Prison inmates needing transfers given bus tickets, pat on the back; to unsupervised felons, Vegas beckons
In the beginning, there
were people. These people got along well with each other. Nothing bad
happened until something did, and then they took the offender and
kicked him out of the group. But then he came back, and so jail was
invented, a place where offenders could be put where they would no
longer do any harm to people outside of jail. They made these jails
so that the offenders could not get out unless they were allowed back
into society by the people who put them in. In short, it was a good
system and everybody was happy.
Then Monopoly came
along and invented the “Get Out of Jail Free” card, and then what
began as a harmless deus ex machina
in a fantasy board game for Depression-era families where they could
pretend they had money suddenly became a frightening reality for
current U.S. residents. The “Get Out of Jail Free” card exists,
and nearly 100,000 inmates since 2006 have already had a chance to
use it.
Last
week, Quizlaw
reported that since the 1990s, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has
been transferring inmates from prison to prison by —
get this —
handing them Greyhound bus tickets! BOP officials tell the convicts
where to get off, and then drop them off at the bus stop for an
unsupervised trip to where they need to go.
I
would have asked you to stop me when this story got ridiculous, but
then I wouldn't have started.
When
this questionable mode of keeping convicts locked up has been covered
elsewhere, the stories have usually citing the case of Dwayne Keith
“Shadow” Fitzen, a cocaine-dealing, motorcycle gang member
halfway through a 24-year sentence who got off his unsupervised
Greyhound trip about 400 miles before his intended destination. He
left the bus in Las Vegas (naturally), and has yet to be
re-apprehended after over 4 years.
The
Bureau of Prisons points out that over 90 percent of the inmates
using this program are headed to halfway houses anyways, where they
can do things like ride buses to work. They also point out that most
inmates don't run. Since April 2006, only an estimated .2% of inmates
have tried to flee, and most are recaptured: 58 out of the 77 inmates
who actually fled between October 2003 and September 2005 were nabbed
and returned to custody with harsher sentences. Still, that leaves 19
criminals left at large who, to be honest, shouldn't have had such an
easy chance to escape. There, I said it, and I feel better.
Cost-effective
or not, pre-screened and low-risk or not, prisoners are still
imprisoned for a reason. This is government hypocrisy, plain and
simple —
prisoners either deserve to be kept away from the general public or
they don't. Either they deserve to be closely monitored or they
don't. The BOP doesn't even tell Greyhound when inmates have bus
tickets. Their statistics are spotty. They can't even tell you
exactly when the program began. The whole plan screams “half-baked.”
This
get out of jail free opportunity needs to end somehow, either with
tighter regulations or with scrapping it altogether. That's just
common sense.
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