In federal law, this was exemplified by the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act, strongly pushed by Ronald Reagan (and my friend Ed Meese). The SRA overall made sentencing stiffer and more certain; eliminated federal parole; and required judges to follow mandatory guidelines (rather than be able to freelance with whatever they thought “compassion” demanded (or whatever they thought could get them a puff piece in the NYT)).

The results were stunning. Over the next generation, after crime peaked in 1991, it fell off dramatically. By 2014, ten years ago, the murder rate had been cut by more than half, to 4.4 per 100,000, which was less than it had been since Eisenhower was President. The number of murders had fallen from 24,700 to 14,164. That’s not a typo: In significant part because we wised up and toughened up, there were slightly more than ten thousand fewer murder victims per year — a development that grossly disproportionately benefited black people, but of course was a boon to the entire country.

Which, one might conjecture, is why the Left was so disconsolate. It had never let go of the “criminal-as-victim” and “society-is-responsible” memes. And, as happens in democracies, complacency crept in. It wasn’t just the Left. Many normal citizens came to view low crime as a benefit that dropped out of the sky rather than something that required a lot of work (and suffering) to achieve. Hence the quiet growth of the petri dish of modern day “criminal justice reform,” an intentionally opaque phrase that actually means throwing away success to re-embrace failure, as long as failure comes with no very specific description and the disguise of a fancier name — say, “restorative justice.”