The Justice System Is Deeply Flawed And Politically Biased ｜ Proof For Your Liberal Friend
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Summary
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
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The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice impacted
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individual. Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the
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behavior of criminals. A couple of months ago in March, a 37-year-old man named Corsetti Brand
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was released on parole in the state of Illinois. He had been locked up on a charge of home invasion
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and sentenced to more than a decade in prison. But the state's prisoner review board decided to
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let him out early with electronic monitoring. And what happened after that was predictable.
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Just a day after he got out of prison, Chicago police say that Corsetti attacked a pregnant
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woman and her 11-year-old boy, killing the child and critically injuring his mother.
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According to court documents, the last time he was on parole, Corsetti had threatened the
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same woman by text and showed up at her home. But somehow none of Corsetti's criminal history,
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including his alleged threats, were enough to keep him in prison. And now authorities say
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that a child is dead as a result. Now, this is obviously clearly a massive failure of the
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judicial system in Illinois, which particularly post-BLM has focused more on rehabilitation
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instead of punishment. It's the kind of episode that you'd hope would spur lawmakers in Illinois
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to pass new laws to rein in their approach of restorative justice, quote unquote, which we
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have talked about recently. But the Illinois government has opted for a very different response.
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Instead of doing something to prevent violent criminals from getting out of prison,
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state lawmakers have decided on a course of action that's ripped straight from a Babylon B article.
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A new bill that was just passed by both houses of the Illinois legislature and which is expected
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to be signed by the governor would modify state law so that the term offender becomes replaced by the
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term justice impacted individual. Justice impacted individual. Department of Corrections and a bunch
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of other government agencies will be required to use that term from now on. So the plan is not to do
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anything about the criminals who are getting out of prison. It's to use a nicer word to describe
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these criminals. Don't call them offenders. Call them justice impacted individuals. Now, I had to check
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several times to make sure this wasn't satire because it is quite literally beyond parody. Actually, if the
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Babylon Bee had come up with this idea, I wouldn't even find it funny because it would be too on the nose.
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But this is reality now in Illinois. This is their cutting edge approach to criminal justice. Watch.
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Bankers have passed a bill that if signed into law by Governor Pritzker will change the term
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offender in state law to justice impacted individual. WGN's Jewel Hillary here to explain. Jewel.
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Hi, Micah and Bray. So this legislation has passed both the state house and senate. And to be very clear,
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the potential language change would only apply to about 1,800 offenders across the state.
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On Tuesday, Bill 4409 passed in the state senate 34 to 20.
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The question is, shall House Bill 4409 pass? All those in favor vote aye. Opposed nay. The voting is open.
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The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice impacted
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individual for individuals in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program, commonly referred to
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as ARI. According to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, ARI is an initiative that
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diverts offenders from prison to programs to help rehabilitate them to success. Republicans say the
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language change portrays a lack of empathy for victims and lack of concern for public safety.
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Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the behavior of criminals.
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Now, before the fact checkers jump down my throat, I'll emphasize one thing, which is that this rebrand
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doesn't apply to everyone who commits crimes in the state of Illinois. Instead, this new term
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applies to many women in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program, or ARI, as you heard.
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According to the government of McLean County, Illinois, the ARI program provides for comprehensive
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daily supervision of dozens of, quote, high-risk adult felons as an alternative to costly penitentiary
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commitment. So they're not rebranding every criminal as a justice impacted individual. They're only
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rebranding some of the high-risk adult felons who otherwise would be in prison. So if you're living
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in Chicago, hopefully you can rest easy tonight with that distinction in mind. Now, the point of the
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word game here is the same as always. First, it removes agency from the individual by making
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terminology as passive as possible. An offender is not an offender anymore because offending is
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something that a person actively does, right? It puts the onus on the individual. You have gone out
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and offended. You've committed an offense. And instead, they're saying, well, they're justice impacted.
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They were impacted by justice. It's not their fault. You know, justice came along and impacted them.
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I mean, they're the victims here, if anything. And second, on top of making everything passive and
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removing agency, it also helps to identify the people that are in your club. Because they're the
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ones who know about these lingo changes and follow the rules. So it's not much different from a child who
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sets up a pillow fort and won't let you inside the fort unless you know the password, which changes
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randomly and on a whim. It's like that kind of idea. Now, if you go looking online for the term
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justice impacted individual, you'll find that it's popular among Harvard podcasters, billionaire
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left-wing activists, giant Silicon Valley corporations like Google. These are the people
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and organizations that conveniently enough have distanced themselves as much as possible from
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communities where crime is high. So they don't want anything to do with the justice impacted
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individuals, but they want you to have to live near them and treat them with respect and even refer
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to them in a way that will not be alienating or otherizing for them. Of course, nobody in the real
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world uses terms like justice impacted individuals, which is precisely the point. If you go around saying
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the word justice impacted individual, then you're instantly communicating where you stand on the
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political spectrum. And perhaps more importantly, people who don't use these new terms are instantly
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identifiable as outcasts, as racists and terrible people. Every so often, wealthy elites and
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academics come up with new ways to provide these kinds of signals. And then they inevitably filter
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down to activists and government bureaucrats, which is what's happening right now in Illinois.
