“A 22-time convicted felon has been burglarizing homes” on Chicago’s “Northwest Side while on parole for 19 armed robberies,” reports CWBChicago. “Despite Vincente Charriez Colon’s extensive criminal history, state officials have decided not to reconsider his parole status.”
Charriez, 60, was paroled in August 2022 after serving time “for the robberies, many of which involved allegations of kidnapping and home invasion, according to court records.” Prosecutors say he burglarized “a woman’s home in the 3600 block of North Kedzie on July 26. Two safes were taken, containing business licenses, $10,000 cash, birth certificates, house and car titles, jewelry, and a pistol, according to a criminal complaint filed against Charriez.” He broke into homes on North Kolmar Avenue and on North Rutherford Avenue as well. After his charges for the first set of burglaries, a judge rejected the state’s detention petition, and put him on electronic monitoring instead. But two months later, after a subsequent arrest, a judge finally “ordered him to remain in custody as a public safety threat” for the time being.
Soft-on-crime policies have increased violent crime and theft in many big cities. For example, the Free Beacon reported last month that there had been “863 carjacking incidents in Washington, D.C., this year. That’s a 106 percent increase compared with last year and a 600 percent increase compared with 2019. Nearly three in four carjacking incidents in 2023 involved a firearm, and the majority of individuals arrested were juveniles.” Killings have also skyrocketed in Washington, DC, up 36% this year to 267 killings.
Cities could slash their crime rate and save lives by imprisoning more criminals. When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell by more than 90%. Jailing more criminals saved thousands of lives in El Salvador.
Judges and progressive prosecutors refuse to jail many offenders because of the myth of “mass incarceration.” But as criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.”
As a Manhattan Institute researcher noted in The Wall Street Journal, back when incarceration rates were higher than they are today,
Contrary to the advocates’ claim that the U.S. criminal-justice system is mindlessly draconian, most crime goes unpunished, certainly by a prison term. For every 31 people convicted of a violent felony, another 69 people arrested for violence are released back to the streets, according to a 2007 analysis of state courts by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That low arrest-to-conviction rate reflects, among other things, prosecutors’ decisions not to go forward with a case for lack of cooperative witnesses or technical errors in police paperwork. The JFA Institute estimated in 2007 that in only 3% of violent victimizations and property crimes does the offender end up in prison.
Far from being prison-happy, the criminal-justice system tries to divert as many people as possible from long-term confinement. “Most cases are triaged with deferred judgments, deferred sentences, probation, workender jail sentences, weekender jail sentences,” writes Iowa State University sociologist Matt DeLisi in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice.
Offenders given community alternatives “are afforded multiple opportunities to violate these sanctions only to receive additional conditions, additional months on their sentence, or often, no additional punishments at all,” Mr. DeLisi adds. In 2009, 27% of convicted felons in the 75 largest counties received a community sentence of probation or treatment, and 37% were sentenced not to prison but to jail, where sentences top out at one year but are usually completed in a few weeks or months. Only 36% of convicted felons in 2009 got a prison term.
Thanks to “criminal justice reform,” a “violent rapist and murderer” recently got out of prison early in Maryland. In other news, a prominent “criminal justice reform” activist was recently arrested for viciously beating his wife. This “criminal justice reformer” had committed a series of armed robberies in his youth. But after his release from prison for those crimes, people claimed he had turned over a new leaf and was now an exemplary citizen whose calls for decarceration and releasing other inmates should be heeded by everyone.
Incarceration keeps dangerous criminals in jail where they can’t kill other people. Most murders in big cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime, and would still have been in prison at the time they committed murder if they had only been given the maximum sentence for their prior crime. “Maryland Public Policy Institute researcher Sean Kennedy, who studied 110 homicide cases” in Baltimore “found that suspects in 77 of these had been previously convicted of a serious crime…Sixty-one of them (79 percent) faced statutory jail terms that should have kept them in prison beyond the date on which they allegedly committed the homicide,” reports City Journal. If these criminals had been kept in jail longer, that would have kept them from killing anyone.
Similarly, many violent crimes in Philadelphia are committed by criminals with long rap sheets. Lawyer Ted Frank described the long series of crimes committed by a man who later killed six people, noting that “Keith Gibson had 29 felony arrests” and “nine convictions,” yet remained “on the streets at age 39 to murder six more people” in Philadelphia and Delaware. Similarly, an “illegal Congolese alien had already racked up multiple convictions, including for sex crimes, but still hadn’t been deported and was walking” the “streets free to rape” a woman on a “Philadelphia train,”
Incarceration is aimed mostly at violent offenders. Most state prison inmates are there for “violent offenses,” according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. As the progressive Marshall Project noted in 2015, “Only 4 percent” of state prison inmates were “there for drug possession.” The percentage is even lower today.
Longer prison sentences also deter violent crimes and theft by people who are not currently incarcerated. Crime in California fell significantly after California voters adopted Proposition 8, which mandated longer sentences for repeat offenders who kill, rape, and rob others. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found those longer sentences deterred many crimes from being committed. As it observed, three years after Proposition 8 was adopted, crimes punished with enhanced sentences had “fallen roughly 20-40 percent compared to” crimes not covered by enhanced sentences. Similarly, a 2008 Santa Clara University study found that longer sentences for three-time offenders led to “significantly faster rates of decline in robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft,” even after controlling for pre-existing crime trends and economic, demographic, and policy factors.
Studies of countries have found that letting criminals out early increases the crime rate, making longer prison sentences a good investment.
Criminal justice reformers claim that people age out of crime by their late 30s, but most don’t. Last year, a murderer was arrested for killing again at age 83 after two prior murder convictions in New York State. The George Soros-funded Law Enforcement Action Partnership claimed to the Virginia legislature that if “people entered prison over a decade ago,” “their continued incarceration does very little, if anything, to maintain safety.” But that’s false. Returning to crime after being released is typical for inmates, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, even when they have been incarcerated for a decade or more. It documented that problem in a 116-page report titled “Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010.” Over an eight-year period, violent offenders returned to crime at a 63.8% rate. The median time to rearrest was 16 months for these violent offenders. So, most violent offenders released from prison committed more crimes. Even among those offenders over age 60, 25.1% of violent offenders were rearrested for committing new crimes.
It is true that rates of reoffending do fall after longer periods of incarceration, although not to very low levels. As Michael Rushford noted in the Washington Post, “an exhaustive, decade-long study released in June by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, tracking more than 32,000 federal offenders released from prison in 2010, found that offenders released after serving more than 10 years were 29 percent less likely to be arrested for a new crime than those who served shorter sentences. Offenders who served more than five years were 18 percent less likely to be arrested for new crimes compared to a matched group serving shorter sentences.” Thus, inmates are more likely to reoffend after short sentences than after long sentences.
