Guest Commentary: Virginia’s “Top Cop” is Peddling False Crime Statistics
By Shawn Weneta, the Legislative Liaison to the General Assembly for The Humanization Project
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Miyares’ office provides comment for Virginia Scope story
Before we get into the new content, Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office has provided a statement for Andrew Kerley’s story last week about the battle between Senate Democrats and Gov. Glenn Youngkin over gubernatorial appointments.
In response to comments from Senate Majority Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, which you can read here, Miyares spokesperson Shaun Kenney said the following:
“Article IV, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution clearly states that the legislative power of the Commonwealth shall be vested in a General Assembly, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Delegates. Further, Article IV, Section 2 states that the State Senate shall not be more than 40 and not less than 33 members. It does not read eight members of a Senate committee. Surovell might be confused, but the constitution is clear.”
Guest Commentary: Virginia’s “Top Cop” is Peddling False Crime Statistics
By Shawn Weneta, the Legislative Liaison to the General Assembly for The Humanization Project
Attorney General Jason Miyares has once again taken to the podium to attack Virginia's Enhanced Earned Sentence Credits (EESC) program, an evidence-based policy specifically targeted at nonviolent convictions that incentivizes growth, rehabilitation, and good behavior.
He came armed with cherry-picked statistics and misleading anecdotes designed to stoke fear rather than inform the public debate. His July 1 press conference mischaracterized the facts and is a dangerous departure from evidence-based criminal justice policy that threatens to undermine meaningful reform efforts across the Commonwealth.
The Attorney General's (AG) presentation suffers from fundamental flaws that render his conclusions not just questionable, but actively misleading. Most egregiously, his office has misrepresented key details about specific cases to support their narrative.
Consider the case of Daniel Vanover, whom Miyares spotlights as evidence of EESC's failures. The AG claims Vanover "began repeatedly raping an 11-year-old girl mere days after his early release" under the EESC program. Yet Vanover never received EESC. And, not only did he not receive EESC, but publicly available arrest records reveal that Mr. Vanover began his crimes in May 2022, months before EESC was even enacted on July 1, 2022.
It is factually impossible to blame EESC for crimes that began months before the program ever existed.
In actuality, Vanover had recently completed a “Truth in Sentencing” term, the very system Miyares champions as superior. The bitter irony is unmistakable: by the AG's own twisted logic, his preferred policy produced this tragedy. If individual cases can indict entire systems, then Truth in Sentencing stands condemned by Vanover's horrific crimes. This is not a matter of interpretation; it is a verifiable fact that exposes either gross incompetence or deliberate deception in the AG's office.
This misrepresentation is not an innocent error; it is a fundamental breach of the public trust. When Virginia’s own self-proclaimed "Top Cop" presents false information to justify policy positions, it undermines the very foundation of democratic governance. Citizens deserve accurate information from their elected officials, particularly when those officials are advocating for policies that will potentially impact the liberty of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The tragic cases highlighted by the AG deserve serious consideration and our deepest sympathy for the victims and their families. No one disputes that violent crime causes immeasurable harm or that the criminal justice system must prioritize public safety. Yet, using individual tragedies to justify wholesale policy changes represents exactly the kind of politicized, rather than evidence-based policymaking that has led to decades of failed “tough-on-crime” initiatives that have actually made communities less safe while consuming enormous public resources.
G.K. Chesterton once observed, "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” The fallacy that harsher sentences automatically create safer communities seemingly remains fashionable with Miyares despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
There is no policy that can end violent crime entirely, but there are policies that can reduce it by incentivizing growth. EESC is one of those policies, and has been shown by Bureau of Justice Statistics studies to do just that. The question is not whether any released individual will ever commit another crime—they will. The question is whether our policies, on balance, make communities safer while respecting human dignity and the possibility of rehabilitation. EESC does just that.
Virginia is leading the nation in reducing its prison population while simultaneously making communities safer. Since EESC expansion, Virginia has achieved the nation's sixth-lowest violent crime rate—42% below the national average, as well as the lowest recidivism rate in the nation. In the past year, homicides dropped 21.9%, violent crime fell 6.3%, and property crime declined 10.2%, with Virginia's crime falling three times faster than the national rate, primarily due to the policies passed in the 2020-2021 legislative cycles. Contrary to Miyares' fear-mongering, EESC recipients show lower violent recidivism rates than the AG’s preferred policy. They were less likely to be rearrested for violent offenses (8.4% vs. 10.3%) and less likely to be convicted of new violence (2.7% vs. 3.2%). Homicide-related rearrests were lower (0.4% vs. 0.6%), rape rearrests were one-third the rate, and sex offense convictions were less than half as common.