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Which is also why, by the way, this may be the first time you're hearing of justice impacted
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individual. Give it like a year or six months and you'll be hearing it everywhere. That's the way this
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always goes. Now, there was an episode during the Canadian trucker convoy a couple of years ago that
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illustrates how this strategy works in practice. The truckers who gathered in the Canadian capital
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city of Ottawa were exactly the kind of blue collar workers that liberals pretend to care about. But in
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this case, the blue collar workers were protesting for freedom. So they had to be crushed. It was vitally
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important for liberals to smear these truckers as racist. And one of the ways the liberals did that was by
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criticizing the truckers for using the wrong lingo. This is a clip from a Fox interview that leftists
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mocked relentlessly during the convoy and listen to it and see if you can spot what they considered the
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problem to be. Listen. It was only one guy. So we are not racist. I have all type of friends,
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color friends, Spanish, Chinese. You know, they are great people. There is no racism here.
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So they're actually, you know, this is a Romanian trucker who clearly speaks English as a second
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language. And he's explaining on primetime television that he's not racist because he has a bunch of
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colored friends. Now, logically, there's no difference whatsoever between saying I have
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colored friends and I have friends who are people of color. It's just a slight grammatical
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difference that means absolutely nothing. It's all semantics. If anything, the latter sentence is
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unnecessarily wordy. Otherwise, they're the same. If a person can be of color, then it's accurate to
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say that the person is colored. A person of color is a colored person. But your intellectual
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superiors have decided, for reasons that cannot be explained, they've just decided that people of
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color is the only phrase you're allowed to use. If you say colored people, unless you're the NAACP,
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you're a bigot. So they vilified this trucker all over social media, both here and in Canada.
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And on top of that, too, not only did he use the lingo or did he use the wrong lingo, but he also
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tried to disprove accusations of racism by saying that he has black friends and
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we're also told by our betters that that doesn't prove anything. But of course,
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it absolutely does. If you have friends of a particular race, it's a pretty good indication
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that you're not racist against that race. But this is one of the main reasons that cutting-edge
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PC lingo exists. It's why you're supposed to say people experiencing homelessness instead of homeless
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drug addict. It's why you're supposed to say minor attracted person instead of pedophile.
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And it's why, if at all possible, you're supposed to employ clever euphemisms to describe criminals
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who happen to be really any race but white. The New York Post is particularly adept at this
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last trick, to the point that it's becoming a running joke online, and presumably in the Post
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newsroom. Among the euphemisms that New York Post has come up with to describe black suspects are
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cold-hearted teens, knife-wielding sicko, misogynistic maniac, and my personal favorite,
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lunchtime rowdies. Now, just in case there was any doubt that the Post is doing this deliberately,
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here's a passage from that article on the lunchtime rowdies. See if you can count all the euphemisms.
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Here it is. And this is totally real. A band of foul-mouthed, toy-gun-waving, pot-puffing
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high school hooligans are keeping residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own
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Tony homes. For at least a year, while school's in session, the roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop
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every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out, and taunting anyone who gets in
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their way. Now, with terms like hooligans, roughnecks, lunchtime rowdies, you'd be forgiven
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for thinking that this is like an article from a small-town newspaper somewhere out in Wyoming in
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the year 1873. My only hope is that in the next Post article they can work in the terms ruffian and
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scoundrel. But in any case, you read the whole article and you won't find any mention in the text
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about the ethnicity of these lunchtime rowdies and pot-puffing hooligans. But if a white person is
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causing problems, the Post will generally put the race in the headline. For example,
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Video shows black NYC partiers scatter for cover as white neighbor douses them with garden hose.
