Simply stated, incapacitation means that when we remove the small percentage of people who commit most crimes from society, they can no longer commit crime against the community.

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The establishment media and political left don’t want you talking about crime, because it proved pivotal in last year’s election.  

The gruesome recent stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, North Carolina commuter train offers just the latest illustration of the point.  

When finally forced to address the stabbing, however, entire swaths of the establishment media deliberately recast the murder as some sort of convenient “talking point” for Republicans.  The examples are too numerous to list, but even The Wall Street Journal ran the headline “Woman’s Stabbing Death Becomes MAGA Talking Point.”  

From the political class, the most mindless pronouncement came from Charlotte’s own Vi Lyles, and not simply because she’s the Democratic Mayor of the city where the ghoulish murder occurred.  

After admonishing the public against “villainizing” the murderer and suggesting that his mental state should be “treated with the same compassion, diligence and commitment as cancer or heart disease,” Mayor Lyles lectured that “we will never arrest our way out of” this runaway crime problem.  

Actually, that’s precisely how we must address crime.  

To understand why, consider the criminal law concept of “incapacitation” and the alarming fact that the Charlotte murderer had been arrested some fourteen times since 2011.  

As every first-year law student learns, American law traditionally maintains four primary rationales for criminal penalties:  retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.  

First, retribution refers to humanity’s instinct for a sense of justice and moral balance, that a person who commits a crime deserves punishment proportionate to their offense.  Second, deterrence seeks to prevent future criminality by making examples of convicted offenders, sending a message by imposing penalties high enough to dissuade future misconduct.  Third, rehabilitation emphasizes reforming convicted offenders, seeking to turn them into law-abiding citizens through education, therapy and vocational training.  

Incapacitation, however, offers the most direct and immediately effective means to prevent crime of the sort that we witnessed in Charlotte.  Simply stated, incapacitation means that when we remove the small percentage of people who commit most crimes from society, they can no longer commit crime against the community.  

Incapacitation doesn’t rely upon speculation about future behavioral change or offenders’ willingness to heed warnings.  It directly neutralizes criminal threats by physically removing them from society.  

Real-world experience confirms the effectiveness of incapacitation.  

In the latter third of the 20th century, the United States suffered an epidemic of crime.  Homicide rates soared from the 1960s into the 1990s, with cities like New York City gaining justified reputations as dangerous and unlivable.  Beginning in the 1990s, however, a renewed focus on incarcerating criminals brought extraordinary reductions in crime.  In New York City alone, the violent crime rate fell by over 80% by the early 2000s, and its formerly crime-plagued neighborhoods once again became safe for tourists, residents and businesses.  

Although multiple factors helped bring about that improvement, a focus on incapacitation played the central role.  As policymakers, prosecutors and courts embraced tougher policies that prioritized removing criminals from the streets, the prison population shot upward.  

But along with that upward surge in incarceration, so did public safety.  

Convicts who previously might have otherwise continued their predation were rendered unable to wreak further havoc.  

Unfortunately, after incapacitation was proven so effective, swaths of America drifted from its proven formula for reducing crime.  

In 2014, the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri led to a false narrative that he had raised his hands in surrender only to be shot while pleading “hands up, don’t shoot.”  That narrative was subsequently discredited even by the Obama Administration’s own Department of Justice, which concluded that “hands up, don’t shoot” was dangerous fiction.  

By that time, however, the incident sparked an anti-policing movement pressuring cities to scale back proactive policing, abandon “broken windows” strategies and embrace “decarceration” policies that aimed to reduce prison populations rather than reduce crime.  As another result, police officers became more reluctant to interrupt potential crimes out of fear of demonization or even prosecution for doing their jobs. 

Those unfortunate consequences even had a name:  the “Ferguson Effect.”  

Consequently, crime began to rise again, including a record 30% single-year increase in murders in 2020.  By the 2024 election, public alarm rose to such a level that voters ranked it among their top concerns.  When America retreated from incapacitation through incarceration, crime rose, and more innocent lives were lost while disadvantaged communities in particular paid the price.  

The correct policy response is obvious.  A renewed commitment to incapacitation will once again reduce crime.  That doesn’t mean abandoning the other three pillars of criminal law where appropriate, nor does it preclude policies aimed at prevention.  

It does, however, mean rejecting the naïve idea that repeat criminals should be allowed to endlessly cycle in and out of the system.  We just witnessed the result in Charlotte, and we shouldn’t tolerate it any longer.