creature

Okay well first thing first: You did not betray your beliefs. You made a necessary choice in a situation with no available Good choices.

I mean, listen: did you have the societal authority to Go Out and Deal With Him yourself? Absolutely the fuck not. Did you have the training and professional experience to do so effectively? I'm guessing HELL no. Did you have anyone else available to call to help you deal with this situation? No!

You did not betray your beliefs.

You live in a society that has laws, and those laws provide for very limited means of addressing the potential violence of other people. You are simply not allowed, on my Tumblr, to attempt to hold yourself responsible for the failure of those societal institutions.

There, you're absolved of your sins.

Now, feeling frustrated and angry? That's totally different. Those institutions failed you! It's their fault, not yours! What the fuck is "he's on his property, he can do what he wants"? He was on your property when he showed up with a bongo drum and he was generating threats off his property when he was waving around a lethal weapon. Those cops were lazy.

And you didn't really ask, but I'll tell you what they could have done with that situation.

They could have finagled a way to arrest him. Let him get sober in jail or if it's not drugs doing this, require a mental health eval on release and not to return to that address. (This practice is hugely annoying and difficult for defendants who have no monetary resources, I would like to note, but if this guy's psychotic, someone in this process will probably catch a clue and refer him for a competency evaluation.)

And if they were bound and determined not to arrest him, what else could they do?

Well, a good start would be to discuss with his wife a safety plan, and tell her that if she can get the guns out of immediate sight that would be a good idea, as well as knives and other immediately obvious weapons (bows and arrows not usually on this list, but it's a situationally flexible recommendation). They should also have gone through the standardized domestic violence risk assessment that has been adopted by many states at this point, and told her that she comes out high-risk twice simply by virtue of the coexistence of "divorce" and "firearms." At that point, they should have connected her to a hotline with a domestic violence shelter to discuss more elaborate safety planning.

The officers then should have filed a specific report that could be referenced quickly by other officers, put out a warning about that guy, shittalked him on the radio for everyone to hear, and made sure everyone was on the lookout for him doing something weird and violent.

To use a real-life example:

Someone I know eighth-hand once seriously considered murdering someone who threatened very descriptively to assault his daughter, but instead chose to call the cops. If there was no alternative and no enforceable consequences, would he have stopped? If he didn't believe that the state would at least temporarily take away this guy's liberty would he have felt as though he had to act? I honestly don't know but it seems more likely.

(For the curious, this was all on Facebook, so the offender in question used his real name and was out on parole for domestic abuse, and I say that not to make a point that he is a bad person or whatever, just to clarify the situation.)

The point I'm trying to make is our incredibly terrible justice system is still a pressure valve. It tells people "here is something you can do instead of murder" and "if you do violence there are consequences, so maybe think it through".

Most of the prison abolition literature seems to center on A. the prison system is awful (100% endorsed) and B. we should have better social services (yep) and this will decrease crime (proven time and time again). I am very pro making our prison system more rehabilitative and also making it illegal for jobs to ask if someone is a former felon and abolishing prison labor because it provides a direct incentive to imprison more people.

But putting aside how prison abolition is a fantasy when there isn't the current political will to make our existing prisons have humane living conditions, I still can't understand how actual full-on prison abolition would work and you're clearly much more immersed in the justice system than I am, so I'm curious about your thoughts on the subject.

Want to make sure you've seen this post; I got both of these asks around the same time and since they're not quite the same I wanted to make sure I address both, but don't repeat too much material. That post talks a lot about the composition of people in prison, which is most likely not what you expect, and how even crimes defined as "serious" and "violent" are often some goddamn bullshit that the police inflated. Cleaning out a lot of that muck is at the core of prison abolition, I think.

But I'd love to dig into this too. You're talking about the justice system's overall purpose in society, and that's genuinely fascinating! Also about the causes of interpersonal violence and mitigation of those causes on a societal level! These are things I would love to study more; my exposure to theories on violence are a little limited.

Societies have justice systems. For what purpose?

A Marxist might say: to enforce the capital-holders' repressive power over labor. Ideas like: The law, in all its wisdom, forbids sleeping under a bridge equally to the rich man and the poor man. Evidence like: 90% of the people charged with crimes are under the federal poverty line +25%.

A conservative or authoritarian moralist, like a Christian Republican, might say: to enforce morals on a society that would be chaos without them. This flirts a little with what you're saying above. Ideas like: Society is a thin veneer and mankind is savage and violent by nature. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Do the crime, do the time. Vengeance, sayeth the lord.

A less authoritarian moralist, perhaps a liberal?: to rehabilitate the criminal. Prisons should have educational programs; probation should help people desist from lives of crime.

A socialist might say: to preserve the social contract. The justice system is meant to be a way to heal wounds done to society and prevent further harm. This is where you get the restorative justice movement. The idea of payment of restitution. Community service.

