Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Yale University’s police union seems to have thought last week that it could scare up a better contract by distributing to incoming freshmen a handbill suggesting that New Haven is so dangerous that just leaving their rooms in the university cocoon could get them killed. Crime and violence in New Haven are “shockingly high,” the handbill said.

Mayor Justin Elicker and other city officials denounced the union’s fear mongering, accused the flyer of inaccuracies, and insisted that crime in the city has been coming down. (It depends on the duration measured.)

It was hard to see how the flyer made a case for a better contract. But most places are far safer than New Haven.

After all, New Haven has a large impoverished population, has shootings almost every day — some fatal — and every month the state’s prisons send back to the city dozens of troubled former offenders who soon will return to crime.

If New Haven was as safe as those offended by the flyer want people to believe, the city wouldn’t have a “shot spotter” system to hasten police response to the constant mayhem, and Yale would not offer security escorts to students around the clock on campus.

But Yalies recognize the university’s urban environment and probably have noticed the deteriorating conditions in many cities. Yale’s reputation has induced them to take a risk.

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So the controversy over the flyer is worthwhile mainly for the rest of Connecticut, whose social contract long has been to accept disintegration in the cities as long as it can be confined. Since increasingly it cannot be confined, maybe it will be addressed seriously only if it keeps spreading.

For try as they might, the cities aren’t equipped to save themselves, being so poor and torn between crime victims and perpetrators, most of each group being city residents. Like every victim, every perpetrator is a disaster for his family.

At a recent meeting Hartford’s City Council noted that serious crime in the city is committed disproportionately by repeat offenders the courts have failed to put away for good or even to bring to any resolution at all, leaving many free on bond for long periods and committing more crimes.

Hartford’s police say 73% of violent criminals in the city have been arrested before and 79% of perpetrators in shootings have already been arrested for other gun crimes. As of a few days ago Hartford had suffered 28 murders this year, a rate higher than last year’s, and — hardly noticed — 67 people had survived shootings in the city.

This should be an outrage beyond Hartford, but it’s not, and the city council has no jurisdiction over repeat offenders or crime generally. It can only appropriate for more police.

The Hartford-area chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also has noted rising crime in the city. But its idea is only to alert city residents to the many “resources” available to them, like food pantries. That won’t tame wild young men.

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Running for mayor, Hartford state Sen. John Fonfara comes closest to the underlying problem.

In an interview this month Fonfara implicitly referred to what is usually unmentionable in Connecticut: child neglect at home engendered by the welfare system and social promotion in school. He cited children who “start school unready, or they couldn’t read by third grade and get discouraged. They end up in ninth grade but they’re at a sixth-grade or fifth-grade level, and they’re too old and they quit. … Maybe they don’t have support at home in their neighborhood. Maybe some of their friends are involved in a gang, and then it goes from there.”

The remedy Fonfara offered was weak: more pre-school. But at least it was relevant, and it’s probably too much to expect a candidate for mayor to ask directly where all this child neglect is coming from in a city that is full of it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)  

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By Chris Powell

Hartford’s Democratic primary for mayor Sept. 12, which will be the equivalent of the general election in November, may give Connecticut another reason to enact the runoff election mechanism known as ranked-choice voting.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters designate not just the candidate who is their first choice but also second and even third choices. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, votes received by candidates who finish third or lower are transferred to the two leading candidates in accordance with each voter’s indications. Ranked-choice voting’s purpose is to build a majority and prevent unrepresentative candidates from winning with a minority of the vote.  

Hartford’s mayoral primary will have three candidates — Arunan Arulampalam, a lawyer and chief executive of the Hartford Land Bank, who has the endorsement of the Hartford Democratic City Committee; and two challengers, state Sen. John Fonfara and Eric Coleman, a former state judge, representative, and senator. Since the challengers are well known and regarded, the winner of the primary probably will receive less than a majority vote and a runoff election between the top two vote getters well might produce a different winner and a more small-d democratic result.

Next month’s Democratic primaries for mayor in New Haven and Bridgeport, which also will be tantamount to election, will have only two candidates each, but with a little more competent petitioning, they also well could have had three or more candidates, creating the same prospect of a winner being chosen by less than a majority.

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In recent decades Connecticut has had elections for governor and U.S. senator in which the winner did not gain a majority and a runoff vote probably would have produced a winner who would have pursued policies very different from those that were pursued by the plurality winner.

