As one of the people trying to mitigate the Salem Witch Trials said roughly, "It is better for 100 witches to get away than for one innocent to be convicted."
It should be the same with today's murders etc. If people are not caught but one innocent is protected, so be it.
Which is how most citizens feel, up until they become a victim of crime. Then the "rose-colored glasses" come off, and the attitude does a 180.
Trouble is, when the releasees go out and kill 20 people, what have you done, in order to protect that one innocent (who you don't know is innocent)?
Houston had a bellyful of that crap in the 70's and 80's. Houston is the state's dumping-ground for releasees and parolees, because the state Board of Pardons and Paroles is stacked with Good Old Boys from Dallas-Fort Worth and other parts of the state, and they just use Houston as the community toilet.
Houston had so many murderers being arrested after reoffending, the voters elected wall-to-wall "hang-'em-high" Republican judges. Harris County (Houston) juries still lead Texas, and Texas leads the nation, in handing out death sentences, because Houstonians are fed up with the child-murderers and sex fiends and rapists and armed robbers who get dumped on the city when their state time is served or the prisons get loaded up with drug mules and the Board of Pardons and Paroles just starts turning them loose.
Tell you how bad it is.......the state legislature redefined house burglary and many theft offenses downward from felonies to misdemeanors, just so they could dump a lot of offenders from state prisons to satisfy liberal judge William Wayne Justice and his prisoner-lawsuit case edicts on overcrowding. The legislature turned thousands of felons out, some of them with violent histories, and sent the huge majority of them to Houston bus stations. That's what happened. True fact. And the 'Rat legislators who did that, thought Texans wouldn't notice what they did. Well, we did notice, and now Texas Democrats are on the official Endangered Species List.
And when one of these Democrat-client murderers kills somebody, we sentence his dying ass to death. No screwing around, no second chances, none of this "my daddy made me a sex fiend" stuff. They go down, they get death.
It's self-preservation, feller.