On Wednesday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, who is a constitutional attorney by training, joined “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss freshman “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s (D-MA) harrowing new “criminal justice reform” bill. As reported by Fox News, Pressley’s bill would “allow ‘transgender individuals to be housed in a facility that conforms with their gender identity’ … [and] would also give incarcerated people the right to vote, repeal federal laws that criminalize illegal immigration, require inmates who are working to be paid no less than federal minimum wage, and increase support for inmates transitioning back into society.”
Hammer, who identifies as a traditional law-and-order conservative with little in the way of sympathy for criminals, joined Wheeler to discusss Pressley’s far-reaching bill.
Wheeler began by asking Hammer whom, exactly, Pressley claims to represent when she says she wants to make our criminal justice system safer and more humane. Hammer responded by lamenting how there oftentimes seems to be strong bipartisan agreement to model criminal justice policy away from the victims of crime and toward the criminals themselves:
There is a bipartisan, across-the-political spectrum problem in our criminal justice political and legal discourse. We are always talking about that the victims of crime are the criminals — and not the victims. On the left, it speaks for itself — that’s what’s going on here [with Pressley]. But on the Right, there’s a lot of libertarian, “criminal justice reform,” Kim Kardashian-flirting about letting violent people out of prison.
You know, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) in 2016 was not very popular when he said this, but he was absolutely correct: We actually have an under-incarceration problem in this country. We have a lot of people in prison, but you know what? We’re also a very violent society. Nineteen percent of property crimes in America, we actually find the perp. Forty-seven percent of violent crimes — less than half of violent crimes in America — law enforcement can identify the perp. So we actually really need to be locking up more people and not letting people out, but you know — right here. Ayanna Pressley, she’s the Ringo Starr of the “Squad,” I mean, she’s auditioning for the John Lennon Paul McCartney role, I guess.
Wheeler responded by pointing out the possibility that Pressley’s plan does not attempt to find a happy median in criminal justice policy; rather, “she just straight-up wants to release anybody who is in prison for any reason.” Hammer replied by pointing out how there has been a recent rise in violent crime, thus paring back the gains made during the Reagan and Clinton tough-on-crime decades:
[I]t’s just over the past, really two to three, maybe four, years that the FBI crime statistics are starting to show an increase again [in violent crime]. This is pretty harrowing. I mean, you know what, a lot of these people on the libertarian-leaning Right were talking about “criminal justice reform” three, four, or five years ago. Maybe it made a lot more sense then; the statistics today just tell a very different story.
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Related: Don’t Let Kim Kardashian Fool You. America Has An UNDER-Incarceration Problem.