I'll observe that in both the criminal justice and counterterrorism fields, there seems to be a tendency among policymakers to treat punishing the innocent as a kind of close second-best to punishing the guilty. And, of course, in bureaucratic terms it is -- a conviction is a conviction and a clearance is a clearance, whether or not you've got the right guy. In crime control terms, though, it's a terrible error to be wasting resources (prison space, prosecutors' and judges' time) on punishing people who aren't criminals. It's also a terrible injustice, of course, but it's not a tradeoff between justice and effective crime control -- punishing the innocent is counterproductive, just like torturing innocent people and wasting your time chasing down their "leads."What if the point of criminal justice and counterrroism isn't to punish the guilty, nor to satisfy any particular bureaucratic benchmark, nor to control crime, nor to produce either leads or "leads"? Or, what if each of those points is real, but incidental to a different, broader purpose?
-Yglesias, getting so fucking, goddamn, agonizingly close
Follow me if you will, me droogs. Imagine if the purpose of all those prisons and torture chambers, those false convictions and false confessions, isn't to control the poor bastards rotting away on the inside, but to control we poor bastards rotting away on the outside. What if the prisoners themselves are incidental to the program.
Now if that were the case, wouldn't a little dance in the direction of the arbitrary be pretty fundamental to the deal. Oh, you wouldn't want it to be entirely so. You wouldn't want to snatch just anyone from the street and throw him in the oubliette. If it were totally irrational, it would devolve into farce. But if a few thousand out of two million adjudicated members of the American Prison Club were not to belong. Well, that would seem to suggest an appropriate unease to your average citizen. And perhaps there could be an element of demographic inequality to it all to encourage some healthy, intercommunal mistrust.
You might say that such a program is pretty monstrous. You might object by saying that if that were the case, wouldn't it implicate not only America in its moment, but every society and every civilization, all the way back to the first stone circle and the first grain store?
Well. Wouldn't it?
24 comments:
Some societies--I'm thinking of Scandinavia and other bits of Europe--have more sane prison systems than we do and don't torture people. Our particular brand of vindictiveness isn't universal.
I think laziness and incompetence--and in the U.S., a warped, all-enveloping sense of moral rectitude--are more likely reasons for our situation than a top-down plan to keep the proles in line. But that's no less damning in my book.
Yes, "demographic inequality." A most necessary ingredient. Best if it encompasses class, race and gender. Aces!
So, let's say, just for the sake of this here exercise, that, okey-dokey, Mr. Host, yes, it would implicate "every society and every civilization."
And that means...? Exactly what, cher IOZ? :>))
This post made me think of Animal House:
Otter: But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
[Leads the Deltas out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]
-dan
Yeah, echoing AS. This issue has been around since the folks swapped nomadic berry gathering for agricultural villages, wouldn't you say? I mean, it doesn't seem like the most fruitful line of speculation ever. My high school guidance counselor, at least, didn't prep me for the hunter-gatherer career path. Nor hermiting, either.
-- sglover
"And that means...? Exactly what, cher IOZ? :>))"
That civilization is monstrous and should be abolished?
(And by "civilization," I'm sure he means the kind with central government. I mean come on, you know there's a plug for libertarianism in there somewhere)
The System: No, not the "l" word, methinks. Check his tags, especially the first one. The "a" word, I do believe.
I just want to hear it spelled out a bit more...a little friendly prodding, that's all. :>))
And not just what it means exactly, but why (a subject I've long planned to write about in some detail, and may get to at some point).
"No, not the "l" word, methinks. Check his tags, especially the first one. The "a" word, I do believe."
You mean there's a practical difference between the two? And here I had always just assumed that a functioning anarchy would inevitably end up being a honest-to-dog Libertopia. ;)
As to the whys, wherefores and whatnots involved here, I suspect I have a pretty good idea, but I'll let the man speak for himself.
Manners and such.
"Men in a state of nature, that is a state without civil government, are in a war of all against all in which life is hardly worth living. The way out of this desperate state is to make a social contract and establish the state to keep peace and order. Because of his view of how nasty life is without the state, Hobbes subscribes to a very authoritarian version of the social contract."
Great choices: a life "hardly worth living", and (You Are Here >)neocon/neolib/neotrot, Staussian heaven.