In 1970 Connecticut native James L. Buckley, who died this month, was elected U.S. senator in New York with only 39% of the vote in a three-way race. Buckley was a pro-Vietnam War conservative running on the Conservative Party line against two anti-war liberals, a Democrat and a Republican, and almost certainly would not have been elected if the anti-war vote had not been split.

Indeed, though Buckley was brilliant, principled, and affable, he was easily defeated for re-election by a Democrat in the 1976 election when the liberal vote was not split. (He ran for senator in Connecticut in 1980 but lost again in a two-candidate race.) 

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The main argument against ranked-choice voting is that it may confuse voters. Indeed, it might confuse some at first. But it’s not rocket science, and electing a candidate opposed by the majority might be even more confusing.

In Connecticut most opposition to ranked-choice voting seems to come from conservatives. Is this because conservatives can imagine winning in Connecticut only when the majority party, the Democratic Party, is split? If so, conservatives are failing to see that the most likely practical effect of ranked-choice voting in Connecticut would be to moderate the Democratic Party.

For in Connecticut as in other states, the far left exerts its control over the Democratic Party in large part through the mechanism of a separate far-left party — in Connecticut, the Working Families Party, which mainly advances the interests of government employees and other government dependents. Ordinarily the Working Families Party cross-endorses Democrats, giving them two lines on the ballot.

But any Democratic nominee suspected of moderation and lack of subservience to the government employee unions can be threatened with the loss of the Working Families Party cross-endorsement and with the party’s nomination of its own candidate, taking votes away from the Democrat.

Ranked-choice voting would greatly diminish the extortion power of extremist third parties, since most people voting for an extremist third-party candidate would designate a second-choice candidate closest ideologically to their first choice. In Connecticut Working Families Party voters would gravitate toward the next-most-leftist candidate, a Democrat, even one suspected of moderation. 

That is, in Connecticut ranked-choice voting would weaken the far left.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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By Chris Powell

While Connecticut state government reduced income taxes this year, being flush with hundreds of millions of dollars of “emergency” federal aid for an emergency that is long over, no one should expect state government to make a habit of it. With a national economic recession coming on, state taxes probably will be raised before they are reduced again.

So the government class soon may renew its clamor for higher state taxes on rich people, who already pay most of Connecticut’s income tax but who are thought to be easy targets politically. Last week the Connecticut Mirror reported that a national liberal advocacy organization, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, has issued a study assuring states that contrary to popular belief, higher taxes won’t provoke rich people to relocate to states with lower taxes. So presumably Connecticut should tax them a lot more.

The study’s conclusion is not entirely ridiculous. For the more money people have, the less sensitive they may be to tax increases — if they are happy with where they’re living. Connecticut has many rich residents who could save hundreds of thousands of dollars and some who could save even millions of dollars a year by moving to states with lower taxes. They stay because money isn’t the only thing of importance to them.

But of course it’s a matter of degree. Tax people enough and at a certain point even the super-rich will move. 

Cheered on by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, liberals in Connecticut seem to want to discover the tax threshold that will prompt the super-rich to relocate, and then raise their taxes to a point just below that threshold. They call this “equity,” though people not on government’s payroll might find it arrogant, greedy, and cynical.

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In any case Connecticut already has created many tax exiles not just among the super-rich but also the merely prosperous, especially older people who want to avoid the state’s winters and have established legal residency in income tax-free Florida while returning to Connecticut in the spring and summer. It’s not just Florida, for Connecticut has lost many residents to the Carolinas, where taxes generally are lower, especially property taxes.

Scorning states that like to cut taxes, the author of the budget and policy group’s study says: “If deep tax cuts result in substantial deterioration in education, public safety, parks, roads, and other critical services and infrastructure, these states will render themselves less, not more, desirable places to live and raise a family.”

Well, sure. But what if a state’s living conditions decline even with tax increases? That seems to be the case in the highly taxed northeastern part of the country, including Connecticut, which has been lagging the country in population and economic growth.

Even Connecticut’s liberals acknowledge the disincentives created by taxes, at least in regard to the high property taxes of the cities, taxes that long have been pushing the middle class out to the suburbs and leaving the cities with ever-worsening poverty and governance. 

In the end Connecticut’s liberals have simply wanted more money for government and its employees no matter the cost in urban demographics or anything else. Results don’t seem to matter.

