It would be difficult to imagine a subject today that occupies the minds of Americans more than the subject of crime! A recent national crime clock tells us we have....A violent crime every 22 seconds....A property crime every 3 seconds....A rape every 5 seconds....An automobile stolen every 19 seconds and....A child abuse case reported every 10 seconds. The threat of Crime hovers over every community in our nation like an ominous dark cloud. Rapists, murderers, drug dealers, sex predators and violent perverts are turned out on the street by a judicial system that is supposed to be the watchdog of our freedoms. America now leads the world in the number of incarcerated-with Russia coming in second.
Every law abiding American is either a direct or indirect victim of the revolving door criminal justice system. According to recent studies and reports approximately 2.0 million criminals of record are behind bars while approximately 5.0 million criminals of record roam the streets because of no truth in sentencing, probation, plea-bargains bonding leniency or just simple judicial discretion by lawyer judges that turn criminals loose. Approximately 570,000 criminals are released back out on the streets annually.
Statistics by the justice department tell us that 70% of the felonies are committed by 7% of the felons...most are repeat offenders committing the same crimes when turned loose on society. In the 1992-93 year over 61,000 criminals were sent to state prisons. Of that number 12,000 had one prior felony conviction for violent crime. Over 4000 had two prior felony convictions for violent crime. Think of the victims left behind by these violent criminals before they were apprehended and sent back to prison for a second and third time.....As Americans cry out for justice what do we hear by government leaders....We hear three strikes and you are out! Three strikes and you are out embodied in the 960 pages of the federal crime bill does not make two cents worth of difference! At the very most the 3-strikes federal crime bill will affect no more than 700 criminals subject to federal law and probably no more than 275, just a drop in the bucket when over 19,000 violent criminals were returned to prison in 1992-93. Year after year the politicians pass multi-billion dollar crime bills, appeasing the masses with a smokescreen while avoiding legal justice reform like the plague!
We have heard a lot of political rhetoric about the 3-strikes and you are out federal crime bill (which incidentally has become one of the biggest packages of social welfare programs in any bill before the congress in modern day). What message does the 3-strikes bill send to the criminal community? It is a message to the criminal community that you can have three murders, three violent rapes, three armed robberies and God only knows what else and you are safe until you hit the third one. What a sad day for America!
What else do we hear from government leaders in the undeclared war on crime? Now we hear gun control! With over 200 million guns privately held in the USA, gun control is like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose! It is obvious to most of us that gun control is a political ploy by the politicians to appease the citizenry in our outcry against crime and once again avoid the question of legal justice reform.
Surely no sane thinking human being would believe that gun control, in and of itself will have an impact on crime, except to leave the criminals armed while law abiding citizens are disarmed. The root cause of crime in the USA is not weapons. Neither is weapons the cure to crime. The trigger finger is always preceded by the murderous heart. Only the legal justice system can deal with the murderous hearts in society.
Now let's get real about crime! Certainly there are many collateral issues which can and do come into play in criminal justice reform and some rightly so. But let's simplify this monster! There are only two prime considerations in the subject of crime and that is....RESPONSE AND PREVENTION! The response of swift and sure punishment may well be the greatest prevention and the one missing ingredient that has created a runaway criminal culture in America. Prevention through social engineering has failed! There are eight major root causes of crime in our society-just like the tree that spreads it's roots in the ground. We can continue to cut off the limbs but that will have no effect upon the roots. Addressing those causes will also address the cure!
The greatest deterrent to crime is swift and sure punishment! We do not have that message going out to the criminal community from the judicial system today. Think of it, according to Justice department statistics....just going into the profession, all criminals collectively have a 79% guarantee of success in America. There is no other profession that is guaranteed that type of success.
Crime does pay and criminals know that. There is no better way to show how punishment is a deterrent to crime than to compare the American revolving door justice system with another criminal justice system that meets out swift and sure punishment. In recent years we have been able to clearly compare two systems of justice. One of our graffiti criminals by name of Michael Fay got loose in Singapore and practiced his criminal art on a dozen or so automobiles and telephone booths. He received a fine of $2000 and got his butt caned with a wet bamboo rod. The old American lawyer ploy of pleading his client not responsible did not work in Singapore. If this crime had occurred in his home town of Dayton, Ohio, Michael Fay would have been fined $750 and received a suspended 90 day sentence. The American criminal justice system today has evolved into an award winning performance of lawyer fraud that attempts to show that the offender is really the victim. If the lawyers miss the mark then the lawyer judge will hobble the jury with dozens of pages of instructions to reach the desired verdict.
