A criminal is a criminal! The New York Sun on Tuesday May 28. 2024 published this headline, “Bill, Advancing in Illinois, Would Reduce the Number of Criminals by Rebranding Some as ‘Justice-Impacted Individuals’.”
In Illinois, a bill replacing “offender” with “justice-impacted individual” for participants in a state program is awaiting the signature of the state’s Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker. The move is said to remove the stigma from criminals and help reduce prison populations, but such word games offer no comfort to victims of crime.
After the Illinois Senate advanced House Bill 4409 to Mr. Pritzker last week, the Chicago Tribune wrote in an editorial that “right-wing Twitter” took exception. But the objections were from a broad enough range of the public that even those favorable to the goals of Democrats were put on defense.
An AP fact-check judged that posts on the bill “lacked context.” It offered the small distinction that the legislation to amend the Illinois Crime Reduction Act of 2009 would “not relabel all people who commit crimes as ‘justice-impacted individuals’ — just those in the state’s Adult Redeploy Illinois program.”
The program, the AP wrote, “is intended to reduce incarceration, in part, by placing individuals with any probation-eligible offense in community corrections programs rather than in prison.” The added information didn’t change the fact that the bill, if signed, will introduce a sanitized and clunky new label for offenders.
“Our government is attempting to make evil good just by changing names of things.”, said the National Director of the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan, Thomas Robb. “Every day we are seeing name changes to make things seem more acceptable. For instance, the LGBTQ+ freaks, it doesn’t make what letter of the alphabet you claim to be, you’re still a mentally ill homosexuals. A few months ago I was reading an article about a teacher reprimanding a student for using the word pedophile. The teacher told the child that the word pedophile was to harsh and that a pedophile should be called a ‘Child Attracted Adult’! Now we’re seeing our government trying to rebrand a criminal. If you commit a crime of any kind, you’re a criminal. Period. Of course a person with parking tickets is a lot different than a rapist, so there are different levels of being a criminality, but to try to change the name of a criminal to a ‘Justice-impacted Individual’ is going a little too far. Our government is trying to make what was once bad or evil into something good. This should show you the extent of how evil our government is becoming.”
