Late last year, a man named Lawrence Reed was arrested for setting a woman on fire aboard a Chicago commuter train. It wasn’t his first arrest, mind you, or his second. Or his 62nd.
No, Reed had a grand total of 72 arrests that could be counted in his 50 years upon this earth — including one just a few months prior for assaulting a social worker in which the judge, when told Reed was a threat who couldn’t be safely monitored out of a carceral facility, told the prosecutor that “I can’t keep everybody in jail because the state’s attorney wants me to.”
Reed was jailed without bail in that case, in which the 26-year-old woman was burned over 50 percent of her body. But Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wasn’t about to let people tell him that he needed to change the laws to ensure that ultra-recidivists stayed behind
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