Friday, September 28, 2007

Insanity and Hearings on Insanity

Real Cost of Prisons has a couple of nicely juxtaposed posts today. One on ">OH’s plan to use a new reentry center to house female offenders returning to the community and . . . wait for it . . . sex offenders who don’t have any other place to live when released. Okay, I know on some planets this makes sense, especially since the sex offenders will be monitored and GPS’ed and everything, and we do say that sex offenders are not all alike and can have low recidivism rates. But think of the PR on this, especially when the surrounding community is already protesting having sex offenders housed around at all. I’m hoping there’s more to the story and this has all been better planned than indicated. Maybe everything will go without a hitch. But sometimes you can’t avoid trouble and sometimes you can. This sounds like a “can.” The other post has to do with Sen. Webb (D-VA) holding hearings (finally) on what our incarceration binge has done to us socially, economically, and politically, with some decent witnesses to present the case. Maybe they’ll talk about how a country can get to the point where it’s considered best economically and administratively to house female inmates and sex offenders together.

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