The Matt Walsh Show - September 06, 2025


The Justice System Is Deeply Flawed And Politically Biased ｜ Proof For Your Liberal Friend


Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

181.39719

Word count

4,609

Sentence count

290

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Illinois lawmakers have proposed a bill that would change the term "offender" in state law to "Justice Impacted Individual" in order to describe criminals who have been released from prison. WGN's Jewel Hillier explains why this is a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice impacted
00:00:07.500 individual. Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the
00:00:11.400 behavior of criminals. A couple of months ago in March, a 37-year-old man named Corsetti Brand
00:00:15.560 was released on parole in the state of Illinois. He had been locked up on a charge of home invasion
00:00:20.260 and sentenced to more than a decade in prison. But the state's prisoner review board decided to
00:00:25.060 let him out early with electronic monitoring. And what happened after that was predictable.
00:00:30.120 Just a day after he got out of prison, Chicago police say that Corsetti attacked a pregnant
00:00:33.580 woman and her 11-year-old boy, killing the child and critically injuring his mother.
00:00:38.540 According to court documents, the last time he was on parole, Corsetti had threatened the
00:00:41.680 same woman by text and showed up at her home. But somehow none of Corsetti's criminal history,
00:00:46.920 including his alleged threats, were enough to keep him in prison. And now authorities say
00:00:52.240 that a child is dead as a result. Now, this is obviously clearly a massive failure of the
00:00:58.840 judicial system in Illinois, which particularly post-BLM has focused more on rehabilitation
00:01:03.820 instead of punishment. It's the kind of episode that you'd hope would spur lawmakers in Illinois
00:01:08.360 to pass new laws to rein in their approach of restorative justice, quote unquote, which we
00:01:13.620 have talked about recently. But the Illinois government has opted for a very different response.
00:01:19.680 Instead of doing something to prevent violent criminals from getting out of prison,
00:01:23.620 state lawmakers have decided on a course of action that's ripped straight from a Babylon B article.
00:01:28.840 A new bill that was just passed by both houses of the Illinois legislature and which is expected
00:01:33.340 to be signed by the governor would modify state law so that the term offender becomes replaced by the
00:01:40.020 term justice impacted individual. Justice impacted individual. Department of Corrections and a bunch
00:01:49.120 of other government agencies will be required to use that term from now on. So the plan is not to do
00:01:55.200 anything about the criminals who are getting out of prison. It's to use a nicer word to describe
00:02:00.860 these criminals. Don't call them offenders. Call them justice impacted individuals. Now, I had to check
00:02:08.280 several times to make sure this wasn't satire because it is quite literally beyond parody. Actually, if the
00:02:13.780 Babylon Bee had come up with this idea, I wouldn't even find it funny because it would be too on the nose.
00:02:19.420 But this is reality now in Illinois. This is their cutting edge approach to criminal justice. Watch.
00:02:27.420 Bankers have passed a bill that if signed into law by Governor Pritzker will change the term
00:02:31.660 offender in state law to justice impacted individual. WGN's Jewel Hillary here to explain. Jewel. 0.93
00:02:38.100 Hi, Micah and Bray. So this legislation has passed both the state house and senate. And to be very clear,
00:02:43.480 the potential language change would only apply to about 1,800 offenders across the state.
00:02:50.120 On Tuesday, Bill 4409 passed in the state senate 34 to 20.
00:02:55.840 The question is, shall House Bill 4409 pass? All those in favor vote aye. Opposed nay. The voting is open.
00:03:00.780 The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice impacted
00:03:06.600 individual for individuals in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program, commonly referred to
00:03:12.940 as ARI. According to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, ARI is an initiative that
00:03:19.480 diverts offenders from prison to programs to help rehabilitate them to success. Republicans say the
00:03:25.660 language change portrays a lack of empathy for victims and lack of concern for public safety.
00:03:31.380 Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the behavior of criminals.
00:03:40.260 Now, before the fact checkers jump down my throat, I'll emphasize one thing, which is that this rebrand
00:03:45.600 doesn't apply to everyone who commits crimes in the state of Illinois. Instead, this new term
00:03:49.740 applies to many women in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program, or ARI, as you heard.
