Other commenters have made this point, but to boil it down to a sentence: Reforms that promote responsible fatherhood and parenting are the best criminal justice reforms, because they promote the earliest and most effective interventions -- far more effective than the best-intentioned government programs.
I like the concept of these debates, but a big problem with them seems to be a lack of sufficient table-setting about what's actually being debated. I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through so far, but I would have loved to see less time spent on what criminal justice reform actually *means* and more on the effects (or lack thereof) of specific policies.
So true! I didn’t hear Kmele or Laura mention fatherless homes. Laura wants more money thrown at these programs but if there isn’t a foundation in the home precious few will rise above it. It is so painfully obvious. When Laura said “lived experience” I knew she was deep into the woke mind virus. Maybe she should go live in one these areas and see what it’s like for the average person living with high crime levels. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I found it quite arrogant to dismiss Seneca who is literally living in this environment.
I really appreciated Seneca's comments! Fantastic real world feedback from someone on the streets of Oakland who is interested in affecting real change. Great work, Free Press!
I would love for Lara Bazelon to be on the victim end of “restorative justice” as it operates in schools and see how she feels. But HR would get rid of her tormentor in a nanosecond for workplace sexual harassment and violent threats. How dare you make children go through this psychological torture never knowing when the next shoe will drop. Lara believes brains aren’t formed until 26, but I have huge concerns about the validity of this finding and the way it’s being used in criminal justice when the issue is not one of conceptual complexity but plain right/wrong. So much of what her side was saying just stupefying as I’ve seen the deterioration in my neighborhood as soon as we got a progressive mayor who supported criminal justice”reform.”
Lara was exhausting. Especially her comment that we can't lock up everybody who is "Scary or problematic". I find the idea that people should be able to deny treatment for chronic mental illness or chronic substance use while simultaneously lowering the quality of life of strangers to be problematic. Your rights stop where they intersect with my rights. Your safety becomes irrelevant when you become a threat to my safety. Zero apologies.
If one is looking for root causes, it's simple, but requires honesty: people who have no business having children are having them, and expecting the rest of us to clean up the mess. It's as if someone knocked on your door in the middle of a dinner party, pushed passed you into the dining room, climbed up on the dinner table, and defecated. Then got up and walked out, while blathering about how it's our shared responsibility to clean up the mess.
When 14-year-old children are car-jacking people in WashDC, that's the parents' fault.
I wish these debates would partner a pundit with an expert in the field like an actual police officer. Hearing people talk about policing when they clearly don't understand it is agonizing, whether they want to hire more cops or not.
Rafael Mangual demolished Bazelon on this topic last year. This was an absolute beatdown. The progressive criminal justice movement since 2020 had about as clear, severe, and fast negative impact on society that it's not even worth arguing over. For people that can't admit that the entire movement was at best stupid and at worse pure evil--imagine trying to evaluate longer tail policy initiatives like entitlements, early childhood, etc.? These things could be going horribly and no one will admit it. There is no accountability.
Now that everyone can see these were terrible ideas by unwise people it's nice watching them squirm to save face. Also upsetting that people can't simply admit they were wrong.
Also, it's the same thing we keep hearing. "Let's get to the root causes". "Causation is nuanced, there are many factors in play."
Of course the root causes are the children and all the things "we" need to be doing for the population of children that grows to being criminals is really, when you look at it, just basic parenting. The government cannot provide that.
Of course causation is nuanced but it's also disproportional. While 10 factors contribute to causation--one of two of those factors are 90% of all of it. Pointing to the hodge podge of other factors is just a debate tactic, but one that has been incredibly effective for failed "experts" since the obvious failure of great society programs.
Bazelon has the view of the criminal justice system that a med mal lawyer would have of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. I bet we can find just as much corruption, negligence, and intentional harm in the healthcare sector but it's still a huge net benefit.
Also, the criminal justice system in America affects 5.5mm people out of 333mm (prison, probation, parole). There are less than 400k people in jail for drug offenses total. For someone arguing against hyperbole, Bazelon made it seem like we are just rounding them up. What a distortion.
Foster is smart, articulate, and clever but he probably couldn't manage a McDonalds. Rather than putting out a grease fire he would be lecturing the place on the structural design flaws in the fryer that probably contributed to the fire. He lives in a world of ideas.
