Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
Were the people that Reagan let out, previously sentenced to life without parole for murder? If so, guess what? He deserved to be criticized for that.
I agree you cant be perfect, and I agree we need to be humane the way we treat prisoners. But letting brutal murderers out for a weekend on the honor system? I'm sorry, you're a lunatic if you think that's a good idea.
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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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