Justice For Safety's meeting with Maryland State Del. Luiz R. S. Simmons was insightful and enlightening, to say the least. Although Del. Simmons seemed to agree in principal with our goal of trying to reduce recidivist violent crime, he gave some advice on how to go about getting our proposed legislation through the General Assembly and also issued a few caveats about opposition we are bound to face -- from both state lawmakers and citizens' groups.
For instance, Simmons said our bill will probably face opposition from groups representing corrections officials who fear that the fewer mechanisms available to inmates for getting out of prison early, the more likely they will be to act violently in prison and endanger the lives of corrections officers, a point that was brought to light in the second article of Patricia Murret's two-part series in this week's Gazette.
And as our chief sponsor, Sen. Nancy King, has noted, our proposed diminution credit legislation -- which would cap such credits at 15% of a violent offender's sentence -- faces an uphill battle because of potential opposition by a legislature that includes a "number of defense attorneys".
Simmons offered a number of suggestions for us to pursue, including focusing more on getting the Maryland State Senate -- as opposed to the House -- to support our legislation and perhaps even shifting our focus on making it so that certain types of offenders are not offered parole.
Most important, he added, was that we need to back up our proposals with facts and data.
In other words, this issue needs to be more than just about Lindsay Harvey. We need to prove that this is a systemic problem that has affected other innocent people in Maryland.
Incidentally, the number of homicides in Montgomery County this year is on par with last year.
Montgomery County Police Capt. Mitch Cunningham has said that he now has a crime analyst looking into the issue of truth in sentencing and how it affects the management of prison populations. Beyond that, he said we need to address the potential financial costs of extending prison sentences and obtain a matrix that ranks states by crime rates, recidivism and whether they are "truth in sentencing" states. Also, he said, we need some detail about how such truth in sentencing is administered.
Capt. Cunningham also wants to look into how judges carry out prison sentences in Virginia, a truth-in-sentencing state that has actually abolished parole and seen its violent crime recidivism rate reduced to 30% (Maryland's recidivism rate, by comparison, is 50%).
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