Society Journal

Many ordinary people and Tampa criminal lawyers understand the law of unintended consequences, the unforeseen results of our decision-making.  One of the greatest unforeseen consequences was the favorable voting of the ‘Three Strikes Law’ several years back.  The Three Strikes Law is intended to have judge’s sentence habitual repeat offenders to mandatory prison terms.  The consequences, which are now showing up, are that there are 155,000 or more prisoners in facilities designed for 100,000.

Many communities are struggling with the thought of having to build more and more prisons to accommodate the ever-growing population of people who are being sentenced to incarceration because they have been caught more than two times, or that their crime did not justify jail time in the first place.

Many criminal lawyers in Tampa understand the severity of the situation of overcrowded prisons, yet feel for the public who clamor for justice and those who have committed a crime to incarcerated no matter how minor the crime they have committed may be.

One of the largest crime waves to be sweeping across America is burglary and theft because when the country is in a recession, when people do not have jobs or can no longer feed their families, some return to criminal activity.  This is not to say that everyone who’s lost a job or that the economy has hit hard is turning to a life of hardened criminals.  People who are going to steal are going to do it no matter what the state of the economy; however desperate times call for desperate measures in some people’s minds.

The overcrowded prison systems across the country is not heard about much in the news media because it’s more like ‘out of sight out of mind’ in addition to having more pressing issues in the news such as wars, healthcare and the state of the economy.

Criminal defense attorneys do everything in their power to help defend those people who have taken a step off of the ethical and moral pathway in order to keep them out of overcrowded jails and hopefully give them a second chance at being a good, law-abiding citizen.