Enough!
This is the way a woman described her rape
assault to Connecticut Commentary in 2014:
“James had assaulted me many years ago and was sentenced to
one year, I believe. He served six months. A protective order was put in place.
Approximately six months after his release… He broke into my house
and waited for me to return home. He beat me for hours using anything at his
disposal: the china cabinet, the TV, stereo, speakers, his fists, the phone. I
sustained extensive serious physical and mental trauma. I had escaped the house
twice, but he dragged me back and continued beating me. The third time I
escaped the house, a snow plow truck driver saw me on the side of the road in a
pool of blood, interceded and saved my life.”
Connecticut Commentary noted:
“This was the second go-around for Mr. Bartis, who had
served six months in prison for a prior assault (on the same woman). The
hospital report on the injuries sustained, as might be expected, was clinically
graphic. She suffered from skull fractures, a jaw shattered on the right and
fractured on the left, five broken ribs, a punctured lung, orbital fractures to
both her eyes and a broken nose. It may have been a bookcase or a china cabinet
brought down on her that fractured her ribs. Fear and terror brushed some of
the details from her mind.”
A few months before the rapist’s early release from prison
the rape victim had received an informational notice from the Victim Services
Unit of the Department of Correction (DOC):
“RE: Inmate JAMES BARTIS… “On July 1, 2011, the
Connecticut General Assembly passed a provision of the Connecticut State
Statutes for an incentive plan for inmates to earn credit toward achieving a
reduction of their sentence and an early release from incarceration known as
the ‘Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program” (RREC). This incentive plan
provides for the earning of credit, by compliance with the Inmate’s
Accountability Plan, good conduct, obedience to the rules and participation in
programs that will prepare the inmate to return to the community.
“This letter is to inform you that the above named
inmate has a sentence that will expire on November 26, 2013 and will no longer
be under the jurisdiction of the State of Connecticut Department of Correction.
Upon discharge the inmate will discharge to probation.”
The rapist had been a graduate of the Mike Lawlor school of
penology. Mr. Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s Under Secretary for Criminal
Justice Policy and Planning had years earlier inaugurated an early release
“Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program” (RREC) that had not excluded
rapists from the unearned time off awards – the program was applied
retroactively to all “non-violent” Connecticut prisoners.
Rape, as the anti-war-on-women warriors in the Democratic
Party continually remind us, is a violent crime. But for Mr. Lawlor and Mr. Malloy incarcerated rapists are not violent criminals. Former State Senator Len Suzio
and other concerned Republicans led the effort in the General Assembly to
compel Mr. Lawlor to excluded rapists from acquiring early release credits.
No deal.
Mr. Suzio has for years been attempting to force Mr. Lawlor
to disgorge data to be made available to the general public on a regular
schedule that would allow legislators, not to mention women in Connecticut, to
measure the success of his program – which the crafty Mr. Lawlor had concealed
in an omnibus end of the legislative session implementation bill. As a former
co-chairman of the State Judiciary Committee along with Andrew McDonald, now a
Supreme Court Justice, Mr. Lawlor knew his bill would slide past the noses of
usually watchful legislators without a public hearing or sufficient oversight.
Yet another casualty of the Lawlor-Malloy “Risk Reduction
Earned Credit Program” has now surfaced.
“Man
rearrested after getting out of jail with state's Early Release prison," WFSB
Channel 3 reports. “A woman was tied up, robbed and sexually assaulted in her
own home, and the man accused of the crime should still have been in jail.
Despite his violent and lengthy criminal past, 35-year-old Edwin Glass was let
out more than seven months early, thanks to the early release program.”
And here’s the ticklish note in the story: “This is a story,
multiple law enforcement sources confirm to Eyewitness News, that Gov. Dannel
Malloy’s administration was trying to keep quiet from the media.”
Mr. Suzio, now running for re-election to his old seat in
the State Senate, has pursued this issue through all its permutations. He is
quoted in the Channel 3 report to this effect: “They don't want the public to
know because it's testimony to the blatant failure of the program and how CT citizens,
men women and children, are paying for it with their lives and their safety.
It's a scandal that needs to be exposed and politicians should be held
accountable for this outrageous law.”
If there is such a thing as “the women’s vote,” smart women
in Connecticut this year will follow this story to its ultimate and, one hopes,
just end. Violent rape – all rape is a violation of the human
personality – is the most egregious assault in a war on women that, according
to Democratic propaganda, is waged by Republicans against women.
But Mr. Lawlor and more egregiously Mr. Malloy – married to a
woman who had counseled raped victims – are Democrats. Both should
be ashamed for having resisted for so long the Republican efforts to remove
rape from Mr. Lawlor’s poorly conceived, Orwellian named “Risk
Reduction Earned Credit Program.” Because Mr. Lawlor’s get-out-of-jail-early
credits were assigned retroactively to all so-called “non-violent” criminals in
the state’s prison system, they were not “earned,” and the “risk” so far
associated with the program has been borne by women in Connecticut and – Mr.
Lawlor should know this – new prison arrivals raped by other hardened male
prisoners.
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