restorative justice

Comment Of The Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, An Ethics Dunce Family, And West Coast Bizarro World”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The tale of the social justice warrior baker whose family announced that in her honor and memory they didn’t want any law enforcement “violence “—like, say, punishment, to be inflicted on her killers has generated a fascinating discussion.

Here is the Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in-NJ, who had been on quite a roll lately. The post under examination is “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, An Ethics Dunce Family, And West Coast Bizarro World”…

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I thought most of the aging hippies moved to upstate New York (home of Ithaca, the City of Evil according to many conservatives) and Vermont (the land of gray ponytails).

All silliness aside, this statement makes me want to yawn, not get angry. One of the ending themes I return to in my writing, both historical and fictional, is that evil always returns, although it may wear a different name or a different face, and it falls to a new generation to fight and defeat it. Yesterday it might have worn a hammer and sickle, the day before that it might have worn a swastika or a rising sun, today it wears a crescent or a double-headed eagle. But the underlying idea, that it is going to impose its will and its vision by force, never changes.

The foolish idealism that often supports it keeps returning also, though it too wears a different name and face in every age, actually often many different names and faces in each age. Today it wears the pan-African colors of Black Lives Matter and the rainbow colors of militant abnormal sexuality. Yesterday it wore the tie-dye of the hippies and the ragged habit of Christian anarchism. There have always been the black-clad true anarchists to spur the idealists along or take the action the idealists balk at. The underlying ideal is always the same: a perfect society with no coercion and perfectly good people, obtained by resistance to the current order. Yesterday the anthem was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” today it’s Brett Dennen’s “Heaven”: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Madeline Brame

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Take that restorative justice bullshit and shove it up your asses! Not for murder!”

—-Madeline Bram, mother of murder victim Hason Correa, 35, a vet and married father of three who was beaten and stabbed to death by a gang in 2018, when the Manhattan Supreme Court handed down a seven year prison sentence to one of the killers.

Well said.

Bram erupted after hearing that the absurdly light sentence had been agreed to by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (above). Bragg is one of several big city DA’s elected with the assistance of George Soros contributions (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who stand for leniency in the justice system as a solution to “over-incarceration.”

The solution to “over-incarceration” is for African Americans to commit crimes in rough proportion to their numbers in U.S. society. Minimizing the consequences of committing these crimes will not achieve that end.

Duh. Continue reading →

More Scary Tales Of The Great Stupid: New York’s “Restorative Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Indeed, Major Clifton. You can’t get much crazier (or stupid) than this.

As I have related here before, in my fortuitous accidental opportunity to chat privately with genius Herman Kahn many years ago, he observed that societies periodically suffer mass amnesia and forget why traditions, rules and policies that had existed for centuries exist. They then try something new that seems like a good idea at the time, only to be reminded it is, in fact, a terrible idea, and one that everyone once knew was a terrible idea, which is why it had been wisely dismissed centuries or even eons ago. This cycle is needlessly destructive, and those who trigger it are incompetent and irresponsible, usually choosing to adopt magical thinking over cold, hard reality because it supports their ideology. For some reason, or because of a cosmic practical joke, the United States is being tortured by such misbegotten inspirations. “Hey! Let’s just let anyone into the country who wants to come!” “Let’s defund the police!” “Let’s give up on stopping people from getting addicted to drugs!” “Let’s wear masks over the lower parts of our faces all the time, just to be safe! And make our kids do it too!” “Hey, why not spend as much money as we want even when we’re already deep in debt?” (I had to stop myself mid-list because the examples popping into my head were obviously going to keep coming.)

New York City has embraced one of the more ridiculous of the ideas arising out of magical thinking, societal amnesia and The Great Stupid: “restorative justice.” Part of an ambitious reform package created by former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio (“Hey! Let’s take advice from one of New York City’s most disastrous failures ever!”), restorative justice is, like so many recent terrible ideas, a response to the uncomfortable results of cultural pathologies in the black community. In 2019, De Blasio announced the criminal justice revolution, which was, he explained, necessary because ““For far too long, this city’s answer to every societal problem was to throw people in jail. We lost generations to mass incarceration, mostly young men of color.” Yes, it was “disparate impact” again! Punishing criminals and enforcing laws had a disparate impact on black Americans, because they are still committing a disproportional number of serious and violent crimes. Solution: Stop punishing criminals and enforcing laws!

Continue reading →