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thedreadvampy · 3 years ago

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On the other hand, and moving away from direct Mechanisms Discourse (which I prefer to not get over involved in tbh but also this ISN'T about that it's just jumping off it) - it absolutely is deeply classist to assume that somebody is illiterate or ignorant because of poverty/assumed poverty, and that's a huge problem. but also I think on a broader social level (at least in the UK) there is an idea in the left that it's classist to acknowledge the connection between poverty and illiteracy, while the truth is that illiteracy is a problem of poverty (poverty not in the sense of just Not Having Money but in the sense of system denial of adequate resources). Poverty doesn't = illiteracy but illiteracy is very much a problem of poverty - not a failure of a marginalised individual but a failure of the system marginalising them.

Adult illiteracy is a surprisingly large issue in eg both rural and urban Scotland, but it's not because poor people are stupid, ignorant or unwilling to learn - it's because schools are inadequate or inaccessible, classes are managed not taught, teachers are stretched thin and schools are underfunded so don't have resources to help struggling students, if you get to secondary school still unable to read and write you're completely locked out of the educational system unless you can access a school with the resources to teach you individually, and because of this, classism and a lack of support, poorer kids are more likely to switch off school as early as possible.

Social geography is also a big issue. In urban areas, schools in poorer areas get bad reputations, so they're underfunded, so they do worse, so they're funded less, etc, until they're a bare minimum of staff just trying to get through the day in collapsing buildings with no resources and five textbooks. Where better-funded schools can afford teaching assistants, 1:1 support for struggling students, decent food provision for kids, follow-up on children in need of support at home, more teachers for smaller classes, maybe counseling and psychological support, maybe Special Educational Needs classes for older kids to work on basic literacy and numeracy to catch up, worse-funded schools have one underpaid unsupported teacher trying to manage a class of 35 kids with wildly different needs. They don't have the resources to help support kids with issues that might affect their schooling, like parental abuse or neglect, trauma, a parent in prison, care responsibilities, hunger, homelessness, neurodiversities that affect their ability to learn in the prescribed way, learning disabilities like dyslexia, physical health issues including visual or auditory impairments...all things that when supported are highly surmountable but when unsupported often end up with children being perceived and treated as stupid, disruptive or evil. The problem then compounds itself because the kids are badly treated which makes them more disruptive and less able to learn, and more and more work is needed to help them which teachers continue to not have any capacity or resources for.

Rural poverty comes with its own schooling issues as well, in that poverty is generally correlated with remoteness. Poor rural communities are often hours away from population centres, so either you have tiny highly local schools serving a handful of families where a single teacher needs to invent lesson plans that somehow balance the needs of 11 year olds and 4 year olds of all abilities, or your kids need to somehow get into town every morning before you get to work, which may mean dropping them off at 6am, having to part pay for buses, taxis or ferries, sending them on their own, or leaving them with friends and family, and realistically the way that often shakes down is that they don't go. You teach them at home, and they may not even exist for the truancy office to know about.

Literacy is also connected to family culture. Both my parents were people with degrees from educated families, and my mum was a full time parent, and the result is that school didn't teach me to read - I was already a confident and enthusiastic reader. Even richer families may hire tutors for small children, pay for extracurricular learning, etc. The poorer a family is, the more likely neither parent is available to spend time reading with their kids, because they're working full time - at that economic level a single income household is almost entirely unviable so either both parents work or there's a single parent working extra hours or they're just exhausted from worrying about the bills and what's sold to them as a personal failure to look after their family.

One thing it's easy to forget is that while people in the UK still do drop out of school in their teens to work, a generation ago it was almost the norm for a lot of communities (especially the children of farmers, miners and factory workers) to have left school well before the end of compulsory education, both because of school being a hostile space and because of the need for an additional income. Now as well as then, a lot of kids drop out to work as unpaid carers, disproportionately in poorer families that can't afford private care or therapeutic support. Literacy aside, generations of leaving school with no qualifications doesn't tend to teach you that formal learning is as important as experience and vocational learning, and you don't expect to finish anyway so why put yourself through misery trying to do well? But it includes literacy. I grew up in a former mining area and a lot of people my dad's age and older were literate enough to read signs and football results, but took adult classes in middle age or later to get past the pointing finger and moving lips. and if you're parents don't or can't read, it's a lot harder for you to learn.

