If there’s one thing progressives love, it’s the ideas of abolishing critical institutions which foster the safety and liberty of this great nation. Americans have witnessed this as progressives call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Obviously, both of these institutions ensure the security of America, but if progressives got their way, they’d make ICE and the DHS vanish.
“Department of Homeland Security” (CC BY 2.0) by DonkeyHotey
Next on the list of institutions that progressives want to throw on the chopping block are prisons. The Daily Caller News Foundation reports that socialist and House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez likened prisons to slavery and the Jim Crow era; the congresswoman furthermore stated that prisons are too inhumane for her liking and that she thinks America needs to come up with an alternative approach.
This notion of abolishing prisons is one of the wackiest, most outrageous statements to come from Ocasio-Cortez and that’s saying quite a bit.
AOC on Prisons in America
On Monday, the congresswoman took to Twitter in order to share her thoughts on prisons in America and why they ought to be abolished. Ocasio-Cortez ultimately made the case that incarceration is too “inhumane.” She also made sure to get in cheap shots at right-wingers before claiming that poor people are imprisoned simply for being poor.
Of course, aside from the litany of untrue statement, Ocasio-Cortez also fails to realize why there are prisons in America. When bad people commit crimes of a certain nature and are found guilty, they are often sent to prison. A person’s inability to pay bail money contrasted with another individual’s ability to do so is not a justification for “abolishing prisons.”
Nevertheless, AOC’s statements on why she wants to abolish prisons in America read as follows:
It’s shocking that this person is an elected official who is serving in our United States Congress. Hopefully, the folks in her district learned their lesson and will not elect her again. Radicals like Ocasio-Cortez should be as far away from congressional positions as humanly possible.
Don’t Do the Crime if You Can’t Do the Time
This idea that America should completely abolish the prison system reaches new levels of insanity, even for someone like Ocasio-Cortez. Progressives have a lot of complaints about incarceration and prisons being “for profit.” What they won’t talk about, however, is the crimes that people commit which cause them to land in prison.
“POLICE” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by cchana
Poverty is not an excuse for criminal wrongdoing, no matter how much Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other Democrats wish to pretend otherwise. People aren’t put in prison merely for being poor, but their poverty may ultimately halt them from being able to afford a world-class attorney or bail money. Those are individual problems, not collective problems which the nation should use as ammunition to abolish prisons.
What do you think about the idea of abolishing prisons in the United States? Sound off in the comments section below!
