California’s actions have a logic.
All decent people want our prisons to be safe places. One could, potentially, make prisons safer by removing the dangerous criminals from the prisons and releasing them onto the streets.
Yes, the logic is there. The sense, the morality, and the justice, on the other hand, are totally absent.
Sadly, California is part of a growing trend of states that believe they are choosing freedom over punishment. Instead, they are diminishing society’s freedom by abandoning justice and safety.
Of course, offering second chances to those who earn them is a good thing. Failing to penalize offenders adequately or deter them in the first place, though, is an invitation to cultural rot and mayhem.
On Saturday, with almost no public notice, California augmented early-release credits for some 76,000 felons, including violent and repeat offenders. This comes atop the state adopting no-bail policies during the pandemic while its Supreme Court forbade cash-bail systems for the indigent. The results of these leniencies in California, as they have been across the country, are rising rates of recidivism and of crime in general.
Leftist officials persist in such policies despite pushback from many prosecutors and even from the press. On Jan. 4, for example, the Yolo County district attorney’s office complained that just in the eight months of a zero-dollar bail policy, 427 released arrestees committed crimes, including serious crimes such as attempted murder, within that county alone. In all, nearly 40% of those released on zero bail reoffended at least one time.
Meanwhile, the CBS affiliate in Sacramento reported last month that “Sacramento County businesses say California’s no bail policy and looser chronic-nuisance-offender policies are destroying their livelihoods. It’s gotten so bad in parts of Sacramento county that some businesses are asking to break their leases to escape the constant crime.”
All this continues a trend that began a full 10 years ago, when the Golden State adopted the first of four major leniency steps — legislative act AB 109, and Propositions 36, 47, and 57 in, respectively, 2012, 2014, and 2016. These new laws capped prison populations, gutted the state’s prior “three strikes” law against recidivists, began treating all thefts of less than $950 as mere misdemeanors, and reduced existing sentences for tens of thousands of non-heinous offenders. Result: While crime rates fell across the nation (until last year’s anti-police overreactions) in the past decade, crime rose substantially almost across the board in California. Perhaps the starkest statistic was that the number of rapes more than doubled in 10 years from about 7,000 to nearly 15,000.
And Oakland today is a proverbial war zone, already well on pace for a murder every three days, which would mean a second-straight year of triple-digit homicides after many years below that grim threshold.
California provides only one stark example of the sudden hike in crime across the nation, much of it correlating almost directly with early-release programs, reductions of cash bail, sentence reductions for serious crimes, and elimination of prison time for lesser offenses. Some of it, to be sure, resulted from early prisoner releases undertaken in order to stop coronavirus spread in crowded prisons. Still, whatever the reason for the releases, the high and oft-violent recidivism rate shows the dangers to public safety inherent in setting too many felons free.
Worse, most of the COVID-related releases were not even necessary for inmates’ health, as noted by crime policy expert Sean Kennedy last summer in the Wall Street Journal. Kennedy said that statistics already showed convincingly back then that “prisoners may actually be safer behind bars.” Predictably, horror stories abounded across the country of released inmates committing murder and other violent crimes mere weeks, or even days, after exiting prisons.
As for police cutbacks, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund features on its website a recent report demonstrating overwhelmingly that “less policing = more murders.” After the anti-police backlash resulting from the infamous murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last summer, homicides in the nation’s largest 60 cities rose 35%.
Another LELDF report shows that leftist prosecutors showing woke leniency also have been allowing crime to spread. When they pursue fewer guilty verdicts, violent crime almost immediately rises. Dallas and San Antonio saw a 15% increase in violent crime when prosecutions decreased, while Philadelphia saw an 18% hike in gun violence and Baltimore a frightening 65% explosion in homicides.
Enough is too much. Many of the so-called reformers pushing easy-on-crime policies do so in the name of liberty and human dignity for the criminals. The broader public of law-abiding citizens, though, loses its liberty to traverse city streets safely as law and order diminishes.
Rehabilitation of offenders is always desirable. These leftist policies rush right past rehabilitation by offering unearned grace. In the end, crime without punishment is a license to kill. It is a license no polity should ever confer.