There's a lot of classism and shame tied up in the roots of illiteracy. Teachers and governments and schoolmates will often have vocally expressed low expectations of poorer students; a rich child who does poorly at school has problems, a poor child who does poorly at school is a problem child. They're often treated with hostility and aggression from infancy and any anger or disinterest in school is often treated not as a problem to be solved but as proof that you were right to deem them a write-off. Poorer or more neglected children (or children for whom English is a second language) will often be deemed "stupid" by their peers, and start at a disadvantage because of the issues around early childhood learning in families where parents are overstretched.

Kids learn not to admit that they don't know or understand something, because if you start school unable to read and write and do basic maths when a lot of kids your age are already confident, you get mocked and called stupid and lazy by your peers, and treated with frustration by your teachers. So kids learn to avoid people noticing that they need help. That means that school, which could help a lot, isn't somewhere you can go for help but a source of huge anxiety and pain - more so when you factor in the background radiation of classism that only grows as you get older around not having the right clothes, the right toys, the right experiences, my mum says your mum's a ragger, my mum says I shouldn't hang out with you because you're a bad lot - so again kids switch off very early and see education as something to survive not something helpful.

The same is very much true of adult literacy. A lot of adults are very shamed and embarrassed to admit that they struggle with reading and writing - a lot of parents particularly want to be able to teach their kids to read, but aren't confident readers themselves, and feel too stupid and embarrassed to admit out loud that they can't read well, let alone to seek out and endure adult literacy classes that are a constant reminder of their perceived failure and ignorance (and can also be excruciating. Books for adult literacy learning are not nearly widespread enough and a lot of intelligent experienced adults are subjected to reading Spot the Dog and similar books targeted at small children's interests). Adult literacy classes also cost time and also money, so a lot of people only have the space for them after retirement, if at all.

And increasingly, illiteracy (or lack of fluency in English) increases poverty and marginalisation, and thus the chances of inherited literacy problems. Reading information, filling out forms and accessing the internet in a meaningful way are all massively limited by illiteracy, and you need those skills to access welfare, to access medical care, to avoid exploitative loans, to deal with any service providers, etc. Most jobs above minimum wage and a lot below require a fairly high level of literacy, whether it's office work or reading an instructional memo on a building site or reading drink instructions in McDonalds. Illiteracy is a huge barrier between somebody and the rest of the world, especially in a modern world that just assumes universal literacy, and especially especially as more and more of life involves the internet, texting, WhatsApp, email, and so on - it's becoming harder and harder for people with limited literacy to be fully involved in society. And that means the only mobility is downwards, and that exacerbates all the problems that lead to adult illiteracy.

People who can't read after the age of 6 or so are treated as stupid. People who can't read fluently when they're adults are seen as stupid and almost subhuman. There's so much shame and personal judgement attached to difficulty reading, but the fact that illiteracy is almost exclusively linked to poverty and deprivation is pretty conclusive. Illiteracy isn't about the failure or stupidity of the individual, it's about the lack of support, care and respect afforded to poor people at all stages of their life. Being illiterate doesn't make you stupid - many people are highly intelligent, creative, capable, thoughtful, and illiterate. I know people who can immediately solve complex engineering problems on the fly but take ten minutes to write down a sentence of instruction. It isn't classist to say that illiteracy is caused by poverty - it's both classist and inaccurate to say that illiteracy says anything about the worth, intelligence or personhood of the poor, that it's a result of a desire to be ignorant, or that it's evidence that people are poor because they're stupid, incapable, ignorant or bad parents. The link between poverty and illiteracy is the problem of classism and bigotry, no more no less, and we deal with it by working against the ideas that both poverty and lack of education are a reflection of individual worth.

Illiteracy isn't a problem of intelligence, it's a problem of education, and that matters because education is not inherent. it's something that has to be provided and maintained by parents, by the state, by the community. you're not born educated. you are educated. except more than a quarter of the Scottish population isn't educated, because the system doesn't give a fuck about them and actively excludes them or accidentally leaves them behind.

#idl why i wrote this I'm just very angry about how we as a culture treat adult illiteracy in the uk #which is to say - we don't #we ignore it and think about it as a problem of the past or of other countries #and if we do encounter it we treat illiterate people as uniquely stupid and ignorant #as if it's a personal not systemic problem #26.7% of people in Scotland are either illiterate or have severe issues with literacy #16.4% in the uk as a whole #it's this invisible symptom of deprivation that nobody fucking talks about #less than half of people in prison have basic literacy and numeracy skills #and that's not because only stupid people end up in prison it's because illiteracy is a symptom of the poverty pipeline #and i don't think there's current data on this but I'd guess we're going to see an ongoing dip in literacy rates #correlated with austerity from 2010 on #because child poverty and child hunger in this country has consistently steeply climbed since then #and you don't. learn well. when you're hungry.#and also i anticipate a drop in literacy associated with Covid. it's two years where kids without existing literacy skills #parents who are home and consistent internet access have really been unable to engage with a lot of classes #and teachers have been even less able to offer meaningful personalised support #and two years is SO LONG in early years. being set back two years compared to other students can affect your education your whole life.

