July
1 is a propitious date for some and an unlucky date for others.
It
is the day Virginia's laws go into effect. Our legislators debated
and decided, the governor approved or denied, the people await the
outcome.
To
know which laws are legal, people open the local newspaper or read
the website of the local newspaper. Some, more ambitious, page
through the mound of measures on the Virginia General Assembly
website, seeking clarification, yet finding exasperation.
Laws
are made, laws are broken, but not eliminated. Laws are enshrined.
Once published, they stay published.
What
about those bills that were ditched?
Here
are a few bills in the most recent General Assembly session that
should have passed but were passed over.
HB1376 Arrest and summons quotas; prohibition.
Arrest
and summons quotas; prohibition. Provides that the Department of
State Police, a local police department, or a sheriff shall not
establish a formal or informal quota that requires an officer or
deputy to make a specific number of arrests or issue a specific
number of summonses within a designated time period. The bill
provides further that the number of arrests made or summonses issued
by an officer or deputy cannot be used as the sole criterion for
evaluating such officer's or deputy's job performance.
Editor:
The Public and The People beware. This bill should have
passed. Yet it was shut down in a subcommittee by a voice vote. Too
bad. This is bad for The Public and bad for police officers and
deputies.
So police and sheriff departments can push employees to
make more arrests and write more summons. So The Public can expect a
slew of arrests and summons every month, just to satisfy a quota? So
quotas can determine legal outcomes?
Justice may be blind. But quotas
will determine arrests and tickets. So the law or the application of
the law will serve the demand of quotas? Who will determine the quota
threshold? Will cities struggling with finances – Norfolk but more
so Portsmouth – arrest The People for spitting, sodomy and
suspicious (to police officers) driving behavior on High St. or St.
Paul's Boulevard?
HB1403 Prisons; telephone systems within correctional facilities.
Provides that inmate phone services commissions paid to the Commonwealth shall not exceed 10 percent of the overall net revenue realized by the provider. All commissions or revenues received by the Commonwealth on prisoner telephone calls shall be paid into the state treasury and credited to the Prisoner Reentry Fund to be used for independent pre-release and post-release reentry and transition services programs.
Editor:
The cost of telephone calls by prisoners to the outside is
usurious. It's a profit machine for the telephone companies and the
prisons and for the state. Who pays?
The prisoner, a friend of the
prisoner or the family of the prisoner. Someone makes a profit from
these calls. Yet profits are exacted from those who can't afford it.
This should stop. Or that money should fund programs for released
prisoners to re-enter society.
The House approved the bill. But the
bill died in Appropriations. Could it be that the money generated by
prisoners fattens the state's budget? Could it be that legislators in
charge of the budget would rather have that money available for other
pet projects instead of dedicated to prisoner re-entry? They do have
their priorities, don't they?
Directs
the Virginia Housing Commission to study opportunities for and
barriers to safe and affordable housing for people reentering society
from Virginia's jails and prisons and to provide a report of its
activities and findings.
Editor: This makes sense but the decision to shelve this study is nonsense. Housing for released prisoners is neither safe nor affordable. Many landlords require credit checks; some even require a background check. If prisoners don't have a home, they are homeless, and the homeless end in shelters, a not very homey environment. If legislators and the public don't know the problems, how can they fix the problems?
I know of an instance in which a released prisoner was
dropped off at a Richmond homeless shelter. He had nothing except the
clothes on his back – his orange prison garb.
How's that for
affordable housing?