Government does many things these days. Some of them it does fairly well, some of them it does very poorly, and some of them it should not do at all.
The most important duty of government throughout the history of the United States has been to protect the physical safety of the governed. At the federal level, that mainly means defending the United States and its interests from foreign attack. At the state and local levels, governmental duty is concerned primarily with enacting and enforcing laws and ordinances to protect the public from crime and provide essential local services.
Sadly, California has forgotten its first duty to its residents.
That state’s spending is so out of control that it is demanding a federal rescue. And indeed, President Barack Obama’s latest proposed budget offers California a bailout of more than $2 billion.
But meanwhile, in belated efforts to balance its budget, California decided to turn thousands of state prison and county jail inmates free before they had completed their sentences.
Lawmakers relied on the prisoners’ having completed certain educational programs that presumably rehabilitated them and meant they were no longer a danger to the public. They did not listen when opponents of that unsound plan predicted horrible results. Now some of those results have come.
Just 13 hours after his release, a freed inmate who had a violent past was arrested and charged with the sexual battery and attempted rape of a female counselor who was trying to help him. He had been released because, under the new law, he was not considered dangerous — even though he had previously served time for assault with a deadly weapon. How many more innocent Californians will be victims of violent crime as inmates flood the streets prematurely is anybody’s guess.
Ironically, California would have sufficient money to uphold its first duty to protect the public if for years it had not been throwing money away on environmental fads and many kinds of wasteful projects.
Jeopardizing basic public safety is not the way to fix a budget — not even one that, like California’s, is $20 billion in the red.