We Keep Giving Them a Pass, and They Keep Proving We’re Fools

In “Our Under-Incarceration Problem, Portland Edition,” Paul Mirengoff shows graphically the savage costs of the nostrum that passes for High Wisdom among criminal justice reformers, to wit,  that “everyone deserves a second chance.”  Of course many, possibly most, criminals deserve a second chance, but as long as we refuse to ask, “Who specifically are we dealing with?” and “Second chance to do what?” we are thoughtlessly opening the door to more criminal brutality.  And we’ll get what you usually get when you open that door  —  as a Portland, Oregon driver learned last week.

A video and an account of the now-widely known Portland street attack is here (warning, it’s graphic).  As Paul notes:

Marquise Love is the thug who was caught on video viciously assaulting Adam Haner in Portland, Oregon the other day during a “protest.” Love knocked Haner unconscious. Police now have Love in custody.

As is almost always true in publicized cases involving serious felonies, Love has a long rap sheet. In a well-functioning criminal justice system, he would be in prison. In our ultra-lenient system, he was free to cause mayhem [and perhaps permanent injury].

Love is only 25 years old, but his criminal history dates back to at least 2012. According to this report, he was arrested twice that year. The charges included second-degree theft, criminal trespass, and interfering with public transportation. He pleaded guilty to the latter charge and was sentenced to 18 months probation and a $500 fine. Apparently, the other charges were dismissed.

Two years later, Love was charged with violating his probation. In the same year, 2016, he was convicted for driving without a valid driver’s license and without insurance. A short time later, still in 2016, he was convicted again for the same offenses.

Incredibly, Love was arrested two more times in 2016. One arrest was for providing false information in connection with the transfer of a firearm. The other was for domestic assault and criminal trespass.

It goes on from there, with additional arrests in 2017 and again last year.  But as Paul observes, there is no record of Love’s having spent so much as a day in jail.  “Love has shown both a propensity for violence and a chronic lack of regard for the law. Yet he was never punished in any meaningful sense.”

We see all kinds of academic mumbo-jumbo these days to the effect that it’s not criminals who need to change their behavior, it’s we who need to change ours.  For the most part, this is just so much tripe.  It’s the sort of thing young professors write, knowing that advancing in academia gets done less by actual thinking than by slavishly promoting the Required Woke Narrative.  Still, in a sense, they’re right  —  we do need to change our ways.  When we’ve spent years teaching hoodlums like Marquise Love that there’s really nothing wrong with their escalating violence, we need to change our message right quick, lest the next hapless driver gets kicked in the head so hard that he winds up, not in the hospital, but in the morgue.