00:03:55.380 According to the government of McLean County, Illinois, the ARI program provides for comprehensive
00:04:00.540 daily supervision of dozens of, quote, high-risk adult felons as an alternative to costly penitentiary
00:04:07.000 commitment. So they're not rebranding every criminal as a justice impacted individual. They're only
00:04:13.860 rebranding some of the high-risk adult felons who otherwise would be in prison. So if you're living
00:04:21.040 in Chicago, hopefully you can rest easy tonight with that distinction in mind. Now, the point of the
00:04:27.420 word game here is the same as always. First, it removes agency from the individual by making
00:04:33.480 terminology as passive as possible. An offender is not an offender anymore because offending is
00:04:39.220 something that a person actively does, right? It puts the onus on the individual. You have gone out
00:04:44.320 and offended. You've committed an offense. And instead, they're saying, well, they're justice impacted.
00:04:49.700 They were impacted by justice. It's not their fault. You know, justice came along and impacted them.
00:04:57.620 I mean, they're the victims here, if anything. And second, on top of making everything passive and
00:05:03.500 removing agency, it also helps to identify the people that are in your club. Because they're the
00:05:10.420 ones who know about these lingo changes and follow the rules. So it's not much different from a child who
00:05:15.540 sets up a pillow fort and won't let you inside the fort unless you know the password, which changes
00:05:20.180 randomly and on a whim. It's like that kind of idea. Now, if you go looking online for the term
00:05:24.920 justice impacted individual, you'll find that it's popular among Harvard podcasters, billionaire
00:05:30.300 left-wing activists, giant Silicon Valley corporations like Google. These are the people
00:05:35.660 and organizations that conveniently enough have distanced themselves as much as possible from
00:05:40.320 communities where crime is high. So they don't want anything to do with the justice impacted
00:05:44.660 individuals, but they want you to have to live near them and treat them with respect and even refer
00:05:49.420 to them in a way that will not be alienating or otherizing for them. Of course, nobody in the real
00:05:56.800 world uses terms like justice impacted individuals, which is precisely the point. If you go around saying
00:06:01.960 the word justice impacted individual, then you're instantly communicating where you stand on the
00:06:07.320 political spectrum. And perhaps more importantly, people who don't use these new terms are instantly
00:06:12.440 identifiable as outcasts, as racists and terrible people. Every so often, wealthy elites and
00:06:18.320 academics come up with new ways to provide these kinds of signals. And then they inevitably filter
00:06:24.160 down to activists and government bureaucrats, which is what's happening right now in Illinois.
00:06:29.900 Which is also why, by the way, this may be the first time you're hearing of justice impacted
00:06:34.720 individual. Give it like a year or six months and you'll be hearing it everywhere. That's the way this
00:06:40.460 always goes. Now, there was an episode during the Canadian trucker convoy a couple of years ago that
00:06:46.380 illustrates how this strategy works in practice. The truckers who gathered in the Canadian capital
00:06:51.120 city of Ottawa were exactly the kind of blue collar workers that liberals pretend to care about. But in
00:06:56.520 this case, the blue collar workers were protesting for freedom. So they had to be crushed. It was vitally 0.66
00:07:04.280 important for liberals to smear these truckers as racist. And one of the ways the liberals did that was by
00:07:09.280 criticizing the truckers for using the wrong lingo. This is a clip from a Fox interview that leftists
00:07:14.420 mocked relentlessly during the convoy and listen to it and see if you can spot what they considered the
00:07:21.500 problem to be. Listen. It was only one guy. So we are not racist. I have all type of friends,
00:07:32.260 color friends, Spanish, Chinese. You know, they are great people. There is no racism here.
00:07:42.400 So they're actually, you know, this is a Romanian trucker who clearly speaks English as a second
00:07:46.600 language. And he's explaining on primetime television that he's not racist because he has a bunch of
00:07:52.400 colored friends. Now, logically, there's no difference whatsoever between saying I have
00:07:58.180 colored friends and I have friends who are people of color. It's just a slight grammatical
00:08:02.720 difference that means absolutely nothing. It's all semantics. If anything, the latter sentence is
00:08:07.020 unnecessarily wordy. Otherwise, they're the same. If a person can be of color, then it's accurate to 1.00
00:08:13.160 say that the person is colored. A person of color is a colored person. But your intellectual 0.58
00:08:19.320 superiors have decided, for reasons that cannot be explained, they've just decided that people of
00:08:25.300 color is the only phrase you're allowed to use. If you say colored people, unless you're the NAACP, 0.76
00:08:31.140 you're a bigot. So they vilified this trucker all over social media, both here and in Canada.
