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‘Ban the Box’ Pro-Criminal Legislation Snuck into… the National DEFENSE Bill

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Yesterday, we learned that an amnesty provision for Liberians was slipped into what was supposed to be a national defense bill for our own homeland, citizens, and soldiers. Well, it turns out that there is more fundamental social engineering embedded in this 3,400-page monstrosity that could never pass in a transparent debate over a stand-alone bill. If foreign nationals were able to get their handout in the bill, I guess the bipartisan liberals felt that domestic criminals needed to get theirs too.

Slipped into page 1,014 of the bill is the Orwellianly named “Fair Chance Act,” a piece of legislation that bars the federal government from asking about criminal records on job applications for government jobs. This applies to both government workers and government private contractors, except for those jobs that require security clearances. This has been a major priority of the Soros-Koch alliance in normalizing criminals, along with letting them out of prison early, abolishing bail, and giving felons the right to vote.

I have already chronicled how such legislation actually harms many black job applicants and how this is a Trojan horse to begin applying anti-discrimination laws to criminals even in the private workplace. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “ban the box” policies “decrease the probability of being employed by 3.4 percentage points (5.1%) for young, low-skilled black men, and by 2.3 percentage points (2.9%) for young, low-skilled Hispanic men.”

However, regardless of your view on this legislation, much like the decision to raise the tobacco age in the omnibus bill, this is a very big policy change that should require a transparent debate in a stand-alone bill. Instead, they insidiously stuck it into a defense bill that includes a pay raise for soldiers. Nobody knew this was in the bill until pro-criminal groups starting bragging about it. That’s how I found out about it, as did one Senate office: “Never in our wildest dreams did we think a criminal justice provision would make its way into an NDAA,” one senior staffer for a conservative senator told CR.

Yesterday, we found out about the provision in the bill granting amnesty to 4,000 Liberian illegal. This, despite the fact that we provide Liberia with $109 million in aid to improve its own homeland. There are other problematic provisions buried in this bill as well that the president and members of Congress seem to be completely unaware of. At the same time, it contains nothing to promote conservative priorities on the mission, character, and objectives of the military, much less any response to the Pensacola shooting in terms of foreign visas and base security. Quite the contrary, the bill actually adds 4,000 more visas for Afghani officials who worked with our military at a time when the Washington Post revealed the entire building of an Afghani military to be a farce. But fear not, Ivankacare, aka a new entitlement of paid family leave for federal workers who already enjoy a more generous benefit package than private workers, was also slipped into the final bill.

What’s further insidious is that this president will wind up signing a “second step” for criminals in the “ban the box” provision before even signing a first step for victims of crime to close the numerous loopholes created by federal courts that allow some of the most violent criminals to escape justice. That is what the president campaigned on.

The rush to pass massive bills with numerous unannounced extraneous policy changes demonstrates a broader ailment with our government. Almost all of our major social and policy changes in this country come from courts and unelected bureaucrats. Even the few things that come from democratically elected legislators as may as well be from unelected people. They stuff the most contentious changes into either massive omnibus bills or universal national defense bills and vote on them before anyone in Congress knows they are there, much less the public.

How prescient was James Madison when he warned, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” (For more from the author of “‘Ban the Box’ Pro-Criminal Legislation Snuck into… the National Defense Bill” please click HERE)

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Jailbreak Epidemic: Gang Member Released on $6k Bail Now Accused of Raping 12-Year-Old Girl

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Listen carefully when you hear Republican and Democrat liberal politicians speak about criminal justice, and you will notice the term “bail reform.” Those who live in the real world probably think this means ensuring that dangerous criminals are not let out on the streets for years pending the disposition of their trials. However, it means the exact opposite. Sadly, such “reform” is already the norm in places like New York. The latest example you will never hear from the “criminal justice reform” politicians is the case of Tony Johnson of Brooklyn.

According to the New York Post, one of the few outlets covering the outrageous jailbreak cases in the city that once led the nation in reducing crime, Tony Johnson, a reputed member of the Folk Nation gang, was arrested in Brooklyn on 34 criminal charges earlier this year, including armed robbery and assault. The prosecutors asked for $225,000 bail at the March 5 arraignment, but Judge Craig Walker agreed to release him on just $6,000 bail.

After his release, according to court documents, he is accused of robbing a female on September 15, robbing a male and severely beating a female victim the following day in separate incidents, and finally kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old girl on October 8. He was arrested two days later on first-degree sexual assault and two counts of robbery. Even now, his bail is set at $105,000, not terribly high given his record and the current accusations.

