Aside from community involvement, reforming policies and reducing recidivism are needed in the CNMI to be able to further fight crime, according to Department of Public Safety Commissioner James C. Deleon Guerrero.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the Rotary Club Saipan\u2019s meeting at the Hyatt Regency Saipan on Tuesday, the DPS chief said that public policy laws such as the Criminal Code and the Vehicle Code need to be updated and rewritten.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of our laws are significantly outdated. Some of our laws, unfortunately, were written as far back as 1962 and were carried over when the CNMI became a commonwealth in 1978,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
According to him, \u201cserious changes\u201d have to be made in some of these laws.<\/p>\n
Deleon Guerrero said they are working on a project with the Office of the Attorney General to have the opportunity to rewrite these outmoded codes.<\/p>\n
Focusing on crimes such as burglary, Deleon Guerrero said they are hoping that a bill now pending in the Legislature that amends mandatory prison terms will be passed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem here in the CNMI is how the criminal justice system works is simply this: serve one-third of your sentence and you\u2019re eligible for parole,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said. \u201cThe bottom line is this: we need to be able to put away people much longer.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Deleon Guerrero also noted that putting criminals in jail is not the only way to solve crimes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIncarceration is not the only answer. The other part of this is that the Department of Corrections still has to have an active rehabilitation [program] in place in order for us to succeed in this fight to be able to reduce crime overall, in the long term,\u201d Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
He noted that a high 79 percent recidivism rate prevails in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
He said programs such as vocational training, basic education courses, and more importantly, employment opportunities when they are granted freedom must be offered and provided for those in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t really expect robbers and thieves to stop what they are doing if we don\u2019t offer them employment at the end of the cycle,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aside from community involvement, reforming policies and reducing recidivism are needed in the CNMI to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2626,26,152,5272],"class_list":["post-203935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-attorney-general","tag-cnmi","tag-deleon-guerrero","tag-rotary-club-saipan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}