crime and punishment

Brinksmanship

By in crime and punishment, imponderabilia No Comments

Being a homeowner, I thought I should look into a security system to protect my property from the roving hordes of barbarians, cannibals, zombies and other undesirables sure to be seen lurching around the post-Rapture hellscape (no sign of Jeebus around here yet, but it’s still only late afternoon). I took an informal survey of the yard signs throughout the nearby suburbs, and a company called Vector was the clear favorite, but still, I ultimately decided to go with Brinks. I figured the people who make armored cars should know a thing or two about keeping your stuff safe, right? And installation was a snap, so now I can kick back and relax, safe and sound.

What? Oh, no, you misunderstood me. I didn’t actually install a security system. Jeez, you know how expensive those things are? I just stole a Brinks sign out of someone’s yard and put it in my own. What burglar is going to call my bluff when there’s so many houses without security signs around here?

I am Become Beard, Destroyer of Worlds

By in atheism, beards, crime and punishment No Comments

It’s a common complaint among my fellow atheists that the majority of our countrymen think us to be immoral simply because we don’t fear celestial punishment in a nonexistent afterlife. It’s bordering on cliché to say that atheists have no chance of ever being elected to high office here. But I have even more cause to feel aggrieved, as it appears that 80% of potential jurors would likely adjudge me a criminal just because of my magnificent facial plumage. This, despite scientific evidence proving me to be the most trustworthy person you know. Imagine if I were on trial for a capital crime and refused to swear on “a book of Bronze Age fables”, before smirking insolently and sitting back to stroke my hirsute cheeks and chin! Would I even make it to sentencing, or would they just draw and quarter me right there in the courtroom?

Funny, too, given that I just got the notice summoning me to be on standby for federal jury duty from June through December. I can tell you right now, anyone with even a few visible whiskers is going to walk as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care if they’re sporting a necklace of human body parts. This tyranny of the smooth-cheeked must be brought down.

I Read the News Today, Oh, Boy

By in crime and punishment, germans supported their troops too, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Glenn Greenwald:

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the alter of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?
Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.
In sum, a murderous religious extremist was killed. The U.S. has erupted in a collective orgy of national pride and renewed faith in the efficacy and righteousness of military force. Other than that, the repercussions are likely to be far greater in terms of domestic politics — it’s going to be a huge boost to Obama’s re-election prospects and will be exploited for that end — than anything else.

I don’t care about Osama bin Laden, and to be quite frank, I never really did. Anyone can kill 3000 people, but it takes a willing nation to kill 1,000,000. 9/11 did not introduce the world to just one monster, it was a day that created two. So don’t expect me to dance, or celebrate, I am not even going to smile. While one monster may have died, the other one still holds a knife to my back, a gun in my mouth, and collects my taxes.

Also, etc. I hadn’t heard anything of this until this morning, when the usual morons at work started chortling about how “we got him.” I assumed they must mean Gaddafi, given that we’d just killed his son and grandchildren over the weekend. But eventually I figured it out, and after listening a little while longer in silence, I was struck by something: all they were doing was complaining.
Complaining about liberals. Complaining about people who “probably wanted him to have a trial so we could put him on probation. Maybe sit down and talk to him about his feelings.” Snort, haw, yuk yuk. Complaining about those liberals who are going to whine about how we have no right to be carrying out military activities inside Pakistan to begin with. Complaining that the NYT and WaPo didn’t have big bold screaming headlines about it despite holding up the press runs for an extra hour (due to their Islamist sympathies, you see). Complaining about all the people who are going to call America evil. Complaining about how Obama doesn’t deserve credit for doing what a six year-old could have figured out to do. Complaining about how, when attacked by all these bleeding-heart liberals for disrespecting Bin Laden’s human rights, Obama was “probably going to blame Bush somehow, you watch.” Sneering about Muslims in general who are probably wailing on their prayer rugs right now. Running their mouths about how liberals should be shot, or beaten in the streets.
This is how they celebrate something they’re happy about. With nothing immediate to complain about, they imagine what a bunch of liberal caricatures might think and say and proceed to complain all the more venomously about that. They’re really that addicted to the dubious joy of venting their neverending hatred of anyone who doesn’t belong to their resentful tribe. They simply don’t know what to do with themselves if they’re not twitching with rage over some intolerable affront to their worldview.
I’ve recollected before some Taoist passage, perhaps from the Hua Hu Ching, that talks about how, when faced with the occasional inevitability of lethal violence, to treat it as an occasion for mourning, sad that it should ever have to come to this, not something to take joy from. I thought of it again this morning, while simultaneously nauseated and pitying over how bitter, miserable, rancid and hateful these people are. I composed myself with a grimace and a shudder and left as quickly as I could. They can have their political and military victories if this is what it leads to. I’d rather spend my time thinking about all the things I have to be grateful for.