How did this happen? It couldn't be because our species pretty much sucks, could it?
I find that the aversion to any discission of anarchy or precivil man as being (sorry, sglover!) unfruitful springs from a very similar mindset as creationism.
Given how things tend to land in the middle, maybe a concerted, potentially violent, push toward anarchy will result in, say, marijuana possession being reduced to a citation offense. That would be progress at least.
So, what exactly is the role of the Miranda rule, the suppression of wrongfully obtained evidence, and the appeals process?
YF
Roughly the same as the role of the purple finger.
just look at the main reason people cite for being against anarchy: law enforcement.
i axe ye: what has a cop ever, everevereverever, EVER done for you? apart from shaking down your house parties when you were 15, of course?
and do those with a legit need for actual protection from property crime, not already hire out rent-a-cops for security?
Hobbes is about as impressive to me as Ann Coulter. (i.e., not very)
If there were no cops I personally would be a murderer, serial rapist, robber, arsonist and vandal. I would also violate traffic laws. Hobbes was right about some of us.
YF
I find that the aversion to any discission of anarchy or precivil man as being (sorry, sglover!) unfruitful springs from a very similar mindset as creationism.
Well that's a helluva dodge, wouldn't you say? Not to mention a world-class smear. If you think there's merit in shucking the institutional superstructure of whatever we (or I, anyway) would call "civilization", or "technological civilization", or whatever, it's pretty lame to disparage sceptics as having a "creationist" mindset.
Call me silly, but I'm guessing that the question "So how are we all going to get along in an acceptable manner?", in various forms, has been floating around since about before writing came along. It still seems to be an open question, and I don't think that's because all humans, including folks like Confucius, Siddhārtha Gautama, Socrates, Thomas More, Hobbes, Bertrand Russell, etc., etc., etc., are morons, or blinkered by their "creationist" dogmas.
-- sglover
Not "sceptics", dear Anonymous, but rather those who decry the discussion of such ideas, and those interested in discussing them, as ludicrous. Dangerous, even.
There is a difference.
That's neither a dodge nor a smear, sglover. It's an observation about utility. Your question--"is this discussion fruitful"--rests on a premise that discussing enduring institutions is only meaningful if the institution is taken as a kind of totality. I think the parallels with creationist cosmogeny are obvious.
In any case, it's hardly revolutionary--or even terribly original--to note that penal codes are a principle mechanism through which societies enforce norms and regulate behavior. Our friend YF is always good for the curmudgeonly response (et nous en adorons), but he tangentially notes an important point--just how much ouf our legal structure is given over not to preventing murder, but to preventing speeding, illegal parking, displaying too-large political banners, and keeping the devil weed marijuana out of the hands of our youth.
Laws and the way we enforce them and the conventions from which they grew are indeed enduring, but they're not part of an eternal order. The conventions of legality that we recognize as nearly universal today were no more present at the outset than an upright gate and a taste for tree-borne fruit was present in the earliest living things.
The history of political philosophy is full of suppositions about man in his state of nature, if ever there was one. To say that it was unfruitful for Hobbes or Rousseau or Locke or Smith (or name your own) to waste their time on such questions strikes me as more than a little intellectually parsimonious.
"Totality"? Well, yeah, I have to admit, it's pretty much impossible for me to imagine a complex technological society functioning without legal codes, formal arbitration mechanisms, and alas, and enforcement regime of some kind. Once the foraging route, or maybe the village, got left behind, life became a matter of dealing with strangers much, maybe most, of the time. It seems to me that, ideally, law is as more a kind of social lubricant than a nefarious means of keeping the plebs down. When I don't know that I can rely on your firm handshake and winning smile, I should at least be able to consult the law books.
Look, maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not going to argue that, say, habeus corpus or the law of contracts are the fulfillment of some Platonic ideal of social order. And hey, if I didn't agree that the garrison state's crawling out of the woodwork, do you think I'd be frequenting this site? But again, it is exceedingly hard for me to imagine a non-horrific social order encompassing more than a few dozen members with NO codified rules. If you've got a gedankenexperiment that suggests otherwise, I'd love to hear it. However, if I've got objections, it just might be because I've got a quibble with the particulars, rather than ALL speculation about the topic. Doncha think?
