Jake Haro walked free as Gavin Newsom pushed for years to keep criminals out of prison

Little Emmanuel Haro’s father never served a day in prison, despite being convicted of savagely abusing another of his children just a few years earlier — the latest shocking example of policies backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that have focused on shutting down penitentiaries and attempting to rehabilitate criminals over locking them up.

Jake Haro faced up to six years behind bars for battering his 10-week-old daughter Carolina so badly that she is now bedridden for life. But a judge let him off with probation, a work-release program and counseling in 2023.

He is now charged with murdering his son Emmanuel after he and wife Rebecca allegedly tortured the boy to death and then claimed he was kidnapped from a parking lot on Aug. 14, prosecutors say.

It’s a case that has stunned California. And Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin fumed last week that it was “outrageous” that Jake Haro was on the street.

“Mr. Haro should have been in prison,” Hestrin said.

But the Haro case was not a fluke in California: His sentence came amid a years-long push led by Newsom to keep criminals, even violent offenders, out of prison.

Haro’s walk-free sentence, given by Judge Dwight W. Moore over the protests of prosecutors, came at a time when more and more convicted felons were getting probation instead of prison.

Nearly two-thirds of felons don’t see a day in prison, according to California’s court system. That figure has risen five points since Newsom took over in 2019.

The latest development in Newsom’s criminal justice agenda: he announced the closure of a state prison in Riverside County last month — the same county where abusive dad Jake Haro was allowed to skate.

The California Rehabilitation Center will be the fifth prison to go dark on Newsom’s watch as state officials work to empty out the cells.

He touted the record-low prisoner population in the Golden State — almost half what it was 20 years ago.

Yet prisons are still dangerously overcrowded with inmates filling up nearly 120% the state’s designed capacity, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Worse, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) expects the number of prisoners to skyrocket by nearly 20% in the next few years, thanks to a recent referendum to re-criminalize shoplifting and other low-level crimes.

Fed-up Californians are pushing back on the soft-on-crime experiment: Prisoner numbers have steadily dropped in the past decade, but crime rates haven’t.

Rather, the state simply shunted its prisoners into county systems, and it introduced a wave of legal get-out-of-jail-free cards to set criminals loose on the streets.

“This decline in the prison population and empty bed space is not a reflection of a lack of need in California. It is a shift of this population from the state government onto local communities,” said Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes.

California’s manic push to empty state prison cells began in the 2010s, after the Supreme Court ordered the state to deal with its notoriously overcrowded prisons.

Instead of building more capacity, lawmakers passed a bill that allowed low-level offenders to serve their time in county jails, stuffing felons with years-long sentences into local lockups that were meant to hold suspects awaiting trial.

Next, lawmakers introduced a wave of new paths to freedom for criminals: One proposition made it vastly easier to gain parole, and another allowed judges more leeway to avoid handing down mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders.

The now-notorious Proposition 47, passed in 2014, downgraded theft of property worth less than $950 to a misdemeanor — sparking an explosion of shoplifting that turned businesses into all-you-can-eat buffets for thieves.

By the time Californians voted to repeal key parts of the law last year, shoplifting was almost 50% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

In theory, the state’s new get-out-of-jail-free laws were meant to apply to non-violent offenders and keep the most dangerous inmates behind bars, but that hasn’t proved to be the case.

Jake Haro was given no jail time even after savagely beating his own daughter, leaving her with fractured ribs, a fractured skull, a brain hemorrhage, and other injuries.

“Our criminal justice system … it broke down. It’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Hestrin, the DA who prosecuted Haro, said.

Last month, Jake and Rebecca tried to convince cops that their son Emmanuel had been kidnapped in the parking lot of a local sporting goods store.

When their story fell apart, they clammed up. Jake Haro allegedly admitted to killing Emmanuel to an undercover cop who was posing as a cellmate, NewsNation reported.

But Haro’s case is far from the only one.

Last year, a road-raging maniac with a nearly 20-year rap sheet was released less than one year into his five-year sentence for smashing drivers’ windshields with a metal pipe on SoCal highways.

The driver, Nathaniel Radimak, was arrested again just months later for attacking his mother and sister in Hawaii.

In 2023, Leroy McCrary received no jail time for an armed robbery in Santa Monica — his second felony in LA County.

A year after ducking a jail cell, McCrary was charged with murder for fatally dragging a woman with his car after a stickup gone wrong in the town of Newport Beach.

Will O’Neil, mayor of Newport Beach at the time, said the murder should have been a wake-up call for state politicians to crack down on crime, not close down prisons.

“Gavin Newsom has made one decision after another with a clear through-line: He is pro-criminal and anti-voter,” O’Neil told The Post.

Now voters are pushing back.

San Francisco and Los Angeles ousted soft-on-crime district attorneys in recent years.

New LA DA Nathan Hochman vowed to reverse plummeting conviction rates under his predecessor George Gascón.

As for the string of prison closures: “I firmly believe the revolving door of recidivism in our state must stop and deterring criminal conduct before it occurs will make our communities safer,” Hochman told The Post.

Last August lawmakers passed a suite of bipartisan legislation to crack down on serial theft, car break-ins, and organized burglary rings.

The pièce de résistance was Proposition 36, passed in November with nearly 70% of the vote, which made low-level theft a felony once again for repeat offenders

Newsom’s answer to the changing attitudes of Californians: Keep closing prisons.

The governor’s administration has already closed three public penitentiaries, ended a contract with one private prison, and deactivated 11 facilities within other sites.

Newsom’s office acknowledged the looming surge of prisoners after Prop. 36, but they expect inmate counts to start falling again by 2027.

The governor’s office argued that there is more than one way to crack down on crime, and the solution isn’t necessarily building more prisons.

“People need to be held accountable for their crimes, while also providing them the resources and opportunity to rehabilitate and reenter as better members of our society. It’s not all or nothing,” governor’s spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo told The Post in a statement.

Newsom’s office pointed out that the state has expanded funding for crime-fighting operations by $1,7 billion since 2019, including expanding California Highway Patrol operations by 310% in 2023, specifically to crack down on retail crime.

The government has also expanded funding for drug rehab and behavioral health programs, and Prop 36 allows it to draw from a pool of funds established by Prop 47 for such programs.

Nevertheless, more people will go to prison in the coming years, and there will likely be neither the space nor money to accommodate them, argued the California Budget and Policy Center in a recent report.

A budget revision released in May “does not propose any new additional state funding to support the service needs and other unfunded costs imposed by Prop. 36 — costs that could easily reach to the low hundreds of millions of dollars each year,” the report reads.

“Instead, Prop. 36 assumes that state and local officials will be able to accommodate the measure’s substantial costs in their already strained budgets,” the Center added.

Even the governor’s prediction that inmate numbers will stabilize may prove to be mere wishful thinking as Californians, fed up with surging crime, continue to vote for policies and leaders that put more criminals behind bars.

That is, if there are still bars left to put them behind.