Tag: prison

Defunding police and prisons: Radical DSA platform grabs spotlight as candidates surge in primaries

s they experience newfound success across the United States in Democratic primaries, the Democratic Socialists of America have gone on a media blitz to share their vision for America. That vision includes radical changes to the American political system, like abolishing the senate, heavily restricting private markets, and abolishing police and prisons. 

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) rode a wave of dissatisfaction with the status quo to unprecedented electoral success this year. DSA affiliated candidates and fellow travelers lead New York City and are poised to dominate its congressional delegation. In other areas of the country, DSA candidates are campaigning on a radical platform once unthinkable.

Beyond New York, DSA candidates have won in Colorado, Michigan, and in down-ballot races in Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah and Maryland. 

Dismantling the entire American system of government

On Tuesday, a DSA member is leading in the polls for the Democratic Party nomination for governor in Wisconsin, testing the viability of the far-left political and economic messaging in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024. Controversy has followed Francesca Hong. Like many other DSA affiliates, her past social media posts, including arguing to defund the police and calling to cancel Thanksgiving, are at the center of it. 

In an interview last month on Fox News, DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer, answered that, “yes,” the DSA’s platform includes “abolishing the Senate,” “[replacing] the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them,” and “absolutely” abolishing immigration enforcement, defunding the military, and, eventually, abolishing police and prisons. 

“Yes,” “true,” and “yep,” said Romer in response to the host’s questions. 

The relentless media tour by senior DSA leaders focused scrutiny on the organization’s official platform. Republicans sensed an opening and traditional Democrats are worried the group’s radical proposals might sink the party’s midterm chances. 

Indeed, many of the Democratic Socialist leaders are self-professed communists, Just the News previously reported. Many of the DSA’s leaders belong to internal party caucuses that explicitly define themselves as Marxist and advocate for achieving communism. This includes Romer, who is a member of the Red Star caucus of the DSA, which explicitly pronounces its ultimate aim: the overthrow of capitalism in the U.S. and, eventually, communism. 

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Socialists’ Demands To Abolish Police And Prisons Will Mean More Dead Americans

Democrats insist that “Black Lives Matter,” yet many increasingly embrace policies that protect violent criminals at the expense of black victims. 

What these Democrats ignore is that criminals overwhelmingly prey on people like themselves. About 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other black people, and 70 percent of black violent crime victims are victimized by a black offender.

Abdul El-Sayed, the projected Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has argued that systemic racism shapes the criminal justice system and has advocated defunding the police and reducing imprisonment. In tweets and interviews in 2020 and 2021, he made comments such as, “I believe that we do need to defund the police,” and “The police have become standing armies we deploy against our own people.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York City and appears likely to win the general election, campaigns on abolishing prisons and would not even say that murderers belong in prison. When asked why he supported Chevalier, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied that she represented the “politics of life.”

State Rep. Francesca Hong, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin, declared, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police” and “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.” On July 22, 2026, Hong added: “We no longer can have a system that protects a power and a privilege that puts the pain and lives of armed officers over black people. We cannot protect a system that continues to rain harm and terror.”

These politicians are far from isolated. In 2024, 61 House Democrats voted against a resolution condemning calls to defund the police and expressing support for law enforcement. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., stated her position plainly: “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”

The number of politicians embracing those positions has continued to grow. “It’s not just a few people anymore,” as Bill Maher recently observed on ABC News. “I read every day about a new person in Colorado or Wisconsin saying some variation of: not defund the police — abolish the police, no prisons, no police.”

Because violent crime is heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods, reducing the likelihood that violent offenders are arrested, incarcerated, or deterred inevitably increases the risks faced by law-abiding black residents. Fifty-four percent of murders in the U.S. occur in just 2 percent of the counties. Within those counties, on average about two-thirds of their murders occur within 10-block areas. The harm in those areas goes well beyond the direct victims of the crime. 

Despite claims that these policies speak for blacks, surveys consistently find that black Americans overwhelmingly want at least the same or greater police presence in neighborhoods with high crime. Even at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in August 2020, a Gallup survey found that 81 percent of black Americans wanted police to spend the same amount of time (61 percent) or more time (20 percent) in their neighborhoods. Gallup noted that “Only 22% of black Americans favor abolishing police departments.”