00:08:37.260 And on top of that, too, not only did he use the lingo or did he use the wrong lingo, but he also
00:08:42.140 tried to disprove accusations of racism by saying that he has black friends and
00:08:49.140 we're also told by our betters that that doesn't prove anything. But of course,
00:08:55.180 it absolutely does. If you have friends of a particular race, it's a pretty good indication
00:09:01.040 that you're not racist against that race. But this is one of the main reasons that cutting-edge
00:09:06.660 PC lingo exists. It's why you're supposed to say people experiencing homelessness instead of homeless
00:09:12.080 drug addict. It's why you're supposed to say minor attracted person instead of pedophile.
00:09:16.400 And it's why, if at all possible, you're supposed to employ clever euphemisms to describe criminals
00:09:22.360 who happen to be really any race but white. The New York Post is particularly adept at this 0.90
00:09:27.060 last trick, to the point that it's becoming a running joke online, and presumably in the Post
00:09:32.780 newsroom. Among the euphemisms that New York Post has come up with to describe black suspects are
00:09:37.280 cold-hearted teens, knife-wielding sicko, misogynistic maniac, and my personal favorite,
00:09:44.560 lunchtime rowdies. Now, just in case there was any doubt that the Post is doing this deliberately,
00:09:50.640 here's a passage from that article on the lunchtime rowdies. See if you can count all the euphemisms.
00:09:57.640 Here it is. And this is totally real. A band of foul-mouthed, toy-gun-waving, pot-puffing
00:10:05.000 high school hooligans are keeping residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own
00:10:10.180 Tony homes. For at least a year, while school's in session, the roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop 1.00
00:10:17.720 every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out, and taunting anyone who gets in
00:10:22.280 their way. Now, with terms like hooligans, roughnecks, lunchtime rowdies, you'd be forgiven
00:10:30.560 for thinking that this is like an article from a small-town newspaper somewhere out in Wyoming in
00:10:35.340 the year 1873. My only hope is that in the next Post article they can work in the terms ruffian and
00:10:41.480 scoundrel. But in any case, you read the whole article and you won't find any mention in the text
00:10:47.520 about the ethnicity of these lunchtime rowdies and pot-puffing hooligans. But if a white person is
00:10:52.980 causing problems, the Post will generally put the race in the headline. For example,
00:10:57.080 one recent headline in the Post read,
00:10:58.780 Video shows black NYC partiers scatter for cover as white neighbor douses them with garden hose.
00:11:05.200 Now, there was no euphemism for the white guy. He wasn't a hose-toting scoundrel or anything like
00:11:12.320 that. He's just a white neighbor. And for what it's worth, not all the people he hit with the water 0.73
00:11:17.040 were black, the Post went out of its way to mention the race of the white guy, even when
00:11:20.340 it was misleading to do so. Of course. And this isn't specific to the New York Post. It's the
00:11:24.700 approach of most major media outlets. As the account Data Hazard found, the race of white
00:11:28.820 murderers is made clear in more than 90% of news articles. But with black murderers, race is only 1.00
00:11:33.720 mentioned in 30% of the articles. And when it does appear, it's usually much lower down in the text of
00:11:39.200 the article. So this is obviously a very intentional thing that they're doing. And journalists do this in
00:11:44.600 part to signal that they're true believers in principles of restorative justice. And in the
00:11:49.240 process, they're denying the agency of black offenders by holding them to a completely different
00:11:53.100 standard. These criminals get additional protections in the media, even when they commit
00:11:57.580 heinous crimes solely on the basis of their skin color. And now the state of Illinois is doing the same
00:12:03.240 thing. It's almost as if they hired the New York Post euphemism guy to write their legislation.
00:12:08.200 Now, to give the left some credit, they understand the role of language in shaping policy and shaping
00:12:15.540 opinions and the views of the public. In order to normalize crime and pedophilia, they first need
00:12:21.820 to change the way people prefer to crime and pedophilia. And that effort is now underway in
00:12:26.900 Illinois, which means that many more justice-impacted individuals will soon be out on the streets.
00:12:31.860 It also means that many more innocent people, including children and pregnant women,
00:12:37.620 will be impacted by these justice-impacted individuals. Because one euphemism at a time
00:12:44.220 in Democrat-run cities all over the country, it's pretty clear that that's the point.
