Horowitz: More insane examples of our under-incarceration problem



Victims of crime often don’t get second chances. But criminals in California get endless chances. The California criminal justice system is so weighted toward the criminal that the most violent criminals who are caught committing gun crimes are released. The case of the mass shooting in Sacramento on Sunday that killed six, allegedly at the hands of a career gun felon who used an illegal weapon, is a perfect example of the old adage, “Guns don’t kill, bad people kill.”

Smiley Allen Martin was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Jan. 12, 2018, after being convicted of domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury. He already had a big rap sheet beforehand, dating back to when he turned 18 and likely when he was a juvenile. Yet he was arrested this week in connection with a mass shooting in downtown Sacramento early Sunday morning, after police say he was caught illegally possessing a handgun modified to fire as an automatic weapon and was injured in the wild shootout.

You might be wondering how a man sentenced to 10 years in 2018 can be out in 2022 to allegedly be involved in a shooting, but you have to remember this is California. Math works differently, at least when it favors the criminal.

According to court documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee, Martin was caught illegally with a rifle in 2013 but was given probation. Ten months later, he was apprehended after committing multiple robberies in Walmart and Target stores. He was sentenced to just two years and likely got out earlier. He was caught while on parole giving false information to police and leading them on a foot pursuit. Shortly thereafter is when he was arrested for brutally beating a prostitute at his home and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, because of the convoluted good time credit system, he was already up for parole three and a half years later. Although he was initially denied release, he was eventually released in February of this year after serving just four years.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert wrote a letter to the Parole Board last year beseeching them not to release Martin. “As shown by Inmate Martin’s pattern of conduct, he is an assaultive and non-compliant individual and has absolutely no regard for his victims who are left in the wake of numerous serious offenses,” Schubert wrote last April. “He has no respect for others, for law enforcement or for the law. If he is released early, he will continue to break the law.”

Schubert and 44 other district attorneys have sued the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation over its new policies of calculating early release credits, which they say could lead to the early release of 76,000 inmates. She is now running for attorney general as an independent.

Martin is not an anomalous criminal. He has the quintessential rap sheet of a career criminal. The reality is that for all the tough talk on gun violence, the anti-incarceration crowd has no desire to lock up gun felons. They get more than second chances. It’s among that pool of criminals that you will find most of the murder and violent crime committed in this country.

The reality is that in blue states, only law-abiding citizens can’t carry guns. New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently admitted about his city, “Here’s a climate on the street that carrying a gun is no longer an illegal act and we have to stop that.” But whose fault is that? He correctly observed, “We have to look at repeated offenders. There’s only a small number of people driving crime in our city and in country. They’re repeat offenders.” Yet his party supports policies that ensure repeat offenders are not locked up because liberals hate prison more than they hate guns.

Lest you think this is only a New York and California problem, though, check out how they punish child molesters in the red state of Ohio. Lamont Baldwin, a former wrestling coach and security monitor at Princeton Middle School in Cincinnati, confessed to fondling four boys with the most satanic subterfuge imaginable. According to Sharonville Police Detective Brad Hondorf, Baldwin would give each kid a dollar bill and tell him to hide it on his person, after which he would fondle him everywhere as if to pretend to find it. Hondorf also believes there were numerous other victims during the time Baldwin spent as a security monitor in the school.

What do you think is the appropriate punishment for a demon like this? I doubt zero time in prison was on your mind, but then again, you don’t work in the corrupt judicial system. Hamilton County probation officials recommended no prison time, and Judge Alan Triggs sentenced him to just probation and community service, along with the requirement to complete a “behavioral intervention program.”

Clearly, this was not an anomaly but a mindset among both the probation staff and the judges. They have all been brainwashed into the notion that we have an over-incarceration problem, but the opposite is true.

By refusing to fund more prisons, courts, and prosecutors to accommodate the growth of the population – as we’ve done with every other policy issue – lawmakers have been faced with a false dichotomy of backlogs or jailbreak. Well, it’s time for another “infrastructure project” to build jails and prisons and to start filling them up with the people who belong there.

