the dope report

California is a state that’s addicted to imprisonment. In good times, all its friends looked the other way, but now that it’s stone-cold broke, spending billions of dollars per year jailing potheads and other non-violent offenders seems excessive. We have more locked up per capita than communist Russia. Are we somehow more crooked and easily caught than the rest of the world? It’s gotten so bad, the feds are stepping in.

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Three federal judges have mandated California release more than 40,000 prisoners to relieve human rights abuses like overcrowding, which has led to open rioting this year. But the state can’t quit.

Last week, the legislature agreed to release 27,000 prisoners, thereby violating the Federal mandate, which means California as a state can be fined around $250 million, and even better, state officials can be jailed for contempt of court. How awesome would that be? Of course, it won’t happen.

Instead we get vile dipshits like The Chronicle’s Deborah Saunders saying things like:

It’s true, California prisons are officially overcrowded and running at 190 percent capacity. But that’s only because 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell and single bunks in dormitories. Now I don’t know many parents who are in a rush to free prisoners so that inmates can get their own room.

Saunders, you callow ass. Any society that meets naked violence with the institutional violence of disparate sentencing and dangerously overcrowded prisons – is doomed.

The question is, who among us is going to battle the state’s all-powerful corrections lobby, backed as it is, by the naked fear and unalloyed racism of the electorate. [AP]