00:12:49.640 History, economics, literature, the Constitution. Did you actually study these in school? Probably not.
00:12:54.380 Or you got some watered-down version that missed the point entirely. Time and technology have
00:12:58.520 changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the
00:13:02.480 world, our country, and our place in it. That's why I want to share something I think you'd find
00:13:06.480 valuable. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses that cover everything from
00:13:11.240 C.S. Lewis and Genesis to the Roman Republic and early Christian history. I've been really enjoying
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00:13:20.080 the challenges it faced during the Civil War, and how it's been undermined over the past century by
00:13:24.480 progressive and liberal ideologies. The course is completely self-paced, with 12 lectures,
00:13:28.380 so you can start whenever works for you. Honestly, I believe our country desperately needs more
00:13:33.340 Americans who truly understand the Constitution and can stand up to our freedoms against an
00:13:39.080 increasingly large and unaccountable government. If you care about preserving what makes America
00:13:42.700 great, I'd encourage you to check out this free Constitution 101 course. It's a great eye-opener
00:13:47.400 to how much we've drifted from our founding principles. Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash
00:13:52.320 Walsh to enroll. There's no cost. It's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash Walsh to enroll.
00:13:57.280 For free, hillsdale.edu slash Walsh. We've talked a lot on the show about the collapse of the criminal
00:14:03.340 justice system. The very concept of criminal justice, of enacting justice and punishing crime
00:14:08.240 has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state
00:14:13.800 of lawlessness back to its origins. And the thing is, you don't need to trace the roots very far,
00:14:19.140 at least maybe not all the way back to its very origins, because you'd have to go all the way back
00:14:22.800 to the fall of man. But you could go back only a few years and start to tell you the story of how
00:14:28.460 we ended up where we are now. There's a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who
00:14:34.240 don't believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are
00:14:39.360 operating according to certain particularly crazy beliefs. And one of those beliefs, as we briefly
00:14:45.020 talked about yesterday, is that deterrence doesn't exist. Effectively, you cannot deter crime by
00:14:51.940 punishing it. That's the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning, the sort of
00:14:58.200 insane idea that can only begin in those institutions, and filtered its way down from there, as these ideas
00:15:04.440 always do. Now, it began with the claim first made years ago that the death penalty doesn't deter crime.
00:15:10.660 You're probably familiar with this. You've heard it before. And now, this claim is always false for
00:15:15.160 reasons we'll touch on later. But whatever you think of the death penalty, the implication
00:15:18.660 underlying the deterrence argument was never going to stop at the death penalty. It was always going
00:15:23.580 to go far beyond that. And indeed, we've seen that progression in recent years. It's no longer,
00:15:28.440 well, the death penalty is pointless because people don't consider those consequences when they
00:15:32.160 commit crime. Instead, the argument we're hearing today is all harsh punishment is pointless
00:15:37.180 because people don't consider any consequences when they commit crime. This is the intellectual
00:15:42.640 origin of the soft-on-crime approach to law enforcement that we're seeing in every major
00:15:47.360 American city in the country right now. And several years ago, this approach was adopted by the Obama
00:15:52.600 DOJ without any fanfare whatsoever. In May of 2016, the National Institute of Justice, which is the
00:15:57.680 research arm of the DOJ, published a document entitled Five Things About Deterrence. You've almost
00:16:04.180 certainly never heard of this document, but it is essentially the modern manifesto of the
00:16:08.660 anti-incarceration movement in the United States. It applies the reasoning of anti-death penalty
00:16:14.860 advocates to all forms of crime and to all punishment. So for that reason, it's a truly remarkable
00:16:21.920 document that even though you haven't heard of, you should. So we're going to go through it today.
00:16:27.880 Here are the five things about deterrence that the memo highlights and then expands upon.
00:16:31.960 Number one, the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
00:16:38.820 In other words, according to the DOJ, criminals are primarily worried about whether the cops are
00:16:44.300 going to arrest them. They're not worried about how long they're going to have to stay in prison.
00:16:48.260 The only thing they care about is whether or not they're going to get arrested.
