Fixing the Criminal Justice System

Fixing the Criminal Justice System

Tim O’Connor – Center for the Preservation of Humanity – 3/6/2023

Any nation which allows criminal acts to go unpunished, regardless of why it goes unpunished, will allow it’s culture to devolve and disintegrate into lawlessness. When traditional laws forbidding certain acts such as murder, theft, rape, and arson are ignored instead of prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the prevalence of lawlessness increases. When made-up crimes are given more priority that real crimes against persons and property then lawlessness will increase. Examples of this include the justice system ignoring politicians engaging in espionage-level bribery and blackmail campaigns while prosecuting parents for voicing their concerns regarding the education their children are receiving at public schools. Nowhere is this lawlessness going to be more manifest than in the populations of offenders who are viewed as juveniles. To fix our very broken criminal justice system we need to address these issues.

If someone is wasted in a bar and they have to get home to pass out and go to work 10 hours later they have a choice to make. Basically the choice is, let someone else, hopefully sober, drive them home and retrieve their car later or drive home drunk. This choice is made based on the risk of getting pulled over from the bar to the residence. If the wasted person is absolutely sure they will be spending the night in jail after getting charged with a DUI, it is highly probable they will not risk it. As the chances of catching a DUI decreases in the drunkards perception; however, the chances they will choose to drive themselves home increases. Drunk drivers pose a very dangerous threat to safety, of course, so the drunk person driving at all is something to be avoided.

Policing has addressed the situation in a multitude of ways – some legal and some not so legal. Public advertising campaigns routinely advise those drinking avoid driving because it may result in their death, the death of others, prison sentences, legal fees, court involvement, licensure suspensions, big fines, and social revulsion. Officers are vigilant looking for those appearing to be driving drunk. Some departments will set up highly illegal checkpoints to check for vehicle infractions as well as to detect drunk drivers. Proposals have included installing ‘blow ignitions’ in all vehicles to deter drunk driving – those convicted of DUI infractions sometimes have the choice to accept one of these devices being installed in their vehicle to allow them to continue to operate a motor vehicle.

Whether the policing activities are legal are not go back to the Constitution. It is constitutionally repugnant to force all drivers to blow to start their vehicles. The proposition violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments. Yet, the devices would greatly reduce the possibility of driving while under the influence of alcohol. The question then arises – is the right to travel and move about an inherent right or a privilege granted by the state. When it comes to operating a motor vehicle in particular, that right has been reduced to a state-granted privilege. This is true to an extent of being in public in general under the influence of alcohol.

How these questions are answered are generally left to our elected politicians and lawyers arguing before judges but these questions should be answered by the general public. This is still possible to effect in jury trials where civically-minded jurors are informed about their rights about jury nullification. The law makes it illegal to drive drunk. An officer pulls a drunk driver over and takes the offender to jail. How many of these people take the case to trial? Virtually no one, meaning jury nullification isn’t possible (and in this case would not be advisable – I don’t think drunk driving should be tolerated). Now image the scenario where the level of alcohol constituting drunk driving is changed from .08 to .02. Jury trials may occur slightly more regularly but the chances that those juries will push for nullification of the .02 limit are vanishingly small. The same holds true when a drunk driver is taken off the streets by having traveled through a checkpoint.

I wrote all of this to show how quickly and how muddy the colors of the legal system are turned from black and white to one of any numbers of hues of grey. As a result, people generally refuse to dredge into the muck to offer a strong opinion one way or another. As people do this on more and more topics, politicians direct the responses they see fit which may or may not reflect the sentiments of their constituency and the people their laws affect. They do this with less accountability to the public. The lack of public accountability demanded by the majority of the population, or even an effective vocal minority, has created the tyrants we now suffer under. In this way, it is our fault that these tyrants exist – it is we the people who have failed ourselves in not demanding the accountability and justice for those thrashing our rights – rights too many of us refuse to even define.

