Ridiculous Remedy
Filing Lawsuits on Gangs
By Daniel Muniz

Perhaps the most ridiculous tactic that a number of larger municipalities have employed in order to stem gang violence is to sue gang members. Some cities are filing lawsuits against these thugs to prevent them from associating with each other while they are roaming our streets.

The purpose for the legal action is to obtain a court injunction to prevent the hoodlums from loitering around in certain areas of a city. If the thugs violate the injunction, they will face a misdemeanor charge and jail time.

The theory is that by limiting contact with other hoods, crime will then be reduced.

What is wrong with this approach is that it tackles the wrong problems.

It is understandable that municipalities are fed up with crime and fed up with gangs. Drive-by shootings, stabbings, armed robberies, rape, and other vicious assaults does spark terror in neighborhoods. In addition, other crimes like graffiti, purse snatching, drug dealing, and other criminal activity makes our streets unsafe.

Accordingly, these cities want to do something proactive that truly reduces crime.

Unfortunately, the real problem is that these hoodlums shouldn’t even be walking free on our streets in the first place especially if they are repeat offenders.

However, an overloaded court docket, an overcrowded penal system, and sympathetic “hug a thug” activists who are financed by our government have created a revolving door that greatly minimizes the amount of time that dangerous criminals spends behind bars.

The result has been startling because these miscreants have a propensity to continue their barbaric lifestyle and they will associate with other lowlifes when they have been released from jail. And even forbidding them from socializing with each other is will have a minimal impact at best because these ex-cons will simply find other ways to congregate that is outside the reach of the local police.

The best way to solve this problem is for the public to accept the notion that the people who have already been convicted of violent crimes should still be sitting in a prison cell without any kind of early release whatsoever. Unfortunately, having these hoodlums running loose on our streets is what is creating the grave urban problems that so many neighborhoods have to face on a day-to-day basis.

The same approach has to be applied to habitual repeat offenders for low-level crime. If someone has turned crime into a lifestyle, then they are going to revert to that behavior the moment that they are released from jail.

But ultimately, cities have to face the harsh reality of why hoodlums are roaming the streets.

“Hug a thug” activist organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have made our prison system outrageously expensive to maintain. And they have also made it cost prohibitive to build more prisons. As a result, our correctional institutions have no choice but to release dangerous criminals’ years or decades earlier than necessary even when there are public outcries to keep these miscreants locked up.

And because of the overcrowding, there is tremendous pressure to reduce the length of incarceration for minor street hoods. Instead of jail being a deterrent, it has become a status symbol for many of these lowlifes. Needless to say, the minor street hoods are emboldened to resume their bad behavior because there are no serious consequences involved which allows them to eventually graduate to being a more dangerous thug.

In addition, there are plenty of people who are sympathetic to criminals and they have helped wreck our legal system by making it enormously expensive to prosecute criminals.

The only solution is that these cities have to go to war against “hug a thug” activists. It is these activists who delight in vicious thugs and common criminals being released early from prison. All too often they tend to view the hoodlum as the victim instead of the honest law-abiding citizenry who were brutalized by these lowlifes.

It is time for cities to demand that states build more prisons and expand capacity of existing facilities. It is also time to fight for our correctional institutions to return to fiscal sanity so that it becomes economically possible to keep these thugs incarcerated for the entire time that they are sentenced to instead of just a fraction of it.

Our communities are safer when the people who are doing the drive-by shootings, armed robberies, carjackings, sexual assaults, and other violent crimes are locked up for an extended periods of time. Harassing gang members with injunctions is only a temporary remedy because these lowlifes are still free to roam our streets looking for trouble. It is time to solve the problem instead of prolonging it.

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