Stop the Insane Coronavirus Jailbreaks
All across the nation, state and local officials have glommed onto the coronavirus pandemic as an expedient to concretize their long-subdued political fantasies. Many progressive governors and mayors have scratched their inner authoritarian urges by enacting draconian crackdowns, often dripping with palpable animus, against religious communities and church gatherings. Alas, as Rahm Emanuel infamously told us, the progressive instinct is to never let a good crisis go to waste.
All across the nation, state and local officials have glommed onto the coronavirus pandemic as an expedient to concretize their long-subdued political fantasies. Many progressive governors and mayors have scratched their inner authoritarian urges by enacting draconian crackdowns, often dripping with palpable animus, against religious communities and church gatherings. Alas, as Rahm Emanuel infamously told us, the progressive instinct is to never let a good crisis go to waste.
But the most destructive of all the coronavirus-inspired mass policy initiatives has been something akin to the opposite of authoritarianism: anarchy. As the virus wreaks havoc, the bipartisan lust for criminal-mollycoddling jailbreak madness, which reached a seeming apogee with the First Step Act federal jailbreak of 2018, has only accelerated anew.
Due to the alleged overly cramped conditions afflicting prison populations and the associated difficulty of “social distancing,” Democrats and “criminal justice reform”-touting liberalized Republicans alike have been letting criminals loose under the guise of “safety” and “compassion.” It is unclear whether our ruling class ever bothers to consider the safety of law-abiding citizens or show compassion for the small business owners whose stores have been increasingly looted amidst the forced lockdowns.
In deep-red Oklahoma, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who instituted the largest single-day jailbreak in U.S. history last November, has vowed to commute the sentences of 450 more inmates. Never mind that Oklahoma has had soaring property and violent crime over the last few years. In Hillsborough County, Florida, an inmate oh-so “compassionately” released due to fears of virus contagion now stands accused of committing second-degree murder the very day after he was released. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has bragged about the hundreds of criminals he’s freed; it turns out grand theft auto has also happened to spike in the Big Apple. What a coincidence.
At the federal level, the Anti-American Criminal Lovers’ Union, otherwise known as the ACLU, has decried the Bureau of Prisons for “slow walking” jailbreak at a certain coronavirus-infected Louisiana penitentiary. What tripe. If anything, the Bureau has been overly generous, having increased the use of overall home confinement by over 40% since March. Overall, since Attorney General Bill Barr’s initial memo on home confinement in late March, the Bureau has transferred more than 900 prisoners into home confinement.
More generally, it takes an obtuse moral dilapidation to survey the national environment right now and conclude that prioritizing criminals’ safety ought to be our true political lodestar. Coronavirus presents a health risk to everyone, but so does allowing violent gang members and sex offenders to roam our largely abandoned streets. The men and women of law enforcement, who put their lives on the line every day to protect us, are already at heightened risk due to the virus. The last thing we need is to flood the streets with more hardened lawbreakers.
The ideological zeal for jailbreak, especially in its most indiscriminate and opportunistic forms, recklessly endangers both the rule of law, as a societal norm, and law-abiding citizens, as individuals. The bipartisan jailbreak cartel promotes its noxious agenda as a properly calibrated response to the purported scourge of “over-incarceration,” but such sloganeering is belied by the facts. As criminologist Barry Latzer has shown, America’s higher rate of incarceration relative to the European median is justified due to our higher rates of recidivism, unique sentence-enhancing firearm penalties and higher murder rates. Overall, the truth is closer to what Senator Tom Cotton once said: America actually has “an under-incarceration problem.”
In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge said: “We have flourished as a people because of our success in establishing self-government. But all of these results are predicated upon a law-abiding people. If our own country should be given over to violence and crime, it would be necessary to diminish the bounds of our freedom to secure order and self-preservation. In whatever direction we may go we are always confronted with the inescapable conclusion that unless we observe the law, we cannot be free.” Now, more than ever before, Americans of all political or partisan stripes ought to heed such timeless advice.
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