Why The Criminal Justice System Gave Up On Punishing Criminals

I have talked a lot about the collapse of the criminal justice system. The very concept of criminal justice — of enacting justice, and punishing crime — has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state of lawless anarchy back to its origins. And the thing is, you don’t need to trace the roots very far.

There is a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who don’t believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are operating according to certain particularly crazy set of beliefs. And one of those beliefs is that deterrence doesn’t exist. Effectively, you cannot deter crime by punishing it. That’s the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning — the sort of insane idea that can only begin in our institutions of higher learning — and filtered its way down from there. As these ideas always do.