You forgot about Biden's Michael Conohan pardon. I did see some people try to argue that wasn't so bad from a prison abolitionist perspective, most likely because they had no idea who he was. A man who quite literally profited from coming up with excuses to send children to jail is exactly the kind of person who can, and does, get away with crime in this country because of the arbitrary way our culture defines what that even means.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that constantly calling Trump a convicted felon didn't convince anyone not to vote for him. Anyone with any familiarity with the criminal justice system in this country knows that you can easily become a felon for the stupidest reasons imaginable. If the liberals had at least tried to go after other billionaires the way they went after Trump maybe they could have convinced people they were serious. No surprise that they didn't.
One hundred percent. The politically milquetoast only care about the crimes of the other side, while those who are generally anti-establishment are screaming for some kind of consistent, equal application of justice, something closer to true class consciousness and adherence to the rule of law. Though certain foundational liberal concepts such as the rule of law have been totally hijacked, perverted, and weaponized by capitalism, I think it's misguided, or at the very least premature, to throw out those concepts as something not to be striven for, especially since most people are effectively inculcated to value those things at least in an abstract sense. Most people are also deeply cynical about the prospects of those liberal ideals, which is a potentially fruitful site for organizing around.
I personally would love to read a lengthy article on a more libertarian socialist vs marxist-leninist vibe, since it’s something I so often go back and forth between. & I loved If We Burn. thanks for the article as always, Kody
This is a topic I think about much more than is probably healthy.
For instance, earlier this week I read an article in the New York Times in which eight men, who provided their names, confessed to having committed sexual assault or coercion in or around high school or college.
One of the first things I questioned, having read it, is why hadn't/hasn't the NYT passed on these men's details to the police for them to be arrested?
Years ago I read an article which had never left me, Struckman-Johnston and Anderson (2003) in which 40% of men and 26% of women confessed to committing what the survey termed "post-refusal sexual persistence".
This solidified the realisation in me that large numbers of people will confess to having committed serious crimes or abuses as long as these crimes or abuses are not explicitly framed as such.
So, there are far, far, far, far more criminals free in society than there are in prison. We all know this. As such, imprisoned criminals are scapegoats - they are only ever standing in for the broader class they represent, suffering on behalf of the broader criminal community (who often refuse to self-identify as such).
As for whether, the individual criminal suffers more from being imprisoned or from self-imposed guilt as a free citizen... honestly, I think it depends on the individual. Closely knowing someone with paranoid schizophrenia (and struggling myself with intense OCD, often related to things I feel guilty about) I can certainly imagine that some individuals experience an abject misery outside of prison that looks more like justice than the comfortable experience //some// prisoners have. Certainly, Jordan Belfort probably suffered less in prison than the veteran/ torturer you met outside of prison did.
However, if we accept that the vast majority of criminals will not be imprisoned and their victims not see justice, how could a government best ensure that justice when imprisoning, say, 40% of men is clearly unrealistic?
One way, for instance, could be that far broader surveys (covering all varieties of criminality) than Struckman-Johnston's coould be carried out across a country after a systematic campaign to present these surveys as part of a wellness or even truth and reconciliation initiative. Upon receipt of these surveys, those individuals who are found to have confessed to crimes could be banned from ever receiving medications (prescribed or self-administered, from anti-depressants to cannabis etc.) that might alleviate their suffering or softening their guilt.
The problem is, however, the often the more condemnatory are the least self-aware! The men in the New York Times article above sound hideous in their confessions (and understandably received a lot of disgust and anger in the comments section) but at least they remembered the awful things they'd done some 50 years later! How many high school bullies, say (who did things that if committed outside of school would have been recognised as crimes) later try to befriend their victims on social media, completely forgetting acts they perpetrated a mere decade or two ago?
Many people I have talked to in everyday life voice tacic or sometimes overt approval of the idea that many prisoners are raped - or, ast least, beaten up in prison. I would go as far as to say that //is// the primary spoken/unspoken punishment of being jailed. When my school year received a talk from a prison guard when we were 12/13 he talked, with pride, about how when a prisoner was violently/ sexually assaulted the guards wouldn't help, but would deliberately look the other way. "Why would we help a criminal?" he said.
What troubles me most is that:
1.) Some of the most keen to punish are the least self-aware /or/ are self-aware but want to deflect attention away from themselves?
2.) Lawful evil (often in the form of systems, governments and institutions, though perpetrated via individuals) causes far, far, far more harm and suffering than chaotic evil... yet it is almost always the chaotic evil individuals (who tend to be poor and disadvantaged in other ways) who are imprisoned.
I appreciate the line in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed': "No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
As someone increasingly sceptical of free will as I get older, I'm not sure if deservingness is a sensible, useful (or even coherent) concept. But I also know there are billions crying out for justivce. But how many of those billions are also criminals themselves, sometimes without the self-awareness to recognise it?
I suspect Elephants would have made a better dominant land animal than us chimps with genocidal needs & desires. Who knows, maybe they tried to prevent that at some unknown point, but we out-organized them...