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The most telling evidence of this indifference to results is in public education, where for years spending has increased despite declining enrollment and declining or stagnant student performance. Insofar as any correlation between education spending and student performance can be found in Connecticut, it is a negative one. The more spending, the worse the results.

The only correlation that counts in education is between spending and the satisfaction of teacher union members, the core of the majority political party’s army.

That’s why Connecticut shouldn’t raise taxes on anyone, including the super-rich. 

For more revenue to the government will just sustain the indifference to results and distract from what the state needs most, an examination of why many expensive policies — including those on education, poverty, welfare, and crime — are not reaching their nominal objectives. Maybe the real objectives are something else.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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By Chris Powell

Some people may privately celebrate the steady decline of the Catholic Church in Connecticut, which worsened last week as Hartford Archbishop Leonard P. Blair announced the closing of two more churches in Waterbury and the merger of three others there.

The church is resented for its opposition to homosexuality, its exclusion of women from the priesthood, and, of course, for the rampant sexual abuse committed by priests over many years and its concealment by the church’s highest officials. Not so long ago the church in Connecticut strove to criminalize contraception and still opposes it, if only theoretically.

But ironically the church may be resented most of all here for its opposition to abortion, a stance that has become heroic as abortion fanaticism has consumed the state’s political class, which not only rationalizes abortions performed long into fetal viability but also wants state government to finance travel and abortions for women from abortion-restricting states.

The church gets little credit for the thousands of lives its hospitals have saved or improved, nor for the education its schools continue to provide, education far superior to and far less expensive than most education provided by Connecticut’s public schools, which have been declining almost as fast as the church itself has been.

Nor is there much appreciation of the ordinary daily work of the church — the baptisms and marriages performed, the counseling for engaged couples, the funerals, and the many other good works that create and sustain community and proclaim the sanctity, obligation, spirituality, and meaning of life, even for the poorest and most demoralized, pushing back against the corrupting materialism and nihilism of the age.

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Yes, correlation is not necessarily causation, but as social disorder explodes in Connecticut, with ever more brazen crime, mental illness, drug abuse, homelessness, educational failure, road rage, hatefulness, political incivility, and such, the bad trends may not be completely unrelated to the decline of religion generally and the Catholic Church particularly.

Connecticut used to be heavily Catholic and this gave the church more political influence than it deserved and used well. But now that, according to Archbishop Blair, the number of Catholics in the Hartford archdiocese has fallen by about 70% in the last 50 years, it’s not apparent that Connecticut is any better for it.

At least Catholic and other churches help hold neighborhoods together and their buildings haven’t become decrepit even as Connecticut’s cities have declined economically and socially and gotten dangerous. Waterbury, one of those cities long in decline, will not be any stronger for the closing and consolidation of more of its Catholic churches. Indeed, few things are more disconcerting, incongruous, and indicative of social disintegration than a vacant church building or one converted to secular use.    

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Of course the church must take responsibility for its decline, for failing to convince people of its necessity. Mere tradition is not a persuasive argument for religious doctrines.

But venerable as it is, the church isn’t the only teacher around, nor the only one making huge mistakes.

The biggest teacher, government, is, unlike the church, tax-funded and so draws on infinite money as its welfare system ruthlessly destroys the family and subsidizes child neglect and other irresponsibility, as it destroys education by abandoning standards, and as it promotes not just all sorts of gambling but also a hallucinogenic drug in the name of raising revenue without direct taxes. Altogether government is embedding and perpetuating poverty and hopelessness in society.     

No church has been doing anything close to damage like that.

*

The British writer, sometime politician, and Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc may have had a point a century ago. “The Catholic Church,” he said, “is an institution I am bound to hold divine. But for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”

By contrast, no matter how much knavish imbecility it commits, government will last forever. It is managed worse than the church but gets away with it mainly because it employs so many more people to do its damage, which they often imagine to be God’s work. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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By Chris Powell

Next week’s installment of Connecticut’s annual suspension of sales taxes on clothing and shoes may be a reminder that government is very good at bribing people with their own money.

Sales Tax-Free Week is promoted as state government’s special benevolence to families with children about to return to school and in need of new apparel, though for years now any close look at students entering or leaving Connecticut’s middle and high schools has shown that scruffiness is far more fashionable than neatness and is fully approved by parents.

But kids are always growing out of their pre-ripped jeans and needing new ones, so parents buying clothes next week may feel that they are saving a little money compliments of their governor and state legislators.

