LET’S START THERE

…after, of course, we’ve said a prayer for the families of the four slain officers in Washington state.

“Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling.”

So goes the infamous New York Times headline that so captures the goofy, upside-down worldview of liberals. Crime falls BECAUSE prisons fill with criminals–not DESPITE the fact.

Thomas Sowell:

Then, as now, liberals seemed to find it puzzling that crime rates go down when more criminals are put behind bars.

Nor is it surprising that the Left uses an old and irrelevant comparison — between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars versus the cost of higher education. According to the Times, “Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, and Oregon devote as much or more to corrections as they do to higher education.”

The relevant comparison would be between the cost of keeping a criminal behind bars and the cost of letting him loose in society. But neither the New York Times nor others on the Left show any interest in that comparison.

In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be 1.9 billion pounds sterling, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at 60 billion pounds sterling.

The big difference between the two kinds of costs is not just in their amounts. The cost of locking up criminals has to be paid out of government budgets that politicians would prefer to spend on giveaway programs that are more likely to get them reelected. But the far higher costs of letting criminals loose is paid by the general public in both money and in being subjected to violence.

And in this case the full price was paid by police officers, who often have to re-confront those who they have already arrested.

The police appear to have done their job. They kept arresting this guy every time he robbed another store or raped another child. But legislators, judges, attorneys, psychiatrists, parole boards, prosecutors and executives all kept dropping the ball or minimizing his crimes and releasing him. Mike Huckabee was one, and he’s going to have to take the heat.

Huckabee cut his sentence in half for an armed robbery committed while he was a teenager. This allowed him to be paroled, even though the guy was a one-man crime wave both before and since. He even committed crimes in court. Yet the system kept spitting him back out to commit more crimes. Prosecutors failed to file additional charges in time and he was released again.

At least Huck wasn’t selling pardons like another former Arkansas governor. The Clintons turned the pardon power into a fund-raising arm of the Clinton Library, a Full Employment Act for their in-laws and a Get-Out-the-Vote campaign tool for Hillary. Instead of a last resort for the powerless, it was a first choice for the powerful to grab even more power. Even liberals were mad at the Clintons for selling pardons–for about five minutes.

This is to be distinguished from the Willie Horton case.

As is their habit, the Massachusetts Supreme Court found a formerly unknown Right in the constitution John Adams wrote: murderers have an Iron-Clad Right to a Weekend Pass. Gov. Mike Dukakis and Lt. Gov. John Kerry loved this idea. Even after Willie Horton went on a rape and torture spree, they defended the program. In effect, they were promising to give Horton another Weekend Pass!

To this very day, liberals still bring up the Horton case, but only as an example of Republican dirty politics, because Horton was black. They never admit that letting violent criminals out is an idiotic idea and calls into question the judgment of those who do it. The only liberal I’ve ever heard denounce it was Al Gore, who brought it up in the first place, but only because he was running against Dukakis.

And just as public safety is the first duty of state executives, national security is the first duty of the chief executive. That’s why his dithering, weakness, kow-towing and dictator-coddling are so dangerous.

Huck must take the heat for his do-gooder-ism. The same liberals who encouraged him to commute will now blame him for listening to their advice. Just ask George “Read My Lips” Bush, Sr. about that.

But Huck shouldn’t be the only one. Prosecutors blew it. Two judges foolishly granted low bail to the now-dead on-parole perp. Why? And where was Gov. Chris Gregoire and the legislature? Why didn’t they stop this policy long ago? She’s jetting off to Copenhagen to legislate against the Sun when her first job is to stop criminals from killing her citizens.

First Duties First.