00:16:50.820 The question that apparently never occurred to the DOJ is, if the punishments aren't severe,
00:16:55.540 then why would the certainty of being caught deter anyone? Why would criminals care if they're going to be
00:17:01.660 caught? If they know ahead of time, they won't be punished. The whole reason that being caught is
00:17:06.100 scary is that you will be punished. But if you aren't going to be punished, then being caught is
00:17:10.520 not a scary prospect anymore. Again, we're seeing this play out in cities across the country. Sure,
00:17:15.320 the criminals are caught sometimes, but it doesn't matter to them because they aren't punished and
00:17:20.520 they're back on the street a day later committing more crimes. So the argument from the DOJ,
00:17:26.100 which is the very first thing on the memo, all that matters is whether you catch them. It doesn't
00:17:30.860 matter whether it doesn't matter whether you punish them. This is what the DOJ is saying.
00:17:36.180 And it's like saying that home invaders are deterred by guns, but it doesn't matter if it's a Glock or a
00:17:42.980 super soaker, just as long as it's a gun. That's all that matters. Will it kill them? Will it make them a 0.70
00:17:48.860 little what? That doesn't, that's not factored in. It makes no sense. The DOJ's manifesto doesn't
00:17:55.380 bother to expand on this point in any way. It just, it just says, quote, research shows clearly that
00:18:00.900 the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.
00:18:06.920 So there you have it. Research shows that punishment doesn't work. Research. What kind of research?
00:18:14.180 Well, they don't say, at least not in that paragraph. Buried in the fine print on the page
00:18:17.620 is a citation to an article by a public policy professor named Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon
00:18:23.780 University. Now, this is the primary paper the DOJ relies on, along with a couple of others.
00:18:30.300 Apparently, Nagin has done the research and he's realized that criminals don't really care
00:18:34.900 about punishment. They only care about being caught, but whether or not they're punished after being
00:18:39.780 caught, they don't care about that. I looked around to see if Nagin actually thinks this,
00:18:44.300 and if so, what his logic is. I came across this clip from many years ago, which I'm going to play
00:18:50.140 primarily because it's kind of hilarious. I want you to watch as a local news team breaks the news
00:18:54.220 that according to Daniel Nagin's first groundbreaking finding, when you have more police officers,
00:18:59.660 criminals tend to commit less crime. The news station interviews then a couple of random people
00:19:04.500 who say that, you know, that pretty much checks out. This is one of the best examples of research
00:19:09.860 telling us something that's incredibly obvious to a comical degree. But buried in this report,
00:19:15.600 if you listen carefully, is Nagin's second theory, which the DOJ finds so compelling. Watch.
00:19:23.460 Now, that event raises a larger question. Is more police presence a deterrent to people who commit
00:19:28.620 serious crimes? Well, that's what research done by one criminologist in Pennsylvania is suggesting
00:19:33.540 tonight. Jerry Askin is here now with that story. Jerry.
00:19:36.240 Hey, Kevin Calvin. Here's research done by Professor Daniel Nagin. Today at the event
00:19:40.260 for National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, we asked Sheriff Heming and many others about the
00:19:44.800 research. Carnegie Mellon University Professor Daniel Nagin is convinced of his findings that
00:19:50.780 better police presence will reduce crime. If the police are properly deployed, that their presence
00:19:58.700 can have a very substantial deterrent effect. In other words, stopping crimes before they happen
00:20:05.800 is more effective than the threat of a lot of prison time. There's little evidence that making
00:20:10.360 punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental deterrent effect.
00:20:16.300 Ron Powell is a pastor at a church on Dotson Avenue, and he agrees with the research.
00:20:20.980 Because when police are close by, they are less likely to commit any crimes. Most crimes are done
00:20:27.020 undercover. The city of Chattanooga, it's growing its budget to bring in at least 40 more officers
00:20:32.180 by next spring or summer. They must first finish their academy and field training before hitting
00:20:37.620 the streets. Ebony Moore is ready to see more officers and believes it will deter criminals. 0.99
00:20:43.320 Yeah, they would definitely be more fearful. They would know, they would be more aware of the
00:20:46.620 surroundings and more aware of everything they're doing. And if I had a police officer on every
00:20:50.460 block, you're going to find it safer than if I had none.
00:20:52.540 So the reporter holds up the stack of papers. Here's the research. It shows that more police
00:20:59.020 means less crime. And then you cut to two local residents and the sheriff who say, uh, yeah.
00:21:04.600 Yeah, you think? Apparently being a professor at Carnegie Mellon, I guess, isn't what it used to be.
00:21:10.440 Random people off the street think that your research is incredibly obvious because it is.
