...and for their entertainment.
Remember Willie Horton? He was the Massachusetts prisoner, serving a sentence of life without parole for murder, who walked away from a weekend release program and later committed armed robbery and rape. In the 1988 presidential election, Republican vice president George H.W. Bush made Horton a major issue against the Democrat, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
Dukakis was blind-sided. He knew little or nothing about Horton or this program until political opponents made an issue of it. The program actually had been signed into law by Dukakis’s Republican predecessor. But Horton escaped on Dukakis’s watch, and he was nailed for it. Anyway, a weekend release program for people in prison for life without parole is pretty hard to defend.
Cut to 2012. A long front-page story runs in the New York Times on Sunday about a halfway house program in New Jersey from which no fewer than 5,100 inmates have escaped since 2005, including 1,300 since Republican Governor Chris Christie took office. These are not the halfway houses you think of -- small, homelike places where prisoners can adjust slowly to a return to society. These are gigantic human warehouses, apparently, indistinguishable from prisons except for less security. The Times has several Willie-Horton-like stories of prisoners just walking away from these facilities, or from job-release programs connected to them, and resuming their careers of murder and mayhem.
In keeping with current fashion, the halfway houses are privately managed, most by a firm called Community Education. Christie, apparently so blinded by ideology (privatization is good; state government is bad) that he can’t see the obvious, has praised Community Education as “representing the very best of the human spirit.”
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