(1) Based on what turned out to be the misplaced notion that there are a lot of people doing time in the Los Angeles County Jail for tickey-tack offenses, Sheriff Lee Baca asked for and received a massive expansion of the electronic ankle brace home monitoring program three years ago. How well has it worked? There are fewer people today on ankle bracelets than there were when Baca made the demand. The fly in Baca’s ointment turns out to be that there are exceedingly few non-violent offenders who would have been sent to jail on tickey-tack bullshit — Virtually everyone sentenced to time in county deserved to be there because of their prior sheets, even if the current offense seems like tickey-tack bullshit.
(2) Here’s another 2007 bright idea that flopped in 2010.
On June 19, 2007, I wrote of a New York City plan to pay people for doing the ordinary and mundane things that people should do, that:
…anyone who has enough ambition to do well on school tests, hold down a job, (not hard for non-whites to do in affirmative action-crazy NYC), attend PTO conferences, make their children go to school 19 days out of 20, graduate high school (once again, not hard for non-whites to do in NYC’s dumbed down public school system), visit the dentist twice a year, visit primary care physicians about that often, and get vaccinations (being mindful that the “poor” pay very little if anything for such health care), then they probably wouldn’t stay poor for long, if they ever are/were.
As it turns out, those that participated in the program only did those things in order to get the temporary cash rewards. Almost all of the households that did got at least one reward, but only about two-thirds got rewards at all possible times that they were available. Furthermore, the awards themselves didn’t result in higher school test scores (you can’t fix stupid), nor in previously unemployed people holding down job for longer than a year (that may not necessarily be their fault, in this economy).
UPDATE 4/1: Steve Sailer has some other reasons why it failed.
(3) A Cleveland man who led cops on a high speed chase ditched his car and hopped a fence — And right into a prison. Thereby saving us a lot of hassle in the CJ system.
