Horowitz: Jailbreak! Man accused of stabbing Senator Rand Paul’s staffer was repeat violent offender released under Trump’s First Step Act

Well, well. It turns out that Congress must stew in the pot legislators cooked. Fox News reports that Glynn Neal, the man accused of stabbing Senator Rand Paul’s staffer, was released early under that ridiculous “First Step Act” signed by Trump, which allows many violent criminals to serve the last third of their sentences on supervised parole. Kim Kardashian and Van Jones, who pressed Trump to pass the jailbreak bill, won’t have to live with the consequences, but members of Congress will be reminded every day as they fear walking around the Capitol in broad daylight.

Earlier this week, Senator Rand Paul announced the shocking news that his junior staffer was seriously injured in a stabbing attack just blocks away from the Capitol. This comes after a career criminal assaulted Democratic Rep. Angie Craig in an elevator of her apartment building last month. Their work in Congress is ironically the only thing exposing them to what working-class people have to deal with every day. This is why earlier this month a bill nullifying the D.C. municipal government’s recent downgrade of criminal offenses sailed through both houses and President Biden had no leverage to veto it. But will members of both parties finally learn the obvious lesson that this is a systemic problem that affects everyone? We indeed have an under-incarceration problem, not an over-incarceration problem.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the combined state and federal prison incarceration rate has shrunk by 28% since 2010. The percentage of the American population in the U.S corrections system (combined federal and state) is lower than at any time since 1992. The overwhelming majority of those in prison are repeat violent felons, and most of them barely serve time commensurate with their threat level. To begin with, only a minority of violent crimes result in a clearing of the case with the perpetrator serving prison time.

It turns out that the suspect in the stabbing of the Paul staffer was a repeat violent offender who was released early from federal prison, violated his probation, and yet was still out on the streets to immediately victimize more people. Glynn Neal, 42, was convicted in 2011 on charges of pandering, procuring, compelling a person to live a life of prostitution against her will, felony threats, and obstruction of justice. He was found to have threatened two women with death if they failed to comply. Neal was sentenced to 12 years and four months in federal prison given that the crime occurred in D.C.

However, as is always the case, he didn’t serve the full time. Anti-crime watchdog Virginians for Safe Communities discovered the court document showing Neal was released early at some point before his time was up. Court documents show that he was cited for a parole violation in September 2021, so he must have been out at least a year early.

As always, that parole violation was dismissed by a Chicago federal magistrate in February 2022. Virginians for Safe Communities also reports that he had a massive criminal history with 14 arrests for burglary, one for illegal fun possession, two for assault on police, two for auto theft, and one for drugs.

He wound up landing back in prison for a short period of time, but according to the AP, he was released last Friday, just one day prior to the attack.

It’s these sorts of criminals who fit the profile of most future murderers or serious assailants. These are the people who were given multiple chances, yet the book is never thrown at them even when they violate parole.

The same applied to Rep. Craig’s attacker last month. The suspect, Kendrid Hamlin, accrued 12 prior assault charges over the past decade, including against police officers. According to court records, two weeks before the assault on Craig, Hamlin was arrested for and pled guilty to spitting blood at several Capitol Police officers, kicking one in the groin and biting another. That incident itself was only several weeks after Hamlin was accused of stealing items from a Capitol Hill supermarket. Each time, he served little or no time. Contrast that to the treatment of military veterans on January 6 who spent time in the gulag pretrial for minor crimes despite having no criminal record, and you have the ultimate form of anarcho-tyranny.

Craig and other Democrats are finally calling for more people to be locked up, but they fail to consider the fact that the entire jailbreak movement that they supported for a decade is the cause of this problem. Their grand master, George Soros, is the sugar daddy of the prosecutors who work for the criminals rather than victims of crime.

Over the past decade, both parties in Washington have bought into the de-incarceration canard and have promoted ideas for early release of career criminals. Standing alone, I’ve warned in this column that we’d reverse the two-decade decline in street crime if we continued down that path. They claimed the First Step Act would only apply to the amazingly low-level criminals who reformed themselves through these really magical, innovative “anti-recidivism” programs. Well, not only have the chickens come home to roost with record violent crime in many cities, but the fruits of “criminal justice reform” are now growing right outside the Capitol, to the point where members of Congress and staff are no longer safe.

Let’s not forget that both parties, including Donald Trump, supported a mass de-incarceration bill that let out many hardened criminals early. Will their own experience on Capitol Hill finally serve as a wake-up call? If they finally turn back to law-and-order policies, we can thank our founders for placing the capitol in D.C. rather than Martha’s Vineyard. That way they can actually live under the consequences of the policies they support, at least regarding crime.