Editorial: ‘Justice-impacted individual’ is a ‘doublethink’ phrase that could come back to haunt Gov. J.B. Pritzker

Right-wing Twitter sure went to town with “justice-impacted individual” this week, it being the kind of clueless phraseology that positively invites ridicule. Gov. J.B. Pritzker would be wise to strike it when it hits his desk before even more reputational damage is done to the state of Illinois.

The gift-wrapped-for-Republicans language change appeared in House Bill 4409, which passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by a 34-20 vote Tuesday after having passed the similarly controlled House in April.

In the minds of those who support the language change, it is an attempt to remove the stigma of being referenced in law as an “offender,” a word that can stick to a person even after they’ve changed their ways. In the minds of Republicans, and plenty of regular old Illinois Democrats, this was yet another example of the state going soft on crime by expressing a reluctance even to call a criminal a criminal.

Add that to Cook County’s now infamous reluctance to prosecute many relatively minor crimes and it feels like the state is suggesting that offenders can offend with impunity.

Simply put, justice-impacted individual sounds to us more like a description of someone who is the victim of a crime than someone who committed one.

Orwellian language has become a progressive favorite of late (see Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” a name designed to distract from the clear reality that it was actually helping fuel inflation). This one puts us in mind of Orwell’s communist allegory “1984” wherein the prescient author described a repressive society that strove to “deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” As a result, Orwell wrote in his brilliant description of what he called doublethink, “the lie is always one step ahead of the truth.” Democrats don’t have a monopoly on doublethink: Supporters of Donald J. Trump should also be familiar with the term. But this kind of language manipulation is still pernicious.

The grammatical syntax is ridiculous too. Justice is a thing you seek, a societal goal, if you will. It’s true that we have a United States Department of Justice, but that’s a reference to what that agency is supposed to achieve. To say that a particular person is “justice-impacted” is gobbledygook given that we’re all justice-impacted individuals. Or so we hope.

Plus, justice is not some cohesive entity that “impacts” people like, say, crime or poverty. It’s all nonsense.

In the aftermath of the reaction to what many Republicans claimed was a dangerously utopian “rebranding” of criminals, the bill’s supporters sought to clarify that not all offenders will be scrubbed as “justice-impacted individuals.”

In fact, House Bill 4409 references only people in the state’s Adult Redeploy Illinois (ARI) program. ARI is a worthy program in our view, far preferable to declining to prosecute someone for, say, a significant property crime as often occurs in Cook County and elsewhere. With the stated aim of “reallocating state resources to develop more effective, less expensive community-based alternatives to incarceration and improve access to interventions that reduce crime,” ARI is run by smart people who keep a close watch on data. By no means are all crimes eligible for the program and parole violators are excluded too. We support the underlying bill’s expansion of ARI.

And we’re sympathetic to the argument that some of the language of the criminal justice system can and does cling to someone genuinely trying to change their life via such a program. There are ways to accomplish that as offenders pass through such a program, and there are ways to celebrate their achievements thereafter. After all, that’s the aim of all programs designed to be alternatives to incarceration, with all its costs and its often terrible impact on family members.

But this tortured euphemism is not one of them. Any language change should reflect the desire to reform and change, not pretend that the crime committed was not committed, or to hide it from plain sight.

Crime has consequences. Crime has victims. Can you imagine being the victim of a serious crime and discovering that the person who committed it was not only not in prison but no longer even called an offender?

Most Illinoisans not in the throes of doublethink can. If Pritzker lets this one go, a governor with presidential ambitions might be hearing the phrase repeated ad infinitum in attack ads. He would be wise to use his line-item veto to head off that potential Willie Horton-style campaign.