Prison Radicalization

This is not a new problem, including in the United States, but it is highlighted in this story from Breitbart.

An excerpt.

One of the terrorists who murdered Fusilier Lee Rigby is radicalising other prison inmates who vow to become jihadists when they are released, prison sources have revealed.

Sources at Her Majesty’s Prison Frankland have told The Mirror that Michael Adebolajo, who along with fellow Islamist Michael Adebowale, murdered and attempted to behead Fusilier Lee Rigby near Woolwich Barracks in 2014, has already radicalised dozens of prisoners.

Non-Muslim prisoners are said to have converted under the influence of the terrorist and have sworn allegiance to Islamic State. His recruits have vowed to commit acts of terror when released, the paper reveals.

One prison official said: “Adebolajo spends most of his waking hours preaching his distorted form of Islam to anyone who will listen. He sees every inmate as a potential Islamic State soldier whether they are Muslims or not.

“He has a big personality and is very charismatic and some of the more vulnerable prisoners will fall under his spell. He is a very dangerous individual.”

The source told The Mirror that Adebolajo sees his role in life to recruit as many Jihadis as possible.

He added: “If he is suspected of trying to radicalise other inmates we step in and move him… But even in prison Adebolajo cannot be watched all the time. We don’t have the staff or the resources.”

Adebolajo was given a whole-life order excluding the possibility of parole, and Adebowale was given a minimum term of 45 years in prison.

In August 2016, a report found that political correctness was to blame for the flourishing of Islamic extremism in prisons, with guards reluctant to confront Muslim inmates for fear of being branded ‘Islamophobic’.

Christianity Failing in Europe?

A troubling scenario–especially considering the presence of Islamic recruiting within prisons–examined in this story from Crisis Magazine.

An excerpt.

On May 22, an Islamic suicide bomber detonated himself outside a pop concert in Manchester, England, killing and wounding dozens, many of them young children.

The terrorist was a 22-year-old named Salman Abedi. A few days after the attack, I was reading an article about the mosque he attended—the Didsbury Mosque. “That’s funny,” I thought looking at the accompanying photo, “that doesn’t look like a mosque, it looks like a church.”

Sure enough, as I discovered, the Didsbury Mosque was once the Albert Park Methodist Chapel. It had been bought by the local Syrian Muslim community and transformed into a Muslim place of worship.

Similar transformations have been taking place in other parts of the UK. St. Mark’s Church in London is now the New Peckham Mosque, St. Peter’s Church in Cobridge was sold to the Madina Mosque. The Brick Lane Mosque in London was originally a Methodist church. But church-to-mosque conversions are only part of a larger story. There are now 423 mosques in London, and the number is expected to grow. Meanwhile, 500 London churches have closed since 2001, and in all of England 10,000 churches have closed since 1960.

The transformation of the Albert Park Methodist Church to the Didsbury Mosque is emblematic of one of the most significant shifts in history: the transformation of Europe from a largely Christian continent to a largely Islamic one. The transformation is far from complete, and there’s an outside chance the process can be reversed, but time and demographics favor Islam.

In several of Europe’s cities, the Muslim population now hovers around the thirty percent mark. In ten years’ time, that will be forty percent. Of course that doesn’t mean 40 percent of highly committed Muslims facing 60 percent of deeply devout Christians. Both faiths have their share of half-hearted “nominals” for whom religion is more a cultural inheritance than a deeply held conviction. Still, the “nominal” problem is a much greater problem for European Christians than for European Muslims. In many European countries, Sunday church attendance is the 5-10 percent range whereas mosque attendance is very high in relation to the size of the Muslim population. In England, there are already more Muslims attending Friday prayers than there are Christians attending Anglican services on Sundays. A study by Christian Research predicts that by 2020 the number of Muslims attending prayer service in England and Wales will exceed the number of Catholics attending weekly Mass.

It’s also noteworthy that the expanding Muslim population in Europe is relatively young, whereas the declining “Christian” population is an aging one. Sixty-forty seems like good odds until you realize that the average age of the 60 percenters will be around 55 while the average age of the 40 percenters will be around 25.

