Read the Rap Sheet First
A career criminal broke into a home, entered a child's bedroom, and climbed into bed with that child while the family slept. He had prior convictions. He was known to law enforcement. He had been through the system multiple times before this night, and the system — the apparatus of courts, supervision, early release, and prosecutorial discretion that American taxpayers fund at enormous expense — had done nothing meaningful to interrupt his trajectory.
The family didn't get a warning. They got an intruder in their child's bedroom at 3 AM.
I want to be precise here, because precision is what this conversation deserves. This isn't an argument for draconian punishment as an end in itself. I'm not interested in punishment theater. I'm interested in a single, answerable question: what would it have cost — actually cost, in dollars and institutional effort — to keep this man incarcerated or under effective supervision, compared to what this family is now living with?
That's a cost-benefit analysis. The government is supposed to be good at those.
The Bureaucratic Machinery of Recidivism
Here's what a career criminal record actually represents. It represents multiple decision points — arrests, prosecutions, plea deals, sentencing hearings, parole hearings, supervision periods — at each of which a government employee made a judgment call. Sometimes that judgment was made under caseload pressure. Sometimes under ideological pressure. Sometimes under budget pressure.
At each decision point, the people whose job it was to protect the public had information about this man's history and made a choice.
I run a small business in a mid-size American city. My property insurance went up 34% last year because commercial burglaries in my area increased. The insurance company told me this directly. They're not wrong. And when I dig into why commercial burglaries increased, it traces back to the same place it always traces back: revolving-door prosecution, inadequate supervision of repeat offenders, and a corrections system that treats recidivism as an acceptable outcome rather than a systemic failure.
The government is not short on funding for criminal justice. The federal and state governments spend over $300 billion annually on criminal justice systems in the United States. Three hundred billion. That's more than the GDP of most countries. And somehow, a man with a documented record of break-ins got close enough to a sleeping child to climb into her bed.
The Libertarian Case for Actually Protecting People
Let me say something that might surprise people who assume libertarians don't care about crime. Personal security is the foundational public good. It is the one thing — the one thing — that government exists unambiguously to provide. Before roads, before schools, before any other public expenditure: the protection of persons.
A government that fails at that specific task while succeeding at everything else has its priorities exactly backwards.
The regulatory state expands annually. The IRS can audit my business with fourteen days' notice. The EPA can penalize me for a drainage issue on my property before I've had a chance to respond. OSHA can fine me for a ladder placement my employee didn't even report. The federal government has enormous, well-funded, highly motivated apparatus for extracting compliance from ordinary citizens.
And yet: career criminal. Child's bedroom. Family sleeping twenty feet away.
The failure here isn't abstract. It isn't a policy paper. It's a child who will remember that night for the rest of her life. The question isn't whether the system failed — it obviously did. The question is whether anyone with the power to fix it will be held accountable, or whether this becomes another case number filed in a system that learned nothing and changed nothing.
History suggests the latter. The family deserves better than history.
