#rehabilitation and justice and helping the poor at least be the ones in charge??
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The pushback to the term "cultural Christianity" from atheists is real odd to me because, as someone who has been an atheist since 13, only ever went to church a handful of times never with my own family (made a note never to sleep over at that friends house on a Saturday again bc I HATED church it smelled like shit, was boring, pews are uncomfortable as fuck, and the religious people I knew were all wildly misogynistic and I've never been here for being told I was less of a person for being Born Like This), and generally had no actual connection to Christianity in a meaningful way but still only knows Christian mythology, has been steeped in Christian values I had to untangle, and my religious understandings are still deeply Christian.
Like Ive never paid attention to the bible, church, Jesus, Christian teachings, or whatever but if you asked me about any religion the one I'll reliably know the most about is Christianity. I don't know why atheists are offended by being called culturally Christian because they have bad blood with the religion because like sorry bruh that doesn't mean you're less indoctrinated by Christian values if the culture you grew up in is predominantly Christian. In fact I'd say that religion being this ubiquitous in the culture regardless of anyone's consent to exactly ONE religion being shoved down our throats is reason to team up with other religious folks who ALSO don't like being constantly evangelized to by the culture at large, not a reason to throw a fit because you don't like being tied to a religion that is so ingrained into the culture that shit like "oh my god" and "Jesus Christ" are common expressions of surprise regardless of how atheist you are. Like surely I'm not the only atheist to notice the shocking amount of cultural religious shit that works it's way into my life and speech despite having not set foot in a church since I was like 10, and I can't remember the last time I was in one before that.
Idk man cultural Christianity seems like a pretty damn useful term to describe my relationship with a religion I never fully bought into and then actively rejected as a child yet still hold weird connections to and knowledge of just because Christianity is so baked into the culture I grew up in like it or not. If you want to be mad, be mad at the Christians who stole your freedom from religion from you, not usually religious minorities who discuss cultural Christianity and how it damages them too.
#winters ramblings#like breh i HATE how much christian bullshit ive had to detangle from my life. like the idea of sin and punishment for example#id say a LOOOOOT of discussion regardless of religion leans towards a Christian understanding of the pridon system#prison is basically a recreation of hell on earth where youre supposed to go to burn off your sins in your 10x10 cell#now i gotta say not all Christians buy inti the styke of punishment and sin i know normal well adjusted Christians#but for the most part a HUGE portion of shit comes with a helping of cultural Christianity. but prison is probably the best example#hell any discussion of punishment relies on a distinctly christian flavor of 'atone for your sin or be doomed forever"#repubs bitch about so called cancel culture but thats just how Christians act towards sin lmao they do it too#except they choose shit you didnt ACTIVITY make a choice about like being gay to condem you to hell.#cant be mad that twitter cancels people for small shit like a crap joke if you actively subscribe to the same belief system#and are only mad bc that logic is applied to YOU now. anyway i could do without this logic in activist spaces#or ANY spaces being doomed forever over sin is only one way to do Christianity. like damn can the ones who like#rehabilitation and justice and helping the poor at least be the ones in charge??#regardless ive never been a Christian and barely have a meaningful connection to the religion. whuch is why i find it rather salient#that i still have this deep connection and knowledge of something i ACTIVELY REJECTED at 13#do you know HOW MUCH i had to have been indoctrinated into this shit with as LITTLE of a connection to organized religion as i do??#the fact i have ANY connection at all is kind if fucked honestly it shows you really REALLY do not get to choose#your religious leanings unless youre actively ANOTHER RELIGION BESIDES CHRISTIAN otherwise tough tiddy#you get to be Christian By Default and i don't like it either. but when i see jewish people talking about it#i know EXACTLY what they mean because i dont like my connection to a religion i never believed in and rejected at 13 either#i don't like that my choice to reject Christianity was stolen from me by such a ubiquitously christian culture#im not mad at jews for pointing this out im mad at christians for stealing my freedom of choice
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Almasi for President
so in about 12 to 16 years, i am running for president. i do not believe the world will have ended then, though i do believe things will be different. hoping for better, not, not expecting worse. our system is broken. all of the systems are broken. the government is corrupt. the justice system is corrupt. those in charge are turning blind eyes, covering things up, and allowing the fall of our country. i will not be surprised if a civil war commences; although i'm also thinking they are going to really create and push for a purge. we are in real trouble then. that just goes back to what i said, are you standing for something or dying for nothing?
people were excited for biden to win. and i have to say, i was not one of them. biden seems like another puppet to me. obama was a puppet. he was his vp. crazy how biden is president and he has a black female vp now. that sounds like a win huh? wrong, she contributed to the failed prosecution of the officers who murdered Oscar Grant. that went over everyone's head during the election though. trump was just so bad had to get him out. biden is anti LGBTQ+. everyone wanted to put it on trump folks getting rowdy and such however, biden won and nothing changed.
trump's slogan was "make america great again." personally, i think he could have. trump's a businessman and to say the least, entertainment. they gave trump four years, why do you think they didn't renew his contract? because he was playing them. trump is a classist. he doesn't like poor people. personally, i think he just believes hardwork pays off, his did and so he just holds everyone to the standard he held himself. there are circumstances, however i think that's fair. he said all this racist shit everyone got mad. yet, he won by a landslide because the country said they would still rather this "bigoted, racist, sexist, classist asshole" than a woman. then the country complained the whole time. he exposed america and instead of society shining light and doing something they continued to do what we have been doing; pointing blame.
the system has failed us. the system failed us a long time ago. all trump did was present a call to action. the one thing i can give rednecks is they patriotic as fuck. they want the america they invision type shit. i feel like melanated people in general struggle with that because america never felt like home. america never wanted us here. but the fact of the matter is, this all we know. this is home now. there are 3 real options.
1. go back to where your bloodline stems.
2. sit and conform, hope they dont get you.
3. defend your rights, your home, and your people; come out on top or die trying.
you have to pick something though. we have to do something because they those set to protect us are out to get us.
we do not have a democratic government not even a representative democracy like we once thought. sorry if you were today years old when you found out. we operate out of a republic; a constitutional federal republic. what's the difference? in a democracy, all that voting that we do, matters. even if it was a representative democracy. we would have representatives to disclose our decisions. the electoral college makes final decisions on elections.
a constitutional federal republic means that the constitution which is the law of the land governs the land. if this is the law of the land, why do we have sub laws? the constitution needs to be amended. want to fix the race and inequality issues? let me tell you how, real easy fix. call a convention. take out any amendment that gives rights to people AND reword the beginning anyway folks see fit so that women and americans from all ethnic backgrounds get the same level of respect and rights. there will always be an unspoken division until things like that are rectified. before black people got rights we were not even counted as complete people, simply 3/5s of a person. life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. these are unalienable rights. my very existence guarantees me these rights.
the judicial system coupled with the criminal law system are hopeful, and still in need of reform. prisons are privately owned institutions, which are supposed to be forms of rehabilitation. instead, they are condemning people and treating them inhumanely; creating the same environment they were in on the outside, on in the inside conditioning them to be stuck in these ways as means of survival and then continue to place blame on them. officers need to take crimes more seriously. people are people, bias, prejudices, and profiling have no place in the workplace. officers are corrupt, arresting kids for selling, who just are trying to help their mother with the bills, then turning around and selling it back out on the streets. officers are wrongfully convictind and killing predominately (as far as the media is broadcasting) though not only melanated people. on top of that, they are walking free. lives are being lost and they arent even losing their jobs. tax dollars are going towards keeping them safe. however, if a civilian shoots a cop. up the river for them.
lawyers aren't fighting hard enough. especially defense attorneys. it is fairly simple to get a conviction with the right information, proving innocence is always a bit more complicated. the problem is that attorneys get too big eyed. they looking at how to get their clients off, accountability is another taboo in this society. there are a multitude of people who are innocent behind bars, as well as those who received heinous outrageous sentences. that is not right.
people factor more than necessary when trying to make a decision, yet they ignore the things that remind them a person is human. its this art contest over who can paint the best picture of the defendant. which story is easy for a jurors bias to sway? how people look matters. and it shouldn't. our government since the building of america, has created dividing markers.
just like with royal kingdoms, the wife couldn't have things of her own. her role was cleaning, cooking, taking care of the kids, and whatever else was asked of her. if there was a divorce, the woman got nothing. they had no rights. imagine being the first born as a female in a royal family and being told you can't have your kingdom, correction you can but you must marry to get it. then if you get married the new king running things not you. what is that? its called patriarchy. our government is run off a patriarchy as well.
so i never really believed there could be like a true separation of church and state because every law and decision made was based on people's morals and beliefs. there is supposed to be a separation of church and state yet, due to people's religious beliefs gay marriage had to get legalized, despite there being no law for heterosexual marriage. would that not make it illegal? since gay marriage had to be legalized though there was not a law for it either? then on top of that, how do you make it a law, and still for religious reasons, ministers and such can refuse? there are always stipulations and hinderances for the rights of those who are not white men.
ABORTION: i really do not know why we are still having this conversation. its literally conversations like this that have me looking at americans like--- seriously? once again there should be a separation of church and state. so religion cannot be a reason to outlaw it. how can you put out a law that dictates what someone can do with their body? all of life, i mean every part of life should be pro-choice. its just that simple. Pro-Choice. i am all for the right to decide for yourself. and men want to feel a way about women making that decision on their own. and while i do stand behind the fact that ultimately it is the womans decision, that does not mean she can't listen to an opinion. it is a part of the woman, literally grows inside of her an entire being. and fathers can just dip out and folks will just look at the mom and suddenly she should just become super woman. the pressure that comes with having a child is enough on its own. like thats a being that is dependent on you. some people are honest with themselves and know they arent ready or dont want it. all they need is support. the mental toll life takes on us is huge as well. still people do not consider that at all.
there is no point of incarcerating people, if they have still lost a chance at a decent life once they get out. jail is for rehabilitation. they go, do their time and then they are supposed to be allowed to try again. our government knows nothing of redemption, that's why all the top leaders go through so much to hide their dirt. they crucify civilians trying to make themselves seem superior, really they are just like you and i.
almasi for president. im going to save the world.
-Almasi
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Exchanges and Compromises - Chapter 1
a/n: So I found a fic that has more than a dozen chapters and is finished. Kind of. It’s going to be part one of an alternate universe. But as far as part one goes, it’s finished. So I’m posting it and fixing it as I go. Yay.
A fated night, 20 years ago - so everybody thought and believed. A fated night that brought Dr Thomas and Mrs Martha Wayne, along with their 10-year-old son, Bruce, to the Cinema at Park Row to watch an old movie rerun. A fated night in which Dr Wayne had forgotten his wallet at the concession stand, and the concession attendant had chased him as they got out of the theater to head back home. It was fate that had stopped Dr Wayne to praise the 17-year-old Lucius Fox who had taken the schedule from his coworker who had played truant for the night - and handed him a thank you speech and a fifty out of said wallet along with his business card and offer for Lucius to come over to Wayne Enterprises whenever he could. Dr Wayne commented that honest man was too rare in Gotham City for him to not grab hold of one it as soon as he saw Fox.
The delays thus made it possible for Alfred Pennyworth, their butler, to arrive just in time to pick them up, just as they were held under gunpoint by a junkie who was trying to rob them. Alfred, a war veteran, had not hesitated in drawing his own gun when he saw the procession, and shot the man who were going to rob Dr and Mrs Wayne.
A fateful night of young Bruce Wayne's first introduction to crime, and the realization that his city - Gotham City - was fully invested with petty crimes. And as his father had said some minutes earlier: an honest man is rare in Gotham.
Alfred's' gun did not kill the wannabe-robber. Yet it shocked Bruce enough to understand that his life has been one of privilege. They did not have to wait in the chilly night or at the precinct for the cops, instead the cops - a young Detective James Gordon - went to their manor for their statements. Joe Chill, the robber, was arrested by the paramedics and police summoned by Alfred. At the trial, he had cried and told the court he was sorry, and that he was rehabilitated while in prison. He was to serve three years for attempted robbery with deadly force.
Bruce Wayne understood well just how lucky he was. He went on to follow his mother's footstep into business school instead of his father, because the blood spurting out of Chill's wound as he had gotten shot had traumatized him. He would not tell his father, but the medical profession is not something he trusted. He was even younger when he had watched his mother lost the infant that was to be his little brother and got hospitalized for it; followed by the death of their older butler, Jarvis, due to heart attack not long after. When Jarvis' son arrived at the manor, he barely could contain his delight. To the then-four-year-old, Alfred looked young enough to play with - albeit having just as cool and stern mannerism as Jarvis. Apparently, he had worked in theaters. Bruce was excited then. And Alfred became his closest companion through the years.
