J6ers May Be the Most Law-Abiding Group of Inmates Ever

Recently there have been many published statements in mainstream (meaning pro-Democrat) news outlets seeking to paint the January 6 community as especially violent, thuggish or undeserving of compensation for their years of abuse by the Department of Justice.

On March 31, 2026 the New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece entitled “The People Trump Pardoned are on a Crime Spree.”  The essay was overloaded with smears against former January 6 defendants, saying “at least twelve” (of 1,583) J6ers have been “charged” with new crimes since being pardoned. This includes protest-related scuffling, the alleged vandalism by Jake Lang, a violation of a family court order, and an alleged act of resisting arrest.  A very tiny handful of pardoned J6ers have been arrested for serious crimes such as burglary or sexual assault.

That’s an arrest rate of 7.5 TENTHS OF ONE PERCENT (0.75%) per year (actually 15 months) for J6ers. This is several times lower than the arrest rate of average Americans.  (Roughly 2–3% of Americans are arrested each year.) And arrestees everywhere tend to be disproportionately male (as are J6ers). Almost FOUR percent of adult MALES are arrested each year.

This means that pardoned J6ers are far more law-abiding than the general population. And this law-abidingness becomes even more startling when one compares released J6ers to other released prisoners.  According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly 43% of released American prisoners are re-arrested for new crimes within the first year. Over SIXTY percent of released prisoners are rearrested within 3 years.  The average American ex-convict is over 53 times more likely to be arrested than the average pardoned J6er!!

Pardoned J6 prisoners may be the most law abiding cohort of inmates ever released from federal prison.

Lost in this discussion is the fact that President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of some four thousand prisoners in December 2024.  And it turns out that a number of the Biden-commuted prisoners have been rearrested—although no news outlet appears to be investigating this (or even interested in it).

A Dothan, Alabama man named Willie Frank Peterson was arrested just two months after former President Joe Biden commuted his drug sentence, for new felony charges including possessing cocaine, hydrocodone, marijuana, and illegally possessing firearms.

A man named Khyre Holbert pled guilty to shooting up the Old Market area in Omaha, Nebraska, and is now back in prison. Holbert’s gun was allegedly linked to other violent crimes. Dequan Willard was rearrested for violating the conditions of supervised release shortly after Biden’s commutation.

Note that there is no systematic, politicized effort to track Biden’s clemencies as there is with Trump’s J6 pardons; so no one knows the true extent of recidivism among the inmates released by Biden.

Or consider the 13,316 federal inmates who were released to home confinement nationwide under the CARES Act during the 2020 COVID-19 panic.  Significantly, these were strictly vetted, pre-screened, mostly senior, inmates deemed medically vulnerable and low risk between March 2020 and June 2023. The media reported that “a small fraction” of those released inmates, 521, were re-arrested and returned to prison for unspecified violations. Twenty-two were arrested for new crimes.

The ACLU, the Vera Institute, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), Forbes, and Reason and Senator Cory Booker all praised these early releases as a huge success. The Biden Administration released a 2024 report extolling the low recidivism rate (just 4.6% rearrested; 22 for new crimes by 2024 alone) of the CARES Act early releases.

But J6ers have a rate of rearrest that is SIX TIMES LOWER.

The incredible law-abidingness of pardoned J6ers begs the question of the legitimacy of the J6 prosecutions themselves.  While the left likes to paint J6ers as fundamentally criminal, the data show that J6ers are overwhelmingly hardworking and law abiding. This further illustrates that J6ers were mostly innocent Americans, subjected to cruel, weaponized prosecutions under the Biden Justice Department.

Where are the criminology professors?