is incarcerated in the U.S. That's 20%, with 4% the population of the globe.
The National Institute of Corrections says:
- There are 10.35 million people incarcerated.
- The USA is #1 with 2.2 million (Wikipedia says 1.8 million).
- #1 in the world/population is Seychelles with 799 per 100,000.
- #2 is the USA with 698.
- We are off the charts compared to other founding NATO countries.
The problem with having so many in jail:
- You need to build prisons, feed inmates, provide air-conditioning, guard them, and so forth.
- 4000 companies profit from mass incarceration.
- Costs $182 billion per year, and that was in 2017. It's actually higher today.
William Harris published The Methuselah Solution in 2000.
Knowing the above, in my book on SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity in 2008, I proposed another solution.
- While crime will occur, is there a way to minimize them?
- You don't want leniency, for that will only encourage more crimes. How many times have you read of a person who has already been arrested and convicted more than dozen times, being caught again?
- Society needs a way to dissuade anyone from committing a crime.
- Of course, behavioral intervention programs in school and community.
- Eliminate blighted neighborhoods.
- Return of the nuclear family.
- More police on the streets. But this adds cost.
- Stricter alcohol policies.
- Gun control.
- Note that all the above are very low priorities of the incoming Trump administration.
- But liberal Democratic leadership has not helped much.
- Sure, after the first conviction, do everything possible to remediate that individual.
- So my Draconian Solution is Three Strikes and You're Dead!
- Not life in prison, which only costs you and I more tax dollars.
- First conviction: Someone commits a crime. Do everything possible to reform the misguided individual. One remediative option is restorative justice, promoting repair, reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships. The process attempts to build partnerships, seeking balanced approaches for victim, wrongdoer and community. There will be a lot of counseling and, as necessary and possible, some restitution. New Zealand legislated in 1989 restorative justice for juvenile crime. Then, there were 64 violations per 1,000 in the population. Today, this figure has dropped to 16.
- Spend the bigger bucks on shoring up the early life (as underscored in Part 1), but be generous, too, on reclaiming this individual after a tolerable first offense. The primary objective will be to prevent those potential second and third crimes. Half of all inmates are back in jail only two years later. A simple way to reduce this rate is to strike fear into the offender so that he abandons all thought of committing another crime. Thus, the penalty for entering stage two should be terrible, if not horrendous.
- Crime #2 is committed and the defendant is judged guilty. Standard prison? Nope. Save your tax monies to build better school systems. Find some hellacious environment where the prisoner will need to support himself, and where the cost to society will be minimal. A mild form -- I was thinking more in terms of dungeons or caves -- of this concept is represented by Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa Arizona County: (Note that this article was written 16 years ago.)
- Jail meals, such as a bologna sandwich, costs 40 cents/serving, and he charges inmates for them.
- No smoking, no coffee and no porno magazines.
- Chain gangs to do free work on county projects.
- Took away cable TV, but was forced to put them back because a federal court required that for jails, so he played only the Disney and weather channels, and added Newt Gingrich lectures.
- When inmates complained, he told them don't come back. Two thousand prisoners in tents with no air conditioning, even when the temperature is more than 116 degrees F. Sheriff Joe says that our soldiers in Iraq are in tents where the temperature exceeds 120, in full battle gear.
- The question is, will those who survive be more apt not to return? The answer is, heck, yes, but mostly because of the consequences of a third conviction! Anyway, why waste good money on the hopeless, which is defined as anyone who is stupid enough to commit a second crime knowing that the punishment will be hell. The prison of Sheriff Joe is a reasonable simple solution for strike two. There are harsher, and probably more effective (but illegal and immoral) options, but for now, let us leave them for future consideration.
- Third conviction: termination! Yes, death. The U.S. has now had more than 1,000 executions since the Supreme Court ended a moratorium three decades ago. The transition will be messy, but under the TSAYD formula, this number could seriously increase in the first few years, but should decline with time. The odds are astronomically high that crime rates will significantly drop within the decade. Where are the supporting statistics? Probably none exists. I just feel this way.
- Oh yes, there are millions of questions and issues. What about a white collar criminal or traffic violator? Can you execute someone for stealing a chocolate chip cookie or a magazine? You've no doubt read of a car thief, who is convicted, convicted mind you, dozens of times (well, I'm not sure what the record is, and I can't imagine our court system being so efficient as to actually convict the same person so many times), and still somehow runs loose and is arrested for stealing yet another car. Maybe enough should be three convictions for anything. Under the TSAYD system, the odds are high that this will all stop after the first arrest.
I earlier said that this Three Strikes and You're Dead solution to crime would be too provocative.
- I recall while I was still writing the book when I introduced this concept sitting at a table with young lawyers for lunch. Thought I'd get a reading from them about this wild idea. They were appalled.
- So bounced it off friends and family. Interesting that these older folks seemed mostly supportive, with a few eagerly looking forward to this general idea to move forward.
- This was a period when I was writing for the Huffington Post. They chose not to publish my effort, the only contribution of more than a hundred they accepted.
Since this posting indicated above was published, relative to the world, the U.S. has become a more dangerous place because of crime. For example.- We rank #132 in the Global Peace Index. Brazil is #131 and Iran #133. But you say, ah, this has to do with war and peace. Nope, this index is about peacefulness within each country, such as perceived criminality in society, level of violent crime and so on.
- About violent crime, we rank #140 in the world.
- The USA ranks #1 in most civilian firearms/100 population with 121. Falkland Islands is #2 with 62 and Yemen #3 with 53. In other words, we own more than one gun/person.
- Here is a list of 205 cities in the world with the highest homicides/population. The USA has 140 cities in this list. The U.S. has 69% of the cities with the highest homicide rate!!! We only have around 4% the world population. Click on that list and find your city.
- Honolulu has a rate 3 times higher than Istanbul.
- New Orleans, the highest rate for the USA, is 39 times higher than Istanbul.
- I bet most in the U.S. would feel safer in New Orleans than Istanbul. Are they wrong.
- I recall going to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and th following day, there were long lines at police stations to report a crime. Many of them were from Hawaii.
- No wonder that Americans tend to believe that crime is up nationally.
- The reality, actually, is that crimes have dropped in the U.S.
What I was leading to is that if crime is a growing problem in the U.S., maybe a Three Strikes and You're Dead law can help make our country safer, with an improvement in our economy from lower prison costs and more tourists.- While many of our cities have become more dangerous, it turns out that, contrary to belief, the USA is getting safer. So forget about TSAYD for now, and maybe forever. It is rather extreme.
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