Cook County, Ill., State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez wrote an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune Friday warning that “the most menacing felony offenders who are shooting up the streets of Chicago killing innocent men, women and children are spending fewer and fewer days behind bars for their violent and repeat felony gun offenses.”
As Alvarez pointed out, “a felon who is convicted of carrying a firearm in public serves less than half of the sentence imposed by a judge or jury” in Chicago—and ”63 percent of these gun offenders will reoffend within 12 months of release, and they are four times as likely to commit a homicide.”
Although Alvarez uses the statistics to push more laws, what good are more laws if authorities won’t enforce them? As we’ve pointed out before, only about 1 percent of the thousands of criminals caught with illegal guns in Chicago are prosecuted under existing federal laws.