Mephisto Schmaltz

By in crime and punishment, extraordinary popular delusions, jests japes jokes jollies, religion No Comments

Ahahaha:

At the heart of Bell’s position is that God’s love can triumph over every obstacle, including sins that Christians have long believed would consign them to anguish in the afterlife. But that notion is appalling to many people, Bell argues, and is minimized even by those who uphold its truth.
“The book is saying we need to take hell more seriously,” Bell told The Associated Press, “Because the people who warn about hell when you die don’t seem to talk about it very much.”
“Atheists are not going to be impressed by this book. Skeptics are not going to be impressed by this book,” said Christian blogger Justin Taylor at the Southern Baptist forum. “The people who are going to be impressed by this book are disaffected evangelicals.
I doubt I’d be impressed either, but it sure does tickle my black humor funny bone to watch heated, incoherent arguments break out over the precise nature of imaginary places. When it comes to hell in particular, I find it of great interest to see what exactly my fellow hairless apes find worthy of eternal torment, and how they react to the idea that they may not be able to take a vicious delight in their enemies receiving their due. The early Church fathers promised that this kind of voyeurism was one of the joys of heaven, damn it!

When in Rome

By in crime and punishment, drugs, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Digby:

Am I the only one who thinks it’s extremely odd that we are sending “Homeland Security” agents to Afghanistan? Don’t we have a military that’s tasked with these sorts of chores? And if it’s just a “loan” of certain specialists, why is Janet Napolitano making the announcement instead of the proper foreign service or military spokesperson? Afghanistan isn’t in her portfolio — at least I didn’t think it was. I thought we were going to keep the new Homeland Security forces here in the … homeland.
That’s all rhetorical, of course, since it’s been obvious for decades that many of our allegedly “domestic” agencies like the DEA and the ATF are really para-military organizations which are deployed all over the world. But it looks as though we aren’t even going to pretend anymore that there’s a separation between the two. And that means that we have created yet another sacred police/military budget item that will be nearly impossible to scale back.
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify severe inequality. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, depending on the state you’re in, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
…What caused the unprecedented explosion in our prison population? It turns out that the activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were right: The “war on drugs” is the single greatest contributor to mass incarceration in the United States. Drug convictions accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state prison system between 1985 and 2000 — the period of the U.S. penal system’s most dramatic expansion.
This kind of stuff is why I largely have no interest in political issues, at least not the sort that occupy most political bloggers. The ever-expanding police/military/surveillance state outweighs almost everything else in importance and in danger to the values we supposedly hold, yet unquestioned support for it is bipartisan, as is the inexorable upward transfer of wealth. Most progressive bloggers feebly note that supposed deficit hawks on the right have no interest in reining in military spending, but none of them are going to waste their time tilting at such windmills either, not when there’s a chance to pose for a picture with the president, or important progress to be made in making sure gays, atheists and fat people all get an equal opportunity to participate in our foreign conquests and occupations. And as Glenn Greenwald observes, even though Democratic politicians just as much as their Republican counterparts are going to keep prolonging the same “wars” on drugs and terror, progressives will meekly drop even the pretense of rebelliousness when election time rolls around.
Feh. If you need me, I’ll be doing some reading.

