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THE RIGHT APPROACH
by Brian Hollander

NOV 1, 2007

Buried down in the literature for all the district attorney candidates, after all the tooth-baring growls about how gangs and criminals had better watch it when the new top guy gets in, how strong the bars are and how high the stone walls are...somewhere down there all three - Vincent Bradley, Independence and Conservative Party nominee, Jonathan Sennett, the Democratic choice, and Holley Carnright, Republican standard bearer - give some lip service to keeping people out of jail.

There are times in our society when offenders refuse to respect the rights, lives, property, families of others and must be isolated, no question. But yet another of the lessons of the Ulster County Jail planning and construction debacle (you know the one - $50 million over projections, three years late) is that finding ways to keep people out of jail pays off in fewer societal damages, better citizens and lesser costs. It doesn't help things that now, with excess capacity, Ulster County is able to board in prisoners from other counties and make some of its money back. If ICE or someone decides to rent the old jail and use it for terrorists or illegal immigrants, why, we might just become the prison capital of the Hudson Valley, making our budgets work on our capacity to keep people locked up. Of course, then we become fiscally dependent on having more inmates, with more of a stake in having a good, tough, lock 'em up DA, and our economic development specialists can talk about what a success our prison capacity has provided them. Lock 'em up, Ulster. Colony of the Chains. And that reflects the rest of America - from Foreign Policy magazine comes this: "The United States ranks first in the world in per capita incarceration, with less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The number of people locked up for U.S. drug-law violations has increased from roughly 50,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today; that's more than the number of people Western Europe locks up for everything."

The DA's race has become the darling of the county, the only countywide contest, with scorned Democrat Bradley trying to pin Democratic nominee Sennett with his only-recent party affiliation, and Carnright sitting back hoping that the Democrats kill each other off, chiding Sennett for wanting medical marijuana to be legal, as if that would have resonance. The candidates, for the most part, have treated the race as if the job were a commodity rather than an office that deals with humans.

Behind the scenes in the Bradley-Sennett Democratic tiff is a city of Kingston versus rest of the county party split that could become more evident in the coming county executive race, scheduled for 2008. Bradley has strong support in the city, while the rest of the county Democrats wish he would have accepted the party's nomination verdict.

We'd like to believe that all would continue the investigation into the bid rigged screwing that the people of Ulster County received on the construction of said jail, our economic boon, but grand juries are conducted behind closed doors and many party regulars would like to see such things disappear.

Given our predilection for seeking a just society by reforming laws and procedures and keeping non-violent offenders out of jail, our choice among the three is easy. We recommend a vote for Jonathan Sennett. He has fewer ties to any old party apparatus in the county and would have less to lose in continuing the jail investigation.

He has said that he would "utilize local community-based organizations that are working with area youths to provide educational, conflict-resolution, self-discovery and physical activities to local children and adolescents with the goal of helping them make healthier life choices and steering them away from drugs, gang activity, and violence," and that he is "strongly opposed to the indiscriminate warehousing of non-violent substance abuse-related offenders, particularly where alternatives to incarceration have not yet been used." He desires further reform of the "infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws, so as to restore discretion in drug offenses to prosecutors and judges alike."

We agree with this approach. Sennett deserves your vote.

Back to UCDW's 2007 County Candidates Page