Gov. Peter Shumlin kicked off a criminal justice reform conference at Vermont Law School Friday morning by calling current criminal justice practices a “miserable failure” in reducing opiate use and making communities safer.
Speaking to a crowd of lawyers, judges and law enforcement officials, the governor urged them to develop alternatives to arrest and incarceration that can be implemented across the state. Building new prison beds to handle an inmate population that has spiked in the past 20 years, Shumlin said, is not the answer.
‘If we don’t get it right soon it will change the quality of life in Vermont. We’ve got the smartest minds in the state here working on a problem that we are botching pretty bad,” Shumlin said. “We can’t build our way out of it. No way. I am open as a governor to taking risks, to change the parameters and assumptions we have always made so we can turn this around, not tomorrow, not next week, but right now.”
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The ironic thing about legalizing marijuana is how it will possibly convert , almost overnight, a bunch of backwoods hippies and anarchists into Republicans. What had been an anything goes enterprise for decades will suddenly be regulated, taxed, zoned and inspected for compliance.
“Be nice to one another” is not the solution to our prison overcrowding problem. Try being a little more specific. Thanks.
Good point.
If Vermont legalized Cannabis and reformed sentencing what would the libs use as talking points?
Remember a successful politician does not fix problems, they create them so they can justify why they should be re-elected.
Why is Vermont behind Maine in legalizing Cannabis and behind New Hampshire in sentencing reform???
Wayyyy too much talk from ‘advocates’…wayyyy too much action from law enforcement…
Does Vermont have leadership in between the idiocrats?
Only not relevant if you choose to ignore the principle behind the message…
Not relevant.
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Meanwhile, violent and sexual offenders roam the streets around our neighborhoods, schools and parks.
“Building new prison beds to handle an inmate population that has spiked in the past 20 years, Shumlin said, is not the answer.”
Hey Pete, you do realize that the DOC gave you a report indicating that in
2002 Total intakes = 7779
2012 Total Intakes = 6496
Umm, to me that looks like a dip not a spike…..
You also clearly missed the graph showing the make up of the prison population on June 2012… out of the 2075 inmates that comprised the prison population 8 were there for a Misdemeanor Drug charge. That’s 0.3% of the prison population….
” Shumlin said. “We can’t build our way out of it.”
Nope your right… we can’t build 8 beds….
Of course it’s the Liberal way to make up problems… we can’t afford all these petty drug criminals clogging up the prison…
I guess if it really makes the libs happy just release the 8 in there and get it over with so we don’t have to hear this nonesense anymore.
For some interesting facts you can look here :
http://www.doc.state.vt.us/abo…