Every day brings a new scandal for the political left in America, as yet another of its candidates turns out to be in favor of policies every American would once have found laughably disqualifying.
The latest is New York City Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn, whom the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) back, and who believes that criminals convicted of homicide, rape, and child molestation should not go to prison, they should just go to reeducation programs. Of course, data from multiple countries and several decades proves this is a disastrous plan, but why let reality interfere with socialistic utopian policies? After all, politicians such as Blackburn probably assume that the serial criminals they release will never kill or assault them.
Bronx Defenders staff lawyer Blackburn is running against incumbent New York City Assemblyman Jordan Wright, and part of his pitch during a March episode of his podcast “Brothers In Law,” according to the New York Post, was not to jail criminals guilty of “predatory sexual assaults of children” and homicide. “Even if, like, the client is guilty as f–king sin, I still don’t think that the punishment, like, meets what happened,” Blackburn rambled.
“I still don’t think that person deserves to be thrown in a cage and locked away for the rest of their life,” he continued, referring to his own advocacy for vicious murderers and pedophiles. “So that’s how I come at those cases. It’s like cool, this person did maybe… something bad to somebody. But, like, what are we gonna do about that?… I don’t think it’s prison.” I agree with that statement, but for very different reason. I think all murderers and child rapists deserve the death penalty. Blackburn’s plan of “treatment programs,” as if criminals only butcher or assault other people because of curable diseases, is perfectly preposterous.
From the Post:
In a March 2025 episode, Blackburn — a socialist who has gushed about his reverence for Karl Marx and Che Guevara — doubled down, suggesting those who shoot and kill innocent bystanders during gang-related feuds shouldn’t automatically be tossed in prison.
“I think what we envision is some sort of separation for society,” he said. “One that doesn’t have to look like a cage … Maybe community supervision, right? Included in that classes for this individual to understand why what he did harmed society.”
Both he and other co-hosts urged so-called “prison abolitionists” to participate on juries so they could vote to acquit someone — regardless of evidence.
Even some of Blackburn’s fellow leftists criticized his position, according to the Post.
Let’s see what the data tells us about the effectiveness of letting killers and sex criminals go free. In 2025, Wichita Bonds reported data from a federal study that found of released state prisoners convicted of homicide, over 57% of them committed another crime and were arrested again within ten years. Recidivism rates for sexual offenders are similarly high.
The 1996 study in Canada found that 42% of child molesters will have a new sexual or violent offense conviction within 15 to 30 years after they are released, and that among those who are homosexual and target young boys, the recidivism rate is up to 77%. A 2004 review of 95 studies estimated an overall recidivism rate for sex offenders of about 37%. The Prison Policy Initiative used Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2019 to note that over two-thirds of rapists and sexual criminals reoffend within nine years, while almost 8 and 10 violent offenders will reoffend within the same time period.
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In 2017, however, the U.S. Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking warned that there is a serious problem of underreporting that makes it possible the recidivism rate for sex offenders is actually much, much higher than even the horrifying above statistics, particularly depending on the seriousness of the original offense. And somehow, neither Blackburn nor the DSA has managed to take any of these statistics into consideration.
Thomas Sowell, in Intellectuals and Society, notes that whenever and wherever soft-on-crime policies are implemented, they always result in a serious spike in crime. He also noted that this reality has never impacted woke intellectuals’ or politicians’ dedication to such policies, nor their self-righteous arrogance at being responsible for implementing them.
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