aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Georgia prisons
We’ve got six prisons in our town. But not one prisoner’s rights advocacy group. It’s the parole board that’s come up with this:
Under a new policy proposed by the state parole board, people who have been convicted of one of 20 serious crimes would no longer have to serve 90 percent of their sentence before possibly being paroled.
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles set the current policy in 1998 when there was political pressure to completely abolish parole in the state.
The public probably won’t let it happen. Among the crimes covered by the proposed new policy is child molestation. Here’s what one Georgia legislator proposed just last week:
House Majority Leader Jerry Keen has a message for sex offenders: Go somewhere else.
The St. Simons Island Republican leader is pitching changes in Georgia’s sex crime laws, from substantially increasing minimum prison sentences for several charges to requiring lifetime electronic monitoring of those who are labeled dangerous predators.
Check out this quote, as edited clarified by the reporter:
“I hope this law becomes so onerous, costly, inconvenient (for sex offenders) that they leave Georgia. I don’t care where as long as it’s not here.”
Lest you missed it, the irony is his actual words might apply to Georgia’s citizens. The onerous cost will inconvenience taxpayers who pay for the care and feeding, minimal as it is, of the incarcerated prisoners.
Remember, it’s the folks who work with the prisoners—have you met any parole officers lately? They’re not the liberal elite—who are saying let these folks go.
I want law and order too, honest I do. And I don’t want dangerous child molesters running around free. But the cost here is not just money, which is significant; it’s also the human lives sacrificed, all those prisoners sitting in prisons.
I just know some of them are innocent, and some are in on trumped up charges. That’s not right. It’s not moral.