Hands All Over

By in crime and punishment, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Hands all over the Eastern border

You know what?
I think we’re falling from composure
Hands all over Western culture
Ruffling feathers
Turning eagles into vultures
– Soundgarden
So, it appears the irresistible force of Americans’ desire for a sterile, antiseptic security state to keep them vacuum-sealed and safe from the slightest threat of harm from evildoers has run headlong into the immovable object of our longstanding Puritanical hangups about nudity and genitalia. This promises to be quite entertaining.
Presidents claiming sweeping new powers to detain and/or execute anyone accused of terrorism without supplying evidence or providing a trial? Yawn, skritch skritch, pass the remote. Security guards making sure I don’t have a bomb stuffed down my urethra, giggling at pictures of my microphallus and man-boobs? Git mah musket, Martha, it’s revolution time!
Ah, well, “Don’t touch my junk!” doesn’t quite rouse the liberty-loving soul in the same way as classics like “Give me liberty or give me death!”, but you go to war against the police state with the slogans you have, not the ones you wish you had.

Emperor U.S.A. (The Naked Truth)

By in augean stables, crime and punishment, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

The first former Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in federal criminal court was found guilty on a single conspiracy charge Wednesday but cleared on 284 other counts. The outcome, a surprise, seriously undermines – and could doom – the Obama administration’s plans to put other Guantanamo detainees on trial in U.S. civilian courts.
…The administration did not want to rely exclusively on the military commissions that the George W. Bush administration had made a centerpiece of its detention policy. President Obama’s strategy, however, has run into fierce, cross-party opposition in Congress and New York, in part because of concerns that it would be harder to win convictions in civilian court.
…But the verdict was still a blow to administration officials, who were quietly confident that Ghailani would be found guilty on all charges. For some, a conviction on only one count amounted to a close call. Had he been cleared of all charges, the administration would probably have been forced to take Ghailani back into military custody rather than see him released.
…”One of 285 counts is not exactly a track record for a prosecution team to be proud of,” said Kirk Lippold, former commander of the USS Cole, which was attacked by al-Qaeda in 2000. “I think the administration is now in a position where they have to get serious about using military commissions. This case sends a clear and unmistakable signal about using civilian courts: It didn’t work.”
So, in other words, if we can’t be guaranteed a guilty verdict in advance, we’re not even going to bother with the pretense of a show trial. If we don’t actually have enough fucking evidence to convict someone under this “rule of law” that makes us so much more special than our enemies, we’ll just keep you in jail anyway until we can get the result we want through a kangaroo court.
What a nation of fucking cowards.

Half Baked

By in crime and punishment, drugs, ohferfucksake No Comments

Josh Marshall:

More generally though, I just don’t know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it’s that I’m getting into my 40s. And maybe I’m a hypocrite. I of course know people who smoke grass. And I don’t have any problem with it. Decriminalized? Yes, I think probably so. But that’s not the same as legalization. It’s very different actually. And let me be clear that I think our drug laws are catastrophic. They create endemic violence first in our major cities and now along the borders and it’s led to generations of Americans rotting in prison. The whole war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster. And the fact that people can’t use marijuana for clear medical reasons is crazy. But do I think it should be like alcohol? Anyone over 18 or 21 can buy it?

What timing! He says this during the same week that this story came out.
Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.
Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the deadliest. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Marijuana, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower.
Anyway, back to Pops and his incoherent rambling:
I remember, many years ago, talking to my father about the idea of legalization. And bear in mind, my Dad, God bless him, smoked a decent amount of grass in his day, said he didn’t like the idea. One reason is that he was already a bit older by that time. But he had this very contradictory and hard to rationalize position which was that he was fine with people smoking pot but keeping it at least nominally illegal kept public usage in some check. Again, how to rationalize that in traditional civic terms? Not really sure. But frankly, I think I kind of agree.
For what it’s worth, of course I’ve smoked pot. But for purely personal reasons I haven’t in more than twenty years.
Good for me, but not for thee. It’s fine for middle-class white guys to use while they’re young, as long as they’re discreet about it. After all, if they get busted for it, the worst that’s likely to happen is a fine, or maybe some probation. As for everyone else, well…
Maybe Josh should just stick to the old “Why do you think they call it dope?” gambit — see, kids? Smoking pot will make you stupid!

G-U-I! L-T-Y! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

By in bread and circuses, crime and punishment No Comments

James Wolcott:

Yes, Clemons’ deceits and trespasses are worse than anyone expected–we don’t needn’t run through the entire litany of his chest-thumping professions of innocence and marital infidelities–but putting him behind bars, what good will that do? Apart from giving journalists malicious delight and talk-radio sports jocks another opportunity to roll out their prison-rape jokes, the inevitable references to the hulking cellmate who’s usually given a black name, har har. Whatever the outcome of his trial, Clemons is hardly some menace to society, and I hate the punitive zeal that animates so much of the media and the online inferno, that girds so much of American society. We lock up too many people as it is, our incarceration rate a national shame and a global disgrace.

