By Chris Powell
According to government officials and politically correct journalism, crime in Connecticut is down. But a dedicated band of chronic criminals is trying to keep up the appearances of a crime wave, even if elected officials refuse to notice.
According to police in New Haven, two weekends ago a 49-year-old man hijacked a city police cruiser with an officer sitting in it. Rather than be hijacked, the officer pulled on the steering wheel, causing the cruiser to crash into a church. Nobody was badly hurt and when the police caught up with the perpetrator, charging him with kidnapping, assault, and a few other things, they discovered that they knew him well, as he already had been arrested 80 times.
It was a big story for a day but few news organizations bothered to quote the police about the perpetrator’s long criminal record.
Journalistic follow-up here is unlikely, since it would be too politically incorrect. “Long criminal record” is hardly news in Connecticut anymore; it’s more like a journalistic cliche.
But campaigns for the November election for the General Assembly have begun. Might some legislators and some challengers see a public service in asking how someone with 80 arrests has managed to stay out of prison and why there has been no recognition of his incorrigibility despite the constant harm he has done to public safety and order?
Every few years the Correction Department issues a report on recidivism — the return to crime and prison of offenders even after they have been imprisoned and released — and typically the rate is around 50%. This rate may be fairly construed as the rate of failure of the criminal-justice system. It would be much higher if it included crimes for which there was never an arrest.
The recidivism rate is so high because most people in Connecticut have to work hard at crime before being sent to prison, having repeatedly received lesser sentences and probations that persuaded them that criminal justice is not serious, and because most offenders are already seriously if not permanently damaged psychologically before a court gets around to locking them up.
Prison often tries to help offenders gain some education and work skills, but this seldom succeeds. Most prisoners are released into poverty, many of them still disturbed psychologically and without housing, a job, transportation, medical insurance, and any idea of what to do with themselves besides more of what got them into trouble.
There may be alternatives to this cycle — like giving parolees an efficiency apartment, a job, medical insurance, transportation, and counseling for a year or so of adjustment. New Haven, home to thousands of former and likely future offenders, is experimenting with something like this. But with severely chronic repeat offenders, nothing is likely to work.
Whether it’s a three-strikes, 10-strikes, or even an 80-strikes law requiring life imprisonment for chronic repeat offenders, reality requires starting there. But does Connecticut have any legislators or legislative candidates willing to face reality?
*
TRY SUING FOR PEACE: Horrible carnage continues in Gaza, as does clamor in the United States and around the world for a cease-fire between Gaza’s terrorist Hamas regime and Israel.
The Associated Press quotes a widowed Gazan mother of three saying, “We don’t know where to go,” and a Gazan father of five saying, “The situation is unbearable.”
But a cease-fire is not peace. There have been dozens of cease-fires in the long Palestinian war against Israel. What is most unbearable in Gaza is not war but peace. No one in Gaza is calling for peace and few outside Gaza are. A cease-fire is just the euphemism for preparing more war against Jews.
Peace might be had tomorrow if Gaza wanted it. There was a sort of peace until last October 7, when Gaza invaded Israel, killing, raping, and kidnapping mostly civilians. But anyone in Gaza who called for peace would be murdered by those dedicated to exterminating Jews.
Exterminating Jews remains the objective of those in charge of Gaza, and now, not surprisingly, the Israeli government is losing fear of exterminating Gazans in return.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
-END-
Chris Powell column 