The feeling is deceptive. That’s because, since money is “fungible” — interchangeable — the real burden of government is discovered less in its particular taxes than in the totality of its spending. With Sales Tax-Free Week state government has not really decided to make a special gift to the people but rather to recover the foregone revenue someplace else. 

This is all calculated when the state budget is devised. Government determines how much money it wants for operations in the year or two ahead, and the amount to be spent is not really reduced to cover the revenue lost by the brief and narrow suspension of the sales tax. Instead, state taxes elsewhere are sustained or raised as necessary, or state government relies more on “free” money from the federal government.

Sales Tax-Free Week does not change the real burden of government.

The Connecticut Mirror this week quoted the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy as noting that even on its own terms Sales Tax-Free Week largely fails as relief for the poor and middle class. The institute says most of the tax relief on clothing goes to wealthier people who can afford to buy more; that sales taxes remain regressive, falling more heavily on people with lower income; and that there are far better ways of providing tax relief to the poor and middle class.

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Either directly or indirectly everyone in Connecticut pays municipal property taxes, which are high, even as most state financial aid to municipalities bestowed in the name of property tax relief is gobbled up by compensation for municipal government employees, achieving little if any property tax relief. 

Requiring municipalities to reduce their property tax rates would help ordinary people far more than a week without sales taxes on clothing and shoes. So would reducing the state tax on gasoline or the fees on driver’s licenses and auto registrations.

But cutting other taxes and fees on a long-term basis would be taken for granted quickly, while Sales Tax-Free Week can be presented as a special event of the benevolence of elected officials.

Indeed, if there were any sincere liberals in Connecticut politics, and not just people who mistake subservience to the government employee unions for goodness, they might wonder aloud why, if one week a year without the sales tax on clothing and shoes is good, 52 weeks a year with the sales tax reduced a bit on everything might not be even better; why larger tax reductions generally might not be better still; and why some basic efficiencies now grossly lacking in state and municipal government might not be best of all.

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WHAT ELSE IS IN THERE?: Now that Connecticut knows that former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski isn’t the state’s only political figure doing business with that awful country (and U.S. ally) Saudi Arabia but that the investment house run by the wife of Governor Lamont, a Democrat, has at least one big Saudi “partnership,” will any of the state’s many politically correct news organizations review the rest of Mrs. Lamont’s extensive portfolio for more examples of political incorrectness?

It would be surprising if there weren’t many. 

Or can only Republicans be politically incorrect in Connecticut?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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By Chris Powell

Government’s subsidizing and thereby encouraging and legitimizing parental irresponsibility isn’t the only cause of the country’s long-worsening child neglect. Government causes the problem in other ways too.

The next most important cause of child neglect may be persistent inflation, which is always underreported in government economic data, since the criteria for measuring inflation have been changed opportunistically to make inflation look lower than it is. This deception has facilitated the stagnation of real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — while inflation produces great unearned wealth for property owners.

Also contributing to child neglect is the repeal of educational and disciplinary standards in public schools and their replacement with social promotion and the acceptance of disruption of classes. Undereducated young people coming out of high schools are not qualified for the better-paying jobs needed to support families. Such young people may have to work longer hours or take second and even third jobs just to survive, sacrificing family time. Undereducated young people are also unprepared for life generally, lacking the understanding needed for taking care of and getting along with others.

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That Connecticut steadily has been getting poorer is implied by the ever-increasing number of state government programs and subsidies said to be needed to sustain the poor or lift them out of poverty. 

For example, last week Governor Lamont announced a substantial expansion of Connecticut’s free school breakfast and lunch program. The program will not yet provide free breakfast and lunches for all students, but the governor said universal free school meals is the objective and he hopes the necessary money — estimated at $90 million — can be found during next year’s session of the General Assembly.

Making breakfast and lunch in school free for all students, rather than just students from poor families, would set an egalitarian tone. But mostly it would provide a subsidy to parents who are not poor, and would presume that even many well-off parents can’t find the time to ensure that their children are fed when they go to school.

Within living memory parents of all incomes — even poor parents — were expected to see that their children were fed, and most did. What do today’s parents have to do that is more important than providing proper care for their children?

But the same sort of question can be put to state government itself. If child nutrition is as important as the governor, legislators, and social-service advocates contended last week as expansion of the school meals program was announced, why couldn’t state government find the extra $90 million for universal free school meals this year?

After all, in the course of any two or three weeks the governor may announce tens of millions in grants to municipalities and social-service organizations for lesser purposes.       

