Tag Archives: crime

Donald’s law.

Based on their rhetoric of late, it seems clear that, with the economy in very rough shape, the Trump administration is opting for a law-and-order driven campaign for re-election. Trump has always been fond of “tough on crime” rhetoric, partly because he likes to present himself as “tough”, but also because he is very much a product of his 70s, 80s, and 90s heyday when political careers were made and broken on the issue of crime and harsh punishment. He has a base, very rudimentary mentality, and one that is laser focused on visceral political issues. His rally speeches are like fascistic comedy routines during which he trots out tried and true laugh lines that pull directly from his generously proportioned sack of prejudices – the same exclusionary and self-aggrandizing posturing that resonated so deeply with his base in 2016.

Can that work in today’s America? I don’t freaking know. It seems like perhaps not, but maybe it can. All I know is that Trump is simply the most prominent standard bearer of this militarist approach to what’s called “public safety”, not its author. And while the Republican party seems most heavily invested in this madness, it is not their sole province; many Democrats have made their political bones on the …. well, bones of generations of young black, brown, and poor white men and women who populate our prisons and wear the chains of the carceral state after they’re released. Joe Biden is one of them. So is Amy Klobuchar. There are many more.

I recently re-listened to an interview of the well-known advocated for prison abolition Mariame Kaba on Chris Hayes’s podcast, and frankly she blew me away. Her critique of our current mess of a system – a system that fails nearly everyone – is spot-on, in my opinion, and she offers both a vision of a better alternative and a theory of change – in effect, a pathway to the vision. We pour $170 million into law enforcement, almost zero into alternatives to incarceration or community investment, and somehow expect things to improve on their own. And as she points out, it’s a system that does not even succeed on its own terms. Severe punishment for murder is meaningless when only 13% of those who murder are serving time, as is the case in Chicago. And policy built from trauma is almost definitionally bad. That’s how political careers are made – developing laws that punish whole classes of people on the basis of a single crime. That’s what Trump will leverage this fall – count on it.

We need to send Trump back to his shabby golden tower. But we can’t stop there. We have to follow through with what he’s telling his Klan rally audiences is the crazy agenda of the far left: building towards an alternative vision of public safety that provides for minimal application of force and maximal investment in under-served communities. That’s the path to a more just society.

luv u,

jp

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Second chances.

I come from the land of second chances, so the current Kavanaugh saga has a distinctly familiar ring to it. Mind you, I have not benefited from the level of privilege that Judge K has enjoyed his whole life through, but close enough. I grew up in what was described once as a “rock-ribbed Republican” town in upstate New York, virtually all white residents, lots of professionals and rich folk as well as middle class, borderline working class. It’s the kind of place where you have to fuck up pretty badly before it affects you in any serious way. Underage drinking, drug use, and other low-level criminality were widespread. Arrests were not unheard of, but rare, and the impact of these brushes with the law were almost never life-changing.

Right down the street, in the heart of the city, people of color face a far different reality. Their opportunities for advancement are severely constrained, and when something goes wrong, it’s either life-changing or life-ending. I think about kids like Hector McClain, who at 16 was sent to prison for four years because he failed to stop two other teens from beating a Utica, NY police officer. Here’s an excerpt of a press report about his trial:


As he was sentenced today, McClain acknowledged what he did was wrong. But McClain went on to defend his actions by saying he feared that his friends were going to be hurt by the officer.

“I only did it to make sure they were OK,” McClain said. “If you care about somebody, you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep them safe.” McClain added, “Nobody sees it the way I see it, know what I’m saying?”

Judge Dwyer said he understood McClain’s perspective to an extent, but still pointed out the flaw in McClain’s thinking. “This wasn’t just somebody on the street — this was a police officer,” Dwyer said.

McClain replied, “I’m not saying my actions were right. I know they were wrong. I’m not a dummy … But I’m still going to protect them no matter what.” Then Dwyer interjected, “You could have protected them better by stopping the incident.”

As the sentencing ended, McClain said, “I’ll just change my life around as soon as I get out.”

“You have to learn from your mistakes … so we don’t have to go through this ever again,” Dwyer said.  (Utica Observer-Dispatch, April 1, 2008)


Four years in prison, for a sixteen-year-old African-American kid. No mulligans for him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the track, white teens like me (a generation removed) commit felonies (albeit vacuous ones) in the shelter of their tony homes, where police patrols are tasked with keeping kids like McClain out, not hauling kids like me and Kavanaugh in. Our mistakes tend not to follow us like a malevolent cloud for the rest of our lives. When you couple that with the generations of advantages our families enjoyed – access to remunerative professions, mortgage assistance denied to black families, ingress into neighborhoods from which people of color were barred, and decades of building wealth – you begin to understand apartheid American-style.

Don’t feel sorry for Kavanaugh. Even if he’s held somewhat accountable and denied a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court, he’ll be just fine.

luv u,

jp