During a press conference on Thursday, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that in order to reduce crime, we should stop building jails.
She said:
“It is not acceptable for us to use jails as garbage bins for human beings. We need to treat people and see them as human. If we want to reduce violent crime, reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them. The answer is to make sure we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care. It’s to support communities, not throw them away.”
This is a newer, dumber take (it is AOC after all) on an argument liberals have been making for decades.
The liberal idea is that the criminal is not really at fault for crime, society is at fault. If only we had done more to alleviate poverty, help people with mental illness, and had been kinder and gentler to criminals, crime would just fade away.
This idea NEVER works.
Inevitably in these cases, the same cycle repeats itself over and over again. Liberals coddle criminals and restrain the police. Crime goes up into the stratosphere. At some point, people get tired of it and insist on a crackdown. The police get support, criminals spend more time in jail and crime goes down. In fact, it hasn’t even been that long since this cycle played itself out in NYC. New York had a reputation for being a crime-ridden hellhole. Rudi Giuliani was elected in 1994, got tough on crime, and guess what? New York City became much safer.
Now, 20 years later, AOC and company are ready to start the whole cycle again. Of course, if 20 whole years are too deep to go back into history, all you have to do is look at all the cities where they decided to “defund the police.” If you’re not sure which cities those are, just look for the ones with the skyrocketing murder rates and you’ll see an awful lot of overlap. If only liberals were capable of learning from their mistakes…
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here and on Twitter here.
Don’t miss The Dan Bongino Show