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woman-loving · 4 years ago

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Policing Lesbians in 1950s-70s Sydney

Selection from Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History, Rebecca Jennings, 2015.

This section describes how lesbianism could be subject to policing even in the absence of explicit criminalization, and how public silence around the issue of lesbianism contributed to confusion over the legal status of lesbian behaviors in a way that aided repression.

Cultural attitudes toward homosexuality in mid-twentieth century Australia were shaped in part by the strong legal stance on the issue. Male homosexual activity was legally proscribed under the Crimes (Amendment) Act 1924, but lesbianism was never explicitly criminalised in New South Wales. Official concern over female same-sex desire appears to have been extremely limited and there is no evidence that the question of legislating against lesbianism was even debated in government circles. Some cultural commentators were critical of this apparent oversight. Dr McGeorge, member of a special committee appointed by the NSW government in 1955 to examine problems associated with homosexuality, complained: ‘No investigation into the lesbianism aspect of it has been suggested. It should have been. The investigation is overdue.’[7] Claiming that ‘ordinarily normal and healthy’ young girls were being seduced into the practice by subtle, older lesbians, McGeorge argued: ‘The authorities, unfortunately, seem to regard this as too delicate a question to be tackled openly. Because of its increase, it must e brought into the open and fought in the open.[8] For McGeorge, lesbianism was a social evil which posed a threat to young women and needed to be both publicly debated and legally proscribed.[9] However, his views did not find support amongst legislators and the special committee of which he was a member was never to publish a report.[10]

While the political will to tackle the issue at government level was limited, concern was apparently greater in the police force. In her autobiography, NSW’s first woman police officer, Lillian Armfield, suggests that female homosexuality was a matter of concern to the police. Referring to the case of Iris Webber, a notorious criminal and lesbian in interwar Sydney, Armfield commented:

“[Lesbianism] is a problem the authorities must face, and it is a difficult one. It will require the co-operation of the wisest and best of our medical specialists, police, clergy, and welfare workers, because it is on the increase. Those who practise it aren’t all as open about it as Iris Webber. They are furtive and subtle, and the leaders in the cult are shrewd and persistent in their eagerness to corrupt others ... Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, this menace will have to be faced by the authorities. It is a menace too serious to be ignored just because it is such an ugly and unpleasant issue to drag out into the open.”[11]

Members of the Vice Squad apparently shared Armfield’s view that lesbianism was a ‘cult which, unfortunately, has a much wider vogue than the average citizen suspects.’[12] Such attitudes helped to share the stance of the police toward lesbianism, and despite the absence of any specific legislation prohibiting sexual acts between women, the police utilised a range of minor, broadly defined offences to target lesbians, thereby rendering certain forms of lesbian practice or identity illegal.[13]

The strongly disapproving attitudes of some members of the police force, combined with the absence of a public discourse on lesbianism and the enforcement of laws against male homosexuality, produced considerable confusion about the precise state of the law relating to lesbianism. Margaret, who became aware of her own same-sex desires in the late 1950s, recalled having a general sense that lesbianism was prohibited. Having met a young woman at work to whom she was attracted, she was apprehensive about approaching the woman for fear of the consequences:

“Well, I felt that this was a big responsibility for me, seducing this young woman and putting her on this path to disaster or that I’d get into trouble, surely, because it wasn’t appropriate to do that--I don’t know if it was a criminal offence, but I suppose if somebody found out about it, it’d be pretty serious.”[14]

