Supervisor Frost fathoms the depths of untruth...again!

Returning to her perennial lament, echoing President Trump, Supervisor Frost writes she is concerned that the recent move to release people from prison in the pandemic will lead to a surge in crime, and she certainly wants no sentence reductions as mandated by California's recent propositions 47 and 57. Yet the 7/6/2020 Sacramento Bee says: "The violent crime rate in the four-county Sacramento region fell to its lowest level in at least 35 years during 2019, according to new statistics from the California Department of Justice."... long after those propositions passed.

Despite that decline in crime, and a decline in arrests, Supervisor Frost recently voted to expand the County Jail --for $89 million!--even though she complains the County does not have enough in financial reserves.

And don't get me wrong, despite declining crime and arrests, the jail is full--or at least it was until the current pandemic. The trouble is that 60% of those in jail were convicted of nothing more than being unable to afford bail. Yep. It's illegal to be poor in Sacramento!

The trouble with Supervisor Frost's continual cry of "wolf!"...er, I mean "crime!" is not just that it's untrue, it's so manifestly unproductive. All she promises is that the beatings will continue until morale improves. Is there any crime, or perhaps an uptick for last week? Then we must increase our army of occupation...er, I mean police...and make penalties even more draconian! In this area, she is the one-trick pony of supervisors.

The trouble with "tough on crime" is that the U.S. has been trying it since Richard Nixon vied with Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination. New York recently repealed the Rockefeller drug laws, incidentally. But as a consequence of being "tough" on crime, the U.S. now has 25% of the world's prisoners even though its population is only 5% of that same planet. Per-capita, demographically-identical Canada incarcerates roughly one seventh as many prisoners as the U.S. So is Canadian crime so much worse that in the U.S? Nope. About the same.

As Anatole France once said: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread." Supervisor Frost proposes her one trick--increasing the beatings--at the end of a bipartisan, multi-generational effort to cut funding for social safety nets. No matter how many troops she calls in, people who have nothing to lose will always threaten her Karen-infested world. She can close her eyes to this, even stop up her ears, but being blind and deaf is hardly a winning life strategy, never mind the premise for good public policy.