A 2025 survey of Chicago residents by M3 Strategies indicated that 59 percent of blacks strongly supported hiring more police officers and another 27 percent somewhat supported that. Only 11 percent opposed the idea. Still another late July 2026 survey by Rasmussen Reports shows that likely black voters oppose proposals to abolish police 58 to 33.

These Democrats at least have a consistent philosophy. They demand eliminating prisons, abolishing or defunding police, weakening immigration enforcement, and restricting law-abiding citizens’ ability to defend themselves. Mamdani has declared, “We need to ban all guns.” Hong earned the endorsements of Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control organizations. Abdul El-Sayed complains, “Too many elected officials are scared of a corporate gun lobby … I will never take a dime from the gun lobby.” Sayed supports virtually every major gun-control proposal now under debate.

The same pattern extends to immigration. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that “an increasing number of established Democrats are calling for a dissolution of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.” More than 40 House Democrats support legislation to abolish ICE. During the Biden administration, at least 12.8 million illegal aliens either surrendered at the border, were apprehended after crossing illegally, or became known gotaways, and no one knows how many additional migrants entered without being detected. 

Recent data for New York shows that illegal aliens are overrepresented in the incarcerated population in the state compared to their overall share of the state population by at least 3.4 times. Of course, illegals harm minorities in other ways. Increasing the supply of low-skilled workers also intensifies competition for the same jobs and puts downward pressure on wages for the poorest, least-skilled Americans whom these Democrats claim to champion.

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DSA Member Has No Answer When Asked What We Will Do With Rapists After Prisons Are Abolished

A DSA member who recently appeared on a news show was asked a very basic question about what society does with criminals like rapists when all of the prisons have been abolished. She had no answer and tried to veer into talking points.

The reason she had no answer is because there is no answer. People who commit crimes like rape and murder need to be locked away from society, plain and simple.

What a lot of people get wrong about these DSA members and their wacky ideas is that they’re just dumb people. Their policies were cooked up in a dorm on some liberal college campus and they’ve never even been challenged.

FOX News reports:

In an interview with NBC 4 Los Angeles, anchor Conan Nolan posed pointed questions to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) National Political Committee Member Frances Gill on the topics of law enforcement, immigration and the movement’s other far-left proposals.

After a brief back-and-forth over what defunding the police means and how that would be applied in practice, Gill resorted to deflecting by refusing to engage in ‘hypotheticals.’

“What we really want to see is a horizon where folks are not reliant on armed enforcement to meet our public safety needs,” Gill conceded.

“Right, but it says ‘defund police’ on your website — that’s your goal — and also to get rid of prisons and jails, correct?” he pressed, to which Gill answered affirmatively.

“So if my daughter is assaulted and raped, is there any agency that would seek to find her assailant and bring him to justice?” asked Nolan.

“Of course, yeah of course—” said Gill before the host jumped back in with a follow-up question.

“What would it be if not police and where would he be if not a jail?” asked Nolan.

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Democrat Roy Cooper Lied About Why He Released 4,200 Criminals from Prison

Democrat Senate candidate and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is shifting blame over the reason he released 4,200 convicted criminals from prison during the COVID pandemic. 

In 2021, Cooper and far-left groups announced a settlement agreement releasing a total of 3,500 convicted criminals from state prison. When Cooper’s settlement was announced, prison officials said only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released. That declaration misled a state legislative committee, forcing officials to correct them at the time, indicating violent offenders would be released. 

The list of specific offenders was shielded at the time and only released when it was confirmed that DeCarlos Brown, the man accused of murdering Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail system, was on the list.

Cooper has offered numerous excuses for releasing violent criminals from prison. 

When Brown’s history became public, the campaign said it was a “lie,” pointing to Cooper’s “career prosecuting violent criminals and keeping thousands of them behind bars as attorney general, and signing tough on crime laws and stricter pretrial release bail policy as governor and pointed to Cooper’s 40-year tenure in public office.”

He then tried to pin the releases on federal prison releases in the Trump administration. Once that explanation fell apart, Cooper sought to blame prison officials, saying it was their determination of who was released. 

Yet Cooper was the only governor in the country who signed a legally-binding agreement requiring their state to release prisoners. 

What made North Carolina different was Cooper being a willing participant in the releases. States such as Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey saw judges order inmate releases, but many of those rulings were later blocked or overturned on appeal by those states’ Democrat governors. Cooper voluntarily agreed. 

Among those released from state prisons were drug dealers, rapists, murderers, and child predators.

