Albany built a justice system that cannot say no, and Shaquan Seth is what it produced. The career Queens crook has been arrested nearly 150 times — one hundred and fifty — and last week New York cut him loose yet again, because the state’s own law forbids a judge from setting cash bail for the kind of crime he keeps committing. As the New York Post put it in a blistering editorial, thanks to “criminal-justice reform,” you can rack up almost 150 arrests in this town and still get to walk when caught again.
The sequence is almost too neat to be real. Seth walked out of Rikers after a five-month stretch for previous thievery. Less than six days later he was collared in Queens on five separate shoplifting busts — five — including a haul of roughly $600 worth of fancy candles. And in the middle of that spree, according to the Post, he threatened to shoot a young female clerk who was brave enough to try stopping him.
Let that sink in. A man who has already done jail time for larceny, robbery, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer told a retail worker he would put a bullet in her, and the machinery of New York justice had exactly one answer available: back on the street.
The people who wrote these laws have a story ready for you. Shoplifting, they insist, is mostly a crime of need — a Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread. Six hundred dollars in designer candles is not a loaf of bread. A man on his 150th arrest is not a desperate father. And a threat to shoot a clerk is not poverty; it is the next rung on a ladder Seth has been climbing in public, on the record, for years.
That is the part the reformers refuse to look at. As the Post warned, what these “reformed” laws actually encourage is years of offending and reoffending as the perp gradually works his way up from petty crime to homicide. Seth is not stalled at candles. He is escalating, exactly the way the pattern predicts, and the state keeps handing him a fresh opportunity. The paper’s conclusion was blunt: he belongs in prison — or, conceivably, locked up in a mental institution.
Instead, the same progressive lawmakers who built the revolving door are pushing to widen it, still working to further empty New York’s jails and prisons. Not reform it. Empty it. After 150 arrests produced one predator with a shooting threat on his tab, their read on the situation is that the problem is too many people behind bars.
This is a window into what happens when a legislature decides that consequences are the injustice. Bail was never a punishment; it was the one lever a judge had to keep a proven repeat offender away from the public while the case moved. Albany took the lever away, called it compassion, and handed the bill to a young woman working a register in Queens who now knows exactly what a man with 150 arrests is willing to say to her face. The Post’s verdict on the lawmakers who did this stands: it proves conclusively whose side they’re on. It isn’t yours.
Source: nypost.com