Widely circulated video of the senseless stabbing murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, North Carolina, transit train last month shocked the nation. She was a refugee from war-torn Ukraine who spent time hiding in a bomb shelter before fleeing to what should have been a safer life in America. This otherwise preventable atrocity was made possible by a justice system that ignored warning signs and cycled her alleged killer through a revolving door of arrests, convictions and releases.
This system of injustice was funded in part and promoted in full by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential private foundations.
The accused, Decarlos Brown, is a reportedly schizophrenic man with at least 14 prior arrests in North Carolina. His convictions include breaking and entering, armed robbery, and possession of a firearm by a felon. This clearly dangerous man was paroled in 2020, after a five year stint in state prison. Unreformed, he resumed his crooked cycle.
Brown’s most recent legal trouble was a January of 2025 arrest for abusing 911 and ranting about being under the control of “a man-made substance.” He was released, with a promise to appear in court, but used the free time to add “first degree murder” to his arrest résumé.
On the web page for its criminal justice policy grants, the MacArthur Foundation brags about reducing jail populations and advancing racial justice. Headquartered in Chicago, MacArthur has an endowment of roughly $8 billion and operates on a global scale. MacArthur funds everything from so-called “climate change” campaigns to journalism initiatives, but one of its big bets is on criminal justice policy. In its own words, MacArthur has invested more than $405 million into over 500 criminal justice projects nationwide.
Its flagship effort, the Safety and Justice Challenge, launched in 2015, explicitly aims to shrink local jail populations with the stated goal of making prison numbers more “equitable.”
Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, has received nearly $3.9 million from MacArthur since 2015 to drive down its jail population, including a 2024 capstone award to “sustain reforms” that keep fewer people behind bars. The result is a system conditioned to see releases as progress, regardless of the associated risk. That culture of decarceration is the backdrop against which someone like Decarlos Brown could cycle through arrest after arrest without meaningful consequences.
Across the country, MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge has funneled millions into counties to shrink jail populations, some by as much as 25 percent. Philadelphia received $3.5 million in 2016 to reduce its jail headcount, and in 2025 the city reported a 50 percent reduction in its jail population over the previous decade. Buncombe County, North Carolina, publicly touted a 30 percent drop in its average monthly jail population between February 2019 and January 2021, and then secured another $1.1 million from MacArthur in 2023 to continue the initiative. In February 2023 Allegheny County (home to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) boasted of a 33 percent reduction in its jail population following a 2018 grant. Pima County, Arizona, likewise implemented MacArthur-funded strategies to reduce missed court dates and jail time for certain nonviolent cases.
MacArthur has not hesitated to use its purse strings as leverage. In 2024, it withheld $625,000 from San Francisco’s district attorney after concluding the office was not meeting agreed-upon jail-reduction goals.
A major red flag is MacArthur’s fixation on racial justice rather than criminal justice. On its website, MacArthur declares that “Our nation’s jail populations have long reflected racial and ethnic disparities that must be addressed.” In other words, the problem is not that criminals commit crimes, but that too many of them happen to be the same skin color. That is not reform; that is bean-counting by demographics.
If prison quotas should reflect the general population, then maybe we should also release more men, since they are overwhelmingly more likely to commit violent crime. Nearly 80 percent of all violent offenses in America are committed by males. Asians, meanwhile, are actually underrepresented in prison, relative to their population. Should we “balance the scales” by arresting a few more of them? That’s the logical outcome of the absurdity of building a justice system around “equity” and quotas, instead of accountability.
Call me crazy, but maybe we should just arrest criminals, regardless of their skin color? Maybe the determining factor of whether or not we let a madman back on the streets should be their criminal record and danger to society, rather than pandering to racial groups?
Iryna Zarutska came here hoping to build a better life. She ended up as a brutally and too-casually ignored statistic in MacArthur’s social engineering experiment. Her killer is behind bars again, but how many more killers are out free because this billionaire foundation is obsessed with “equity”?
