Saturday, March 10, 2018

GateHouse: Few prisoners benefit from compassionate release

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
March 9, 2018
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...


The headline on Matthew Mangino's opinion below should have read: FEW PRISONERS SHOULD BENEFIT FROM COMPASSIONATE RELEASE. Compassion is an admirable quality probably unique to human beings and we should be wary of those without it. But another quality unique to us is the ability to reason and control our emotions including compassion. Just how compassionate should we be to prisoners, especially the uncompassionate ones? And that's what many seeking this form of early release are. The living conditions of those behind bars in the U.S. are already better than many in this country outside of prison and much better than millions more in other parts of the world.

In Mangino's pursuit of more releases of this type he says, "prison inmates age at an accelerated rate compared to people living outside the walls". Also "it is not a good thing". What does that mean? It probably is not a good thing that they are inmates to begin with. Is his a quest to benefit society economically or does he just feel sorry for the prisoners? From an economic standpoint, the public will most likely be taking care of the prisoner until the prisoner's death whether that death comes inside or outside of prison. And viewing it as a humanitarian measure is where compassion seems to get misplaced.

The primary reasons criminals are sent to prison are (1) to protect the public, (2) rehabilitation and (3) punishment. Punishment shouldn't be the least important of these and certainly should not be substituted with convenience or uncontrolled sympathy regardless of whether the prisoner is no longer thought to be a threat. Punishment is still considered by reasonable people to not only be a payment of debt for one's crime but also a deterrent to crime.

Most opponents of this early-release gesture see the high denial rate not as excessive but probably not high enough, especially where the prisoners' crimes were violent. Where is the compassion for victims and their families who want to see and indeed deserve to have justice administered as though the sentence was something other than a mistake? Why should terminal illness or advanced age play a part in compassion being shown if the uncompassionate people are of the ilk of Manson groupies and murderers Susan Atkins or Leslie Van Houten? Manson himself didn't die at an unusually young age and he died right where he should have died only much later than he should have if one wants to look at it from an economic standpoint.

Life-long sentences for non-violent crimes can be reasonably argued against as unjust and "inequitable" themselves and laws allowing them should be rethought. Rethinking can also be suggested for Congress after they gave judges the power to retroactively cut sentences short in "extraordinary and compelling circumstances" inviting subjectivity to run amok.


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