I always need to remind myself where most of us live adjacent to the alternate realities of others. The ideologues of the far right and far left absolute believe the distortions and historical revisions upon which their beliefs and behaviors are based. Cult contagion is the only reason I can come up as to why a cartoon like Chesa Boudin was ever elected. What ever happened the centrist common sense……..it has become a category of individual to be held in suspicion for not confessing loyalty to the revisions and distortions of extreme views. Lara Bazelon’s comments made my stomach turn, though I believe she is well intentioned. I read Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko and found it refreshingly honest and objective, especially since it written by a liberal (I am viscerally programmed to distrust liberals, having grown up and lived many years in New York City). The observation that statistics can manipulated and misinterpreted like a Rorschach ink blot is a point well taken. I stand firm in my support for police officers, law and order, and the need to involuntary treat the mentally ill and substance dependent. I also don’t believe that mad dogs can be reformed. One the developmental damage is done, some people never change, especially once sociopathic personality structure has congealed.
I live in a small city in California where virtually all violent crime is either inter-family or one druggie fighting another druggie. I don't fear for my personal safety walking around or at my house.
What there is is a massive epidemic of low-level theft, vandalism, arson, illegal camping, brandishing, and general druggie nonsense where, like...
Someone acts out and smashes a window and they get arrested and they're back out on the street 48 hours later and they steal the copper out of someone's AC and they're back out and they steal a catalytic converter and blah blah blah and it just keeps going until they meet their Day Man/Night Man counterpart and there's a battle and someone ends up hospitalized or dead and only then is it serious in the eyes of the law.
And meanwhile when the catalytic converter gets stolen out of my company's work truck then that screws up the whole business from top to bottom.
Drew Magary took a walk around Lake Merritt last week to show everyone how safe Oakland is and on the back leg there was a car on fire in what is normally a "safe" area.
Nobody died; it doesn't add to the murder stats. However, that's an economic hit that matters to the people there. The perception that the economy is not so great these days isn't just inflation, it's the fear that a broken car window could be ruinous.
1. My sister-in-law was brutally murdered by a repeat violent offender with a long history of mental illness who was in front of a progressive judge less than two weeks prior for being a suspect in the murder of his aunt via arson. He was set free to walk the streets while pending trial. He was set free to rape, torture, and murder my sister. So when Lara said that violent and psychopathic criminals are NEVER just being set free, that it just doesn’t happen, that really really really pissed me off.
2. Incredible that Lara accused the other side of straw man arguments, when first she mischaracterized the opposition’s concerns about cutting police as a suggestion that her side was supporting zero police and total anarchy. Then she went on to contrast that by saying that she is also opposed to “lock everyone up” and “one giant government institution that will incarcerate and institutionalize everyone that we find scary.” Literally no one is saying any of that at all. So it’s weird that she said she wanted more nuance while simultaneously misrepresenting the other side’s arguments in a very un-nuanced way.
3. I actually admire and appreciate the empathy of Lara when she grieves over her 30 year old client. As a Christian, my faith informs my belief that no one is disposable and every life has value. It is a grief that his life turned out the way that it did. And I support the impulse to do more to intervene earlier in young people’s lives. But sometimes in these conversations, it starts feeling like there is more empathy for those who have committed a crime than the person they harmed. I am not setting up the “false binary” that Lara objects to. You can have empathy for a criminal for the situation of their life, but it needs to be in parallel with and NEVER at the expense of the criminal’s victims. Victims of crime deserve empathy first.
4. Lara’s statement that just a couple of interventions in his life would have prevented his outcome is a bold assumption. Some folks are given chance after chance and still make the wrong choices. Unless someone is truly mentally ill, we are all responsible for our choices. This isn’t an argument against all prevention, especially where evidence shows it works. But it’s a separate argument from what should be done with folks who have already committed crimes. Further, my intuitions and observations tell me that the real solution aren’t ones that the government can readily provide (i.e. intact families, virtue, faith, etc).
5. I feel like the premise of the debate maybe could have been better because I found myself agreeing with everyone on the panel (even Lara a couple of times). Yeah, we need criminal reform AND we need to enforce law and order. We need more, well paid, highly respected, better trained, but also held accountable, cops.
6. Final point! I was really struck by Kmele’s comment about anyone who is libertarian and skeptical of government and public schools should be equally suspicious of cops and prisons. It really made me think. Because I am just such a libertarian-leaning skeptic. But then I thought, I am also pretty supportive of the military. Which isn’t to say that I don’t believe there is nothing that needs reform in the military…I do! But we absolutely need a strong and well-supported military, and I think law enforcement is closer to that than it is to administering public schools or regulating businesses.
