Crime is up — now documented in 1080p resolution — while sympathy for criminality can be observed in district attorney offices and university halls from coast to coast. Domestically, hourlong adoration of serial killers is as familiar to our televisions as baseball or the evening news — with steepled fingers, the Freudians patiently explain how the incarcerated are the unfortunate products of tough childhoods.
Having grown up in a household that dealt with the criminal element daily — my dad a cop, and my mom a jail instructor — I benefited from his experience with evil among the public juxtaposed with my mom’s successful attempts to reform convicts enough to get them a GED (General Equivalency Diploma). The students who got out and stayed out we’d run into at the local Walgreens — they were there for cigarettes, and we were after kettle corn.
When I got older, I’d occasionally visit Mom’s classroom in the jail and help tutor students. Her students, necessarily the most well-behaved to have such privileges, weren’t good guys or misunderstood. Many had pasts they had made violent, and all had victims plural.
The modern discussion of “restorative criminal justice” as anything other than a vain attempt at wishing away the intentional actions of destructive people is observable in our streets. So to come across the Substack of JustACon, a former inmate and forever “Convict” who doesn’t give in to boastfulness or criminal apologetics, was incredibly refreshing.
I expected scorn, judgement, mistrust and had prepared for years to carry it. I stuck my chest out because I knew what was coming and I was going to show everyone that I could take it. Yet it never came. Instead I found fascination, curiosity, sympathy and strangers making excuses for me. You explained my crimes away TO ME when I made no attempt to do so myself. I became a novelty and people would treat me as if my life were an episode of their favorite crime drama. I have actual victims, lives ended and ruined, and people tell me the tragedy was because I was so young.
Society has become desensitized to criminals. And not only that, in many cases, it’s become fascinated by us.
You can read the rest here.
He has the whole of it. Convicts don’t deserve our peremptory forgiveness. Freedom is enough. Everything after that is earned.