The Matt Walsh Show - The Justice System Is Deeply Flawed And Politically Biased | Proof For Your Liberal Friend

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

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As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326, participating stores only well supplies lastly out for full terms. The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice-impacted individual.

Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the behavior of criminal. A couple of months ago in March, a 37-year-old man named Crosetti Brand was released on parole in the state of Illinois. He had been locked up on a charge of home invasion and sentenced to more than a decade in prison. But the state's Prisoner Review Board decided to let him out early with electronic monitoring. And what happened after that was predictable. Just a day after he got out of prison, Chicago police say that Crosetti attacked a pregnant woman and her 11-year-old boy, killing the child and critically injuring his mother. According to court documents, the last time he was on parole, Cressetti had threatened the same woman by text and showed up at her home. But somehow none of Crosetti's criminal history, including his alleged threats, were enough to keep him in prison.

And now authorities say that a child is dead as a result. Now, this is obviously clearly a massive failure of the judicial system in Illinois. which, particularly post-BLM, has focused more on rehabilitation instead of punishment. It's the kind of episode that you'd hope would spur lawmakers in Illinois to pass new laws to rein in their approach of restorative justice, quote-unquote, which we have talked about recently. But the Illinois government has opted for a very different response. Instead of doing something to prevent violent criminals from getting out of prison, state lawmakers have decided on a course of action that's ripped straight from a Babylon B article,

A new bill that was just passed by both houses of the Illinois legislature, which is expected to be signed by the governor, would modify state law so that the term offender becomes replaced by the term justice impacted individual. Justice impacted individual. The Department of Corrections and a bunch of other government agencies will be required to use that term from now on. So the plan is not to do anything about the criminals who are getting out of prison. it's to use a nicer word to describe these criminals. Don't call them offenders. Call them justice-impacted individuals. Now, I had to check several times to make sure this wasn't satire

because it is quite literally beyond parody. Actually, if the Babylon B had come up with this idea, I wouldn't even find it funny because it would be too on the nose, but this is reality now in Illinois. This is their cutting-edge approach to criminal justice. Watch. Bankers have passed a bill that if signed into law by Governor Pritzker, will change the term offender in state law to justice-impacted individual.

WDN's Joel Hillary here to explain, Joel. Hi, Mike and Bray. So this legislation has passed both the State House and Senate, and to be very clear, the potential language change would only apply to about 1,800 offenders across the state. On Tuesday, Bill 4409 passed in the State Senate 34 to 20. The question is, Your House Bill 4.4. 409 pass. All those in favor of vote aye. Posnay, the voting is open. The proposed legislation would remove the term offender and replace it with justice-impacted individual.

For individuals in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program commonly referred to as ARI. According to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, ARI is an initiative that divert offenders from prison to programs to help rehabilitate them to success. Republicans say the language change portrays a lack of. of empathy for victims and lack of concern for public safety. Change this, change that. The only thing that you don't want to change is the behavior of criminals. Now, before the fact checkers jump down my throat, I'll emphasize one thing, which is that this rebrand

doesn't apply to everyone who commits crimes in the state of Illinois. Instead, this new term applies to many women in the state's adult redeploy Illinois program, or ARI, as you heard. according to the government of McLean County, Illinois, the ARA program provides for comprehensive daily supervision of dozens of, quote, high-risk adult felons as an alternative to costly penitentiary commitment. So they're not rebranding every criminal as a justice-impacted individual. They're only rebranding some of the high-risk adult felons who otherwise would be in prison. So if you're living in Chicago, hopefully you can rest easy tonight with that distinction in mind. Now, the point of the word game here is the same as always.

First, it removes agency from the individual by making terminology as passive as possible. An offender is not an offender anymore because offending is something that a person actively does. It puts the onus on the individual. You have gone out and offended. You've committed an offense. And instead, they're saying, well, they're justice impacted. They were impacted by justice. It's not their fault.

