Question of the week: Pay to jail criminal illegal immigrant
Question of the week: Pay to jail criminal illegal immigrants or give them early release and a trip back home
CALIFORNIANS have always faced a sticky predicament when it came to illegal immigrants and crime. Pay to jail them, or send them back?
Currently, the state chooses to punish anyone - legal or not - who commits a crime in the state. To do so, taxpayers pay millions to convict criminals and house them while they serve their sentences, which means sometimes tracking suspects who flee the country and bringing them back to face justice. But the state does all this without full reimbursement by the federal authorities - whose schizophrenic immigration policies set the stage for this problem in the first place.
But is it better to pay to house these criminals for their full sentence - at our cost - or let them go early, provided they are deported back to their home country?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes the latter, and he's proposing that about 19,000 state prison inmates who are illegal immigrants get early release (sex offenders and violent criminals not included) and sent on a bus or plane back to Guadalajara, Vancouver, Paris, or Beijing. It's not likely these convicts will serve out the rest of their time in their home countries, which makes this more of a "get out of jail free" card for people who have committed crimes.
This action will of course save some money, about $182 million. It's small change next to the state's immediate $24.3 billion budget deficit, but could potentially avoid deeper and wider cuts in health care, education
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or law enforcement.
But at what social cost?
Early release and deportation might sound like a simple, money-saving solution for a cash strapped state. But there can be real consequences commuting the sentences of actual criminals. Indeed with borders as porous as those of the United States, many of those released - burglars, identity thieves, drug dealers, for example - could be right back in the U.S. looking for new victims faster than you can say "coyote."
What do you think? Is it a true dilemma or is there a clear solution?
Should California do something else with illegal immigrant convicts? Should this state even bother punishing those who hop the border and commit crimes? Or should the state turn them over to authorities in their home nations with the hope that they will be properly prosecuted?
Send your response to opinionated@dailynews.com. Please include your full name, the community or city in which you live and a daytime phone number. We'll print as many as we can in Sunday's Opinionated section.
http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_12668219