Ten years after that fated night, Gotham City had continued to deteriorate. It has held the position of the worst city to live in in the US for ten years in a row, regardless of everything Dr Thomas Wayne has done to fix it. Bruce, now in business school, has offered ideas that were quickly implemented by his father; his mother's brother, uncle Philip; and everyone at Wayne Enterprises. Some of the ideas rooted and sprouted, only to be killed a little while later by Gotham's own citizens who had claimed that they do not trust people like the Waynes. One of the ideas was to send Lucius Fox to college, and then hire him by the time he finished his engineering studies. Fox was one of Bruce's ideas that hit the jackpot but nearly got drowned by Fox's own colleagues.
The rich people are all corrupt, they had said during a random polling done by an external agency. Regardless of how much money the Waynes owned, or the fact that if it hadn't been for the Waynes, at least 70 percent of Gothamites would not have had a job.
"They are rebelling through crime just for the sake of pettiness," Dr Wayne commented dryly, as news about a robbery that was done by the Red Hood Gang blared on TV. "They seriously thought that robbing banks could distribute wealth instead of working hard for it."
Bruce just sighed. He couldn't understand it, either, how people were robbing banks and thought they would make a change. "Obviously, their simple minds only think that when you rob a bank belonging to one of The Families, we would be poor. They obviously has no notions of insurances and the fact that they were only stealing from their own neighbors." he commented.
The Waynes had come from a very long line of riches, all the way back to the Old World. It had been the Waynes who initially came up with the plans to build Gotham. The other families; the Kanes, a.k.a. his mother's forefathers; the Cobblepotts; the Dumases, and Crownes - all had acquired their immense wealth only after Gotham had stood.
There are only three families remaining out of Gotham's original founding families, with the rest diluted or got themselves renamed with lack of successors. Like the Dumases - now Galavan; Crownes - now Elliotts. Other families would rise, such as the Drakes, previously unknown and inventors of new medicines and amateur archaeologist - also in-laws of the Galavan; the Belmont family, who made their money in banking; the Arkham family who founded the Asylum for the Psychologically Impaired just at the outskirts of the city and so on. They truly made Bruce believe that with hard work and perseverance, anyone could get rich in Gotham.
He wondered, often, what would it take to turn a common man to change - be it for the better or worse. The criminals who got caught would blame it on a 'really bad day', and ignored the fact that their crime would make another person get a bad day; and thus perpetuate the circle.
There were still good people in Gotham, Bruce knew. People like his father, who would keep trying to open new manufacturing facilities. He would often be hindered by the anti-monopoly law that barred him from owning every manufacturing facilities that supply to Wayne Enterprises' own manufacturing line. But he would try, anyway, by making alliances with a number of the other business owners; establishing schools so that kids could grow up to be business owners; establishing free training seminars to allow people to get certifications for their skills; and so on and so forth.
Still, Gotham, the city with the highest job-hazard related incidents, seemed to want to resist him. The factories owned by unscrupulous people would continue to neglect their employees' safety, and caused incidents, that in the long run, prevented said factory to get the safety certification needed to supply Wayne Enterprises, and therefore would end up with the factory going bankrupt.
Then there were people like Dr Leslie Thompkins, a physician who was a classmate of Dr Wayne's. She opened a free clinic at the worst part of Gotham, Crime Alley. Dr Wayne would provide the supplies free of charge for her. And then people would try to rob the clinic. Bruce couldn't understand that, nor could he understand Dr Thompkins' insistence to remain there and use no security measures.
He understood the needs, alright. Wayne Enterprises has built a number of hospitals for low-income people. They have hired numerous good physicians - only to have said physicians quit or killed when gangs after gangs tried to rob the hospital. The ones remaining in those hospitals are the ones with bare minimum training or couldn't care less. Not good enough. Never good enough. None of them were Leslie Thompkins, who had skills and heart to do good all the way, by any means possible.
None of them was James Gordon, either - the Detective that was sent to question the Waynes and Alfred following the robbery. Bruce came to knew Gordon's background when he again met the man after being held at gunpoint for a robbery of his car. The one thing Gordon said had struck a note in Bruce's heart; "Just because you're wealthy, Bruce, doesn't mean you deserve to be robbed. Justice is justice, wherever levels of society you're in."
Gordon, Bruce knew, had come from Chicago; where he was 'boxed' - being sent to a boxed corner office cut off from the rest of his squad - for being too honest and refusing to let go of an investigation that involved the city's bigwigs. Gordon has two children; one biological son called James Junior, the other a daughter he had adopted when his brother and wife passed away. Her name is Barbara, and her redhead matched Gordon's, making people believed she was Gordon's biological child instead of the blond James Junior.
Gordon and his family seemed happy being in Gotham, much to Bruce's confusion. He noted that while visitors often found happiness in Gotham, most of its born-and-bred residents seemed to feel otherwise. Again, Gordon's comment - as he and Bruce started to befriend each other - made sense, "Some people just don't have it in them to appreciate what they have and think that the grass is always greener everywhere else; except in their own ignored pastures."
Bruce had often quietly promised himself that he would keep trying to help Gotham, so the city can live beautifully; and the people residing within her will realize that their home is beautiful and thus needs to be loved. With that in mind, he turned his focus in his school. There has got to be some way to keep Gotham's people happy, safe, and maybe even grateful.
#Bruce Wayne#Thomas Wayne#Martha Wayne#James Gordon#alfred pennyworth#Barbara Gordon#Dick Grayson#Jason Todd#Tim Drake#Damian Wayne#Twist of Fate!AU#JayTim#Batman
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Efforts to Keep COVID-19 out of Prisons Fuel Outbreaks in County Jails
When Joshua Martz tested positive for COVID-19 this summer in a Montana jail, guards moved him and nine other inmates with the disease into a pod so cramped that some slept on mattresses on the floor.
Martz, 44, said he suffered through symptoms that included achy joints, a sore throat, fever and an unbearable headache. Jail officials largely avoided interacting with the COVID patients other than by handing out over-the-counter painkillers and cough syrup, he said. Inmates sanitized their hands with a spray bottle containing a blue liquid that Martz suspected was also used to mop the floors. A shivering inmate was denied a request for an extra blanket, so Martz gave him his own.
“None of us expected to be treated like we were in a hospital, like we’re a paying customer. That’s just not how it’s going to be,” said Martz, who has since been released on bail while his case is pending in court. “But we also thought we should have been treated with respect.”
The overcrowded Cascade County Detention Center in Great Falls, where Martz was held, is one of three Montana jails experiencing COVID outbreaks. In the Great Falls jail alone, 140 cases have been confirmed among inmates and guards since spring, with 60 active cases as of mid-September.
By contrast, the Montana state prison system has the second-lowest infection rate in the nation, according to the COVID Prison Project. No confirmed coronavirus cases have been reported at the men’s prison out of 595 inmates tested. The women’s prison had just one confirmed case out of 305 inmates tested, according to Montana Department of Corrections data.
One reason for the high COVID count in jails and the low count in prisons is that Montana for months halted “county intakes,” or the transfer of people from county jails to the state prison system after conviction. Sheriffs in charge of the county jails blame their outbreaks on overcrowding partly caused by that state policy.
Restricting transfers into state prisons is a practice that’s also been instituted elsewhere in the U.S. as a measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Colorado, California, Texas and New Jersey are among the states that suspended inmate intakes from county jails in the spring.
But it’s also shifted the problem. Space was already a rare commodity in these local jails, and some sheriffs see the halting of transfers as giving the prisons room to improve the health and safety of their inmates at the expense of those in jail, who often haven’t been convicted.
The Cascade County jail was built to hold a maximum of 372 inmates, but the population has regularly exceeded that since the pandemic began, including dozens of Montana Department of Corrections inmates awaiting transfer.
“I’m getting criticized from various judges and citizens saying, ‘Why aren’t you quarantining everybody appropriately and why aren’t you social-distancing them?’” Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter said. “The truth is, if I didn’t have 40 DOC inmates in my facility I could better do that.”
Unlike convicted offenders in state prisons, most jail inmates are only accused of a crime. They include a disproportionately high number of poor people who cannot afford to post bail to secure their release before trial or the resolution of their cases. If they do post bail or are released after spending time in a jail with a COVID outbreak, they risk bringing the disease home with them.
Andrew Harris, a professor of criminology and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said he finds it troubling that more attention is not paid to the conditions that lead to COVID outbreaks in jails.
“Jails are part of our communities,” Harris said. “We have people who work in these jails who go back to their families every night, we have people who go in and out of these jails on very short notice, and we have to think about jail populations as community members first and foremost.”
Some states have tried other ways to ensure county inmates don’t bring COVID-19 into prisons. In Colorado, for example, officials lifted their suspension on county intakes and are transferring inmates first to a single prison in Canon City, Department of Corrections spokesperson Annie Skinner said. There, inmates are tested and quarantined in single cells for 14 days before being relocated to other state facilities.
Outbreaks are also occurring in county jails in states that never stopped transferring inmates to state prison. Several jails in Missouri have experienced significant outbreaks, with Greene County reporting in mid-August that 83 inmates and 29 staffers had tested positive. Missouri Department of Corrections spokesperson Karen Pojmann said the state never opted to stop transfers from county jails, likely because of a robust screening and quarantine procedure implemented early in the pandemic.
At least 1,590 inmates and 440 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 in Missouri’s 22 prison facilities since March, according to state data. The COVID Prison Project ranks Missouri’s case rate 25th among the states — better than some states that halted inmate transfers, including Colorado, Texas and California.
The halting of transfers was a critical part of the response by officials in California, whose prisons have been among the hardest hit by COVID-19. An outbreak at San Quentin State Prison this summer helped spur Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to order the early release of 10,000 inmates from prisons statewide.
Stefano Bertozzi, dean emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health, visited San Quentin before the outbreak, and afterward helped pen an urgent memo outlining immediate actions needed to avert disaster. He recommended halting all intakes at the prison and slashing its population of 3,547 inmates in half. At that point, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was already more than two months into an intake freeze.
Overcrowding has long been an issue for criminal justice reform advocates. But for Bertozzi, the term “overcrowding” needs to be redefined in the context of COVID-19, with an emphasis on exposure risk. Three inmates sharing a cell designed for two is a bad way to live, he said, “especially for the guy who’s on the floor.” But if those cells are enclosed, they offer far better protection from COVID-19 than 20 inmates sharing a congregate dorm designed for 20.
“It’s how many people are breathing the same air,” Bertozzi said.
Some California county jails struggled. In July, inmates in Tulare County’s facility, where 22 cases had been reported, filed a class action suit against Sheriff Mike Boudreaux alleging he’d failed to provide face masks and other safeguards. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Drozd ruled in favor of the inmates in early September, directing Boudreaux to implement official policies requiring face coverings and social distancing.
California resumed county intakes on Aug. 24 following the development of guidelines designed to control transmission risk and prioritize counties with the greatest need for space. But a huge backlog remains: 6,552 state inmates were still being held in county jails as of mid-September, according to corrections officials.
In Montana, the number of inmates at county jails awaiting transfer to prisons and other state corrections facilities was 238 at the beginning of September, according to state data obtained through a public records request.
Montana and county officials butted heads over delays in inmate transfers before the coronavirus, but the pandemic has increased the stakes.
“Once we had the issue with the pandemic and we had to maintain space for quarantining and isolating inmates, then it became even more critical because the space wasn’t really available,” Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder said.
Montana Department of Corrections Director Reginald Michael acknowledged to state lawmakers in August that halting county intakes places a strain on counties but said it was “the right thing to do.”
“This is one of the reasons why I think our prisons are not inundated with the virus spread,” he told the Law and Justice Interim Committee.
Committee Chairman Rep. Barry Usher, a Republican, gave Michael his endorsement: “Sounds like you guys are doing a good job keeping it controlled and out of our prison systems, and everybody in Montana appreciates that.”
Since then, Montana officials have transferred up to 25 inmates a week, but they continue to block transfers from the three counties with outbreaks: Cascade, Yellowstone and Big Horn.
Martz dreaded the thought of COVID-19 following him out of jail. So much so that, after his release in early September, he walked to an RV park, where his wife met him with a tent.
Despite having tested negative for the virus prior to his release, he self-quarantined for a week before going home. The hardest part, he said, was not being able to immediately hug his 5-year-old stepdaughter. It “sucked,” but it’s what he felt he had to do.
“If somebody’s grandpa or grandmother had gotten it because I was careless and they ended up dying because of it, I’d feel horrible,” said Martz, who has returned home. “That’d be a horrible thing to do.”
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/efforts-to-keep-covid-19-out-of-prisons-fuel-outbreaks-in-county-jails/
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Why we need a more forgiving legal system
The Supreme Court on March 12, 2019. | Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Harvard law professor Martha Minow on the possibilities of restorative justice.
The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world.
Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators?
These ideas are central to a growing “restorative justice” movement in America, which seeks to bring together criminals, victims, and affected families as part of a process of dialogue and healing. Think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a model for this approach to justice.
A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities.
