Has Hovind Actually Learned Something?
Kent Hovind says on his weblog:
At lunch last week, one of the inmates said, “If I could, I would bomb the Christian Coalition. They are the reason we are here.” I was shocked by his statement! I love the Christian Coalition, but I understand the man’s point. For years, Christians have pushed judges and legislators to be “tough on crime.” Most are thinking about violent crimes when pushing for this type legislation. However, only about three percent of those incarcerated in the United States are incarcerated for violent crimes. The unreasonable sentences people are given have come from judges who have never spent even one day locked up and who brag that they will give out sentences totaling “a million years” during their time on the bench.
Having been here for nearly six months, I will forever be an advocate of closing most jails and prisons. What this type of punishment does to families and society is terrible.
(emphasis added.)
Well, duh. There’s a saying that “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”. Perhaps we can add another saying, that a liberal is a conservative who’s been screwed by the system.
Glad he’s finally figured out what some people have been saying for years. That maybe throwing people in prison willy-nilly isn’t as good as actually doing something about the root problem, that the cost of incarceration (both monetary and its effects on others) may exceed its beneficial effects, and generally that while “getting tough on crime” may be a good slogan, it’s not necessarily the best approach in the real world. (In fact, it may make things worse: apparently the number of murders shot up when Florida passed a law making armed robbery a capital crime: people holding up 7-Elevens would kill the clerk so he couldn’t be a witness; they figured since they were committing a capital crime anyway, then adding murder to that wasn’t going to make things any worse for them).
Minimum-sentencing laws bother me because they take away the judge’s ability to impose a light or suspended sentence if he or she deems it appropriate, even though it’s the judge’s job to learn the facts of the case and determine how justice can best be served. It’s like passing a law that anyone with attention-deficit disorder must take Ritalin: it may be a good idea in most cases, but not all. And why should the legislature, rather than one’s doctor, make that decision?
Anway, just to show that he’s still the same old Kent Hovind, he adds this bit of paranoid nut-jobbery:
I believe that we as Christians are unwittingly funding and encouraging the very prisons that will house the Christians as the New World Order approaches!
In other news, Hovind is apparently now in solitary.