In his latest Weekly Check on the Bias, Jeff Soyer discusses the current crime wave in Philadelphia and asks whether lenient judges are to blame:

More anti-gun laws don't stop crime. Locking up thugs for a good long time does. The City of Brotherly Love is experiencing a surge in gun violence. There's been an interesting set of letters appearing in the Philadelphia Daily News over the past few weeks. It started with one by Joseph Fox, Chief of Detectives of the Philadelphia Police Department here:

More than 70 percent of Philly's murder victims have criminal records, many of them extensive. In excess of 80 percent of those arrested for murder have criminal records, many of them for violent crime.

The number of people who are engaged in violent criminal activity is minuscule as a percentage of the overall population. Common sense dictates that if this limited number of violent criminals are locked away, the bloodshed would begin to abate.

Our judges have the power to do this.

Prison overcrowding:

PHILADELPHIA -- As many as 25 to 30 men have been kept for days in a holding cell with a single toilet and no beds as detainees overwhelm Philadelphia's prison system, a lawsuit filed yesterday charged.

The suit comes just five years after state and federal courts ended 30 years of supervision prompted by earlier lawsuits over prison conditions.

The city -- whose prison population has more than doubled since 1987 to about 8,800 -- reopened a long-shuttered prison over the weekend to make room for the newest detainees.

Holmesburg Prison, which was closed a decade ago, is being used temporarily to hold prisoners during the intake process. Pretrial detainees have recently been held for days in police districts and the police administration building, sometimes without beds or access to lawyers or medical care, the lawsuit charged. Police holding cells are designed to hold people for just a few hours.

"It's intolerable to treat people that way, and there's something called the Constitution which says that you can't," said civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who filed yesterday's suit as well as an earlier suit in 1971.

City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. said the city has been aware of the problem, and working on it with judges, prosecutors and others, for more than a year. He expects that more money will be needed to hire staff and equipment and come up with alternative solutions, such as home-monitoring devices for low-level offenders.

The city currently spends $262 million a year on its prison system, up from $93 million in 1987 and $195 million in 2001.

Rudofsky, btw, is a member of the Penn law school faculty, a prominent prison rights attorney, and former local counsel for the famed Mumia Abu Jamal, so he knows his turf. While I am leery of activists whose ultimate goal is to close all prisons, it strikes me that if prison conditions are so unconstitutional that inmates have to be released early, something is very, very wrong.

Professor Rudofsky mentions the war on drugs:

"With the war on drugs, you have an inexhaustible supply of possible prisoners, limited only by the number of police you have," Rudovsky said.

Alternatives to incarceration should be considered for people charged with minor crimes and those nearing parole, he said.

Riley's 20-year-old son died after a .22-caliber bullet went through his forehead and lodged in his brain. A neighbor, Anthony Byrd, confessed.

Byrd, also 20, told police that he had bought the gun "off someone in the street." What street, from whom and for how much, he didn't say.

Byrd called the shooting an accident, which is curious since he ran from the crime scene and waited a week to surrender.

"I was confused," he told investigators. As for the gun? "I don't really remember what happened to it."

Byrd admitted his guilt, and let the lawyers decide whether to call it murder or manslaughter. A few weeks ago, he was sentenced to 111/2 to 24 months behind bars, with credit for time served since his arrest last fall.

With the Philadelphia prison system so overcrowded the city is being sued, the odds are that Byrd will be free sooner rather than later.

Get a gun, take a life, and get yours back that fast? If it's that easy, no wonder everyone's doing it.

Conservatives and many Second Amendment supporting libertarians (like myself) often argue that the solution is locking up people who commit crimes with guns, but if they cannot be locked up, doesn't that tend to reduce the lock-em-up argument to a form of mere debate rhetoric?

The fact is, violent criminals with long records are not being locked up. They can get guns illegally in numerous ways, and making guns harder for law abiding people to get only decreases the number of armed law abiding citizens. Considering the dysfunctional nature of the lock-em-up system, armed law-abiding citizens -- like this store owner, and this armed citizen -- are one of society's few last lines of defense.

I think this is another example of how the drug war is ruining the criminal justice system.

By artificially driving up the price of substances of little inherent worth, these laws create opportunities for instant wealth, torture traditional notions of crime and jurisprudence, manufacture false morality while criminalizing human suffering, and provide a gigantic, artificial playing field for opportunistic crime which otherwise would not be there.

The result is that ordinary police work is corrupted, and we see police overreacting to things like cell phone photography, as well as the use of deadly SWAT teams in routine law enforcement.

If drugs were legal, the streets would be safer, there'd be room in the prisons, and while addicts would continue to be victims, they'd no longer be punished for being victims, and they wouldn't have to prey on the rest of us.

Who knows? Some of them might be motivated to get help.

MORE: I forgot to mention that Jeff is taking a break from his weekly report on the bias. I hope it's only temporary, as I think Jeff is providing a real service to the Second Amendment.