Criminals and Courts

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 143 - 145

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Criminals and Courts

OFTEN, IN SPORTS, THE WINNER was no more skilled or talented than the loser but simply "wanted it more," as they say. That may be why crime has grown so dramatically over the past 30 years. The criminals are more serious about what they are doing. They are more determined to win.

The police may also be determined to win, but the courts have the last word on what the police can do—and they have the last word on what is done to the criminals after they are caught and convicted. According to statistics from the Pacific Legal Foundation, violent crime is today 5 times as prevalent as it was back in 1960.

Some of the reasons may be found in how criminals are treated. Three out of four convicted criminals are not incarcerated at all. Nationwide, criminals serve less than 37 percent of their sentences. Why then are they given sentences in court that do not mean what they say?

Those sentences are not meant to determine how long criminals stay behind bars. They are meant to mollify people like you and me by letting us think that some serious sentences are being handed out for serious crimes.

Many of the people who write the laws, who sit as judges or who serve on parole boards are convinced that they know so much better than the rest of us poor dumb slobs how to handle criminals. Phony sentences keep the public happy, while reduced sentences and "rehabilitation" through psycho-babble are supposed to deal with the crime problem.

The net result is that even murderers are in jail less than 8 years. And of course they may be on the street periodically on "furlough" even during those years—and of course commit other crimes, including murder, while taking part in these wonderful programs dreamed up by the anointed.

A study of more than 100,000 former prisoners showed that 63 percent of them were rearrested for serious crimes, including more than 2,000 murders. Even the phrase "life in prison without the possibility of parole" means less than meets the eye. A multiple murderer in Puerto Rico with such a sentence was released last fall by the retiring governor. Other murderers under similar sentences have escaped, killed while on furlough, or killed in prison.

Criminals understand that they are at war with society. But many of those whose jobs it is to protect society do not want to treat criminals like mortal enemies. Too many judges and members of parole boards devote their authority to massaging their own egos instead of protecting society.

Some years ago, when a young, black teenage girl I know was raped by a hoodlum released by some judge, I thought: Somewhere out there in the affluent suburbs, there is a white liberal judge who feels good about himself because he gave a ghetto youth another chance.

Many of those who began the current legal trends back in the 1960s began with a vision in which the problems of the world—crime included—exist only because ordinary people do not have all the wonderful special insights and deep moral commitments that the anointed like themselves have. Their first order of business, therefore, is to brush aside what ordinary people think, mollify them with rhetoric and phoney sentences if need be, but instead engage in social experiments designed to get at the "root causes" of crime, rehabilitate criminals and perform miscellaneous other miracles as needed.

Have three decades of disastrous experience with this approach—and the soaring crime rates that followed—taught them nothing? Well, not much.

While the political left today may not have the boundless confidence with which people like Chief Justice Earl Warren or Attorney General Ramsey Clark proclaimed the new approach to crime back in the 1960s, nevertheless it could be devastating to their egos to admit that their moral preening had unleashed the runaway crime that has blighted many lives and snuffed out many others.

The anointed are going to believe any other explanation, however strained, before they believe that. Far better to believe that crime is caused by the "neglect" of "society" than to believe that you have blood on your own hands. Far better to keep on trying a failed approach than to look at yourself in the mirror and realize what monstrous crimes have resulted from your own petty vanity.

There is always a war going on between criminals and the rest of society. Over the past generation, however, too many people in "responsible" positions have forgotten that, while taking an ego trip instead of fighting back.

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13 June 2024