You may object that if there is any fighting to be done, most of the fighting on the “Christian” side will be done by the army, not by citizens in walkers and wheelchairs. But keep in mind that the military draws its recruits from the ranks of the young. As the population of the people that Islamists refer to as “crusaders” ages, European governments will be forced to draw more of their new recruits from the Muslim population. The same goes for the police forces. Many Muslims will serve their country or their city faithfully, but many will have divided loyalties, and some will have signed up in the first place with mutiny in mind.

Most likely, however, the transformation will be effected without major battles. It won’t be a matter of numbers or of military strength, but of strength of belief. Those with the strongest beliefs will prevail. Those who are not sure what to believe will submit without a fight.

Dawa, a Strategy to Understand

This is an important article from The Catholic Thing, especially so for those doing Catholic prison ministry.

An excerpt.

So, what do you know about dawa? You know what jihad is, and what sharia is. That is Islamic vocabulary 101.

At the more advanced end of the lexicon are terms such as taqiyya (a form of lying specifically permitted to advance the cause of Islam). Or the formerly obscure taharrush, which might sound familiar inasmuch as it – the practice of groups of men surrounding and sexually assaulting women in public – rudely materialized in several European cities recently. That there is a name for it suggests it is a frequent enough occurrence. Charming.

These are all terms with which we were happily ignorant not so long ago. But how many of you are familiar with dawa? That is the question Ayaan Hirsi Ali posed last year to a crowd of admirers who had come to honor her for contributions to culture and civilization. Yet few of even her highly educated and engaged audience could answer.

And so she took them to task. In a way, obviously, that can only be done among friends: “You are honoring me and I am thankful, but I almost want to say to all of you who do not know what dawa is, ‘Shame on you.’”

That’s not what you’d expect at such a banquet, making it all the more effective as a way of seizing the audience’s attention. Not a bad idea. But she wants the attention of the wider public and so has elaborated upon the concept in a new report accessible through the Hoover Institution. Dawa can be likened to proselytizing, but it is much more than that. It might be summed up as the insidious project to Islamize the world – as cultural imperialism bent on corroding Western liberties and ultimately imposing sharia law. It is an all-encompassing precursor to jihad, a summons to conquer non-violently, and utilizes any number of mechanisms to achieve that end.

Some – too many – will say: that sounds like paranoia. Pope Francis can lament the cultural imperialism of today’s degenerate West. But to the extent that the exportation of stifling, dehumanizing ideas is critically acknowledged in the “progressive” West at all, it can only be self-directed – and confined to the past.

Dawa is nothing short of the effort to subvert from within. It is “to the Islamists of today what the ‘long march through the institutions’ was to twentieth-century Marxists.” We have a hard time imagining the immutable designs of Islam, even though Islamic leaders themselves forthrightly say they will conquer Europe and America though dawa, not the sword.

It would be hard to find this more explicitly spelled out than in the Strategic Plan of the Muslim Brotherhood for North America – a land they see as territory to be settled:

The [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

To bring this about, alas, they are to become masters in the art of cooperation and coalition building. Authorities happened to stumble upon that document back in 2004, making their partners in “dialogue”– however much they want to seek common ground – all the more willfully credulous today.

Here Islamic actors have their (frequently Catholic) “partners” right where they want them – for now. Hirsi Ali pleads that we should be able to see – in our supposed “information age” – where the road of dawa leads: to subjugation.

Prison Reduces Crime

An excellent article from Crime & Consequences Blog about the proof.

An excerpt.

No one doubts that the increased use of mandatory minimum sentencing laws has contributed, likely significantly, to the big increase in the prison population from 1990-2010 (it has dropped since then).

The next question crucial to our sentencing debate, then, is how much has increased incarceration contributed to the astonishing drop in crime over those 20 years (and astonishing is the right word, see this table showing that crime rates fell by nearly half).

Obviously, if increased incarceration accounts for only a small part of the falloff in crime, then the case for easing off on the use of prison becomes stronger. Conversely, if more prison has been a big driver of plummeting crime, the country justifiably will be more hesitant to go back to the softer policies that brought us the crime explosion in the quarter century before 1990.

This central question has been studied.  How much does increased incarceration contribute to the drop in crime?  What do the data say?

It tuns out we have plenty of data and they say pretty much the same thing.