Minow’s book is very much what the title implies: a plea for a justice system that emphasizes forgiveness over resentment, resolution over punishment. It’s not a call for abolishing punishment altogether, but it is an attempt to challenge some of our most basic assumptions about law and order.
What we have now, Minow argues, is a system that forgives some and not others, that favors the powerful over the marginal. And the only way to change it, she concludes, is to rethink the incentive structure that guides our entire criminal justice process.
I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
The law, as you point out in the book, already forgives, but it’s very selective about when and who it forgives. Who gets forgiven now and why?
Martha Minow
One of the central reasons to write this book is that many of the inequalities reflected in the distribution of power in this country help explain who gets forgiven and who doesn’t, particularly when there’s discretion that’s given either to a judge or to some other law enforcement official, like a police officer or a prosecutor.
When there’s discretion, then the biases of the individual come into play. One of my favorite cartoons shows a judge with a big bushy mustache and a large nose looking down from the bench at someone with the exact same mustache and nose saying obviously not guilty.
There’s an understandable but dangerous tendency to identify with people like ourselves and to not identify with people who are different. Developing a jurisprudence of forgiveness is partially about developing criteria for judging when and how discretion is exercised.
Sean Illing
Can you give me an example of a type of person or institution that receives forgiveness now?
Martha Minow
Right now, for example, we have a bankruptcy code that allows a for-profit college or university to declare bankruptcy but does not allow the students who took out loans to go there to declare bankruptcy. That reflects a political judgement about who or what can be forgiven. And it’s an expression of who has the power to lobby in this country, of who has the power to influence legislation.
We should be critical of these sorts of imbalances and fight for a system that extends the same sense of charity to less-powerful individuals and institutions.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
Loss Prevention Supervisor Lonnie Hernandez looks over some of the 55 letters he has received from shoplifters that have been through the Longmont Community Justice Partnership in Longmont, Colorado on August 19, 2016.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
A letter Lonnie Hernandez received from a shoplifter is seen on his desk. Part of his organization’s restorative justice program includes offenders writing letters apologizing for their crimes.
Sean Illing
What are some crimes right now for which there is no mechanism of forgiveness but you think there should be?
Martha Minow
America is the most incarcerating country on the planet, and one consequence of that is the presence of fines and fees that are layered on top of people who are convicted of a crime. Many systems actually impose on the criminal defendant the cost of a probation officer or the cost of monitoring anklets with which they’re discharged, and the fines and fees accumulate.
These are often people without a lot of resources and there’s no forgiveness mechanism and therefore they can face even more incarceration for nonpayment. I think that’s an area where absolutely we should have mechanisms of forgiveness. Although there’s some efforts now to do just this, it’s not nearly enough.
Sean Illing
Who would you say gains the most from a more forgiving legal system?
Martha Minow
Not to be too simplistic, but I think we all do. In an interpersonal context, the one who forgives often gains as much if not more than the one who was forgiven. To let go of a grievance is to be freed in many ways.
More transparency and a more forgiving and pragmatic approach to crime also benefits the entire community because it constrains law enforcement and prevents the needless break-up of families, which is what incarceration does.
Sean Illing
There’s another prosecutor problem, though, which you discuss in the book and which New York Times legal reporter Emily Bazelon has written about. We have a significant number of overzealous prosecutors, people who are benefiting politically from from locking up as many people as possible. How do we address that?
Martha Minow
The emergence of progressive prosecutors is encouraging. It’s part of a broader movement to support and demand the election of people who are very clear about their intention to be less punitive and to pursue alternative models like restorative justice.
Another technique, of course, is to not have elected prosecutors at all, which is flawed for countless reasons. We can also develop ways to measure and reward other indicators of success besides how many people did you lock up. For example, we should pay more attention to how many people end up falling back into the criminal justice system after their initial contact with it.
If prosecutors are just tossing people in jail who continue to commit crimes after serving time, well, that’s obviously bad. But that’s just not part of the incentive structure right now.
Sean Illing
Do you worry that more forgiveness means prioritizing the interests of perpetrators over the needs of victims?
Martha Minow
I certainly do. And as much as I criticize mass incarceration, I do believe that we need vigorous law enforcement, and often the people most victimized by crime are the most disadvantaged. They’re poor people, people of color, people who are most likely to be targeted by violence. So while we need to talk about fairness, there are definitely dangers in taking the concerns of perpetrators too far. At the same time, we can’t let that concern get in the way of thinking more broadly about how to construct a more just, balanced, and forgiving system.
Sean Iling
Some people have raised concerns that there’s an imbalance in terms of our expectations about who should forgive and that simply calling for more forgiveness risks normalizing certain forms of oppression or violence. How do you respond to this?
Martha Minow
These are very important objections and I don’t think it’s accidental or unique to our society that people with relatively less power are either more likely to be expected to forgive than people with more power.
People of color and women in particular, at least in our society, have developed more muscles when it comes to forgiveness, even when they may be more often on the receiving end of harms. We see this now with the Me Too movement where very often someone who’s been identified as engaging in sexual assault or sexual harassment then expects their victims to forgive, and that’s often an expression simply of the power that they had in the first place.
I don’t think the problem here is forgiveness, though. Forgiveness is a resource every human being has and indeed every religion, every major moral philosophy, and every society has tried to cultivate. The real problem, as you suggested, is the unequal expectations around who should forgive and when.
Sean Illing
The idea of forgiveness seems at odds with our whole philosophy of justice in this country. Do we need a fundamental shift in how we think about justice and law?
Martha Minow
Every law student learns that there are multiple purposes of the criminal justice system. Deterrence of crime is one, incapacitation of people who are dangerous is another, but so is retribution and finally rehabilitation. Those are the four classic goals.
The United States doesn’t have a criminal justice system — we have many, many local fiefdoms of criminal justice systems and many of them have been moving away from rehabilitation for a long time and very much toward retribution and not even always thoughtfully using deterrence as a goal.
Since most of our system operates by plea bargain, much of it’s not even public. Prosecutors often work by stacking up as many charges as possible so that people will plead to something and then using that as leverage to press them into some admission of guilt and then some kind of punishment.
So how does that feed back into a deterrent system? It’s not clear. I think we’ve swung way out of balance from the goals that the system itself is supposed to have.
I think that we can learn some from other systems. I’m very encouraged when I hear that there are delegations from a city in the Midwest going to Norway or Finland to learn about how they engage in more restorative practices. There are increasing experiments in this country. The District of Columbia has decided to use restorative practices for its juvenile justice docket. I think there are a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, different political persuasions, who are saying, “There’s something very broken here and we can change.”
Sean Illing
Let’s say we did shift to a more forgiving legal system, are there any trade-offs that concern you? Is there something our current system does well that we might lose if we made this change?
Martha Minow
I think we have to step back and recognize that we have too many people incarcerated and too many people in debt and we need a reset. That’s what I’m calling for.
But are there risks? Of course. One danger is that introducing more forgiveness into the system could further jeopardize the principle of equality under the law if it’s not applied fairly. If we don’t eliminate the imbalances we were talking about earlier, then more forgiveness could easily deepen the inequalities that already exist.
So, above all, we have to ensure that the benefits of a more forgiving system extend to everyone and not simply to the most powerful forces in the country. If we can do that, the country as a whole will be better.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2XegO9Q
0 notes
Text
Why we need a more forgiving legal system
The Supreme Court on March 12, 2019. | Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Harvard law professor Martha Minow on the possibilities of restorative justice.
The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world.
Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators?
These ideas are central to a growing “restorative justice” movement in America, which seeks to bring together criminals, victims, and affected families as part of a process of dialogue and healing. Think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a model for this approach to justice.
A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities.
Minow’s book is very much what the title implies: a plea for a justice system that emphasizes forgiveness over resentment, resolution over punishment. It’s not a call for abolishing punishment altogether, but it is an attempt to challenge some of our most basic assumptions about law and order.
What we have now, Minow argues, is a system that forgives some and not others, that favors the powerful over the marginal. And the only way to change it, she concludes, is to rethink the incentive structure that guides our entire criminal justice process.
I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
The law, as you point out in the book, already forgives, but it’s very selective about when and who it forgives. Who gets forgiven now and why?
Martha Minow
One of the central reasons to write this book is that many of the inequalities reflected in the distribution of power in this country help explain who gets forgiven and who doesn’t, particularly when there’s discretion that’s given either to a judge or to some other law enforcement official, like a police officer or a prosecutor.
When there’s discretion, then the biases of the individual come into play. One of my favorite cartoons shows a judge with a big bushy mustache and a large nose looking down from the bench at someone with the exact same mustache and nose saying obviously not guilty.
There’s an understandable but dangerous tendency to identify with people like ourselves and to not identify with people who are different. Developing a jurisprudence of forgiveness is partially about developing criteria for judging when and how discretion is exercised.
Sean Illing
Can you give me an example of a type of person or institution that receives forgiveness now?
Martha Minow
Right now, for example, we have a bankruptcy code that allows a for-profit college or university to declare bankruptcy but does not allow the students who took out loans to go there to declare bankruptcy. That reflects a political judgement about who or what can be forgiven. And it’s an expression of who has the power to lobby in this country, of who has the power to influence legislation.
We should be critical of these sorts of imbalances and fight for a system that extends the same sense of charity to less-powerful individuals and institutions.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
Loss Prevention Supervisor Lonnie Hernandez looks over some of the 55 letters he has received from shoplifters that have been through the Longmont Community Justice Partnership in Longmont, Colorado on August 19, 2016.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
A letter Lonnie Hernandez received from a shoplifter is seen on his desk. Part of his organization’s restorative justice program includes offenders writing letters apologizing for their crimes.
Sean Illing
What are some crimes right now for which there is no mechanism of forgiveness but you think there should be?
Martha Minow
America is the most incarcerating country on the planet, and one consequence of that is the presence of fines and fees that are layered on top of people who are convicted of a crime. Many systems actually impose on the criminal defendant the cost of a probation officer or the cost of monitoring anklets with which they’re discharged, and the fines and fees accumulate.
These are often people without a lot of resources and there’s no forgiveness mechanism and therefore they can face even more incarceration for nonpayment. I think that’s an area where absolutely we should have mechanisms of forgiveness. Although there’s some efforts now to do just this, it’s not nearly enough.
Sean Illing
Who would you say gains the most from a more forgiving legal system?
Martha Minow
Not to be too simplistic, but I think we all do. In an interpersonal context, the one who forgives often gains as much if not more than the one who was forgiven. To let go of a grievance is to be freed in many ways.
More transparency and a more forgiving and pragmatic approach to crime also benefits the entire community because it constrains law enforcement and prevents the needless break-up of families, which is what incarceration does.
Sean Illing
There’s another prosecutor problem, though, which you discuss in the book and which New York Times legal reporter Emily Bazelon has written about. We have a significant number of overzealous prosecutors, people who are benefiting politically from from locking up as many people as possible. How do we address that?
Martha Minow
The emergence of progressive prosecutors is encouraging. It’s part of a broader movement to support and demand the election of people who are very clear about their intention to be less punitive and to pursue alternative models like restorative justice.
Another technique, of course, is to not have elected prosecutors at all, which is flawed for countless reasons. We can also develop ways to measure and reward other indicators of success besides how many people did you lock up. For example, we should pay more attention to how many people end up falling back into the criminal justice system after their initial contact with it.
If prosecutors are just tossing people in jail who continue to commit crimes after serving time, well, that’s obviously bad. But that’s just not part of the incentive structure right now.
Sean Illing
Do you worry that more forgiveness means prioritizing the interests of perpetrators over the needs of victims?
Martha Minow
I certainly do. And as much as I criticize mass incarceration, I do believe that we need vigorous law enforcement, and often the people most victimized by crime are the most disadvantaged. They’re poor people, people of color, people who are most likely to be targeted by violence. So while we need to talk about fairness, there are definitely dangers in taking the concerns of perpetrators too far. At the same time, we can’t let that concern get in the way of thinking more broadly about how to construct a more just, balanced, and forgiving system.
Sean Iling
Some people have raised concerns that there’s an imbalance in terms of our expectations about who should forgive and that simply calling for more forgiveness risks normalizing certain forms of oppression or violence. How do you respond to this?
Martha Minow
These are very important objections and I don’t think it’s accidental or unique to our society that people with relatively less power are either more likely to be expected to forgive than people with more power.
People of color and women in particular, at least in our society, have developed more muscles when it comes to forgiveness, even when they may be more often on the receiving end of harms. We see this now with the Me Too movement where very often someone who’s been identified as engaging in sexual assault or sexual harassment then expects their victims to forgive, and that’s often an expression simply of the power that they had in the first place.
I don’t think the problem here is forgiveness, though. Forgiveness is a resource every human being has and indeed every religion, every major moral philosophy, and every society has tried to cultivate. The real problem, as you suggested, is the unequal expectations around who should forgive and when.
Sean Illing
The idea of forgiveness seems at odds with our whole philosophy of justice in this country. Do we need a fundamental shift in how we think about justice and law?
