The logic behind criminal justice reform and combatting overpopulation in prisons is a twisted pretzel that relies on misleading and misdirecting the public at the expense of its own safety.

Term-limited Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) is on his way out of office, and Louisiana voters have decided to replace him with a Republican. Naturally, as lame-duck Democrats are prone to do, Edwards is wielding his executive power to help get criminals out of jail. Edwards went further than the typical commutations for drug offenders, though, pardoning 40 convicted murderers along with people convicted of arson and robbery.

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Eleven of those 40 were convicted of first-degree murder, which in Louisiana means they committed the act with “specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm” on the victim. Among those Edwards is releasing are a man who stabbed a 15-year-old to death when he was 20 and another who stabbed a convenience store worker 39 times to the point that the tip of his knife broke off and remained in her skull. Several others are listed as habitual offenders, including one who knocked his own attorney unconscious in court in 2004.

Edwards justified this as fanatical reform advocates typically do. "For as long as I can remember, Louisiana reflexively responded to an increase in crime by putting more people in prison and keeping them there longer," he said. "We've never been made safer as a result of that. There is no data to suggest that an increase in crime here was because of the reforms."

Aside from the bait-and-switch between saying “we’ve never been made safer” by locking up criminals and saying that there is no data to show that we haven’t been made less safe by reforms, Edwards ignores a very basic logical explanation. If you lock up someone who has committed murder, that person will not commit murder again in society. If you lock up a habitual offender guilty of first-degree robbery, for example, that person will not commit robbery or any of the other crimes they have been committing as a career criminal.

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Moreover, the point of sending people to prison for life for committing homicide or being habitual career criminals is that they have proven themselves dangerous and unable to be members of society who respect their fellow humans. Being sentenced to life in prison for taking someone’s life is called justice. Evidently, Edwards thinks the lives of victims killed in premeditated homicides are worth less than the lives of the murderers who killed them.

This is what criminal justice reform requires you to believe, though. It requires you to think that locking up criminals doesn’t stop those criminals from committing crimes even though they are incarcerated and that still-alive murderers deserve a second chance at living freely in society even after they deprived their victims of that. “Criminal justice reform” defenders such as Edwards are allergic to both logic and empathy, and society is made worse because of it.