What do you do with someone who has a rap sheet going back more than a generation, listing crimes such as drug possession, sex offenses, strangulation and suffocation, illegal firearm possession, resisting arrest, battery, and beating up and then running over the mother of one of his children?
If you say, release the person on a $1,000 bond to continue his predation, congratulations — you qualify to be Milwaukee County district attorney.
For this is precisely what the actual Milwaukee County district attorney, John Chisholm, did via his policies with respect to Darrell Brooks. Brooks is the man who drove his SUV into Waukesha, Wisconsin’s Christmas parade on Sunday, killing six people and injuring more than 60.
It was just last week that Brooks was arrested for using a vehicle to run down his baby momma “and charged with five counts — one of which was bail jumping,” writes commentator Andrea Widburg. “With his record, one would think his bail would be high — or maybe, like those January 6 protesters rotting in jail without bail on charges of trespassing and ‘parading,’ Brooks would be denied bail entirely.” But not with Chisholm in charge, a man whose office was at least partially bought with left-wing billionaire George Soros’s money.
After all, aside “from inflammatory tweets about January 6 in which he calls for fire and brimstone to rain down on the protesters — statements he was not obligated to make sitting in his little corner of Wisconsin — Chisholm has repeatedly made clear that he believes that his obligation as the prosecutor isn’t to enforce the law but is, instead, to protect wrongdoers from law enforcement, all in the name of equity and social justice,” Widburg also informs. She then presents a couple of relevant tweets (below):
Speaking of “objective data” is odd given that leftists have of late written off “objectivity” as reflecting white supremacy. But truly notable about Chisholm’s comments is the hang-up with race and ethnicity and the notion of “proportional outcomes.”
It’s not clear what he means by the latter. But if it’s that different perpetrators shouldn’t be punished differently for the “same crimes,” note that different perpetrators are called different perpetrators because they’re different. In other words, they may not always share sameness of circumstances and background. But Chisholm could also by “proportional outcomes” be referring to ensuring that blacks and Hispanics aren’t subject to greater incarceration than whites are.
This is, frankly, a major driver behind the larger prison-abolition movement, epitomized by the endorsement last year by Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) of a bill that would eliminate federal prisons over the course of 10 years. (In a recent interview, Tlaib didn’t appear to have any grasp of the details and of how freeing child sex traffickers and other miscreants wouldn’t be dangerous for society. But, hey, who needs details? Après moi, le deluge!)
But those who care about details, and know history, understand that this has been tried before. In the 1960s and ‘70s there also was a movement to reduce incarceration — i.e., punishment — in favor of “rehabilitation.” The justification back then wasn’t explicitly racial, but rather tended to be class-oriented: “‘Underprivileged’ [poor] people may be more criminally inclined, but they’re victims of their environment” was the thinking.
But the result was the same as we’re experiencing now with leftist prosecutors’ freeing of criminals: Crime exploded.
That is, until we started exploding the prison population by locking people up in the ‘90s. (What a shock: Fewer criminals on the street=less crime!)
Of course, though, to the more childish, “History started with me!” leftists supporting the current slap-on-the-wrist movement, it seems like some novel idea. And thus did G.K. Chesterton once observe, “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.”
But if Chisholm is trying to achieve equal racial outcomes (“equity”) in punishment, this idea, too, is no longer new. Among other things, Barack Obama pressured schools more than a decade ago to punish students based on racial quota. Yet as Professor Thomas Sowell pointed out regarding such, unless you believe that a black boy couldn’t possibly be more likely to misbehave in school than an Asian-descent girl, what’s the point?
And, actually, this brings us to the next point: Those trumpeting racial proportionality in criminal-justice aren’t at all sincere. Consider: Do these “reformers” ever complain about whites having a far greater incarceration rate than Asian-descent Americans? On the contrary, they often hide this fact.
The National Institute of Justice, for example, provides its “Figure 2. U.S. Incarceration Rates by Race and Sex,” but doesn’t present Asian-descent Americans at all. It does provide Hispanics’ rate, however, even though “Hispanic” isn’t even a race (it’s an ethnicity). The same is true for this Sentencing Project page.
Why the obfuscation? Well, it’s hard blaming racial incarceration disparities on “systemic racism” and “white privilege” if people know that Asians have more “white privilege” than whites do.
Not hidden because no one even thinks to mention it, is that females apparently have more “male privilege” than males do. After all, men have a far higher incarceration rate.
Such inconvenient facts point to the reality: Generally speaking, cops and judges aren’t just randomly yanking people off the street and locking them up based on prejudice (except, oh, when at issue are innocent white teens who shoot rioting miscreants in self-defense). Some groups really do commit more crimes than other groups. Go figure.
As for Chisholm, whatever the method to his madness, he knew his woke schemes would get people killed — he admitted as much in a 2007 interview. “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he asked rhetorically. “You bet — guaranteed.”
So, perhaps, the Waukesha massacre has made him an honest man. For unlike most leftist politicians, his next campaign slogan can now be, “Predictions vindicated — promises kept.”