Martha Minow
Every law student learns that there are multiple purposes of the criminal justice system. Deterrence of crime is one, incapacitation of people who are dangerous is another, but so is retribution and finally rehabilitation. Those are the four classic goals.
The United States doesn’t have a criminal justice system — we have many, many local fiefdoms of criminal justice systems and many of them have been moving away from rehabilitation for a long time and very much toward retribution and not even always thoughtfully using deterrence as a goal.
Since most of our system operates by plea bargain, much of it’s not even public. Prosecutors often work by stacking up as many charges as possible so that people will plead to something and then using that as leverage to press them into some admission of guilt and then some kind of punishment.
So how does that feed back into a deterrent system? It’s not clear. I think we’ve swung way out of balance from the goals that the system itself is supposed to have.
I think that we can learn some from other systems. I’m very encouraged when I hear that there are delegations from a city in the Midwest going to Norway or Finland to learn about how they engage in more restorative practices. There are increasing experiments in this country. The District of Columbia has decided to use restorative practices for its juvenile justice docket. I think there are a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, different political persuasions, who are saying, “There’s something very broken here and we can change.”
Sean Illing
Let’s say we did shift to a more forgiving legal system, are there any trade-offs that concern you? Is there something our current system does well that we might lose if we made this change?
Martha Minow
I think we have to step back and recognize that we have too many people incarcerated and too many people in debt and we need a reset. That’s what I’m calling for.
But are there risks? Of course. One danger is that introducing more forgiveness into the system could further jeopardize the principle of equality under the law if it’s not applied fairly. If we don’t eliminate the imbalances we were talking about earlier, then more forgiveness could easily deepen the inequalities that already exist.
So, above all, we have to ensure that the benefits of a more forgiving system extend to everyone and not simply to the most powerful forces in the country. If we can do that, the country as a whole will be better.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2XegO9Q
0 notes
Text
Why we need a more forgiving legal system
The Supreme Court on March 12, 2019. | Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Harvard law professor Martha Minow on the possibilities of restorative justice.
The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world.
Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators?
These ideas are central to a growing “restorative justice” movement in America, which seeks to bring together criminals, victims, and affected families as part of a process of dialogue and healing. Think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a model for this approach to justice.
A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities.
Minow’s book is very much what the title implies: a plea for a justice system that emphasizes forgiveness over resentment, resolution over punishment. It’s not a call for abolishing punishment altogether, but it is an attempt to challenge some of our most basic assumptions about law and order.
What we have now, Minow argues, is a system that forgives some and not others, that favors the powerful over the marginal. And the only way to change it, she concludes, is to rethink the incentive structure that guides our entire criminal justice process.
I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
The law, as you point out in the book, already forgives, but it’s very selective about when and who it forgives. Who gets forgiven now and why?
Martha Minow
One of the central reasons to write this book is that many of the inequalities reflected in the distribution of power in this country help explain who gets forgiven and who doesn’t, particularly when there’s discretion that’s given either to a judge or to some other law enforcement official, like a police officer or a prosecutor.
When there’s discretion, then the biases of the individual come into play. One of my favorite cartoons shows a judge with a big bushy mustache and a large nose looking down from the bench at someone with the exact same mustache and nose saying obviously not guilty.
There’s an understandable but dangerous tendency to identify with people like ourselves and to not identify with people who are different. Developing a jurisprudence of forgiveness is partially about developing criteria for judging when and how discretion is exercised.
Sean Illing
Can you give me an example of a type of person or institution that receives forgiveness now?
Martha Minow
Right now, for example, we have a bankruptcy code that allows a for-profit college or university to declare bankruptcy but does not allow the students who took out loans to go there to declare bankruptcy. That reflects a political judgement about who or what can be forgiven. And it’s an expression of who has the power to lobby in this country, of who has the power to influence legislation.
We should be critical of these sorts of imbalances and fight for a system that extends the same sense of charity to less-powerful individuals and institutions.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
Loss Prevention Supervisor Lonnie Hernandez looks over some of the 55 letters he has received from shoplifters that have been through the Longmont Community Justice Partnership in Longmont, Colorado on August 19, 2016.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
A letter Lonnie Hernandez received from a shoplifter is seen on his desk. Part of his organization’s restorative justice program includes offenders writing letters apologizing for their crimes.
Sean Illing
What are some crimes right now for which there is no mechanism of forgiveness but you think there should be?
Martha Minow
America is the most incarcerating country on the planet, and one consequence of that is the presence of fines and fees that are layered on top of people who are convicted of a crime. Many systems actually impose on the criminal defendant the cost of a probation officer or the cost of monitoring anklets with which they’re discharged, and the fines and fees accumulate.
These are often people without a lot of resources and there’s no forgiveness mechanism and therefore they can face even more incarceration for nonpayment. I think that’s an area where absolutely we should have mechanisms of forgiveness. Although there’s some efforts now to do just this, it’s not nearly enough.
Sean Illing
Who would you say gains the most from a more forgiving legal system?
Martha Minow
Not to be too simplistic, but I think we all do. In an interpersonal context, the one who forgives often gains as much if not more than the one who was forgiven. To let go of a grievance is to be freed in many ways.
More transparency and a more forgiving and pragmatic approach to crime also benefits the entire community because it constrains law enforcement and prevents the needless break-up of families, which is what incarceration does.
Sean Illing
There’s another prosecutor problem, though, which you discuss in the book and which New York Times legal reporter Emily Bazelon has written about. We have a significant number of overzealous prosecutors, people who are benefiting politically from from locking up as many people as possible. How do we address that?
Martha Minow
The emergence of progressive prosecutors is encouraging. It’s part of a broader movement to support and demand the election of people who are very clear about their intention to be less punitive and to pursue alternative models like restorative justice.
Another technique, of course, is to not have elected prosecutors at all, which is flawed for countless reasons. We can also develop ways to measure and reward other indicators of success besides how many people did you lock up. For example, we should pay more attention to how many people end up falling back into the criminal justice system after their initial contact with it.
If prosecutors are just tossing people in jail who continue to commit crimes after serving time, well, that’s obviously bad. But that’s just not part of the incentive structure right now.
Sean Illing
Do you worry that more forgiveness means prioritizing the interests of perpetrators over the needs of victims?
Martha Minow
I certainly do. And as much as I criticize mass incarceration, I do believe that we need vigorous law enforcement, and often the people most victimized by crime are the most disadvantaged. They’re poor people, people of color, people who are most likely to be targeted by violence. So while we need to talk about fairness, there are definitely dangers in taking the concerns of perpetrators too far. At the same time, we can’t let that concern get in the way of thinking more broadly about how to construct a more just, balanced, and forgiving system.
Sean Iling
Some people have raised concerns that there’s an imbalance in terms of our expectations about who should forgive and that simply calling for more forgiveness risks normalizing certain forms of oppression or violence. How do you respond to this?
Martha Minow
These are very important objections and I don’t think it’s accidental or unique to our society that people with relatively less power are either more likely to be expected to forgive than people with more power.
People of color and women in particular, at least in our society, have developed more muscles when it comes to forgiveness, even when they may be more often on the receiving end of harms. We see this now with the Me Too movement where very often someone who’s been identified as engaging in sexual assault or sexual harassment then expects their victims to forgive, and that’s often an expression simply of the power that they had in the first place.
I don’t think the problem here is forgiveness, though. Forgiveness is a resource every human being has and indeed every religion, every major moral philosophy, and every society has tried to cultivate. The real problem, as you suggested, is the unequal expectations around who should forgive and when.
Sean Illing
The idea of forgiveness seems at odds with our whole philosophy of justice in this country. Do we need a fundamental shift in how we think about justice and law?
Martha Minow
Every law student learns that there are multiple purposes of the criminal justice system. Deterrence of crime is one, incapacitation of people who are dangerous is another, but so is retribution and finally rehabilitation. Those are the four classic goals.
The United States doesn’t have a criminal justice system — we have many, many local fiefdoms of criminal justice systems and many of them have been moving away from rehabilitation for a long time and very much toward retribution and not even always thoughtfully using deterrence as a goal.
Since most of our system operates by plea bargain, much of it’s not even public. Prosecutors often work by stacking up as many charges as possible so that people will plead to something and then using that as leverage to press them into some admission of guilt and then some kind of punishment.
So how does that feed back into a deterrent system? It’s not clear. I think we’ve swung way out of balance from the goals that the system itself is supposed to have.
I think that we can learn some from other systems. I’m very encouraged when I hear that there are delegations from a city in the Midwest going to Norway or Finland to learn about how they engage in more restorative practices. There are increasing experiments in this country. The District of Columbia has decided to use restorative practices for its juvenile justice docket. I think there are a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, different political persuasions, who are saying, “There’s something very broken here and we can change.”
Sean Illing
Let’s say we did shift to a more forgiving legal system, are there any trade-offs that concern you? Is there something our current system does well that we might lose if we made this change?
Martha Minow
I think we have to step back and recognize that we have too many people incarcerated and too many people in debt and we need a reset. That’s what I’m calling for.
But are there risks? Of course. One danger is that introducing more forgiveness into the system could further jeopardize the principle of equality under the law if it’s not applied fairly. If we don’t eliminate the imbalances we were talking about earlier, then more forgiveness could easily deepen the inequalities that already exist.
So, above all, we have to ensure that the benefits of a more forgiving system extend to everyone and not simply to the most powerful forces in the country. If we can do that, the country as a whole will be better.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2XegO9Q
0 notes
Text
Why we need a more forgiving legal system
The Supreme Court on March 12, 2019. | Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Harvard law professor Martha Minow on the possibilities of restorative justice.
The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world.
Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators?
These ideas are central to a growing “restorative justice” movement in America, which seeks to bring together criminals, victims, and affected families as part of a process of dialogue and healing. Think of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a model for this approach to justice.
A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities.
Minow’s book is very much what the title implies: a plea for a justice system that emphasizes forgiveness over resentment, resolution over punishment. It’s not a call for abolishing punishment altogether, but it is an attempt to challenge some of our most basic assumptions about law and order.
What we have now, Minow argues, is a system that forgives some and not others, that favors the powerful over the marginal. And the only way to change it, she concludes, is to rethink the incentive structure that guides our entire criminal justice process.
I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
The law, as you point out in the book, already forgives, but it’s very selective about when and who it forgives. Who gets forgiven now and why?
Martha Minow
One of the central reasons to write this book is that many of the inequalities reflected in the distribution of power in this country help explain who gets forgiven and who doesn’t, particularly when there’s discretion that’s given either to a judge or to some other law enforcement official, like a police officer or a prosecutor.
When there’s discretion, then the biases of the individual come into play. One of my favorite cartoons shows a judge with a big bushy mustache and a large nose looking down from the bench at someone with the exact same mustache and nose saying obviously not guilty.
There’s an understandable but dangerous tendency to identify with people like ourselves and to not identify with people who are different. Developing a jurisprudence of forgiveness is partially about developing criteria for judging when and how discretion is exercised.
Sean Illing
Can you give me an example of a type of person or institution that receives forgiveness now?
Martha Minow
Right now, for example, we have a bankruptcy code that allows a for-profit college or university to declare bankruptcy but does not allow the students who took out loans to go there to declare bankruptcy. That reflects a political judgement about who or what can be forgiven. And it’s an expression of who has the power to lobby in this country, of who has the power to influence legislation.
We should be critical of these sorts of imbalances and fight for a system that extends the same sense of charity to less-powerful individuals and institutions.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
Loss Prevention Supervisor Lonnie Hernandez looks over some of the 55 letters he has received from shoplifters that have been through the Longmont Community Justice Partnership in Longmont, Colorado on August 19, 2016.
Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images
A letter Lonnie Hernandez received from a shoplifter is seen on his desk. Part of his organization’s restorative justice program includes offenders writing letters apologizing for their crimes.
Sean Illing
What are some crimes right now for which there is no mechanism of forgiveness but you think there should be?
Martha Minow
America is the most incarcerating country on the planet, and one consequence of that is the presence of fines and fees that are layered on top of people who are convicted of a crime. Many systems actually impose on the criminal defendant the cost of a probation officer or the cost of monitoring anklets with which they’re discharged, and the fines and fees accumulate.
These are often people without a lot of resources and there’s no forgiveness mechanism and therefore they can face even more incarceration for nonpayment. I think that’s an area where absolutely we should have mechanisms of forgiveness. Although there’s some efforts now to do just this, it’s not nearly enough.
Sean Illing
Who would you say gains the most from a more forgiving legal system?
Martha Minow
Not to be too simplistic, but I think we all do. In an interpersonal context, the one who forgives often gains as much if not more than the one who was forgiven. To let go of a grievance is to be freed in many ways.
More transparency and a more forgiving and pragmatic approach to crime also benefits the entire community because it constrains law enforcement and prevents the needless break-up of families, which is what incarceration does.
