Far be it from me to agree so aggressively with my friend Steve Maviglio, but he’s absolutely right that Chris Kelly is making a fool out of himself by holding to outdated and dangerous Tough on Crime rhetoric in his campaign for Attorney General. Kelly, the former Facebook chief privacy officer, has created a Cause called “Protect Our Communities.” As Maviglio says, George Runner couldn’t have done it better himself:
Do you think the early release of 20,000 convicted felons will solve California’s budget crisis? I don’t.
Please stand with me: Click here to join my new “Protect California Communities” cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!
Our state is already more than $26 billion in debt and issuing hundreds of millions more in IOUs every week.
We need innovative solutions to get out of this mess. But a plan by Governor Schwarzenegger and some in the Legislature to early release nearly 20,000 felons from state prison is not one of them.
I’m all for prison reform — but this is surrender, not reform. Even if it would save us money — which it won’t — putting thousands of dangerous criminals back on the streets is a risk that California should never take.
Please stand with me: Click here to join my new “Protect California Communities” cause on Facebook and help me build grassroots opposition to this phony budget plan!
“Dangerous criminals” back on the streets include the terminally ill, nonviolent drug offenders and people returned to prison for the crime of technical parole violations, which eats up about 2/3 of total incarcerations in California in any given year. This is the kind of absurd rhetoric that has our prisons full to bursting, that has created 1,000 sentencing laws passed by the Legislature in the past 30 years, ALL OF THEM increasing sentences, that has turned our parole policy and prison health care systems into a national joke and a federal crime, that has cost the state billions in overtime for prison guards and overall system costs, that has scared the public into passing really dangerous, pernicious laws like three strikes, that has nearly busted our Treasury, destroyed our corrections system and eliminated any possibility for rehabilitation.
The Attorney General position can be one of leadership in producing alternatives to our prison crisis. Kelly has forfeited any ability to call himself a leader by playing to the least common denominator. He can go back now to devising schemes to strip privacy on social networking sites.
I got to ask Chris about his feelings on “3 Strikes”, and he stood firmly by it, believing that it didn’t need reforming and even said he wasn’t sure it was a strong enough law. He also didn’t believe that the 200% overcrowding of our prisons in any way attributed to the current budget crisis.
That alone scared the crap out of me. Not sure where he’s getting his talking points about being AG in California, but he’s going to need new ones before I’d consider casting a vote for him.
rather than a candidate for AG who has no prosecutorial experience and chooses to sound tough. The former has the ability to recognize problems in laws like 3 strikes and recommend changes while being immunized from the soft on crime attacks. The latter have nothing to fall back on and so are reluctant to be exposed as soft on crime and are unable to be objective.
Keep in mind two things: Democrats are viewed by the public as generally being softer on crime than Republicans. And the public outside the activist base of the Democrats generally support the death penalty, stronger sentencing guidelines and other “tough on crime” efforts. Many of those who stay in prison longer are in fact dangerous criminals.
So I submit its best to get someone who has the political/prosecutorial capital to say ” This doesn’t work,” or ” We need to release some of these people who are not a threat to society and can be effectively monitored in a less costly manner.” The same message coming from those without the political/prosecutorial capital will result in road kill, hence Chris Kelly’s pants drop.