It’s time to treat serious ‘state crimes’ as federal crimes

Yet another tweet going viral about ‘repeat violent offenders’:

As I discuss in “The Murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk and the Failure of Law Enforcement”, the root of the problem is states’ rights gives too much discretion to district attorneys and judges.

This is how you get situations where people can reoffend many times for violent state-level crimes and nothing happens, yet selling drugs online or moving drugs across state lines can be punishable by up 30 years years and no parole under federal guidelines. Yes, some guy who sells drugs on the ‘dark web’ gets 20 years even after a plea deal, but habitual dreadlocks-clad violent offenders keep being released, provided his crimes don’t cross state lines.

Covid clearly showed how government overreach can compromise individual rights, as seen in China. But where I take exception prison funding and sentencing, which I have long argued should fall under the purview of the federal government for violent crime, fraud (e.g. shoplifting rings), or recidivism. Local governments often lack the resources to solve sophisticated or serious crimes or build and staff sufficient prisons, leading to overcrowding, overly-lenient sentencing of violent criminals, unsolved crimes, and early releases. Many shoplifting rings will target the largest states (e.g. California, Florida, or Texas), knowing that the punishment is much more lenient by not crossing state lines, and that the state police lack the resources of the feds, so the crime will last much longer.

It’s evident the the system is broken. What is needed is a federal three-strikes law that is applicable for state-level crimes, or to hold state-level offenders to the same sentencing standards as federal-level criminals. One can argue that this is unconstitutional, but committing a crime inevitably entails forfeiting many individual constitutional protections, so the Constitution does not fully apply. And it’s common for the FBI to help in the investigation of homicides–a recent high example being the murder of Unitedhealth CEO Brian Thompson, in which the FBI immediately assisted despite putatively being a state-level homicide.

I have argued that prison spending has among the highest ROIs of any government spending, because unpunished criminals represent a deadweight loss or inefficiency, that is measurable in terms of economic loss from affected businesses. When states fail to adequately punish criminals, the resulting leniency imposes a collective cost on society, with no possible upside.