By Chris Powell
Despite its devotion to political correctness and everything “woke,” could government in Connecticut actually be approaching relevance when it comes to gun crime and crime generally?
That was the implication the other day as Governor Lamont, the mayors of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Waterbury, and police chiefs gathered at the state Capitol and seemed to admit that the gun violence problem isn’t so much a problem of guns themselves as a problem of chronic offenders who shouldn’t be loose.
The mayors gave compelling examples. In Waterbury 70% of the people charged in shootings last year were awaiting trial on other charges or on probation, and 63% already had convictions for violent felonies or gun crimes. Of those charged in shootings in Hartford last year, 39% were awaiting trial on other charges, 14% were on probation, and 5% on parole.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker and Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim concurred that a few chronic offenders commit a disproportionate number of gun crimes in their cities.
Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin added that someone who has been convicted of criminal possession of a gun is 8,000 times more likely to be charged in a shooting than someone with no convictions.
That is, the big problem in the state’s violent crime is chronic offenders.
So, in a pleasant surprise, the governor and mayors broke from state government’s tedious habit of calling for more laws to hamper gun ownership by licensed and law-abiding people and instead proposed what should have been obvious decades ago: tougher enforcement against gun criminals.
“There have to be serious consequences for serious firearms offenses,” Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said. But gun charges are often dropped to secure plea bargains on other charges.
So the mayors want the Judicial Department to increase the number of courts with dockets dedicated to gun crimes. The mayors want “serious firearm offenses” to be more broadly defined, and criminal possession of a firearm to carry a longer sentence.
The mayors proposed new procedures for revoking bail, probation, and parole for offenders charged with new crimes, and requiring higher bonds for defendants with felony records.
The proposals were wonderful — and, sadly, so elementary. It was as if the mayors had just begun reading their local newspapers. wherein the phrase “long criminal record” appears almost every day in arrest reports about serious crimes. If the mayors had been reading the papers they might have noticed many years ago that police often arrest offenders who have incurred 10, 20, or even more convictions but who remain free and may not ever have spent much time locked up.
Meanwhile state officials and bleeding hearts boast about closing prisons.
But the mayors’ proposals omitted two crucial things.
First, they omitted an incorrigibility law, known elsewhere as a “three-strikes” law — a law requiring life sentences for chronic repeat offenders. In Connecticut even a “10-strikes law” might markedly reduce crime.
And second, the mayors omitted anything about ensuring that offenders are truly rehabilitated before their release.
Two days after the governor and the mayors acknowledged the problem of chronic offenders, the Capitol was visited by a social-justice group, the Career Resources Data Team, which reported on the horrifying condition of Connecticut’s prisoners and parolees.
According to the report, half of parolees have a serious drug problem and 60% are mentally ill to some extent. Almost half of parolees lack a high school diploma, 85% have less than five years of work experience, and 32% have less than two years. Eighteen percent have no housing — they are essentially destitute.
Without education, work skills, rudimentary housing, and mental health, parolees hardly can be expected to resist the temptation to return to crime. So maybe [ITALICS] every [END ITALICS] offender with a serious conviction should get an indeterminate sentence for which parole can be obtained only through a year-long, government-sponsored job apprenticeship that provides medical insurance and a private room to live in.
Dumping uneducated, unskilled, unhoused, and disturbed people on the street, as Connecticut long has been doing, is only asking for more crime and is a crime in itself.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 