By Daniel Greenfield April 13, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
The pro-crime movement that swept America began in part with an article by Angela Davis, "Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition." Davis, a UCLA academic, started by quoting Michel Foucault, a French academic with the Collège de France.
The two activist academics were not really interested in crime and the penal system as a field of research. They were bent on fomenting a civil war that would put the Left in power.
Foucault, a Marxist-trained philosopher, had been a co-founder of the Prison Information Group to support the Maoists imprisoned over the radical violence in France in 1968. Foucault had credited the riots with stimulating his interest in “the direction of penal theory”.
Within
the span of two generations, future law enforcement personnel were
being indoctrinated with the teachings of Marxist domestic terrorists
and their political allies. The situation at John Jay is emblematic of
what has happened to criminology departments across the country.
The
country’s top criminology departments, like those at the University of
Maryland, UC-Irvine and Rutgers, begin with the premise that the
criminal justice system is racially biased.
The University of
Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice has its Racial
Democracy Crime and Justice Network Small Grants Program, UC-Irvine’s
Criminology program has a graduate emphasis on “Race and Justice
Studies”, while Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice takes part in the
university’s Fellows in Racial Justice program. One of those fellows
brags that being a “convicted felon” who spent time in maximum security
prison allows him to “empathize with the downtrodden” and led to his
“fervent commitment to activism”.
That’s the state of criminology
at universities, but the general state of universities is even worse.
Black studies programs offer a prison abolition syllabus (which
predictably includes both Foucault and Davis) tying together faculty
from Harvard and Wesleyan among others. Rutgers, Notre Dame, the
University of Texas, the University of Colorado, among many others,
offer Black Lives Matter courses, whose villains are invariably white
people and cops.
BLM protests were widely backed by 8 out of 10
college students. Many of the protests were organized on campuses and
involved faculty like Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles
chapter, who has made a bid to take over the group. Abdullah, the
granddaughter of a prominent German Marxist, is a black studies
professor at California State University.
The fundamental message
of Foucault and Davis, refracted through BLM, was broadcast through
academia. The policies, police defunding, prison releases and
decriminalization, and the violent riots, helped unleash an
unprecedented crime wave. The ideas originally promoted by radicals in
the 70s have led to a generation of progressive pro-crime DAs, many
backed by George Soros, like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Los Angeles’
George Gascon and Philly’s Larry Krasner, or Biden’s US Attorney in
D.C., Michael Graves, who declined to prosecute in 67% of cases, who
have dismantled the criminal justice system from within.
As a
result of BLM and pro-crime policies, around 5,000 more people were
murdered in 2020. And the rate of black people being murdered increased
more than any other group. The CDC’s research showed that, “in 2020, one out of every 1,000 young Black males (15–34) was shot and killed.” Murder is the leading cause of death for black men from 20 to 44 years old.
All
of this can be traced back to academia which promoted the idea that
white people are racist oppressors and that the best way to fix that is
to replace the police and the criminal justice system with social
workers and apologies.
Restorative Justice, which proposes to
replace crime and punishment with forgiveness for the perpetrator,
originated in part from Goshen College in Indiana which now offers both a
major and a minor in letting criminals go unpunished. Mariame Kaba, the
contemporary godmother of police defunding, teaches at Barnard
University. Kaba made her views plain
in an op-ed titled, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The
world that Kaba would make is laid out on her site, ‘Transform Harm’,
which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It features a
sociologist proposing that rapists write apology letters and a
professor of gender studies claiming that sending Larry Nassar, who had
sexually abused some 250 girls, to prison embodies “political
whiteness”.
Even in the face of growing crime and violence,
academia continues to double down on a pro-crime program initially
conceived in support of Marxist terrorists, but which has become a
general program of supporting and enabling criminals across society.
To
fight crime, we must lock up criminals, but we must also end the
taxpayer funding of pro-crime universities, departments and programs.
While most criminals eventually face consequences for the robberies,
rapes and murders that they commit, the academics who enable them never
do.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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