The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work.
—Thomas Sowell
Hug-A-Thug is a convenient term for defundng police, not prosecuting crimes, eliminating bail, and ignoring guidelines for sentencing, parole, commutation and pardon. Because these practices have been disastrous wherever enacted, they merit an epistemological inquiry into how leftists know what they know and how it relates to actual experience. In standard English, this means, “What the F*#CK were they thinking?”
Let’s review their bedrock ideas:
1. Criminal are victims. Crooks rape, rob, assault and kill because society, and especially the police, oppress them and make them do it.
2. “Root causes,” such as racism and poverty, make them do it.
3. Criminals are sufferers. Most are mentally ill and drug addicts.
Where do The Left get such notions? Certainly not from experience. Nearly all government officials who make crime policies and pass criminal laws, and most academics and reporters who think, comment and influence same, do not live in violent neighborhoods and have never actually talked with felons. Even criminal judges and prosecutors have only brief, rote interactions with criminals, such as, “What’s your name?” and “Do you understand the plea agreement you signed today?” Now and then a bad guy will dash past fatso bailiffs and sock a judge in the puss, but not often, perhaps not often enough.
Criminal justice researchers almost never ride with cops, move into high-murder neighborhoods, or walk the streets of Crime City. Distressingly, they devote most of their effort to parsing the statistics that issue endlessly from the U.S. Burea of Justice Statistics from its mid-rise ziggurats in West Virginia.
Academic writing about criminal justice has the airless quality of medieval angelologists calculating the dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin aptitudes of cherubim, seraphim, virtues and thrones. The insight that comes from catching a slug in the chest, or a bludgeon to the head, or being robbed, raped, jacked or burgled, is sadly lacking.
The Left’s beliefs that crime results from victimhood and affliction are the notions of the lecture hall and seminar room. If criminals are sufferers, (Latin patiens) they are also passive (Latin passus). Ergo, they must be treated as “patients.” Criminal justice for The Left becomes therapy. The degreed and credentialed Carelords of the Left will administer the cures.
Vicky Waters, a spox for the California Department of Corrections, described the repurposing of San Quentin prison’s most famous ward thusly: “We are starting the process of closing death row to repurpose and transform the current housing units into something innovative and anchored in rehabilitation.” She further described the transformed ward as a “positive, healing environment.”
So, what are the current prescriptions of the Crime Doctors of the Left? Let’s review:
• Root Causes. This has been a mantra for the last 50 years. It is inspired by Freudian psychotherapy, during which analyst and analysand together reach back in time to discover the childhood trauma which is the root cause that has blocked the sufferer from achieving fulfillment.
The assumption is that poverty, wretched housing, poor health and lack of food cause people to sally forth to rob, rape, maim and kill. The cure is massive spending on cash benefits, Medicaid, food credits, and subsidized apartments and larger grants to local non-profits that often are staffed—surprise— by relatives of elected officials.
This spending is always supplemented by massive contracts to universities and consultants to do new studies, as if the torrent of crime research gushing from the Bureau of Justice Statistics were insufficient.
I have interviewed dozens of murderers in Florida and Georgia jails. None was poor. All had cars, guns, and ammunition, which aren’t cheap. They lived in apartments and appeared well-fed if not tubby. In my experience, improvement in circumstances has no effect on the actual root cause of violence, which is not material and remains mysterious.
• Restorative Justice. This is inspired by group therapy and 12-step addiction meetings. New York Times writer Susan Dominus described it thusly in 2016:
“Restorative justice is built on values like community, empathy and responsibility; in its specifics, it asks students and teachers to strengthen connections and heal rifts by sitting on chairs in circles and allowing each participant to speak about how a given incident affected him or her.”
Restorative justice has been in practice for decades in Teen Courts to which juvenile offenders are diverted by judges. In Teen Court, victims bewail their abuses and losses. Defendants confess their crimes, apologize to victims, pay restitution (maybe), and vow to mend their ways. Adolescent jurists, perhaps fortunately, lack state power to execute their judgments, so these interventions are about as successful as you can imagine. Most killers with prior arrests as juveniles already have passed through Teen Courts where these exist.
In adult criminal courts, restorative justice takes the form of the Victims’ and Defendants’ pre-sentencing statements. Victims appear, often in tears, and express their pain and loss to the accused and the court. Defendants make statements of contrition. Over the years this has become ritualistic and rote, like auto da fé confessions before the Inquisition. Remorse has become a mere check box on sentencing reports.
Many victims prudently forego the opportunity for holistic and healing dialog in open court. They don’t want to show themselves out of a not unreasonable fear that the family and accomplices of the defendant might decide to drive by their homes, locked, loaded and with extra mags, and exact their own sort of restorative justice. Authorities make revenge easy by publishing the names and addresses of victims and witnesses in police reports which are free on the Internet or available for dimes and nickels from cop and court clerks.