Sean Illing
There’s another prosecutor problem, though, which you discuss in the book and which New York Times legal reporter Emily Bazelon has written about. We have a significant number of overzealous prosecutors, people who are benefiting politically from from locking up as many people as possible. How do we address that?
Martha Minow
The emergence of progressive prosecutors is encouraging. It’s part of a broader movement to support and demand the election of people who are very clear about their intention to be less punitive and to pursue alternative models like restorative justice.
Another technique, of course, is to not have elected prosecutors at all, which is flawed for countless reasons. We can also develop ways to measure and reward other indicators of success besides how many people did you lock up. For example, we should pay more attention to how many people end up falling back into the criminal justice system after their initial contact with it.
If prosecutors are just tossing people in jail who continue to commit crimes after serving time, well, that’s obviously bad. But that’s just not part of the incentive structure right now.
Sean Illing
Do you worry that more forgiveness means prioritizing the interests of perpetrators over the needs of victims?
Martha Minow
I certainly do. And as much as I criticize mass incarceration, I do believe that we need vigorous law enforcement, and often the people most victimized by crime are the most disadvantaged. They’re poor people, people of color, people who are most likely to be targeted by violence. So while we need to talk about fairness, there are definitely dangers in taking the concerns of perpetrators too far. At the same time, we can’t let that concern get in the way of thinking more broadly about how to construct a more just, balanced, and forgiving system.
Sean Iling
Some people have raised concerns that there’s an imbalance in terms of our expectations about who should forgive and that simply calling for more forgiveness risks normalizing certain forms of oppression or violence. How do you respond to this?
Martha Minow
These are very important objections and I don’t think it’s accidental or unique to our society that people with relatively less power are either more likely to be expected to forgive than people with more power.
People of color and women in particular, at least in our society, have developed more muscles when it comes to forgiveness, even when they may be more often on the receiving end of harms. We see this now with the Me Too movement where very often someone who’s been identified as engaging in sexual assault or sexual harassment then expects their victims to forgive, and that’s often an expression simply of the power that they had in the first place.
I don’t think the problem here is forgiveness, though. Forgiveness is a resource every human being has and indeed every religion, every major moral philosophy, and every society has tried to cultivate. The real problem, as you suggested, is the unequal expectations around who should forgive and when.
Sean Illing
The idea of forgiveness seems at odds with our whole philosophy of justice in this country. Do we need a fundamental shift in how we think about justice and law?
Martha Minow
Every law student learns that there are multiple purposes of the criminal justice system. Deterrence of crime is one, incapacitation of people who are dangerous is another, but so is retribution and finally rehabilitation. Those are the four classic goals.
The United States doesn’t have a criminal justice system — we have many, many local fiefdoms of criminal justice systems and many of them have been moving away from rehabilitation for a long time and very much toward retribution and not even always thoughtfully using deterrence as a goal.
Since most of our system operates by plea bargain, much of it’s not even public. Prosecutors often work by stacking up as many charges as possible so that people will plead to something and then using that as leverage to press them into some admission of guilt and then some kind of punishment.
So how does that feed back into a deterrent system? It’s not clear. I think we’ve swung way out of balance from the goals that the system itself is supposed to have.
I think that we can learn some from other systems. I’m very encouraged when I hear that there are delegations from a city in the Midwest going to Norway or Finland to learn about how they engage in more restorative practices. There are increasing experiments in this country. The District of Columbia has decided to use restorative practices for its juvenile justice docket. I think there are a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, different political persuasions, who are saying, “There’s something very broken here and we can change.”
Sean Illing
Let’s say we did shift to a more forgiving legal system, are there any trade-offs that concern you? Is there something our current system does well that we might lose if we made this change?
Martha Minow
I think we have to step back and recognize that we have too many people incarcerated and too many people in debt and we need a reset. That’s what I’m calling for.
But are there risks? Of course. One danger is that introducing more forgiveness into the system could further jeopardize the principle of equality under the law if it’s not applied fairly. If we don’t eliminate the imbalances we were talking about earlier, then more forgiveness could easily deepen the inequalities that already exist.
So, above all, we have to ensure that the benefits of a more forgiving system extend to everyone and not simply to the most powerful forces in the country. If we can do that, the country as a whole will be better.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
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July 2019 Discussion - Prison Abolition & Crime
Monday July 29, 2019
7 PM
Dundonald Park, Ottawa (Somerset and Lyon)
Readings
—
Abolition:
“I think the criminal justice system places a lot of emphasis on the deficits of people, as do psychiatric and medical models – that people be reformed or rehabilitated rather than think about their access to social services, mental health supports, or community. The system criminalizes and "deters" migration rather than questioning why people are displaced in the first place and how Canada is complicit. Rather than constructing prisons and detention centres, we need to focus on building access to dignified means of life and all the things you need to survive as human beings."
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/abolition-architecture
Prison:
"To me, it’s inevitable that there will be more Indigenous women in prison, as we continue to deny them their rights and resources in their own communities. I think that there is a real need for feminists and Indigenous women to work together. The alliance-building has to start in earnest, especially in the face of this prison industrial complex that is unfolding. We are too few to count alone, and it’s time for us to start working together."
https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/criminal-injustice
Abolition:
"Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration
Prison:
"Modern prisons have become places of irredeemable harm and trauma. J. C. Oleson surveys these dehumanizing warehouse prisons, where guards have overseen systems of sexual slavery or orchestrated gladiator-style fights between inmates."
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-policing
Abolition:
"In the real world, there are people who have committed serious violent crimes, like serial domestic abusers. If those people were all suddenly freed one day, they would likely resume the pattern of abuse, because it’s very hard to transform a person overnight. If you are concerned not just with the injustice inflicted on defendants by a brutal prison system, but on victims by violent aggression, then prison abolition just amounts to blindly focusing on stopping one injustice while ignoring the potential consequences for increasing the amount of another injustice."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/08/can-prison-abolition-ever-be-pragmatic
Crime:
"An overemphasis on the structural causes of crime overshadows the fact that about half of the people in state prisons are serving time today for nonviolent offenses, many of them property or drug offenses that would not warrant a sentence in many other countries. Many others are serving savagely long sentences for violent offenses even though they no longer pose serious threats to public safety"
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/criminal-justice-reform-minimum-sentencing-mass-incarceration
Abolition:
"As Yale Law School professor James Forman, Jr. has cautioned, “The Jim Crow analogy encourages us to understand mass incarceration as another policy enacted by whites and helplessly suffered by blacks. But today, blacks are much more than subjects; they are actors in determining the policies that sustain mass incarceration in ways simply unimaginable to past generations.”"
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/beyond-criminal-justice-reform-black-silent-majority
Prison:
"[P]risons, despite the fact that they are public institutions, have this extraordinary ability to resist inquiry from the outside. They are able to commit abuses and atrocities because they have been able to remain sealed from public inquiry. And it’s an extraordinary thing that they are allowed to do that, considering that they are funded at taxpayer expense and that they are charged with keeping the public safe."
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/prison-strike-uprising-attica-today-heather-ann-thompson
Crime:
"It was Bishop L. Robinson, the city’s first black police commissioner, who began the push to criminalize squeegeeing. His intentions were as pure as a policeman’s can be. “I introduced it in the best interest and safety of the children,” he later told the Sun. “It was not intended to send children to jail.”"
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/plight-of-the-squeegee-kids-philo
Crime:
"The current political climate and electoral success of conservatives sometimes seems like proof that democracy is not such a good idea after all. Conservatives have hijacked some valid and popular ideas lately. While progressives defend the individual’s right to exist and express themselves in public, conservatives have come to power—at least in city politics—by defending the public as a whole. In brief, conservatives are defending what used to be a progressive cause: Public Space."
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/quality-of-whose-life
Abolition:
"We should continue to send violent offenders to prison. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that this will solve North End problems. Filling our prisons with more young Aboriginal men – over seventy percent of inmates in Manitoba are Aboriginal – will not stop the violence. These street gang members bring the wisdom of experience that has been missing in the public debate about inner city violence. They are part of the problem. They know that. But they can be part of the solution if we collectively have the courage to go down a different road, and create real opportunities for them."
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/if-you-want-to-change-violence-in-the-hood-you-have-to-change-the-hood
Abolition:
"What if, instead of talking endlessly about the supposed crimes of the poor, we instead tried highlighting the way the mass media regularly fails to condemn abuses of power and force by police and prison personnel and neglects institutionalized persons? What would happen if we chose to reject current theories of crime and criminality and instead focused on trying to prevent - and when unsuccessful punish - those who perpetrate the most harmful behaviours?"
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/if-you-have-come-here-to-help-me-...-why-women-are-in-canadian-prisons-kim-
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update - Strangers in the Night
Thanks for the support everyone!
knottedblonde (AKA @parenthesisfanfiction) is my blessed beta - read her story ! It’s good for your health.
AO3 | FFN
There's a knock at the front door by the time Artemis' eyes snap open. It's sunny and bright, even with the thick drapes hanging over her windows. The light is a welcome presence for her, but the repulsive scent of blood mixed with antiseptic makes her nose scrunch up in discomfort. Her studio reeks of hospital, only less sanitary.
Artemis quickly realises that there is no way she's going to let anyone into this warzone, much less see the wings hanging off her back, carpenters on not, but then Wally's already shouting, "I'll get it!", so she decides to scramble for the bathroom instead.
Easier said than done. She forgets that she can't move as swiftly as she used to. Artemis falls to the ground in a heap just as the door opens and reveals four masked figures standing in front of her in utter disbelief. She can't see them now, of course, hair having tumbled all over her line of sight on her way down, but she's seen enough to know exactly who and what is standing on the threshold of her home: the Justice League.
The freaking Justice League is filing into her house, one by one, thanking Wally for allowing them inside like they know him. She realises with a jolt that these are the connections that he has. Not mafia, not gangsters, nor are they hitmen. They're superheroes. Wally West is on a nickname-basis with Earth's most prominent superheroes.
The Flash, she's used to – Batman, no way.
All the alarm bells are going off in her head, urging her to duck and hide, or conceal the suitcase carrying Venom in the crack beneath the floorboards while Daddy goes to answer the door. Artemis blinks. She remembers that Sportsmaster is long gone, probably off committing some heinous crime on the other side of the globe. She's safe; the League isn't a trigger warning for her anymore. Breathe, Artemis. Breathe.
Pulling her tresses away from her eyes, Artemis spots Wally walking back and forth from her fridge, accommodating the heroes with cups of the cheap orange juice she'd recently purchased for half price. They don't seem to register the obviously poor quality of the juice, nor do their noses wrinkle at the pungent scent emanating from her carpet.
All four of them: Batman, Nightwing, Hawkwoman, and the Flash, are staring at her inquisitively. She feels naked under their gazes, like they're all trying to peel off the layers of her skin, like they're trying to uncover all of her deepest, darkest secrets. Sadly, Artemis has those in surplus, most of which are highly relevant to the League – not that they know that, she hopes.
The Flash coughs pointedly, and all of a sudden Wally's gently prying her off the ground, making sure to avoid exacerbating any wounds on her arms, then helps settle her back onto her bed, this time sitting upright and facing them all.
Interestingly, Wally has a knack for alleviating awkward situations with witty repertoire and light-hearted jabs (which, honestly, freaks her out, because Batman doesn't seem to be the type who enjoys joking around), because soon Nightwing's starting to join in with Wally's conversation with the Flash.
"So," he addresses her, in an oddly familiar voice, "A little bird went nuts when he called me about your situation last night, I hope you don't mind that I've called some back-up; this isn't something that a simple renovation will fix, unfortunately." He gestures towards her wings with a gloved hand.
She gets his point, accepts the glass of juice and painkiller tablets that Wally shoves under her nose, downs them, and coughs a little. "I'll manage."
Batman's slitted eyes angle towards her. She gets the feeling that he recognises her from the few run-ins they'd had while she trained with Sportsmaster, but thankfully he doesn't comment on it. Artemis prays he doesn't remember her, because she left Gotham City to start over, and there's no telling what will happen if he opens that can of worms.
"Artemis Crock," he says, with an air of finality.
"Yes."
Hawkwoman interjects herself into the conversation. "Your wings are impressive."
"Thanks." Artemis notes the credibility of that statement.
It's not the first time Artemis has heard of Hawkwoman, but it's the first time she's seeing the woman up close and in real time. She's deeply impressed. There's a severe mask on her face, hawk-like and shimmering gold wherever the sunlight hits it. Overall, Artemis gets the feeling that Hawkwoman isn't someone she wants to mess with, seeing how there are muscles bulging out from underneath her battle-gear, and the metallic wings protruding from her shoulder blades look so sharp they can (probably) cut into diamond. Distantly, she wonders why Batman's summoning Hawkwoman - of all people - to show up in Kansas when there's so many other exciting places she can be, like Michigan, or Prague.