The Post quotes a local detective lamenting how the politicians only seem to care about the perpetrators and springing them from jail, not the victims. “Nobody ever talks about the victims. This poor girl’s life has been ruined because they gave this guy another chance he didn’t deserve.”

Sadly, the voices of law enforcement, victims of crime, and law-abiding citizens are never heard any more. Now it’s the criminals who are the protected class. New York has enacted a new law effective this coming January that will essentially abolish bail for juveniles and for crimes that they dubiously label as “low-level,” meaning the accused will be released immediately on their own recognizance.

In addition, the bill will create numerous legal loopholes for defendants to block convictions by asking for more access to evidence and information about witnesses, as well as the right to return to the scene of the crime, which would mean the private home of a woman in the case of a rape that was alleged to have happened in the victim’s residence. Monroe County District Attorney Sandra Doorley fears this new law will be a “total overhaul of our criminal justice system as we know it.”

The New York Post has covered a rash of recent cases where career violent criminals either were let out of prison early, violated parole and were not reincarcerated, or were never locked up to begin with. Rodriguez “Randy” Santos was arrested last week for brutally murdering four homeless men. He had 14 prior arrests, including four very violent charges this year, but was out on the streets. Joshua Henderson was rearrested three times over the past year for violating his parole but was out on the streets to allegedly rape a woman in Queens, forcing on her a horrific choice between engaging in incest or being raped.

The same weekend Santos is accused of killing four homeless men in NYC, two repeat violent felons are accused of shooting up a bar in Kansas City, resulting in four fatalities. It was a mass shooting you won’t hear about in the media. In turns out that both suspects, one of whom is still at large, had lengthy rap sheets and were released with pending charges just a few weeks ago despite violating their parole.

The increase in violent crimes by repeat offenders begins with the hands-off approach toward policing against misdemeanors, the exact opposite of the “broken windows” policing in the Giuliani era that so effectively dropped crime in the nation’s largest city. Jacob Gershman reports in the Wall Street Journal that there has been a 50 percent drop in misdemeanor arrests in New York City since 2010. That is the lowest point since 1990, the days of the Mayor Dinkins crime wave. As U.C. Irvine professor Alexandra Natapoff is quoted as saying, “Misdemeanor enforcement is much less sensitive to actual crime rates and influenced by changing political and cultural winds.” Those winds are all in the direction of jailbreak.

Conservatives need to wake up before it’s too late and realize that the Left has already quietly succeeded in getting Republicans to support a worse form of jailbreak than anything we feared from the Dukakis Democrats. And most people don’t even know it’s happening. (For more from the author of “Jailbreak Epidemic: Gang Member Released on $6k Bail Now Accused of Raping 12-Year-Old Girl” please click HERE)

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EXPOSED: The Big Lie of the ‘Criminal Justice Reform’ Movement Is Killing People — Including Police

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Every Democrat presidential candidate and too many Republicans repeat the lie that too many people are locked up for too long for first-time, non-violent offense. The dirty little secret is that most of the prison population is composed of repeat violent criminals, who are already given too many leniencies and not locked up long enough. Continuing this trend of loosening sentences, avoiding incarceration, and sometimes even avoiding arrests just to lower the prison population will induce a massive crime wave. And we are already seeing it on the horizon.

Over this past weekend, two hero cops were shot dead, one in Houston and one in New York City, thanks to jailbreak policies that placed violent offenders on parole instead of behind bars. On Friday, Houston’s first Sikh officer, Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal, was walking back to his patrol car after pulling over Robert Solis for a routine traffic stop, when Solis allegedly got out of his car and shot the policeman in an ambush-style attack.

Who is Robert Solis? Unfortunately, he has the all-too-familiar violent rap sheet that is common on the streets today, yet despite his violent history, he was out on parole. A quick search of Harris County court records shows a 30-year career criminal history that includes burglary, theft, multiple arrests for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, robbery with a deadly weapon, drunk driving, and multiple kidnapping charges.

In 2002, Solis was convicted for shooting a man in the leg and then holding his own toddler son hostage with a gun during a standoff with police. He was sentenced to 20 years, but thanks to Texas’ jailbreak policies, he was let out in 2014 after serving just 12. OK, second chances, right? Well, as we’ve witnessed across the country, the same motivation behind letting these people out of jail is also driving the push to keep them out of jail despite violating parole. In 2016, he was arrested for DUI, but was not sent back to prison for violating his parole. A year later, a warrant was issued for his arrest after he was caught possessing a gun, but he managed to be a fugitive for two years, eventually resulting in the murder of this hero officer.

