Our president today:
I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule – but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections – such as lowering penalties for carjackings.
If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did – I’ll sign it.
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 2, 2023
I understand that this is just some cheap tough-on-crime posturing, and I'll even acknowledge that it's probably politically smart. That said, if you believe in home rule only when you agree with the homies, then you don't really believe in home rule.
Plus there's nothing wrong with lowering penalties for carjacking.¹ As a country we routinely hand out insanely long prison sentences that do nothing to deter criminals but cost all of us tremendously—taxpayers in money and prisoners in wasted lives. At a guess, the only thing wrong with the DC bill is that it doesn't shorten the sentences for more crimes.
¹Carjacking is just one of several crimes that the bill deals with. However, it's a sudden fan favorite because motor vehicle theft is up 100% in 2023. That is, it's up over the past eight weeks. That's not a good reason to panic.
If long sentences should be eliminated because they don't deter crime, then why impose any sentences at all? If criminals are not reformed by being in prison, which seems to be the case, and the threat of being put into prison is not a deterrent, which is questionable, then the reason for putting people in jail is to keep them off the streets and not committing crimes. The longer they are kept in prison, presumably the less crime that is committed. The cost of keeping them in prison should presumably be balanced against the cost of the crimes, but that difference is not dependent on length of sentence.
Even supposing that the prospect of a 10-year sentence is no more a deterrent than that of a 3-month sentence, there are good reasons for long sentences for crimes which are serious costs to society.
+1
Your argument is like saying, "If lowering taxes from 90% is good why don't we just get rid of taxes". Well, there is probably an optimum sentence length for deterrence and that length is probably shorter rather than longer. Most of the penalty for being incarcerated occurs up front, losing your job, your savings, society making it impossible for you to get employment, etc.
Finding what that optimum value is would benefit society by maximizing effect and minimizing costs.
Lowering from what to what?
Plus there's nothing wrong with lowering penalties for carjacking.
Sure there is. Doing so helps the country's fascists win elections.
Also, there's nothing even faintly hypocritical or inconsistent about supporting statehood for DC, but also feeling the federal government should oppose bad, local DC policies until statehood arrives.
There was that great quote about someone learning that it cost something like $500,000 to keep someone on Rikers Island (I know that's an extreme example) for a year, and said "give me half of that and I promise you'll never hear from me again."
Yes, that's a lot of money to punish/isolate someone. But that's not the point of Rikers. We know how to skimp on prison costs in this country.
Rikers is a make-work program for cops. It helps keep the NYPD a potent threat against any mayor who dares to cross the real estate boys.
“Carjacking” is an extremely dangerous crime, both to the victim and the perpetrator. Cars are very valuable and people are more willing to fight to keep them. Since they are big and heavy there is more chance of getting hurt in the process. The perpetrator has no way of knowing if the driver is armed or capable of defending themselves. There is a very good chance of getting caught and if caught doing serious time. It is a crime of stupidity and desperation.
Auto theft is pretty easy and doesn’t have the pitfalls of carjacking. Less likely that you will be caught, less physical danger, and much less time if caught.
Carjacking was popular for a short time in the 80’s, if I recall correctly. It quickly disappeared as an issue, and I don’t understand why it has resurfaced.
Yeah, this. Carjacking is dangerous.
Also, I trawl the DC subreddit at times (well, it shows up in my mobile feed) because I live in the metro area and figure I should know what's going on. The general attitude there is that Bowser and the MPD are royally fucking up on not enforcing jack shit. One of the favorites is shaming cars that have thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) in unpaid tickets for illegal parking - with photos of the car parked on the sidewalk, or blocking an entire lane of traffic, etc. That's fairly benign, but when combined with policies like rapid release after arrest for certain gun crimes then the optics are very bad.
Also, Kevin didn't even get the carjacking stats correct. They've been going up for 5+ years now. "Carjackings in D.C. increased for a fifth straight year in 2022. There were 485 incidents reported to D.C. police, a 14% jump from 2021." https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/01/04/dc-carjackings-rise-for-fifth-straight-year
Look at that chart (carjacking tripled from 2019 to 2022). It sure looks like maybe lowering penalties for carjacking isn't what should be happening right now.
I think it's resurfaced in DC because DC has kind of just the right mix of concentration/traffic and side streets where it's easy to "get away" - it has a very connected grid.
Perhaps the rise in carjackings is evidence that very heavy penalties are not having the desired effect, and so there's no reason to keep them in force.
Snark?
Carjacking is robbery, a violent and dangerous crime. People get killed during robberies. Everyone who is robbed is terrorized and in a carjacking it’s likely they were physically assaulted and hurt. Since robbery is the domain of the most stupid of criminals it is also one that is unlikely to be deterred by fear of capture. Deterrence isn’t the only reason for penalties. The saying is let the punishment fit the crime not let the value of deterrence fit the crime.
I would posit that the reason it has resurfaced is purely economic. The cash return on cars and car parts has never been better. A ripple effect from COVID induced shortages in the automotive industry.
Add to that the fact that parked cars are far harder to break into if they aren't an older Hyundai or KIA.
"Plus there's nothing wrong with lowering penalties for carjacking.¹ .."
Other than being both substantively and politically stupid.
Yglesias has been all over this issue, and the Biden White House House supposedly reads him. Not making that up. Whether that's good or bad depends on what you think of Yglesias's takes, I guess.
Regardless of the portmanteau, if the crime is aggravated even if only a property crime, it should be a felony and treated as such. Threatening violence, brandishing weapons, driving off with children, assault during the commission is not just motor theft.
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The time to push for D.C. statehood was immediately after January 6. Back then, there was a feeling that, not being a state, D.C. was restricted in several key areas - like not having their own National Guard.
Democrats should have introduced a bill to make it a state, if only to get the idea out in the open, and "thinkable", so that subsequent attempts have a better chance of succeeding.
The trouble with that was that the the 2 usual Senators, yeah the ones from WV & AZ were against statehood. Don't even get me started!!!!
It doubled on only 8 weeks? Terrifying as fuck.
Ah.... as for me I never supported Home Rule. The center of the country needs belong to the whole country. The feds should rule it directly.
The 800,000 or so (bigger than 3 states) citizens residing in DC deserve the full fruits of Democracy.
Kevin's cavalier attitude towards carjacking is pretty appalling. If committed with a weapon, it is armed robbery and should be treated, at minimum, as such. Instead of reducing penalties for carjacking, city and municipal leaders should be shouting from the rooftops that if you do this crime you will do the time.
The revised code DID NOT LOWER penalties for car jacking. It lowered the MAXIMUM penalty from 40 years to 24 years. NO ONE ever got the maximum. In fact, hardly anyone ever got more than 15 years and no one ever got more than 24.
The DC and Federal prosecutors were unanimous in their support for the revisions.
One of their major arguments was that the revised code would make it easier to charge people with appropriate crimes and MUCH EASIER to convict people.
Far from making DC more dangerous, the revised code would have made DC much safer.