"Uh-"
"Safe to say you won't be at the Museum for a while, then?" The Flash interrupts her thoughts, ignoring Hawkwoman's irritated elbow-jap at his side. "Sorry. You could always pass your wings off as an elaborate costume. Early Halloween? It's still a month away." Batman shoots him a look. "Shutting up now."
She can't help but grin at the familiarity of his countenance. Everything around her is shifting and collapsing, but at least she knows that Central City's favourite hero moves at a constant speed. Flirty and flighty he may be, but Artemis finds herself unexpectedly reassured by his presence.
Deciding to angle for diplomacy, Artemis clears her throat and ignores the ache in her back. "So," her voice sounds unexpectedly hoarse when all four superheroes and Wally refocus their attention to her, "I think it's best that we address the elephant in the room. What brings four high-profile members of the Justice League to cosy Kansas?" And how? Artemis hadn't known that so many big-gun heroes could be so receptive to a civilian scientist. Clearly, Wally has much more influence than she's aware.
Batman, forgoing all formalities, wastes no time being as transparent and simultaneously vague as possible. "The League is interested in the necklace that your team excavated in Greece months ago, Miss Crock. We have reason to believe that it possesses magical properties - dangerous properties, should it be placed in the wrong hands - and as it stands, we know almost nothing else about it, save for what's right in front of us." He lets the implication of his words sink in.
"We're here to offer you a deal, or a partnership." Batman's tone softens slightly, yet still retaining the hard edge that she's come to associate with Gotham's Dark Night. "You've spent years of your life writing a dissertation on the influence of power on Greco-Roman art and scouring the globe for the very same information that the League is now looking for. Should you choose to help us, we can offer you rehabilitation, and protection."
She fidgets on her bed slightly, somewhat disconcerted by the onslaught of information. Judging by the nonplussed expressions of everyone else in the room, Batman's extensive periods of silence, peppered with outbursts of cold, hard facts, seem to be a 'thing'. She isn't sure if she finds that funny or not.
"Look," Artemis says after a brief pause, "I'm going to pretend that I'm not creeped out by how much you know about me." She really isn't, though. Anyone who knows anything in Gotham City knows that the Batman and his gang of Bat-children are the world's pantheon of detectives. "And I can help you, free of any charge. There's no reason why you should go out of your way to protect me when I'm hardly a target."
Because by now, Artemis knows well enough to steer clear of any unnecessary affiliations with the Justice League, lest any questionable family members manage to track her down and make her life a living Hell. Still, she's relieved to know that Batman is here for the knowledge that she's been researching for close to a decade, and not to arrest and accost her for her underground connections.
And then she sees the slight wince from the more expressive faction of her audience - namely the Flash - and looks at them curiously. "Unless, there's something else you need to tell me."
It becomes startlingly clear that Batman is the go-to man for the deliverance of bad news, because he immediately resumes his speech. "The Justice League isn't the only party that wants you, Miss Crock." He presses a button on his suit's wrist and shows her a holographic screen of the three specific words she'd been hoping to avoid for longer. "I assume you're familiar with the League of Shadows?"
There's a trickle of dread flowing down from the nape of her neck to the bottom of her spine, a feeling Artemis hasn't had creep up on her for years. "Yes," she replies, feeling her throat clamp up, "I am."
He's the only one who looks at her knowingly, and she suspects that her family isn't as underground as she would prefer anymore. Everyone else in the room seems to look scandalised, or shocked, or both. "So," Batman says with an air of finality, though the slits in his mask seem to vaguely express something more sympathetic. "Do we have a deal?"
Wally watches Batman's black cloak disappear behind Artemis' door with a sombre feeling in the pit of his stomach. Which is saying something, given that his stomach is widely considered to be bottomless.
Artemis is still upright on her bed as he turns around and realises one thing: he has no idea how to explain this entire situation to her. His connection to the League, the fact that as a civillian (to her), he really shouldn't be as aware of their operations as he should've been. But then again, the fact that Artemis had barely blinked an eyelash when Batman brought up the League of Shadows, or that Batman hadn't even needed to elaborate on their operations to her, was the one thing that hadn't stopped bugging him since she made a deal to join the League.
Join, in the unofficial, ward-of-the-Justice-League, sense. Not as a superhero.
Unless she wanted to be one.
He stares at the gigantic brown spot covering the majority of Artemis' carpet, yet to be cleansed or removed. It'll be problematic if someone unwittingly visits Artemis' studio and sees the portal to Hell emblazoned onto the floors. The cops might get involved, and thereby the media - he really doesn't want Aunt Iris to find out about Artemis' wings via the Police, and before he has a chance to explain the situation to her. Wally's hand runs down the length of his face.
And what was the League of Shadows' deal with Artemis anyway?
They'd all been debriefed about their task before they left for Central City: the Museum was holding an exhibition unveiling an artefact that the Flash had recovered, and their job was to protect it from harm. The curator was the second priority when they started, but now Wally's beginning to realise that Batman and Nightwing are being annoyingly unclear about their motives again - obviously Artemis Crock is a lot more than she lets on, and so far only they're the ones who really seem to know her. Her and her affiliation with the Shadows, the world's deadliest group of assassins.
He watches the wings protruding from her back move to the rhythm of her chest, fluttering lightly when she fidgets. It's then that he also realises that Artemis is fixing him a stare more scrutinising than Batman's trademark.
She opens her mouth and slams it shut a second later, as though she's deciding against something. Wally dearly hopes, on Einstein's grave, that she'll let go of whatever thought is clearly making her more upset by the second. He has literally been awake for twenty-eight hours without a sizeable amount of food in the past six, and so genuinely cannot handle an argument at this point in time.
"You-" she pauses and takes a deep breath as he tenses, "Who are you?"
"I'm Wally," he replies slowly. "Wally West? Do you have a concussion?" Wally reaches for her head. Artemis slaps his hand away.
"I mean, you're one of the hundreds of scientists who work at STAR Labs. How do you even know the Justice League?"
"The same way you do," he shoots back, mentally slapping himself, "I'm a big fan."
Artemis breathes out through her nostrils. "Big fans normally aren't on a nickname-basis with Batman," her eyes narrow at him, "Are you a spy?"
"I'm not a spy."
"Then how about you tell me how you happen to be able to call Earth's Mightiest Heroes over to Kansas - overnight?" He knows what her predicament is, what it looks like. In all honesty he wouldn't trust someone from highschool (who isn't Dick Grayson) who invites some of the biggest superheroes in the world to respond a small distress signal, either. Artemis' expression becomes stonier the longer he stays silent. "You've got to be kidding me."
"Hey - you're not exactly Little Miss Transparent either!" His foot flies into his mouth before he can catch it, and Artemis is already starting to glare at him, so Wally decides to Hell with it and runs ahead. "You didn't even blink when the Shadows came up! How do you know about them?"
"What I know is none of your business."
His jaw clenches at the hypocrisy. "Well, you don't see me launching the Spanish Inquisition against you - why should I tell you about the League?"
"Because you're living in my apartment, genius," she's standing up on her bed and glowering down at him like she really, really wants to punch him. "Which, by the way, I never wanted!" He blinks exactly once from the gust of wind that rushes through the studio and feels his expression harden into a glare.
"Fine," his voice doesn't come out as shaky as he feels internally, which he's thankful for. "But I was never here for you - I'm here for Iris."
Despite the bluntless of his words, the name seems to trigger a calming response in Artemis. Her eyes begin to look considerably less crazed, she exhales deeply, and her wings start to fold in. She's silent for a good few minutes, during which time Wally's anger ebbs away in small waves - enough to dissipate the uncomfortable feeling scratching its way up his chest but not enough to stop his face from burning. "Fine."
"Get some sleep," he walks over to the window that isn't next to her bed and throws it open. Its frame slams against the wall noisily, which neither of them bother commenting on. "I'm grabbing more bandages."
And going out for air. Wally shrugs on a coat and closes the door behind him - carefully, this time - before activating the alarm system he knows Nightwing installed just before the League were officially introduced into Artemis' studio. He isn't angry at her, per se. Just incredibly frustrated. He doesn't recall her being as confrontational in high school, and quickly amends that thought when he distinctly remembers her never talking to him for a decade.
And in any case, he'll be seeing her more frequently than she'd like for a while now - as Kid Flash, and not Wally West. The image of her connecting the dots and realising that she's been living with Kid Flash does not bode well in his stomach, which is obnoxiously grumbling by now. Wally passes a hotdog vendor and retracts his footsteps.
At the very least, before he stresses out over Artemis for another few weeks, he'll eat his weight in sausage.
#knottedblonde#fanfiction#young justice#yjfanfic#spitfire#wally west#artemis crock#wally x artemis#chalant#justice league#batman#dark knight#the flash#hawkgirl#shayer thal#nightwing#dick grayson#kansas#museum au#curator au#wings au
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When we rebuild it
In 1972, I was eight years old and the elections were coming. I asked my father what the differences between Republicans and Democrats were. He said that Democrats’ first question was “What is the individual’s duty to society?” And that the Republicans’ was “How do we protect the individual from society?”
There was a lot more -- he explained the extremes, from progressive to liberal to socialist to communist, and from conservative to reactionary to John Birch Society to fascist. He also confirmed that he was a Republican. A Jewish Republican from Chicago, technically the null set, but that’s a story for a different day.
For today, I wanted to start with the terms he laid out above. Both of those driving questions are good ones. And there are times where I would come down on one side of an issue or the other, depending on my own worldview. Should the government tell me how to love? Probably not. Should it tell me that, say, a year of national service is a way for me to pay back for infrastructure? Probably so. These are my answers, not necessarily yours. Yours could well be the the opposite.
My point is that the basic nature of the opposing sides made sense, not just to me (more of a progressive sort) and to my father. He’s been frustrated by presidential elections since about 2004, as his party has drifted away from him.
I get it. Beginning in 1980, my party drifted away from me -- and I wasn’t even able to vote yet! In my mind, Ronald Reagan successfully demonized the word “liberal,” and ever since then my Democratic party has been afraid of its own policies. They have been formed not in light, but in the shadow of the other party. “Hey, at least we’re not those guys” isn’t really much of a platform.
I’ve been thinking about this since the election, and as I’m typing this, it looks like all hell is about to break loose with the Russia investigations. Maybe it won’t. Maybe they’re planning a war with Iran or North Korea to try to distract us. Maybe something else. But let’s say for now that things go A to B to C, the way they always do when Bunker Time starts, and there’s about to be some serious, fast, shocking, destabilizing changes. I’d like us to prepare for them.
I have a message for everyone who is heart sick, everyone who has woken up every morning will a sense of ill-ease, as if we have just remembered there is a candle burning next to a stack of newspapers. Everyone who looks at the weather and wonders if the weather will ever be normal again. Everyone who is being priced out of housing and who is feeling like there is a rug about to be ripped out from under them, be it healthcare, pensions, job security, education. Everyone who feels that the parties in charge are no longer accountable to citizens. My message is that we’re all in this together. And that has to be the message that the party getting us back into the light will trumpet every place it can.
I have a recurrent fantasy about facing the few folks I know who are Trump voters. It has nothing to do with getting anyone to change their minds. It goes like this: I’m on a stage in a debate, and I am allowed to ask the first question. My question would be “Can you articulate my position?”
(In my fantasy, that always throws them.)
See, I ask that because each side (and we are down to sides now, tribal and unthinking, rather than people who bond together differently on different issues) sees the other as kinda dumb. And they’re right. My side is kind of dumb about stuff. Obama and drones, Obama and surveillance, Obama and the death of privacy, Obama and the bankers -- all of those things are horrible and I ignored them because, hey, Obama was an adult who backed up my point of view. I absolutely, positively realize I made some mistakes there.
Likewise I made a mistake in dismissing Reagan. Yes, he lied repeatedly, covering up crimes with folksy witticisms that drove me insane. But they weren’t just distractions. They gave people energy to go out and be Americans and work hard and have something to believe in. It drives me crazy that his bellicose Russian strategy paid off in some ways. Yes, I realize it’s more complicated than that, but I do see merit in the position: whatever else his flaws were, there’s a good argument that Reagan helped defeat our ideological opponent, and that’s got to at least be taken in and considered.
I would be curious if Trump supporters could say of me why I voted the way I did, at all times assuming that I’m not a complete idiot, but instead human and bound by my experience and perceptions. I would like to do the same for them. But there’s a lot of noise. I’m not sure why they voted for him beyond what the media reports, and the answers are so jumbled: economics, racism, wanting an authoritarian dad, not understanding cause and effect, a weak Democratic candidate, misogyny, delight in the LOLZ of it all -- I’m not sure i know anyone who votes like that.
I have a feeling, not supported by any evidence, that there’s an un-examined reason for all the rising authoritarianism in the world. The questions my father said the parties asked back in 1972 only have equal interest for voters in a world where the future looks limitless. If there is an infinite amount of resources, then figuring out our responsibilities to each other follows.
