I saw the recent Herald article reporting on the City of Everett Council’s thought to create a new ordinance to sentence people who repeatedly commit certain crimes to a 30 day period (“Everett council weighs minimum sentences for repeat offenders,” The Herald, Dec. 15).

This is really a poor idea; in effect, criminal in and of itself. I believe Jazmyn Clark, the ACLU Smart Justice campaign policy program manager nailed the wrongheadedness of this action, commenting that “it’s focusing on the wrong part of the problem.”

The people who commit these crimes are more often than not only victims of their behavioral illness or addiction and wouldn’t have committed these transgressions but for issues over which they have little or no control. These people should be being diverted into treatment and programs to help them toward recovery, which is what I thought the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program was supposed to be doing; pre-booking diversion into services rather than “tiger-trapping” them into the justice system. Isn’t this program working? If not, why not?

Jim Bloss

Monroe