There is debate going on in the Texas House of Representatives between those legislators who think we're too soft on crime and those who think we're not nearly hard enough. Bills recommending stiffer penalties and criminalizing some behaviors have been introduced. For example, increasing the penality for stealing air conditioners or strangling your mama, making assaulting someone with a bodily fluid a crime, and making it a crime to steal a military grave marker are all bills on the table.
Representative Harold Dutton of Houston doesn't like this direction. He's one of those ACLU "diversion and rehabilitation" types. He says that the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee is sending Texas back in time, bowing to attorneys and special interest groups, and sending more people to prison. Well, yeah! If you steal an air conditioner, you should go to prison. If you strangle your mama, you should go to prison. If you throw your tainted blood, saliva, or worse on somebody, you should go to prison. Dutton says, "Soon we're going to have not just 150,000 prisoners in Texas, we're going to have 250,000." If there are 250,000 out there committing crimes, they should be in prison. Our crime rate is high, not because we incarcerate criminals, but because we consistently fail to incarcerate them!
"House cranks out stiffer penalties." The Dallas Morning News; May 1, 2009; p. 3A.
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