{"id":11046,"date":"2010-02-04T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-02-04T17:13:32","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T17:13:32","slug":"justice-kennedy-blasts-prison-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2010\/02\/04\/justice-kennedy-blasts-prison-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice Kennedy Blasts Prison System"},"content":{"rendered":"

After his outrageous opinion in Citizens United, freeing corporations to spend willy-nilly on politics, Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t my favorite Justice. (Justice Breyer currently holds that title for his dissent in the Prop 8 trial youtube decision.) But, give the man credit for some honest talk at a forum at Pepperdine Law School.  While Republicans in the state are, shall we say, going in another direction, he encourages some real soul searching on our penal system.<\/p>\n

“California now has 185,000 people in prison at $32,500 a year” each, he said. He then urged voters and officials to compare that expense to what taxpayers spend per pupil in elementary schools.<\/p>\n

“The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” Kennedy said of the measure mandating life sentences for third-time criminal offenders. (LA Times<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also of note was his remark that American prison sentences are eight times longer than European sentences. You’ll see with a casual glance at the statistics<\/a> that the additional expenses for the sentences are not really an efficient use of resources.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After his outrageous opinion in Citizens United, freeing corporations to spend willy-nilly on politics, Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t my favorite Justice. (Justice Breyer currently holds that title for his dissent in the Prop 8 trial youtube decision.) But, give the man credit for some honest talk at a forum at Pepperdine Law School.  While Republicans in the state are, shall we say, going in another direction, he encourages some real soul searching on our penal system.<\/p>\n

“California now has 185,000 people in prison at $32,500 a year” each, he said. He then urged voters and officials to compare that expense to what taxpayers spend per pupil in elementary schools.<\/p>\n

“The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” Kennedy said of the measure mandating life sentences for third-time criminal offenders. (LA Times<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also of note was his remark that American prison sentences are eight times longer than European sentences. You’ll see with a casual glance at the statistics<\/a> that the additional expenses for the sentences are not really an efficient use of resources.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[200],"tags":[8361],"class_list":["post-11046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-200","tag-8361"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2Sa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}