Get rid of the “justice-touched” governor. This is unfair to victims of crime.

This week, right-wing Twitter certainly went to town with “justice-impacted individual,” which is the kind of clueless phraseology that positively invites ridicule. Governor JB Pritzker would be wise to knock it when it hits his desk before the reputation of the State of Illinois is further tarnished.

The gift-wrapped language change for Republicans appeared in House Bill 4409, which passed the Democratic-controlled Senate on Tuesday by a vote of 34-20, after being passed by the Democratic-controlled House similarly in April.

In the minds of those who support the language change, it is an attempt to remove the stigma associated with being referred to in the law as an “offender”, a word that can stick to a person even after she changed her habits. In the minds of Republicans and many old Democrats in Illinois, this was another example of the state going soft on crime by expressing even a reluctance to call a criminal of criminal.

Add to that Cook County’s notorious reluctance to prosecute many relatively minor crimes and you get the impression that the state is suggesting that offenders can commit offenses with impunity.

Simply put, the term “justice-touched individual” seems to us more to describe a person who is the victim of a crime than a person who has committed one.

Orwellian language has become a progressive favorite of late (see Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” a name designed to distract from the clear reality that it was actually helping to fuel inflation). This reminds us of Orwell’s communist allegory “1984”, in which the prescient author described a repressive society that strived to “deny the existence of objective reality while taking into account the reality that we denies.” As a result, Orwell wrote in his brilliant description of what he calls doublethink: “a lie is always one step ahead of the truth.” Democrats don’t have a monopoly on doublethink: Donald J. Trump supporters should be familiar with the term, too. But this kind of manipulation of language remains pernicious.

The grammatical syntax is also ridiculous. Justice is something you seek, a societal goal, if you will. It is true that we have a Department of Justice in the United States, but that refers to what that agency is supposed to accomplish. To say that a particular person is “touched by justice” is gibberish given that we are all individuals affected by justice. At least that’s what we hope.

Furthermore, justice is not a coherent entity that “impacts” people like, for example, crime or poverty. This all makes no sense.

Following the backlash to what many Republicans called a dangerously utopian “rebranding” of criminals, supporters of the bill sought to clarify that not all offenders would be considered “justice-impacted individuals.”

In fact, House Bill 4409 only refers to people participating in the state’s Adult Redeploy Illinois (ARI) program. ARI is, in our view, a worthwhile program, far preferable to refusing to prosecute someone, for example, for a significant property crime, as often occurs in Cook County and elsewhere. With the stated goal of “reallocating state resources to develop more effective and less costly community-based alternatives to incarceration and improve access to interventions that reduce crime,” ARI is led by smart people who closely monitor the data. By no means are all crimes eligible for the program and parole violators are also excluded. We support the ARI expansion contained in the underlying bill.

And we are sympathetic to the argument that some of the language of the criminal justice system can and does latch on to someone who is genuinely trying to change their life through such a program. There are ways to achieve this when offenders are in such a program, and there are ways to celebrate their achievements afterward. After all, that is the goal of all programs designed as alternatives to incarceration, with all its costs and often terrible consequences for family members.

But this tortured euphemism is not one of them. Any change in language must reflect the desire for reform and change, not pretend that the crime committed was not committed, nor hide it in plain sight.

Crime has consequences. Crime has victims. Can you imagine being the victim of a serious crime and finding out that the person who committed it not only was not in prison, but was no longer even classified as an offender?

Most Illinoisans who aren’t plagued by doublethink can. If Pritzker lets this go, a governor with presidential ambitions might hear the phrase repeated endlessly in attack ads. It would be wise to use his veto to avoid this potential Willie Horton campaign.