Recently inflation in food prices has been especially high. But who in authority in Connecticut is pressing the question of political responsibility for rising food prices? Certainly not the advocates of free universal school meals, though free meals purchased with “free” money from the federal government — as the expansion of Connecticut’s free school meals program will be financed — may add to inflation.

Is sending another billion or two to Ukraine every month more important than properly feeding all schoolchildren? The state’s congressional delegation seems to think so. For unlimited federal government spending now is being financed by unlimited borrowing, which not only increases demand for real things without increasing supply but also raises interest rates, inflationary in both respects.

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That is, inflation — currency devaluation — now is a primary mechanism of government finance, in state government as well as the federal government, since all states lately have gotten huge amounts of “emergency” federal aid.

But inflation doesn’t help parents provide proper care for their children. It just induces them to seek to transfer more of their own responsibility to the government. What’s next in this cycle of parental default — having students stay in school for dinner too and then being taken home at night with their teachers to ensure that homework gets done?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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By Chris Powell

Most people in Connecticut want to support the police, especially now that social order seems to be breaking down throughout the state. But last week the state police union provided another reason why such support is not always deserved.

The union announced that its members had taken a vote of no confidence in the commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, James C. Rovella, and his executive officer commanding the state police, Col. Stravros Mellekas. Union President Todd Fedigan charged that Rovella and Mellekas “allowed others to publicly make false allegations, destroy the morale of our troopers, and dismantle the reputation of the state police.” 

This was in connection with the recent audit finding that 130 current or now-retired state troopers appear to have written about 26,000 fake traffic tickets in recent years, tickets that were entered into a state police database but not the Judicial Department’s database and so were never acted on.

The union’s complaint is nonsense. The audit was undertaken by an outside agency and the commissioner and the colonel had no control over it. Called to a hearing of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, the commissioner couldn’t explain what had happened with the fake tickets, since, he said, his department’s investigation was incomplete. So he couldn’t defend what he didn’t know enough about, though he should have gotten better informed for the hearing.

But if, as the union president complains, the morale and reputation of the state police have been “destroyed” by the scandal, the union itself may have been in the best position to avert that. Surely some of its current and former members have a clue about what was going on with the fake tickets, and the union has yet to produce them for questioning in a public setting. 

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But then like most government employee unions in Connecticut, the state police union is in business in large part to conceal, minimize, and excuse the misconduct of its members, not to ensure that anyone is held accountable for misconduct. A recent state police union contract prohibited disclosure of misconduct complaints.

The troopers union’s lack of confidence in management isn’t so important. Since the state police department is a public agency and its employees work for the public, the most important confidence to be maintained here is the public’s own. That confidence indeed has been damaged, and  whatever has happened with the fake tickets, the public’s confidence will be restored only with full disclosure. Of course the union will resist that to the end.

Will anyone else produce full disclosure in the ticket scandal? 

State police management could if it overcame its befuddlement. 

The chief state’s attorney, Patrick Griffin, could but he suspended his investigation upon a request from the U.S. Justice Department to take over the case. That might take a long time since the department is so busy trying to subvert investigation of President Biden’s son, Hunter, for influence peddling to foreign interests.

That leaves the legislature’s Judiciary Committee. It could investigate by holding another public hearing, subpoena witnesses, and put them under oath. Such a hearing might be entertaining as well as informative, with any number of unionized state troopers taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. 

But the General Assembly doesn’t investigate anything. It just appoints study committees so difficult issues go away for at least a year or two.

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While Connecticut residents wait for an explanation of the traffic ticket scandal, they should listen to the recordings of 911 calls made to the state police from motorists caught in the street takeover riot in Tolland in May. The recordings were released by state police last week. 

People pleading for help against assault by thugs were told that no help would be forthcoming, though supposedly state troopers were working under cover amid the rioters. 

Governor Lamont and state legislators should listen to the recordings too and then explain their determination to disarm the law-abiding.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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By Chris Powell

During last year’s campaign for governor, leading Democrats from Governor Lamont on down may not have known that they were probably being hypocritical by criticizing the Republican nominee, Bob Stefanowski, for doing consulting work for a company connected to the Saudi Arabian government. 

But now that it has been disclosed that the investment fund company run by the governor’s wife, Ann Huntress Lamont, has a partnership with a Saudi government investment fund, try to find those Democrats.

