"Not Going Back"

Doubling down....or tripling down....on stupid:

• Members of the Illinois House Legislative Black Caucus said they “remain open to thoughtful, data-driven refinements” to the landmark criminal justice reform law known as the SAFE-T Act, but will not consider measures that undermine the goals of the law, which eliminated cash bail as a condition of pretrial release.

  In a lengthy statement released Monday, the 22-member caucus said in part that they’re “not going back to a system where penalty enhancements, jailing more people, ignoring root causes and underinvesting in our communities were treated as public safety policy.”

  “That system was not just. It was not smart. And it did not make us safer,” they wrote. “We will not support legislation that carries the remnants of the system we left behind, because those approaches are adversarial to this work, adversarial to fairness, and adversarial to real public safety.”

Do you think these morons ever heard of the "social contract"? Here's a basic overview:

• ....social contract is an idea, theory, or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a constituent assembly and constitution.

  Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.

In other words, we agree as a society to get along....BUT (and this is the key) everyone has to get actually get along. When one segment decides they don't have to get along with everyone else and those nominally in charge do everything in their power to remove the legitimate authority from enforcing the social contract, then things break down

1. people begin to get fed up;
2. they lose respect for the institutions;
3. they stop participating in a process they consider illegitimate; 
4. they move away;
5. in the extreme, they form loose alliances to do the enforcement that the government refuses to do

In other words, vigilantism becomes more prevalent....and eventually, the norm.

We might be mistaken and we might have missed a step or two, but it sure looks like we're in the midst of Step 4.

You know what discourages misbehavior?

Avoidance of consequences, like fines and prison. 

And do you know what permanently discourages misbehavior? 

The inability to do it again.