Accelerated release of prisoners a bad idea

Picture this if you will.
You're sitting in a courtroom in the public gallery of any courtroom in this great land watching the sentencing of a man who pled guilty to, oh I don’t know, lets say counterfeiting.
The Crown prosecutor stands up and asks the judge to give the man 15 months in jail, a respectable amount of time for such a crime.
The defense lawyer then stands up and asks that his client receive two years plus a day in jail.
"What?" you may ask yourself.
"Why would the defense counsel ask for more time for his client?”
Well, the answer is rather simple.
Two-years-less-a-day puts the convicted person in a provincial jail. Two-years-plus-a-day puts them in a federal one.
And in the federal system there's something known as the accelerated release program.
It works like this.
Once he's inside the federal system and the clock starts counting, his file can be reviewed to see if he's a risk to reoffend in a violent way. If he's not, he is eligible for release after serving only one-sixth of his sentence.
That means the convict sentenced to two-years-plus-a-day can be released after serving only four months of time.
Now, the idea behind this is to cut back on the cost of keeping people in our already overcrowded prison system.
But somewhere along the way someone forgot that it also costs money to put people through the court process, and some people as we all know, spend a lot of time in court. Again and again.
I think there's something wrong when more time in jail equals less and less equals more. Sounds kind of like War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength, to quote the man who introduced the word Doublespeak into the English language.
The cops catch these guys, the Crown works hard to prove their guilt and the judges have to adhere to case law to decide how long the accused will go to jail, their hands tied in many respects by the Supreme Court and the legislation set down on sentencing.
So a convict gets two years in jail, serves four months, walks out and picks up where he left off, sometimes appearing before the same judge again and again.
And through it all, it’s you, the citizen, who suffers.
You have to pay the taxes to keep these guys in jail, and you also have to pay for them to go through the court process again and again.
I say get these criminals early and get them good.
It's not just the big crimes that we have to worry about. It’s the small time slap-on-the-wrist offenses that have to be targeted and the small-time hoods that have to be made an example of.
Most rapists and killers don't lead respectable lives then climb out of bed one day and say, "Hey, I feel like raping and killing someone today."
They build up to it. They break into houses. They steal cars. They deal drugs. A little at a time, they build up a resume and before you know it, you've got a big-time crook standing before a judge, a judge who gives this person a chunk of time in the spring and sees them in the same courtroom before the snow flies, probably knowing they’ll see them again before the January thaw.
Something's got to be done or God help us all.