Crime and punishment fills the media people consume and especially the extraordinary hearings cases captivates the public mind, promoting fear of crime and ultimately legitimising the bourgeois police state.

In such an ideological environment leftist positions such as prison and police abolition, rehabilitation and conflict resolution ends up feeling weak and out of touch to most people, despite being the correct responses.

Telling people how fears over crime are most often not rooted in reality comes off as arrogant and as avoiding the issue. Nobody likes to be told that their emotions are invalid and when you’re afraid that the new Boston strangler is coming for you, you’re not interested in hearing about how unlikely you are to get killed, you’re interested in being reassured that you will be kept safe and that the monster will be stopped.

Leftist responses to crime often lacks the immediate commonsense appeal that reactionary positions has playing on their ideological home turf. Most people thinks cops are here to protect you, most people think that criminals are ontologically evil, most people think that the way to stop crime is by putting criminals throughout the carceral state. In such an environment responding to the latest crime panic with more cops and more violence will feel like the appropriate and effective thing to do while things like abolishing the police will seems outright deranged and divorced from reality.

In a future where the left somehow gains access to loyal mass media coverage of its own things might be different but for now leftist agitation has to deal with the fact that we have to get through many layers of bourgeois ideology before we can make an argument. Crime and punishment has proven very effective vectors for the bourgeoisie state to legitimise itself skiing the proletariat and as such the left should get better at talking with people about it.