In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis resisted similar demands and highlighted that Cooper could have pursued a different legal path instead of settling in the case. While the ACLU ultimately prevailed with a consent decree with the state Department of Corrections, Polis’s opposition and continued litigation avoided a court-mandated quota system.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker never signed a contract guaranteeing or commanding a large-scale mass release of prisoners, keeping the control over population figures within executive discretion. 

In New Jersey, the state’s legislature passed measures allowing mass releases where Cooper’s team admitted to misleading oversight from the North Carolina General Assembly. 

Nearly half of the criminals Cooper released have gone on to reoffend. These violent offenders were responsible for the murder of 25 North Carolinians and over 600 violent felonies. 

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Abigail Spanberger Restores Voting Rights to 66,000 Virginians ‘with Past Felony Convictions’

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) announced that her administration has restored voting rights to more than 66,000 Virginians who have “past felony convictions.”

In a press release on Friday, Spanberger expressed that “the right to vote is foundational to who we are as Americans.” Spanberger added that as a gubernatorial candidate and since taking office she has “heard from many Virginians who have shared their personal stories of redemption with me.”

Per the press release, the civil rights restored by Spanberger also include “the right to vote, serve on a jury,” and to “run for public office”:

Virginia is one of three states with a constitution that permanently disenfranchises citizens with past felony convictions — leaving restoration of rights entirely to the Governor’s discretion. The civil rights restored by Governor Spanberger include the right to vote, serve on a jury, run for public office, and become a notary public.

“I’m proud that — after contending with my predecessor’s efforts to deny Virginians their fundamental rights — we have restored the rights of more than 66,000 Virginians who have served their time,” Spanberger said. “These Virginians deserve the right to use their vote, make their voices heard, and be recognized as contributing citizens to our Commonwealth and country.”

The press release comes as Virginia residents in the fall will be able to “vote in a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would allow” felons in Virginia to have their voting rights restored “upon their release from incarceration.”

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“A Shameful Relic of Our Jim Crow Past” – Democrat Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger Restores Voting Rights for 66,000 Felons Before Midterms

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger announced on Friday that her administration has restored voting rights for more than 66,000 felons since taking office in January. 

The Democrats gained 66,085 new voters with this move.

Their rights to serve on a jury, run for public office, and become a notary public were also restored under Spanberger’s direction.

“By giving these Virginians back their ability to make an impact at the local, state, and national levels, we are empowering our neighbors to take hold of their second chance,” Spanberger said in a statement.

Virginia is one of three states that strips convicted felons of their right to vote.

Spanberger’s predecessor, Republican Glenn Youngkin, previously rolled back a policy of automatically restoring felons’ rights and chose to evaluate applications on a case-by-case basis.

According to the Blaze, Youngkin had restored the right to vote for about 10,000 felons.

“The right to vote is foundational to who we are as Americans. As a Member of Congress, as a candidate for Governor, and in the months since I took office, I have heard from many Virginians who have shared their personal stories of redemption with me — and heartfelt reflections of the moment their voting rights were restored by previous Governors,” Spanberger said.

“I’m proud that — after contending with my predecessor’s efforts to deny Virginians their fundamental rights — we have restored the rights of more than 66,000 Virginians who have served their time. These Virginians deserve the right to use their vote, make their voices heard, and be recognized as contributing citizens to our Commonwealth and country.”

She further urged voters to vote yes on a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons upon completing their sentences. She called the practice of stripping voting rights from felons “a shameful relic of our Jim Crow past.”

The governor wrote, “This fall, voters can cast their ballots for Virginia to no longer strip so many of our neighbors of their fundamental rights — a shameful relic of our Jim Crow past. I hope Virginians will join me in voting yes.”

Not only is Spanberger trying to get as many convicted-felon voters as possible, but her state is now pausing the removal of noncitizen voters from the voting rolls 90 days before the election in accordance with a court settlement between Virginia and the Campaign Legal Center.

According to Judicial Watch, “Virginia cancelled 6,531 declared non-citizen voter registrations. But Virginia entered into a settlement with leftist groups to pause the program to remove declared noncitizens from voting rolls for the 90-day period before federal elections.”

According to Judicial Watch, The more than 6,500 noncitizen voters were removed between 2024 and June 2026.

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DSA Co-Chair Romer Defends Proposals to Abolish Senate, Borders, Prisons

On this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer defended their proposals to abolish Senate, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prisons.

