COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:

We’ve read in these very pages about the State of California facing serious challenges just about everywhere it turns — with a bloated budget, rampant illegal immigration, aging and insufficient infrastructure, inadequate water and power supply, and on and on.

One issue that hasn’t been making headlines, but is even more dangerous, is an effort afoot by a trio of very liberal judges who’re debating the particulars of an ill-advised scheme that would open the gates of California’s prisons and lets tens of thousands of felons walk right out the door and back into civilized society, without having served the entirety of their sentences.

Thankfully, our Republican legislators in Orange County have done their part to intervene in these deliberations, to bring a sense of sanity to the process and to keep the felons where they belong — behind bars. Well, that is every Republican legislator, except one. Sen. Tom Harman (R–Huntington Beach) stands alone, key in hand, as the only O.C. Republican legislator supporting the Free the Felons policy.

It’s no secret that our prisons are overcrowded, and that this creates a serious problem for the safety of law-abiding Californians. However, the solutions emanating from this judicial panel aren’t calls for increased prison capacity or sentencing reform. No. Instead, these judges seem set on a much simpler solution: If there are too many felons in prison, just let some go free.

And so, aided by Harman, who refuses to stand up against them, these judges will soon let upward of 50,000 criminals loose, with more than 3,000 of them likely headed back right here to the O.C.

If these were just small-time perps it would be one thing, but they aren’t. More than 80% of California’s prison population is made of up violent criminals. Not the kind of people we want sitting in the parking lot when we leave the supermarket at night.

It is simply unconscionable that in light of the oncoming threat of prison caps being imposed, and the prisoner release it would trigger, that Harman would stand as the only Orange County Republican legislator not doing everything he can to avert that danger.

Should Harman get his way and 3,000 convicted bad guys find their way back into Orange County, if just one of them falls back into their old ways and commits another crime — everyone will know at whom to aim their outrage. Hopefully Harman will wake up and join his colleagues in fighting this outrage of letting criminals loose, making the O.C. a safer place to live before it’s too late.

Josh Barnett is a member of the California Republican Assembly.