Letters: You can’t just lock people up

Re “Another way on prisons,” Editorial, May 8

The failure of the public policy that released sick people from hospitals to the streets simultaneously created the homeless crisis and the overcrowding of jails and prisons.

Eighteen percent of all Los Angeles County jail inmates are men held in downtown L.A.’s Twin Towers for treatment of mental illness. That doesn’t include the roughly one-third of jail inmates who are mentally ill but are not getting specialized treatment or follow-up care when they are released.

If California wants to truly reduce overcrowding and recidivism, and therefore save money, some of the funds for Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison realignment should go toward providing community-based mental heath services. That way, people who would otherwise be locked away again without adequate treatment could get housing, healthcare and jobs, leave the criminal justice system and join the rest of us as productive citizens.

Marsha Temple

Los Angeles

The writer is the executive director of the nonprofit Integrated Recovery Network.

Unlike the “root causes” this paper claims, the true root cause of California’s (and America’s) prison overcrowding is men, since they constitute about 90% of the prison population.

Until many more men act like adults and society expects this of them, and until news coverage addresses these facts, overcrowding and the enormous costs involved will not change. Numbers don’t lie.

Julie Adele

Long Beach

Re “Former lt. gov. attacks prison policy,” May 9

This article about former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado launching a campaign to repeal the state’s realignment law perfectly captures why it is that those who lead or want to lead are getting very little done: Getting elected or staying in office is their real goal.

Maldonado would apparently say just about anything to restart his stalled political career, including misinforming his audience about the public-safety effects of realignment without offering solutions to the problem of overcrowding.

And how about the fact that we are a country with a well-established legal system? Realignment is an attempt to comply with a federal court order to reduce the state’s prison population; appeal the decision or obey it.

Judi Jones

San Pedro

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