Most liberal criminal justice reform energy isn’t derived at all from a desire to be more compassionate and understanding but simply to have a new designated hate object.

From Ah, Carceral Liberalism by Freddie deBoer.  The subheading is it's pretty weird to be the anti-police, pro-fire-and-brimstone party.

Ideologically incoherent is one of the old stalwart criticism of the modern woke left.  Freddie deBoer is pointing out one of the manifestations of that incoherence.

We’ve spent the past two years with the left-of-center world debating, and largely endorsing, quite radical ideas about ending policing and prisons. This would seem to suggest a certain predisposition to forgiveness and equanimity in human affairs, a communal understanding that life is complicated, all of us are sinners, and there but for the grace of God go we. But as the various groans about the New York piece show, the urge to defund the police etc. is really much less about a particular ethic of caring and much more about simply nominating a communally-approved target for progressive anger. It happens that the abstract category “the cops” is a good thing for people to target, but the broader point is that most liberal criminal justice reform energy isn’t derived at all from a desire to be more compassionate and understanding but simply to have a new designated hate object. And this condition is unhealthy, is my feeling. Because forgiveness is good and absolutely central to the left-wing conception of the world.

[snip]

But it gets worse for our liberal champions of anti-carceral measures. Within this large bulk of violent offenders, there’s also many who have committed sex-based offenses like sexual assault, domestic violence or intimate partner violence or similar, or hate crimes. These are considered (to borrow a term) especially heinous by liberals for various ideological reasons. What I frequently feel moved to remind anti-carceral-state lefties is that their efforts to shutter prisons will necessarily involve letting a lot of the guys responsible for those things out. Let me highlight this: there is no path to dismantling the prison industrial complex that does not let out a lot of people guilty of “identity crimes” like sexual assault, hate crimes, or domestic violence. And so you have a bit of a dilemma if you’re a standard-issue (read: not particularly well-considered) liberal, which is that you must rail against the punitive state knowing that if your efforts were to succeed you would inevitably free a lot of people you would prefer stay locked up, perhaps even for longer than initially sentenced.

[snip]

The deeper anger of the progressive cause, and whether it’s turned into something toxic and incurable, is of more interest to me. It’s difficult to have pretty much any kind of conversation about anything because everyone is screaming all the time. If you suggest the screaming is unhelpful, you’re accused of not caring about The Injustices, but you could be forgiven for asking how exactly the screaming is helping us with The Injustices. I think the truth of the matter is that the political left in the United States, a group to which I belong, is a pack of angry losers. This is an entirely neutral and objective description; there is no honest read on reality that disputes this. Liberals and leftists can get nothing done. The degree to which this is self-inflicted is a topic of constant discussion, but the base reality of impotence endures. And I can’t help but feel that the rancor against the kid in the New York article and those who attempt to think compassionately about him is ultimately mostly an expression not of the inherent injustice of what he did but of the endlessly-metastisizing rage liberals feel about not being able to make real change.

The Woke Left made a mistake when they abandoned the goal of making Justice better and started pursuing the fanciful notion of Social Justice.  

A Justice system can be better or worse but will never be perfect.  In practice, the best we can achieve is mostly effective.  Social Justice, on the other hand, almost always ends up being an unstructured, almost random, effort to punish ideological enemies and targets of ideological hatred.  It is a repugnant bullying effort to exercise arbitrary authority.