Community Policing. This is a lefty fave. It means assigning police officers to a single zone so they can get to know the neighbors. Instead of arresting thugs, cops chat up citizens. They appear in church meeting rooms for heart-to-heart discussions with local worthies and deploy Officer Friendlies to charm children in schools. This “builds community” which, as far as I can determine, means generating good vibes and a propensity to vote correctly in municipal elections.
In my high-crime neighborhood, we have the opposite—Community Hoodluming. These are heart-to-heart dialogs that occur after shooters blow away some mope. They go door to door to discuss what will happen if anyone identifies them in a lineup or photo array, or testifies, or signs a statement. These are most holistic discussions indeed.
Send in the nurses! Acting on the premise that violent people are merely ill, New York City’s mayor has announced, with the fanfare one would expect for the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that squads comprised of nurses, social workers and cops will soon descend into subway tunnels to offer aid and succor to the teeming homeless who live there. Homeless shoving citizens off platforms to be splattered by oncoming trains or electrocuted by the third rail, and similar hijinks, have motivated this deployment. So far, most municipal nurses are saying, “No,” and their union is making that stick. For those that dare, some free advice: Class 2 armor with rifle plates and Class 3 armored helmets with ear flaps. Brushing up on martial arts is also advised. Spit- and acid-resistant glasses are also cool.
“Social workers, lots of social workers.” This phrase, delivered with appealing warmth by Joe Biden in his recent speech on crime, is utterly disingenuous. America already has a dense nexus of social workers in schools, in child protective services, in court-ordered diversion programs and throughout the gigantic probation and parole systems of states. Most violent criminals have had multiple interventions by social workers and psychologists beginning in elementary schools and continuing through various incarcerations in juvie halls, adult jails and state prisons. They’ve had volunteer mentors, been coached by cop buddies in police athletic leagues, met with jail chaplains and prison missionaries, dried out in drug treatment centers, and sat in endless circles of metal folding chairs to do “group.”
The premise that social work is a cure for crime is that, deep inside every felon, there is a proto-citizen. This hidden homunculus has the morality of the Ten Commandments permanently imprinted on the cerebral cortex and an inborn savoir faire sufficient to enable rich interaction with his or her fellows. Deep engagement with social workers will rehabilitate, i.e., restore to life, this wondrous being.
In this scenario, a guy formerly devoted to banging, balling and boning, not to mention slapping women and babies upside the head and popping a slug into all who annoy, will, after therapy and a good cry, change utterly. He will rise at dawn, don a logo-ed shirt and paper hat, and fry up sausage McBiscuits with a smile on his face and a song in his heart for twelve smacks an hour.
Déjà vu all over again. In 1967, Titicut Follies, a documentary about a hideous Massachusetts mental hospital, created a sensation. In a media-driven frenzy, politicians closed state mental hospitals. Inmates, they proclaimed, would be “mainstreamed” into society with help from thousands of psychiatrists and social workers who would dispense care, understanding, and large doses of the exciting neuroleptics Thorazine and Stelazine, which can turn a raging schizophrenic into a zombie.
The caregivers never appeared, and deranged people often exchanged their pills for beer, wine and heroin. Never mainstreamed, mental patients instead were “main streeted.” The results are with us today in the throngs of mentally ill who stumble, gesticulate, scream and weep in the dystopian ruins of American downtowns.
Releasing dangerous people into outpatient therapy has already been tried. It didn’t work 50 years ago, and it won’t work now. I predict the entire effort will evaporate when the first social workers sent on police calls are shot, stabbed, pushed under onrushing trucks and trains or defenestrated from high windows.
The therapeutic approach to crime is novel only to the young and privileged and to the earnestly, or willfully, ignorant. All of the Left’s proposals have been tried not just for years but for decades. Not billions but trillions of dollars have been spent. If these practices worked, we would know by now. The Left wishes not to know, and their management of police and courts in cities they control has produced, in a mere ten months, a collapse of order and a terrifying resurgence of violence, destruction and death.
The one idea that is never, ever, discussed by The Left is evil. If you prefer a less historico-religious term, we can call it irredeemable savagery. Evil does not require belief or discussion. It is not an absence of good, whether supplied by a Divine Being or by social workers.
It just is.
Arresting and incarcerating violent people is a humble acknowledgement that, after thousands of years, we don’t understand evil and don’t know anything else to do with savage criminals except to hook ‘em up, lock ‘em up, and feed ‘em until age degrades their ability, if not their desire, to hurt and kill.
Wes Denham spent years as a criminal defense investigator and Spanish translator in Florida and Georgia jails and prisons. He is the author of Arrested, a consumer guide to criminal defense, and Arrest-Proof Yourself, a guide to avoiding unnecessary arrest. He is a graduate of Princeton University.