The governor himself can claim that he didn’t know about his wife’s own connection to the awful Saudis and can note that the connection was listed in a public financial filing somewhere — as if there is enough journalism left in Connecticut to review such filings promptly, and as if Mrs. Lamont’s investment fund issued a press release about its Saudi connection any more than Stefanowski did about his.

Bad as the Saudi government may be, totalitarian and theocratic, it long has been a crucial financial and military ally of the United States, and Stefanowski had a plausible defense for his work in the country, which was to speed the transition from the country’s oil-based economy to “green” hydrogen-based energy.

For all anyone knows — Mrs. Lamont isn’t talking — her partnership with the Saudi government may have similar objectives. Or Mrs. Lamont’s company may just be helping to invest some of the U.S. dollars the kingdom has earned selling its oil to the United States and the rest of the world, oil purchases that long have implicated all Americans in Saudi totalitarianism.

Was Mrs. Lamont’s company in partnership with the Saudi Arabian company even when her husband and his Democratic colleagues were denouncing Stefanowski for a similar connection? Maybe. 

Did she not mention the irony to her husband? Who knows? 

Since the hypocrisy and sleaze here involve Democrats instead of Donald Trump, mainstream journalism will let it drop.

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Homelessness has risen in Connecticut for a second straight year, even as the state is full of hotels and motels that are operating at less than capacity or aren’t  operating at all.

City government in New Haven, where homelessness is acute, is aiming to acquire a local motel to turn it into “supportive housing,” providing not only basic shelter but also connection to medical, psychological, and employment services.

Meanwhile Danbury’s zoning board is still disgracefully blocking a bid by a social-service agency to use a defunct motel for similar purposes.

Under-used and defunct motels and hotels are perfect for addressing homelessness. They require no extensive conversion to become “supportive housing” and are located in commercial zones — and lovely as summer in Connecticut is, winter will be here soon enough. 

The homeless, many of whom are mentally ill or drug-addicted, have no political constituency. The economy is not half as good as elected officials claim after they manipulate economic data, and times are getting harder, so escaping from homelessness, addiction, and long-term unemployment is more difficult than most people think.

Of course most state residents don’t want “supportive housing” nearby any more than they want “affordable” housing nearby, since “affordable” housing can shelter not just young people starting out in life but also the demoralized, addicted, broken-down, and anti-social. But if Connecticut is to remain decent, these people have to be accommodated somewhere so they don’t have to sleep under bridges and risk death in the street.

For many months now Governor Lamont has taken the lead with the motel in Danbury, issuing and renewing an executive order exempting it from city zoning. But the order has expired even as homelessness is worsening.

So the governor should use whatever emergency authority he can still muster, calling the General Assembly into special session if necessary, to authorize state government to acquire such property as necessary and to supersede municipal zoning to put a roof over the heads of the forsaken before winter arrives and help them restore themselves, and to ensure that no municipality has to use its own funds to do this.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut is full of repeat criminal offenders. It is unusual to find any serious crime in the state whose perpetrator didn’t already have a substantial record. 

State government’s most recent report on recidivism found that 43% of people released from prison in the state were convicted and imprisoned again within three years. The more extensive a criminal’s record, the more likely he would be convicted and returned to prison within three years — a recidivism rate of 60% for the most serious offenders. 

Bad as they are, the most recent recidivism rates are actually slight improvements over the rates of previous years, probably reflecting reduced opportunities for crime during the recent virus epidemic.

So it should be obvious to police, prosecutors, judges, parole and probation officers, and even to state legislators and governors that the most urgent work of criminal justice is to put repeat offenders away for good. Sad as it is, some people are so damaged that they can’t be rehabilitated. 

But as was suggested by one of last weekend’s three murders in Hartford, all this is not obvious to most people in authority in the state.

According to news reports, a man charged in one of those murders had been charged with assault and carrying a gun without a permit in connection with another murder two years ago, and 10 other criminal and motor vehicle charges are pending against him as well. Somehow he has managed to post $800,000 in bonds in those cases and has remained free for two years, supposedly under strict supervision.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin was angry enough about this that he called a press conference to denounce the “systemic failures” of the court system in not resolving the many charges against the murder defendant. The mayor repeated the call he made in February with other city mayors at the state Capitol for more vigorous prosecution of repeat gun offenders. In May the state Office of Legislative Research reported that two-thirds of gun charges brought in Connecticut between 2013 and 2022 had been dropped, usually in plea bargaining achieving convictions on other charges.