Singapore has no record of a repeat offender who has been previously caned-it is punishment to remember. Is punishment a deterrent? Let's compare Singapore justice with American justice on a greater scale. Los Angeles, California is about the same size as Singapore with about 3.5 million people. Lets use the year 1993 for comparison;
CRIME LOS ANGELES SINGAPORE Homicides 1,100 Rapes 1,855 80 Robberies 39,277 1008 Auto Theft 65,541 3162
Singapore has had no kidnappings during the five year study and only a handful of armed robberies. Singapore has an immediate mandatory death sentence for those who fire a gun during the commission of a crime. Twenty offenses carry the death penalty. Firearm and drug trafficking offenses carry the most swift punishment. During a four year period, 47 convicts were hanged in Singapore, more than all violent criminals executed in the entire United States during the same period of time. Twenty two of those who were hanged were convicted of drug trafficking. Capital punishment is a definite deterrent to crime. An executed criminal cannot commit another crime.
The USA can learn a great lesson from the Singapore caning experience. In fact we could learn so much about punishment as a deterrent to crime, with legal justice reform, we could apply billions of dollars in crime costs and crime bills and completely eliminate the government deficit with the savings on crime costs in a short period of time.
Get rid of the great American Welfare System and watch long term crime decrease. We have several generations of Americans that have leached onto the great welfare system in America. Beginning with the great society under Lyndon Johnson, the welfare program took its real roots. Millions of babies have been born as a direct result of the welfare system. A government program called Aid To Dependent Children or ADC that is still in force as of this writing is one of the programs that promoted government sponsored prostitution. If a woman did not have a man in the house, she could receive a monthly payment for each child as they were born. Many of those welfare babies were brought into the world for the wrong reason. These babies grow up without character priorities, without family ties, without self- image and not knowing the first thing about choice and consequence. People achieve and become producers because of their own self-esteem and self-image. People with no self-image contribute little to society and generally take out their frustrations on society. Those frustrations often translate into some form of criminal activity. Today great numbers of the welfare culture roam the street in gangs-which they call their family! The welfare state has spawned a group who expect something for nothing. Crime is something for nothing. These people have not been trained to give anything-only to be takers.
This society today led by the nose-by the main stream media avoids the word evil like the plague. Evil will always be with us a criminal reality. Evil has a history going back thousands of years, in biblical times it began with Cain when he killed his brother Abel in cold blood. Criminals have been with us since the beginning of civilization. Call it evil, call it genetic, call it mean, call it behavioral or call it a dozen other names but evil is the name. Lawyers redefine evil acts as a sick act by a sick person, generally because of childhood abuse or some other deficiency. Regardless of the art of deception it is still evil. Let's face it! There is an evil group in society and the group will enlarge with society, they will always be with us and we will always have the need for a prison system to house evil people. We need to include evil in our vocabulary, our anticipation and our planning in society!
A lawyer-based justice system that denies blame, consequence and responsibility. We have permitted the evolution of a justice system that denies responsibility for criminal acts. We permit the system to allow award winning performances by lawyers preaching the non-responsibility doctrine to influence the juries. We permit the system to bring on paid professional experts to evaluate the criminals to convince the juries that the offender is really the victim in pre-meditated murder, rape and assault cases. We permit a system to hide choice and consequence in favor of evaluations and psychological examinations. Instead of criminals facing responsibility, we see batteries of lawyers running around filing trumped up defense motions to convert the offenders to victims. Another message going out from the judicial system to the criminal community...go ahead and practice your profession...a lawyer will get you off with a redefinition of the facts, hide the truth, deception, fraud or a sales job where a plea bargain is the product! We are spawning generations of young people who scoff at choice and consequence and many of them do not even know the meaning of it and who is the teacher....the American judicial system.
For a number of reasons, largely attributed to collapse of the family, America over the past few decades has witnessed the birth of a counter-culture espousing the doctrine of self-service and self-gratification. The great American society is now being dismantled by a counter philosophy that says I don't give a damn about someone else, I am the important one and I want what I want when I want it! With this philosophy the sacred value of human life is continuously downgraded. Mothers dispose of their babies in dumpsters like garbage. Young people shoot and kill each other and their elders just for the sake of wasting someone. Drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and instant gratification have replaced honesty, love, kindness, consideration, choice and consequence in generations of our young people. When the virtues of self-sacrifice are abandoned in a society-watch out! Out comes the evil counter-culture committing every evil act imaginable and we see it today. At this point laws come into play! If these self serving evil acts are not met with good laws and the quick enforcement of those laws a much larger and more ugly problem is on the way and that problem is called vigilante justice!
