Giving delinquents endless chances
Crime and prison admissions in Connecticut have fallen so much, Governor Malloy announced the other day, that a state prison in Enfield will be closed early next year and its inmates transferred to other prisons. But within a few days of the governor’s announcement arrests in several sensational crimes in Hartford cast doubt on the prison closing.
First Hartford police charged a Windsor man with shooting three men in September, killing two of them. Police said the suspect had 23 previous arrests and at least one felony conviction, for molesting a 13-year-old girl.
Then, Hartford police said, a 17-year-old boy stole a car and an hour later was discovered by the car’s owner sitting behind the wheel elsewhere in the city. Police said the owner approached the car and pointed a gun at the teen, whereupon the teen drew his own gun, prompting the owner to shoot him in the face. The teen managed to drive away but soon was apprehended, bleeding badly. Police said that despite his youth he already had a long record of stealing cars.
That profile matched those of the many young delinquents some prosecutors say don’t fear the law because they have learned that juveniles are never really punished for anything in Connecticut. For anything short of murder prosecution of juveniles is undertaken in secret so the public can never evaluate juvenile justice. Everyone involved with juvenile justice enjoys this unaccountability.
And then a burglar broke into a house on the west side of Hartford, causing the woman who lived there to retreat to the house’s “safe room,” from which she called police. They found the burglar hiding in a bathroom, carrying a knife and a bag filled with stolen items. The police said he already had 130 arrests and 46 convictions.
The governor is right that it’s usually better to keep lawbreakers out of prison, to find other ways of imposing justice on them, since prison overwhelmingly tends to make people worse, not better, to make them unemployable and incapable of decent lives.
But as those sensational arrests in Hartford suggest, some people just become incorrigible even at a young age, and government’s first duty is not to reform them but to protect society against them. When it is possible for people in Connecticut to accumulate dozens of arrests and convictions and yet remain free, criminal justice is failing. The governor’s “second-chance society” is a good idea for a while but after a dozen or so second chances it becomes a sick joke.
That’s why despite any decline in crime and prison admissions Connecticut still needs some sort of “three strikes” law, a law that recognizes incorrigibility and gives life sentences to incorrigibles. Even a “dozen strikes” law might have prevented the murders, car theft, and burglary that quickly mocked the governor’s prison-closing announcement.