While Margaret was unsure of the exact consequences she might be faced with, the perception that lesbian sexual practice was, in fact, illegal, was relatively widespread before the 1970s and both the police and members of the public--including lesbians themselves--acted accordingly. When 15-year-old Sandra Willson attempted to put her arm around an older female friend in 1950s Sydney, the woman called the police and a female officer warned Sandra: ‘You do realise that your behaviour constitutes a criminal offence?’ She was told that if she contacted the woman again, she would be brought before the Children’s Court.[15] A few years later, her sexual practices brought her into contact with the police again. Now 17 and living with her girlfriend in a small Bondi flat, Sandra wrote to a friend describing her new domestic circumstances. The letter fell into the hands of the friend’s mother who, believing Sandra’s lesbian relationship to be illegal, contacted the police. That Sunday, Sandra and her girlfriend Barbara were at home in bed when the police arrived at the door. Referring to Sandra’s letter, an officer claimed: ‘New you can’t try to deny you are a homosexual because the letter states quite plainly that you are. And that you are living with this other girl as “man and wife.”‘[16] The police searched the flat, apparently commenting on any evidence that the two girls were sharing bedroom, and Sandra recalled:

“They acted like a law unto themselves and I hated their bastard hides for it. I wanted to rush them to attack them, but their size alone showed this would be folly. But I was also cowed by the feeling that they were right, and I felt such shame. I knew it was a criminal offence to make love to anyone of one’s own sex Men over the age of eighteen could actually go to jail for up to three years for it. Not a public performance, but for an act done behind their own bedroom doors, in their own home and lodgings.

It was a criminal act. Against the laws of God and man!”[17]

The police took Sandra and Barbara down to Central Police Station on Liverpool Street where they were charged with ‘being exposed to moral danger’. Sandra, who, as the elder of the pair, was portrayed as the seducer, was sentenced to detention at the Girls Training School in Parramatta, while Barbara was released into the care of her parents.

Child welfare legislation was widely used in early and mid-twentieth century NSW to control socially unacceptable, but rarely criminal, behaviour by teenage girls. Kerry Carrington and Margaret Pereira have argued that ‘The blurring of delinquency and neglect led to the expansion of juvenile justice intervention into the lives of young people which allowed the Children’s Court the jurisdiction to punish children for non-criminal conduct.’[18] Girls were charged under the NSW Child Welfare Act 1939 as either ‘neglected’ or ‘uncontrollable’ and ‘exposed to moral danger’ for behaviours such as truancy, sexual activity or being the victims of sexual abuse. A broad range of agents, from the police to social workers, education professionals and psychologists, advised on and intervened in cases, basing their determinations as much on family and social background and current medical and psychiatric theory as on the specific details of the relevant offence or charge. Girls could be sentenced to an indeterminate period in a child welfare institution such as Parramatta Girls Training School, sometimes only ending when they turned 18, although girls charged with a criminal offence would usually only remain for between six and nine months. There was no formal system for distinguishing between girls convicted of a criminal offence and others, although a broad attempt was made to keep girls deemed ‘corrupt’ apart form the rest. Conditions in the home were tough and perceived misdemeanours were punished with solitary confinement or harsh and humiliating tasks such as the scrubbing of floors.[19]

For adult women, a range of other laws related to vagrancy and public decency were utilised by the police to express disapproval of lesbianism, in the absence of specific legislation against female same-sex activity. In the decades after the war, dress codes were employed to contain the activities of butch lesbians in the public sphere, although confusion was again widespread as to the precise state of the law in this regard. Sandra Willson, who regularly dressed in men’s clothes on the street in 1950s’ Sydney and occasionally wore men’s suits to work, made enquiries into the legality of this practice. She was informed by her parole officer that wearing men’s clothes was not in itself illegal, but masquerading as a man was: ‘There is nothing illegal about it’, she was told, ‘as long as you make no attempt to portray yourself as a male. You can’t, for instance, use a men’s urinal but will always have to use the women’s convenience.’[20] Laurie, however, recalling her experiences as a butch lesbian in Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s, maintained that laws did regulate women’s dress. ‘Some law,’ she said, required that, ‘With the butches, in those days, you had to wear, if you dressed butch--three piece suits and that--you had to wear a bit of women’s apparel, didn’t matter what.’[21] Rae agreed, claiming: ‘Back then the laws were quite strange. God help you if you didn’t wear a bra, for example, because, if you were picked up by the police, you had to be wearing three pieces of women’s apparel. Now I don’t wear a bra, if I’d been picked up, I’d have been really in trouble. No, you had to have three pieces of women’s apparel on.’[22] Vagrancy laws, which prohibited indecent and disorderly behaviour, had been used in NSW and elsewhere in Australia to target cross-dressing since the nineteenth century, although research has demonstrated that the penalties faced by those who came to notice of the police could vary widely.[23] However, it is unclear whether any law specifically defined male impersonation in terms of items of apparel and it is interesting that the apparently widespread belief in such legislation is also reflected in US butch lesbian communities of the postwar period. In their study of a lesbian community in Buffalo, New York, in the mid-twentieth century, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis note that ‘Many narrators mention the legal specification for proper dress, although some said it required three pieces of female clothes, [and some] two.’[24] Kennedy and Davis were unable to locate ‘a New York State law about what constitutes male or female impersonation, despite the unanimity of narrators on the subject’ and, drawing on the work of Nan Hunter, concluded that ‘a judge in a particular case made a ruling that two or three pieces of clothing of the “correct” sex negated male or female impersonation and that set a precedent used by law enforcement agencies.[25]

