Chicago admits that criminals commit crimes
Hondo sends us a link from Fox News that discusses the high rate of gun crimes in Chicago. According to the article, there have been more than 800 shootings in the city this year and, at the time the article was written, 133 Chicagoans had been murdered so far this year, compared to 77 during the same time period last year. The city blames the judicial system. For example, Lamar Harris had been arrested 43 times and convicted of felony charges seven times before he shot three of Chicago’s police officers a few weeks ago.
[Former Chicago Police Department Chief of Patrol Eddie] Johnson, unlike many of the city’s African-American elected officials, is seeking tougher sentencing laws. Over the coming weeks, he plans to be “asking our legislative partners in the near future to help us” pass new laws that will ensure judges throw the book at violent offenders.
It’s become easy for police to predict who will be on both ends of the explosion in gun violence. Some two-thirds of murder victims are already on the Police Department’s “strategic subject list,” [SSL] a roster of residents identified as being at risk of being a victim or an offender of gun violence. The list is kept so police can carry out lifestyle intervention efforts.
In one weekend in late March, 76 percent of shooting victims were on the SSL and 95 percent had lengthy criminal histories.
It seems to me that, if Chicago wants to protect victims, those predicted victims should be able to arm themselves.
“We are arresting people,” [Chicago Police spokesman Anthony] Guglielmi told FoxNews.com. “And we are arresting the right people. We are facing a long-term problem and that is that individuals are just not being held accountable for gun crimes.
“What we need to do is remove the repeat offenders from society because they are exacerbating the problem of crime,” he added.
The problem is the same one that we face in the war against terror – politicians aren’t willing to make consequences harder for those who terrorize average law-abiding people. For example, one of the longest-serving persons on death row in Texas, died of old age the other day. Jack Harry Smith had been on death row since 1978 – he even criticized the system for imprisoning him for so long. The urban culture romanticizes and idolizes those who serve time in prison. That’s been going on in Chicago for decades, since prohibition. Prison life isn’t hard enough to convince repeat offenders that they don’t want to go back.
Category: Crime
“The city blames the judicial system” and the remedy is to “pass new laws” (As opposed to passing old laws, I guess.) And this issue I have visited more than a few times here over the years. It’s a pet issue of mine, the combination of prosecutorial discretion in making deals to notch a guilty plea w/o the effort and expense of going to trial and the Teflon, usually anonymous, judges who dole out silly sentences or approve silly deals. But this is largely a state problem. In this instance, it belongs to Illinois. Good luck to you who live there.
It’s less a state problem than a Chicago problem. It extends outward from the Loop and that idiot mayor’s office to the collar counties, but Johnson (interim Chief of CPD) is being pro-active about finding solutions. I blame most of the crap in Chicago on the current doofus in the mayor’s office.
The problem is decades old and is systemic. My point is a generic one, affecting all states. Felony courts (by differing names in the states) are creatures of state law and while it may be true that Chicago’s problems in prosecutions and sentencing may be glaring, they are not unique. The fix–and this is my point–must come from within each state b/c it is a state issue. In my view, new laws will not help b/c where mandatory minimum sentences are provided by statute, a popular the end-around is to bargain away the qualifying crime and allow the defendant to plead down. Until the citizenry gets fed up and demands accountability, nothing will change.
Having worked in a jail, I can tell you, there is no incentive to NOT come back, they have a craft room, pool tables, tv lounge, good food, weights, why in hell would they be afraid to come back, its better than most of them have at home! Arm the people, they will weed out a lot of dead wood, clean out the jails, they are for punishment, not country clubs…let the bas’ards WORK ON ROAD GANGS, that alone would scare the shyt out of them..HAVING TO WORK!
I think that it is not that simple. I think that prison is too nice — going to prison doesn’t really inconvenience the prisoners — and it is like a parking ticket, inconvenient but not shameful.
I also think that many of the prisoners don’t mind it there – they are, after a fashion, happy there and when they get out, they cannot get a job (as though they ever would anyway) and the society that they live in does not look down on them for having been convicted of a crime.
Seems to me that the thinking goes, “Prison is something that happens when you screw up and those other people catch you. It isn’t my fault that I have to steal from you or beat you up, that is the way of things. It is your fault for putting me in this position and you are a moron for making prison so easy and pleasant. Why would you ever think that things would change under these circumstances?”
