Crime and justice

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Crime and justice

The following are from The Thomas Sowell Reader, pp. 195 - 200

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Penny-wise on crime

For more than 200 years, the political left has been coming up with reasons why criminals should not be punished as much, or at all. The latest gambit in Missouri is providing judges with costs of incarcerating the criminals they sentence.

According to the New York Times, “a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,700.” For a more serious crime, where a 5-year imprisonment would cost more than $50,000, it would cost less than $9,000 for what is described as “five years of intensive probation.”

This is only the latest in a long line of “alternatives to incarceration” schemes that are being pushed by all sorts of clever people, not only in Missouri but across the United States and across the Atlantic, especially in Britain.

The most obvious question that is being resolutely ignored in these scientific-sounding calculations is: What is the cost of turning criminals loose? Phrases like “intensive probation” may create the illusion that criminals at large are somehow under the control of the authorities but illusions are especially dangerous when it comes to crime.

Another question that ought to be obvious is: Why are we counting only the cost to the government of putting a criminal behind bars, but not the cost to the public of turning him loose?

Some may say that it is not possible to quantify the costs of the dangers and anxieties of the public when criminals are walking the streets. That is certainly true, if you mean the full costs. But we can quantify the money costs — and just the money costs to the public vastly exceed the costs to the government of locking up criminals.

In Britain, where the “alternatives to incarceration” vogue has led to only 7 percent of convicted criminals being put behind bars, the annual cost of the prison system has been estimated at just under two billion pounds sterling. Meanwhile, the annual financial cost alone of crimes committed against the public has been an estimated sixty billion pounds sterling.

In the United States, the cost of incarcerating a criminal has been estimated as being $10,000 a year less than the cost of turning him loose.

In all these calculations we are leaving out the costs of violence, intimidation and the fears that people have for the safety of themselves and their children, not to mention the sense of helplessness and outrage when society refuses to pay as much attention to innocent victims as they lavish on the criminals who victimize them.

These are all important costs. But it is unnecessary to take them into account, when just the money costs of turning criminals loose is enough to show what reckless nonsense is being preached to us by arrogant elites in the media, in academia and elsewhere.

Deception of the public by advocates of leniency to criminals has been institutionalized in legal practices that create the illusion of far more punishment being meted out than is actually the case. “Concurrent sentences” are one of the most blatant of these frauds.

When a criminal has been convicted of multiple crimes, having him serve his sentences “concurrently” means that he actually serves no more time for five crimes than he would serve for whichever of those crimes has the longest sentence. In other words, the other four crimes are “on the house.”

Sentences in general overstate how long the criminal will actually spend behind bars. Probation, furloughs, parole and time off for good behavior lead the list of reasons for turning a criminal loose before he serves the sentence that was announced to the public when he was convicted.

Even “life imprisonment without the possibility of parole” — often offered as a substitute for execution for first degree murder — can be misleading. There is no such thing as life imprisonment without the possibility of a liberal governor being elected, and then commuting or pardoning the murderer later on. And, of course, the murderer can commit murder again behind bars.

With all the things that liberals are willing to spend vast sums of money on, it is a little too much to have them become penny-wise when it comes to keeping criminals off the streets.

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Justice for little Angelo

Little Angelo finally got justice, though he died too young to even know what justice meant. Angelo Marinda lived only eight months and it took more than twice that to convict his father of the murder. Tragically, the policies and the mindset among the authorities responsible for the well-being of children — the practices and notions that put this baby at risk — are still in place and more tragedies are just waiting to happen. Little Angelo came to the authorities’ attention only days after he was born, when he turned up at a hospital with broken bones.

How could a baby less than two weeks old have broken bones? And what do you do about it?

Many of us would say that you get that baby away from whoever broke his bones and never let them near him again. But that is not what the “experts” say. Experts always have “solutions”. How else are they going to be “experts”?

The fashionable solution is called “family unification services.” The severity of little Angelo’s injuries would have made it legally possible to simply take him away and put him up for adoption by one of the many couples who are hoping to adopt a baby.

But no. Through the magic of “family reunification services” parents are supposed to be changed so that they will no longer be abusive.

A social worker told the court two years ago that the San Mateo County Children and Family Services Agency “will be recommending reunification services, as the parents are receptive to receiving services.” The fact that little Angelo’s sister had already had to be removed from that same house did not seem to dampen this optimism.

At the heart of all this is the pretense to knowledge that we simply do not have and may never have. There are all sorts of lofty phrases about teaching “parenting skills” or “anger management” or other pious hopes. And children’s lives are being risked on such unsubstantiated notions.

Little Angelo himself apparently knew better. After months in a foster home, he was allowed back for a visit with his parents and “had a look of fear in his eyes” when he saw them.

