There was a wailing NPR panel about this one afternoon while I was driving home from work. The host clearly thought the decision was a bunch of right wing police state nazism signaling the death of the American dream. The panel was divided. One of the leftist types was actually pragmatic about it -- I mean, if you're putting people into the general population then you have to search them for contraband.
Only one panelist, I think he was center-right, brought up the root cause issue here which is that our modern justice system puts lots of non-violent offenders into prison. The problem isn't that people get strip searched before they go into the general holding population at County Lockup. The problem is that we're incarcerating huge percentages of the population. If we stopped throwing non-violent personal-use drug offenders, people who fail to pay minor fines, and other similar offenders into prison and instead decriminalized the activity or treated it like a simple Revenue Generating Measure like traffic fines, then you'd have fewer people being abusively strip searched.
No comments:
Post a Comment