Re "In the Thin Air of Coors Field, It's Not the Hits, It's the Humidor," Aug. 17: That's an interesting theory about the Colorado Rockies' humidor, which allegedly keeps balls from drying out, helping to reduce offense at Coors Field in Denver.
Studies have found no evidence that keeping prisoners jailed for decades for nonviolent offenses reduces crime.
By eliminating this opportunity for a misdemeanor offense while reducing crime rates, Californians have proven that a large percentage of people our justice system once identified as "criminal" pose no real threat to public safety.
Woodward was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder, though the judge reduced the offense to manslaughter, and sentenced Woodward to time served.
Kansas lowered the maximum jail sentence for first-time possession and reduced second offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.
For example, education and job-focused programs like San Francisco's Back on Track program and New York's Bard Prison Initiative have dramatically reduced re-offense rates to less than 10percentt, creating pathways to productive lives for the sons, daughters, fathers and mothers caught up in the criminal justice system, at a fraction of the cost of incarceration.
The primary effect of this provision is to reduce an offense of murder to one of manslaughter.
Because if you can eliminate a quarter of the field, you then significantly reduce the offense's ability to be creative and score points.
For much of the night, it reduced the Redskins' offense to a dink-and-dunk attack that had little success.
But the McGreevey administration has found that many drivers -- 233,000 of them last year -- avoided them by getting their offense reduced to a charge of unsafe driving.
