Raul Aranda post 1

The article is from the Albuquerque Journal on Thursday, September 3, 2009. The article talks about how the city is targeting repeat offenders by attempting to use the city’s general fund to pay the district attorney $275,000 dollars in order to prosecute repeat offenders. A team of two lawyers and one civilian will target repeat offenders and will be funded for one year by the city. This is more of a “hard” type of social control due to its main purpose being to keep repeat offenders behind bars in the first place, so harder punishment is what is desired. Mayor Chavez states, “We want repeat offenders behind bars.” The idea of keeping repeat offenders behind bars by increasing punishment seems to be a decent idea, but it has its flaws as well. The idea that they want to implement here seems some what familiar to California’s three strikes rule. The idea is to give repeat offenders only so many chances before the state draws the line, but it has caught many people who have done only minor things while there are those who have committed serious crimes who get off relatively early back into the community. If this sort of thing is implemented here it will more than likely work in the desired function, but also function against people who have really only committed minor crimes against society causing our prisons and jails to be further overcrowded. The idea seems good to me in practice, but I believe that it is necessary to look deeper into the issue other than just basically saying “we are going to be harder on crime.”