Does felony = prison time?

[timesjoke]

Based on a recent discussion where hugo maintained that a woman charged with a minor felony would cost between 30 - 40 thousand to house her in prison, I decided that maybe this could be a good discussion.

Using Texas as a basis of the discussion being as hugo is from Texas I decided to look around at some info about their crime rates. According to THE TEXAS UCR PROGRAM, they had a decrease in their violent crimes rate from 511.2 (in 2007) to 508.2 (in 2008), now this is per 100,000 residents. Texas has a polulation of around 24,782,302. This means they have more than 123,000 new violent crimes inserted into their criminal justice system every year. Texas has about 171,790 inmates in State and private prisons. Using just the violent crimes numbers and excluding the non-violent felonies it is not hard to see that it would be impossible for even a small fraction of these violent offenders to be held in a prison, at least not very long.

Consider that most violent crimes have minimum prison time of fifteen years, if your adding more than 123,000 new fifteen year or more inmates into a system with 171,000 beds, that does not work.

So what happens to the "lesser" felons?

Texas had 969,807 cases of property crimes in 2008, because of differences between reporting because different areas consider crimes in different ways not all of these are felony charges. We have to look at this list and see it included things like Burglary and Motor Vehicle Theft so I believe at least half being a felony is a fair assumption.

So now we add about 500,000 lesser felons to the total of violent felons to get about 671,000 felony charges but 171,000 beds that are already occupied. If we assume 10 years per person (some get less, many more get more) then in 9 years you would have over 6 million people in prison before some of them can qualify to get back out. 6 million in 9 years. If we extend this further out and include inmates with longer times that are already there and will be there longer after this time as new are added we can easily see how complicated it will get.

So what happens to the "tiny"felons?

Well, it does not take a rocket scientist to understand that if the State of Texas does not have enough room to keep even serious to violent felons in prison, it would be close to impossible to find the prison room for the minor felons, these people will end up with small penalties and maybe a short probation time. Texas has about 500,000 people on probation.

So in closing, I believe we can easily say that based on this information it is very doubtful that a minor felon will ever see a prison cell, they just do not have the beds to put them all into prison.

 

[hugo]

of course if they are not caught they will not serve time. Go back and rethink.

Never trust the statistics of someone who claims Libertariuans who make up 1/2 of 1% of the voters cost McCain, who lost by 8%, the election.

 

[timesjoke]

Again with the dodging through misrepresentation?

While I never said Libertarians were the only group, they certainly were one of the most prominent to vocally support Obama, if that splinter group ran away from their normally conservative talk, not hard to understand how other splinter groups did the same thing.

Anyway, what does that have to do with how felony charges in Texas rarely result in someone going to prison?

I did notice a couple stories of how Texas recently turned to some new progressive programs of prison and Inmate reforms. They say there has been such a large reduction in people going to prison that three prisons that were already funded and schedueled to be built will now no longer be needed. Texas the new reform State? Who would have thought of that?