That is, despite all the political blather against guns, Connecticut really doesn’t take gun crime very seriously.

*

The backlog in criminal cases in the state’s courts is attributed to the suspension of much court business during the epidemic. But in shutting down so much state business Governor Lamont and court officials should have anticipated the risk they were creating. “Essential” state services continued, but putting repeat offenders away was not essential — and still isn’t.

The epidemic has been over for many months and government operations are back to normal, and yet state government and municipal governments continue to spend tens of millions of dollars in “emergency” federal money on all sorts of goodies that have nothing to do with recovering from the epidemic — and nothing to do with eliminating the criminal case backlog.

Connecticut well might use 20 more courts working exclusively on the criminal backlog and gun violations particularly so that no gun violation has to be plea-bargained away. If the governor and state legislators ever took seriously their own rhetoric about gun violence, they would enact a law making gun crime as serious as murder and require a life sentence without parole for any gun crime. They also would enact an incorrigibility law requiring life sentences for repeat felony offenders.

* 

No criminal in Connecticut will ever be much deterred from using a gun to commit a crime when two-thirds of gun charges are dropped and when gun offenders can remain free on bond for years pending trial.

Instead the governor and leaders of the majority party in the General Assembly — Mayor Bronin’s party, by the way — boast of having reduced the state’s prison population when that reduction is largely a matter of leaving repeat offenders free to renew their predations.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)   

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By Chris Powell

Who is to blame for the death last month of the 2-year-old Hartford boy who, along with his four sisters 12 and younger, was left unattended by his mother as she went to work as a taxi driver only for the boy to fall out a window of their squalid third-floor apartment? 

Prosecutors have added a manslaughter charge to the 10 charges of risk of injury first filed against the woman. But her lawyer, relatives, and friends say the government and society are really to blame.

At a press conference the woman’s lawyer, Wesley Spears, said the state Department of Children and Families didn’t help his client enough and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which gave the woman a Section 8 housing voucher, didn’t inspect the apartment properly.

A clergyman, Sam Saylor, said the woman “went to work to survive and support her children because no one else would.” He added: “Because we haven’t experienced what poverty and single parenthood are, let us not rush to say ‘bad mother’ without saying ‘bad system.'”

The woman’s relatives and friends wore T-shirts inscribed, “It takes a village,” a reference to the supposedly African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child. The woman’s sister contended, “We all should take accountability.”

DCF Commissioner Vanessa Dorantes, whose department had been monitoring the woman’s household, wasn’t ready for responsibility to be shifted to her agency. The commissioner said the woman and her children had been “connected to community-based supports.” The commissioner asked that judgment be withheld pending more investigation.

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But there is no need to wait before wondering how the presumption that parents aren’t and shouldn’t be primarily responsible for their children has taken root in the culture and policy, along with the belief that there’s nothing wrong with having children outside marriage, with having more children than one can support, and with raising children without fathers.

That two-parent households are far better able to support children is elementary. Within living memory divorce was considered dishonorable for people whose children were still minors. Unhappy couples stayed together “for the sake of the children.” How quaint it sounds today.

While this is the age of free contraception and abortion right up to the moment of birth, it is also an age in which many women think it’s fine to have any number of children without a husband or man committed to his offspring. Of course many men are delighted to evade responsibility. 

After all, when parents can’t or won’t take responsibility these days, the government will — not just with housing but also with cash stipends and medical insurance, food, day care, and the like. 

This support from government is not luxurious but it often provides a better lifestyle than its recipients can imagine achieving on their own after 12 years of social promotion in Connecticut’s public schools.

Government thinks it’s not just cheaper but better to leave children in such a defective environment despite its self-perpetuating demoralization. The only deterrent to profound irresponsibility may be to stop coddling it — to curtail welfare for people who keep having children they can’t support and to put the children in foster homes. 

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Journalism fails to question the presumption that “it takes a village.” The other day a Connecticut newspaper asked why any parents should have to choose between buying diapers and buying food for their children, as if there should be no connection between having children and having the ability to support them. So why should anyone have to choose between having children and having a good time?

In this respect lawyer Spears is right, if for the wrong reasons, to blame the government for the irresponsibility of his client. For as Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a century ago, “Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example.”

For many years government has been teaching that parental responsibility is obsolete. So now as many as a third of this country’s children grow up without fathers and barely parented, with increasingly catastrophic results. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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