There are so many more.

Let's unpack the pressure valve theory that you're talking about.

This is that: if people are wronged, they would do something about it, unless there is a trusted system to do something about it for them. Evidence for it? You betcha: how many escalating feuds between gangs/families/factions/parties/etc. does history even have?

(Quick side note: There is some interesting criminological theory that Black people in inner cities are both under and over-enforced. For low-level crimes, they are over-enforced, suffering under more policing than their white counterparts; in terms of murder, they are under-enforced, as the murders of black people are often disregarded and forgotten, unsolved. The theory states that this is why gangs keep killing each other in revenge.)

You're also talking about the coercive power of the state. Threat of prison isn't the only coercive power that the state has, but it sure is an overused one around here. You don't want to come to court? We'll put you in jail! Don't pay your child support? Jail! You're mentally ill on the street? Jail!

But this doesn't explain everything about why people obey the government, right? I don't know that people file tax returns because they think they're going to jail if they don't. Doctors don't keep their medical files in systems up to HIPAA standards because they might go to jail if they don't. And you know what most of my clients do if they find out they have a warrant? They peacefully go to jail to turn themselves in.

The government's last response to resistance is violence, just like violence is a last resort in any interpersonal reaction. That's not the same as saying that all government power is based in violence.

(In fact, I have a theory that if mild-looking people who aren't bristling with guns, tasers, radios, body armor, etc., showed up to some of the scenes that call for police, they could take charge of a scene with much less violence taking place. I think personally they should try day-glo vests and clipboards and lanyards.)

I also think it's worthwhile to question whether the person who ended up calling the police really wanted to engage in violence -- theorists on violence basically say that most people don't want to, and therefore in the moment, if they can, if they're given escape hatches to take without losing face, they take those escape hatches. You have to train people really really hard, break them down and brainwash them into obeying orders, to get them ready to go shoot strangers in war. It takes the overwhelming pressure cooker of violent streets and constant trauma to make Black kids pick up guns, too. It's not overnight, it's not immediate. Violence is obvious, and there's bonkers level opportunities to de-escalate it. We are programmed to think it is more necessary than it is because we see heroes solving problems with violence all the time on tv and movies. But violence almost always, if not always, causes more problems than it solves.

But here's the other thing.

Did it work, calling the police, in that situation? Did a very descriptive threat of harm to that guy's daughter result in any additional protection for her? Or was it just charges for him, a constant ordeal in which her pain is paraded publicly for her, and then a short prison stay and he's out again to threaten her? Because that's my best case scenario. My worst case scenario on that would be: police say he hasn't yet done anything so there's nothing they can do. Because police don't protect.

What if we built a justice system around protecting people, not about authoritarian prison-based revenge once the harm is already done? I'd like that better.

I am also planning to check out some of the linked books, but this has always been a challenge for me to wrap my head around!

The first thing you have to let go of when you're imagining this is the idea that anywhere near this number of people in prison is normal or okay in most Earth societies. And to do that, you have to understand why people in prison are in prison.

Like half of them are there for probation or parole violations. That means it's hard to tell why exactly they're there, but, looking at the breakdown of probation and parole violations I've defended, it's actually not super likely that this is because of a new crime conviction. People get dinged on probation/parole violations for stuff that's legal for other people to do, including marijuana and alcohol, or not calling the probation officer enough, or being homeless, or not having a job because you got fired because of your probation meetings.

Next, the bulk of people in and out of local jails are there for honestly just stupid nonsense. Misdemeanor assaults, trespasses, drug possessions. There's compelling evidence that these short stays in jail increase recidivism, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense -- imagine your live being interrupted by an abrupt few months in jail. If you have family support, they might be able to retrieve your stuff from your place before your landlord leaves it all on a curb. You get an eviction on your record. You're fired. You might lose all your important documents if no one was available to get them from your apartment. And then you're spat back out with nothing, an overdrawn bank account, zero possessions except what you were arrested with, and told "now get a job or you're going back to jail."

Then there's mid-level cases that are felonies. Most people think felonies are Serious Business. They are -- in terms of consequences. The crimes that are felonies are defined in ways that are often absurd and ass-backwards. It's very hard to explain what I mean without just providing an example, so here goes.

In my state, there's a crime of "shooting at an occupied dwelling" (something clearly intended to be a law against drive-by shootings, which I would like to note were ALREADY ILLEGAL, it being illegal to attempt murder on people and to recklessly handle firearms etc., so the law was arguably totally unnecessary, but I digress). There is also a crime of discharging a firearm inside an occupied dwelling. This is not as bad of a crime as shooting at an occupied dwelling.

