The London Terrorist Attack Shows Rehabilitative Justice Doesn’t Work

The London Terrorist Attack Shows Rehabilitative Justice Doesn’t Work

There's a reason London witnessed another terrorist knife attack. It’s a perfect nightmare of woke academics, their flawed rehabilitation theories, and activist judges.

The British police force was severely cut under prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron, the British version of the liberal-neocon duopoly who, just like their American counterparts, believed in the transformative nature of justice. Transform they did, although not criminals and terrorists. Instead they transformed their countries for worse. The British police force is kneecapped by its own ruling class, the product of its new woke elite, complete with crackpot theories and activist impulses.

The U.K. death penalty was removed due to the liberal empire. Police patrols were de-sexed — mom and dad duos, as some Brits call them. Now U.K. police are represented by a middle-aged, overweight, balding man and a plump woman in comical fluorescent jackets, looking more like road repair workmen than law enforcement officers, standing on street corners looking bored as they do their daily hours. In police stations, woke officers are more interested in checking mean tweetsand dancing during LGBT parades than in catching criminals.

Civilians Are Taking the Law Into Their Own Hands

But that’s not all. Even when the specialized police force actually properly works, like this time when it took only five minutesfrom reporting time to take down a terrorist, it is kneecapped.

Consider this latest case. The terrorist Usman Khan was caught and docked after he planned a mass murder in the London Stock Exchange in 2012. The punishment was hideously lenient, even from the beginning. The total jail sentence was 16 years. Yet halfway through the sentence, he was released by activist judges who, given their enormous wisdom, decided an electronic tag could control this maniac.

Think about that for a moment. A violent and emotionally stunted man, radicalized by an ideology that promises martyrdom for mass murder, was thought to be controllable with only an ankle tag to monitor his movements, by our judges, who live in guarded mansions. Naturally, when this man fled his house, got a giant knife, and started indiscriminately stabbing people on the London Bridge, members of the public were left to stop a terrorist with a fire extinguisher and a pub-door decoration of a Narwhal tusk.

During a similar attack in the same place, another random Londoner took on a knife-wielding terrorist with pub chairs and bare fists. The official London police policy for civilians during a terror attack is to run and hide. It is increasingly clear that Londoners refuse to likewise run and hide. They are also increasingly taking the law into their own hands against street muggers and criminal gangs.

Rehabilitative Justice Doesn’t Work

Almost like clockwork, leftist media started warning against a “knee-jerk” reaction in the wake of the Friday terrorist attack. A war of words broke out between a Conservative minister and her Labour counterpart regarding who was responsible for the early-release legislation, with the Labour MP falling on the side of “rehabilitation.”

That is the crux of the problem. Modern Western law enforcement and academic theories behind it tilt heavily toward rehabilitative justice instead of a classical and orthodox punitive deterrence — almost so much, it verges on utopia. Led by leftist professors and academics with flawed research and biased conclusions, churned out like gospel truth by sympathetic urban liberal journalists, and enforced by law enforcement officers and hyper-liberal activist judges, for more than 40 years our society has been slowly but surely transformed from within.

This applies not only to terrorism, which is numerically at its lowest. The root cause of favoring rehabilitation over deterrence has taken a toll. Every medium of propaganda from mass media, to films, to music, has glamorized crime and criminals, who are always helpless victims of social injustice and structural inequality, just one reform away from being Nelson Mandela.

Case in point, the terror apologizers in the U.K., called CAGE, have systematically blamed all terror attacks on persecution of Muslims. They’re a British version of the Southern Poverty Law Center, if you like.

Criminal Justice Must Be Punitive

This is unsustainable. Chris Phillips, a former head of the U.K. national counterterrorism security office, was quoted in The Guardian, of all places, saying:

The criminal justice system needs to look at itself. We’re letting people out of prison, we’re convicting people for very, very serious offences and then they are releasing them back into society when they are still radicalised. So how on earth can we ever ask our police services and our security services to keep us safe? I’ve said it a few times today, we’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, letting convicted, known, radicalised Jihadi criminals walk about our streets.

Unfortunately, nothing will change unless heads start rolling. The common people in both the U.K. and the U.S. don’t care about harebrained schemes. Most people want the government to do minimum: govern, provide security and safety, and maintain the public works and streets. Fewer advertisement bans, fewer plastic straw bans, and more severe punishments for habitual offenders.

But our elite classes — from academics, to bleeding-heart nonprofit organizations and politicians, to activist judges — don’t get to feel the pain of their idealistic utopian theories. There is no accountability.

They are not facing the brunt of stupid misadventure in Mesopotamia. They are not getting murdered in random gang violence in the streets of South London, or walking through the diarrhea-, vomit-, blood-, and syringe-filled streets of San Francisco. Like modern versions of Marie-Louise Thérèse of Savoy-Carignan, they are sowing the seeds of populist uprisings.

Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.

Photo Wikimedia Commons