Broken judicial system

Dear Editor:If you read a newspaper or listen to the local news, you have likely noticed a definite up tick in reports of crimes against individuals walking down the street, car burglaries, home burglaries and home invasion robberies. The criminals who perpetrate these crimes are bold. They don't mind kicking in a door at 11 a.m. in broad daylight, with a construction crew almost directly across the street. They are fast. They can get in and out of the house with a blaring house alarm and to the waiting car in just a couple of minutes. Their goal is to grab as much as possible in that small window of time, before the police respond. They don't necessarily all wear hoodies and look like thugs. The guy sprinting from the front door of the house just down the street was well dressed in slacks and a polo type of shirt. He looked like he belonged in the neighborhood. A police officer told me that there has been a huge surge in these kinds of crimes, not just in Downey, but all over the state of California ever since the "get out of jail free" card was dealt by the Supreme Court because of the "inhumane" crowded conditions in California prisons. Those individuals residing in those crowded prisons are there because they broke the law. Those criminals are now sent to county jails, that are also too crowded to hold them, so they are subsequently released and unleashed upon the law-abiding citizenry, committing more crime and hurting more innocent victims. If the police apprehend these criminals, they are sent to the court, the court sends them to the county jail, and because conditions are too crowded there, the criminals are simply released again. California is a great place to be a criminal because there are no consequences for the kinds of crimes mentioned above. The Supreme Court ordered California to release at least 30,000 state inmates from our over-crowded prisons. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling "staggering" and "absurd." He also stated that with the release of "46,000 happy-go-lucky felons, terrible things are sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order" and Justice Thomas agreed with him. In a separate dissent, Justices Alito and Roberts said that the ruling conflicted with federal law intended to limit the power of federal judges to order release of prisoners. According to an ABC report published May 26, 2011 the staggering number of illegal aliens who are part of the California prison and jails population was 20,864. So if the federal government fulfilled it's responsibility to secure the borders of the United States, we could conceivably have 20,864 fewer prisoners in our jails. That would leave only 9,136 prisoners who may be contributing to the "inhumane" overcrowded conditions. 9,136 is a much more manageable number than 30,000. I don't have answers to all the problems with our complicated, broken judicial system, but border protection might be a good place to start. Paula Mayfield, Downey

********** Published: April 12, 2012 - Volume 10 - Issue 52