Bill, Advancing in Illinois, Would Reduce the Number of Criminals by Rebranding Some as ‘Justice-Impacted Individuals’

In Illinois, a bill replacing “offender” with “justice-impacted individual” for participants in a state program is awaiting the signature of the state’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. The move is said to remove the stigma from criminals and help reduce prison populations, but such word games offer no comfort to victims of crime.After the Illinois Senate advanced House Bill 4409 to Mr. Pritzker last week, the Chicago Tribune wrote in an editorial that “right-wing Twitter” took exception. But the objections were from a broad enough range of the public that even those favorable to the goals of Democrats were put on defense.An AP fact-check judged that posts on the bill “lacked context.” It offered the small distinction that the legislation to amend the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 would “not relabel all people who commit crimes as ‘justice-impacted individuals’ — just those in the state’s Adult Redeploy Illinois program.”The program, the AP wrote, “is intended to reduce incarceration, in part, by placing individuals with any probation-eligible offense in community corrections programs rather than in prison.” The added information didn’t change the fact that the bill, if signed, will introduce a sanitized and clunky new label for offenders.The Tribune, concerned about Mr. Pritzker’s “presidential ambitions” in the face of the bill’s “gift-wrapped-for-Republicans language,” urged him to keep his pen in his pocket. They noted that even “regular old Illinois Democrats” saw the change as “going soft on crime by expressing a reluctance even to call a criminal a criminal.”Adult Redeploy Illinois’s website states that it “provides grants to counties, groups of counties, and judicial circuits to increase programming in their areas in exchange for reducing the number of people they send to the Illinois Department of Corrections.”Note that it’s not reducing actual crimes perpetrated and innocent citizens victimized that earns additional funding from the state. Instead, success is judged by the number of offenders kept on the streets — and, thanks to the euphemism, the bill would ensure they never even have to bear a stigma for their actions.A Republican state senator in Illinois, Terri Bryant, noted that softening language for criminals “over and over again” has come at a price. It costs “thousands and thousands of dollars just to do a name change,” she said in a hearing, because “each agency has to make the change on every one of their documents.”By rewriting definitions, some municipalities have ceased prosecuting some forms of lawbreaking altogether. If something is not classified as a crime, then there is no criminal or even “justice-impacted person.” Of course, there is still a victim — often citizens who suffer a lower quality of life.This approach to anti-social behavior is what New York’s Democratic senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned about in his 1993 essay titled, “Defining Deviancy Down: How We’ve Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels of Crime and Destructive Behavior.”Moynihan quoted a French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who postulated that a society can endure only so much aberrant behavior before it reduces its standards. “‘From this viewpoint,’” Moynihan wrote, quoting Durkheim, “‘the criminal no longer appears as an utterly unsociable creature.’”The bar is lowered; crime is “‘no longer considered an evil.’” In 2017 New York City reduced the penalty for public urination down to parity with a speeding ticket. At the stroke of a pen, 100,000 criminals were removed from the justice system, even as the undesirable behavior persisted.“Crime has consequences,” the Tribune wrote, noting that Cook County had stopped prosecuting some offenses altogether. “Crime has victims. Can you imagine being the victim of a serious crime and discovering that the person who committed it was not only not in prison but no longer even called an offender?”

Bill, Advancing in Illinois, Would Reduce the Number of Criminals by Rebranding Some as ‘Justice-Impacted Individuals’

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