The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

NY Prosecutor: ‘We Know Incarceration Doesn’t Really Solve Any Problems’

Posted on | April 7, 2023 | 1 Comment

From the DA’s office that is prosecuting Donald Trump:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s chief prosecutor, Meg Reiss, bragged about letting violent criminals and felons off the hook – including a murderer – using her restorative justice approach to help them avoid incarceration, Fox News Digital found.
“We know incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” Reiss said during a Peace Institute event in May 2021. Fox News Digital has previously reported that Reiss said criminals are not “bad dudes” while simultaneously blasting juries for believing police officers facing misconduct allegations deserve the “benefit of the doubt.”
Reiss went on to describe how the Manhattan district attorney helped a murderer get out of jail time for a homicide victim who had very few relatives. . . .
Reiss also blasted the idea that criminals in New York illegally possessing firearms should amount to jail time.
She said the office has a “gun diversion” program for criminals illegally possessing firearms. . . .
Criminal possession of a firearm in New York is a Class E felony, and carries up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office did not answer whether it is their general practice to divert Class E felons and violent criminals from the criminal justice system.

There is a word for Meg Reiss’s attitude: insanity.

In 2016, Reiss was appointed as the first Executive Director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution (IIP) at CUNY’s John Jay College. She was described at the time as a “Brooklyn and Nassau County prosecutor with more than two decades of high-profile experience in the courtroom and in efforts to reform the criminal justice system.”

The phrase “reform” implies that the criminal justice system in New York wasn’t working. We may then ask, for whom was it not working?

As you can see, over the course of two decades, there was a drastic decline in the number of murders in New York City, from a peak of more than 2,000 per year in the early 1990s, to fewer than 500 by 2007. By the time Reiss was appointed to head the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution in 2016, NYC’s murders had decreased to fewer than 350 a year.

From a standpoint of public safety, then, there seemed to be no need for “reform” or “innovation” in New York’s criminal justice system, but once you start such “reform” measures — e.g., eliminating cash bail, and declining to prosecute “low-level offenses,” as Alvin Bragg has done — it’s amazing how quickly criminals discover that there are no real consequences. After 2017, when there were only 272 murders in New York City, the homicide rate increased 67% percent by 2021, when there were 488 murders in the city. “Incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” we are told by Meg Reiss. We know this, she says, but if she explained how we know it, I must have missed the explanation.

What Meg Reiss and other “progressives” generally fail to acknowledge is the problem of recidivism. Criminal behavior, like most other patterns of human behavior, is largely a matter of habit. The person who, at a young age, develops a pattern of criminal behavior is likely to continue committing crimes:

Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners. Examines the recidivism patterns of former prisoners during a 9-year follow-up period. The researchers found that:

— The 401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner. Sixty percent of these arrests occurred during years 4 through 9.
— An estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.
— Eighty-two percent of prisoners arrested during the 9-year period were arrested within the first 3 years.
— Almost half (47%) of prisoners who did not have an arrest within 3 years of release were arrested during years 4 through 9.
— Forty-four percent of released prisoners were arrested during the first year following release, while 24% were arrested during year-9.

One way of looking at this data is to conclude, as does Reiss, that “incarceration doesn’t really solve any problems,” i.e., even after serving a prison sentence for their crimes, criminals continue committing crimes. The possibility of being sent back to prison doesn’t seem to have as much deterrent effect as we might wish. But another way of looking at the data is to conclude that, when we do send criminals to prison, we need to keep them there as long as possible, in order to protect society from their habitual criminality. Oh, but that’s “mass incarceration,” the progressives scream, with no regard to the factor of public safety in such matters.

The people who elected Alvin Bragg as District Attorney deserve every bit of the violent anarchy they have unleashed on New York City. More Democrat voters getting murdered? Oh, what a shame!.



 

 

Category: Crime, New York

Comments

One Response to “NY Prosecutor: ‘We Know Incarceration Doesn’t Really Solve Any Problems’”

  1. DaleyGator News/Opinion weekend links - The DaleyGator
    April 7th, 2023 @ 12:40 pm

    […] The Other McCain reports on DA FAIL! […]