But I think that’s no longer the case. I’ve said it before, but the world no longer sees the future as a renewable resource. We see limits where we didn’t before. It’s climate change. The earth is starting to treat us like an opportunistic infection and it’s starting to burn us off of it. That’s terrifying. We all know it’s coming, even the people who deny it. They deny it because it’s terrifying and because taking responsibility for our actions is not something Americans of any party have ever been good at.
They also deny it because the corporations that now control most discourse are looking for short term gains. Decreasing resources mean that the people who own them are getting richer. They will always put the thumb on the scale to make sure their agenda gets heard. Their agenda is “anything that regulates us, or promises to allow more people access to wealth is bad.” But they don’t phrase it like that. They instead make promises that are insupportable (”More jobs!”), but only if you know how to analyze them.
I am by the way a fan of capitalism. But I’m a fan of them they way I am of teenagers. See: the stock market has the emotional maturity of a teenage girl. OMG OMG OMG OMG, like that. And corporations have the ethics of 14 year old boys. I like 14 year old boys but I don’t think they should be allowed to drive, as badly as they want to. So: yes to your energetic natures, corporation and teenagers, but like a good parent -- and citizens of democracy are the parents of capitalism -- I need to reign that energy in to make sure it doesn’t drive the car into a ditch.
When we rise again, it is going to be chaotic. There will be competing voices. Some will be Democratic party fossils who think that trying to capture 50.1% of the vote is good enough. No. It’s got to be a new set of questions. It’s something like “What is the individual’s duty to society?” again, but taking in the current state of affairs. People who are smart at platforms should understand that it’s crucial to be positive and specific.
Start like this: it’s tough out there, so the way we’ll handle this is by banding together and figuring out 10 million new jobs building the boats that go into the ocean and clean up the plastic, which will we figure out, using science, how to use to build housing; we’ll rehabilitate the planet and we’ll do it using the world’s greatest workforce. Let’s do it as a joint force between business and government and figure out how the maximum number of people can benefit.
There’s more, but that’s the place I’d start.
This isn’t going to convince a lot of Trump voters. I don’t worry about it too much. One thing I’ve read repeatedly is that they think progressives look down on them, and guess what? That’s right. I’ve seen a lot of FB threads where people assume the only way someone voted for Trump was to momentarily dislodge themselves from their Lazyboys, then bring Pop-tart-sticky fingers to the ballot box, where they voted against their own interests and then farted and giggled about it.
That’s not helpful.
I have a different narrative about that.
My day job is that I write historical fiction, much of it about con men, much of it about the pursuit of power. Trump is an amazing character, purely American, exactly our Golem, our Anti-Golem, a creature into whom every poor American aspect, everything we’ve tried to sweep under the rug, every little awful thing we have done as Americans and yet still tried to argue that America is the greatest country on earth, all of that was poured into a mold and made into a President. Let’s ignore class and race and hereditary wealth and how the law buys different justice for the rich and Gerrymandering and the rights of people of color, and the problems of reality TV blending into reality, and the death of our educational system, and let’s no longer teach kids how to think, because thinking is hard, but revelation is extremely fulfilling, and when we do all of that, we have marked a chalk outline, and then dropped Trump right into it. It’s kind of amazing and it’s the kind of thing that makes me think he really is our own special kind of doom.
But he’s not. He’s a con man and a serial domestic abuser and a sexual assailant and a bully. What all of these characters have in common is that they are weak. Trump is a small, weak coward who will fold when a rolled up newspaper gets near his nose. That’s not so much the point as this: the victims of con men, abusers and bullies internalize shame to an extent that evades logic and reason. When you realize you’ve been betrayed it’s awfully hard to admit it, and you want to defend your bully even more. So: I’m not on board with shaming anyone for having voted for him, nor still defending him. That’s going to last for a while, and I’d just let that happen and have some sympathy for it.
Instead, this: we’ll just be over here, listening. We are all in this together. And to be honest, there’s something that everyone who is liberal, conservative, or at some different part of the politcal spectrum can agree upon is that we’re all kind of a bunch of jerks. Yep, we’re really assholes a lot of the them. And that makes sticking it out hard. But what choices do we have? I would rather team up with other people in my neighborhood and work on something to turn back that feeling of dread that’s been in my soul than use the fear of the future to barricade my precious, dwindling resources away from them.
Step one: have a pathway for all of those people who are about to realize they’re fucked. Step two: see if you can articulate their points of view. My campaign slogan: “Sure we’re jerks, but we’re all jerks together.”
This post will update as coffee and time allow.
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"How Jeff Sessions Is Undermining Trump’s Prison Reform Agenda"
The title of this post is the headline of this new lengthy Marshall Project piece. I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts from just the first part of the article:
In federal penitentiaries across the nation, prisoners eagerly awaiting a transfer to halfway houses say they are being told that they will have to wait weeks or months longer than they had anticipated because there is a shortage of beds at the transitional group homes. But that’s not true.
According to inmates, halfway house staff and industry officials, scores of beds lie empty, with some estimates of at least 1,000 vacant spaces. They remain unused due to a series of decisions that have sharply reduced the number of prisoners sent to halfway houses. And home confinement, a federal arrangement similar to house arrest that allows prisoners to complete their sentences with minimal supervision, is being even more drastically curtailed.
The Bureau of Prisons says it is curbing overspending of past years and streamlining operations, but that doesn’t make sense. Putting inmates in halfway houses or on home confinement is much cheaper than imprisonment. The federal government spent almost $36,300 a year to imprison an inmate, $4,000 more compared with the cost to place a person in a halfway house in 2017, according to the Federal Register. It costs $4,392 a year to monitor someone on home confinement, according to a 2016 report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Abandoning transitional supervision aligns with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ disputed opinion that reduced prison populations during the Obama administration are to blame for a small uptick in violent crime. As a senator from Alabama, Sessions led the charge two years ago against a bill to ease sentences, and as attorney general he has instructed prosecutors to be more aggressive in charging defendants. But his draconian ideas are undermining his own boss’ stated preference for early release and rehabilitation programs....
And now there is evidence the Bureau of Prisons, under Sessions’ direction, is actively discouraging the use of transitional supervision even under existing rules. The Bureau of Prisons declined interviews and would not answer specific questions, but said in a statement that the “fiscal environment” prompted a thorough review of programs, which led to ways to “most effectively use our resources.” The agency said placements are based on each prisoner’s needs, the prison system’s ability to meet them, public safety “and the need for the BOP to manage the inmate population in a responsible manner.”...
Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who leads bipartisan efforts to reshape sentencing laws and prisoner rehabilitation, said the Justice Department had not explained to Congress the cutback in inmate transfers to transitional housing. “Attorney General Sessions has reversed key prison reforms like reducing the use of restricted housing and private prisons and improving education opportunities and reentry services,” Durbin said in a statement. “It makes no sense to eliminate reforms that are proven to reduce recidivism and make our communities safer.”
Since the 1960s, halfway houses have provided federal prisoners a running start before release to find work, which has been shown to help people stay crime-free longer. A Pennsylvania state study found connections between higher rearrest rates and stints in halfway houses, while federal violations, violence and overdoses have contributed to poor public perception of the facilities. But prisoners and their advocates say moving into a transitional residence gives inmates an incentive to avoid trouble in prison and join rehabilitative programs.
Under the Obama administration, the number of federal prisoners in halfway houses and other transitional programs boomed. The federal government required the privately-run residences to provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, and the Department of Justice also increased access to ankle monitors so more prisoners could finish sentences in their own homes. At the peak in 2015, more than 10,600 prisoners resided in federal halfway houses. The number of inmates in home confinement — 4,600 — was up more than a third from the year before. In all, one in 14 of the people under Bureau of Prisons supervision was living at home or in a halfway house. Since then, the population in halfway houses has dropped by 28 percent to 7,670. Home confinement is in freefall, down 61 percent to a population of 1,822. The majority of that cut has come in just the past year. Now only one in 20 people under federal supervision is in transitional housing....
Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, who chairs the Committee on Criminal Law of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which helps write policies and guidelines for federal courts, said “we are also in the dark about those numbers.” He said the committee is working to establish better communication with the Bureau of Prisons. Federal judges, who can sentence defendants to halfway houses, need to know how much space is available. Rough estimates based on the current population in halfway houses, internal memos, statements from prison officials and prison records put the number of vacant beds in the federal system anywhere from 1,000 to several times that number. Swaths of beds lie empty even after the prison system ended contracts with 16 of its nearly 230 halfway houses, facilities described as “underutilized or serving a small population.” Martinez, whose committee has pushed for placing more prisoners on home confinement, said that advances in tracking technology and risk assessments should alleviate public safety concerns. “It’s a stupid waste of taxpayer money to put people in a confinement level they don’t need to be in,” the judge said.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2018/10/how-jeff-sessions-is-undermining-trumps-prison-reform-agenda.html
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Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better
Jonathan Kay, The Atlantic, July 17, 2017
When I was a young kid growing up in Montreal, our annual family trips to my grandparents’ Florida condo in the 1970s and ‘80s offered glimpses of a better life. Not just Bubbie and Zadie’s miniature, sun-bronzed world of Del Boca Vista, but the whole sprawling infrastructural colossus of Cold War America itself, with its famed interstate highway system and suburban sprawl. Many Canadians then saw themselves as America’s poor cousins, and our inferiority complex asserted itself the moment we got off the plane.
Decades later, the United States presents visitors from the north with a different impression. There hasn’t been a new major airport constructed in the United States since 1995. And the existing stock of terminals is badly in need of upgrades. Much of the surrounding road and rail infrastructure is in even worse shape (the trip from LaGuardia Airport to midtown Manhattan being particularly appalling). Washington, D.C.’s semi-functional subway system feels like a World’s Fair exhibit that someone forgot to close down. Detroit’s 90-year-old Ambassador Bridge--which carries close to $200 billion worth of goods across the Canada-U.S. border annually--has been operating beyond its engineering capacity for years. In 2015, the Canadian government announced it would be paying virtually the entire bill for a new bridge (including, amazingly, the U.S. customs plaza on the Detroit side), after Michigan’s government pled poverty. “We are unable to build bridges, we’re unable to build airports, our inner city school kids are not graduating,” is how JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon summarized the state of things during an earnings conference call last week. “It’s almost embarrassing being an American citizen.”
Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been no shortage of theories as to why America’s social contract no longer seems to work--why the United States feels so divided and dysfunctional. Some have focused on how hyper-partisanship has dismantled traditional checks and balances on public decision-making, how Barack Obama’s rise to power exacerbated the racist tendencies of embittered reactionaries, and how former churchgoers have embraced the secular politics of race and nationalism.
All of this rings true. But during my travels up and down the American East Coast in recent years, I’ve come to focus on a more mundane explanation: The United States is falling apart because--unlike Canada and other wealthy countries--the American public sector simply doesn’t have the funds required to keep the nation stitched together. A country where impoverished citizens rely on crowdfunding to finance medical operations isn’t a country that can protect the health of its citizens. A country that can’t ensure the daily operation of Penn Station isn’t a country that can prevent transportation gridlock. A country that contracts out the operations of prisons to the lowest private bidder isn’t a country that can rehabilitate its criminals.
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, ranks its members by overall tax burden--that is, total tax revenues at every level of government, added together and then expressed as a percentage of GDP--and in latest year for which data is available, 2014, the United States came in fourth to last. Its tax burden was 25.9 percent--substantially less than the OECD average, 34.2 percent. If the United States followed that mean OECD rate, there would be about an extra $1.5 trillion annually for governments to spend on better schools, safer roads, better-trained police, and more accessible health care.
It’s really quite simple: When Canadian governments need more money, they raise taxes. Canadians are not thrilled when this happens. But as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, taxes are the price paid “for civilized society.” And one of the reasons Canada strikes many visitors as civilized is that the rules of arithmetic generally are understood and respected on both sides of the political spectrum. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hiked the marginal income-tax rate up over 50 percent on rich taxpayers, right-wing commentators expressed disapproval--but the issue was relegated to the status of political subplot.
Among the American right, by contrast, the conversation about taxes often seems infused with magical thinking. Specifically, it is imagined that even severe and abruptly implemented tax cuts will serve to actually increase government revenue, thanks to the turbo-charging effect on economy growth. As T. R. Reid of The Washington Post writes in his recent book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, there is scant evidence that supports this idea--and much that opposes it. Denmark, with a tax burden of 49.6 percent, stands atop the OECD index. It also happens to be a wonderful place to live, with a high standard of living funded by a diversified, high-tech, export-driven economy.
By contrast, when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback abruptly slashed the state’s top income tax rate by 26 percent in 2012, state revenues went into a freefall. Yet the notions that government is always a plague upon the economy and that lower tax rates will lead directly to growth and prosperity--which have together accreted into a core plank of U.S. conservative ideology since the Reagan years--still remain popular. And Donald Trump seems intent on steering the country onto the same downward trajectory as Kansas: His “Taxpayer First” budget plan, released in May, proposed enormous tax cuts that, his administration claimed, would pay for themselves through the economic boom they’d bring about. (In an analysis released last week, the Congressional Budget Office took a much dimmer view.)