Horowitz: Man accused of shoving woman onto NYC subway tracks released 4 days earlier after similar attack



If the panacea for the virus is early treatment before it shuts down your lungs, the cure to the crime epidemic is incarcerating the bad guys before they strike again. However, it's hard to tell which policy our government is failing worse on at this point.

Once the pride of America's largest city, New York's subways are now one of the most dangerous places to be on earth. Whereas most violent crime occurs between rival gangs in bad neighborhoods, NYC subways have been the site of a rash of random attacks in recent months. And the attacks are becoming more dangerous.

On Sunday, a 59-year-old deaf woman was punched and shoved onto the tracks in broad daylight at a Manhattan subway. Not surprisingly, when the NYPD caught the suspect a day later, he had a massive rap sheet and spent little time behind bars. The suspect, Vladimir Pierre, is a 41-year-old alleged gang member with 27 prior arrests! Here's the thing: He was arrested just four days earlier for reportedly punching a mother of two in the face, again in broad daylight, while she was waiting for a shuttle at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

How was he free to attack another woman, you might be wondering? Well, thanks to the new "criminal justice reform" signed by the now former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, assault is too low-level a crime to warrant pretrial holding. Pierre walked free without posting any bail, despite the fact that he already had two charges pending in court. One of them stemmed from yet another subway attack, in which he is accused of randomly choking, punching, and biting a woman on a train, according to the New York Post.

Criminals like Pierre used to be behind bars but are now commonplace on New York's subways and pose a particular threat to women. However, nobody is allowed to carry a gun in New York City — unless of course you are a criminal caught in felony possession, in which case you will be set free without bail.

Just two weeks ago, another woman was shoved onto a subway track in Brooklyn by a career criminal. A similar incident occurred in Queens in June when a woman suffered a deep cut on her leg from the fall. Luckily, nobody has been hit by an oncoming train in any of these incidents ... yet.

However, the jailbreak policies are taking a much more tragic toll across New York and the country in other cases. Another career criminal was let out of prison after just one year of time served for an attempted robbery and was arrested earlier this week for raping a 70-year-old Bronx woman at gunpoint in her apartment building.

The point is that nearly every violent crime in this country is committed by a repeat violent offender who has not been properly deterred and punished. Just this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released an updated 10-year report on recidivism in 24 states. The findings are horrific:

Among persons released from state prisons in 2008 across 24 states, 82% were arrested at least once during the 10 years following release. The annual arrest percentage declined over time, with 43% of prisoners arrested at least once in Year 1 of their release, [another] 29% arrested [by] Year 5, and 22% arrested [by] Year 10.

In other words, a little more than four in 10 incarcerated criminals are re-arrested within one year and 66% are re-arrested within three years. The numbers were even higher among criminals under age 24. What's particularly problematic is the fact that criminals are now released earlier than ever before, while an increasing share of them are paroled from day one.

This is especially true for gun and drug charges, which our system views as "low-level." The problem is that all of the violent gang members who are caught for drugs and guns go on to commit other violent crimes. The BJS report found that 75% percent of drug offenders released from prison in 2008 were arrested for a non-drug crime within 10 years. Those released after serving time for weapons charges recidivated at a higher level than any other group.

Cops in Chicago recently stumbled across a case that perfectly exemplifies the culture of leniency propelling this current wave of recidivist crime. CWB Chicago reports that last week Chicago cops stopped a car for a traffic violation and then inspected it after seeing marijuana in the car. They found three loaded guns in the center console, all illegally possessed. Here is the criminal history and this is what happened.

Prosecutors said the men are Marcus Taylor, 30, who was on bail for another pending felony gun case; Jerry Glover, 22, who has two prior felony narcotics convictions; and Isaiah Robinson, 23, who is on parole for a felony gun conviction.
But prosecutors only charged the men with one count of misdemeanor unlawful use of a weapon each. During a misdemeanor bond court hearing, Judge Susana Ortiz asked an assistant state's attorney if more serious charges were being considered. The prosecutor said no.
That, folks, is the story of Chicago and New York in a nutshell. And that will be the story of the rest of America unless Republicans begin rolling back the "criminal justice reforms" they bought into in recent years.