Criminal behavior (and school misbehavior) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Since 1960 the number of boys raised without fathers has grown along with welfare state policies that make fathers less relevant. The debaters ignore this and promote drug legalization and government interventions they assume will fix toxic American family culture that inculcates many boys. "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple describes English city life (pathological violence, drug use, fatherless boys, unemployment) among lower classes identical to ghetto culture in US cities. Yet these cultural patterns go unnoticed by political and media elites promoting government solutions with little empirical evidence of success. Government can't create healthy families, but unintended consequences of feel-good policies certainly incentivized family dysfunction.
💯. We are a society untethered… not beholden to family, religious institutions, or community. In times past, these institutions created guardrails of shared values, and people were shamed or shunned by their immediate families or the greater community if they did not follow the rules, written and unwritten. Our current culture celebrates every extreme expression of untethered individualism, and the collective has suffered. In addition, we have devalued the role of young males, who are no longer needed to provide, and who cannot provide even if they wanted to. It has become prohibitively expensive to start a family or buy a home, so these aspirational hopes have also gone by the wayside for the many. The only way back to some sort of sanity is the promotion of policies that build families. Right now there are none.
We have more criminals because America has a tradition of freedom that no other country shares. With that freedom, people may make poor choices.
Should that additional freedom mean more responsibility for one's actions? The criminal "reform" group says absolutely not.
The fundamental question is whether we should have a justice system that focuses on the rights of criminals or the rights of law-abiding citizens.
We've gone so far in the criminal rights direction that many people are no longer even bothering to report crimes and police are afraid to act even when crimes are committed right in front of them.
This is why the crime rate may actually be reported as declining in the cities most affected by "reform".
Absolutely correct. The modern left is insanely pushing for a society with freedom from consequence for everything but a person's immutable characteristics. That's a hell of a thing to build a society on.
Other commenters have made this point, but to boil it down to a sentence: Reforms that promote responsible fatherhood and parenting are the best criminal justice reforms, because they promote the earliest and most effective interventions -- far more effective than the best-intentioned government programs.
I like the concept of these debates, but a big problem with them seems to be a lack of sufficient table-setting about what's actually being debated. I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through so far, but I would have loved to see less time spent on what criminal justice reform actually *means* and more on the effects (or lack thereof) of specific policies.
So true! I didn’t hear Kmele or Laura mention fatherless homes. Laura wants more money thrown at these programs but if there isn’t a foundation in the home precious few will rise above it. It is so painfully obvious. When Laura said “lived experience” I knew she was deep into the woke mind virus. Maybe she should go live in one these areas and see what it’s like for the average person living with high crime levels. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I found it quite arrogant to dismiss Seneca who is literally living in this environment.
I really appreciated Seneca's comments! Fantastic real world feedback from someone on the streets of Oakland who is interested in affecting real change. Great work, Free Press!
I would love for Lara Bazelon to be on the victim end of “restorative justice” as it operates in schools and see how she feels. But HR would get rid of her tormentor in a nanosecond for workplace sexual harassment and violent threats. How dare you make children go through this psychological torture never knowing when the next shoe will drop. Lara believes brains aren’t formed until 26, but I have huge concerns about the validity of this finding and the way it’s being used in criminal justice when the issue is not one of conceptual complexity but plain right/wrong. So much of what her side was saying just stupefying as I’ve seen the deterioration in my neighborhood as soon as we got a progressive mayor who supported criminal justice”reform.”
Lara was exhausting. Especially her comment that we can't lock up everybody who is "Scary or problematic". I find the idea that people should be able to deny treatment for chronic mental illness or chronic substance use while simultaneously lowering the quality of life of strangers to be problematic. Your rights stop where they intersect with my rights. Your safety becomes irrelevant when you become a threat to my safety. Zero apologies.
100%
If one is looking for root causes, it's simple, but requires honesty: people who have no business having children are having them, and expecting the rest of us to clean up the mess. It's as if someone knocked on your door in the middle of a dinner party, pushed passed you into the dining room, climbed up on the dinner table, and defecated. Then got up and walked out, while blathering about how it's our shared responsibility to clean up the mess.
When 14-year-old children are car-jacking people in WashDC, that's the parents' fault.
