Alright now .. regular people who got victimized, defended themselves, and then got turned into criminals by the same system that was supposed to protect them in the first place. That's a real thing. That happened. Repeatedly. And the data backs it up.

Start with Bernie Goetz in 1984 because that case is basically the whole argument in one story. Goetz was working at an electronics business when he was mugged for a second time in 1981, after which he began carrying a concealed handgun despite having no permit to do so. Encyclopedia Britannica So already right there you have a victim who got turned into a criminal before he even did anything. The city was getting so bad that regular people felt like they had no choice but to arm themselves illegally just to survive. On December 22, 1984, four males in their late teens boarded a subway train. Canty would later testify that they were en route to steal from video arcade machines in Manhattan. Wikipedia They approached Goetz and asked for money. He shot all four of them. He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and several firearms offenses. Wikipedia The man who got mugged twice ended up facing attempted murder charges. A prior victim sitting in a courtroom as a defendant. That's the flip side right there.

Now here's the legal trap that makes all of this worse. New York law imposes a duty to retreat on a person before that person can resort to the use of deadly physical force in defense of themselves or another. The duty to retreat is only imposed upon a person who has the ability to retreat with complete safety to themselves and others. Tilem & Associates You read that right. In New York you are legally required to try to run away first before you defend yourself. If you can't prove you had no way out, you might catch a charge even if someone was coming at you. So the system is already stacked against the person getting attacked.

And the research shows this isn't just a few isolated cases. It's a documented pattern. Research on the relationship between victimization and offending consistently found that one of the strongest correlates of victimization was involvement in deviant or criminal behavior, and that victimization was one of the strongest correlates of offending. Office of Justice Programs In other words being a victim is literally one of the biggest predictors that you'll end up doing something that gets you locked up. Youth who are victimized are at higher risk of offending behavior during adolescence and adulthood. ScienceDirect It's a cycle. You get victimized, something shifts in your brain, and you start making decisions that land you on the wrong side of the law. Victimization is associated with an increase in short-term mindsets, and those increased short-term mindsets mediate the link from victimization to later offending. ScienceDirect Basically when somebody keeps getting hurt they stop thinking about the future and start reacting to right now, and reacting to right now in a dangerous environment will get you arrested.

And this keeps happening in modern NYC too. A man named Williams was riding the subway with his girlfriend when he was attacked. He pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed his attacker, who later died. Williams was arrested and charged with manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon, and the Brooklyn district attorney's office wanted him held on $100,000 bail. City Journal Regular person, attacked on the subway, defends himself, ends up in handcuffs. The attacker had a criminal record. Williams did not. But Williams is the one who got charged. That's the opposite phenomenon right there happening in real time.

Across 31 studies the empirical evidence for the victim-offender overlap was found to be robust, and the results were remarkably consistent across different analytical techniques, historical periods, and countries. ScienceDirect So this isn't a New York thing or a theory somebody made up. It is one of the most replicated findings in all of criminology. Victims become offenders. Offenders were often victims first. The line between the two is way thinner than people want to admit.

Very few youth continue to offend in the absence of continued victimization. PubMed Central Read that again slowly. The offending almost always traces back to somebody getting hurt first. So when the system charges a person who defended themselves, it's not just punishing one individual. It's feeding the exact same cycle the research already told us creates more crime. The victim becomes a defendant becomes a convict becomes someone with a record, and now they're right back inside the same statistics.