Abolishing Prisons? Yeah, Right
If the odious Black Lives Matter movement isn’t quite dead due to its unqualified support for the terrorist murderers of Hamas coupled with the previous exposure of its financial scams, its insane attacks on the criminal justice system should be the final nail its coffin because the effects of actually defunding the police are now being felt big time in America’s cities, and unsurprisingly many of those adversely affected are black.
Violent crime in blue states has spiralled out of control, and non-violent crime, in particular organised shoplifting, is causing food deserts and worse. This article from earlier this year gives an insight into how this is affecting consumers. As usual, it is the little people who suffer the most, namely the working class, lower middle class and the disadvantaged.
Although the call to defund the police sounds insane, this is something that if done sensibly can lead to reducing the crime rate. The key is to defund or simply prohibit the police from making their own work by investigating victimless crimes. In the United States where prostitution is illegal, the police waste enormous resources investigating and at times entrapping prostitutes and their ‘johns’ when they could be taking violent thugs off the street. In Britain, they seem to spend most of their time monitoring Twitter in case somebody says a forbidden word.
What though of prison abolition? Again, this sounds insane, but if we focus instead on prison reduction, it makes sense. A lot of petty criminals, overwhelmingly men, are in and out of prison regularly for at times relatively trivial offences. Some end up serving a life sentence on the installment plan. It is easy to condemn these men, but for those especially without some sort of family support, their behaviour is hardly surprising. We need to put more resources into rehabilitation including helping them with housing and finding well-paid work. Those who have drug and other problems may need more specialised help, but the idea that prisons can simply be abolished is ludicrous. People of both sexes who commit serious crimes need to pay a serious price. Are we going to stop locking up serial killers?
Having said all that, does Black Lives Matter really want to abolish prisons? Not for Derek Chauvin, pictured above. Chauvin was of course convicted of murder, but those who have viewed the full bodycam footage might rightly conclude that he should have been convicted of manslaughter at the very worst. The other three officers involved in this incident were also convicted (of lesser offences) and sentenced to prison. Most recently, Tou Thao received a sentence of four and three quarter years after a bench trial.
Did Black Lives Matter believe these men should not have been incarcerated? Clearly not, what this pernicious organisation and its left wing fellow travellers did was riot all over Minnesota, all over