Laws against insulting or offensive behaviour were also interpreted broadly by police to include demonstrations of affection between women or visible manifestations of a lesbian identity. Addressing a seminar on ‘Female Homosexuality’ at Sydney University in 1975, Helen Coonan outlined a number of ways in which lesbians were discriminated against in law, and noted that ‘lesbian behaviour can be prosecuted and has been prosecuted under the catch all phrase of “offensive behaviour”.’[26] In 1978, the feminist and gay press reported that two women had been arrested and charged for hugging on the grass in a Sydney park.[27] Women in lesbian bars were also subject to police harassment. Jan Hillier, a Melbourne butch lesbian, recalled the ‘frightening times she and her friends experience don a trip to Sydney in the 1960s:

“I remember I once went to Sydney with Hank and Speedy and a few of the butch lesbians. We all got on the train and off we went and we got all dolled up and went to some gay bar in William Street. Well Bumper Farrell raided the place, scooped us all up and put us in the Darlinghurst cells for the weekend. We were only kids, 16 or 17. He locked us up for being drunk and disorderly and left us there for the whole weekend. No charges were ever laid. On the Monday we had to go back to Melbourne to work. I was terrified my mother was going to find out I’d been in jail ... I’ve never been that fond of Sydney.”[28]

Such police tactics continued into the 1970s and, in March 1978, lesbian and gay campaigning group CAMP NSW complained that clientele at the lesbian nightclub Ruby Reds had been arrested on charges of using offensive language.[29]

While no legislation explicitly targeted female homosexuality, therefore, the very absence of a public discourse around lesbianism and the law left women in considerable doubt as to which behaviours were legal and which, if any, were not. As a result, many women absorbed a general and ill-defined sense that desire between women--and any outward expression of it--was not only unacceptable but potentially punishable in some way.

#lgbtq history #lesbian history #australia #sydney #australian lgbtq history #rebecca jennings #police

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msclaritea · 4 years ago

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“There have been prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynching, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality,” Politico reported.

“It matters who is in those rooms. I knew I had to be in those rooms. We have to be in those rooms even when there aren’t many like us there.” Kamala Harris makes history

What Kamala Harris Did In Those Rooms: Or 50 Criminal Justice Reforms & Accomplishments (link includes corresponding articles)

1. Deputy DA- Kamala Harris Opposed Prop 21 (passed with 62%) which increased criminal penalties for crimes committed by youth and incorporated many youth offenders into the adult criminal justice system.

2. Deputy DA- Kamala Harris co-founded the Coalition to End the Exploitation of Kids, to provide legal and health services to sexually exploited children, including teenage “prostitutes”

3. As member of the board of trustees of SF MOMA, Kamala Harris created the 1st of its kind in the US “Matches” program, which pairs at-risk youth with mentors to expose them to art and broaden their horizons.

4.DA- Kamala Harris created Back on Track program to help drug offenders re-enter society. Provided vocational training, counseling, parenting services, etc. Substantially reduced recidivism for participants

5.DA- Kamala Harris refused to seek the death penalty even when pressured by members of her own party due to racial disparities in how it is applied 6.DA- Created LGBT Hate Crime Unit

7.DA- Kamala Harris worked to get the first safe house in San Francisco for girls who wanted out of the sex trade 8.DA- Changed underage women/men from being treated as prostitutes to being treated as victims

9.DA/AG- Kamala Harris helped found the Center for Youth Wellness which works to improve the health of children exposed to childhood trauma

10.AG- Kamala Harris created the Bureau of Children’s Justice (BCJ) to streamline enforcement of laws that uphold children’s rights & pursue policies that improve the lives of children Unroll available on Thread Reader

11.AG- BCJ partnered w/USC to link data from the DOJ & Social Services’ case mgmt systems to enable researchers for the 1st time to better determine the overlap b/w CA’s child welfare &juvenile justice populations

12.AG- Kamala Harris’ BCJ worked to diagnose challenges in California’s juvenile justice data systems, in partnership with the Governance Lab at New York University

