by Robert M. Traxler

There are no criminals; there is only a criminal nation or society that made the criminal. It is better and much cheaper to send those convicted of drug-related crimes to rehab than it is to incarcerate them. There is no need for prisons as electronic monitoring can control prisoners more effectively, humanely and cheaper at home.

The United States has a criminal revenge system not a criminal justice system. The United States criminal justice system warehouses people it doesn’t rehabilitate them. The criminal justice system is not perfect thus it must be done away with, and replaced with job training and rehabilitation programs.

The above are all concepts I found on line in researching progressive attitudes concerning the American criminal justice system. I spent two decades in law enforcement (in the Military Police and Army Criminal Investigation Command) have an undergraduate degree in criminal justice and taught law enforcement courses at the college level, so this is a subject near and dear to me.

A major problem with the folks who advocate for criminals is they rarely deal with the victims of violent crime.

After holding a 10-year-old girl in my arms when she died, a victim of a drunk driver, I have very little tolerance for criminals who drive drunk. My list of heart-breaking examples of tragic victims of crime is long and forged my attitude concerning our criminal justice system.

The good folks who advocate for criminals rarely if ever see first hand the tragedy of crime; they see criminals who are sober, calm and rehearsed and pleading for justice from a society that made them criminals. A very large percentage of criminals will plead innocence or victim status; few criminals will admit to wrong doing and most will rationalize what crimes they committed as someone else’s fault.

A very good interview/interrogation technique is to find a rationalization criminals will accept and offer that as an excuse for their actions. Tell an armed robber that the victims should have not been in that area with a large amount of money on them, they were asking to be beaten and robbed, and some will agree. It was not their fault — it was the victim’s fault for being in an area where they should not have been in the first place, and with that amount of cash. The felons will then look at themselves as the victims and in some cases confess.

The left of center swing of the American society in the 1960s/’70s witnessed the birth of the corrections system over the prison system; any inmate who wished could receive job training and education free of charge. The theory was that it was the lack of marketable job skills that made criminals, and if armed with marketable skills they would re-enter society and never return to a life of crime. Sounds great; sentences were reduced, convicts were released early, and it did not work. The recidivism rate was not reduced and the number of victims of crime increased.

The Great Society social experiments in the 1960s/’70s called for reduced sentences and increased pardons and paroles, a policy President Obama wants to reinstitute. In some federal cases life in prison meant seven years. The term for the justice system became the “revolving door system of justice;” provided job skills, prisoners were released early and the prison population went down. The only problem was that crime went up and the number of victims went up. Crime became so prevalent that some major cities would not investigate nonviolent crimes as they just did not have the time or assets.

As in so many things, the victims of a social justice policy were the poor minorities they were attempting to help. Most criminals commit crimes within five miles of home and the majority of them are committed within the criminals’ “comfort zone” or even closer to home. Poor minority criminals commit crime in poor minority communities and produce poor minority victims.

I have often asked if the good-hearted progressive folks in the middle to upper-class advocating for releasing criminals early whether they would have the same attitude if the criminals were released to their liberal communities. A progressive who is a victim of a violent crime becomes less of a progressive while hospitalized, if they survive the crime.

The plain truth is that bad people do bad things and 75 percent of bad people will do a lot of bad things. The noble Great Society experiment of corrections over confinement spent a lot of money and effort only to prove that keeping bad people out of society reduces crime.

President Obama is resurrecting the failed progressive criminal Justice programs of my youth; he will fail, and thousands of good solid poor minority Americans will fall victim to increased crime. Once again the road to hell will be paved with good intentions.