____________________________
Conservatives addressing criminal justice system
Russ Jones - OneNewsNow - 9/12/2011 4:05:00 AM
A prison reform group has received a significant endorsement from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, making him the latest conservative to sign the Right on Crime "Statement of Principles."Vikrant Reddy, policy analyst for the campaign, says the endorsement of the younger Bush is important to the efforts of the organization.
"We were just delighted. He is obviously a gigantic figure in modern Republican politics, and we were really enthusiastic to hear that he is a supporter of all of our principles and that he wanted to be involved," Reddy shares.
His group advocates spending less on criminal reform and obtaining better results."What we would like is for conservatives to take that very critical attitude that we have towards all government programs and all types of government spending and start applying that same kind of critical eye towards critical justice, prisons, and sentencing," the policy analyst explains.
He goes on to encourage people to start asking, "How much is this costing us, and what is the government really giving us in return?" And he points out that if individuals who are sent to prison come out worse than they started, "we're paying for that, and we're not particularly happy to be paying for those kinds of terrible results."
The Right on Crime campaign believes an ideal criminal justice system works to reform amenable offenders who will return to society through harnessing the power of families, charities, faith-based groups, and communities.
It sounds like these are the conservatives mentioned in the Senator Webb piece. Again, there may be hope on the horizon, if people will take a critical look and not just accept things at face value.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the Fishmeister. This does sound hopeful. The criminal justice system definitely implements various intuition-based approaches and pumps major dollars into them, often with little-to-no empirical evidence to support them. With faulty evaluation practices, officials often fail to realize the amount of money being wasted. It is long overdue that someone with weight begin to tighten the reigns.
ReplyDeleteI caution, though, about the "crackdown" approach. Walker's definition for such a tactic included words like "short bursts." A problem like this will require a slow, steady and persistent solution...