You’ve got to give this Washington Post op-ed, “Free violent offenders from prison early, too”, credit for demolishing the “criminal justice reform” myth that it’s just a matter of releasing “non-violent offenders” locked up for drug offenses.

But a solid majority of Americans believe that about half of all people in prison are there for drug offenses, even though the actual fraction is much lower. While about half the people held by the federal system are in for drugs, the feds hold only about 10 percent of all prisoners. In the state systems, with the remaining 90 percent, only 15 percent are in for drugs. Those serving time for violence constitute 55 percent. And that’s a floor on the fraction of people really in prison for violence. The available data classifies inmates by the most serious offense for which they were convicted. If someone is arrested for domestic violence but is found to possess heroin, he may plead guilty to just the heroin charge and appear in the data as a “nonviolent drug offender,” even though the only reason the prosecutor sought prison time for the drug charge was the uncharged violence. 

The non-violent offender is, in other words, a myth.

About 25 percent of the entire American prison population, or about 365,000 out of more than 1.3 million people, is serving time just for homicide, rape or sexual assault. Almost everyone with a long sentence — those who would actually benefit from commutations, whether or not a pandemic is involved — is in prison for serious violence… Even before the coronavirus reached us, it was obvious that any effort to scale back prisons would require us to contemplate a less punitive response to violence 

So this isn’t so much honesty as the usual lefty bait and switch.

Radicals convince the general population (in the outside world, not prison) to support horrible policies by using sympathetic test cases and minimizing the consequences. Most people didn’t think supporting Bruce Jenner would lead to men showering with girls. And the criminal justice reform movement seduced people into believing that they’d just be releasing some people who had sold drugs 20 years ago.

Nope, suckers. You’re going to have to free murderers and rapists if you want real criminal justice reform.

The Horton effect persists because we don’t fully value the lives of those in prison for needlessly long sentences.

That’s true and we don’t value their lives because they don’t value our lives.

That is the point that the entire longwinded argument misses. We dehumanize murderers because they dehumanized their victims. By rights they should be dead. But lefty pro-crime activists have neutered the death penalty, claiming, falsely, that executing a murderer won’t make us any safer. Now they claim that imprisoning a murderer won’t make us any safer.

They don’t value our lives. Lefties value the lives of murderers.

And now that the coronavirus jailbreak is underway, people are buying guns because they know what keeps them safe when Democrats free massive amounts of criminals.

As Daniel Horowitz notes, some of the perps being freed are the worst of the worst.

 Under the leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York State prison system just released eight high-level sex offenders. These eight were among 51 prisoners released from the Monroe County jail on Saturday. Three of the criminals have been convicted of child rape and have registered as “level 3” sex offenders. 

This is what happens when the lives of pedophiles are viewed as more important than the lives of children.