Compassion Has A Time And Place, But The Courtroom And Prison Are Not It

Mahatma Gandhi has been culturally deified since his death. The same is true of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were brave, and, while preaching peace, compassion, and nonviolence, they literally walked into the batons of those who did not share that peaceful passion. Both men led movements that changed the way their nations functioned and, as a result, became larger-than-life figures.

But here’s the thing that most don’t recognize: They succeeded only because the people against whom they were fighting were moral people. I don’t mean that the people throwing slurs at or using guns or dogs against their followers were angels. Not at all. But the British people, in Gandhi’s case, and white Americans, in MLK’s, were largely moral people.

And how do we know that? Because Gandhi and King succeeded. The tactics both men employed would never have worked in most circumstances in human history, because the humanity shown by the British and the American whites was anomalous, frankly. The truth is, we’d likely never have known of them had they tried those tactics against the Nazis or the CCP or the Romans or the Mongols or Al Qaeda or the Aztecs...or virtually any other government or civilization in human history.

Such non-violent sentiments, particularly pacifism, may have a place in political discourse, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, and most certainly not at all times. Einstein was famously a pacifist almost his entire life. But even he abandoned that when the Nazis began targeting the Jews in pre-WW II Germany. He quickly reverted to it once the Germans were defeated in Europe, becoming an outspoken advocate for not using the nuclear weapons he had played an indirect role in developing, despite the horrors of the Japanese being at least equal to those of the Germans.

The problem with pacifism/non-violence is that it depends on the goodwill of the people being targeted. That might work if everyone on the planet were Mother Teresa, but most are not.

Which brings me to modern-day American leftists. We see in America today a tangential drive, one for compassion. But it’s compassion not for the victims of horrific crimes, but for the perpetrators. Between “bail reform,” “sentencing reform,” and the movement to replace police with social workers, it’s simply ludicrous. Indeed, wrong-headed “compassion” can be fatal.

Adam Smith famously said, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” We see this no more clearly than with a spate of recent killings, with some of the most well-known being Iryna Zarutska, Nicola Tanzi, and Hunter Simoncic. The thing that one notices is that in every one of these cases, the killers had double-digit interactions with the justice system, often spending years in prison.

And it’s not just the cases that make the headlines that should concern us. It’s the information that doesn’t make the news that’s also concerning: Forty-seven percent of criminals who get sent to prison had at least 10 prior arrests, and fully 80% had at least three. And fully 80% of criminals re-offend within 5 years of release.

The problem is that leftists look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of Gandhi and MLK, but live in a world where the real color isn’t rose, it’s red, as in blood. Gandhi and MLK succeeded because the media in the UK and the United States shocked citizens into living up to their own ideals.

The fact that this worked for them was extraordinary, but the reality is that it doesn’t work for the millions of victims of violent crime every year. For every Timothy Bohler (45 prior arrests) or Sanchez Nicholson (33 arrests) or Courtney Boose (99 priors, never been in prison) who makes the news and outrages communities, there are thousands of other criminals walking the streets robbing, beating, raping, or attempting to murder mostly innocent victims.

Tim Hsiao had a great American Thinker piece last week titled Without Retribution, There Is No Justice. In it, he makes a compelling argument for capital punishment. He’s 100% right. His most salient point:

If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes.

And that phrase “deterrence and rehabilitation” is the language of the left, not what someone deserves. While I applaud the deterrence element of prison and the chair, I’m not so keen on the “rehabilitation” part. The goal of the justice system should be one thing: Keep criminals from harming innocent civilians. Do that enough, and eventually they will learn, and other potential thugs in the making will figure out that crime is not a good career choice.

Now, taken to its extreme, this sentiment could mean executing every criminal every time. That’s clearly neither desirable nor practical—but neither is the system we have today, where criminals can spend practically their entire lives preying on innocents with only the most cursory of stints behind bars.

But “How can that be?” you might ask, given that the United States has the largest number of prisoners and the 5th highest prison rate in the world. Maybe, in contrast to the leftist narrative, the answer isn’t that those numbers are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough, and the death penalty is not meted out enough.

El Salvador, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1,659 per 100,000 vs. 541 per 100,000 in the United States, saw its murder rate decline by 98% over a decade after implementing effective, albeit admittedly draconian, law enforcement measures. But the result has been a citizenry that feels far safer, and international tourism has skyrocketed. The quality of life—and actual life in many cases—in El Salvador has improved tremendously.

While locking up prisoners can be expensive, what’s not usually counted is the cost to society of not doing so. Citizens being scared to walk around and engage in their communities has both psychological and economic consequences. Then there are the actual costs (ER and hospital care, lost wages, long-term care, disability, trauma, lost productivity, and quality of life) that run into the tens of billions annually.

Leftists focus their compassion on criminals. They pretend they’re champions for men like Gandhi and MLK, but in reality, they’re champions for men like Ted Bundy and Decarlos Brown, who’ve left nothing but blood and misery in their wake. And they use their power in the criminal justice system, the media, and the grifting NGO universe to inflict their fiction on communities across the country. Unlike the people whom Gandhi and MLK faced, those whom leftists force citizens to face are not moral.

Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex.

Compassion has a time and place, but the courtroom and prison are not it. The goal of the system should be to be sufficiently bad that no one ever wants to return to it. Criminals are humans too, and most humans respond rationally to incentives and disincentives.

It’s time for voters to decide which they prefer: To live in crimescapes like St. Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore, or in communities where they can talk to their neighbors, walk their dogs, and pick up their kids at school without worrying about becoming a statistic on a police blotter as their families’ lives are shattered.

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