As serious and violent crime is slowly retreating from their 2022 highs, juvenile crime has sharply increased. Liberty Unyielding has this article examining what happened in New York after the legislature passed the”Raise the Age” law in 2017. That law reduced the punishment for 16 and 17-year-old criminal offenders. The Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who immigrated to the U.S. from Africa, witnessed the impact of that law.
“Since that law passed, youth gun crime statewide has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled. About 75 percent of violent felony cases now get handled in family court, which returns teens to the streets, where they often commit new crimes or become victims themselves of tit-for-tat gang warfare. “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process . . . a minimum of three times,” Soares told local legislators in July. This was a system that was never designed to handle or deal with violent—super, super violent—youth.”
Earlier this year Soares was disinvited from testifying at a state Senate hearing because progressive politicians could not countenance a black elected official acknowledging what everybody already knows but are afraid to say—that crime and violence is concentrated in black communities and most of the victims are other blacks, and laws like “Raise the Age” are enabling this.
For the hardcore progressives who have pushed criminal justice reforms sharply reducing consequences for crime in the name of racial justice, the data shows that these reforms are making things worse for the very population they claim to be helping. But their narrative is more important than the truth. No place in the country has demonstrated that replacing criminal justice with social services works. An influential progressive agency head, “Jones,” is adamant: if no jurisdiction in this country has yet achieved public order this way, we just need to try harder and wait longer…. Until everyone is dead one supposes.
While overwhelming evidence suggests that law enforcement reduces crime . . . .this is the kind of data-based evaluation that progressives believe obscures deeper truths about the relationship between social or economic disadvantage and crime. Jonathan, a progressive New York City court program head, dismisses quantitative analyses . . . . “I get annoyed with evidence blah blah blah.”
“To justify soft-on-crime policies, “criminal justice reform” groups like FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums) routinely make false statistical claims that are obviously wrong, about the effects of incarceration. “People age approximately three times faster in prison,” says Maria Goellner, director of state policy at FAMM (formerly Families Against Mandatory Minimums).” In reality, incarceration has surprisingly little effect on people’s life spans. Studies sometimes find that criminals actually live longer in prison than they do in the outside world.
A recent peer-reviewed study in the American Economic Journal finds criminals have lower mortality rates in prison than they do outside of prison. That study, titled “The Health Effects of Prison,” found that when prisoners have to serve more time before being released. Criminals do not have particularly long life spans. But going to prison actually curbs some of criminals’ self-destructive behaviors, enabling many of them to live longer.
Why do groups like FAMM make false claims about inmates dying early due to incarceration? They do it in order to lobby for laws releasing inmates early, such as legislation lowering the age of geriatric release to age 50 (as Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam proposed in 2020 for many inmates). If inmates really did age three times faster in prison than in the outside world, they would be close to death by the time they hit age 50…”
It is apparent that Soros-funded groups like FAMM don’t actually care what happens to minorities after their policies are adopted. They don’t care about racial justice, or any justice for anyone. It seems that what’s most important is their belief that America is racist, and that it must be destroyed and rebuilt into a socialist utopia. Brainwashing segments of the population into believing that they are oppressed and that the government, the culture and institutions are the oppressors is the objective.
When people are more afraid of the police than they are of the violent criminals gunning down folks in their neighborhoods, it is a victory for progressives.