Death By Sentencing Reform
Six People were killed and at least 40 were injured after a 39-year-old repeat felon on parole ran down participants in Waukesha, Wisconsin’s annual Christmas Parade on Sunday. 18 of the victims are children and 10 are in intensive care. Michael Ruiz of Fox News reports that the suspect, Darrell Brooks, Jr. had a 50 page rap sheet of criminal charges going back two decades, and was free on bail awaiting trial on charges of battery, domestic abuse, resisting arrest and bail jumping. Current Wisconsin law does not consider these to be serious crimes and does not hold criminals in jail who were on parole or probation when they are arrested for them. Last February Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a democrat, vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature which required offenders who commit new crimes while on parole or probation to be returned to prison or jail. In his veto message Evans expressed his support for “policies that focus on rehabilitation and reduce incarceration, particularly the over-incarceration of poor people and people of color.” Brooks was one of the “people of color” Evans protected from over-incarceration.
On Wednesday, November 17, 2021 Sacramento, CA police arrested habitual felon Tyrice Lawurence Martin for the murders of 7-year-old Isabel Delgedillo and Clifford Hall. Martin and his victims were black. Katie Wermus of Newsweek reports that Martin had been given a no-bail release from jail with an ankle bracelet in October while awaiting trial for being a felon in possession of a firearm. While the Deputy District Attorney asked the judge to hold Martin in jail, California law allowed to judge to turn him loose. Last March Martin was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and inflicting great bodily injury. Prior to California’s adoption of sentencing reforms to eliminate racial disparities, Martin would have been sent to prison for the assault conviction and held in jail on the more recent firearm charge.
These are not rare occurrences. Our elected leaders have told us that the habitual criminals allowed to remain on the streets under democrat-supported sentencing reforms would not increase crime and were necessary to correct racially-biased sentencing, yet every day these released offenders are robbing, raping and murdering law abiding people everywhere these reforms are being enforced. Thousands of people living in towns like Waukesha, medium sized cities like Sacramento, and large cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago and New York are being shot, stabbed, run down and killed every month by habitual criminals protected by these so-called reforms.
Democrat leaders and the national media supporting these reforms continue to tell us this is not happening, while every day people on the streets or watching the local news are seeing it with their own eyes. The time has come for the public to call out these liars for what they are, and vote them out of office
The Criminal Justice System should not be a place to advance political goals or engage in social experiments. It should be a colorblind process which identifies people who commit crimes, and punishes them based upon their criminal history and the danger they pose to society.
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I’m confused, when you say that the Criminal Justice System should be color blind what non-color blind law are you referring to? Don’t all of these laws apply regardless of race? Also, when you say this is a frequent occurrence do you have data to back that up or just anecdotes? What percentage of people released due to these legal changes have reoffended?
The prevailing claim by progressives is that the criminal justice system is racially biased. There were, years ago, laws and procedures that did discriminate against minorities and those laws have been removed. We actually helped win a Supreme Court decision to assure this. The fact that the Criminal Justice system should be colorblind is shared by the vast majority of people in this country. The allegation from the left is that it is not. It is important to me that groups like ours, which support law enforcement, make it clear that this is a priority. I don’t have time to go back over the past two years and recount every incident we have reported on a habitual criminal released early under progressive sentencing reforms or by progressive District Attorneys due to the pandemic, which committed new violent crimes. Unfortunately, state and federal authorities have not released data on this phenomena, but that does not make it less real. Studies on recidivism like this recent one from BJS (https://bjs.ojp.gov/BJS_PUB/rpr24s0810yfup0818/Web%20content/508%20compliant%20PDFs) indicate that 72% of offenders released after serving their full sentences are arrested for new crimes after five years. There is no data to support the assertion that releasing offenders earlier than their full sentences would result in a lower rate of recidivism. Several factors have contributed to the increase in crime we have been seeing over the past several years. It would be naive to discount the release of tens of thousands of known offenders and the reduction of consequences for the commission of new crimes as a major contributor. I recommend that you read “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America” by professor Barry Latzer, ($13 at Amazon) to gain some insight into what factors have influenced crime in this country.