You know, justice came along. and impacted them. I mean, they're the victims here, if anything. And second, on top of making everything passive and removing agency, it also helps to identify the people that are in your club. Because they're the ones who know about these lingo changes and follow the rules. So it's not much different from a child who sets up a pillow fort and won't let you inside the fort unless you know the password, which changes randomly and on a whim.

It's like that kind of idea. Now, if you go looking online for the term justice impacted individual, you'll find that it's popular among Harvard podcasters, a billionaire left-wing activist, giant Silicon Valley corporations like Google. These are the people and organizations that, conveniently enough, have distanced themselves as much as possible from communities where crime is high. So they don't want anything to do with the justice-impacted individuals, but they want you to have to live near them and treat them with respect and even refer to them in a way that will not be alienating or, you know, or otherizing for them. Of course, nobody in the real world uses terms like justice impacted individuals, which is precisely the point. If you go around saying the word justice impacted individual, then you're instantly communicating

where you stand on the political spectrum. And perhaps more importantly, people who don't use these new terms are instantly identifiable as outcasts, as racist, and terrible people. Every so often, wealthy elites and academics come up with new ways to provide these kinds of signals, and then they inevitably filter down to activists and government bureaucrats, which is what's happening right now in Illinois. Which is also why, by the way, this may be the first time you're hearing of justice impacted individual.

Give it like a year or six months, and you'll be hearing it everywhere. That's the way this always goes. Now, there was an episode during the Canadian trucker convoy a couple of years ago that illustrates how this strategy works in practice. The truckers who gathered in the Canadian capital city of U.S. Ottawa were exactly the kind of blue-collar workers that liberals pretend to care about. But in this case, the blue-collar workers were protesting for, you know, freedom. So they had to be crushed. It was vitally important for liberals to smear these truckers as racist. And one of the ways the

liberals did that was by criticizing the truckers for using the wrong lingo. This is a clip from a Fox interview that leftists mocked relentlessly during the convoy and listen to it and see if you can spot what they considered the problem to be. Listen. It was only one guy. So you are not racist. I have all type of friends, color friends, Spanish, Chinese, you know. They are great people. There is no racism here. So they're actually, you know, this is a Romanian truck who clearly speaks English as a second language. and he's explaining on primetime television that he's not racist because he has a bunch of colored friends.

Now, logically, there's no difference whatsoever between saying I have colored friends and I have friends who are people of color. It's just a slight grammatical difference that means absolutely nothing. It's all semantics. If anything, the latter sentence is unnecessarily wordy, otherwise they're the same. If a person can be of color, then it's accurate to say that the person is colored. A person of color is a colored person. But your intellectual superiors have decided, for reasons that cannot be explained, they've just decided that people of color is the only phrase you're allowed to use. If you say colored people, unless you're the NAACP, you're a bigot.

So they vilified this trucker all over social media, both here and in Canada. And on top of that, too, not only did he use the lingo or did he use the wrong lingo, but he also tried to disprove accusations of racism by saying that he has black friends. And we're also told by our betters that that doesn't prove anything. But of course, it absolutely does. Like if you have friends of a particular race, it's a pretty good indication that you're not racist against that race. But this is one of the main reasons that cutting-edge PC lingo exists. It's why you're supposed to say, you know, people experiencing homelessness instead of homeless drug addict.

It's why you're supposed to say minor attracted person instead of pedophile. And it's why, if at all possible, you're supposed to employ clever euphemisms to describe criminals who happen to be really any race but white. The New York Post is particularly adept at this last trick to the point that it's becoming a running joke online and presumably in the Post newsroom. Among the euphemisms that New York Post has come up with to describe black suspects are cold-hearted teens, knife-wielding sicko, misogynistic maniac. and my personal favorite, lunchtime routies.

Now, just in case there is any doubt that the Post is doing this deliberately, here's a passage from that article on the Lunchtime Routies. See if you can count all the euphemisms. Here it is. And this is totally real. A band of foul-mouthed toy gun-waving pot-puffing high school hooligans are keeping residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own Tony Holmes. For at least a year while school is in session, the roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop.