This is a man who had a history of gun felonies, yet he was allowed out of prison and was not sent back at the first sign of trouble. Before Texas’ political leaders look into gun control, maybe they ought to ease off the jailbreak policies of career gun felons and institute some criminal control.

Then there is the case of Antonio Lavance Williams in the Bronx, NY. On Sunday, Williams reportedly struggled with NYPD Officer Brian Mulkeen in what became a fatal shooting killing both the officer and Williams. Williams had his own gun, but Mulkeen was heard saying, “He’s reaching for it,” fearing the suspect would take his gun. It was originally thought that Williams fired the fatal shot, but it turns out that Mulkeen’s colleagues fired the shots in a fatal friendly-fire incident. Either way, this would never have happened had Williams been behind bars.

Williams was originally convicted of burglary in 2011. He was paroled in 2015, but was caught in a drug bust in 2018. However, because of the stigma against locking up drug traffickers, including those with prior felonies, Williams was paroled through 2022. He was caught again in January of this year for larceny in Binghamton, but got off with a $100 fine. He failed to appear in another case in May, according to the New York Daily News. Again, on August 15, he was arraigned on harassment charges but was released the same day. That case stemmed from a charge of assaulting his girlfriend after she found drugs and a firearm in his closet during a domestic dispute. Thus, he had numerous violations of his parole, but was never sent back to prison. And of course, as no law-abiding New Yorker is able to carry a gun for protection to deter the endless “knockout” attacks, this felon had no qualms about carrying a weapon.

These two cases resulted in the deaths of police officers, but unfortunately these are exactly the types of people who cycle in and out of the criminal justice system. Low-level “first-time” criminals don’t serve any time, but as we see here, even many of the repeat violent offenders don’t serve enough time. Whenever you see the push for jailbreak initiatives under the guise of not filling up the prisons with low-level offenders, just remember it is people like Williams and Solis who will be released.

According to a report by Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, “60% of state prisoners are serving time for murder, rape, assault, robbery, or burglar.” That is four times the number convicted only of drug offenses, who themselves are often committing other violent crimes or arrested for other crimes but plead down.

Yet as it stands now, even without the more robust jailbreak policies the bipartisan political elites are seeking to implement, “less than 15% of state felony convictions result in more than two years served in prison; even 20% of those imprisoned for murder, and nearly 60% of those imprisoned for rape or sexual assault, serve less than five years of their sentences.”

Only 15 percent of those serving time in state prison are for drugs, and most of those are repeat offenders with long rap sheets. Even those people only serve an average of 17 months for trafficking offenses. As Fordham University law professor John Pfaff wrote in a recent Politico op-ed, “If we freed everyone in prison tomorrow except that 25 percent who are there for murder, manslaughter or sexual assault, we’d still have an incarceration rate higher than that of almost every European country.”

Moreover, that analysis doesn’t even factor in the reality that many of the violent offenders don’t serve that much time and so many more violent offenses go unsolved without resulting in an arrest. For example, just in one year, 6,013 murder cases went uncleared by law enforcement. In addition, 79,310 rape cases, 206,091 robbery cases, and 349,190 aggravated assault cases were uncleared in 2017, according to the FBI.

The fact that most states have reversed the incarceration trend sharply in recent years even for these sorts of convicts has resulted in a rise in victimization in many cities. Why is Baltimore the way it is? The average murder suspect in 2017 in this city, according to city police data, had nine prior arrests, and 70 percent had prior arrests for drugs. The people doing all the crime are barely serving time. In total, 85 percent of murder suspect had a criminal record, and 44 percent were previously arrested for gun crimes. Thus, while law-abiding citizens in the city can’t carry weapons for defense, known gun felons are barely punished at all. Overall, the Maryland prison population has plummeted by 30 percent over the past decade, even as the population grew.

The moral of the story is that we simply have a ton of violent crime in this country, and the less we deter it with more lenient criminal justice, the more of it we will get. The Left’s answer is to remove all consequences to criminal behavior in the hope that unicorn “anti-recidivism programs” will magically solve the problem of crime without the need for punishment and deterrent. At some point, the people need to speak out, because if they don’t, the politicians certainly won’t do it for them. (For more from the author of “Exposed: The Big Lie of the ‘Criminal Justice Reform’ Movement Is Killing People — Including Police” please click HERE)

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