The editors of the New York Times reject jail time for illegal immigrants, apparently regardless of what other laws they have broken:
The Obama administration has spent years endorsing and enacting smart criminal-justice reforms, including pushing back against decades of useless, degrading imprisonment of nonviolent and petty offenders. But there is one huge area where it seems immune to enlightenment: immigration enforcement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, takes about 300,000 immigrants a year into detention; the daily population averaged about 28,000 in fiscal 2015. About 63 percent of detainees are held in private prisons under contract with Homeland Security.
[…]
There are ways to enforce the law without mistreating a population that fits no definition of a criminal threat. The job of dismantling the prison network Mr. Obama built will pass on to Hillary Clinton, if she is elected. If it’s Donald Trump, who wants to make immigration enforcement the federal government’s overriding priority, then private incarceration, industry profits and human suffering will go through the roof.
The woman whom they cite as an example has violated at least two laws—our immigration law and the law against theft—and, given how the law is enforced these days, probably many, many more.
Law falls into two broad classifications: malum in se, things that are inherently wrong like murder, rape, and theft, and malum prohibitum, regulatory infractions. Arguably, immigration laws are malum prohibitum although there’s also an argument they’re malum in se.
However, few would argue that theft is anything but malum in se.
The editors of the NYT seem to be dividing laws in a novel way: laws against things that pose a “criminal threat” and laws that don’t. The remedy for laws that pose no criminal threat is repeal, not failing to enforce them. The real problem the editors have revealed is that Los Angeles has declared itself a “sanctuary city”.
There is a question I would like to ask the editors. Why do we have laws? I think that the criminal code represents the minimum standard of conduct we expect. If conduct is below the minimum acceptable, we shouldn’t accept it and “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” What do the editors think?
I suspect they either mean violent crime, or think that after 12 years she is unlikely to shoplift again. Not that unreasonable. Anyway, seems largely directed against the private prison system, which, while I have not read extensively on it, does seem to have issues.
Steve
Editorial reads like something an earnest sophomore would write conflating multiple issues with a red herring (or three) to keep the grader reading.
Now where was that actuary table….