But “expertise” brushes aside what non-experts believe — and little Angelo was not an expert, at least not in the eyes of the social workers who were in charge of his fate. The fact that he had returned from a previous visit with bruises did not make a dent on the experts.

Social workers thought it would be nice if little Angelo could have a two-day unsupervised visit with his parents at Christmas. It was a visit from which he would not return alive.

Now, more than 16 months afer the baby’s death, Angelo’s father has been convicted of having literally shaken him to death.

Incidently, there were experts who testified on the father’s behalf at the trial, one of whom gave testimony that contradicted what he himself had written in a book. This expert had never seen little Angelo, dead or alive.

The time is long overdue for us to stop pretending to know things that nobody knows — not even people with impressive letters in front of their names or behind their names. Whether these experts are simply cynical guns for hire or really believe their own theories and rhetoric is beside the point. Unsubstantiated theories are no foundation for risking the lives of the helpless.

How anyone could break the bones of a newborn child is something that people may speculate about. But to claim to know how to turn such parents into decent human beings is reckless. And to risk a baby’s life on such speculation is criminal.

It is too bad that only one man will go to jail for this crime. There ought to be room in a cell somewhere for the social workers and their bosses who made this murder possible in the face of blatant evidence about the dangers that an infant could see, even if the responsible adults refused to see.

The pretense of knowledge allows judges, social workers, and others to “do something” by sending people to “training” in “parenting skills” and other psychobabble with no track record of success. And it allows children like little Angelo to be killed.

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Love those killers!

Most of us were horrified to learn that Andrea Yates had killed five of her own children by drowning them — one at a time — in a bathtub. But that may be because we are not among the morally anointed. Big time celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell and Today Show Katie Couric apparently see things differently.

“I feel such overwhelming empathy for her of what it must have been like for her to do that,” said Rosie O”Donnell. “When you’ve been on the edge you can understand what it is like to go over.”

Katie Couric on the Today Show seemed likewise to think the big issue was Mrs. Yates” psyche. She said: “Mrs. Yates, after you drowned your five children, how did that make you feel?”

The Today Show put on the screen information showing where to send donations to the legal defense fund for Andrea Yates. In Houston, the local chapter for the National Organization for Women formed something called “The Andrea Yates Support Coalition” and is planning to raise money for her defense.

This has apparently become a so-called woman’s issue because the claim is being made that Mrs. Yates suffered from postpartum depression and that either that or the drugs she had to take caused her to kill her children. But of course the reason we hold trials is to find out which claims by either side can stand up in court.

The judge has slapped a gag order on the attorneys in this case, in order to prevent pre-trail publicity from biasing the jury. But, in reality, that just means that the public will hear only Andrea Yates side of the story before the trail. We will never of course hear the children’s side of the story.

Unfortunately, the vogue of leaping to the defense of killers is not limited to women or even to the United States. Just this summer, two teenage boys who had sadistically murdered a two-year-old toddler in Britain when they were ten yeas old were released from prison — and given new identities, so they would not suffer any bad consequences from members of the public who were not so much in tune with current non-judgmental fashions.

What other people might suffer from these young killers in the course of another half century or more of their lives did not seem to raise nearly as much concern. Shrinks said they were no danger to others — which is what shrinks said about some of the American teenagers who later killer their schoolmates in shooting sprees.

At a cost of about $2 million to the British taxpayers, the young British killers and their families have been set up in three-bedroom homes. They have even been given spending money with which one of the parents has bought a car.

Even before being released from “imprisonment” — in facilities without bars but with TV and other amenities, including karate lessons and spending money for Christmas — the young killers are allowed out on supervised furlough to see sports events and even visit shopping malls. It was at a shopping mall that they had lured this little toddler away and then tortured him to death.

The foreman of the jury that convicted them recalls seeing the terrible pictures of the little toddler’s body and then catching the eye of one of the young killers — who smirked in the courtroom. However, the politically correct line in Britain, as in the United States, is that expressed by a “penal reform” advocate, who said: “If children do something wrong, they should be dealt with through the care system and not the criminal justice system.”

Meanwhile, the liberal media in England has vilified the mother of the murdered child, who has protested these boys’ early release and the posh life provided for them and their families. The media “compared her unfavourably with more forgiving mothers,”according to The Guardian newspaper. Apparently all mothers should be non-judgmental about their babies’ sadistic young killers.

Back in the 1960s, it was considered eccentric, at least, when Norman Mailer took up the cause of a convicted murderer and managed to get him released from behind bars. It was no doubt considered somewhat more than eccentric by a man that the ex-con killed after being released. But today, what was once considered eccentric is par for the course in certain elite circles.

Outcries of outrage from the public only confirm the anointed in their own smug sense of being special — nobler and wiser that the common herd. What a price to pay so that some people can feel more non-judgmental than thou or simply affirm within their own little coterie that they are one of Us instead of one of Them.

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4 Dec 2023