Recently, two state legislators announced that they will co-sponsor a bill to eliminate Cook County’s boot camp program. The main thrust of their opposition to the program comes from a Sun-Times investigation which discovered that some ineligible defendants were given boot camp. They argue that the program is flawed and fundamentally unfair to those convicted in the rest of the state.
I strongly disagree with their proposal. For one, conviction rates and sentence severity has always varied from county to county. So the “fairness” argument rings hollow when the location an offense is committed has always affected how the case will play out.
In my line of work, I have come across many former offenders that truly credit boot camp for turning their life around. Boot camp serves as the wake-up call that these people need to rehabilitate. In addition, because those convicted serve months rather than years, they are less of a strain on the overburdened and overfilled Illinois prison system. But make no mistake, boot camp is no walk in the park. It is an intensive program, but still allows defendants to avoid the pitfalls of spending years in prison. It is much easier to rehabilitate when you re-enter the world quickly with a new outlook than it is after you have become habituated to prison life.
Even if some people convicted were wrongly given boot camp, abolishing the whole program amounts to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Now that there has been so much attention brought to the sentencing guidelines as it relates to boot camp, I do not imagine that there will be such widespread error in sentencing anymore. If there are still flaws, then work to fix them rather than lazily throwing out something that does have positive results.
I strongly disagree with their proposal. For one, conviction rates and sentence severity has always varied from county to county. So the “fairness” argument rings hollow when the location an offense is committed has always affected how the case will play out.
In my line of work, I have come across many former offenders that truly credit boot camp for turning their life around. Boot camp serves as the wake-up call that these people need to rehabilitate. In addition, because those convicted serve months rather than years, they are less of a strain on the overburdened and overfilled Illinois prison system. But make no mistake, boot camp is no walk in the park. It is an intensive program, but still allows defendants to avoid the pitfalls of spending years in prison. It is much easier to rehabilitate when you re-enter the world quickly with a new outlook than it is after you have become habituated to prison life.
Even if some people convicted were wrongly given boot camp, abolishing the whole program amounts to throwing the baby out with the bath water. Now that there has been so much attention brought to the sentencing guidelines as it relates to boot camp, I do not imagine that there will be such widespread error in sentencing anymore. If there are still flaws, then work to fix them rather than lazily throwing out something that does have positive results.
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