Guilty by Reason of Insanity – HotAir

All of us have some sense or another about how screwed up our criminal justice system has become. But I am unconvinced that enough people have grasped that we are not facing a problem, but a crisis. 





That crisis is twofold: the lack of law enforcement and protection of the public from predators, and the growing lack of faith in the criminal justice system itself. 

To many of us, it seems that the people in charge of keeping the public safe from predators are on the wrong side, more concerned with showing compassion to criminals than in defending us, and civilization itself. 

There are countless examples of this, and I mean that in a literal sense: far too many to keep track of, and far too many examples that we never hear of because the stories are treated as local. 

It’s only when a high-profile case draws national attention that most people even notice the problem.  Daniel Penny has to defend a subway car from a serial criminal, or Irina Zarutska gets murdered by a man who had more encounters with law enforcement than I have with doctors over the years. 





I recently wrote about a case in Seattle where a man randomly attacked a 75-year-old woman and blinded her in one eye, nearly killing her, and it turned out that he was such a regular “customer” of the police that they basically shrugged. No matter how many times he was arrested for randomly punching people, he was let back out onto the streets. 

“He’s a regular. He usually punches.” Imagine being a police officer and becoming blasé about a criminal like that. But what can you do? Judges and prosecutors make the criminal justice system a revolving door, and politicians talk about systemic racism, compassion, and side with the criminals. 

Abigail Spanberger is moving to reduce sentences for a whole range of crimes, and during her campaign decried how punitive our criminal justice system is. 





Huh? What about the victims? None of these people seems to care. 

The case in Florida that I linked to above is a perfect example. A man goes on a shooting rampage, and in a bench trial, a judge releases him back into the community with an order to get mental health help. No jury would have let him off with an insanity defense, but a judge did, and he went on to kill three random tourists. 

His name was “Jihad.” FFS, man. 

Like many people—like many liberals—I don’t believe that the arrest-incarcerate-release-repeat model of criminal justice works. If you asked me about whether the purely punitive model of criminal justice is optimal, I would say ‘No.” Not that I have any clear idea on how to improve it, of course, because it turns out that the whole reason why we have a criminal justice system in the first place is that in edge cases, civilization has broken down. 

Sometimes civilized responses to uncivilized behavior won’t work. Sometimes they will, and it is hard to figure out which is which in many cases. 

But the incarceration model has one great advantage: it separates the uncivilized, for whatever reason, from the civilized. Before you can deal with how to improve how the criminal justice system works, you MUST protect civilization. Just releasing criminals back into the general population is a betrayal of civilization itself. 





“He’s a regular. He usually punches.” 

The current liberal “solution” is creating a crisis. A crisis of confidence in the system. And when that happens, at some point, ordinary citizens will take the law into their own hands. 

That is a much worse outcome for everybody involved than overincarceration, if you think that is the current state of things. 

Before you can reform criminal justice, you must segregate the criminally inclined from the rest of the population. Perhaps you can “cure” criminals of criminality—surely some can reform, and we have examples—but throwing criminals back unreformed is an assault on civilization itself. 

And it is our elites leading that charge. 


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