I wish these debates would partner a pundit with an expert in the field like an actual police officer. Hearing people talk about policing when they clearly don't understand it is agonizing, whether they want to hire more cops or not.
Rafael Mangual demolished Bazelon on this topic last year. This was an absolute beatdown. The progressive criminal justice movement since 2020 had about as clear, severe, and fast negative impact on society that it's not even worth arguing over. For people that can't admit that the entire movement was at best stupid and at worse pure evil--imagine trying to evaluate longer tail policy initiatives like entitlements, early childhood, etc.? These things could be going horribly and no one will admit it. There is no accountability.
Now that everyone can see these were terrible ideas by unwise people it's nice watching them squirm to save face. Also upsetting that people can't simply admit they were wrong.
Also, it's the same thing we keep hearing. "Let's get to the root causes". "Causation is nuanced, there are many factors in play."
Of course the root causes are the children and all the things "we" need to be doing for the population of children that grows to being criminals is really, when you look at it, just basic parenting. The government cannot provide that.
Of course causation is nuanced but it's also disproportional. While 10 factors contribute to causation--one of two of those factors are 90% of all of it. Pointing to the hodge podge of other factors is just a debate tactic, but one that has been incredibly effective for failed "experts" since the obvious failure of great society programs.
Bazelon has the view of the criminal justice system that a med mal lawyer would have of doctors, nurses, and hospitals. I bet we can find just as much corruption, negligence, and intentional harm in the healthcare sector but it's still a huge net benefit.
Also, the criminal justice system in America affects 5.5mm people out of 333mm (prison, probation, parole). There are less than 400k people in jail for drug offenses total. For someone arguing against hyperbole, Bazelon made it seem like we are just rounding them up. What a distortion.
Foster is smart, articulate, and clever but he probably couldn't manage a McDonalds. Rather than putting out a grease fire he would be lecturing the place on the structural design flaws in the fryer that probably contributed to the fire. He lives in a world of ideas.
I always need to remind myself where most of us live adjacent to the alternate realities of others. The ideologues of the far right and far left absolute believe the distortions and historical revisions upon which their beliefs and behaviors are based. Cult contagion is the only reason I can come up as to why a cartoon like Chesa Boudin was ever elected. What ever happened the centrist common sense……..it has become a category of individual to be held in suspicion for not confessing loyalty to the revisions and distortions of extreme views. Lara Bazelon’s comments made my stomach turn, though I believe she is well intentioned. I read Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko and found it refreshingly honest and objective, especially since it written by a liberal (I am viscerally programmed to distrust liberals, having grown up and lived many years in New York City). The observation that statistics can manipulated and misinterpreted like a Rorschach ink blot is a point well taken. I stand firm in my support for police officers, law and order, and the need to involuntary treat the mentally ill and substance dependent. I also don’t believe that mad dogs can be reformed. One the developmental damage is done, some people never change, especially once sociopathic personality structure has congealed.
I live in a small city in California where virtually all violent crime is either inter-family or one druggie fighting another druggie. I don't fear for my personal safety walking around or at my house.
What there is is a massive epidemic of low-level theft, vandalism, arson, illegal camping, brandishing, and general druggie nonsense where, like...
Someone acts out and smashes a window and they get arrested and they're back out on the street 48 hours later and they steal the copper out of someone's AC and they're back out and they steal a catalytic converter and blah blah blah and it just keeps going until they meet their Day Man/Night Man counterpart and there's a battle and someone ends up hospitalized or dead and only then is it serious in the eyes of the law.
And meanwhile when the catalytic converter gets stolen out of my company's work truck then that screws up the whole business from top to bottom.
Drew Magary took a walk around Lake Merritt last week to show everyone how safe Oakland is and on the back leg there was a car on fire in what is normally a "safe" area.
Nobody died; it doesn't add to the murder stats. However, that's an economic hit that matters to the people there. The perception that the economy is not so great these days isn't just inflation, it's the fear that a broken car window could be ruinous.
1. My sister-in-law was brutally murdered by a repeat violent offender with a long history of mental illness who was in front of a progressive judge less than two weeks prior for being a suspect in the murder of his aunt via arson. He was set free to walk the streets while pending trial. He was set free to rape, torture, and murder my sister. So when Lara said that violent and psychopathic criminals are NEVER just being set free, that it just doesn’t happen, that really really really pissed me off.