The primary question remains – will offenders get caught? Take certain democrat governors in several states during COVID-19 mitigation efforts. New York, in particular, refused outside entry to nursing homes. Family members could not visit their loved ones in these facilities. Meanwhile, the governor of New York ordered those sickened with the disease to be placed in those same nursing homes. Was he ever held accountable for intentionally infecting large numbers of the most susceptible of the disease while illegally restricting loved ones from being able to hug their grandparents, mothers, and fathers? No. None of the governors doing this got into any trouble for the mass murder campaigns they operated. New York’s governor got ‘caught’ by the court of public opinion but legal charges are lacking meaning the criminal justice system is broken. Nothing has been done to deter any other governor from doing the same thing in the future.

Another issue is what happens when people are caught by the criminal justice system? Lets say our drunkard has been caught for the fourth time driving around drunk. I know two people who have faced this situation. One will be unable to get a driver’s license for the next 10 years and until they obtain the license, are forbidden from operating a motor vehicle legally. The other received a provisional license, more classes, fines, and is still permitted to operate motor vehicles. Which one is correct? In my opinion the former ruling is more correct because they just don’t seem able to comprehend the danger their actions pose to the general public. Maybe it should be 10 years with a blow ignition though. Maybe the person with a valid drivers license should be forced to blow for the next 10 years as well. There is a lot of grey area in these cases and a lot of different outcomes. Because of all of these different outcomes, the deterrent effects of sentencing is destroyed.

Nowhere is this more evident than when dealing with juvenile justice. The age of the offender used to be seen as a mitigating factor in sentencing. Today the age of the offender is used to determine the causes of the crime. A 14 year old murdering a classmate in today’s America is often put into the juvenile system because of their age. Had this child been 16, the chances they ended up in the adult criminal justice system rises spectacularly. At 18 years old, adult criminal justice applies no matter what.

The idea is rooted in legalizing lawlessness and rationalized by the modern idea of psychologically-based notions of rational thought. According to youth.gov, “juvenile justice systems should put more emphasis on encouraging offender accountability through restorative justice, engaging in community service, and helping youths take responsibility and make amends for their actions. Juvenile justice systems should help prevent reoffending through structured risk and needs assessments and using interventions rooted in knowledge about adolescent development.”

This stands the idea of ‘do the crime, do the time’ on it’s head. People in prison do not pose a risk to the general citizenry. Current notions of juvenile justice want to get rid of this idea altogether. What it does is allows juvenile offenders to receive little or no time in an institutional setting. They end up back in the same environments, with the same people around them, and commit new offenses knowing that even if they get caught they will spend a short time (at best) in an institutionalized corrections setting and be back to commit more offenses a month or two later. By the time some of these young offenders get picked up for murder or rape a lot of them have rap sheets pages long including thefts, burglaries, drug dealing, firearms possession, and assaults. The current manifestations of the juvenile justice system seems to exist to make sure recalcitrant youths are given every opportunity to commit progressively more heinous crimes. The only lessons many of these repeat offenders learn is that if they get caught the punishment will return them to the streets in a short time and how to ensure that outcome is reached.

We could, of course, start sentencing these youths to sentences where they are no longer permitted to roam the streets after minimal ‘incarceration’ terms. While there they could, and should, receive an education built on morals, accountability, and responsibility. Remediating education should also be engaged in focusing on making sure these youths are able to read, write, and do arithmetic at an appropriate level. These institutions could, and should, offer emotional training to mitigate the destructive actions these youths engage in when they are angry, frustrated, or saddened and be given instruction about how to deal with their perception of what it means to be slighted. We should probably be doing this for all prisoners though – especially for those with a possibility of parole.

We should be working to get rid of the idea that age can mitigate intent entirely. There are plenty of low-IQ and mentally ill offenders incarcerated who are over 18 years old. Defenses of those with these conditions should not allow them to return to the streets just like the age of a person should not allow them to return to the streets. We need a criminal justice system which allows for a reduction of sentence length to a certain point. There should be no juvenile system and adult system in criminal justice – the adult one should serve all offenders.