Every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out, and taunting anyone who gets in their way. Now, with terms like hooligans, roughnecks, lunchtime rowdies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is like an article from a small town newspaper somewhere out in Wyoming in the year 1873. my only hope is that in the next post article, they can work in the terms ruffian and scoundrel. But in any case, you read the whole article and you won't find any mention in the text about the ethnicity of these lunchtime rowdies and pot-puffing hooligans. But if a white person is causing problems, the post will generally put the race in the headline. For example, one recent headline in the post read, video shows black NYC partiers scatter for cover as white neighbor douses them with garden hose. Now, there was no euphemism for the white guy. He wasn't a hose-toating scoundrel or anything like that.

He's just a white neighbor. And for what it's worth, not all the people he hit with the water were black. The Post went out of its way to mention the race of the white guy even when it was misleading to do so. Of course. And this isn't specific to the New York Post. It's the approach of most major media outlets. As the account data hazard found, the race of white murderers is made clear in more than 90% of news articles. But with black murderers, race is only mentioned in 3,000.

30% of the articles. And when it does appear, it's usually much lower down in the text of the article. So this is obviously a very intentional thing that they're doing. And journalists do this in part to signal that they're true believers and principles of restorative justice. And in the process, they're denying the agency of black offenders by holding them to a completely different standard. These criminals get additional protections in the media, even when they commit heinous crimes solely on the basis of their skin color. And now, the state of Illinois is doing the same thing. It's almost as if they hired the New York Post euphemism guy to write their legislation. Now, to give the left some credit, they understand the role of language in shaping policy and shaping

opinions and the views of the public. In order to normalize crime and pedophilia, they first need to change the way people prefer to crime and pedophilia. And that effort is now underway in Illinois, which means that many more justice-impacted individuals will soon be out on the streets. It also means that many more innocent people, including children and pregnant women, will be impacted by these justice-impacted individuals. Because one euphemism at a time in Democrat-run cities all over the country, it's pretty clear that that's the point. History, economics, literature, the Constitution. Did you actually study these in school? Probably not. Or you got some watered-down version that missed the point entirely. Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental trends. truths about the world, our country, and our place in it.

That's why I want to share something I think you'd find valuable. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses that cover everything from C.S. Lewis and Genesis to the Roman Republic and early Christian history. I've been really enjoying their Constitution 101 course, which dives deep into design and purpose of our Constitution. The challenges it faced during the Civil War and how it's been undermined over the past century by progressive and liberal ideologies. The course is completely self-paced with 12 lectures so you can start whenever works for you. Honestly, I believe, I believe, our country desperately needs more Americans

who truly understand the Constitution and can stand up to our freedoms and freedoms against an increasingly large and unaccountable government. If you care about preserving what makes America great, I'd encourage you to check out this free Constitution 101 courts to say great eye-opener to how much we've drifted from our founding

principles. Go right now to Hillsdale. Atedu slash Walsh to enroll. There's no cost. It's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale.edu slash Walsh to enroll for free, Hillsdale. edu slash Walsh. We've talked a lot of Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. I'm out on the show about the collapse of the criminal justice system. The very concept of criminal justice of enacting justice and punishing crime has been destroyed. But very few people ever take the time to trace the roots of our current state of lawlessness

back to its origins. And the thing is, you don't need to trace the roots very far. At least maybe not all the way back to its very origins because you have to go all the way back to the fall of man. But you could go back only a few years and starts to tell you the story of how we ended up where we are. Now, there's a reason why we now live in a country governed by people who don't believe in simply enforcing the law and punishing lawbreakers. These are people who are operating according to certain particularly crazy beliefs. And one of those beliefs, as we briefly talked about yesterday, is that deterrence doesn't exist. Effectively, you cannot deter crime by punishing it.

