Of course we should make addiction treatment, mental-health care, job training, and other services available to incarcerated people — and, where possible, to troubled people who have not yet entered the criminal-justice system. But none of that solves the basic problem of how to protect the public from people who already have shown a propensity to commit violent crimes. This isn’t a problem that can be dreamt away. There is a great deal of room between a “locking people up for being poor” regime — under which low-level, non-violent offenders are kept in custody because they can’t put up cash bail and won’t be released under personal recognizance — and the lax practices that put someone like Vernon Menifee on the street. Menifee was released on bond three times for felonies in 2019 and 2020 and had six felony convictions to his name when he was charged with the murder of Guy-Anthony Owen Allen in Houston. There are dozens and dozens of cases like his in Texas and hundreds or thousands of them each year across the country, in which violent offenders out on bond commit more violence, up to and including murder. While “defund the police” hysteria mostly has been talk, the loosening of release practices has had real effects on communities around the country, from Texas cities to Albany County, N.Y., where a suspect recently was released without bond after his fourth bank-robbery arrest. In Memphis, a carjacking and attempted-robbery suspect has just been released on bond in spite of his having had 14 active warrants and 13 open criminal cases at the time of his arrest. The guy arrested over that tiger roaming around the Houston suburbs? Out on bond for murder. The list goes on.