An AP story encountered Sunday online at MSNBC (linked in the title above) shrieked in horror that "About 1 in 10 inmates released early from Los Angeles County jails were arrested and charged with new crimes while they were supposed to be behind bars, a newspaper reported Sunday."
The story recounts how 16,000 early releasees, including 16 who murdered, were rearrested. The message from city attorney Rocky Delgadillo is "That puts us all in peril."
What the story does not do is offer a bit of perspective. If 16,000 represents the number who couldn't be trusted to behave responsibly, that also means 144,000 did take full and proper advantage of a second chance. The Men's Central Jail in Los Angeles (http://www.lasd.org/divisions/custody/mcj/index.html) reports an average daily cost of $53.45 to house an inmate. At little simple math yields a figure of $19,509.25 annually, or $2,809,332,000.00 for the 144,00 inmates released who chose not to return the taxpayer funded lodging establishments. It is true that not all facilities in Los Angeles carry the same costs as the Men's Central Jail, but even if the systemwide average were dropped to a very generous assumption of $38.05 per day that is still $2 billion that taxpayers don't have to come up with.
Certainly mistakes are made on occasion, and people who should be kept behind bars are released. That is the nature of our judicial system, which would prefer a hundred guilty be wrongly exonerated rather than a single guilty person be wrongly convicted. Such a system forces our police and prosecutors to perform their duties more effectively, and protects us all from the possibility of persecution by a capricious government. That is a protection we all must vigorously defend even, if not especially, in a "post 9-11 world".
If this were still the 1980's, you can bet Clara Peller would be demanding to know "Where's the beef?"
