Los Angeles, CA —The State of California’s prisons are overcrowded, the state is broke and they have no choice but to release thousands of violent offenders on the street.  Crime will skyrocket as a result.  The most dangerous are the convicts between the ages of 18 and 35.  There is almost no hope with early releases they will not be victimizing others again.  The damage will cost taxpayers far more than building new prisons.  There are those prisoners that are elderly and disabled.  Some are blind, crippled and even suffer from dementia.  Others have advanced cancers and serious heart disease.  I really don’t care what these people have done.  If they are harmless we should not be wasting money keeping them behind bars.  Most of these people won’t be doing much of anything but filling assisted living and nursing homes.  If they are too frail to inflict violence there’s really not much risk.  What kind of violen...

Corcoran State Prison, CA —In this tough prison there are few bright spots.  Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and many other convicted criminals who have committed despicable crimes wait here to simply die.    Most other inmates will quickly get out and the rate of return is astronomical. Of course they destroy lives along the way.  Our correctional institutions do anything but correct.  They are almost all, in reality advanced schools of crime and violence. We have locked up millions of young people in what we call correctional institutions.  We demand they turn their lives around but have made that daunting task impossible.  Perhaps it’s because we place them with one another where they can form peer groups of despair, destruction and depravity.  This concept can only fail. Most of these convicted losers come from ignorance, poverty and are raised by the worst mentors society has to offer.  We only make things worse for them. ...

Phoenix, AZ —There is a movement in the Legislature here to begin charging visitors $25.00 every time they visit an inmate. I call that cruel and unusual punishment and its downright stupid. There is probably not a psychiatrist on the planet that would endorse this terrible idea. Cutting off inmates from the outside world and their families would make them even more dangerous than they are already. Visitation is not a right but a privilege and is in and of itself a behavior management tool. Inmates that want to receive visits have no choice but to behave. Taking this management tool away will cost lives in the long run. Immediately this bureaucratic brain-fart will create more fiscal problems than it will solve. Prison officials complain that they must conduct expensive background investigations on visitors for security reasons. They claim they are looking for a way to reduce costs. I can help them in this area a lot by suggesting they take advantage of new technology that would...