Sunday, July 06, 2008
LA Times: Inmates With Life Sentences Should Receive Parole
The LA Times is run by monkeys on crack.
The other day I was talking about how the LA Times is losing readers by the truckload because they are constantly on the wrong side of the issue, and they go out of their way to side with criminals, sheisters, and low down dirty scoundrals. In todays exciting edition of the LA Times, the editors want to know why more inmates, many of whom received life sentences for committing heinous acts, aren’t receiving parole from the state board of prison terms.
They are trained at putting tough questions to convicted murderers, but the state’s powerful parole board commissioners have found themselves on the other side of the table lately, under interrogation in a political conflict that has cost some of them their jobs.
On one side of the dispute is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who routinely appoints former law enforcement officials to the Board of Parole Hearings, which decides whether to release the most serious criminals from prison. On the other is state Senate leader Don Perata, a Democrat from Oakland who believes commissioners deny parole to deserving inmates far too often.
Since January, Democratic senators led by Perata have rejected four of the eight commissioners they have grilled at confirmation hearings, ousting a third of the 12-member board and forcing Schwarzenegger to replace them. Members can serve a year after their appointment but must then receive the Senate’s blessing to complete their three-year terms.
The upheaval has further disrupted an already problem-plagued board that has postponed thousands of parole hearings in recent years, potentially exposing the state to hefty fines from a Superior Court judge.
Perata has called the board “a sham” for denying parole to 95% of so-called life inmates, many of whom have been locked up for decades. He has urged the governor to appoint commissioners from outside the law enforcement world to augment the former police officers, sheriffs and probation chief who make up all but one of the current board members.
“It just defies logic to suggest that they can interview or evaluate over 5,000 people [a year] and make only a handful of remands back to the community,” Perata said in an interview. “Where are the social scientists, the psychologists? Where are the people who bring a different dimension to life, a different view on rehabilitation?”
A different view on rehab means that we take everyone in prison and put a bullet in their head after dragging them out of their cell and telling them they better make their peace with God very quickly. What we have right now is what it should be like. We have former members of the law enforcement community who decide whether or not a person who makes a living by lying, cheating, killing and stealing should be put back in the community. I believe that none of them should. I know for a fact that 75% percent of parolees go back to prison for committing crimes yet again. Parole agents are backed up, we (police officers) are backed up with arresting these dirtbags, and for all I could care, they do not even deserve to go before the board to present their case. Parolees, and 99% of criminals who are behind bars in state prison, are pieces of trash that do not deserve to breath the same air as law abiding citizens.
Which brings me to Don Perata. Perata is a man who is constantly wrong about everything he opens his mouth on, and I still have no idea how he got elected in the first place. This is a guy who wants shrinks and activists sitting on the parole board. Shrinks and activists like criminals and believe that cops are the bad guys. The last thing I want is for them to decide who is let back out on the street.
So in conclusion, Don Perata is wrong, and the LA Times is wrong. But what’s new? It’s business as usual to me.