Arnold G. York
This and that
It isn’t often that I get to write back-to-back columns anymore, but this week I’ve been sidelined with a terrible cold, so flying to Sacramento was out of the question and I actually get to spend the entire week in Malibu, which feels like a luxury and allows time to write.
Once you stop writing every week you get a little stale and what used to come easy now is a little harder to do. So I turned to my old standby, the L.A. Times, slowly perused the pages for anything that caught my eye.
I see that Univision, owned principally by our local media mogul Jerry Perenchio, is going to be sold to another group, which includes another Malibu notable-media mogul Haim Sabin-for umpteen billion dollars. It’s kind of heartwarming to know that this Spanish-language station is going to stay in the Malibu family. Kudos to Perenchio, who was one of the first on the media mogul block to figure out the value of the Spanish-speaking market but he also knows when to get out. My guess is that in a generation or so, the Spanish-speaking market will go the way of all the other foreign-language markets, like Yiddish theater in New York, or all sorts of ethnic publications. Maybe that ethnic world might survive two generations, but by then the grandchildren will be speaking English and voting Republican.
If you think I’m kidding let me relate a real story. We have a number of Hispanic legislators, of some prominence, whose Spanish speaking abilities are, to put it gently, not too strong. I’ve been told In fact, they’re third and fourth generation and when they get up on the stump to speak to a Hispanic audience, they may look Hispanic but they sound like some gringo from Beverly Hills who learned Spanish at Berlitz. And worst yet, their audiences start to giggle. So the Assembly sent a bunch of them on a crash course to Mexico, to teach them to be more Hispanic and to make them sound like the genuine article and not some Gringo imitation
The World Cup caught my attention for a brief moment, partially because some of the games were like a replay of several World Wars past. The truth is that I never found soccer much of a spectator sport and the rules seemed kind of archaic. I suggested that to a European friend and he reacted as if I had suggested putting a new coat of paint on the Holy Grail. The sense I had watching the Cup is that it’s the penalty calls that shape the outcome of the game. In basketball, a bad penalty call can cost you a few points, whereas in soccer a bad call plus a penalty kick can be the entire game. I think that the officiating has too large of an influence on the game, especially without instant replay. Vitriolic letters with opposing opinion will be accepted.
The governor is out cutting a deal with the prison guards and now wants to build a couple more prisons to handle the overcrowding and also get the federal courts off his back. The federal courts are making noises that they may take control of the California prison system away from the state because of the overcrowding and the fact that the medical care is so bad the prisoners keep dying. I’m sure the governor’s plan will cost multiple millions, if not billions, and I have a much cheaper solution. First, I’d suggest that we take then entire prison population and triage it, that is break it up into thirds. Then we take the least dangerous third of the population, provided that they’re all over the age of 35, and parole them to serve their time outside in some sort of minimally supervised situation.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of the people in our prisons are there for crimes related to using drugs. And the overwhelming percentage of crimes-drug related or otherwise-are committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 35. By the time they reach 35 , 40 if you want to be really conservative, they typically cease to be a threat, provided they get some minimal subsistence.
They need the subsistence because they won’t survive without help. After 20 years they can’t live outside without some sort of subsidy. This is not a moral choice; it’s an economic one. Why spend $40,000 or $50,000 per year to keep some 40-year-old in jail until he dies at 80, with all of the accompanying medical costs, when you can put him out on parole probably at a fraction of that cost? Why continue a system that works so poorly and is so expensive?