The nation's thugs rejoiced when the coronavirus plague hit the U.S., giving anti-incarceration social justice warriors just the push they needed to find a reason to let them out of their prisons.

Lefty city and state leaders ensured that it happened, and predictable as sunrise, the released thugs went back to doing what got them incarcerated in the first place.

According to the New York Post:

A Bronx man released from prison by Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month amid the spread of the coronavirus has been charged with beating and robbing a 62-year-old man[.] ... Daniel Vargas, 29, was being held on $50,000 bail on robbery, grand larceny and assault charges after allegedly approaching the elderly victim on Valentine Avenue in the Bronx shortly after 8 a.m. Tuesday, according to a criminal complaint. Vargas allegedly demanded $80 that the man, who was leaving a local bodega with a cane and began punching and kicking him when he refused. "Give me your money," he allegedly told the man. Vargas allegedly then slugged the victim in his body, pushed him against a wall and shoved him to the ground, the complaint said.

Sounds like just the violent brute you'd want to let out of jail to keep him safe and protected from the coronavirus. As if a guy like that would socially distance and wash his hands as health officials direct, and use a mask — for anything other than a crime tool to protect against identification. Only to a leftist would any of this make sense. This one got let out on March 28 and took less than two weeks to get back to business, and those are only the violent crimes we know about. He's been out for several days, and we can guess. What he did may not have even been reported as crimes, given that cops are no longer making a lot of arrests.

It's a textbook example of social justice warrior leftists taking the coronavirus crisis and using it to advance their long-held agendas.

The far left, including the Soros front groups, Angela Davis, Chesa Boudin, and other extremists, have long advocated for getting rid of prisons and letting their denizens all out to prey upon us, under the tangled rubric of "social justice," a social justice that always finds itself devoid of laws. The real game of this bunch is more likely to inflict criminals upon law-abiding citizens, the better to restrain their freedoms, which is always their real agenda. If law-abiding citizens can no longer walk about on the streets in any safety (nor use weapons in self-defense, another hobbyhorse of this bunch), we all should be more controllable by the state. The late, unlamented Hugo Chávez of Venezuela first introduced this "concept" of socialist control to the world, as Venezuela descended into the world's foremost socialist crime hellhole.

This Vargas criminal is hardly the only one New Yorkers need to worry about. He is joined in the Great Uncaging by charmers like this:

At the request of the Legal Aid Society, Justice Mark Dwyer freed 18 Rikers Island inmates, including accused murderer Pedro Vinent-Barcia, who allegedly stabbed his girlfriend to death.

...and according to the New York Post, some 329 other violent ones, as well 207 "non-violent" felony detainees, probably drug-traffickers, porno perverts, and other social plagues.

New York in fact has released 1,500 of these thugs from its Rikers Island prison, the hellhole where they take the really thuggy convicts and detainees, a place so bad that it's used as a threat to force cooperation with prosecutors. New York's prosecutors tried to do that to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort until they got called out for sleaze tactics and were forced to backtrack.

But instead of using common sense, such as testing everyone, giving prisoners personal protective gear, or getting rid of visitors and isolating the sick ones, maybe even moving them to some other lockdown, they've indiscriminately let Rikers's finest out, so now the plague of crime is beginning in New York City to accompany the pandemic.

According to the Post's second report on prison let-outs:

"Largely through efforts from judges, district attorneys, defenders, DOC and New York State DOCCS, over 1,500 people have been released from jail since March 16," the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice touted in a fact sheet posted online. "Today the jail population is at a number last seen in 1949." The 20 percent decline from 5,447 city inmates to 4,363 reflect data through April 6, the sheet says.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's office sounds pleased as punch at that one. Fewer jailings of criminals, happier social justice warriors.

Tell that to the guy who got beaten and robbed for $80, or the family of the woman who had to have stared in disbelief as her accused killer got let out scot-free.

And don't think it isn't selective and political, either. How is it Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer now in the pokey, got denied a pass from prison, even though it would be unlikely he'd be out knocking over old people for their billfolds, while this maggot got let out? His appeal to get let out, was roundly denounced as publicity seeking by the judge last March 24, while the thugs who got let out got no such scoldings. How is it that thugs can get let out of prison to plague the citizenry while non-violent criminals with the wrong political associations are told to stay in the hoosegow? Public safety didn't figure in either of these cases.

Yet public safety is what jailings are all about. They're also about citizen participation - as it's juries who decide on the guilt of these denizens and render the verdicts with consequences for the perpetrators. Nullifying that and letting the hoods out is another reason people don't want to serve on juries. It's a violation of the public trust by public officials -- and like China's leaders, they need to be held accountable by the public for the acts of those they let out. If not, justice becomes a complete shadow puppet show, not an ultimately democratic act with the power of the people behind it.

There shouldn't be any such let outs at all, and especially not of the violent ones. Just as society needs to be protected from the airborne plague of the coronavirus, so does society need to be protected from the human plague of violent criminals. The one does not outweigh the other.

New York is going to learn this the hard way as the era of Mick Jagger's 'Shattered' becomes the model for life in New York once again. They can console themselves by knowing that the thugs didn't catch the coronavirus in prison.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of Pixabay public domain images.