California needs to stop coddling convicted criminals
Bryce Houghton was 13 years old when he was killed by a drunk driver. Ike Souzer was 13 years old when he stabbed his mother to death with a kitchen knife and left her to die on their front lawn in 2017.
Souzer escaped from custody not once, but twice. He was given credit for time served after violently attacking three correctional officers, sending them to the hospital. He is currently facing charges he manufactured a shank inside the jail. Despite killing his own mother, two escapes from custody and repeated criminal behavior behind bars, Souzer continues to get break after break.
So does Kevin Arroyo — who was under the influence of alcohol when he slammed into the back of the Houghton family van, killing Bryce, and seriously injuring his older brother and sister and both his parents. He was sentenced to 7 years and eight months in state prison.
Arroyo is coming home next month — 2,147 days early — another beneficiary of a convoluted concoction of “good time” credits awarded by the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation that not even law enforcement agencies are privy to unless they swear under penalty of perjury they will keep that information confidential — even from victims who deserve to know.
That's because the state Legislature has been busy re-calibrating the scales of justice so they weigh far heavier in far of the murderers and the violent criminals who terrorize our communities.
Meanwhile victims are left to hang in the balance. Gov. Gavin Newsom wants us to transform public safety in California. I agree. We need to go back to a time when California was safe.
In 2011, before a decade of reckless public safety policies were unleashed, California was the safest the state had been in three decades. Orange County has still managed to stay California's safest large county. But I don't know for how much longer.
Decarceration and decriminalization efforts have led to “mass victimization” across
California through more homicides, sexual assaults, aggravated assaults and drug poisoning deaths, according to a new study by the Pacific Research Institute, “Paradise Lost: Crime in the Golden State 2011-2021.” Yet, the governor and the state Legislature aren't talking about the victims, like 13-year-old Bryce Houghton or Barbara Scheuer-Souzer.
Society has an absolute right to punish criminals for committing crimes. A marked decrease in appetite for punishment combined with reckless law changes to retroactively roll back sentencing and allow convicted felons ever-evolving options to be released from custody has resulted in homicides increasing 31.6%, aggravated assaults rising 34.6% and drug-related deaths jumping 715% between 2011 and 2021.
Over the last decade the halls of justice have become crowded with more and more victims while the prisons have become more and more empty. When I was chair of the Select Committee on Prison Construction and Operations while in the state Assembly, we significantly reduced the prison population — and we kept the community safe doing it.
I'm in favor of rehabilitative programming, but instead of putting in the work, tens of thousands of dangerous and violent felons are walking out of California's prisons, cashing in on Newsom's get out of jail free cards just by sitting on their cell bunk. That's not rehabilitation; that's charity.
The governor's announcement at San Quentin — which he is rebranding as a “rehabilitation center” — is nothing new. It's just another way to release more and more violent felons back into the community with little consequence — and no consideration for the victims they left in their wake. And they think no one will notice.
We cannot redefine the definition of a crime and then celebrate a reduction of that crime because it no longer meets the definition. We cannot redefine the definition of a victim to include those killed while committing a crime — and then argue that 75% of victims favor reducing sentence lengths.
Victims are still being victimized and crimes are still being committed — regardless of how you define it.
Gov. Newsom said at San Quentin we have to be focused on “homecomings.” But he never mentioned the homecomings that will never happen for Bryce Houghton or Barbara Scheuer-Souzer or the 2,361 Californians who were murdered in just 2021 — by the very people the governor is empathizing with.