That's the insane idea that began in our institutions of higher learning, the sort of insane idea that can only begin in those institutions and filtered its way down from there, as these ideas always do. Now, it began with the claim first made years ago that the death penalty doesn't deter crime. You're probably familiar with this. You've heard it before. And now, this claim is always false for reasons we'll touch on later. But whatever you think of the death penalty, the implication underlying the deterrence argument was never going to stop with the death penalty. It was always going to go far beyond that. And indeed, we've seen that progression in recent years. It's no longer, well, the death penalty is pointless because people don't consider those consequences when they

commit crime. Instead, the argument we're hearing today is all harsh punishment is pointless because people don't consider any consequences when they commit crime. This is the intellectual origin of the soft-on-crime approach to law enforcement that we're seeing in every major American city in the country right now. And several years ago, this approach was adopted by the Obama DOJ without any fanfare whatsoever. In May of 2016, the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the DOJ, published a document entitled Five Things About Deterrence. You've almost certainly never heard of this document,

but it is essentially the modern manifesto of the anti-incarceration movement in the United States. It applies the reasoning of anti-death penalty advocates to all forms of crime and to all punishment. So for that reason, it's a truly remarkable document that even though you haven't heard of, you should. So we're going to go through, today. Here are the five things about deterrence that the memo highlights and then expands upon.

Number one, the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment. In other words, according to the DOJ, criminals are primarily worried about whether the cops are going to arrest them. They're not worried about how long they're going to have to stay in prison. The only thing they care about is whether or not they're going to get arrested. The question that apparently never occurred to the DOJ is, if the punishment aren't severe, then why would the certainty of being caught deter anyone? Why would criminals care if they're going to be caught if they know ahead of time that they won't be punished?

The whole reason that being caught is scary is that you will be punished. But if you aren't going to be punished, then being caught is not a scary prospect anymore. Again, we're seeing this play out in cities across the country. Sure, the criminals are caught sometimes, but it doesn't matter to them because they aren't punished and they're back on the street a day later, committing more crimes.

So the argument from the DOJ, which is the very first thing on the memo, all that matters is whether you catch them, it doesn't matter whether it doesn't matter whether you punish them. This is what the DOJ is saying. And it's like saying that home invaders are deterred by guns, but it doesn't matter if it's a Glock or a super soaker. Just as long as it's a gun. That's all that matters. Will it kill them? Will it make them a little wet? That doesn't.

That's not factored in. It makes no sense. The DOJ's manifesto doesn't bother to expand on this point in any way. It just says, quote, research shows clearly that the chance of being caught is a vastly more effective deterrent than even draconian punishment. So there you have it. Research shows that punishment doesn't work. Research. What kind of research?

Well, they don't say. At least not in that paragraph. Buried in the fine print on the page is a citation to an article by a public policy professor, named Daniel Nagin at Carnegie Mellon University. This is the primary paper the DOJ relies on, along with a couple of others. Apparently, Nagin has done the research, and he's realized that criminals don't really care about punishment. They only care about being caught, but whether or not they're punished after being caught,

they don't care about that. I looked around to see if Nagin actually thinks this, and if so, what his logic is. I came across this clip from many years ago, which I'm going to play primarily because it's kind of hilarious, I want you to watch as a local news team breaks the news that, according to Daniel Nagin's first groundbreaking finding, when you have more police officers, criminals tend to commit less crime. The news station interviews then a couple of random people who say that, you know, that pretty much checks out. This is one of the best examples of research telling us something that's incredibly obvious to a comical degree. But buried in this report, if you listen carefully,

is Nagin's second theory, which the DOJ finds so compelling. Watch. Now that event raises a larger question. Is more police presence a deterrent to people who commit serious crimes? That's what research done by one criminologist in Pennsylvania is suggesting tonight. Jerry Askin is here now with that story. Jerry. Hey, Kim and Calvin, here is research done by Professor Daniel Nagin today at the event for National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day.

We asked Sheriff Hemman and many others about the research. Carnegie Mellon University professor Daniel Nagin is convinced of his findings that better police presence will reduce crime. In other words, stopping crimes before they happen is more effective than the threat of a lot of prison time. Runpaw is a pastor at a church on Dotson Avenue, and he agrees with the research. Because when police are close by, they are less likely to commit any crimes. Most crimes are done undercover. The city of Chattanooga, it's growing its budget to bring in at least 40 more officers. by next spring or summer.

