Frank Cagle, in a News Sentinel column, doesn’t like the movement to reduce sentences of drug offenders and let them out of prison.
FBI statistics reveal that there has been a steady decrease in the crime rate over the last 10 years as prison populations have grown.
Coincidence? I think not.
There is a growing movement at the federal and state level to empty the prisons, releasing people who got long sentences for drug offenses. In Tennessee, news reports say more than 1,000 drug offenders would be eligible for release over the next five years.
Police organizations, if they are any good, know who commits most of the crimes — break-ins, home burglaries, robberies, car thefts. But it’s hard to catch them in the act. So you catch them with dope, convict them and send them to prison. While they are in prison the crime rate goes down.
When you hear about all the people in prison just because they were using drugs, you should remember how they financed their drug habit. If Tennessee releases more than 1,000 of these people, you can expect that there will be an uptick in crime.