Abolish “justice affected persons,” Governor. It's unfair to crime victims.

Right-wing Twitter has been going to town this week on the phrase “justice-affected person,” a clueless phrase that invites ridicule. Governor JB Pritzker would be wise to refrain from using it if it lands on his desk before the state of Illinois' reputation suffers even more damage.

The change in wording, which was wrapped like a gift for Republicans, appeared in House Bill 4409, which passed the Democratic-dominated Senate on Tuesday by a vote of 34 to 20 after being passed by a similar majority in the House in April.

In the eyes of those who support the wording change, it is an attempt to remove the stigma that comes with being called a “felon” in the law, a word that can stick with a person even after they have changed their behavior. In the eyes of Republicans and many ordinary Democrats in Illinois, it was another example of the state being soft on crime by expressing a reluctance to call a criminal a criminal at all.

When you add to that Cook County's now notorious reluctance to prosecute many relatively minor crimes, you get the impression that the state wants to suggest to offenders that they can commit crimes with impunity.

Simply put, describing a person affected by the law sounds to us more like describing a victim of a crime than a perpetrator.

Orwellian language has become a darling of progressives of late (see Joe Biden's “Inflation Reduction Act,” a name designed to distract from the plain reality that it actually helps fuel inflation). This reminds us of Orwell's communist allegory “1984,” in which the prescient author describes a repressive society that strives to “deny the existence of an objective reality while simultaneously taking into account the reality one denies.” As a result, in his brilliant description of what he called doublethink, Orwell wrote, “The lie is always one step ahead of the truth.” Democrats do not have a monopoly on doublethink: supporters of Donald J. Trump should be familiar with the term, too. But this kind of language manipulation is still harmful.

The grammatical syntax is also ridiculous. Justice is something to strive for, a societal goal if you will. It is true that we have a U.S. Department of Justice, but that is an indication of what that agency is designed to accomplish. To say that a particular person is “affected by justice” is gibberish, since we are all affected by justice. At least we hope so.

Furthermore, justice is not a coherent entity that “affects” people, like crime or poverty. That's all nonsense.

Following the reactions to what many Republicans saw as a dangerously utopian “renaming” of criminals, supporters of the bill sought to make clear that not all criminals would be dismissed as “justice-affected persons.”

In fact, House Bill 4409 only applies to people who participate in the state's Adult Redeploy Illinois (ARI) program. In our view, ARI is a worthy program that is far better than not charging someone with, say, a serious property crime, as often happens in Cook County and elsewhere. With the stated goal of “reallocating state resources to develop more effective, less costly, community-based alternatives to incarceration and to improve access to crime reduction measures,” ARI is run by smart people who keep a close eye on the data. By no means all crimes qualify for the program, and parole violators are also excluded from it. We support the expansion of ARI in the underlying bill.

And we understand the argument that some language of the criminal justice system can and does stick with someone who is genuinely trying to turn their life around through such a program. There are ways to make that happen while offenders are going through such a program, and there are ways to celebrate their successes afterward. After all, that is the goal of all programs designed as 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 linguistic change should reflect a desire for reform and change, not pretend that the crime committed did not happen or hide it from the public eye.

Crimes have consequences. Crimes have victims. Can you imagine being the victim of a serious crime and then finding out that the person who committed it is not only not in prison, but is no longer even referred to as the perpetrator?

Most Illinoisans who don't engage in doublethink can. If Pritzker lets this go, a governor with presidential ambitions could hear the phrase repeated ad infinitum in his attack ads. He would be wise to use his line-item veto to prevent a potential Willie Horton-style campaign.