Laws decide who is, isn’t behind bars

Rep. Hans Dunshee was recently quoted in regard to funding for a new 768 bed prison wing in Franklin County as being “convinced the state is headed in the wrong direction” and that he’s “determined to keep seed money for a new prison out of the capital budget this session.”Dunshee politicizes the issue by saying it’s easy for politicians to say that they are tough on crime. Obviously he is not. (This is particularly amusing as Dunshee constantly tees up education and “doing it for the kids” as his political pander.)

Currently, according to Dunshee’s statistics, putting a person in prison prevents about 18 crimes. Personally, I think that is a great number, but evidently Dunshee does not. He would rather lower the enforcement bar and put the drug dealers and the meth dealers back on the street where they can interface with our children, or continue to shovel sand against the tide in trying to rehab them (at a greater expense than putting them behind bars).

The laws are already in place to determine who is a criminal and who is not. When did it become acceptable for a legislator like Dunshee to independently decide who should or shouldn’t be behind bars?

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