The most systematic study is here, in which Prof. Steve Levitt of Chicago finds, in a 2004 research paper, that increased incarceration accounted for 25% or perhaps more of the large decrease in crime in the Nineties, and noting that the “evidence linking increased punishment to lower crime rates is very strong.”

Prof. William Spelman at Texas found the amount to be between 27% and 34%, see here.

Eminent UCLA criminologist Prof. James Q. Wilson took a look at the Levitt and Spelman conclusions and agreed with them in a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal.

Finally, a well-regarded expert favorable to  sentencing reform, John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, acknowledged in his 2014 debate with Judge Michael Mukasey and me that increased incarceration may account for between 25% and 35% of the reduction in crime in the relevant period. See John’s balanced presentation between 7:30 – 8:10 of the tape of his remarks.

So the consensus of neutral scholarship is that increased use of incarceration resulted in roughly 28% of the crime decrease that started at the dawn of the Nineties.and went on for the next 20 years (or more).

Cell Phones & Computers in Prisons

The criminals in prison are getting better-equipped to commit crimes, as this article from CNN reports.

An excerpt.

Lax security allowed inmates at an Ohio prison to build two computers and connect them to the state’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s network, investigators found.

The computers were found hidden in the ceiling of the prison in Marion County in 2015, prompting an investigation by Ohio’s Inspector General.

The computers contained applications for credit cards using another inmate’s information, pornography, research on tax refund fraud, recipes for homemade drugs and message exchanges.

The Marion Correctional Institution inmates were also able to issue passes to gain access to multiple areas within the prison.

IT employees had received an alert about a computer using ODRC’s computer network that “had exceeded a daily internet usage threshold.” The alert also pointed out that the computers were being used with a former employee and prison contractor’s stolen credentials.

The resourceful inmates had access to old computer parts through a prison program that employs inmates to dismantle old gadgets for recycling.

During the investigation, two inmates allegedly admitted to building the computers and placing them in the ceiling. One of them told investigators they transported the computers within the prison due to “pretty lax” supervision from some of the corrections officers, according to a report released Tuesday.

“Inmates were allowed unsupervised access to computers and computer parts. Inmates were allowed unsupervised access to vast areas of the institution, and unsupervised time to build, transport, run computer cables, and hide the computers in the ceiling,” the report said.

“Investigators determined prisoners took advantage of the freedoms, programs, and lax security standards at MCI,” it concluded.

Police Officer Killing in California

The recent tragic killing of a police officer appears to have a clearly defined cause, as shown in this Press Release from the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

Release Date:  February 22, 2017 Contact:  Michael Rushford (916) 446-0345

LEGAL GROUP: WEAKER SENTENCING KILLED WHITTIER COP

Michael Mejia, a gang member released from jail ten days earlier, has been identified as the suspect in the killing of a Whittier police officer and the injuring of another in a shootout. Authorities attributed his being on the streets to AB109, a 2011 law signed by the Governor that reduced sentences for habitual felons, and Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that converted drug and theft felonies into misdemeanors. “We need to wake up. Enough is enough,” said Police Chief Jeff Piper.

It wasn’t the first time this happened, according to the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Habitual felons Trenton Trevon Lovell, who murdered Los Angeles police officer Steve Owen on October 6, 2016, and John Felix, who murdered two Palm Springs police officers on October 8, 2016, were most likely loose on the streets because of AB109 and Proposition 47. Lovell was on parole for a 2009 armed robbery and attending a rehabilitation program for a 2015 drunk driving with injuries conviction when he shot officer Owen five times. Felix had served time in prison for a 2009 attempted murder and was on parole in 2013 when he was convicted for fighting with officers who were looking for his brother. He was convicted of drunk driving the next year.

Prior to the adoption of AB109 and Proposition 47, all three of these criminals could have been sent back to prison for violating parole and for the commission of new crimes. The Foundation has warned that the reduced consequences imposed by these laws is resulting in increased crime.

Data from the FBI Preliminary Crime Report for 2016 indicates that last year violent crime increased in two-thirds of California’s largest cities. The report tracks crimes committed during the first six months of the previous year in U. S. Cities with populations over 100,000. Of the state’s 69 largest cities, 46 had increased violent crime last year. Some cities saw increases of more than 50% in crimes, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. In Los Angeles, violent crime rose 16.8% compared to 2015. In 2015, the U. S. Department of Justice reported that violent crime in California increased by 7.6%, two and one-half times the increase nationally.

