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How Many Lies Can You Spot?

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The ACLU put out a press release today that contains the following paragraph:

Although the mandate of prosecutors is to advance justice, many district attorneys have focused on punishment at any cost.  This approach has increased the jail and prison population; led to sentences that are too severe for the offenses; produced more wrongful convictions and more death sentences; and sent people with addictions, disabilities, and mental health conditions into jails and prisons who should receive treatment or other social services instead. These consequences of unchecked prosecutorial power burden people of color and the poor disproportionately.

Hence the title of this entry:  How many lies can you spot?
Let's take it from the top.

--  "Although the mandate of prosecutors is to advance justice, many district attorneys have focused on punishment at any cost."

The premise here is misleading and the conclusion is false.  The premise is that there is a tension between justice and punishment, whereas punishment for crime is almost universally understood to be a component of justice.  And the statement that "many district attorneys" seek "punishment at any cost" is just flat-out false.  

--  "This approach has increased the jail and prison population..."

Also false.  According to a survey by the liberal Pew Charitable Trusts, the prison population has been falling for at least seven years. http://thehill.com/homenews/news/312480-us-prison-population-falling-as-crime-rates-stay-low.  The Pew Report states:

The number of Americans in jails and prisons across the country continued to fall in 2015, according to new government statistics, as both violent and property crime rates reach low levels not seen in half a century.
 
Nationwide, just shy of 2.2 million people were serving in local, state and federal prisons at the end of 2015, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total prison population fell by 51,000 inmates from the year before, the largest drop since 2009. 
 
The number of inmates held by the federal Bureau of Prisons declined seven percent over the last year, while the number of inmates held by state prison systems declined by nearly two percent. Twenty-nine states showed a drop in prison populations.
 

--  "...led to sentences that are too severe for the offenses..."

A value judgment not shared by the public, but put forward as a fact.

--  "... produced more wrongful convictions and more death sentences..."

No documentation is produced showing more "wrongful convictions," and the statement that we have more death sentences is, again, a point-blank lie, as the ACLU can't help knowing.  Indeed, the Left has been crowing at the top of its lungs that the number of death sentences (and executions) has been falling for the better part of two decades.  You can see this in any of the last year's numerous "Death Penalty Is Dying" opinion pieces.

 --  "...and sent people with addictions, disabilities, and mental health conditions into jails and prisons who should receive treatment or other social services instead."

Again, a value judgment at best, and a thoroughly misleading one.  A huge swath of the population has some sort of disability (I have a heightened risk of skin cancer, for example, and my hearing's not too good, either), and "mental health conditions" could include temporary depression (again, shared by tens of millions of people) or annoying but not terribly significant phobias, such as fear of heights.

 --  "These consequences of unchecked prosecutorial power burden people of color and the poor disproportionately."

Again, extremely misleading to the point of being the functional equivalent of lying.  

First, prosecutorial power and the policies it embodies face significant checks, as Loretta Lynch found out six months ago.  Second, the real disproportionate burden for "people of color and the poor" is the rate of violent crime which, the ACLU never tells us, has been sharply increasing since 2014.  That would be more than two years in which  -- ready now?  --  the prison population (that is, the number of criminals previously kept off the streets) has been declining, in large part because of the success of programs like the one the ACLU is pushing in this press release.

For those who think years of shrinking the prison population has nothing to do with resurgent crime, I would simply note that, according to Eric Holder's DOJ, the overall recidivism rate is over three-quarters, and the recidivism rate for those convicted of violent crimes is slightly over 70%  https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfm:

An estimated two-thirds (68 percent) of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of release from prison, and three-quarters (77 percent) were arrested within five years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today.

More than a third (37 percent) of prisoners who were arrested within five years of release were arrested within the first six months after release, with more than half (57 percent) arrested by the end of the first year....

Recidivism rates varied with the attributes of the inmate. Prisoners released after serving time for a property offense were the most likely to recidivate. Within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders were arrested for a new crime, compared to 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders.


All in all, the ACLU report is simply breathtaking in its dishonesty. 

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