Our under-incarceration problem, anti-Semitism edition

Grafton Thomas is the anti-Semite who is being held for assaulting with a knife a crowd of Jews in a rabbi’s home during a Hanukkah celebration. I don’t blame the Democratic Party for Thomas’s anti-Semitism or for his decision to assault Jews.

However, I do blame Democrats, and some Republicans, for the criminal justice policies that enabled Thomas to be able to act on his violent anti-Semitism outside of prison walls.

According to the Washington Post, Thomas has been arrested at least seven times since 2001, on offenses that include assault, resisting arrest, killing or injuring a police animal, driving while under the influence, possessing controlled substances, and menacing a police or peace officer. He appears to have received a jail sentence only for a 2013 arrest for possession of a controlled substance. In a properly functioning criminal justice system, a repeat offender thug like Thomas would have been behind bars and unable to attack anyone this month.

Daniel Horowitz says “there are thousands upon thousands of people like Thomas throughout the country who are repeat violent offenders and barely serve time in prison.” He’s probably right because, as documented on Power Line, almost every time I check out the record of someone charged with a high profile crime, he turns out to have an extensive criminal record such that he should have been in jail.

Unfortunately, as Horowitz states, “thanks to reduced sentencing, endless second and third chances for parole violations, abolishing pretrial bail, and seven ways from Sunday to plead down and get off on technicalities, we have reversed the gains we made against crime with policies put into place under Reagan and local officials who shared his vision.”

Thomas isn’t the only anti-Semite who should have been in jail instead of being free to assault Jews in the New York area this month. Horowitz points to Tiffany Harris, a 35-year-old Brooklyn woman, who was arrested last week for assaulting three Jewish women and yelling, “F— you, Jews.” He notes that, thanks to a new jailbreak law, Harris was released almost immediately without posting bail. The very next day, she was arrested for assaulting another woman.

Harris should have been in jail at the time she committed the initial assaults on Jews. According to Horowitz, she still has an open criminal case for assault from last November, and just last month she was sentenced to zero prison time for a criminal mischief conviction. Moreover, she missed several court dates in that case, which is usually grounds to deny bail for subsequent charges. But this policy seems to have been overlooked after Harris’s assault on three Jews.

Ridiculously lenient policies that aren’t even enforced. That’s the real criminal justice scandal in this country. Innocent people are paying the price for this liberal/libertarian frolic. Jews are the latest victims, but innocent non-Jews, a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, experience the same horrors on a regular basis.

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