A Life Vs. A Mouthful of Dog Food
The L.A. Times reports:
On a Tuesday in October 2003, Ki Hong entered Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles to serve a five-day sentence for soliciting a prostitute.
He didn’t survive two hours.
Three members of a Korean gang instantly spotted Hong, 34, who authorities allege was a member of a rival gang. The trio had broad freedom to roam the jail because sheriff’s deputies had given them jobs as inmate workers — jobs for which they, awaiting trial on murder charges, should have been ineligible.
They let themselves into Hong’s dormitory using a guard’s control button. Then they stabbed Hong repeatedly, strangled him with bed linen and hid his body in a trash bin.
. . . .
The Hong case cost the county $800,000 in legal claims and prompted sanctions against a dozen jail employees.
$800,000. That’s less than a third of what the city was going to give Tennie Pierce for being tricked into having a couple of mouthfuls of dog food.
When you read reports like this you just shake your head in disbelief. Just what are people thinking when they allow actions like this to happen? Is there a moron test within the Sheriff’s Dept? And which ones’ get assigned to the lock-up? The winners, or the losers?
Another Drew (8018ee) — 12/17/2006 @ 12:06 pmAnd, why was this man given jail time? Did he flip-off the judge? Isn’t an offense of this nature usually punished by a fine and your name (and maybe your picture) in the local paper?
This man’s family was awarded $800K for his death, and the pin-heads on the LA City Council were prepared to give $2.7M to Tennie Pierce because he was the victim of a practical joke?
The real victims in this scenario are us, the taxpayers. Just how long are we going to put up with this crap? It is long past time to break out the tar and feathers, and to find a suitable rail for these “esteemed leaders” to ride.
Unless we, the sovereign citizens of a free republic, take control of this mess, we will find that when we lose to the IslamoFascists, the imposition of Sharia will at least bring order, but we will no longer be members of that free republic that our predecessors battled so hard to found and keep.
Just curious – what sort of relief (monitary to the family, or in terms of sactions, or both) for allowing a murder in a prison do you think is appropriate?
Having lived in NoCal for 10 years, I know this would never get past the prison union, but I would love to see prison guards bonded. Just to make another comparison, do we care about the quality of a bug exterminator’s work more than those who literally have the power of life and death over imprisoned people?
fishbane (3389fc) — 12/17/2006 @ 4:39 pmIt’s not the prison guards’s fault, fishbane. It’s institutionalized malign neglect. Due to an extreme reluctance on the part of tax-payers to adequately fund jails and prisons and liberal court decisions which have put the animals in charge of the zoo. The first of which has its roots in a sick philosophy that prisoners should experience hell on earth and the second in an equally sick philosophy that people who behave like animals when free will behave like human beings once confined.
nk (54c569) — 12/17/2006 @ 6:28 pmNk –
I’d like to agree with you, but I can’t. I know most guards are good people. That is why I think bonding them would be a great idea – better accredited professionalism would protect the good majority. The union, of course, would never let that happen, because it would disrupt their current cushy collectivist deal with CA government that keeps expanding their power. Again, doctors, lawyers, exterminators, (I think, in CA, but I could be wrong) even plumbers need to be bonded. There have been efforts for professional regulation of my field – software development. Really, if writing what amounts to entertainment software or killing cockroaches needs bonding, shouldn’t the direct oversight of the living conditons of incarerated people be as well?
I don’t understand which animals have been put in charge of the zoo by the evil liberal courts, so I don’t know how to respond to that, but to the first complaint, we (meaning U.S. citizens) lock up far too many people for dumb reasons, forcing a warehousing response that ends up necessarily inhumane, by virtue of simple economics – taxpayers have a limited tolerance for paying to imprison people, but a seemingly endless desire to lock them up over things like smoking dope.
fishbane (3389fc) — 12/17/2006 @ 10:43 pmIf we now know that these guys were gang members, why wasn’t that information used to prevent what amounts to a gang being empowered to roam the jail ? Of course, most inmates must be gang members but there should be some policy about allowing them to act in concert and have free rein.
The one city council member who I’ve seen talk about the dog food incident was way beyond rational consideration of the matter. She (Hahn) was emotionally out of control at those “boys” acting in such a juvenile manner. Another feminist who wants boys to act like girls and men to act like women. What does she think firemen do ? One clue; my son, who is one, has to pass an agility test by running up nine flights of stairs with a heavy reel of hose on his shoulder. They are more like athletes than the bureaucrats she spends her days with.
Mike K (b30d3b) — 12/18/2006 @ 6:47 am