Sounds easy right? Just a boring topic that states the obvious. The problem is, when it comes to the criminal justice system, the mainstream media has, on one hand, created the myth that prison is hell on earth, and, on the other, horribly mislead the public about the death penalty. The prison systems in the United States have been locked in the 1960s liberal fantasy that we can — and, worse, should — always try to rehabilitate career criminals.

To be clear, I am focusing this post on the worst of the worst: the murderers, violent gang members, rapists, child molesters, etc. The people who my wife and I have dedicated our lives to prosecuting. I will save discussing how retribution should apply to addicts or non-violent first time offenders for another day. But how we punish the worst of the worst will shock you. There is a massive moral deficit in the criminal justice system, one that values criminals far above victims — and it is disgusting. If we are to regain the moral clarity and fortitude to punish the worst of the worst, it will only come from the political right.

Those who don’t have experience in the trenches of the criminal justice system get a very myopic and negative view of it: cops are renegade vigilantes with a badge; the death penalty costs too much and often punishes the innocent; prisons are nothing but raping grounds and murder houses; cowboy legislatures keep increasing not only what is criminal but also the sentences associated with crime. Some of these debates are worth having, but the casual listener must understand that he is only being given anecdotal information from a pro-criminal left that seeks to relegitimize the liberal fantasy of the reformed killer. One needs only to look to how the left slobbers over Mumia Abu-Jabal — a convicted cop-killer who has turned his crime into celebrity — to see how morally bankrupt the criminal justice system is. In a moral society, Abu-Jamal would have been vilified and put to death — as most of those on death row or serving life sentences should be.