In a further effort to save some money, some members of the Washington legislature are proposing a bill that would virtually eliminate prison as a possibility for property crimes.

Under the present system, the range of sentence that a person can get for a new or the current crime is based in part the defendant’s past criminal history. The past convictions form an “offender” score. The higher the defendant’s offender score, the greater the sentence for a particular crime. This policy is fair. It is based the idea there should be different punishment for the first time a person makes a mistake compared to the tenth. Common sense.

The proposal will limit the amount of time that someone can be sentenced for a property crime to just one year. Just one year—No matter what the offender score. No matter that it is a felony. Since it is only one year, all property crime defendants would serve their time in the county jail rather than in the Department of Corrections. This would be at county expense rather than state expense. And because time in the county jail is reduced by 1/3, a year sentence means they would only serve 8 months.

Washington is the highest in the nation when it comes to property crimes, even though by population, Washington is number 13. We are number 4 in auto theft crimes. And the solution to this problem is thought to be to reduce the punishment for property crimes?

This is a clever way for the state to shift the costs for housing prisoners from the state to counties. The state wants the counties to pay for housing those state prisoners. Remember, these are people who are guilty of violating State laws, are prosecuted in State courts and sentenced by State judges to sentences dictated by State laws.

I believe there are consequences in life, and in my view, if a person has repeatedly demonstrated that they will not abide by the rules and respect another persons rights, then we as the people should be able to put them somewhere (for a while) where they don’t have the chance to violate others rights again. Prison. It does not work for everybody, but at least it works for the time a person is there. Lets hope a majority of our legislators have not lost their minds and do not pass this proposal into law. (This seems so crazy, it makes me wonder if I got it right when I read it. )