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Next Tuesday, voters, please remember that Democrats will never run out of excuses for criminals. They drone on about “racism,” “root causes,” “poverty,” “drug addiction,” “his gun dropped,” “mental illness,” “learning disabilities,” “he made a mistake” and “prison doesn’t work”!

It’s not the government’s job to probe criminals’ psyches. These are predators, monsters, feral beasts attacking civilization, with no regard for your property, bodily integrity or life. The government’s only job is to keep them away from us, not to ensure that they have fulfilling lives.

At the New York gubernatorial debate last week, feisty Republican challenger Rep. Lee Zeldin hit Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, hard on the crime wave engulfing New York. Finally, he said, “We’re halfway through the debate, she still hasn’t talked about locking up anyone committing any crimes.”

In a city where citizens are afraid to leave their homes because of crime, Hochul’s blithe response made headlines. She said: “I don’t know why that’s so important to you.”

Her unfathomably out-of-touch reply was so infuriating, viewers might have missed the first part of her answer: “Anyone who commits a crime under our laws, especially with the change we made to bail, has consequences.”

“Has consequences.” Take note, New Yorkers! She did not say, “will go to jail” or “will be prosecuted” or “will be removed from the streets for the welfare of society.”

“Has consequences” is progressive code for “restorative justice.” In lieu of actual punishment, the criminal will be required to write a letter to the victim, hug it out or attend a family “mediation.” Thus, if a pack of teenagers beat the crap out of your kid at school, he will be forced to sit down with his attackers so they can tell him, Hey, sorry, man, we thought you dissed us.

One of the major drivers of New York’s unprecedented increase in crime is the “no bail” law — meaning “no jail.” The same predators are arrested over and over again but can never be put in jail, thanks to the Democrats.

Apart from their overriding objective of keeping “black bodies” out of jail — as opposed to, say, protecting the white and black bodies of their victims — the Democrats’ argument for never jailing arrestees is that bail “discriminates” against the poor, who can’t afford to pay. First, show me the rich person mugging New Yorkers or shoving commuters in front of subway trains.

Second, we’re lucky when we can even catch one of these monsters. And, if caught, the vast majority of guilty criminals will never spend a day in prison. Only about 30% of those arrested for a violent crime go to prison — and those were the statistics before Soros-backed district attorneys started releasing criminals all over the country. Those were the statistics before the racial reckoning.

Another fantastic Democratic idea for reducing crime is to deploy “violence interrupters,” i.e. otherwise difficult-to-employ ex-cons who get a nice social work job from the city. Or to fund endless “mental health” services, the sole purpose of which is to create more useless government jobs for Victim Studies majors from Bard College.

Look, if some idiot wants to counsel rapists and muggers in prison — fantastic! They can volunteer. But the counseling needs to take place behind prison walls, where their clients belong.

Though I think it’s kind of important to mention that there is no evidence that “mental health” counseling has ever worked. The New York Times admitted as much in an uncharacteristic burst of honesty in 1983: “Dozens of studies … have found that rehabilitation programs in prison have failed, that there is no reliable way of telling whether a prisoner has reformed and that many released early commit new crimes.”

No matter what they call it, liberals have been pushing their anything-but-prison plans forever.

Here are some Times headlines from as far back as the 1980s:

1982: “According to a recent Rand Corporation study, [putting fewer criminals in prison] could reduce both the prison population and the crime rate.”

1987: “After years of increased sentences, and an extraordinary drain on our state’s treasury, we need to acknowledge that longer sentences do not deter most crime.”

1988: “An Answer to Jails Is Reading”

1989: “Prison Can Be a Dumb Solution”

1991: “Alternative to Prison Mends Fences and Lives”

Note that it wasn’t until 1994, and the election of Rudolph Giuliani, that crime actually, for the first time, went down. (Giuliani did not follow the Times‘ advice.)

And leaping ahead to the present, here is the Times in 2020: “Can Prosecutors Be Taught To Avoid Jail Sentences?”

(I couldn’t help but notice that every one of the writers above was a female. So the good news is, we have no shortage of prison volunteers!)

“Alternatives to prison” never have worked, never will work, and liberals don’t care that they don’t work. They just don’t want criminals in prison.

This is a parlor game of one-upmanship for Democrats:

I’m the most compassionate!

No, I am!

Look — the object of my compassion is way worse than yours! He’s a rapist and a murderer!

The purpose of the criminal justice system is to lock up bad guys, not to allow liberals to feel good about themselves. (Least of all is it to ensure that all ethnicities are incarcerated at the exact same percentages.)

In fact, now that I think about it, separating criminals from the law-abiding is the government’s most basic responsibility. It’s also the only government program where liberals suddenly become hard-nosed fiscal conservatives. In just this one case, we get detailed breakdowns of the cost of prison. How much do the public schools cost? How about the cost of subsidized housing for able-bodied (but nonworking) Americans? How about food stamps? How about the endless layers of “social workers”?

Democrats can’t change and won’t change — they can only be defeated at the polls. (Even that’s only a start.) If you ever want to leave your home again, without fear of your body or property being violated, vote Republican on Nov. 8.