I’ve written a good deal about the damage that the field of modern psychiatry has done to mankind, across a variety of contexts. Most of the harms — the invention of gender ideology, the mass overprescribing of psychotropic drugs, and so on — are relatively widely known. What’s less well-known, because not a lot of people talk about it, is the sinister influence of modern psychiatry on our criminal justice system. For all the criticism to be made of Soros D.A.’s and Democrats’ refusal to prosecute criminals — all of it justified — the role of modern psychiatry in freeing violent offenders is often ignored. But it’s very much a crisis in this country, and it’s been one for some time.

It was all the way back in the early 1970s when a man named Charles Meach beat a 22-year-old grocery store clerk to death in Anchorage, Alaska. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and shipped off to a mental institution. But just seven years later, Meach was released. Psychiatrists claimed Meach had made a full recovery. He promised he wouldn’t murder anyone in the future, and that was good enough, apparently. After all, why would he lie? What had Charles Meach ever done to prove himself untrustworthy? I mean, aside from the whole beating-someone-to-death thing. So he was released on the honor system. He pinky promised not to murder ever again. But the promise was short-lived. Two years later, Meach purchased a revolver and murdered four teenagers at a campsite, just for the thrill of it.

Reforms were promised after that massacre, and you can see why. It was a pretty clear sign that mental health professionals should stop pretending that murderers can somehow be “cured” of their murderous tendencies. Murder is not, in fact, a symptom of an illness. It is a manifestation of human evil. And people who commit those kinds of evil acts should be locked in prison forever.

But psychiatrists were not dissuaded. Instead, our sainted mental health professionals, with the help of mostly Democrat-controlled state governments across the country, have continued to embed themselves into the criminal justice system. Their psychiatric facilities now function as safe houses for violent thugs like Jordan Neely, who didn’t go to prison even after he punched an elderly woman in the face on the subway and broke her nose. Instead, Neely was offered “intensive outpatient psychiatric treatment,” which would supposedly cure him of his addiction to terrorizing random people on the train. And we all know how that turned out.

Any rational person who looks at incidents like this will recognize immediately what’s going on. Left-wing prosecutors have found a kind of hack that enables them to release extremely dangerous criminals, even when their guilt is beyond any doubt. All the prosecutors have to do is find some hippy psychiatrist to sign off on a “treatment plan,” and then pretty much anything is possible. They could release some of the most dangerous and depraved criminals on the planet, who committed their crimes not too long ago, based solely on the pseudoscience of modern psychiatry — which is completely subjective, and often relies entirely on the promise of the criminal not to reoffend. There is no crime — and I really mean no crime — so heinous that the criminal cannot be released back into society if a psychiatrist claims that he’s been successfully “treated.”

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

If you think I’m exaggerating, then please consider the case of Tyree Smith, which has to be one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice we’ve ever seen in American history. Tyree Smith confessed to the brutal murder of a 43-year-old homeless man in a vacant apartment in Connecticut back in 2011. Smith was apparently distressed about losing his job at Starbucks, before he began to hear voices in his head.

Now, the details of his crime are so horrific that I’m sorry that I have to share them with you. But it’s important that you have the full story. So here it is. Smith used an axe to kill the man inside an abandoned home in Bridgeport. He then hacked up the man’s body, removed several of his organs — an eyeball and some of his brain — and then ate them at cemetery nearby. So this is an axe murdering graveyard cannibal we’re talking about. Something straight out of a horror film. The man’s body (or what was left of it) wasn’t found for nearly 40 days. At trial, Smith was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2013, a panel of judges committed Smith to a mental institution for 60 years.

But Smith will not spend anywhere near 60 years in a mental institution.

Instead, something called the “Psychiatric Security Review Board” in Connecticut has just granted Smith a “conditional release.” That means he’ll receive “day passes” to wander around the hospital grounds as he pleases. And very soon, he’ll be able to make “off-site” visits into the community.

If you had told me a few years ago that woke justice reform would soon lead to the release of an axe murderer cannibal, it would have seemed too outlandish even to me. Even if you have a black murderer and a white victim, as you do in this case — even given everything we’ve seen during the moral panic of the BLM era — it still seems unthinkable. And it only gets more unthinkable when you look into the specifics of Tyree Smith’s case and why he was released.

First of all, it’s perhaps worth nothing, this decision was made during a hearing in which Tyree Smith wasn’t even present. He teleconferenced in, and he didn’t appear on the video screens in the hearing room. Right away, that should be disqualifying. You will not find very many employers in this country that are willing to hire a job applicant after a phone call, without seeing the applicant in any way. Which means it is, at least in some ways, more difficult for a normal person to get a job at Walmart than it is for a homicidal cannibal to get released from an asylum.

So why is Connecticut releasing Tyree Smith? As the hearing went on, a psychiatrist testified that Smith has recovered. He is a reformed cannibal. His axe murdering days are behind him. And her evidence for this statement is that Smith has denied experiencing any hallucinations, or a desire to harm other people. He’s better now, and we know he’s better now, because he says he’s better now. I’m going to play that clip from the hearing, then at the end you’ll see a question from the prosecutor to the doctor. Watch:

As you just heard, evidence of Tyree Smith’s “recovery” is based on self-reported data. They “know” that he hasn’t had any hallucinations or cravings to consume human flesh because he told them: “He denied visual hallucinations or a desire to harm others or himself.” Well, okay then. What more do you need to know? Oh and by the way, if he stops taking his medications, he could totally become a cannibal again. But he pinky-promises that he’ll keep taking his medications, and stop murdering people.