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Now, there was no euphemism for the white guy. He wasn't a hose-toting scoundrel or anything like
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that. He's just a white neighbor. And for what it's worth, not all the people he hit with the water
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were black, the Post went out of its way to mention the race of the white guy, even when
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it was misleading to do so. Of course. And this isn't specific to the New York Post. It's the
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approach of most major media outlets. As the account Data Hazard found, the race of white
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murderers is made clear in more than 90% of news articles. But with black murderers, race is only
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mentioned in 30% of the articles. And when it does appear, it's usually much lower down in the text of
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the article. So this is obviously a very intentional thing that they're doing. And journalists do this in
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part to signal that they're true believers in principles of restorative justice. And in the
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process, they're denying the agency of black offenders by holding them to a completely different
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standard. These criminals get additional protections in the media, even when they commit
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heinous crimes solely on the basis of their skin color. And now the state of Illinois is doing the same
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thing. It's almost as if they hired the New York Post euphemism guy to write their legislation.
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Now, to give the left some credit, they understand the role of language in shaping policy and shaping
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opinions and the views of the public. In order to normalize crime and pedophilia, they first need
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to change the way people prefer to crime and pedophilia. And that effort is now underway in
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Illinois, which means that many more justice-impacted individuals will soon be out on the streets.
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It also means that many more innocent people, including children and pregnant women,
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will be impacted by these justice-impacted individuals. Because one euphemism at a time
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in Democrat-run cities all over the country, it's pretty clear that that's the point.
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History, economics, literature, the Constitution. Did you actually study these in school? Probably not.
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Or you got some watered-down version that missed the point entirely. Time and technology have
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changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the
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world, our country, and our place in it. That's why I want to share something I think you'd find
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the challenges it faced during the Civil War, and how it's been undermined over the past century by
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00:13:42.700
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00:13:47.400
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00:13:57.280
For free, hillsdale.edu slash Walsh. We've talked a lot on the show about the collapse of the criminal
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justice system. The very concept of criminal justice, of enacting justice and punishing crime
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has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state
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of lawlessness back to its origins. And the thing is, you don't need to trace the roots very far,
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at least maybe not all the way back to its very origins, because you'd have to go all the way back
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to the fall of man. But you could go back only a few years and start to tell you the story of how
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we ended up where we are now. There's a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who
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don't believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are
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operating according to certain particularly crazy beliefs. And one of those beliefs, as we briefly
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talked about yesterday, is that deterrence doesn't exist. Effectively, you cannot deter crime by
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punishing it. That's the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning, the sort of
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insane idea that can only begin in those institutions, and filtered its way down from there, as these ideas
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always do. Now, it began with the claim first made years ago that the death penalty doesn't deter crime.
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You're probably familiar with this. You've heard it before. And now, this claim is always false for
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reasons we'll touch on later. But whatever you think of the death penalty, the implication
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underlying the deterrence argument was never going to stop at the death penalty. It was always going
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to go far beyond that. And indeed, we've seen that progression in recent years. It's no longer,
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well, the death penalty is pointless because people don't consider those consequences when they
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commit crime. Instead, the argument we're hearing today is all harsh punishment is pointless
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because people don't consider any consequences when they commit crime. This is the intellectual
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origin of the soft-on-crime approach to law enforcement that we're seeing in every major
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American city in the country right now. And several years ago, this approach was adopted by the Obama
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DOJ without any fanfare whatsoever. In May of 2016, the National Institute of Justice, which is the
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research arm of the DOJ, published a document entitled Five Things About Deterrence. You've almost
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certainly never heard of this document, but it is essentially the modern manifesto of the
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anti-incarceration movement in the United States. It applies the reasoning of anti-death penalty
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advocates to all forms of crime and to all punishment. So for that reason, it's a truly remarkable
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document that even though you haven't heard of, you should. So we're going to go through it today.
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Here are the five things about deterrence that the memo highlights and then expands upon.
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Number one, the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
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In other words, according to the DOJ, criminals are primarily worried about whether the cops are
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going to arrest them. They're not worried about how long they're going to have to stay in prison.
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The only thing they care about is whether or not they're going to get arrested.
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The question that apparently never occurred to the DOJ is, if the punishments aren't severe,
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then why would the certainty of being caught deter anyone? Why would criminals care if they're going to be
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caught? If they know ahead of time, they won't be punished. The whole reason that being caught is
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scary is that you will be punished. But if you aren't going to be punished, then being caught is
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not a scary prospect anymore. Again, we're seeing this play out in cities across the country. Sure,
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the criminals are caught sometimes, but it doesn't matter to them because they aren't punished and
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they're back on the street a day later committing more crimes. So the argument from the DOJ,
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which is the very first thing on the memo, all that matters is whether you catch them. It doesn't
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matter whether it doesn't matter whether you punish them. This is what the DOJ is saying.
