the crime report

Cash-strapped states are releasing thousands of prisoners as they seek to trim ballooning prison budgets, says the Wall Street Journal. The same squeeze compelling them to free more inmates makes it tougher for ex-convicts to start a new life, and is fueling a debate about how best to prevent them from returning to crime. Some policymakers are pushing states to help ex-convicts assimilate. “The battle here and in other states has been whether money saved by reducing incarceration will then be reinvested into programs designed to keep people safely out of prison,” says Michigan state Sen. Alan Cropsey, who supports devoting more resources to counseling parolees. (more…)

California parole officials have issued new rules that increase monitoring of thousands of sex offenders already required to wear global positioning system tracking devices, reports the Los Angeles Times. The move that comes after sharp criticism of high-profile lapses by the department. Parole agents must now track the whereabouts of nearly 5,000 low-level sex offenders through ankle monitors at least four days a month. Previously, no policy mandated how often low-level offenders had to be tracked. An additional 2,000 high-risk sex offenders, who already are supposed to be monitored daily, must be visited by a parole officer at their homes twice a month, up from one monthly visit. (more…)

Texas elected officials are “disingenuous or naive” to believe that Mexican drug violence is spilling across the border into the U.S., Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan told the Houston Chronicle. Saruhkan attributed the recent escalation of violence in Ciudad Juarez to desperate attempts by narcotics kingpins to protect their shrinking turf, praised the Obama administration’s attempts to clamp down on the smuggling of U.S. weapons to the Mexican cartels, and denounced the murders of reporters who cover the Mexican government’s bloody war against the nation’s powerful drug cartels. (more…)

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