California Governor Newsom, acting on his own initiative – not with advice of the Parole Board or Legislature – orders early release of 76,000 felons, many of them violent felons, including almost 20,000 serving life sentences.
This is the progressive answer to “mass incarceration,” which in effect means more criminals in prison than they want to pay for. The assumption is that many don’t deserve to be in prison. But what is this assumption based on? Wishful thinking? Leftist theories? Surely not working in a city emergency department and seeing the shootings, stabbings, and beatings that criminals inflict on the people politicians are sworn to serve. Reality may not always be pretty, but it is always reality.
Let’s be thankful this approach wasn’t used for Covid-19. Hospitals and ICUs overflowing? Hospitals running out of supplies and funds. Don’t increase support for hospitals. Don’t recruit more personnel to help. Instead, cut hospital bed capacity and send thousands of patients home to spread the illness. Sounds insane? It would have been.
But is this not exactly what Newsom is doing in the case of criminals? Send them out to spread the disease of crime and social disorder. And why not? They probably won’t come to the upscale neighborhoods and gated communities where Newsom and his friends live. No, they’ll come to the inner cities and farm towns where poor people and minorities tend to live. But who cares about them? Surely not Newsom and his progressive friends.
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