Money to Jail Pot Smokers, but not Violent Monsters?
The state of Virginia is getting ready to release from prison a man who thirty years ago kidnapped a boy, brutally and repeatedly raped and beat him, and buried him four feet down in a four foot by four foot by eight foot box, in which he kept him to satisfy his lust. (The story is detailed in a chilling article in the January 25, 2003 New York Times [registration required].) It seems likely that the boy would have been murdered by his assailant, Richard Ausley, had not a passing group of hunters heard his screams and located where his box was buried. Why is such a dangerous predator likely to be released into the general population, despite a 1999 Virginia law designed to deny freedom to dangerously violent predators who continue to present a danger to others? According to the NYT, “the law has not been carried out because of a lack of money to provide the required housing, care and treatment.” So the state of Virginia can afford to spend millions of dollars to arrest, prosecute, and jail people for victimless crimes, but can’t find the money to protect members of the public from dangerous monsters? Well, at least we know the priorities of the state legislature and the governor in the Old Dominion.
(Ausley may be kept behind bars, but only because of the tireless lobbying of his now grown up victim and the fact that two other men have stepped forward with claims that Ausley preyed on them when they were boys. As a consequence of the victim’s lobbying, the legislature is considering appropriating money to carry out the 1999 law. No doubt such additional funding will be used to justify tax increases, rather than, say, reducing expenditures on enforcement of the state’s victimless crime laws.)