We also need to stop inventing new crimes while ignoring traditional crimes. Murderers need to be taken off the streets. Rapists need to be taken off the streets. Arsonists, looters, rioters, and those committing assaults need to be picked up. They need to be prosecuted for violating the crimes already on the books. To fix the incidence of the rates of these criminal actions, certain politicians and one political party in particular, have decided that these actions are just fine as long as the ideology driving it is supported by their party. Are the looters, rioters, and arsonists in prison for their actions in Minneapolis, Minnesota during the summer of 2020? How about the Chaz creators in Portland, Oregon?

There is a great deal of focus on making speech illegal. The goons of Minneapolis and Portland; however, are not in prison. Instead new laws codifying so-called hate speech which is determined to be damaging to the reputations of criminal or deviant elements in our societies are being enforced. The effect is that speech denoting the fact that those perpetrating the George Floyd riots, arson sprees, assaults, and murders are goons is what is being targeted – not those committing the acts. In this regard, the criminal justice system is adhering to lawlessness while persecuting the lawful who are demanding the traditional laws be upheld. This needs to end immediately if the criminal justice system hopes to ever regain trust or compliance.

As mentioned earlier, it is up to us to demand criminal justice be fixed. This is what BLM stated they were doing. The problem with BLM is that they want to get rid of all of the criminal justice in the United States and incorporate a Marxist version of justice based on class, race, and equality of outcome. The United States was built on the morality given to mankind found in the Torah and this is nowhere more true that in the bedrock of our justice system. As we have become less adherent to the Torah, we have grown more lawless. As we have seen declines in Biblical understanding, we have seen perversions rising up in the culture they are increasingly protected by an increasingly lawless justice system. The system devised in the United States Constitution was never meant for an amoral society. Now, we have an amoral society, distant from the teachings of the Bible and the word of God, and we have suffered under the tyrants and lunatics the justice system has helped to create long enough.

In order to fix the criminal justice system in the United States we must return to apprehending those committing the crimes without distinction of status; hold all, regardless of age, accountable for their actions; and stop criminalizing legal acts. If there is any chance whatsoever for the criminal justice system in the United States to regain the trust of it’s citizens the system must recognize why it is not trusted in the first place. That is a difficult task – it is far easier to create criminal sanctions for those of us pointing that out. Likewise, we, as citizens, must peacefully demand these changes happen and demand our justice systems hold violators accountable. But none of this will ever be possible if we refuse to recognize the importance of the Word of God and the legal and moral edicts passed down to mankind through the Torah. We are in this mess because of our distance from Torah, and we will never get out of this mess unless we, as a nation, return to the instructions given to us in the Torah.

I recognize that most of the people who read these articles are Christians. To many of you the Torah is the Jewish way and there is a belief that the laws do not apply to you. I suggest you again read your Bible and seek the truth of what it actually states. While undertaking that endeavor, please consider this – the Torah is Jesus and Jesus is the Torah. Following Jesus and living like Jesus is always an act of putting one’s self under the law of the Torah – not in the legalistic sense, but in the sense of making one’s self holy, or set apart for God. Following Jesus is following the Torah. Without coming to this basic realization, how can this nation survive at all, especially now that it has been conquered by forces who have openly declared war on God, and on Jesus, and call good evil and evil good? We can’t. And we will not save anything about the United States unless, and until, we, ourselves, on an individual level, in brotherhood through the Word of God, come together and are sanctioned by God Himself. The truth is the bedrock of civilization and that truth is the Torah, salvation through Jesus’ sacrifice, and communication through the Holy Spirit. Mankind can only build on sand and our leaders have decided to do their level best to turn the bedrock of truth into their preferred building block – sand. This is why our criminal justice system is broken – it is a casualty in their war against God.

Bless God and may God bless you.