Criminal Justice "Reform" Bites, and Reality Bites Back

Pretending that being nice to criminals reduces crime turns out to have some, ummmm, problems

We occasionally hear what are heralded as “groundbreaking” announcements of a new, more humane approach to crime. The problem is that they’re anything but new — they’re just same the old Sixties and Seventies stuff warmed over in fancier language — and they’re not humane either, at least if one thinks that the proliferating number of crime victims we get as a result isn’t particularly humane.

After the results start coming in, then, with a much quieter announcement, the people who were originally so enthusiastic take a step, or quite a few steps, back. Hence, in the Mercury News (a local Bay Area paper) — and conspicuously not on CNN or MSNBC or any of the biggies — we see this story:

OAKLAND — Days after ordering 120 California Highway Patrol officers to the East Bay, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced plans to also send state attorneys to Alameda County to beef up prosecutions of numerous “serious and complex crimes.”

The move was welcomed by the county’s top prosecutor and lauded by the state attorney general — who began his political career by winning a city council seat in the East Bay — but criticized as a “terrible idea” by the Alameda County public defender.

Newsom will send attorneys from the California Department of Justice and the National Guard to boost the capacity of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s office in prosecuting “violent crimes, serious drug-related crimes and property crimes,” including retail theft and auto burglary, according to the governor’s announcement.

It turns out that when crime explodes, businesses board up and leave, and ordinary citizens feel like they can’t go out after dark, even the Gavin Newsoms of the world get the message. And no, although understandably some of us might think this is an attempt by Newsom to tack to the center in anticipation of Biden’s inability to mount a campaign, I’m not (yet) that cynical. Instead, I think it’s the first cousin to Democratic mayors’ finally acknowledging that uncontrolled illegal immigration is more than they can handle.

Newsom did not say exactly how many prosecutors would be deputized to work in Alameda County in the coming days. Few other details were announced, beyond a focus on prosecuting “significant cases targeting major criminal networks in Oakland and the East Bay” and offering “investigative and analytical support to identify criminal networks.”

Criminal networks??!! But the Left has been telling us for years that they’re all Jean Valjean, stealing and mugging and yoking for subsistence — subsistence being all they can get because of the evils of capitalism. How shocking it is to learn that it’s not Jean Valjean and is instead organized crime — people who do targeted stealing and then sell the proceeds on the underground market (their own form of capitalism, just without civilized rules).

“An arrest isn’t enough,” Newsom said in a statement. “Justice demands that suspects are appropriately prosecuted. Whether it’s ‘bipping’ or carjacking, attempted murder or fentanyl trafficking, individuals must be held accountable for their crimes using the full and appropriate weight of the law.”

The Governor must have been paying more attention than I thought in his debate with Ron DeSantis.

Still, there are those ready to step up to defend the status quo, no matter how bloody it gets.

Newsom’s moves drew a sharp rebuke from Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods, who lambasted the idea as “a Band-Aid on a broken arm” that “is not going to solve anything.”

The Public Defender, of course, spends long hours every day trying to make sure there’s not even a Band-Aid; that the arm breakers get put back out on the street with no cash bail; and that, if there’s a trial, a sleepy jury can get hookwinked into thinking it was the criminal who’s the real victim (of racism, classism, bourgeois thinking, or the other usual suspects).

He said that rather than flooding the streets with more law-enforcement officers and sending state prosecutors into Alameda County, the state should “go back to things that we know work,” including pumping money into mental health, housing, employment and education initiatives.

It’s true that we know what works, that being all the stuff the Public Defender gets furious about, to wit, more police, more aggressive policing, and more use of incarceration. The emphasis on the “medical model” of crime and its “solutions” — “pumping money into mental health, housing, employment and education initiatives” — is what we know, from having tried it for about three decades starting in Sixties, does not work and, to the contrary, feeds the perverse cultural entitlement that undergirds the enormous increase in crime we got over those years.

“It’s an absolutely terrible idea,” Woods said. “When we think about where we are right now and where we’re trying to get, all this is going to do is increase the number of people who are Black and brown who are being held in custody.”

Since most of the crime in the Bay Area is committed by people who are black and brown, then, yes, they are going to be the ones in custody. The answer, however, is hardly for us to change our behavior and release thugs because of liberals’ phony and unworthy race huckstering. The answer is for thugs to change their behavior. But it’s simply impossible to get the Left to admit it.

“This is a step backwards,” he added. “It’s going to increase mass incarceration.”

Actually, we don’t have mass incarceration; about one-half of one percent of the population is incarcerated. And it’s not increasing; it’s been going down for almost 15 years. Other than that………….

Still, I’m glad Newsom has seen at least a little bit of the light. One must wonder, though, how many innocent people were robbed, swindled, beaten up, overdosed or killed while the Governor took his sweet time.