2. Incredible that Lara accused the other side of straw man arguments, when first she mischaracterized the opposition’s concerns about cutting police as a suggestion that her side was supporting zero police and total anarchy. Then she went on to contrast that by saying that she is also opposed to “lock everyone up” and “one giant government institution that will incarcerate and institutionalize everyone that we find scary.” Literally no one is saying any of that at all. So it’s weird that she said she wanted more nuance while simultaneously misrepresenting the other side’s arguments in a very un-nuanced way.
3. I actually admire and appreciate the empathy of Lara when she grieves over her 30 year old client. As a Christian, my faith informs my belief that no one is disposable and every life has value. It is a grief that his life turned out the way that it did. And I support the impulse to do more to intervene earlier in young people’s lives. But sometimes in these conversations, it starts feeling like there is more empathy for those who have committed a crime than the person they harmed. I am not setting up the “false binary” that Lara objects to. You can have empathy for a criminal for the situation of their life, but it needs to be in parallel with and NEVER at the expense of the criminal’s victims. Victims of crime deserve empathy first.
4. Lara’s statement that just a couple of interventions in his life would have prevented his outcome is a bold assumption. Some folks are given chance after chance and still make the wrong choices. Unless someone is truly mentally ill, we are all responsible for our choices. This isn’t an argument against all prevention, especially where evidence shows it works. But it’s a separate argument from what should be done with folks who have already committed crimes. Further, my intuitions and observations tell me that the real solution aren’t ones that the government can readily provide (i.e. intact families, virtue, faith, etc).
5. I feel like the premise of the debate maybe could have been better because I found myself agreeing with everyone on the panel (even Lara a couple of times). Yeah, we need criminal reform AND we need to enforce law and order. We need more, well paid, highly respected, better trained, but also held accountable, cops.
6. Final point! I was really struck by Kmele’s comment about anyone who is libertarian and skeptical of government and public schools should be equally suspicious of cops and prisons. It really made me think. Because I am just such a libertarian-leaning skeptic. But then I thought, I am also pretty supportive of the military. Which isn’t to say that I don’t believe there is nothing that needs reform in the military…I do! But we absolutely need a strong and well-supported military, and I think law enforcement is closer to that than it is to administering public schools or regulating businesses.
Well said. All of it...
Excellent review of the “debate”. Thank you for sharing your family’s pain and loss. It certainly gives you credibility.
Criminal behavior (and school misbehavior) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. Since 1960 the number of boys raised without fathers has grown along with welfare state policies that make fathers less relevant. The debaters ignore this and promote drug legalization and government interventions they assume will fix toxic American family culture that inculcates many boys. "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple describes English city life (pathological violence, drug use, fatherless boys, unemployment) among lower classes identical to ghetto culture in US cities. Yet these cultural patterns go unnoticed by political and media elites promoting government solutions with little empirical evidence of success. Government can't create healthy families, but unintended consequences of feel-good policies certainly incentivized family dysfunction.
💯. We are a society untethered… not beholden to family, religious institutions, or community. In times past, these institutions created guardrails of shared values, and people were shamed or shunned by their immediate families or the greater community if they did not follow the rules, written and unwritten. Our current culture celebrates every extreme expression of untethered individualism, and the collective has suffered. In addition, we have devalued the role of young males, who are no longer needed to provide, and who cannot provide even if they wanted to. It has become prohibitively expensive to start a family or buy a home, so these aspirational hopes have also gone by the wayside for the many. The only way back to some sort of sanity is the promotion of policies that build families. Right now there are none.
No, it hasn't. The Democratic Party has made our cities unsafe. And people like you invited it. That's how you sustain your grift.
Vote for it. Watch it fail. Write about it. Cash the checks. Repeat...
The Democratic Party Rehabilitation Project, DELENDA EST!
We have more criminals because America has a tradition of freedom that no other country shares. With that freedom, people may make poor choices.
Should that additional freedom mean more responsibility for one's actions? The criminal "reform" group says absolutely not.
The fundamental question is whether we should have a justice system that focuses on the rights of criminals or the rights of law-abiding citizens.
We've gone so far in the criminal rights direction that many people are no longer even bothering to report crimes and police are afraid to act even when crimes are committed right in front of them.
This is why the crime rate may actually be reported as declining in the cities most affected by "reform".
Absolutely correct. The modern left is insanely pushing for a society with freedom from consequence for everything but a person's immutable characteristics. That's a hell of a thing to build a society on.