“Families are losing loved ones and innocent people are being robbed, raped, assaulted, and burglarized by criminals left on the streets under these laws. How many victims will it take before the Legislature and the Governor stop telling us that everything is fine and take real action to restore public safety?” asked Foundation President Michael Rushford.

The FBI Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January-June 2016 is available at: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2016

The FBI report Crime in the United States 2015 is available at: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015

CJLF President Michael Rushford is available for comment at (916) 446-0345.

Another Book on Mass Incarceration

This article from the Wall Street Journal—which makes some good points, but buys into some myths, primarily by using the Marxist inspired slogan ‘mass incarceration’ —operates on the academic assumption that criminals are created by social, economic and biological conditions and accepting that means we can, by using crime reduction programs liberals still think work, but don’t; reduce prison population while not increasing the risk to the public.

An excerpt.

The good news is that a growing number of proven tactics can keep violent crime low, and perhaps reduce it even further, without relying as much on prison. If governments lock up fewer people for violent crimes, they can use some of the savings to help fund these alternatives.

One widely adopted approach is what experts call “focused deterrence,” which was first tried, with great success, in Boston in the mid-1990s. Aimed at reducing the violence associated with gang membership, the program brings gang members together with the police, social-service providers and respected members of the local community. They are told that if violence continues, the police will crack down quickly and severely. Those who agree to put violence behind them, however, are offered help with housing, education, drug and alcohol treatment and other services, and community leaders make a moral plea to them.

Such programs have had a significant effect on street violence in many places. Nine of the 10 high-quality studies that have been done on focused deterrence report strong impacts—a 63% decline in youth homicides in Boston, a 35% decline in murders among “criminally active group members” in Cincinnati and so on.

A related but less conventional approach called “Cure Violence” has been tried in New York City and Chicago (and even as far afield as Rio de Janeiro and Basra, Iraq). This program treats gun violence as a public-health problem: If left “untreated,” a shooting will be transmitted to another victim, thanks to retaliation. The idea is to interrupt that cycle, relying on people like former gang members (as opposed to the police) to help shooting victims and their friends and family find other, nonviolent ways to resolve the conflict.

Like focused deterrence, this approach also seeks to provide at-risk youth with access to resources, ranging from housing to entertainment. In New York City, a study conducted between 2010 and 2012 found that areas where Cure Violence operated had experienced 20% fewer shootings as compared with similar areas. Conversely, shootings in Chicago began to rise sharply shortly after a stalemate over the state budget resulted in a drastic cut in funding for Cure Violence in March 2015. The biggest increases in lethal violence occurred in those neighborhoods where the program had been used most widely.

Crime Up, Real Answers

The real answers come from Heather Mac Donald at City Journal.

An excerpt.

The Black Lives Matter crusade against the police continued to cost lives and destroy civil peace in 2016. Two recent estimates of violent crime in the nation’s largest cities show that murders and shootings remained on an upward trajectory this year, as officers backed off of proactive policing. The Brennan Center for Justice projects that murders in the 30 largest cities will be 14 percent higher in 2016 compared with 2015, a stunning increase coming as it does on top of 2015’s already massive homicide rise, which was 14.5 percent in all cities with populations over 250,000 and 20 percent in cities with populations from 500,000 to 1 million. The Wall Street Journal found that homicides increased in 16 of the 20 largest police departments in 2016. Meanwhile, gun murders of police officers are up 68 percent through December 23, compared with the same period in 2015.

Medium-sized cities that don’t show up in the Brennan Center or Wall Street Journal analyses are also in distress. Cleveland’s murder numbers, for example, are up again in 2016 over 2015, which, with a 15 percent spike over 2014, was already one of the deadliest years in a decade. By early December 2016, Richmond had logged a 40 percent increase in homicides over 2015, making this year Richmond’s deadliest in a decade. And even in some cities where homicides decreased modestly over the previous year’s violent crime surge, the drop may simply reflect the vagaries of emergency-room treatment, ambulance speeds, and gangbangers’ shooting skills. Non-fatal shootings are up in Baltimore, though homicides are down slightly compared with 2015. Measured on a per capita basis, 2016 will still be Baltimore’s second deadliest year in its history.

