“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Adam Smith’s wise words are becoming more glaringly evident every day. Sadly, completely preventable murders keep piling up, such as Iryna Zarutska, stabbed by a man with a rap sheet a mile long, and Logan Federico, senselessly shot by a man with 40 previous criminal charges. A child killer like Ronald Exantus, who murdered a six-year-old in Kentucky named Logan Tipton, instead of being six feet underground where he should have been, was let out of prison early on “good behavior.” Allow the irony of that to sink in.

Needless to say, our justice system is a joke.

Holly, the woman who was violently punched and nearly killed in Cincinnati, Ohio, by a man out on bail, is right to say that her attacker should never have been allowed back onto the streets. This prompts the question that many of us, including Matt Walsh, are asking: “Why are we choosing leniency and compassion for violent criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens?”

Back to Adam Smith’s quote, notice his choice of words. He doesn’t say, “Mercy to those accused of a crime.” He says, “Mercy to the guilty.” Meaning the person has been proven guilty of a crime. In all of these cases, the accused have been convicted of crimes. And as we have witnessed over and over again, repeat offenders who are let off with a slap on the hand and an ankle monitor not only commit more crimes but also escalate their offenses.

Yet another victim of this insanity is Bethany MaGee, a 26-year-old woman who is fighting for her life after a man on a Chicago train set her on fire. Again, the 50-year-old man involved is a career criminal previously arrested 72 times and convicted in 15 of the cases. According to the New York Post, “One of those busts included an aggravated arson charge, in which he was accused of dousing the city’s Thompson Center government building with liquid and setting it on fire.” Unsurprisingly, Lawrence Reed didn’t serve any jail time and “was only given probation despite being convicted of the arson incident in April 2020.” The report noted that the prosecutors in the case wanted him locked up, but the judge released him. As a result of the derelict decision by the judge, a law-abiding citizen is now suffering from severe burns that, if she doesn’t succumb to them, will alter her life forever.

That a career criminal with over 70 arrests, including at least one for arson, not only committed another crime but then escalated it is the very definition of a pattern. But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson refuses to see the problem and goes so far as to insanely claim, “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence. … [Incarceration] is racist. It is immoral. It is unholy.” Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, would beg to differ; he has proven the very opposite to be true. He did incarcerate his country out of violence and into a safe place where law-abiding citizens no longer live in fear and are flourishing once more. It can be done, Mayor Johnson; you just need the morality and the will to do it.

As we know, the root cause of the problems plaguing blue cities is that they are controlled by those with an inverted sense of justice.

Leftists’ “compassion extends to criminals who are so-called victims of the ‘system,’ of inequality, racism, sexism, etc.,” explains The Daily Signal’s Jarrett Stepman. “Traditional victims are, to those on the Left, merely the casualties of systemic injustice. The individuals committing evil — this line of reasoning goes — need compassion, not more punishments. So, as they seek to tackle the ‘root’ causes of crime, they end up creating weaker penalties for individual lawbreakers and focus on rehabilitating the criminals.” The consequences of those backwards ideas are being made manifest, and it seems that with the sheer amount of leftist judges sitting on benches, it will only get worse before it gets better. In another nod to the El Salvadorian president, he had to “Bukele” the judicial system as well to restore law and order to his country. “He who spares the wolf sacrifices the sheep.”

Despite all the examples of how the Left’s methods have failed, the new leader of the Big Apple, Zohran Mamdani, seems hell-bent on continuing his city’s descent into further urban chaos. His “new era for New York City” is looking a lot more like the old socialist/communist playbook that has been tried and failed every time. Of the 400 people that Mamdani has appointed to various committees, a few should raise eyebrows. Additions to his Committee on Community Safety include Alex Vitale, arguably New York City’s most prominent police abolitionist, and Kassandra Frederique, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading advocate for drug legalization.

Vitale not only wrote a book called The End of Policing, in which he calls for the complete abolition of policing, but he wrote it before 2020. He doesn’t believe that police, or what he calls “violence workers,” are there to enforce the laws of the city, state, and country. He asserts that the police are “fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation.” He wants to shut down the NYPD’s gang database, he calls on Mamdani to let the NYPD’s sworn force size decline by attrition, and he supports decriminalizing prostitution.

Frederique wants to end the criminalization of drugs not only for users but also for dealers, claiming that they can be part of the campaign for the “legal regulation of drugs.” What an absurd idea! Oh, yes, let’s let the drug dealers regulate the drugs — what could possibly go wrong? Adding to Viale’s destructive propositions, if Kassandra Frederique’s organization gets its way and decriminalizes drugs, you have all the elements of a perfect storm. Gangs of NY, here we come.

But Mamdani doesn’t care that these policies have failed and will only increase crime and criminal behavior. He still has the same inverted ideas of justice characteristic of the Left. As City Journal’s Charles Fain Lehman relates, “Mamdani said what he knew he had to say to get elected, but that deep down, he’s still the same guy who thought the NYPD was ‘racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.’”

He doesn’t care about the actual victims of a defective and ineffective system of “justice” — the ones that the system was supposed to protect from the criminals. Rafael Mangual, author of the excellent book Criminal [In]justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, wrote that the murders and attacks mentioned above should never have happened. He argues that stopping “high-frequency offenders requires meaningful — and mandatory — sentencing enhancements based on their criminal history.” He recommends something similar to the three-strikes laws popularized in the ‘90s to remove repeat offenders from society sooner. By strengthening and doubling down on these types of laws, we can drastically reduce crime going forward.

As I said, the blue cities will get worse before they get better due to their corrupt leaders, but they have Batman Bukele to look to as an example of how to turn their cities from crime-infested to clean. He succinctly states, “In El Salvador, we have chosen to prioritize the safety of honest citizens over the comfort of criminals. Some say that we have imprisoned thousands of people, but the truth is that we have freed millions. Today, honest people can move about freely, without fear, with full respect for their freedoms and human rights.” This is the way.