I think that for many of those repeat guys, prison is nothing to be ashamed of so the only purpose it serves is to keep the prisoner separated from the rest of us. When you let them out, they go right back to doing what they were doing before and, in the society that they hang around with, there is no shame. Prison without inconvenience, pain, death, or shame is meaningless. For the victims, prison would be a punishment and we think that is punishment for the perpetrators. For the perpetrators, prison is just like home except with heat, food, and a bed.
One of the primary purposes of a prison is to remove dangerous and violent individuals from the law-abiding population, thus removing the threat they pose to the law-abiding public. As such, incarceration is a good compromise between more forceful older methods (e.g., execution, forcible banishment under threat of immediate execution on return) and allowing them to remain among and continue to threaten the law-abiding population.
I fully agree that we have made prisons entirely too comfortable – it should be a horrible, nasty place for those incarcerated, so bad that no one in their right mind should ever wish to find themselves incarcerated. It should also have a gainful but hard labor component, to reduce the economic cost of the prison to society’s taxpayers. But you can also thank libidiot and foolish judges for the fact that prisons no longer are harsh, nasty places.
Maybe we need to make our prisons like those found in say, South Korea where the convicts get “The Three C’s”, Cold food Cold Showers and Cold Cells!!
Or like in Mexico!!
If these “victims” on the SSL are bad guys already, I’m thinking that the only problem is only 76% of them are getting whacked vs 100%.
Unfortunately, sometimes innocents get nailed along with them. And I’m willing to wager long odds that many of those that get whacked commit additional violent crimes against innocents before they get nailed, too.
A revolving-door jail or prison is less than useless. It wastes resources while providing little or no benefit to society.
Yeah I know how reality bites.
Just wishful thinking….
BTW, what seems like a lifetime ago I worked in Chicago as a semi-truck mechanic. The last tool we’d put in the tool tray when heading out for a service call was a pistol. I left that job for the safer confines of active duty Army.
How did someone, who was on death row in Texas, the state that executes over ten times the amount of the number two state vís a vís death penalty executions, stay alive for 38 years and die of old age?
IMHO one good improvement would be getting rid of lazy Prosecutors and the lazy-assed “Let ’em Loose Bruce” breed of Judges as well as making prison life more miserable, WHY should they even have TV while incarcerated?
A couple of weeks ago Obama pardon some violent gun criminals. It’s ok though cuz they were black and the evil racist justice system was the real bad guy.
Shot and killed in Chicago, to date:142
Shot and wounded in Chicago, to date:756
Total homicides in Chicago, to date:162
Courtesy of http://heyjackass.com/
Slow weekend, bad weather and all that.
The statistic that is missing here is the Homicide Closure rate. That rate is currently (Mar 31) 12.9 per cent. Who cares what the courts do when 88 % of murders remain unsolved. Not only dindonutten, they dinseenutten or dinhearnutten and doannonutten!
Isn’t it illegal to own a gun in Chicago?/sarc
The problem can be summed up in three words:
LIBERAL…DEMOCRAT…POLITICIANS
Anywhere they control urban politics the result is the same.
If you try and do something about it, I would venture two words will come out from the gates of the DOJ in Washington: disparate impact.
Of course you realize that it is because of our white privilege that these kids continue to offend.
If we didn’t have such white privilege these kids would be upstanding citizens and we would all be the criminals.
Solution for those BLM morons???
Jail all the white people, that way they can’t complain about the poor black kids shooting each other over drug turf or bad debts…
[…] Cruz Campaign The Quinton Report: Anne Arundel County Sheriff Arrested This Ain’t Hell: Chicago Admits That Criminals Cause Crimes Weasel Zippers: Poll – 25% Of British Muslims Want To Live Under Sharia Law Megan McArdle: […]
Not sure arming the folks at the biggest risk of getting shot is the right idea… in a way it sounds good (just read that lib research shows people who got shot were 5 times as likely to be shot again as people who hadn’t been- the problem is that most of those getting shot are in the same thug culture as the shooters.) Arming a Crip who was shot by the Bloods once is not gonna help anything…
Crooks are KILLING other CROOKS. NO, we SHOULD NOT be arming these POS crooks.
The PROBLEM really is the INNOCENTS being killed/injured.