The media, academia, and some police officials are again twisting themselves into knots to deny that depolicing is responsible for the ongoing violent-crime increase. None of their alternative explanations fits the timing. The Wall Street Journal cites Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos for the proposition that the demolition of Chicago’s massive public-housing projects is resulting in more gang violence today: “What we are seeing now is more ‘mom and pop’ type of activity,” he says. But the last of the projects went down in 2011. Chicago’s homicides dropped significantly in 2013 and 2014. It was only in 2015, as race riots and virulent anti-cop protests spread across the country and as Chicago cops went “fetal,” in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s words, that Chicago’s homicides and shootings started spiking.

The Brennan Center cites “long-term socioeconomic problems (high poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation)” for the 2016 violent crime increase, the same explanation it gave last year for the 2015 crime spike. But such “long-term socioeconomic problems” have not worsened in the last two years. In implicit recognition of that fact, the Brennan Center this year has added an ad hoc supplemental explanation: cities with high poverty “are more prone to short-term spikes in crime,” the Brennan researchers allege without evidence. But last year’s national homicide increase was not some typical short-term blip; it was the largest in nearly 50 years. Virtually every population tranche of cities experienced it. The Brennan Center also cites “gang violence” as a cause of the rising violence in Chicago—a circular explanation.

University of Missouri, St. Louis, criminologist Richard Rosenfeld continues to propose that a loss in police legitimacy has made residents of high-crime areas less willing to cooperate with the police in solving crimes, and more likely to turn to retaliatory shootings in search of justice. But the no-snitch ethic has been the code of the streets for decades in minority areas. The young men who are gunning each other down in black ghettos at elevated rates were no more likely three years ago to fulfill their civic duties by helping solve shootings. What has changed is their likelihood of getting stopped and questioned by the police as they hang out on the corner; with the police backing off, they are more likely to carry and use guns.

Another ‘Mass Incarceration’ Report

From the Brennan Center, a liberal think tank helping promote the misleading narrative that the United States incarcerates too many people though our recent past policing and incarceration policies have resulted in the biggest reduction in crime rates over the past few decades.

Here is an excerpt from the study, virtually wrong on all counts; and reading my analysis of the mass incarceration narrative should help clarify that.

An excerpt from the study.

While mass incarceration has emerged as an urgent national issue to be addressed, the reforms currently offered are dwarfed by the scale of the problem. The country needs bolder solutions.

How can we significantly cut the prison population while still keeping the country safe? This report puts forth one answer to that question. Our path forward is not offered as the only answer or as an absolute. Rather, it is meant to provide a starting point for a broader discussion about how the country can rethink and revamp the outdated sentencing edifice of the last four decades.

This report is the product of three years of research conducted by one of the nation’s leading criminologists, experienced criminal justice lawyers, and statistical researchers. First, we conducted an in-depth examination of the federal and state criminal codes, as well as the convictions and sentences of the nationwide prison population (1.46 million prisoners serving time for 370 different crime categories) to estimate how many people are currently incarcerated without a sufficient public safety rationale. We find that alternatives to incarceration are more effective and just penalties for many lower-level crimes. We also find that prison sentences can safely be shortened for a discrete set of more serious crimes.

Second, based on these findings, we propose a new, alternative framework for sentencing grounded in the science of public safety and rehabilitation.

Many have argued that regimented sentencing laws should be eliminated and replaced with broad judicial discretion. Others counter that this would reinstate a system wherein judges are free to deliver vastly divergent sentences for the same crime, potentially exacerbating racial disparities and perpetuating the tradition of harsh sentences.

This report proposes a new solution, building on these past proposals. We advocate that today’s sentencing laws should change to provide default sentences that are proportional to the specific crime committed and in line with social science research, instead of based on conjecture. These defaults should mandate sentences of alternatives to incarceration for lower-level crimes. For some other crimes that warrant incarceration, they should mandate shorter sentences. Judges should have discretion to depart from these defaults in special circumstances, such as a defendant’s criminal history, mental health or addiction issues, or specifics of the crime committed. This approach is grounded in the premise that the first principle of 21st century sentencing should be to protect public safety, and that sentences should levy the most effective, proportional, and cost-efficient sanction to achieve that goal. It aims to create more uniform sentences and reduce disparities, while preserving judicial discretion when needed.