13.AG- BCJ worked to deliver previously unavailable juvenile justice data (from the Juvenile Court Probation Statistical Sys) to researchers at the Public Policy Institute of CA, Harvard U of Chicago,& UC Berkeley 14.AG-BCJ collaborate with the Judicial Council to develop dashboards for judges to make better decisions about adjudicated juveniles. 15.AG-Awarded Second Chance Grant to expand Back on Track to LA as AG

16.AG- As Attorney General CREATED the Division of Recidivism Reduction and Re-Entry (DR3) to reduce the number of repeat offenders

17.AG- DR3 partnered on the Court of College (C2C). The program is designed to divert young offenders from future criminal behavior through cognitive behavioral intervention & exposure to higher education

18.AG- Kamala Harris’ DR3 partnered on the Career Pathways program. It’s an out-of-custody, recidivism-reduction program that provides resources to a probation-supervised population.

19.AG- Kamala Harris’ CA DOJ was accepted into the natl Defending Childhood State Policy Initiative; a cross-sector team of state leaders to develop shared priorities to prevent/address children’s exposure to violence.

20.AG- Created the Truancy Intervention Panel to implement best practices for truancy prevention.

21.AG- BCJ in partnership w/the Ad Council & CA Endowment, conducted a study/designed a public education toolkit to help educators/community leaders communicate w/parents on the importance of kids being in school

22.AG- Created SmartJustice, a new database and analytical tool to track repeat offenders and offense trends to provide counties with more effective options in developing anti-recidivism initiatives.

23.AG- Kamala Harris issued guidance to CA law enforcement agencies outlining new responsibilities to track/report citizen complaints against peace officers, including complaints alleging racial/identity profiling

24.AG- Supported AB71 (which became law) requiring all CA law enforcement agencies to collect data on shootings & use of force by a civilian/police against the other that result in serious bodily injury or death.

25.AG- Created the first Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (“POST”) certified law enforcement training on both procedural justice and implicit bias, the first of its kind in the country.

26.AG- Instituted a body camera policy for all DOJ special agent personnel conducting field operations.

27.AG- Convened community members, incl. roundtables w/HS students from South/East LA. The topics were experiences with police and ideas on how to improve the relationship between youth & law enforcement.

28.AG-Created the 21st Century Policing Working Group to foster discussion regarding implicit bias and building community trust.

29.AG- Kamala Harris created OpenJustice, a 1st of-its-kind criminal justice open data initiative providing unprecedented data. Provides key criminal justice indicators and transparency Unroll available on Thread Reader

30.AG- Kamala Harris opened a civil pattern or practice investigations into the Kern County Sheriff’s Office 31.AG-Kamala Harris opened a civil pattern or practice investigations into Bakersfield Police Department

32.AG-Kamala Harris Created the Racial Profiling Advisory Board Unroll available on Thread Reader

33.AG- Kamala Harris issued guidance outlining the law enforcement agencies responsibilities to assist immigrant crime victims in applying for U-visas.

34.AG- Kamala Harris enlisted major law firms to provide pro-bono legal services to for unaccompanied children entering the US. She supported legislation to provide $3M to qualified CA nonprofits to provide legal aid.

35.AG-Kamala Harris sponsored Bill that allows human trafficking victims to petition court to set aside a conviction of solicitation/prostitution.

36.AG- Kamala Harris eliminated longstanding rape kit backlog of over 1,300 untested kits and significantly reduced processing times. Received the US DOJ’s Award for Professional Innovation in Victim Services

37.AG- Kamala Harris sponsored AB1644 to establish 4yr pilot to assist elementary schools in providing mental health services to students, prioritizing schools in communities with high levels of childhood trauma/ adversity

50 Times #Kamala Accomplished/Advocated for #CriminalJusticeReform 38.AG- #KamalaHarris supported Senate Bill 1143 to significantly limit the practice of isolating juveniles in room confinement. The bill was signed into law and took effect in 2018.

39.AG- Kamala Harris supported AB 1840 to require that state agencies give preference to homeless youth and formerly incarcerated youth when hiring interns and student assistants

40.AG- Kamala Harris supported AB2390 to provide a legislative fix to 2010 legislation that inadvertently removed a mechanism for juvenile offenders with good records on supervised probation to obtain honorable discharge status

41.AG- Kamala Harris supported AB1843 to ensure that juvenile records are protected from unfair and undue inquiry during employer background checks.

