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In what can only be described as the Democratic Party's latest audition for a reboot of Escape from New York, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has resurfaced comments advocating for the mass release of prisoners while participating in a webinar that featured a convicted murderer and a registered sex offender.
The August 2020 webinar, hosted by prison abolition activists and promoted with hashtags such as #FreeThemAll and #AbolishPrison, invited El-Sayed to discuss the "road to decarceration and abolition." For those unfamiliar with progressive jargon, "decarceration" is the fancy academic term for "let's see what happens if we stop putting criminals in prison."
El-Sayed enthusiastically embraced the concept.
"Not only are we taking people's rights from them, but also we have failed to provide them the basic means of a dignified life," he said. "Every choice we make about incarcerating somebody is about robbing that somebody from the people who love them and the people who need them."
Noticeably absent from the discussion were the people who got robbed, assaulted, raped, murdered, or otherwise victimized by the criminals in question. In the progressive hierarchy of compassion, crime victims increasingly appear to rank somewhere below convicted felons and slightly above carbon emissions.
El-Sayed went even further, declaring:
"Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in."
Any and all efforts.
That's quite a slogan. Most politicians at least pretend to draw a distinction between a shoplifter and a serial violent offender. El-Sayed appears to have settled on a more streamlined approach: prison bad, freedom good, details unnecessary.
The webinar itself was a remarkable spectacle. Joining El-Sayed were former prisoners Martin Vargas, a registered sex offender convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl, and LaWanda Hollister, who served 34 years for second-degree murder. It was essentially a campaign event that accidentally wandered into the casting department for a true-crime documentary.
Yet this wasn't an isolated incident. Earlier that year, El-Sayed appeared on a podcast hosted by Joshua Hoe, a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty to soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex. Rather than treating such a background as disqualifying for public leadership, El-Sayed encouraged Hoe and other former convicts to run for office because their "voice is needed."
One can only imagine the campaign slogan: Experience matters.
Republicans have already seized on El-Sayed's record, portraying him as a far-left ideologue whose political instincts seem permanently trapped inside a graduate seminar on prison abolition. His associations with socialist influencers, anti-Israel activists, and various progressive causes have already raised eyebrows. But telling voters that prisons themselves are the problem may be the kind of argument that sounds better in an activist Zoom call than in a general election.
After all, most Americans still cling to the quaint and outdated notion that people who commit serious crimes should face serious consequences.
El-Sayed and his allies appear determined to challenge that assumption.
The rest of Michigan may soon have an opportunity to decide whether that vision represents criminal justice reform or simply criminal justice surrender.
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