Hi Michael –
I know you disagree with this, but I agree (at least in principle) with the goals of these “progressive prosecutors”, which are or should be to reduce crime and incarceration. Trying to minimize the (often lifelong) consequences of criminal justice involvement is a laudable goal, and there are at least some cases in which the prosecutorial aim can be met while often changing lives in a positive way. Milwaukee DA Chisholm ( the DA who handled Brooks’s previous arrests) even admitted in 2007, “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach”. This admission means that even though there will be failures, there is a societal value in trying to reduce incarceration by reducing the societal causes (poverty, trauma, addiction) that can cause individuals to become criminally involved. Our society simply cannot afford locking up individuals forever (though I know you and others would say you disagree with this, the only risk-free criminal justice approach would involve incarcerating everybody who becomes criminally involved for life without parole) and if there are ways to inspire individuals to change short of incarceration and felony convictions (restorative justice, diversion programs), they should be embraced. An approach that embraces alternatives to incarceration/convictions recognizes that we are all fundamentally flawed and that individuals can grow and progress in positive ways and should not be branded/labeled for life. It also recognizes that some individuals have biological or behavioral deficits that through no fault of their own can lead to criminal behavior and a more defined understanding of the early causes of crime can lead to a more humane and compassionate society.
Thank you for reading,
Brett Miler
A few things.
1. Longer sentences do not deter crime and may increase it. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence
2. Evidence is not the plural of anecdote. The fact that you have reported on instances in which people released from prison have committed crimes is not evidence that criminal justice reform has increased crime. How many reports have you done on people who were released and did not commit a crime. Also being arrested is not the same as committing a crime. There is no data in your report on convictions rates for those arrests and over 30% were for some kind of supervised release violations, the majority of which are technical violations, not new crimes. Moreover, while the rearrest rate is over 70% the reincarceration rate is 40%, further suggesting that many of those arrests are not for serious crimes
3. Nothing you have said shows that the any progressive reform has led to a criminal justice system that is not color blind. The fact that the motivation for reform is to address racial bias does not result in any laws that are not racial color blind.
4. The claim that the criminal justice system is not racial bias ignores a mountain of evidence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/
Download the Five Things PDF and you will find this disclaimer: “Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.” The authors claim that severity of sentencing is a weak deterrent, not a zero deterrent as you claim, but even that is simply their opinion. Other researchers believe that their studies have shown substantial deterrent effects in the circumstances studied.
Point 1: That assertion has been proven false. Read Sentence Length and Recidivism: A Review of the Research: https://www.cjlf.org/publications/papers/SentenceRecidivism.pdf
Point 2: California is the petri dish for the progressive sentencing reforms you support. Public Safety Realignment (AB109) implemented in 2011, reduced the CA prison population by 30,000 in three years and prohibited prison sentences for most criminals, including car thieves, burglars, drug dealers, and wife beaters, and reduced state supervision of the criminals it released. The year after it became law violent crime in California increased for the first time in all but one of the previous fifteen years, by 12%. It has continued to increase in seven of the past ten years as the state enacted Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that turned most felonies into misdemeanors with essentially no consequences for offenders, and Proposition 57, the 2016 initiative that dramatically reduced the sentences for serious and violent criminals and authorized the early release of thousands of inmates including rapists and murderers. Last year Los Angeles had the most murders in a decade and this year after ten months of Gascon’s reforms, homicides are up 95% and the county is awash with criminals stealing cars, assaulting strangers on busy streets, beaches and parks in broad daylight and rampaging through department stores stealing everything in sight with impunity. And you are saying that this is not evidence that these reforms are increasing crime?
Points 3 & 4 deal with the same subject. The Washington Post piece you cite is an opinion piece, using aggregate numbers to support racial bias. National reporting going back decades show extreme differences in crime and victimization among different races. The felony commission rate among urban blacks is consistently seven times that of whites, and the victimization rates are comparable. This fully explains why arrest and conviction rates are higher among blacks. The overwhelming majority of calls to police reporting crimes or gunshots come from urban black neighborhoods. If every state were to mandate arrest rates proportional to the racial makeup of communities, which is unofficially occurring in Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland and New York City, we would see the wildly disproportionate and unacceptable levels of black on black crime already occurring in those places spread nationally.
Reality is a harsh teacher and policies which do not recognize it, especially involving crime, are dangerous and doomed to fail. Eight people died in the incidents at Waukesha and Sacramento and stupid, fantasyland policies were responsible for keeping the criminals free to kill those people. It might be easy for some to label this an anomaly or collateral damage in pursuit of a higher goal, but to those who have lost friends or loved ones it is injustice. For those who don’t know history, everything is new.