 |
| Those crazy eyes.... |
There are two ways to do that. The rational one which means, e.g., building fast at least some sort of provisional interment camps for low risk prisoners, and those accused of crimes not involving murder. That way overcrowding and delinquency education is partially solved while new jails are built for the medium term solution, as long term solutions of social changes to decrease crime rates are undertaken. She is crazy but she has the big mouth required to obtain from the regime, in election years, the funds for such endeavors.
And there is the bat-crazy way that, sure enough, she picked.
The woman first decided that there was 40% of people that should not be in jail. Criteria were not revealed but we assumed that it would include those pending trial for crimes not related to loss of lives (and those condemned for non lethal crimes).
One can be allowed to have mixed feelings about such decision. After all part of the jail overcrowding is due to inexcusable judicial delays linked mostly to corruption and a lazy judicial system. A case could be made that your small time robber might be better off in the streets than in jail awaiting trial, where he would surely acquire the experience and contacts to go into a real life of crime once he is released (or even before he is released....). But 40%? Why such exact number within days of her designation?
But she meant business because she also announced that all judges that would not be willing to expedite criminal dossiers would be fired. She would phone the TSJ as needed.... One cannot make up such things, she actually said it. Proving, by the way, to those idiots that still believed in a separation of powers in Venezuela that there is no such thing as an independent judiciary.
We were barely dealing with that piece of news, already thinking about what new defenses to our home we would add, and places and hours we should all cross from our daily movements, when she decided today that well, neither the courts nor the police could send anyone to jail unless she allowed it. That is, overcrowding will not get worse, and if any judge reaches a decision, or if any police department makes an arrest, well, they will have to keep the new "privado de libertad" at the station, at home, wherever they can, or release him/her to our good citizen care.
There is a method in this utter madness which is deliberately sending people to hide at home in terror.
Fist, no matter how obviously crazed the measures are, after the 1 month siege of El Rodeo jail the government needs to give the impression that it is doing something. Anything. The more so since it needs to regains the "privados de libertad" vote which is much larger than what you think as not only prisoners are allowed to vote but also their relatives who have been shown very pissed off during El Rodeo disaster.
Second, for all the talk of crime, polls do not show that it is taken much out of the chavista lumpen electoral base. In a beggarized country through Mercal and other co-dependency programs, it seems that people are more concerned about cheap food than being robbed. And the people that would suffer the most from a renewed expanding crime rate, as freedom rings for malandros, are not voting for Chavez anyway.
It has got to be such a win-win situation for chavista pollsters that the interior ministry had the gall to declare a couple of days ago that the crime came from the 4th republic ancien regime. Forgetting conveniently to mention that Chavez has been already 12 fucking years in office under whose tenure crime rate went up about three fold.
In third, as a bonus, it allows the regime to deflect the guilt more on the judicial system incompetence rather than the regime own incompetence, or its economic policies that can only but increase crime. The already pimped up high court, TSJ, will certainly oblige Chavez and take the guilt, in exchange of yet a newly increased paycheck as they keep doing by violating the public workers income laws granting themselves abundant bonuses. Thus there is nothing to hope from the TSJ who is already behaving like those people it is supposed to put in jail....
See, I told you, Iris Valera was going to solve the jail problem. For Chavez image, that is.