Consider Alternative Punishments

In Pennsylvania there are an average of 900,000 crimes per year and only 2.2% of those crimes go unsolved. That leaves 882,000 people being held accountable for their crimes. A lot of these crimes are summary offenses along with low grade misdemeanors which usually get sentenced as probation, fines and restitution being paid. This type of sentencing is considered acceptable by many people.

We consider our small town home and the town does a very good job of keeping everything looking presentable, but as many of you know these small towns do not have a lot of money in their budgets to hire more than maybe two or three borough or township workers for the upkeep and regular maintenance. This leaves these workers with an excess of work that needs done in just a few short months before winter once again comes to town. Work such as picking up litter from the streets and walking trails, painting roadway curbs, keeping the sidewalks clean of debris, etc.

This list can go on and on. There are always the wonderful people who volunteer their time to help do this kind of work, and I thank you for that. The hard truth about volunteering is that, in the state of Pennsylvania only 26.7% of the citizens volunteer their time. On average these people volunteer 29.1 hours of time per year. This still leaves a lot of work for the town employees to complete.

We all wake up each morning and head to work pay our yearly taxes. A portion of those taxes go to paying the employees of local jails, along with paying for these inmates to sit around for most of the day playing cards and doing a whole lot of nothing. Some of these inmates have done small crimes and are only spending three to six months in jail.

Usually with these small crimes the judge has a choice as to whether the person goes to jail or gets probation. What I propose is that with these people who have committed small crimes, such as any summary offense and select low grade misdemeanors, not spend their sentence in jail, where we as tax payers get to pay for their laziness, three meals a day and to have a corrections officer watching them, along with their health care and medications, and having most of these inmates consider this a vacation get alternative sentencing. I propose that the judge start to use an alternative method of punishment. For example: two men are arrested at the local bar for fighting. If this is their second or third time offense for such a crime, they could face a small jail sentence. Instead of jail I suggest that these types of crimes should be handled in the following way. These people should have to first wear a brightly colored shirt that states the crime that they committed. Second the borough would have a list of work that needs completed locally, and the judge would choose the job(s) that the criminal must complete. These punishments could coincide with said crime. (Bar fights get mandatory AA meeting(s) and scrubbing bar floors, cleaning parking lots, doing work at the food pantry.)

These criminals would be placed on probation and the probation officer would make sure that the individual is keeping to task via borough workers/police chief. If that the individual was arrested for fighting in the bar for the second time. Instead of a 60 to 90 day sentence in jail, the judge would sentence them to 280 hours of manual labor in the borough in which the crime was committed. Imagine the work that could get done in these local towns to help beautify the town, and the best part is that this is free labor.

Please help me convince the judge that this needs to happen. I will be attempting to set up a meeting with the judge and council people sometime in the near future to present this idea , but I need your help in showing that we believe in this and that it can work.