There are a few scattered signs that GOP state legislators see the limits of this strategy: As The New York Times reported in early July, conservative lawmakers in several red states have grudgingly acknowledged that they need to boost tax rates to keep public services viable. Indeed, even Brownback’s own fellow Kansas Republicans successfully revolted against his cuts. But fiscal moderates like these often have to do battle with their own governors in the process.
Has Canada figured this all out? Of course not. Some of its communities, especially remote indigenous reserves, are afflicted with poverty and squalor that stain the national conscience. But when I recently interviewed Canadian business leaders about the challenges they perceive, the word taxes didn’t get mentioned much. Instead, I heard a lot about the need for high-skilled workers, the lack of affordable real estate, dangerously high household-debt levels, and the importance of mass-transport infrastructure.
In these discussions, Canada’s universal health-care system was often described as a plus. Because Canadian entrepreneurs can quit their day jobs without their spouse losing access to dialysis, or their children losing access to pediatricians, such a system allows business-builders more professional freedom. (Under this system, Canadians tend to live longer than Americans, though they also spend more time, on average, waiting for treatment.)
My wife and I signed our 2016 tax returns about a month ago. In total, we gave up about 42 percent of our income to the federal government and to the province of Ontario. Add in property taxes, gas taxes, and sales taxes, and the figure goes up to about 46 percent. By my rough calculation, a similarly situated couple living in an equivalent part of the United States--I picked Chicago, which sometimes is described as a sort of sister city to Toronto, where I now live--that number would be about 10 points lower, at 36 percent.
What does that 10 percent premium buy for my family? Aside from universal health care, there’s world-class public schools, a social safety net that keeps income inequality at rates well below America’s, and an ambitious infrastructure program that will help Canada keep pace with its swelling ranks of educated, well-integrated immigrants. Oh, and I also get that new bridge. Naturally, it will have a bike lane, and be named after the hockey legend Gordie Howe.
Canadians tend not to talk about making their country great again. Canada never was particularly great--at least not in the sense that Trump uses the word. Unlike Americans, Canadians haven’t been conditioned to see history in epic, revolutionary terms. For them, it’s more transactional: You pay your taxes, you get your government. That might not be chanted at any political rallies or printed on any baseball hats. But it works for Canada. And it’d work for America too.
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New Post has been published on World Best Lawyers
New Post has been published on http://www.worldbestlawyers.com/a-surprising-comparison-between-prison-and-slavery/
A Surprising Comparison Between Prison and Slavery
The fairly new term, “mass incarceration,” means that the U.S. has 2.3 million prisoners, more than any country in the world. A greater percentage of the U.S. population is in prison than in any other nation. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. The entire U.S. correctional population, including those on probation, on parole and awaiting trial, is 7.3 million Americans.
These eye-popping numbers came about for many reasons: mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes legislation, illegal drugs, gangs, immorality in all its modern forms, the war on drugs, the decline of marriage and families, high rates of recidivism, incarceration of the mentally ill, the decline of capital punishment, problems with the criminal justice system and all the forces pushing tough crime policies. Difficult economic times focus attention on the increasing costs of keeping all these people – 93% of them men – behind bars. Each prisoner costs about $25,000 per year, and the average prisoner does little to offset the cost of confinement. The social costs may be even higher. Breadwinners are lost, families destroyed, more kids grow up without fathers or mothers, welfare costs increase, the entire sex ratio is thrown out of balance and prisoners face grim prospects when released.
The hyper-incarceration statistics for African-American males are much worse. We incarcerate one in nine African-Americans between the ages of 20 and 34. In 2003, it was calculated that “At current levels of incarceration newborn black males in this country have a greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while Hispanic males have a 1 in 6 chance, and white males have a 1 in 23 chance of serving time.” By 2007, just four years later, the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that African-American males have a 32% chance of going to prison or jail – becoming slaves – in their lifetimes. Young black male high school dropouts are almost 50 times more likely to wind up behind bars than the average American and 60% of that demographic cohort eventually goes to prison.
African-American males have always been incarcerated in significantly higher percentages than their portion of the general population, except in the Old South, where slaves were virtually never incarcerated. The state slavery in our modern penitentiary system, which now cages over one million African-Americans, and more than a million whites and Latinos, did not exist in the antebellum South. A prosecutor in the Old South, whose district covered at least half a dozen counties, in eight years of public service, only indicted 12 African-Americans out of 2,000 indictments. Disparate treatment of enslaved African-Americans in the legal system existed in the Old South. Back then, blacks received much less punishment from the formal legal system than did whites, the opposite of the way it is now. Slaves were too valuable as workers to incarcerate. The North incarcerated 30 times more African-Americans on a percentage basis than did the South in 1850. In 1850, almost all of the incarcerated African-Americans, North or South, were classified as “free colored.” Antebellum prisons in Mississippi and Georgia recorded zero African-American inmates at different times. By 1890, there were still only 8,417 prison inmates of all races in the entire South, and the federal prison system did not yet exist.
The most severe injustices of slavery were limitations on education and opportunity for advancement. The principal injustices of antebellum slavery can be avoided as we adopt some old-fashioned punishments and re-establish the importance of hard work under the constitutional guarantees all now invoke. Continuous employment is an unappreciated feature of slavery, and it was generally good for the hard worker. Many ex-slaves looked down on the generations raised in freedom because the younger generations never learned to work as hard as their slave ancestors. Many slaves had good personal relationships with their owners. The hard truth is that it’s better to be exploited and appreciated than ignored, disparaged and excluded.
The number of African-Americans incarcerated right now is numerically equal to one-half of the entire antebellum male slave population in 1860. African-American males in 2008, with infinitely greater educational opportunities, were 337 times more likely to be in prison than African-Americans in the antebellum South. African-Americans in the modern U.S. correctional population, including those on probation and parole, exceed the total number of American slaves in 1850! The factors of low employment, poor discipline and the destruction of the modern family best explain these terrible statistics. As a percentage of population, the South still incarcerates far fewer African-Americans than the North compared to the number of whites incarcerated in those states. Those who contend racial disparities in incarceration are a legacy of slavery have some explaining to do. Comparing rates of incarceration for whites to rates of incarceration for blacks yields a surprise: the greatest incarceration disparities today in favor of whites and against blacks are in the North, in the very same states that took the strongest stances against slavery. Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin had the greatest racial disparities as of 2005, all over 10-to-1, while the Deep South states of Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas all had racial disparities of less than 5-to-1. Almost without exception, the states of the old Union incarcerate significantly greater percentages of African-Americans compared to the percentage of whites incarcerated – about twice as many – than the states of the old Confederacy.
The modern American prisoner is 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the antebellum slave. A surprising comparison using thorough research proves that modern mass incarceration is an unrealized social and financial disaster of mammoth proportions – while antebellum slavery for most U.S. slaves was not as inhumane as many believe. I contrast the modern American prison system with antebellum slavery, with narratives from hundreds of ex-slaves, using their own words. In the Old South, outlaws were generally white people, while slaves were considered safe and never incarcerated – race and crime are not truly related. I propose racially neutral reforms to reduce and improve incarceration through discipline and hard work, substantially helping taxpayers, victims of crime, our “new age slaves” in prison and the American economy. “Prison & Slavery – A Surprising Comparison” contains the only practical market-oriented, faith-based solutions to what the NAACP’s president now regards as the greatest major crisis in our democracy, mass incarceration. Forget stereotypes. The facts will surprise you.
Well over half of released prisoners wind up behind bars again, often within three years of their release date. It’s a revolving door. In 1910, Emma Goldman wrote: “Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, shipwrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence.” With regard to recidivism, nothing has changed in 100 years.
Modern prisons or “penitentiaries” have not been around as long as many believe, less than 200 years. Modern prisons developed after the U.S. Constitution was written. The original purpose was to rehabilitate offenders, but rehabilitation has been spectacularly ineffective. Prison usually makes offenders worse. The only thing it really does is keep them from preventing crimes while they are behind bars. Federal statutes prevent prison industries and prison labor from competing in the marketplace, which is why most prisoners are idle most of the time.
The mark of Cain today is the “felon” label, a stigma that effectively disqualifies ex-cons of public assistance, subsidized housing, food stamps and most jobs. Today, because African-Americans constitute a huge percentage of the correctional population, the felon stigma is called the New Jim Crow, after a book by that name written by Michelle Alexander. Angela Y. Davis, the famous radical, has called modern mass incarceration “New Age Slavery.” Most critics of the current system of mass incarceration come from the left half of the political spectrum, those who side with the less fortunate members of society. Unfortunately, the liberal critics of the system do not have many practical solutions to the problem. Booker T. Washington knew better than W.E.B. Du Bois about some things. Big government has been in charge of state slavery all along, has clearly failed in its experiment and offers little hope by itself.
Our delusion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originating as a humanitarian movement, was the idea that people would get better with time if placed in cages or cells. This misconception brought about yet another form of slavery, which is now more prevalent in the United States than in any other country. We have not reached the final chapter of American slavery. We abolished slavery, we thought, and then developed a new form of slavery. Antebellum chattel slavery is gone, but new age American slavery, mass incarceration, is much worse. We are not accustomed to thinking of prisoners as “slaves,” but in all the basic ways, they are state slaves. Although not strictly chattel, prisoners owe absolute obedience, have no physical freedom and little status, enjoy few rights and remain subjugated or abused for many years, in prison and after their release. The United States has gone from an agrarian, paternalistic, personal form of private enterprise slavery to the socialized, impersonal, institutional, mass state slavery through incarceration inside hard surfaces, directed from Washington, D.C. and 50 state capitals. The twisted world of modern mass incarceration, state slavery, is New Age Slavery. Unfortunately, our American prison population is now the largest group of full-ride welfare recipients in the world.
The problem must be approached from market-oriented, racially neutral, biblical, constitutional and pro-American ways. I studied antebellum slavery and determined it was not as horrific for the average slave as our modern media portrays it. This is confirmed on a Library of Congress website where about 2,300 Slave Narratives gathered from 1936 to 1938 are posted. For each horror story of antebellum slavery, there is an ex-slave who remembered the Old South fondly, usually because they had good owners. Modern research proves that slavery was economically efficient, productive and profitable for the slaveholders. Many plantations were self-sufficient in food, clothing and shelter. The slaves commonly had good healthcare, adequate food, clothing and shelter, no financial worries, were in superb physical condition, did not use alcohol or drugs to excess, did not kill each other nearly as much as they do today, worshiped fervently, had fun holidays that Frederick Douglas recognized kept slave discontent down, were never incarcerated, displayed Christian virtues and had many children. Slaves consumed 88% of their own economic production. Slave children were more likely to grow up in a two-parent family than modern American kids.
We can derive some solutions to modern problems from the study of antebellum times if we take the racism and injustice out of our New Age slavery. Obviously, reforms will proceed on a non-discriminatory basis. In a nutshell, we need (1) repeal of three federal statutes inhibiting prison labor and industries, together with (2) an exemption for prison industries from most employment-related laws, to allow laissez-faire negotiation between private employers and prisoners (not convict leasing); and to significantly reduce the number of people in prison: (3) an old-fashioned home monitoring device, a metallic collar, with or without modern electronic enhancements, and (4) corporal punishment (strongly recommended in the Bible and by a dozen ex-slaves I quote, together with George Washington as a general, not as a slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson as a legislator, not as a slaveholder, Cesare Beccaria, etc.). These reforms will allow prison labor to work in a safer, spiritual, more positive environment, in businesses run by religious groups, industry or anyone willing to invest in prison labor and industries.
Corporal punishment has worked everywhere they’ve ever tried it and was a feature of every slave society and most free societies in history. Liberty is preserved with corporal punishment and metallic collars (or modern monitoring devices). After punishment, offenders are not removed from their families, marriages, jobs, schools, churches and communities. Except to incapacitate criminals while in prison, long years of incarceration have failed everywhere to punish, deter or rehabilitate criminals. The supply-side attack method of fighting the war on drugs has failed completely; it is time to attack the demand side with corporal punishment, just as they successfully do in some nations we now regard as backward.
Hard work is nearly the opposite of crime. We need to provide useful work for American prisoners, teaching them how to discipline themselves and prepare for their release, keeping them out of trouble, and breaking the power of prison & street gangs. This can only be accomplished if prison industries are self-supporting and free of most government economic regulation. The public will not pay for other types of rehabilitation and tends to believe “nothing works.” The current economic crisis can be overcome better if we put our human resources to work.
Change is coming. California faces a massive crisis in their prison system, as federal judges, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, order the release of from 30,000 to 46,000 prisoners California cannot afford to support with medical services. In other states, correctional budgets have increased steadily for years in relation to educational funding. Societies eventually do what makes economic sense with their prisoners. American prisons and penal policies clearly and without question need and will have fundamental reform.
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