The research is unequivocal: earned sentence credits for demonstrated growth make communities safer.
The most rigorous scientific analysis comes from the First Step Act, a bipartisan federal law championed by President Trump in 2018. Comparing people with similar charges, demographics, and risk levels, those earning enhanced credits in the federal system are now 55% less likely to recidivate than matched individuals without similar incentives, a dramatic improvement upon the already impressive 37% lower recidivism rate found after the program's first two years. Since its inception, the First Step Act has enabled 44,000 people to earn their release, serving as a major driver behind the 13% reduction in the federal prison population.
This safety-increasing, budget-trimming success explains why Virginia's EESC program has earned praise from leading conservatives who examine the outcomes objectively. Miyares' attacks on EESC are not merely contrary to evidence; they constitute an assault on a bipartisan success story championed by Donald Trump himself.
EESC works because it incentivizes self-improvement and provides hope. Recipients like Sam Harris, who was also pardoned by Governor Youngkin, now lead reentry programs. JJ Joyner works essential county services while supporting his family, and Jared Rose counsels veterans while serving on Roanoke's Gun Violence Prevention Taskforce. These success stories demonstrate that EESC creates community leaders, not public safety risks, and is perhaps one of the reasons Governor Youngkin signed the bill in 2024 fully enacting the EESC program.
And what's the price tag for implementing the AG's preferred policy? According to the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission and the Department of Planning and Budget, the policy change proposed by Miyares will cost Virginia taxpayers $295,528,384.00. That's more than a quarter of a billion dollars that could otherwise be invested in education, mental health services, substance use disorder treatment, robust victim services, and other programs that actually prevent crime and repair harm. The AG provides no analysis of these fiscal tradeoffs, nor does he explain how the state would fund the increased incarceration that would result from his proposals. This omission is particularly glaring given Virginia's ongoing budget challenges and the competing demands for public resources across multiple areas of state government.
Most importantly, victims of crime deserve better than to have their suffering exploited for political gain. They deserve a system that actually works to prevent crime, hold people who cause harm accountable, and support their recovery and healing. The families who have lost loved ones deserve honest analysis of how to prevent future tragedies, not misleading presentations designed to score political points.
However, rather than engaging in such good-faith analysis, Miyares, appears to be using his office to advance his partisan political agenda, or more likely, to buoy his campaign aboard the Republican statewide ticket by claiming to champion victims while using them as political props. Yet Miyares's commitment to victim advocacy appears to be more rhetoric than reality. While Miyares repeatedly invokes his "criminal first, victim last" characterization of Democratic policies, his own office recently threatened to cut funding to statewide victim service organizations that don't align with his political positions, according to Richmond Times-Dispatch reporting.
This hypocrisy exposes the hollowness of the "People's Protector" victim advocacy claims; a true champion of victims would expand access to services, not weaponize already scarce funding as political coercion. More troubling still is the question of whether his office has provided accurate information about these programs to the victims and survivors whose trauma they exploit for political theater.
Meanwhile, it is actually Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly who are substantively advancing victim rights through legislation like the 2025 Fair Access to Victim Compensation Act, carried by Delegate Karrie Delaney and Senator Creigh Deeds, which extends the time for victims to file compensation claims from one year to three years and removes barriers that have historically prevented vulnerable victims from accessing support.
At the end of the day, Governing is hard. Demagoguery is easy. Virginians deserve leaders who choose the hard path of real problem-solving over the cheap applause of political theater. Miyares has made it clear which path he prefers—and it's not the one that actually keeps us safe.
Weneta can be reached at shawn@thehumanizationproject.org
George Mason’s president appears to be the Trump administration’s next target
This is the Virginia Scope daily newsletter covering Virginia politics from top to bottom. Please consider becoming the ultimate political insider by supporting non-partisan, independent news and becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter today.
This is very well-done. As Sgt. Joe Friday, Jack Webb's famous law-and-order detective, was famous for (supposedly) saying, "Just the facts, ma'am." Jason Miyares should go back and re-read Robert Jackson's speech "The Federal Prosecutor" (https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/the-federal-prosecutor/): "While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst."