Liberal judges who decide not to jail violent career criminals and sadistic psychopaths ought to be held liable when the felons attack innocent citizens. Two horrendous, unprovoked attacks on helpless young women on public transit in recent weeks would never have happened if the legal system had done what it’s designed to do.
The problem here is the context: we live in a society in which almost no trials happen at all, because aggressive charging coupled with plea bargains almost always prevent any trial of an accused. It's 98% of Federal criminal trials, and 95% of state-level ones.
The system is not failing on the side of leniency for the accused, even if it is possible to find two recent cases out of the lives of four hundred million people. Making judges liable if they happen to release someone who later commits a crime would only add an additional incentive to send people to prison for a long time without worrying too much about whether or not they actually did anything wrong. The US is already the world's leading producer of prison population; if anything, we should be trying to reduce the number of Americans in prison if we can find good ways of doing so.
It's a dangerous world. Freedom and protection are oppositional goods; the more protected you are, the less free. Everyone can and should be horrified by the murder in Charlotte, for example, but it doesn't follow that we need even more incentive to put people in prison for long sentences. Prison doesn't work anyway: nobody gets reformed. More of a bad solution is not a good answer to any problem.
3 comments:
Prison may not work for reform if that is the way you are going to define its purpose but it may work to reduce the incidence of crime in other ways.
Steve Hayward posted on the underlying topic yesterday at his Political Questions Substack which pointed to and quoted from this article by Tal Fortgang posted at City Journal regarding analysis of criminal behavior.
From Tal (quoted in part by Steve H)
These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact . . . with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest.” Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features,” the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality.” As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”
The case for an incapacitation-first approach to crime control follows directly from these indisputable facts. An analysis of the Swedish paper reveals that violent crime would fall nearly 80 percent if perpetrators could be prevented from re-offending after their first conviction and would fall by half if they were fully incapacitated after their third. So concentrated is violent crime among a profoundly antisocial few that making even a tenth violent conviction punishable by life without parole would cut overall violent crime by 20 percent.
I have read that in both of the most recent and notorious attacks on public transit the perpetrators had been arrested and then released from custody multiple times for various offenses.
We may certainly have a problem with over-incarnation resulting in indiscriminate jailing of those with the potential for reform with criminals much more likely to reoffend, and with overly harsh sentences for otherwise minor crimes. The later likely feeds into the large numbers of plea bargains because if prosecutors were not able to threaten a possible conviction resulting in a lengthy prison term they would have much less leverage. We also have to grapple with how to respond a specific ethnic group being overrepresented among the incarcerated.
Making judges liable if they happen to release someone who later commits a crime would only add an additional incentive to send people to prison for a long time without worrying too much about whether or not they actually did anything wrong.
Well, if the judge has a good reason to expect that the prisoner in question will go out and commit more violent crimes, then the judge should be punished for it. There's a difference between a first offender, or even a repeat offender who has only committed non-violent crimes, and someone with a long history of violent crime.
Also, we aren't talking about prison, necessarily. From the article:
Reed had been deemed too dangerous to stay in the locked psychiatric wing of a Chicago hospital where he allegedly attacked a social worker and knocked her unconscious, causing a severe concussion, an eye injury and a broken tooth.
So Cook County Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez let him out on the streets in August with an ankle monitor, trusting him to abide by the curfew she set.
So Reed was already locked up and proved too dangerous for the psychiatric wing of a hospital and the judge set him free. What else was going to happen but that he would violently assault someone? That seems very much like criminal negligence on the judge's part.
In some cases people with long histories of violent crime are charged with a new violent crime and then released without bail, only to go commit more violent crimes. Again, prison isn't in the equation. This is a pre-trial situation.
I agree in general that we imprison too many people and that there are other problems with our justice system, but the left-wing approach of siding with violent criminals and setting them loose to prey upon the innocent seems wicked.
- Tom
One solution I've advocated off and on includes this:
Only lock up the violent criminals. Attempts to rehabilitate them are fine, and if they're serious, they should be pursued. It's important, though, to not lose sight of the needs to isolate them from society for a significant period and to punish them commensurately with the nature of their violent crime in the effort to rehabilitate.
Get rid of sentencing guidelines and impact statements by either side. Let only juries set the punishment, whether that be the jury that convicted, or a separate jury, operating solely on the information presented at trial. Absent the impact statement froo-froo, the sentencing should proceed from the day following a guilty verdict or as soon as the separate jury can be seated, which shouldn't take more than two or three days.
For nonviolent criminals, sentence them to a community service that teaches them a marketable trade, then bar them from their original neighborhoods, which may mean barring them from their original city. The idea here is to get them out of the environment in which they went astray. The bar needn't be permanent, but it must be for enough years for new habits to become innate.
There are problems with this internal exile step, but those are impediments, not barriers.
Eric Hines
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