Washington, D.C., has a revolutionary idea on how to combat its crime crisis: arrest and incarcerate violent criminals.
Councilwoman Brooke Pinto, chairwoman of the City Council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, has proposed more stringent laws and penalties for the council to consider. The proposal would increase the maximum sentencing for gun crimes from one year to five years, expand the definition of carjacking, and keep juvenile criminals in pretrial detention for violent crimes.
Novel concepts, cracking down on gun crimes after a 35% increase in homicides, on carjackings after an 82% increase in motor vehicle thefts, and on juvenile crime after an exponential surge in juvenile criminals since 2020. Maybe the city shouldn’t have gone so soft on those things in the first place.
Washington, D.C., isn’t out of the woods yet, though. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who has been weakening crime laws in the city for decades and has stuck his head in the sand during the city’s crime surge, has issues with provisions that allow police to set up drug-free zones for up to 120 hours in high drug activity areas. Evidently, even as other cities have seen their crime surges start to decline, the still rising crime numbers in Washington, D.C., aren’t enough to wake up everyone on the City Council.
Those ideas of putting criminals in jail to keep them from committing more crimes seem pretty straightforward, but they are still being rolled back in pockets across the country. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court just ruled that adults between the ages of 18 and 20 are not allowed to be sentenced to life without parole for murder. The decision even opened up the possibility of extending that sentencing restriction up to adults who are 24 years old.
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Again, it is considered unfair by Massachusetts bleeding heart liberals to keep a 20-year-old murderer behind bars for life, and potentially even if that murderer happens to be 24.
That attitude is exactly what put Washington, D.C., in the terrible crisis it is still too squeamish to commit to solving. The solution remains what it always has been: throw the book at violent criminals, whether they are murderers or armed carjackers, and keep them from committing more crimes. How? By refusing to turn the justice system into a revolving door for unrepentant, violent people.