They must first finish their academy and field training before hitting the streets. Ebony Moore is ready to see more officers and believes it will deter criminals. Yeah, they would definitely be more fearful. They would know, they would be more aware of the surroundings and more aware of everything that they're doing. And if I had a police officer on every block,

you're going to find it safer than if I had none. So the reporter holds up the stack of papers. Here's the research. It shows that more police means less crime and then you cut to two local residents and the sheriff who say, yeah, yeah, you think? Apparently being a professor at Carnegie Mellon, I guess, isn't what it used to be. Random people off the street think that your research is incredibly obvious because it is,

but, you know, they still get the big research grants and everything to go and compile all this paperwork, telling us what everybody already knows. But the key part of that segment for our purposes is what Daniel Nagin says in the clip. He reports that, quote, there's little evidence that making punishments even more severe than they already are has an incremental effect. Right away, that's actually a different argument from the one that DOJ is making. The DOJ said flat out that, quote, draconian punishments don't deter crime. But the argument that this Carnegie Mellon professor is advancing in that clip is that if you make our existing punishments more severe, then they won't deter crime all that much additionally, which are really two different arguments.

And this little inconsistency confused me enough to look up Nagin's actual paper, the one of the DOJ cites in its manifesto on deterrence. And in that article, you'll find two claims. The first one is the idea he outlines in the video clip that, quote, there's little evidence that increases in the length of the already long prison sentences yield general deterrence effects that are sufficiently large to justify their social and economic costs. In other words, he's saying that existing prison sentences are a sufficient deterrent, and we don't need to make them longer.

But afterwards in the paper, Nagin goes on and says pretty much what the DOJ claims. He says, quote, I have concluded there is little evidence of a specific deterrent effect arising from the experience of imprisonment compared with the experience of non-custodial sanctions such as probation. It's clear that lengthy prison sentences cannot be justified on a deterrence-based crime prevention basis. Now, those claims don't follow at all. His starting point is that we don't need to make prison sentences longer. And somehow without showing his work, he ends up with a declaration that criminals don't really care about their punishments. and whether they're apprehended, as though apprehension without punishment matters to anyone. So we might as well just sentence everyone to probation.

Like that's what he's saying. It doesn't make a difference whether you give them probation or you send them to prison. It's going to have the same effect. The technical term for this kind of argument from an academic perspective is that it's garbage. It's a clearly absurd claim. But it's the basis for the DOJ's entire argument against deterrence. This is the document that the DOJ's. cites to justify its policy of releasing as many criminals as possible, or at least criminals

who share the DOJ's politics, you know, those are the ones that they tend to prefer. So it's hard to overemphasize just how truly bizarre and incredible this is, but it gets weird. Citing Nagin's research, the DOJ goes on to claim that, quote, sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn't a very effective way to deter crime. Again, that's a direct quote from a document produced by the DOJ in 2016. sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn't a very effective way to deter crime. And they're saying that because some random Carnegie Mellon professor wrote it down a few years earlier. Again, they don't really clarify this point.

Here's the extent of the DOJ's explanation, to a point that's like should be shocking coming from the DOJ. Prison doesn't deter crime at all? Like prisons are pointless? Quote, prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences, particularly longer sentences, are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect. Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment.

Now, if this is true, it's an argument for giving out even longer sentences, not shorter ones. In fact, this is a solid reason to be much more generous in handing out life sentences. because if you give a life sentence and actually make it a life sentence, meaning that the person isn't released after 25 years or whatever, but they're really there for the rest of their lives, then the deterrence issue, at least for that individual, is a moot point. He's gone. He's off the street for good. But the DOJ doesn't mention this possibility in the memo at all.

They don't mention that, well, you could just do that. Instead, they go the opposite way. They conclude that we should let people out of jail sooner. Like after just telling us that jail only makes criminals more dangerous, well, we should just have the sentences be shorter. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill. Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news.

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