Partial transcript as follows:

SHANNON BREAM: We’re going to put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform. And I want to ask you, just give me sort of a true or false on these. Abolish the Senate?

ROMER: True.

BREAM: OK, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?

ROMER: Yep

BREAM: Abolish ICE?

ROMER: Absolutely.

BREAM: Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally?

ROMER: As a long-term plan, yep.

BREAM: Defund the Pentagon?

ROMER: Absolutely.

BREAM: Abolish prisons, at least in large part?

ROMER: Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah?

BREAM: OK, so no prisons. Government or public ownership of most large corporations?

ROMER: Yeah, absolutely.

BREAM: Okay, so then let’s go back through some of those, then, abolish the Senate. There are people who are in the Senate now who are very supportive of DSA. They lose their seats?

ROMER: Well, the Senate is an anachronistic institution, and it comes from the British House of Lords. It is meant to protect power. You know, the Senate was part of the, the system that was made to make sure that the people didn’t have too much of a say. So we want to expand the Congress significantly, but make it a unicameral legislature.

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DSA Assault on Prisons Is Rooted in Third Worldist Lust for Barbarism

The Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment. In fact, they’re having a season. DSA candidates are winning nationwide in Democratic Party primaries, knocking off incumbents while running on some of the most deformed and deranged platforms in recent political memory. Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young socialist in Gracie Mansion, is the new leader of the DSA pack. Terrifying as it may be, Zo may be the closest thing the entire activist left has these days to a kingmaker.

It couldn’t be clearer what the DSA wants: The democratic socialists want to finish the job, launched by Barack Obama on the precipice of presidential victory in 2008, of “fundamentally transforming” the United States. The DSA’s new policy platform, released earlier this month, says the quiet part out loud: “We are workers fighting to transform society,” to “draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.”

It would be one thing if these were the words of a starry-eyed freshman pothead, first exposed to Marx and pontificating to dormmates while John Lennon’s dreadful song “Imagine” plays in the background. But people like Hizzoner and the new uptown socialist “it girl,” Darializa Avila Chevalier, are adults. They are serious. And that makes them not just naive but dangerous.

Zo has had a complicated relationship with the issue of public safety.

The official DSA platform stops short of calling for full “abolition” of prisons or policing, instead calling to “demilitarize police departments” and “end mass incarceration.” But Avila Chevalier promoted full-on police and prison abolition from a since-deleted Twitter/X account, and Mamdani condemned the “carceral state” when he ran for state assembly in 2020. After Avila Chevalier’s primary victory, Mamdani was pressed during an appearance on ABC News on whether he supports the existence of prisons. “There are prisons,” he simply responded.

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Canada’s Supreme Court restores mandatory jail time for child sex predators

Canada’s Supreme Court again restored a mandatory minimum sentence for those who have been convicted of trying to engage in sex acts with minors under age 18.

The restoration of a mandatory six-month jail sentence came after a 7-2 decision by the Supreme Court on July 10.

The new ruling means that a May 2024 decision by the Quebec Court of Appeal, which ruled that a mandatory minimum sentence for trying to engage in sex with a minor was unconstitutional, is now null.

The appeal of the mandatory minimum sentence came from a case involving then-61-year-old Mario Denis, who was convicted of communicating online with a minor for trying to obtain sexual services. Denis had clicked on an ad offering underage escorts that was a police sting operation and was arrested when he went to a room he thought the underage girl was in.

While Denis was found guilty and given a six-month sentence, he appealed that his sentence violated his Charter rights because it was cruel and unusual punishment. As a result, the Quebec Court of Appeal agreed with Denis that a six-month sentence was indeed unconstitutional, but his sentence was not reduced.

The recent court ruling is at odds with a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that found a mandatory one-year sentence for possessing or accessing child pornography is “unconstitutional.”

This ruling was blasted by both Conservative and even non-Conservative politicians alike, with Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew saying anyone caught with child pornography should be “buried under the prison.”

Despite the outrage from left and right provincial leaders, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Mark Carney said it would not be looking to overturn via a constitutional tool the recent Canadian Supreme Court ruling that a mandatory one-year sentence for possessing or accessing child pornography is “unconstitutional.”

Child pornography and the sex trafficking of minors is a growing problem in Canada and the world.

As LifeSiteNews columnist Jonathon Van Maren noted in a recent blog, Canada is one of the world’s largest exporters of pornography.

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Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

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