I don’t have anything important to add. It’s just always good to see someone else disgusted by the carnival-like atmosphere that pervades the spectacle of a celebrity arrest/trial/jail sentence. Frankly, I’m much less concerned about the comeuppance due to Martha Stewart, Lindsay Lohan, Roger Clemons, or even O.J. Simpson than I am about the ease with which ordinary people turn into such bloodthirsty voyeurs, as if they haven’t been able to sleep for ages, knowing these villains are out there roaming free.
And yes, it certainly is an interesting window into the American psyche, this gleeful obsession with criminals being victimized by big, black rapists. Perhaps some historians and psychologists could examine that perennial theme in more depth.

Cruel and Unusual

By in crime and punishment, foolosophy, the big sleep No Comments

Speaking of support for capital punishment, approximately 60 percent of Americans still support the death penalty. Why does it persist in this country when the majority of developed nations have abandoned it?
It’s becoming clear to many people in this country that we have a very high number of people in prison and that we are using capital punishment more than many Western nations. When you add it all up, the United States is really quite a punitive nation. And yet, many of the people who created the foundation for this country were sent as slaves, convicts and indentured servants. Our society was built on that — like Australia, it’s very much a part of our DNA. But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We want to put our prisons out of sight, out of mind, and have executions that seem to not be causing any pain and are carried out out of the public gaze because it doesn’t square with our notion of who we are.
– Salon
Is it just me, or did that not really answer the question? We defy world opinion on the death penalty because we won’t accept that we’re a nation of convicts and other undesirables? Huh?
Anyway, I’ve often wondered about that myself, and while you might think I would seize a golden opportunity to condemn Myrrhkins as ignorant, bloodthirsty barbarians, I’m actually sympathetic to the pro-capital punishment crowd in certain respects. Of course there are myriad issues with the system itself that make the case for a moral opposition to the death penalty, and I’ve argued it many times myself against conservatives. You don’t have to look far to find yet another story of someone who was freed from death row or a life sentence after DNA evidence exonerated them. Then you even have Kafkaesque situations where DNA isn’t even involved, and eyewitnesses retract their testimony, or even admit dishonesty, yet the conviction and sentence are somehow allowed to stand. That’s all on top of the class issue, where poor people may primarily be guilty of not being able to afford competent attorneys, or they may have run afoul of laws reflecting cultural hysteria that disproportionately affect certain people more than others (only 18 to 1 is an improvement?) There are plenty of solid reasons to oppose the entire idea on principle.
But since the constitutional issue of cruel and unusual punishment always comes up in this discussion, I wonder about the seemingly casual way that people can accept a sentence of life without the possibility of parole as being some sort of humane alternative. If you’re willing to accept the idea that there are some people who are clearly guilty and remorseless about it, unable to ever be rehabilitated and reintroduced into society, well, who is it benefiting to keep them alive? I don’t ask facetiously; I myself would rather die than spend decades locked in a small cell or building. People seem to have allowed the Christian notion that human life is inherently sacred to blind them to the fact that pure existence itself, for its own sake, is meaningless. What are we living for?
I remember when Ted Kaczynski tried to hang himself with his own underwear during his trial rather than face the possibility of being stuck in a cage for the rest of his life. I don’t recall clearly, but he may have even asked for the death penalty at one point. Seeing news reports happily describing his new life in a Supermax prison in Colorado, confined to a small cell 23 hours a day, viscerally repulsed me more than the idea that he might possibly feel pain during lethal injection. The man wants to die. He’s never going to be free again. But we’re going to force him to live as long as he can to satisfy our own pointless vengeance.
The idea that a certain number of innocent people will die every year to provide you with comfortable illusions of justice and safety is most certainly one that advocates should force themselves to consider deeply. What does it say about you if you accept that trade-off? But equally imperative is the need to consider what it says about us when we’re willing to prolong a person’s punishment and torment when there’s nothing to be gained from it, the need to consider what it really means to live, suffer and die.
1 2 3 4