Libertarian Neiss details platform, website

The urgent need to end the abuses of overincarceration and civil forfiture and to stop criminalizing youngsters in our schools are the planks comprising the platform of Shad Neiss, the Libertarian candidate for State Attorney, 16th Circuit (Monroe County).

Neiss’s reform platform seeks 1) to deemphasize criminal prosecutions of victimless crimes, children, the mentally ill, and others better served by scientifically-informed treatment or restorative justice programs,  to reduce plea bargains for dangerous predators, and 2) to reform civil forfeiture practices.

“Americans are the most jailed people in the world,” says Neiss. “There are more Americans presently incarcerated, per capita, and in total numbers, than there are prisoners in communist China or in authoritarian Russia, in spite of the fact that crime rates in America track with international norms. So-called ‘morality crimes’ comprise a subatantial portion (about 40%) of prosecutions, and no one but special interests profit from mass incarceration. Florida’s prison budget alone is $2.1 billion and one in eight state workers are employed by the state Department of Corrections. Mass incarceration has increased over the past generation, although crime rates have generally remained flat, or declined.”

Clearly, the candidate argues, “mass incarceration wastes resources necessary to arrest and prosecute dangerous predators. In 1965 — before the era of mass incarceration — the majority of serious crimes, including over 90% of murders and over 70% of rapes, were solved. Here in Monroe County around seven to eight of every ten crimes goes unsolved.”

In addition, children are now being entangled in the criminal justice bureaucracy in record numbers, creating a virtual school to prison pipeline. In Monroe County for fiscal year 2014-15, law enforcement arrested 23% more children in school per capita than the state as a whole, often for non-violent youth misbehavior including cutting class, talking back or fighting.

For full details of both problems and Neiss’s very specific solutions, visit his website, www.CriminalJusticeReformFL.com/Neiss for State Attorney 2016.

Neiss faces incumbent State Attorney Catherine Vogel, a Democrat, and former State Attorney Dennis Ward, a Republican, in the November election.

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