Earlier this year Arkansas’ Governor Beebe led the charge thru the Legislature to pass his bill to free his newly identified “band of brigands” from potential jail time. Seems that if you have never been convicted of a violent crime, and are currently under arrest for a “non-violent” crime, beginning 2012 you will not go to prison. Why you ask? Well otherwise the State would be forced to spend money to build more prisons, hire guards, feed and cloth the miscreants and lose out on taxes that the miscreants might pay were they employed and law abiding citizens. The “Le” Pew Center in Washington was the intelligentsia force behind this assessment, which “The Beebe” and his cohorts adopted hook, line, and sinker.
And for the average over taxed law abiding citizen, not spending more money to build housing, guard, feed, cloth, and supply gym facilities for these “outlaws” seemed to be a good deal. So with that level of intellectual scrutiny, the law passed. Unfortunately it was probably written up in newspapers and widely distributed nation wide among those miscreants that could read. The headlines were probably something like, “Come to Arkansas, the Land of Opportunity! There You Can Commit the Crime and Pay No Time!” (No Shirley, I’m not actually, really aware of any such headline. I’m just putting my interpretation on what the average “non violent” miscreant that read of this new law might have thought.)
Getting a head start on this new liberal pleasing, progressive punishment theory, the State Department of Corrections jumps right out and begins to turn incarcerated “non violent” criminals lose from prison. Not by the thousands, just a few hundred or so. (Well, OK Shirley I don’t remember the exact number they released; but it was more than one or two.) Yes, it was in keeping with the new, more thrifty and humane treatment of “non violent” miscreants.
Well, would it surprise you to learn that the City of Little Rock just published 1st quarter crime statistics and low and behold, crime is alive and prospering in that fair city? The local paper headline was: “Violent, property offenses up in LR. 1st quarter sees 8% jump in city.” (Should you ever become a crime victim, please note that you were merely on the wrong end of an “offense”, not really a crime victim. But I rant and digress simultaneously.)
Per the above mentioned newspaper article, “The official crime statistics released by the Little Rock police last week show that in the first quarter of 2011, property crimes went up 6.71% and violent crime climbed by 21.55% compared with the same months last year.”
“The number of ‘Part 1’ offenses, which include homicides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, thefts and arson… an increase of 8%. Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said that there are always ‘ebbs and flows’ when it comes to crime in the city. But such an increase in the first quarter hasn’t happened since 2004…. Thomas said that there isn’t any single driver behind the numbers and that the arrival of a few armed people from outside of town can throw crime rates into the black.” (Emphasis mine). Wow! Really? And just why would we have an influx of miscreants this year? Certainly there is no correlation to the fact that now if you “Commit a Non-violent Crime, You Pay No Time”! Of course the real up-tick was in Violent Crimes! Isn’t that just the way things work. You give a few miscreants a break and they go overboard!
Do you really believe that those “few armed people from outside of town” read the new state motto, “Commit the Crime and Pay No Time”, and thus moved to the “Land of Opportunity? Well only time will tell, but this just might be the early “chickens coming home to roost!”
Beebe’s “Band of Brigands” just may have jumped the gun by a few months.
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