There is a notable case where a prosecutor chose to prosecute someone who shot inside a dwelling under the shooting at a dwelling law. Why? Because worser penalty is why. The higher Court, after appeal, ruled that a shooting done inside a dwelling is by default at a dwelling, since the dwelling is in fact in every direction from the shooter. Thus, every shooting in an occupied dwelling must be a shooting at an occupied dwelling. The less serious law is thus effectively nullified by the court.

I'll take it one step further. The law about shooting at an occupied dwelling also says that it doesn't have to be a gun, it can be a "missile." There's some language in there about how it has to cause significant risk of death or bodily harm. Despite that language, my most notable case under this law was the following facts:

One thirteen-year-old shot another thirteen-year-old with an Orbeez gun in a living room.

The judge refused to dismiss the charge. "Those things can put an eye out," she said. And thus the child was subject to felony liability for the drive-by shooting law for A FUCKING ORBEEZ GUN I SWEAR TO GOD I COULD NOT MAKE THIS UP IF I TRIED okay maybe I'm still a little mad

But the discussion on prison abolition tends to center not on these INCREDIBLY VAST MAJORITIES OF CASES where the law is stretched to fit the facts, where people weren't really hurt, where the police even generated the crime themselves perhaps by responding to a mental health crisis and provoking the situation until there are felony assault & battery on law enforcement charges.

Prison abolition discussions are all about what to do with murderers. Rapists. Abusers. Sex offenders.

To be clear, I believe there are some situations where a person will keep doing societal harm and will not stop. These situations are so shocking because they are so rare.

The first murderer I ever met was this guy who freely admitted what he did: he said he killed the guy who raped his daughter. He managed to get an incredibly low sentence out of the jury that heard the case. He was willing to pay the price of prison. He was honestly pretty interesting and willing to talk my visiting law student clinic through a lot of what had happened.

The first murder case I had, the client killed because of a sincerely held belief that he was in danger. The fact that this sincerely held belief was from an intense delusional psychosis makes it a deep tragedy.

Different places report different figures, but anywhere from half to 90% of the women in prison for murder are there for murdering an abusive spouse. Women don't fit under traditional definitions of self-defense, see; they don't wait until someone is coming at them ready to kill. Women shoot when the man is asleep. Women want to survive.

So even when you think of 'murder,' question this: why is heat-of-passion murder less bad in our system than premeditated murder? Premeditated murder, apart from serial killers, is a one-and-done thing. It's also much more common for female murderers to fall into the category of premeditation and for masculine to fall into heat of passion. People who murder when they're angry are an ongoing danger to society.

Prison abolition says: everything about this is wrong. Looking for an "alternative" is in many ways the trap question -- the wrong question. It's not about finding a different, better way to punish people. Maybe we still do need 1 in 100 of our current prisons to confine people who won't stop hurting others. Maybe a mental health system that's a tiny bit less pathetically anemic could help handle the load.

Prison abolition says: there's no reason to take this person out of society for x years, all of them at 100k/year expense to the taxpayers, subject to cruelty and dehumanization, in the interests of punishment, because it does too much harm. One year, nine months for possession of a meth pipe with residue? Go to a drug program, for god's sake. Two years, one month for larceny? Why spend more on locking the person up than they stole? Why lock them up where they can't pay restitution?

The Green Tulip & Ice Cream Corner restaurants in the Plaza Hotel, NYC, NY (1971)

Designed by Sally Dryden, AID of Chandler Cudlipp Associates

Scanned from the December 1971 issue of Interior Design magazine

Liddi is brimming with pent-up wriggles, now, but she keeps herself still. She tries not to fuss much about wanting to move, even when she really, really wants to move. Devin's done his best – bringing her into the hospital's pool so she can kick her legs, holding her hands in the garden while she tries to support her own clumsy weight, getting up and walking around himself when she's beyond her tolerance for boredom, even when it makes him grit his teeth with pain. He's done his best. He never asks her to be brave for the doctors, either, and he always lets her say when she's all done for the day, and he never lets any of them tell her otherwise.

He doesn't expect her to be brave. Which makes her want to be braver.

So he doesn't know how badly Liddi often wants to get down and run around. He doesn't know how much she wishes she were normal, or how desperately she wants to play, or how small and stupid and shameful she feels that she isn't getting better. He's already so tired. She doesn't want to make him sad, too.

Tonight, though, it's only a few seconds before Liddi realizes something is different. Because tonight, Devin is awake.

He doesn't seem to know that she's awake. He's muttering to himself, a guttural half-whisper, like he's trying not to rouse her. It might be a spell. Or a prayer, Liddi thinks - but then she remembers. Devin can't exactly pray to himself.

It's when Liddi hears the tinny, muffled sound of a response that she realizes: Oh. He's talking on the phone.

"That can't be the last god," Devin says.

There's a short response, to which he snaps, "Well, then make them talk to you."

Kandy G. Lopez R ² - Roscoe and Reggie 2024 Yarn and acrylic paint on hook mesh