Of course, at the same time, Smith also knows that his only chance of ever seeing the outside world again is to lie about all of this. So either he is an axe murderer cannibal who grew out of it like a child grows out of a bed-wetting phase, or he’s lying. There’s about a 99.9999 percent chance of the latter.

At the hearing, one of the victim’s family members pointed this out. She remarked, “How do we really know he’s not going to do this again? He had no remorse for killing Angel.” She also said that the whole family is terrified because it’s quite possible Tyree Smith will reoffend. Watch:

So the axe-murderer is apparently the life of the party at the insane asylum. He’s a joy to be around. Of course we can probably assume that the man he hacked to death and then consumed would disagree with this assessment. But he’s not here — because he’s dead. The point is that, as long as Tyree Smith isn’t axe-murdering, he’s really quite pleasant. But that’s small comfort to the family of his victim, who really wants an answer to a pretty basic question, which is: What assurances do we have that he won’t kill us, exactly?

In their report, the Connecticut psychiatry board includes this line, which is really an all-time caliber line. If you’re assembling a hall-of-fame of the most deranged statements that the medical profession has tried to pass off as legitimate, this would have to be very high on the list. This is directly from the Connecticut psychiatry board’s report. I’m not making this up, I assure you: “He denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.”

Yes, cravings. So just relax, everybody. There’s nothing to worry about. The Connecticut psychiatric board is releasing an axe murderer cannibal back into society, but they assure us that if he experiences any “cravings” for the taste of human flesh, he will immediately “reach out” for help. They’re going to release him but they’ll say on his way out the door: “Hey, make sure to reach out if you ever feel like eating someone’s brain!” And that should do it. What a relief. In the last decade or so that he’s been locked away, Tyree Smith has become totally and completely normal. There’s zero likelihood that Tyree Smith will, say, order Uber Eats and assume that the delivery driver is the meal.

Of course, all of this discussion about whether Tyree Smith is “reformed” actually misses the point anyway. Even in the fantasyland scenario where an axe murderer could be transformed into a functional, tax-paying member of society, he still shouldn’t be released. He should be in prison as a matter of basic justice. If he’s truly cured of his schizophrenia and murderous tendencies, then he should be shipped to a maximum-security prison. The idea that he belongs in civilized society, after brutally murdering a man and then eating him, is only appealing if you’re the kind of person who — for one reason or another — sympathizes more with killers than the victims who are killed. And that’s the kind of attitude that defines a lot of psychiatrists.

For example, I looked up one of the Yale psychiatrists who testified for the defense in Smith’s original trial, named Reena Kapoor (pronouns she/her/hers). She’s written a lot of articles about her time working with murderers who were found not guilty by reason of insanity. Here’s a direct quote from one of those articles. It’s about how an inmate — a murderer — asked to take a walk with her while in prison. And apparently it left her very hot and bothered:

J.M. and I never did take a walk together. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the idea again. … As far as I know, J.M. does not speak of me longingly or wax nostalgic about our year of psychotherapy. .. As for me, I have had some time to reflect on things, and I am plagued by one last question about J.M.’s request to take a walk with me. Why did he ask to take a walk in particular? Why not ask to see a movie or have lunch together?

It reads like an early 2000s MySpace post or a LiveJournal blog from a teenage girl who’s infatuated with serial killers. But it’s not. It’s an excerpt from an article published in the “Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.” This is how a lot of “doctors” in the field of psychiatry conduct themselves. It’s the kind of thing they fantasize about. And in Tyree Smith’s case, they have taken their ideology to its logical conclusion. Of course, they don’t want Smith to live anywhere near their neighborhoods. They just want you to have to deal with him.

This is bleeding heart liberalism in its final, horrifically deranged and monstrous, and also literal, form. Although, as I’ve often pointed out, this isn’t actually due to an overabundance of compassion or sensitivity. It’s exactly the opposite. These decisions are fueled by a kind of psychotic indifference to the immense human suffering that will inevitably come as a result. The people who made this decision know that there’s a high likelihood that this man will butcher another person, and they just don’t care. They are just as psychotic as he is. In Russia, they send their cannibals to fight in war, to inflict horrors on the enemies of the state. That happened several times in just the past few years, during the war in Ukraine. But in the United States, psychiatrists want cannibals to inflict those horrors on Americans.

When modern psychiatry was just getting started in 19th century Britain, something called the “Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society” formed. They saw psychiatrists as completely illegitimate — as totalitarians who just wanted to imprison people without due process. And there was indeed a long period of time where psychiatry was used to imprison people who were not dangerous and had done nothing wrong. We now have the exact opposite problem. Psychiatry has done a 180 flip. Deranged lunatics are being freed as a means of circumventing the criminal justice system. The common thread here — the the thing that ties together these two extremes — is that in both cases psychiatry is a cover to inflict horrors beyond comprehension onto the public.

The reality — and this really shouldn’t need to be said — is that someone who kills another human and eats his brain will never be fit to live freely in society ever again. This should not be a controversial statement. In fact, it should be the least controversial statement ever uttered. But in psychiatry, it is controversial, which is why people living in Connecticut are worried that they’re back on the menu tonight. The truth is that the people who freed the axe murderer cannibal are just as demented as the axe murderer cannibal himself. They haven’t consumed human flesh at a graveyard — as far as I know, anyway — but they are equally deranged. And because they have a lot more power, and are legitimized under the veil of “science,” they are quite a bit more dangerous.