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| Getting corrections wrong is very costly |
| By dailymail.com |
| Published: 08/31/2009 |
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BECAUSE the state's prisons and regional jails are overcrowded, and because building prisons is expensive, the Legislature has asked the West Virginia Law Institute to look at the sentences prescribed under the state's criminal code. That needs to be done. Controlling the cost of every public program, including corrections, is important. Since 1991, legislators have passed 75 laws that lengthen prison sentences. But as it undertakes its review, the institute will surely keep in mind the context of these decisions - the price citizens can pay when the state doesn't do its job. Last week, authorities near Antioch, Calif., charged Phillip Garrido, 58, of kidnapping and sexually molesting an 11-year-old girl he had kept imprisoned for 18 years. Garrido shouldn't have had the opportunity to do that. He should have been in prison all along. In 1977, a judge sentenced him to 50 years in federal prison for kidnapping a woman in Reno. He also was sentenced to serve five years to life in state prison afterward on a state charge of sexually assaulting the woman. But government wasn't serious about protecting the public. Garrido served less than 11 years in the federal prison instead of 50, and seven months in Nevada's state prisons instead of the minimum of five years. Read More. |
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