There are two main divisions of the criminal justice system, the informal and the formal! The formal goes by the book, the rules, the statutes and the codes. The informal goes by the seat of the pants of lawyer judges, commonly called judicial discretion. Experts estimate that over 60% of criminal cases are decided on the informal side of the system. It is this judicial discretion that has baby rattlesnakes crawling in and out of the juvenile justice system by the millions while they laugh and mock the system. This so called judicial discretion is building a criminal culture of tomorrow that may destroy us! Lawyer judges, lawyer prosecutors and defense lawyers get together and cut a deal for probation, plea bargain or low bonding and the criminal laughs all the way to his next crime! Let's eliminate judicial discretion and make the entire criminal justice system subject to codified law-without exception. Of course this would cut into the lawyer revenue-which brings us back to square one and that is legal justice reform.
If I were a criminal, I might actually look forward to going to prison in America now and then. I could get the best medical care, my occupancy, food and clothing paid for. Generally a nice gym to keep in shape, color television, a good law library where I could learn how to file outrageous civil rights lawsuits against the prison system on everything from bad food to a hard mattress and charge that litigation expense to the taxpayers. I would not have to pay taxes on the $32,000 per year it is costing taxpayers for my upkeep. I would have access to the best criminal teachers on how to improve my skills as a criminal when I am released. Best of all if my sentence follows the national average I would be released after spending only part of my sentence so I could get on with my criminal profession more quickly.
The American prison system is a multi-billion dollar fraud that is a breeding ground for crime and a retail outlet for the major drug pushers. Prison is not a rehabilitation organization. The over 60% rate of recidivism is all the proof we need.
Let's get real about this giant criminal prison fraud. Separate off the punishment program in America into three divisions. One prison division to lock up the violent criminals and throw away the key or perform fast executions. A second prison division to send the non-violent criminals and try to salvage them with an educational rehab program with full restitution to their victims, a system that would be self-supporting with products and services. A third division of boot camps in every state to handle the non- violent juvenile crop of youngsters, where hell would be preferable, to keep this group out of the prison system. Also a system that would be self-supporting with products and services. The old argument about where are we going to put the criminals is solved with self-supporting prisons turning out products and services where the U.S. Government could be the largest client.
War has not been declared on crime in America and criminals know it. The masses today are crying out for our government leaders to declare war on crime but that declaration has not yet been made. The reason it has not been made is because it would require legal justice reform in a lawyer-based system of justice and the lawmaking bodies have also become lawyer-based. We spend billions on crime bills which are no more than new social programs. Our government talks about correctional institutions and convict parole instead of lifetime lockups. Government leaders promote a continued revolving door justice system while millions of our citizens are maimed and slaughtered. Our system is a death row mentality where violent criminals who should have been executed can spend years feeding the lawyer business opportunity at taxpayer expense. The execution of John Wayne Gacy is an example in point. Sentenced to death for the gruesome murder of 33 people found buried under his house, Gacy lived the next 14 years on death row spending millions of taxpayer dollars on exhaustive appeals. Many of his victims were handcuffed and repeatedly raped...last words by his lawyer; "John Wayne Gacy's death was an inhumane act".
No this nation has not declared war on crime! In a recent 13 year period ending in 2002, one hundred fifty nine million American lives were touched by crime...think of it...nearly one in two Americans were casualties of crime. With laws piled upon top of laws reaching into the heavens crime increases. No this nation has not declared war on crime. If this nation conducted our most recent wars, the Gulf War and the war on terror like we conduct the undeclared war on crime, about 600,000 young men and women would have come home in body bags. Then we would have been calling for the heads of the generals. Most criminals are not stupid, they know this nation has not declared war on crime. In fact this nation is such a ripe, fertile field for criminals, sadly about 25% of the criminals behind bars in the USA are illegal aliens. What the citizens of this nation needs to do as the first act of each day is to get out of bed...go over and raise the window...and announce to our lawyer-based system of government...in a very loud voice....I'm madder than hell about this and we are taking back our turf from the criminals with or without you.
Today each one of us have a greater chance of being a victim of violent crime than being hurt in a traffic accident. Many states are now or have been under order to release tens of thousands of prisoners back out on the street. DWI's have killed more Americans than in all our wars combined and recent arrests in my own state of New Mexico revealed some DWI's are out on the street after 21 prior arrests. Violent crime is adding billions to health care costs in America. Fatalities caused by violence in one year added $13.5 billion to the nations medical bill. Since the terror invasion on 9-11-01 and ending in 2006, the offshore war on terror cost approximately one trillion dollars. During the same period of time the undeclared war on crime in America has cost over four trillion dollars (direct and indirect cost).
There are two cultures that have become a ruling class in America one is the lawyers and the other is the criminals. Our lives are dominated by both cultures and the time is here for legal reform of the entire justice system.
By: Author Sammy Sorrell
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