Pinkerton: NYC’s Woke District Attorney Is Creating the Real-Life Sequel to ‘Escape from New York’

Did you ever see movie Escape From New York? The crime-news of today bring that decades-old film back to mind.

Starring Kurt Russell, Escape From New York, released in 1981, had a wild premise: Manhattan had become so crime-ridden that authorities simply built a wall around it, turning the island into a giant prison. That was an okay solution until Air Force One crashes there; the president survives the crash, and so a motley crew of commandoes led by Russell must rescue him.

Okay, so that’s not the most plausible of premises. And yet without a doubt, the depiction of New York City as a hellhole was simply true; the crime rate at that time was as high as a skyscraper. In 1981, there were 2,166 murders in the city, and 1,214,935 serious crimes overall—that was more than one serious crime for every six residents. So we can see, in a Hollywood way, the scenario that New York City was a menace to the innocent and law-abiding was perfectly plausible.

Yet beginning in the 1990s, the movie became implausible. Why? Because the crime rate started falling. Fast. Rudy Giuliani, the crime-fighting mayor from 1994 to 2002, was the turnaround figure, bringing in a new chief of the NYPD, Bill Bratton, who used data, as well as tough tactics, to bring crooks to heel. And for a time, the successors of Giuliani and Bratton were happy to keep riding on their positive momentum. By 2017, the number of murders and serious crimes in the city had fallen by three-quarters.

Yet then came widespread wokeness, Black Lives Matter, and defund the police. And so in the past few years, crime in New York City has spiked. (And elsewhere, too, of course.)

So now comes news that might make Hollywood think that it’s time for an Escape From New York reboot. On January 4, the New York Post scooped that the new district attorney for Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, doesn’t really believe in prison:

In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

We might observe that “carceral” is the politically correct way of saying “prison.” The Post continued, describing the new procedures that Bragg has in mind:

Assistant district attorneys must also now keep in mind the “impacts of incarceration,” including whether it really does increase public safety, potential future barriers to convicts involving housing and employment, the financial cost of prison and the racial disparities over who gets time, Bragg instructed.

The idea, of course, is not to put the guilty in jail or prison. Peter Moskos, a realistic criminologist at Manhattan’s John Jay College, looked at Bragg’s memo and pronounced, “This seems like a big deal”—as in, a major...

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