00:21:14.620 But, you know, they still get the big research grants and everything to go and compile all this
00:21:18.240 paperwork telling us what everybody already knows. But the key part of that segment for our purposes
00:21:22.960 is what Daniel Nagin says in the clip. He reports that, quote, that there's little evidence that
00:21:27.740 making punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental effect.
00:21:32.640 Right away, that's actually a different argument from the one that DOJ is making. The DOJ said flat
00:21:37.220 out that, quote, draconian punishments don't deter crime. But the argument that this Carnegie Mellon
00:21:42.520 professor is advancing in that clip is that if you make our existing punishments more severe,
00:21:46.840 then they won't deter crime all that much additionally, which are really two different
00:21:53.200 arguments. And this little inconsistency confused me enough to look up Nagin's actual paper, the one
00:21:58.520 the DOJ cites in its manifesto on deterrence. And in that article, you'll find two claims. The first one
00:22:05.420 is the idea he outlines in the video clip that, quote, there's little evidence that increases in the
00:22:10.200 length of the already long prison sentences yield general deterrence effects that are sufficiently
00:22:14.920 large to justify their social and economic costs. In other words, he's saying that existing prison
00:22:19.400 sentences are a sufficient deterrent and we don't need to make them longer. But afterwards in the
00:22:24.300 paper, Nagin goes on and says pretty much what the DOJ claims. He says, quote, I have concluded there is
00:22:29.140 little evidence of a specific deterrent effect arising from the experience of imprisonment compared with
00:22:34.120 the experience of non-custodial sanctions such as probation. It's clear that lengthy prison sentences
00:22:39.200 cannot be justified on a deterrence based crime prevention basis. Now, those claims don't follow
00:22:46.580 at all. His starting point is that we don't need to make prison sentences longer. And somehow without
00:22:50.860 showing his work, he ends up with a declaration that criminals don't really care about their
00:22:55.780 punishments and whether they're apprehended as though apprehension without punishment matters to
00:23:01.080 anyone. So we might as well just sentence everyone to probation. Like that's what he's saying. It doesn't
00:23:05.860 make a difference whether you give them probation or you send them to prison. It's going to have the same
00:23:09.900 effect. The technical term for this kind of argument from an academic perspective is that it's garbage.
00:23:16.580 It's a clearly absurd claim, but it's the basis for the DOJ's entire argument against deterrence. This is the
00:23:25.380 document that the DOJ cites to justify its policy of releasing as many criminals as possible or at least
00:23:30.340 criminals who share the DOJ's politics. Those are the ones that they tend to prefer. So it's hard to
00:23:37.380 overemphasize just how truly bizarre and incredible this is, but it gets weirder. Citing Nagin's research,
00:23:43.360 the DOJ goes on to claim that, quote, sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison
00:23:48.460 isn't a very effective way to deter crime. Again, that's a direct quote from a document produced by the
00:23:54.680 DOJ in 2016. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn't a very effective way to
00:24:01.620 deter crime. And they're saying that because some random Carnegie Mellon professor wrote it down a
00:24:07.080 few years earlier. Again, they don't really clarify this point. Here's the extent of the DOJ's
00:24:13.100 explanation to a point that's like should be shocking coming from the DOJ. Prison doesn't deter
00:24:18.740 crime at all? So like prisons are pointless? Quote, prisons are good for punishing criminals
00:24:24.740 and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences, particularly longer sentences, are
00:24:28.500 unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect. Inmates learn more
00:24:33.340 effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the
00:24:38.140 threat of future imprisonment. Now, if this is true, it's an argument for giving out even longer
00:24:45.080 sentences, not shorter ones. In fact, this is a solid reason to be much more generous in handing
00:24:50.860 out life sentences. Because if you give a life sentence and actually make it a life sentence,
00:24:55.960 meaning that the person isn't released after 25 years or whatever, but they're really there for
00:24:59.480 the rest of their lives, then the deterrence issue, at least for that individual, is a moot point.
00:25:05.440 He's gone. He's off the street for good. But the DOJ doesn't mention this possibility in the memo at
00:25:10.840 all. They don't mention that, well, you could just do that. Instead, they go the opposite way.
00:25:15.080 They conclude that we should let people out of jail sooner. Like, after just telling us that jail
00:25:20.780 only makes criminals more dangerous, well, we should just have the sentences be shorter.