Obama: Let's Go Easy on Violent Criminals... Just Like in Europe
"In Europe, a murder sentence of 10 years is considered severe"
October 28, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
Obama's current civil rights crusade is freeing drug dealers. Going easy on drug dealers is a major left-libertarian project these days under the guise of "sentencing reform". This is dressed up in talk about "non-violent offenders", but Obama tipped his hand in a White House meeting, as I discuss in today's article about how pro-crime policies kill cops.
Now, obviously, the devil is always in the details here, and there are going to be some disagreements on how successful is drug diversion, and can we, in fact, significantly reduce the prison population if we’re only focusing on non-violent offenses where part of the reason that in some countries -- in Europe, for example -- they have a lower incarceration rate because they also don’t sentence violent offenders for such long periods of time.
The devil sure is in those details about going easy on violent criminals. And some say he might be in the White House too.
So the hand is being tipped as far as the real agenda. It's not just drug dealers aka non-violent offenders. It's about going easier on murderers, rapists and armed robbers.
You can get a taste of some of the good stuff Obama will be serving up from the Economist.
However, harsher sentences for violent criminals accounted for nearly half the rise. Between 1984 and 2009, the time typically served in state prisons increased by roughly five years for murder, three years for sexual assault, eighteen months for robbery and six months for burglary. A significant reduction in the incarceration rate will require rolling back prison terms for these crimes, too.
We aren't discussing murder yet, but we're discussing sexual assault. And you can bet every feminist organization will be cheering it on while claiming that Republicans hate women.
You can get it straight from the pro-crime lobby at the Marshall Project which is behind much of the Save the Killers push.
Though there is a strong bipartisan movement for sentencing reform, discomfort with allowing violent criminals to avoid prison time or to serve much shorter sentences has left prominent conservatives reluctant to echo the call to “Cut50.”
"I have long argued that our criminal justice system locks up too many people for too long,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Marshall Project in an email. “I have also argued that we should maintain harsh punishments for violent or hardened criminals.”
Here's what conservative collaboration with the left gets you. An introduction to the left's real goals which are even worse than the evil goals you signed up for.
Jones and other reformers, both progressive and conservative, say it is not yet time to focus on the hot-button question of whether to redefine violent crime. “We’re not heavily leaning into that part of the conversation yet, because there is so much common ground on the nonviolent offenders, the indigent population, and the mental health population. We think we can get some momentum going,” Jones said.
And once that momentum is in place, we can start freeing the straight up killers and rapists. Here's what Obama is really talking about when he means matching Europe's incarceration rates.
To bring the United States to a prison incarceration rate equal to that of European nations — or to our own rate in the early 1970s — we would have to slash our incarceration rate from 623 per every 100,000 adults to about 150 per 100,000. That would be a reduction of approximately 80 percent.
And that would entail some very new thinking. In Europe, a murder sentence of 10 years is considered severe
Here's your bright new Obama sentencing reform future.
It's amnesty for drug dealers, killers and rapists. And any conservative who collaborates in such a crime should be challenged on the consequences.
Glenn Martin, founder of Just Leadership USA, believes the public will only embrace the Cut50 movement if inmates and their families are humanized. “What’s the public really scared of? If it’s only crime, we could get out of this mess quickly. This is about race, this is about class, and we have to tackle those issues. The way you do that is by changing the way the public thinks about who is or was in prison.” That includes people like Martin himself, who served a six-year sentence for robbery.
Criminals assault people because they dehumanize them. Now they and their advocates that we need to humanize the perpetrators.
Maybe instead of humanizing criminals, and thereby dehumanizing their victims for being of the wrong class and race, maybe we could restore civilization and start humanizing victims instead.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260598/obama-lets-go-easy-violent-criminals-just-europe-daniel-greenfield
