America’s Real Injustice: Under-Incarceration

The following is converted from a speech delivered to the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University as part of Young America Foundation’s Logan Family lecture series on December 6, 2021.

Criminal gangs are looting stores all over the West Coast. Violent crime is on the rise all over the country. Assault is up. Rape has spiked 20% in recent years, according to the FBI. And the number of homicides jumped 30% in just one year from 2019 to 2020, according to the FBI and CDC. That’s the largest increase in at least 115 years and possibly ever.

Just two weeks ago, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the neck while walking to school in the Bronx. His attacker was out on bail from a gun charge just a few months earlier, which he committed while out on parole for another gun charge. So a little boy took a bullet to the neck because — twice — the authorities in the criminal justice system failed to do their jobs and lock up a thug for his crimes.

A couple of weeks before that, Edmond Harris became the fiftieth person arrested in Chicago this year for murdering, attempting to murder, or shooting someone while out on felony bond. Harris had already been arrested on February 12 after allegedly crashing a carjacked SUV. For some reason he was not charged with any crime related to the carjacking or the crash and was instead charged only with “failure to register as a sex offender in an unrelated matter,” which itself is a felony. But then again, Harris was released after only a few days on a $1,000 bond. Then, according to federal prosecutors, five weeks after posting bond, Harris killed a 31-year-old Uber driver in yet another carjacking. A 31-year-old Uber driver, just trying to make a living, is dead because authorities in the criminal justice system refused to do their jobs and lock up a thug for his crimes. 

Then, of course, two weeks ago, we saw the horrific Christmas parade attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in which a man mowed down 60 innocent people, killing six, including an eight-year-old boy. The driver was a career criminal. His rap sheet goes back at least 22 years. His social media posts reveal him to be a black nationalist who recently encouraged people to “start bakk knokkin white people TF out.” Much as he dislikes white people, he seems especially to hate the Jews, about whom he says “Hitler was right” and “did the world a favor by killing Jews.” All of this — his rap sheet, his lack of rehabilitation — is publicly available. At the time of the attack he had several open felony charges for things like recklessly endangering safety, battery, and domestic abuse. And still, he was able to commit the Christmas parade massacre because two days earlier, the leftist district attorney in Milwaukee, John Chisholm, let this monster out of jail on $1,000 bail. Now 60 people are injured, and six people are dead.

America is in desperate need of criminal justice reform. America desperately needs to lock up more criminals and keep them locked up longer.

It seems so obvious. When crime goes up, that means there are too many criminals on the streets. And yet many politicians seem to have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion. Over the past few years, leftist politicians have called for “defunding the police,” “abolishing the police,” and even “abolishing prisons.” 

Congressman Rashida Tlaib just recently reaffirmed her support for emptying federal prisons within 10 years. Jonathan Swan, a reporter at Axios, asked Representative Tlaib just recently if she really thought that not a single person should remain in federal prison. What about rapists, murderers, serial killers? She refused to back down. In the eyes of Tlaib — and her squad-mate Ayanna Pressley and a number of other Democrats as well — every criminal needs to be released from federal prison.

Now, I have come to suspect this sort of thing from the Left. Letting criminals off the hook is par for the course for them. What I did not expect was that the Right would go along with it. But unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened. Otherwise-conservative politicians have come to echo the Left’s claims of “overincarceration.” Even President Trump — one of the strongest conservative politicians to come around in my lifetime, a man I greatly admire and for whom I voted twice — even Trump endorsed a jail-break bill, “First Step Act,” as one of his administration’s signature achievements. But America does not have an “overincarceration” problem. On the contrary, America has a severe under-incarceration problem, and almost no one seems willing to addresses it.

The proponents of the “overincarceration myth” usually begin by pointing out that America has the highest prison population and the highest incarceration rate in the

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