Decriminalizing Crime

Crime statistics are an embarrassment. Minority groups commit more crimes per capita than others. Members of these groups are rightly embarrassed by the statistics, but their solution seems most often to be to blame someone else, like white police officers.

Even the ascendancy of Barack Obama did not seem to make a dent in the crime statistics. Obama’s home town, run by a mayor who had been Obama’s chief of staff, kept racking up unacceptably large murder rates. Again, it was an embarrassment. The nation has been told to look away and to blame white people, especially white racists and white supremacists.

By what is acceptable reason, we are not permitted to suggest that the people who commit the crimes ought not to be committing the crimes and that their communities ought not to be defending them or exonerating them… because the fault lies with white police officers.

One alternative might be to decriminalize crime. By the logic of the radical left crime must be a social construction. If we decriminalize certain criminal behaviors there will be less crime. Problem solved, sort of.

Victor Davis Hanson explained how it’s working in California:

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Mission accomplished.

If that does not suit your intellectual predilections, the Washington Post has just run a series of articles about how bad prison is. The ostensible purpose of these articles, written by people who have suffered incarceration, is to empty the prisons. The reasoning behind them: people who are in prison have mental health issues. And that prison is not very good therapy. If not, prisoner are the victims of capitalist patriarchy and are simply revolting against their oppressors.

Notable scofflaw Piper Kerman, the mind behind the television show, Orange is the New Black, explains it all in her lead article. Paul Mirengoff reports on it for Powerline blog (via Maggie’s Farm):

Kerman complains that “the American criminal justice system does not solve the problems — violence, mental illness, addiction — that it claims to address.”

And also:

Kerman’s article is a smorgasbord of leftist cliches. She claims, for example, that “mass incarceration is a result of policies that have grown out of a history of slavery, colonialism, and punishment of the poor.”

To which Mirengoff responds:

If slavery, colonialism, and punishment of the poor were to blame for incarceration, we should see less, not more, incarceration as time takes us further and further away from this history. But that’s not what we see.

Thus is blame shifted from the criminals to the society at large. The fault, by leftist ideology, lies with a criminal Western culture that has exploited and oppressed peoples for ages now. Those who hold these views are saying that criminal behavior is the natural and normal response of oppressed peoples toward their oppressors. If not, it is a function of mental health problems that the nation is refusing to treat.

Meringoff remarks that Kerman and the Washington Post have misunderstood the purpose of prison:

The primary purposes of the system are to punish criminals and prevent them from committing crimes. It achieves these objectives, at least while the criminal is incarcerated. Longer sentences would prevent criminals from committing crimes for longer periods. But this, of course, is not what Kerman has in mind.

By incapacitating criminals, the justice system reduces violence. Violent crime plummeted following the harsher federal sentencing regime adopted towards the end of the last century. This isn’t the same thing as “solving” violence, but that’s not a realistic goal of a criminal justice system.

In effect, the solution offered by Kerman and the Post is the problem. When communities do not hold criminals accountable, when they do not shun those who cause the communities to fall into disrepute, you get more crime. Effectively, the article decriminalizes crime. It will naturally produce more crime. We should shut up and suffer it because we all deserve it.

Meringoff explains:

If anything here is being “normalized” here it’s crime, not incarceration. Advocates like Kerman (and those like the Washington Post who give them a platform) treat criminal behavior as a normal and natural response to slavery, colonialism, imbalances in power, etc.

Accepting this notion will lead to rampant crime in excess even of the crime wave of the 1970s that led to the stiff sentencing regime in place until recently. It will eat away at the fabric of our society — a fate that radicals like Kerman may consider the just dessert of a “racist” and “colonialist” nation like America.