Talarico in 2022: Let’s Defund the Prisons!

Forget about Defund the Police. Today’s deep question is: Are prisons just as anachronistic as cassettes and telegrams? 

Four years ago, James Talarico argued that, and more. Right now, the Democrat nominee for the US Senate seat in Texas claims he’s always supported law enforcement. In 2022, though, Talarico made a public speech arguing that prisons were as passé as eight-track tapes and wanted them closed. The Free Beacon has the scoop, again:

Left-wing Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says he opposes defunding the police and has a “proven track record” of supporting law enforcement. Perhaps that is true now, but in 2022, he called to slash police and prison budgets and redirect the money to social programs, a move he argued would “make prisons obsolete,” video footage shows.

Talarico’s remarks came during a 2022 speech he delivered to a group of Texas inmates graduating from a high school diploma program. After approvingly quoting the prominent prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—Talarico described her as an “anti-prison activist” who said “prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems”—he laid out his vision for a “world without prisons.”

“Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” Talarico said. “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”

“It’s hard to imagine a world without prisons,” he continued. “But it was also hard to imagine a world without telegrams and cassette tapes. Just because it was hard to imagine doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. We won’t build it overnight, but dreaming is the first step.”

Ahem. At a time when crime was soaring, thanks to Joe Biden’s border crisis and the social unrest from the George Floyd riots and COVID-19 lockdowns, Talarico wanted Texas to empty its prisons, at least at some point in time. He saw prisons as a “catchall solution to social problems,” when most Texans would have seen them as a way to catch criminals and put an end to the “social problems” they create through crime. 

To some extent, this is more or less typical Marxist Utopianism. Its construct connects to the promise of Marxist ideology, which is that man can somehow be perfected by socialist government intervention. The Soviets obsessed over this, claiming to have changed and perfected human nature in the New Soviet Man, but all socialist thought revolves around the same concept. It has been and still is the basis for re-education camps in every communist and socialist dictatorship ever established over the past century-plus. 

Talarico’s timing could not have been worse for this, and not just because of the crime wave that Defund the Police and non-incarceration policies had already produced by that point. That’s bad enough, but his remarks followed a year where social spending spiked to nearly double its normal level to 6.5% of GDP, thanks to the flood of COVID relief Congress passed in three tranches before Talarico’s remarks. That may not have had a causal link to the spike in crime, but it certainly correlated with it and, in doing so, debunked the premise entirely. 

Also, does Talarico have any idea what we already spend on social safety-net programs? In the FY2024 budget, total safety-net spending runs over one trillion dollars, far more than what we spend on the military. That comprised 16% of all federal spending in that cycle, and the amount increased by $74 billion in FY2025. As the St. Louis Fed demonstrates, spending on welfare and social services has increased steadily and well over the rate of inflation for the last sixty years:

Has crime decreased over that period of time? Has law enforcement become less relevant to the lives of voters in commensurate measure to this investment? Voters answered that question rather forcefully in 2024 when they made clear that they wanted a change of direction away from Marxist Utopianism and open borders. 

Policing is still relevant. Prisons as a consequence of criminal behavior are, if anything, even more relevant. Marxist Utopianism needs to go the way of the eight-track tape, the buggy whip, and the idea that human nature can change through socialist dogma. James Talarico needs to go too, and as soon as possible. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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