You forgot about Biden's Michael Conohan pardon. I did see some people try to argue that wasn't so bad from a prison abolitionist perspective, most likely because they had no idea who he was. A man who quite literally profited from coming up with excuses to send children to jail is exactly the kind of person who can, and does, get away with crime in this country because of the arbitrary way our culture defines what that even means.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that constantly calling Trump a convicted felon didn't convince anyone not to vote for him. Anyone with any familiarity with the criminal justice system in this country knows that you can easily become a felon for the stupidest reasons imaginable. If the liberals had at least tried to go after other billionaires the way they went after Trump maybe they could have convinced people they were serious. No surprise that they didn't.
One hundred percent. The politically milquetoast only care about the crimes of the other side, while those who are generally anti-establishment are screaming for some kind of consistent, equal application of justice, something closer to true class consciousness and adherence to the rule of law. Though certain foundational liberal concepts such as the rule of law have been totally hijacked, perverted, and weaponized by capitalism, I think it's misguided, or at the very least premature, to throw out those concepts as something not to be striven for, especially since most people are effectively inculcated to value those things at least in an abstract sense. Most people are also deeply cynical about the prospects of those liberal ideals, which is a potentially fruitful site for organizing around.
I personally would love to read a lengthy article on a more libertarian socialist vs marxist-leninist vibe, since it’s something I so often go back and forth between. & I loved If We Burn. thanks for the article as always, Kody
This is a topic I think about much more than is probably healthy.
For instance, earlier this week I read an article in the New York Times in which eight men, who provided their names, confessed to having committed sexual assault or coercion in or around high school or college.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/18/opinion/men-metoo-high-school.html
One of the first things I questioned, having read it, is why hadn't/hasn't the NYT passed on these men's details to the police for them to be arrested?
Years ago I read an article which had never left me, Struckman-Johnston and Anderson (2003) in which 40% of men and 26% of women confessed to committing what the survey termed "post-refusal sexual persistence".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10707600_Tactics_of_sexual_coercion_When_men_and_women_won't_take_no_for_an_answer
This solidified the realisation in me that large numbers of people will confess to having committed serious crimes or abuses as long as these crimes or abuses are not explicitly framed as such.
So, there are far, far, far, far more criminals free in society than there are in prison. We all know this. As such, imprisoned criminals are scapegoats - they are only ever standing in for the broader class they represent, suffering on behalf of the broader criminal community (who often refuse to self-identify as such).
As for whether, the individual criminal suffers more from being imprisoned or from self-imposed guilt as a free citizen... honestly, I think it depends on the individual. Closely knowing someone with paranoid schizophrenia (and struggling myself with intense OCD, often related to things I feel guilty about) I can certainly imagine that some individuals experience an abject misery outside of prison that looks more like justice than the comfortable experience //some// prisoners have. Certainly, Jordan Belfort probably suffered less in prison than the veteran/ torturer you met outside of prison did.
However, if we accept that the vast majority of criminals will not be imprisoned and their victims not see justice, how could a government best ensure that justice when imprisoning, say, 40% of men is clearly unrealistic?
One way, for instance, could be that far broader surveys (covering all varieties of criminality) than Struckman-Johnston's coould be carried out across a country after a systematic campaign to present these surveys as part of a wellness or even truth and reconciliation initiative. Upon receipt of these surveys, those individuals who are found to have confessed to crimes could be banned from ever receiving medications (prescribed or self-administered, from anti-depressants to cannabis etc.) that might alleviate their suffering or softening their guilt.
The problem is, however, the often the more condemnatory are the least self-aware! The men in the New York Times article above sound hideous in their confessions (and understandably received a lot of disgust and anger in the comments section) but at least they remembered the awful things they'd done some 50 years later! How many high school bullies, say (who did things that if committed outside of school would have been recognised as crimes) later try to befriend their victims on social media, completely forgetting acts they perpetrated a mere decade or two ago?
Many people I have talked to in everyday life voice tacic or sometimes overt approval of the idea that many prisoners are raped - or, ast least, beaten up in prison. I would go as far as to say that //is// the primary spoken/unspoken punishment of being jailed. When my school year received a talk from a prison guard when we were 12/13 he talked, with pride, about how when a prisoner was violently/ sexually assaulted the guards wouldn't help, but would deliberately look the other way. "Why would we help a criminal?" he said.
What troubles me most is that:
1.) Some of the most keen to punish are the least self-aware /or/ are self-aware but want to deflect attention away from themselves?
2.) Lawful evil (often in the form of systems, governments and institutions, though perpetrated via individuals) causes far, far, far more harm and suffering than chaotic evil... yet it is almost always the chaotic evil individuals (who tend to be poor and disadvantaged in other ways) who are imprisoned.
I appreciate the line in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed': "No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
As someone increasingly sceptical of free will as I get older, I'm not sure if deservingness is a sensible, useful (or even coherent) concept. But I also know there are billions crying out for justivce. But how many of those billions are also criminals themselves, sometimes without the self-awareness to recognise it?
I suspect Elephants would have made a better dominant land animal than us chimps with genocidal needs & desires. Who knows, maybe they tried to prevent that at some unknown point, but we out-organized them...
Tim