On Monday, Townhall’s Marina Medvin shared a tweet showing shoplifting in San Francisco that should be considered shocking; a young man simply rides through a pharmacy with a trash bag, steals whatever he can, and not only does security allow him to ride out of the store, it seems nobody even moves to call the cops. //

For those unfamiliar, restorative justice is the progressive philosophy regarding crime. Its basic definition is “a system of criminal justice that focuses on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community at large.”

In other words, the solution to crimes is not punishment, but rehab and trusting that the criminal wants to change and be better and that the person committing said crime had no other choice — society forced him/her to do so.

So, all a criminal has to do is apologize, say he’ll commit to working hard, and prosecutors like Boudin give him a pass because, as Donahue referenced, these progressives believe that society–not the individual–is to blame for their crime.

To that extent, you’d be hard-pressed to find that society has ever forced a young man to ride through a pharmacy with a trash bag and snag whatever he can.

Maybe instead of imbibing from the church of progressivism, Boudin can listen to a priest from his city’s namesake’s religion; Roman Catholicism.

The now-deceased Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.”

He also stated, “There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex, over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze. . . Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity. . . All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.”

Indeed, perhaps progressives need to stop viewing society as the problem, start giving these criminals their rightful dignity, and recognize that they choose to commit crimes such as shoplifting which should rightfully be punished. Otherwise, San Francisco will continue to descend into anarchy. //

mjc227
an hour ago
Look for all the leftist losers running the city whining that SF is a food desert, hardware desert, drug store desert, dollar store desert and every other business desert and then blaming "society" after they ran every business out. It will be Trump's fault somehow or Republicans or the Tooth Fairy. Lefties create the problem, blame everyone else but who caused the problem and then come riding in with a crackpot solution to a problem they created that could not possibly solve the problem but the taxpayers wind up paying for the solution that has a zero chance of ever working. Wash, rinse and repeat.