Commentary by Theodore Dalrymple. You may have noticed that liberals have a exasperatingly lenient and casual attitude toward criminal behavior:
A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. [. . .] The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right" one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.
So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.
The sentence I bolded is very important. This is why a ban on the death penalty is very foolish besides being morally obtuse. But there is no common sense on the Left, so much so that contemporary liberalism is arguably more of a mental aberration than a cogent position on social and political questions.
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