42.SEN- Kamala Harris reintroduced (along with colleagues) the National Criminal Justice Commission Act. Creates a National Criminal Justice Commission to review & propose reforms to address the most pressing issues facing the Criminal Justice system.

43.SEN- Kamala Harris sponsored bill that would legalize marijuana; expunge prior convictions, require re-sentencing hearings for those still under supervision;& invest money in communities adversely impacted by the War on Drugs

44.SEN- Kamala Harris sponsored the Pretrial Integrity and Safety Act of 2017 — to encourage states to reform or replace the practice of money bail.

45.SEN- Kamala Harris sponsored legislation to increase funding for public defenders, reduce their workload, and provide pay parity between prosecutors and public defenders

46.SEN- Kamala Harris introduced legislation to limit the use of solitary confinement. Also pressed Bureau of Prisons to take measures to address the significant increase in the use of restricted housing.

47.SEN- Kamala Harris sponsored legislation to end discrimination in public housing for offenders released from prison

48.SEN- Kamala Harris sponsored legislation to reform the treatment of incarcerated women in order to reduce the negative impact incarceration has on the family of women behind bars, especially their children

49.SEN-Kamala Harris sponsored legislation to establish the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men & Boys. The Commission will investigate/provide recommendations to improve the disparities Black men experience.

50.SEN- Kamala Harris worked with civil rights groups (like the NAACP LDF) to strengthen the First Step.

MY QUESTION TO HER CRITICS: CAN YOU DO BETTER?

#Kamala Harris #Accomplishments #Those Rooms=The Lion's Den #LGBTQ Rights #Black Lives Matter #California #Georgia #nevada #Arizona #Black Men #Black Women #Recidivism #Civil Rights #Financial Rights

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gov-info · 5 years ago

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if-you-fan-a-fire · 4 years ago

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“Movie Thrillers Blamed For Juvenile Delinquency,” Border Cities Star. March 11, 1931. Page 05. --- Attacked at Convention ---- Urban Trustees Told That U.S.Productions Are Worst ---- BAN IS DISCUSSED ---- Adoption of Quebec Rule Barring Minors Under 16 Is Endorses --- Motion picture thrillers, especially those produced in the United States, were branded as insidious propaganda for the spread of crime and juvenile delinquency, at the 12th annual convention today of the Urban School Trustees Association of Ontario.

BACKED BY DELEGATES The attack was the movies was led by Dr. Campbell Laidlaw of Ottawa and received whole-hearted support from the delegates. Dr. Laidlaw introduced a resolution which was seconded by F. B. Edmunds K.C. of Toronto, calling upon the executive of the Association to study ways and means whereby the Department of Public Welfare would be petitioned ‘to remove this menace so far as it possible.’

The resolution, which was carried unanimously, suggested that this miht be accomplished by rigid censorship or by adopting regulations now in effect in Quebec, which would bar children under 16 from attending certain pictures.

The discussion on movies was introduced by Dr. Laidlaw after E. T. Howe, Attendance Officer of the Windsor Board of Education had presented a paper outlining problems of delinquency that crop up in the study of school attendance.

‘American producers are allowed to sent their pictures into Canada. I believe this is largely responsible for the trouble, Mrs. M. Arnold of St. Thomas declared. ‘I understand that on April 1 three producing companies are going to start operations in Windsor. We ought to ban the United States films. We don’t require them and well will be showing a bit of British fair play.’

CALLED MENACE Dr. Laidlaw’s resolution states that ‘the moving picture theatre as we have it in our midst today it a great menace and ‘directs children, often most unwholesomely, from the main aim in their young selves, gaining an education.’ The executive will report at next year’s conventions on steps that should be taken.

‘Causes of truancy are many,’ Mr. Rowe said. Some fancied grievance with the teacher the irresistible call of the great outdoors, the environment of poverty and insanitary housing, the evil influence of bad companionship, visual defects, adenoids, lack of co-operation of negligent parents in school attendance, lack of shoes and clothing, and the sensitive temperament of a child. Frequent visitation of the Attendance Officer means less truancy and less crime in the future. Unfortunately the public and the average citizen are apathetic on the value of attendance work. They regard ‘playing hookey’ as harmless when in reality it is often the first step toward criminal tendencies later in life.’

REFLECTION ON HOME ‘One of the most deplorable things in life is the socially ambitious mother who has not the time for her daughter, and the amusement-craving daughter who has not time for her mother. In the child we readily see a reflection of the home and its environments. Parents these days do not believe in the process of acquisition by hard work. They want to make everything easy for their children they want everything ready-made. What we need today is more parents who will teach their children love, service and responsibility, along with morality, ethics, and religion. Parents who have the fear of God in their hearts give their children the proper upbringing.

