If you live in California and feel safe inside your home during the coronavirus, that may soon change. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom plans on releasing 8,000 inmates, some currently serving time for serious felonies, from the California prison system by August. Democrats like Newsom have always wanted to release prisoners, but the Wuhan coronavirus has now given them an ostensible reason to do so.
Newsom believes prisoners, who broke criminal laws, will observe CDC guidelines and practice social distancing out of concern for their fellow man. In all fairness, the freed prisoners will likely wear face masks inside banks and liquor stores.
Three separate efforts aimed at releasing 8,000 prisoners by the end of August were recently approved by the governor.
(Via The Guardian)
The first initiative expands a previous effort to expedite the release of people with 180 or fewer days left on their sentences to include people serving time for serious felonies.
The second measure is an immediate review of cases of people with less than a year left to serve in eight prisons that have large populations at high risk of developing Covid-19 complications.
The state will also launch a one-time program under which those incarcerated in state prisons, including people serving time for violent felonies, will receive a credit shortening their sentences by three months. People with recent rule violations and those who are sentenced to death or life without parole are excluded from the program. Prison officials say the program will affect roughly 108,000 people, or about 95% of the state prison population. For 3,100 people, the credit will allow their release when the program begins on 1 August.
The Army Corps of Engineers just demonstrated the lightening speed in which new hospitals can be built, but instead of quickly building new prisons and reducing any overcrowded conditions, if there truly are any, the governor has decided to throw caution to the wind and put those prisoners back on the streets.
Crime is already exploding in cities across the country following violent protests and the government's nonresponse to them. And as crime skyrockets, Democrats are doubling down on their calls to defund police departments and other "systems of oppression," to quote Ilhan Omar
The country is a tinderbox, and Newsom and the Democrats keep pouring kerosene all over it.