On an unrelated note, to YF: David Simon's "Homicide" has an interesting discussion of the practical ramifications (at the interrogation room level) of Miranda.
-- sglover
It seems to me that, ideally, law is as more a kind of social lubricant than a nefarious means of keeping the plebs down. What it lacks as a paraphrase, it more than makes up for as a groundless assumption.
Of course, when I hear people cite the limits of their imagination as the boundaries of inquiry, I think immediately of Walter Kirn's great put-down of Harvey Mansfield's latest: "Manliness starts in a fussy lecture-hall mode with Mansfield taking the wordy, long way around to prove a few points about the male and female--that they're innately different, and in exactly the ways people always thought they were before they did any thinking on the subject." The emphasis is mine.
In any case, let me return to biology, because I believe it's instructive to the point. Creationists are still fond of arguments from so-called irreducible complexity. An eye, which depends on many interconnected parts and operations, could not by steps have evolved into what it is. Or, to take a popular example: the bacterium flagellum seems an unlikely candidate for emergence through small, discrete steps.
But what evolutionary biology teaches us is that not only is it possible, it's often even further the case that structures like the flagellum whose very purpose seems innate to their "design" in fact began as different structures performing functions altogether unrelated to their current use.
Your argument, at last, boils down to: "This is the function that the law supposedly serves. To consider otherwise is to advocate collecting berries." But since every famous fag from Plato to Michel Foucault managed to question the recieved purpose of the law, I feel decidely unradical in inching out along the same branch.
Berries sound very yummie right now. Can I collect some berries?
Deterrence, as that term is used in criminal justice, is not specific to the individual being arrested/sentenced or to those who consider a similar crime in the future. The deterrence element of criminal justice is its function as general social control mechanism.
It seems obvious that it has been used since time immemorial as a social control mechanism. It also seems obvious that the level of arbitrariness needs to be maintained somewhere short of "Brazil."
There's a class of people (my clients), they don't blog much, who know 'black on a sunny day,' as the repressive side of authority (per Il Duce Giuliani).
There's a certain level of naivete in those not exposed to the vagaries of the criminal justice system on a regular basis.
Prof.
I always unbuckle my seat belt whenever I see one of those "click it or ticket" billboards. if I want to redecorate the interior of my Toyota with crimson and grey, I should have that option.
It seems to me that the difference between anarchy on one hand and a society with laws and law enforcement on the other is that in the latter there's one additional group of particularly heavily armed thugs that have also stacked the deck in their own favor in the endless and ubiquitous condition of human on human violence.
DL
The Fight: What Does it Mean and Where Does it Come From, An Essay
Homo sapiens: A man. He is alone in the universe. A punker: Still a man. He is alone in the universe, but he connects. How? They hit each other. No clearer way to evaluate whether or not you’re alive.
Now, complications. A reason to fight. Somebody different. Difference creates dispute. Dispute is a reason to fight. Now, to fight is a reason to feel pain. Life is pain. So to fight with reason is to be alive with reason. Final analysis: To fight, a reason to live.
Problems and Contradictions: I am an anarchist. I believe that there should be no rules, only chaos. Fighting appears to be chaos. And when we slam in the pit at a show, it is. But when we fight for a reason, like rednecks, there’s a system: we fight for what we stand for: chaos. Fighting is a structure, fighting is to establish power, power is government and government is not anarchy. Government is war and war is fighting. The circle goes like this: our redneck skirmishes are cheap perversions of conventional warfare. War implies extreme government because wars are fought to enforce rules or ideals, even freedom. But other people ideals forced on someone else, even if it is something like freedom, is still a rule; not anarchy.
This contradiction was becoming clear to me in the fall of ’85, even as early as my first party. “Why did I love to fight?” I framed it, but still, I don’t understand it. It goes against my beliefs as a true anarchist. But there it was: competition, fighting, capitalism, government, THE SYSTEM. That’s what we did. It’s what we always did. Rednecks kicked the shit out of punks, punks kicked the shit out of mods, mods kicked the shit out of skinheads, skinheads took out the heavy metal guys, and the heavy metal guys beat the living shit out of new wavers and the new wavers did nothing.
What was the point? Final summation? None.
-from SLC Punk
Post a Comment