I read with interest Jon Browder’s reasoning on voting against the jail tax (“Jail taxes: Do the crime and pay for it, literally,” Saturday).
He feels inmates should “work every day of their sentence.” Aside from the legal side of society’s responsibilities when taking away an inmate’s rights with jail sentences, there is the practical side. Just where does he propose to have these folks work, and at what jobs? Do we build a huge warehouse so they can be supervised? Or do we release them to the general public to work? And just what work will they do? When corrections people try to establish a work program (the dairy farm in Monroe, for example), it often proves to be economically impractical or those in the private sector raise a cry of unfair competition. I, for one, would not be pleased to find myself unemployed while inmates fill my job in a subsidized work program. The truth is we have a hard enough time collecting court-ordered fines, fees and restitution already.
As another writer pointed out, one way to cut costs is to raise the threshold of what constitutes jailable offenses. Until we can improve prevention and concentrate on alternative policies, the cost of incarceration must be born by society. We may have taken away inmates’ civil rights, but not their human rights. Building and staffing the new jail will be much cheaper than handing millions of dollars to inmates in future lawsuits due to the overcrowding. If Mr. Browder is unwilling to pay for staffing, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hand over a nest egg to inmates.
Snohomish
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