Criminal Law Review

It is no secret that when it comes to the California budget deficit that it appears that this state may actually fall off into the sea, and that when it does it will be human error and have nothing to do with the mighty San Andreas Earthquake Fault rupturing in its 150-year cycle. Now, the California state government is over $24 billion in debt and is desperately trying to find places to cut costs anywhere it can.

One of the major cost for the California State Budget is the prison system. So the state legislators have decided that if they let criminals out early they can save a ton of money and layoff prison guards. This is unfortunate in the middle of a recession because if you let people out of prison and there are no jobs, you are giving them an economic incentive to go out and commit more crimes, at a time when we are also reducing police budgets.

That simply does not make sense. Additionally, if they enroll and go back to community college to learn a new skill, well, there are budget cuts there too and they are cutting classrooms, teachers, and curriculum. There are waiting lists for most classes now. Meaning retraining for parolees is not in the cards either.

Further, the detective departments at the major police departments are also cutting their forensic crime laboratories. So, as these criminals commit crimes, there will be no way to catch them, of course, there will be no cops to come pick them up, and there will be no prison guards to guard them anyway. Does any of this really makes sense?

What about criminal Law deterrents?

One of the reasons we have punishments in criminal law is to prevent crime. But if people can commit a crime and they will not be punished, or the punishment is so small, that is in reality of the criminal mind at least a justify of risk and reward and so, they’ll continue to commit more crimes. Please consider all this.