America’s Under-Incarceration Crisis
More people need to be locked up and their sentences need to be for much longer
The brutal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte commuter train and other recent high-profile crimes by repeat violent offenders have exposed that, far from the “over-incarceration” problem that liberals so often lament, the United States actually has a serious under-incarceration crisis – and it’s costing innocent lives.
In the wake of Zarutska’s gruesome murder by Decarlos Brown, Jr., a man with 14 prior arrests, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, a Democrat, outrageously claimed that arresting criminals is not the way to stop crimes from occurring. “We will never arrest our way out of issues such as homelessness and mental health,” Lyles said.
Of course, basic reality and common sense directly disprove Lyles’s statement. If Brown Jr. had been in jail – as he should have been – for any of his prior crimes, Iryna Zarutska would still be alive today.
But that absurd reasoning – that putting violent people in jail won’t stop violent crime – is now the default position of the Democrat Party. U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett was even more direct when she declared on a podcast recently that “committing a crime doesn’t make you a criminal.” New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, has questioned the “purpose” of jails and prisons. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said that jails and law enforcement are “a sickness that has not led to safe communities.”
Liberals cite plenty of reasons for opposing incarceration as a crime-fighting tool, including claims that the criminal justice system is “systemically racist” and that “society” is to blame for “failing” career criminals. Additionally, liberals believe that “tough on crime” policies like “broken windows policing,” or “stop and frisk,” are discriminatory, and so criminals that would otherwise be identified and detained by police are allowed to roam free in the name of “equity” and “social justice.”
But one of the left’s favorite lines, as Mayor Lyles alludes to, is that we can’t lock dangerous people up because prisons are “overcrowded.” Accordingly, liberals tell us, we must empty out the jail cells. The constant refrain from the political left is that prisons are now over capacity, and so certain “non-violent” crimes should not be punished.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment just how dangerously radical that notion is, because it reveals the total lack of coherent logic at the core of the liberal mindset.
According to the left, America supposedly does not have enough jail cells. But instead of the sensible solution, which would be to build more jail cells to lock up the criminals, the left’s proposition is that we release the criminals.
Moreover, the claim that prisons are bursting at the seams is dubious at best. Despite the media narrative, prison populations have been falling for over a decade, even as violent crime remains high in many major cities. Far from being “overcrowded,” many state systems, especially in blue states, are operating below capacity, while thousands of offenders, especially so-called “non-violent” career criminals like Decarlos Brown, Jr., (who had prior arrests for robbery with a dangerous weapon and assault) never face meaningful prison time at all.
In truth, not only do more people need to be locked up, especially repeat offenders, but their sentences need to be for much longer.