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| DATE | 2016-10-07 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
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| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] Hey, Ruben! Plastic bag initiatives!
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From hangout-bounces-at-nylxs.com Fri Oct 7 05:34:50 2016
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From: Rick Moen
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Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.
X-Mas: Bah humbug.
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
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Subject: Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] Hey, Ruben! Plastic bag initiatives!
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I wrote:
> > Your understanding of drug pricing is laughable.
>
> Maybe yes, maybe no -- but I didn't express any view on drug pricing.
>
> > They will never be able to purchase anything but a small subset of
> > drugs at anywhere close what the VA purchases them for in any event
> > and the VA suffers from extortion just like anyone else.
>
> It's an open question what effects Prop. 61 would have, as noted by
> outside experts quoted in the linked newspaper stories. I'm undecided
> on my personal vote (which is why the note about 'with reservations'
> is there). If the state does pass it and adverse results occur,
> fortunately the Legislature can annul or modify it with a simple
> statute. (I.e., it's not a constitutional amendment, just an
> initiative statute.)
After yet more reading and yet more pondering, particularly some ballot
analysis by noted elections analyst Pete Stahl, I regretfully concluded
that California Proposition 61 doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell
of working as proponents hope, so I'm not going to vote for something
unlikely to work. Accordingly, I edited 'I'm voting yes (with reservations)'
to 'I'm voting no (with reservations).
This is actually one of the good bits about writing a ballot analysis up
as a Web page, especially when the ballot's as absurdly long and
convoluted as this one. (_17_ initiatives? Sheesh.) As you get more
information and ponder, you can revise and improve your work.
> > Anyway, build more jails.
>
> I'm for it.
>
> However, the real cause of the out-of-control prison population was
> three-fold. (1) The idiotic 'three strikes' law. Parts of this were
> finally rolled back in 2012, but this left a huge number of people in
> the system who hadn't been before, often on trivial third charges.
> (2) The War on Some Drugs. (3) Until 2014, excessively low thresholds
> for felonies. 2014's Proposition 47 fixed this, raising the threshold
> for property crimes to be deemed felonies to $950. (I think it was
> $500.) But again, it will take quite a while for the effect of that to
> work through the system.
>
> Peak prison population was 2006, but it simply takes a long time to work
> down.
I did some basic research on this matter, too.
To rethink the above, I'd be for it _if_ California had a bunch of money
sitting around burning a hole in the state's figurative pocket, but it
doesn't.
It turns out, within the last thirty years, California has built 22
prisons. In that same time span, it's built _one_ additional University
of California campus. Average annual drain on the state budget for its
34 state penitentiaries has been around $10 billion.
That's ludicrous. That's an absolutely terrible priority -- and why did
it happen? It happened because the prison population exploded, from
about 25,000 to about 130,000. And _that_, in turn, happened because of
ludicrous overcriminalising during the 1980s of minor non-violent
offences (like shoplifting and possession of minor amounts of drugs),
and because of that moronic Three Strikes Law.
Build more jails/prisons? Fsck you, Ruben. Not unless you're paying
for it.
You want me to have a poorer and stupider state. Fsck right off.
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