Our proposed sentencing defaults for each crime weigh four factors:

• Seriousness: Murder, for instance, should be treated as a far graver crime than writing a bad check.
• Victim Impact: If a person has been harmed in the commission of a crime, especially physically, weight toward a more serious sentence.
• Intent: If the actor knowingly and deliberately violated the law, a more severe sanction may be appropriate.
• Recidivism: Those more likely to reoffend may need more intervention. Our findings and recommendations, determined by applying the four factors above to the prison population, are detailed below. (The rationale for these factors and our full methodology is described in Appendix A.)As depicted in Figure 1, this report finds the following:
• Our Findings

• Of the 1.46 million state and federal prisoners, an estimated 39 percent (approximately 576,000 people) are incarcerated with little public safety rationale. They could be more appropriately sentenced to an alternative to prison or a shorter prison stay, with limited impact on public safety. If these prisoners were released, it would result in cost savings of nearly $20 billion per year, and almost $200 billion over 10 years. This sum is enough to employ 270,000 new police officers, 360,000 probation officers, or 327,000 school teachers. It is greater than the annual budgets of the United States Departments of Commerce and Labor combined.
• Alternatives to prison are likely more effective sentences for an estimated 364,000 lower-level offenders — about 25 percent of the current prison population. Research shows that prison does little to rehabilitate and can increase recidivism in such cases. Treatment, community service, or probation are more effective. For example, of the nearly 66,000 prisoners whose most severe crime is drug possession, the average sentence is over one year; these offenders would be better sentenced to treatment or other alternatives.
• An estimated 212,000 prisoners (14 percent of the total population) have already served sufficiently long prison terms and could likely be released within the next year with little risk to public safety. These prisoners are serving time for the more serious crimes that make up 58 percent of today’s prison population — aggravated assault, murder, nonviolent weapons offenses, robbery, serious burglary, and serious drug trafficking.
• Approximately 79 percent of today’s prisoners suffer from either drug addiction or mental illness, and 40 percent suffer from both.35 Alternative interventions such as treatment could be more effective sanctions for many of these individuals.

Myth of Property Offenders

Liberals and uniformed conservatives have long promoted the myth that property offenders are less violent so can safely be released from prisons without serving long terms.

Recent data from the government reveals the fallacy of the myth, as reported by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in their newest Press Release:

Release Date:  December 8, 2016 Contact:  Michael Rushford (916) 446-0345

BJS DATA: RELEASING PROPERTY OFFENDERS EQUALS MORE VIOLENT CRIME

New data released yesterday by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicates that property offenders released from prison are rearrested for committing violent crimes nearly at the same rate as violent criminals.

Supplemental BJS data on recidivism for inmates released from prison in 2005 shows that 28.5% of property offenders, such as burglars and car thieves, were rearrested for a violent crime within five years. This figure is only slightly lower than the 33.1% of violent offenders released the same year who were rearrested for violent crimes within five years.

“Nobody should be surprised by this,” said Michael Rushford, President of the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. “The notion that property and drug offenders are not dangerous has been disproven time after time.”

In addition to property offenders, the Foundation points to the breakdown of violent recidivism rates among other offenders whom alternative sentencing advocates consider non-violent, such as those convicted of drug and public order crimes. According to the BJS data, over the same five-year period 24.8% of drug offenders and 29.2% of public order offenders were rearrested for a violent crime.

“California’s Governor and supporters of the reduced sentences under his Realignment law, this year’s Proposition 57 and the 2014 ballot measure Proposition 47, have been telling us that locking up habitual thieves and drug dealers is unnecessary because they are not dangerous and can be rehabilitated in our communities. This is an entirely false narrative. The law-abiding public faces more than a one-in-four chance that the car thief getting an early release from prison today will be tomorrow’s violent criminal. Those are unacceptable odds,” said Rushford.

Foundation President Michael Rushford can be reached for comment at (916) 446-0345. Bureau of Justice Statistics data referred to is available here.