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And it's like saying that home invaders are deterred by guns, but it doesn't matter if it's a Glock or a
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super soaker, just as long as it's a gun. That's all that matters. Will it kill them? Will it make them a
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little what? That doesn't, that's not factored in. It makes no sense. The DOJ's manifesto doesn't
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bother to expand on this point in any way. It just, it just says, quote, research shows clearly that
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the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment.
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So there you have it. Research shows that punishment doesn't work. Research. What kind of research?
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Well, they don't say, at least not in that paragraph. Buried in the fine print on the page
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is a citation to an article by a public policy professor named Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon
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University. Now, this is the primary paper the DOJ relies on, along with a couple of others.
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Apparently, Nagin has done the research and he's realized that criminals don't really care
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about punishment. They only care about being caught, but whether or not they're punished after being
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caught, they don't care about that. I looked around to see if Nagin actually thinks this,
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and if so, what his logic is. I came across this clip from many years ago, which I'm going to play
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primarily because it's kind of hilarious. I want you to watch as a local news team breaks the news
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that according to Daniel Nagin's first groundbreaking finding, when you have more police officers,
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criminals tend to commit less crime. The news station interviews then a couple of random people
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who say that, you know, that pretty much checks out. This is one of the best examples of research
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telling us something that's incredibly obvious to a comical degree. But buried in this report,
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if you listen carefully, is Nagin's second theory, which the DOJ finds so compelling. Watch.
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Now, that event raises a larger question. Is more police presence a deterrent to people who commit
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serious crimes? Well, that's what research done by one criminologist in Pennsylvania is suggesting
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tonight. Jerry Askin is here now with that story. Jerry.
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Hey, Kevin Calvin. Here's research done by Professor Daniel Nagin. Today at the event
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for National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, we asked Sheriff Heming and many others about the
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research. Carnegie Mellon University Professor Daniel Nagin is convinced of his findings that
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better police presence will reduce crime. If the police are properly deployed, that their presence
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can have a very substantial deterrent effect. In other words, stopping crimes before they happen
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is more effective than the threat of a lot of prison time. There's little evidence that making
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punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental deterrent effect.
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Ron Powell is a pastor at a church on Dotson Avenue, and he agrees with the research.
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Because when police are close by, they are less likely to commit any crimes. Most crimes are done
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undercover. The city of Chattanooga, it's growing its budget to bring in at least 40 more officers
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by next spring or summer. They must first finish their academy and field training before hitting
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the streets. Ebony Moore is ready to see more officers and believes it will deter criminals.
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Yeah, they would definitely be more fearful. They would know, they would be more aware of the
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surroundings and more aware of everything they're doing. And if I had a police officer on every
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block, you're going to find it safer than if I had none.
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So the reporter holds up the stack of papers. Here's the research. It shows that more police
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means less crime. And then you cut to two local residents and the sheriff who say, uh, yeah.
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Yeah, you think? Apparently being a professor at Carnegie Mellon, I guess, isn't what it used to be.
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Random people off the street think that your research is incredibly obvious because it is.
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But, you know, they still get the big research grants and everything to go and compile all this
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paperwork telling us what everybody already knows. But the key part of that segment for our purposes
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is what Daniel Nagin says in the clip. He reports that, quote, that there's little evidence that
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making punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental effect.
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Right away, that's actually a different argument from the one that DOJ is making. The DOJ said flat
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out that, quote, draconian punishments don't deter crime. But the argument that this Carnegie Mellon
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professor is advancing in that clip is that if you make our existing punishments more severe,
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then they won't deter crime all that much additionally, which are really two different
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arguments. And this little inconsistency confused me enough to look up Nagin's actual paper, the one
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the DOJ cites in its manifesto on deterrence. And in that article, you'll find two claims. The first one
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is the idea he outlines in the video clip that, quote, there's little evidence that increases in the
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length of the already long prison sentences yield general deterrence effects that are sufficiently
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large to justify their social and economic costs. In other words, he's saying that existing prison
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sentences are a sufficient deterrent and we don't need to make them longer. But afterwards in the
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paper, Nagin goes on and says pretty much what the DOJ claims. He says, quote, I have concluded there is
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little evidence of a specific deterrent effect arising from the experience of imprisonment compared with
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the experience of non-custodial sanctions such as probation. It's clear that lengthy prison sentences
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cannot be justified on a deterrence based crime prevention basis. Now, those claims don't follow
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at all. His starting point is that we don't need to make prison sentences longer. And somehow without
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showing his work, he ends up with a declaration that criminals don't really care about their
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punishments and whether they're apprehended as though apprehension without punishment matters to
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anyone. So we might as well just sentence everyone to probation. Like that's what he's saying. It doesn't
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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.