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Sgt. Snuggles On Prisons
The Snuggles Presidency will be marked by American excellence. We will lead the world in such things as education and economics. We will maintain our championship in the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest, and finally earn a gold medal in table tennis. I mean, it is hard to believe that no one has yet to rise up from the ranks of their suburban basements, or neighborhood Boys Clubs, to take on the mighty Chinese. Do they have neighborhood Boys Clubs in China? I don’t even think they would say the word Boys Club.
Anyways, one thing that we do lead the world in is prisons. We have more people behind bars than China and Russia combined. We have more Americans locked up than all of Europe. Our 2.3 million prisoners equals the combined population of Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, and Washington D.C. On top of that, we have over 10 million people under government supervision: one out of every 30 people is somehow labeled and controlled by the criminal justice system. If they were their own state, they would be the eighth biggest state in the Union!
Unlike my insecure opponents, Snuggles stands for “Smart on Crime.” The age of fear tactics is over, as is Tough on Crime and the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is just a war against the poor; a war against those with a health problem. You don’t see a SWAT team kicking in the doors of an exclusive drug rehabilitation center, do you? So we don’t need to spend good money on combat equipped troops in South Providence, East Oakland and everywhere else poor people lack the resources to hide an American health problem of addiction…
We will begin to eradicate the Prison problem in America with the following 5 initial measures:
- Catch the Big Criminals. White Collar Crime accounts for billions of dollars of pain in America- far more than the crimes we are filling our prisons with.
- Sentencing Deferment Plans. We will set up Drug Courts in every jurisdiction. Realizing that most of our crimes are drug related, we need to distinguish them with separate resources.
- Stomp out the bars to education for prisoners, and work to replicate the Bard College program in New York. It is a shame for the smartest and most motivated to have no clear path to steer clear of illegal business enterprises.
- Enact Probation Reform so that those who are in the System are not easy prey for any malicious accusation that comes along. Here in Rhode Island, we passed a bill to ensure that states: anyone who is accused of a new crime while on probation, if that crime is eventually dismissed, his violation is also dismissed.
- Eliminate the bars to work that chase released prisoners in every jurisdiction. A convicted felon was Mayor of Providence for many years, but I can't get a job at Stop & Shop?
