Bernie Sanders' Criminal Justice Reform Plan

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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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As we have previously noted, the accused Philadelphia shooter of three days ago should have been in prison on the day that he shot — thankfully with all the accuracy of Imperial Storm Troopers — six Philadelphia Police officers, but was out on the streets because the judges in the City of Brotherly Love were too lenient. We have also pointed out that the spate of murders of Philadelphia Police officers from 2007 to 2009 was caused by other criminals who were in the custody of the judicial system but who were sentenced too leniently and paroled too early even on short sentences. And we have written about lax and lenient law enforcement which allowed Nikolas Cruz to have no criminal record, despite dozens of ‘contacts’ with the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, enabling him to pass the criminal background check and buy the weapons with which he shot up the Stoneman Douglas High School, killing seventeen students and staffers.

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Naturally, there are more such failures:

  • In the Texas church shooting, the killer had a conviction in an Air Force court martial, but it was never reported to the NICS, meaning that Devin Kelley was able to buy a weapon legally that he would never have been allowed if the Air Force had made the proper reports. Of course, he should still have been in jail when the massacre happened, but wasn’t because he was given too lenient a sentence.
  • Parole officers let Byron Allen get by with a positive test for PCP, doing nothing about throwing him back in jail .  .  . and a Kensington woman nearly paid for it with her life.  Mr Allen has been charged with one murder, and is under investigation for two more, and is suspected in at least four sexual assaults, but the parole officers in charge of monitoring his activities did nothing.
  • Officials in Multnomah County, Oregon, were asked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to notify them when they were going to release Sergio José Martinez, an illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record, who had been previously deported twenty times, but they declined to do so under idiotic ‘sanctuary’ policies, and he attacked another woman.
  • Kevin Janson Neal killed five people, after Tehama County, California law enforcement let him go following reported incidents of him firing ‘hundreds of rounds’ from a gun he was legally barred from owning. Who will be held accountable for this? Sheriff Dave Hencratt is directly responsible for the failure of his department to take the necessary and legally justified actions to place Mr Neal under arrest, to have him locked up when he should have been locked up, and because he failed to do his job, five people are dead. Will Sheriff Hencratt pay for his negligence by being brought up on criminal negligence charges? Will he at least be fired? Will anyone who was negligent in doing his duty be punished in any way?
  • Mujey Dumbaya was found dead, just before she was scheduled to testify against Quinn Anthony James for raping her, a convicted felon with a long rap sheet, who was out on bail. Why was a sexual predator, with a record dating back to 1991, who had admitted to sex with the victim, but claimed it was consensual — which it couldn’t be, since she was only 15 at the time — ever allowed out on bail? Some idiotic judge, who will never be called to account for his decision, allowed it.
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And Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the failed presidential candidate of 2016 and a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, wants to make things worse!

Bernie Sanders Unveils Sweeping Criminal Justice Reform Plan

by David Boddiger | August 18, 2019 | 5:38 PM EDT

Sen. Bernie Sanders unveiled on Sunday a broad plan to overhaul the country’s criminal justice system that includes the goal of reducing the prison population by half.

Among the proposals, which Sanders announced during a campaign stop in Columbia, SC, are putting an end to the for-profit prison system, legalizing marijuana, ending the federal death penalty and urging states to do the same, and banning the cash bail system, which jails hundreds of thousands of poor people each year.

“America is now the world’s leading jailer. We lock up more than 2 million people in America, which is more of our own people than any country on Earth,” his campaign website states.

In South Carolina, Sanders acknowledged that people in U.S. prisons are “disproportionately poor, disproportionately minority — African American, Latino, Native American,” The Washington Post reported.

Ahead of the plan’s public release, the Vermont senator told the Associated Press that the U.S. justice system is “racist” and “needs fundamental change.”

What does the socialist from Vermont want to do?

Sanders wants to do away with “three strikes” laws and expand alternative sentencing, according to the AP. Part of criminal justice reform also would include better care for mental health issues, a major contributor to the country’s burgeoning prison population. . . . .

“We must end the school-to-prison pipeline,” his campaign stated.

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If only the school-to-prison pipeline had existed in Broward County, Florida, and Mr Cruz been in prison for his various assaults, there would have been seventeen people who would have gone home on St Valentine’s Day of 2018, rather than to the morgue. If only a weakling judge had sentenced Daniel Giddings to the term for which the District Attorney asked, rather than half that, and the parole board not released him even earlier than that, despite a bad record while in prison, Philadelphia Police Officer Patrick McDonald would have gone home to his wife that fateful day, rather than being killed. Had then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham treated the drug violations of Lewis Jordan seriously, rather than offering him a ‘treatment program’ and record expungement, he would have been locked up on the day he murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Charles Cassidy during a botched armed robbery.

Instead of locking up criminals, Mr Sanders would attack the First Amendment rights of the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens . . . and his ‘Gun Safety’ program isn’t even the worst among the Democratic candidates.

He would release more convicted criminals from jail, and try to have fewer criminals sentenced to incarceration, even though strict law enforcement would have prevented some of the mass shootings and killings of police officers in the past. He would attack the rights of the law-abiding, while going soft on those who are criminals.

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Sadly, he’s pretty much going right along with the other Democratic candidates; not a single one of them can be trusted with our safety.
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