Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
Here’s the paragraph before the one I previously quoted
I n the mid- to late-80s, all 50 states had furlough programs. These passes allowed inmates to leave the prison for periods of time ranging from a few hours to several weeks, depending on their sentence and their behavior in prison; while in the community, they could visit family, look for work, or participate in religious activities. Almost 10 percent of state and federal prisoners received a furlough in 1987. Nationally, murderers served an average of eight years before they were paroled or commuted, so furloughs were, in the toolkit of a previous generation, an uncontroversial proposition. They offered incentives for good behavior behind bars and a good way for inmates to reacclimate to the life they would almost certainly return to outside of prison. “Use of furloughs for prisoners in the U.S. is widespread, successful and relatively problem free,” the editor of a magazine for corrections professionals told the New York Times in 1988.
When we talked to him in his office at Northeastern University, where he is a professor of politics, Dukakis said furloughs were a sensible means of protecting public safety.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS
“One of the values of a furlough program,
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Dukakis points out that one of the most liberal furlough programs at the time was the one in the federal prison system under President Reagan and Vice President Bush. And under California’s program when Reagan was governor, two
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as always, you chose not to answer my question. Horton was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. that sentence is reserved for the most brutal of murderers ( few murderers get that sentence). yet he was given a weekend pass, as long as he gave his word that he’d come back on sunday afternoon. never occurred to anyone that he might lie about that.
i will ask again, please let me know if you don’t understand the question...are you really ok with letting inmates walk out for the weekend unsupervised, when they have been convicted of murder and sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
we have to draw the line somewhere about who gets furloughed, and no one has a crystal ball, so good faith mistakes will be made. i get that. but extending this privilege to people sentenced to life without parole, is asinine. can you tell us if reagan’s program did that? not all
murderers are equal. very few get sentenced to life without parole, that is reserved for the worst of the worst.
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