Posted on 11/24/2025 10:13:49 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
James Q. Wilson’s work showed that removing dangerous people from the streets protects communities.
Sergio Hyland seemed like the perfect advocate. Calling himself a “fierce, relentless, implacable abolitionist,” determined to end incarceration in the United States, Hyland had spent more than two decades behind bars before joining Pennsylvania’s Working Families Party as an anti-prison organizer. His criminal record only burnished his credentials: he had pled guilty to the 2001 killing of a 15-year-old and was later charged in connection with another homicide in 2002. Once he got out of prison in 2022, Hyland launched a website offering “speaking engagements” and “harm/de-escalation tactics” training, and he frequently appeared alongside Philadelphia’s progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner. The two even shared a news release in April 2025 announcing the Working Families Party’s endorsement of Krasner, which the prosecutor was “honored to accept.” A week later, Hyland was arrested for murdering a 30-year-old mother of two. Police discovered a stockpile of illegal guns in his home. Now Krasner’s office will have to prosecute him.
Not every violent offender commits murder after his supposed rehabilitation, of course. And Hyland has not yet been convicted of this latest charge. But his arrest for a new heinous crime suggests a broader insight that political scientist James Q. Wilson long emphasized: incarceration is often valuable simply because it takes dangerous people out of circulation, removing them from society.
It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice—and law enforcement—rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement...
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
And there's your problem. See tag line.
To reduce crime:
1. Execute all murderers
2. Execute all drug dealers
Remember what Bill Bennett said? “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”. Seems kinda ridiculous, doesn’t it?
Gee! Who would ever thought that getting bad people out of circulation would for make a better community.
Next they’ll tell us that water is wet!
Meh. We’ve got the highest incarceration rate in developed countries yet also have the highest violent crime rate.
The current “justice” system is very profitable, especially to the private prison industry.
But there is the other kind of crime, that is done by violent sociopaths, and it is done by a very small fraction of people. About 100 out of every million. If you lock those people up your violent crime will drop by at least 50%.
Will it resolve the whole problem? No.
Will it resolve a big chunk of it? Yes.
Will the big cities that have a major violent crime problem do it? No.
"Thank God we got penitentiaries!"
Problem is low moral people watch over them and become just as bad.
In Torah, there were three punishments: execution for violent crimes, restitution plus 20% for financial crimes, and exile for everything else.
The American prison movement was supposed to give criminals a chance to think about their criminal behavior and repent/become penitent (why prisons were called “penitentiaries”). It was a wonderful Quaker idea that never ever worked.
Of course, attempting to turn America into a Torah-like society concerning criminal justice would require the execution of a few million violent criminals, which would feel like a holocaust.
Same thing with most gunshot victims.
80/20 is about the best you can expect with any human endeavor.
What’s interesting is how the article explains that when incarceration goes up and crime goes down the public gets comfortable to where the naysayers speak out and the public then goes soft.
In every institution/organization someone hast be there to enforce the rules-the bad guy. They’re the pigs in Orwell’s novel or sheepdogs of whom sheep don’t find very popular.
Life imprisonment for taking a life. Then find a cheap way to make it ‘humane’. No need for capital punishment.
Yes
People say, well it won't solve the entire problem and bring up some unique one off that just does not happen that often.
It does not have to solve everything. Just to reduce the problem to manageable size.
Once you got it down to manageable size you can come up with tailor made solutions to your one offs. You have the time money and resources to dedicate to solving the problem.
But you can not do that when the problem is that big.
Wanna bet?
He should have never gotten out of prison being a two time murderer.
Presuming that we are talking about Murder 1 as distinguished from manslaughter. In my book the penalty for Murder 1 should be death but for the joke the legal profession has made out of the appeals process.
Fixed it for them.
Anybody care to guess at the rate of recidivism among criminals who've had their heads cut off?
If they are incarcerated they cannot repeat offend...so it works.
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