All Crime and No Punishment, from Chicago to Springfield

On Saturday, April 9, the most recent session of the Illinois State Legislature finished up its business by passing a bunch of "anti-crime" measures.

Note that the term "anti-crime" is in quotations. It has to be… because to the Democrat majority in Springfield, "anti-crime" measures exist to win votes on election day, not to make the streets safer.

Think about it: if you really wanted to reduce crime, not just show “effort,” but to actually minimize the number of people who are robbed, raped, beaten or killed, what would you do?

Well, you would do what everyone with that same goal has done throughout history:

You would try to capture, prosecute, and convict as many guilty parties as you can…

Then either lock them away for a very, very long time, or execute them (just worst offenders, of course - the murderers, the attempted murderers, the violent rapists, the big drug pushers), both to stop them from repeating their crimes as recidivists, and to deter others from choosing that path.

And you do the best you possibly can to drive the criminal element away, to generally discourage criminals from choosing your region as a target market.

And in particular, what do Illinois Democrat party super-majorities do, wherever they are in power, from the city of Springfield to the county of Cook?

Well, they throw money at it. They spend money on cameras, on task forces, on bureaucrats, on social programs. By calling these expensive projects “anti-crime” measures, they can win political points, list bullet points on their brochures, accrue favorable newsprint, even boast about them on their radio, television, and Internet commercials as the election season progresses.

But what else do these Democrat super-majorities do, besides spending our money?

Well, they refuse to actually sentence the criminals they convict. They refuse to put people in prison after guilt has been proven. More often than not, they let them go with time served, and probation, and sometimes a fine (one that can be paid with the money from their next robbery).

Or, if they do put them in jail, because they are forced to by mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, then the governor can always take advantage of his incredible, unrestrained powers, to set the prisoners free afterward, after they have already been safely locked away.

In recent years, Democrat governors and judges all over the country - oh yes, including those in Illinois - have used such excuses as overcrowding, fear of sickness, or budget constraints, to throw open the prison gates and release convicted criminals back onto the streets, years before they had to. Why?

And the only motivator that makes sense, as horrifying as it may seem, must be that these governors and judges must feel a greater affinity for the criminal element than they do for the law-abiding citizens being terrorized by those criminals.

And, shockingly, what else do Illinois Democrat politicians do, from the governor's mansion to the general assembly, from the county buildings to the city halls? They make the cities, counties, and states a virtual magnet for the illegal alien criminals of other countries.… through the illegal designation of their lands as sanctuary communities.

"Sanctuary" doesn’t even exist in US law. It’s a well-intentioned holdover from the feudal era in Europe., where it often did make sense. But here in the USA, the Democratic party, in recent years, has jumped on the concept, warped it beyond recognition, and made the word their own.

By all counts, Illinois has at least a half million illegal aliens in it (though many estimate the number to be far higher). While we all want to think of this community as well-intentioned poor folks from miserable third world origins, desperate for a chance to earn an honest living in the land of opportunity… we have to admit the truth: some percentage of them - maybe 5? maybe 10? maybe 20? who knows? - were already active criminals in their homelands, and came here either to either escape punishment at home, or to serve their crime gangs in a new territory, or just to individually brutalize a richer community than the ones they fled.

Democrat politicians will spend this election season boasting of the many "anti-crime" bills they passed this month, slapping each other on the back for all the progress they will claim to have made… as retailers continue to shut their doors, as residents together continue to cower in fear of the countless muggers, rapists, and gangs... and as businesses and individuals together continue to flee the state, due to the empowered criminal element that has continuously expanded its hold on the state of Illinois.

At bare minimum, as individuals, we can educate ourselves, and study those who do the hard work of gathering the data, putting it out there for all the world to see.

In an excellent and fair analysis of the closing days of this session, writer Matt Rosenberg reveals all the details from Springfield in today’s report for Wirepoints. Please read it.… And thereby gain the information necessary to respond, when candidates brag about things that no honest person would boast about.

Statistics, history, the names of bills and the real purposes… It’s all there, courtesy of Wirepoints.

And then, use that information - along with your own common sense - to be that much wiser when you walk in the polls on election day, so that you don’t have to do what so many of us anticipate doing the day after election day:

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.

A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.

And please do read Matt Rosenberg's detailed piece, referenced in the article above, in Wirepoints, here:

https://wirepoints.org/illinois-legislatures-anti-crime-efforts-end-with-a-whimper-not-a-bang-wirepoints/

snip
“The 102nd General Assembly of Illinois ended in the early hours of Saturday April 9 and Illinois Supermajority Democrats approved new spending and laws they say will boost public safety. With 2022 elections approaching and Cook County homicides in excess of 1,000 for the first time in 28 years, they needed to show movement on crime. It was a largely cosmetic crime bill package designed for campaign brochures. Worse, it did material harm by failing to unwind anti-cop, pro-criminal measures within a larger criminal justice “reform” bill approved last year.”

Well the reality is that the vast majority of the crimes in Chicago and the rest of Cook County are committed by minorities. If the author’s recommendations for addressing crime in these places were to be implemented then the result would be mass arrest and incarceration of minorities. This would lead to the inevitable cries of racism therefore it won’t be done and Chicago will become an even bigger sh!thole.

I would rather look at it this way, Technically Right:

The vast majority of crimes are committed by recidivists. Almost all of them, in fact.

Obviously there has to be a first time for everything, but even so... the vast majority are committed by people who have already been through the process and have rap sheets.

So we are ALREADY catching, prosecuting, and convicting these people, again and again. The rap sheets prove it.

The only thing we’re not doing with them is locking them up.

The left likes to say that if you lock up the people committing a million crimes, there’d be a million more people in jail... but that’s a lie. Since most of those crimes are committed by recidivists, if they were in jail, most of those crimes wouldn’t be committed at all.

So instead of a million more people in jail, there might be 25,000 more people in jail, and 975,000 fewer crimes.

(obviously I don’t know the exact breakdown... nobody does... but this is the crucial point to consider.)

We’re not talking about as many people as they claim. We’re talking about relatively few people who commit a ton of crimes, terrorizing the entire community, just because we refuse to lock them up after we’ve gone through all the work and risk to convict them!

JFD

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