The brutal, unprovoked murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr. on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina, should be a radicalizing moment for all law-abiding Americans who just want to live and work in peaceful, orderly cities.
Above all, it should rally public support for a crackdown on violent criminals and a return to mass incarceration and involuntary commitment in cities across the country.
We used to know how to deal with psychotic, violent criminals. They would either be incarcerated for a long period of time or involuntarily committed to long-term treatment in a state psychiatric hospital.
But for many years now, involuntary commitment and mass incarceration have been deemed “structurally racist” by leftists and useful idiots on the right. We were told we had to get rid of these problematic relics of the past, which didn’t work anyway. The BLM movement of 2020 and the false narrative around George Floyd’s death did much to bring about criminal justice “reforms” like cashless bail, decriminalizing homelessness, and emptying the jails in the name of racial equity. A cadre of Soros-funded district attorneys in major cities, along with radically left-wing municipal governments and mayors, were only too eager to make these changes. We were told these things were not just moral imperatives necessary to atone for racism but that they would make our streets safer.
What utter nonsense.
First, consider what has happened with involuntary commitment. It should be clear by now that shutting down state psychiatric hospitals and changing our laws about involuntary commitment was a huge mistake. Anyone who has spent time in a major American city over the past 20 years knows we have a huge problem with mentally ill, violent homeless people who cannot care for themselves and are a danger to public safety.
How did this problem get so bad? Because of misguided, reckless public policy. The shuttering of psychiatric facilities all over America in the 1980s and ‘90s was part of a long-term trend of deinstitutionalization that began in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was accelerated by the passage of Medicaid, allowing states to move psychiatric patients out of state-funded hospitals and into smaller, non-secure facilities and group homes, which federal Medicaid dollars would pay for.
Over time, the result was the near complete emptying out of our psychiatric hospitals. Currently, the population of involuntarily committed criminals is only 25,000 in the entire country. In the 1950s, the nation’s two largest psychiatric hospitals each had a census of more than 16,000 people. This trend toward de-institutionalization needs to be reversed. We need to rebuild the entire infrastructure of state-run psychiatric hospitals and revive laws that allow for the involuntarily commitment of violent, mentally unstable criminals.
As it stands, in most states it’s very difficult to involuntarily commit even violent criminals. Just this week, for example, a Colorado sheriff said he was forced to release a “very dangerous” inmate because of a new state law, passed last year, requiring the release of anyone found to be incompetent to stand trial. Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams warned residents on Monday that he had to release 21-year-old Debisa Ephraim, who was caught on video knocking out several men and then beating them in the face while they laid on the ground unconscious.
“He is a very dangerous person, and his actions, from what we can tell, were unprovoked,” said Reams. Ephraim had been jailed for the past five months facing charges including attempted second-degree murder, assault, and burglary. But the law, signed last year by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, stipulates that those found incompetent to stand trial must get mental health treatment instead — contingent on them qualifying for treatment. Ephraim did not qualify, said Reams, and so was released per the new law.
This sort of thing happens all the time now, especially in Democrat-controlled jurisdictions. By all accounts, the 34-year-old Brown was someone who should either have been in prison or locked away in a psychiatric hospital. He had been arrested 14 times, and had been convicted on charges including felony larceny and armed robbery, for which he served a six-year prison sentence and was released in 2020. Within months of his release, he was charged again for assault — of his own sister.
He was then diagnosed with schizophrenia. Back in January, he was arrested after repeatedly calling 911 and claiming that a “man-made material” had been implanted in him and was dictating his thoughts and actions. Despite this delusional behavior and his long rap sheet, he was released without bond. Even though his own mother said he shouldn’t be loose on the streets. Had Brown been involuntarily committed in January, or earlier, Zarutska would be alive today.
Beyond the mentally ill, there’s the question of violent criminals who terrorize our cities. Over the past two decades, the “criminal justice reform” movement has convinced Democrats and Republicans alike that America has a problem with mass incarceration — that it’s expensive and inhumane and doesn’t reduce crime. The policy proposals that have come out of this movement call for closing prisons, reducing the incarcerated population, and pursuing “alternatives to detention” and “restorative justice.”
All of this is wrong. As Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute has written, “the decarceration case is built on sand. Prison does work. It’s one of the few effective strategies that governments have for fighting crime.”
Lehman argues that one of the big things pro-decarceration advocates get wrong is not giving prison enough credit for incapacitation — that is, preventing people from committing crimes while they’re locked up. By obsessively focusing on whether prison reduces or increases recidivism (evidence suggests it doesn’t increase recidivism, despite repeated claims to the contrary) the pro-decarceration crowd ignores the fact that incapacitation reduces crime in absolute terms. Put another way, when people like Brown are in prison they can’t murder innocent people on public transit in broad daylight.
Speaking of recidivism, there’s a strong and growing body of evidence showing that non-carceral approaches to crime through so-called “community violence intervention programs” loudly touted in recent years by decarcerationists don’t have any effect on violent criminals.
But you don’t have to be a criminologist to know this. In 2023, then-Washington, D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee had a viral moment at a press conference when he said, “The average homicide suspect has been arrested eleven times prior to them committing a homicide. That is a problem. That is a problem.” The solution to that problem, he added, was to keep violent criminals locked up.
Instead of buying into the dangerous lie that mass incarceration doesn’t work, we should be building more prisons and sending violent criminals there for lengthy sentences. Likewise, if federal funding restrictions are what caused state psychiatric hospitals to close, maybe federal funding should be made available to build new ones, with incentives for states that make it easier to involuntarily commit violent, mentally unstable criminals.
What we’ve been doing for years now is dangerous and morally indefensible. Releasing violent criminals onto the streets, as White House deputy chief Stephen Miller said Tuesday, is a “form of political terrorism” — perpetrated by Democrat elected officials against the people who live in their jurisdictions.
It should not take the gratuitous slaughtering of an innocent young woman by a psychotic maniac on a public train to force a national conversation about how wrong the criminal justice reform movement has been about everything. But if Zarutska’s murder results in a surge of public demand for a return to mass incarceration and a revival of involuntary psychiatric commitment, it will be a small step in the right direction. It will also be a long-overdue rebuke of the leftist ideologues who unleashed mayhem on our cities for the sake of damnable lie.