‘The modern youth has far greater problems to meet than have ever before been encountered by the youth of any generation. He has social and educational problems to meet and they are complicated by the modern inventions. Just because a boy fails to make the proper adjustment does not necessarily mean that he is worthless. It seems to me we should try to adjust our educational system to fit the boy or girl. The problem is a big one and the school authorities should have the assistance of the social, religious and industrial bodies to assist them in getting the modern youth to make the most of his abilities.

#windsor #toronto #crime movies #truancy #censorship #banned from canada #state censorship #causes of crime #youth in the toils #deviant youth #education #boy problem #middle class reformers #child savers #school trustees #great depression in canada #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada

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newstfionline · 6 years ago

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Family Separation: It’s a Problem for U.S. Citizens, Too

By Shaila Dewan, NY Times, June 22, 2018

In May, when the outrage over the separation of migrant children from their parents was beginning to boil, President Trump’s secretary for Homeland Security shrugged off accusations that it was a “form of state terror.” After all, she said, “We do it every day in every part of the country.”

On this point, the secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, is right. Family separation is a fact of life in the United States, happening hundreds--if not thousands--of times a day.

Advocates for criminal justice reform have argued that Americans appalled at the treatment of immigrant families at the border should realize that prosecutors and the police routinely separate children from their parents. It happens when parents or children are arrested, it happens when incarcerated women give birth--it can even be triggered when a pregnant woman fails a mandatory drug test, or when a child skips school. It comes with no warning, sometimes in the middle of the night.

“I see all these progressive mayors and governors getting up and grandstanding about how awful it is,” said David Menschel, a criminal defense lawyer in Portland, Ore., of the impassioned response to the Trump administration’s practices. “Well, if it’s so awful, why are we doing it so much?”

Unlike with the more than 2,300 migrant children that the government has taken from their parents since the crackdown, American parents may not be faced with the fear that the government has lost track of their sons and daughters altogether. But experts say cleaving families apart is still damaging.

Here are a number of ways the government separates families:

Incarcerating parents. A quarter of a million American children are estimated to have a single mother in jail, where the majority of detainees committed a minor offense or have been arrested and are awaiting trial, according to the most recent data from the mid-2000s. Another 150,000 had a mother in prison. Since then, the number of incarcerated women has risen. Many more children have incarcerated fathers--one in four black children can expect to have their father incarcerated before they turn 14.

Most of these children are sent to live with a family member. But children with incarcerated mothers are five times more likely to end up in foster care than those with incarcerated fathers. And as with the migrant children, some have the potential to be lost. In a 2017 investigation, The Dallas Morning News found that children whose parents were behind bars had slept in state offices, run away from foster homes and, in one case, left to be looked after by their 12-year-old sister. In most communities, the newspaper reported, “No one in the criminal justice system is responsible for the safety of children whose mothers go to jail.”

Women who give birth while incarcerated are also usually separated from their babies. Recent years have seen the creation of a handful of prison nurseries, where female inmates can bond with their babies for an extended period of time. But much more common are policies that require a woman to part with her newborn after 24 hours or a handful of days. Most babies are turned over to a family member, but federal law says that any parent whose child spends 15 out of 22 months in foster care can permanently lose their parental rights.

Having an incarcerated parent has been linked to a host of negative outcomes in areas including behavioral and mental health, homelessness, school performance, and future interactions with the criminal justice system.

Incarcerating children. More than 30,000 children are locked up in juvenile facilities in this country.

That number is less than half what it was at its peak, in 1999, and experts believe it will continue to decline as officials find more effective alternatives. But there are major racial disparities. According to the Sentencing Project, black children are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than white children. More than 60 percent of child offenders are being held for nonviolent offenses like drugs, theft or even violations that only apply to minors, like curfew violations, underage drinking and truancy.

And while some of the worst facilities have been reformed or shuttered, children are still held in appalling conditions. In Louisiana, violence and the use of restraints have spiked in the last five years. A lawsuit filed this week in Palm Beach County, Fla., says teenage boys awaiting trial are held in solitary confinement for months at a stretch and denied education, some for no reason other than needing to be kept apart from a co-defendant.

Removing children from the home. There are some 400,000 children in the foster care system, many of whom are prohibited from any parental contact. Of those, about 12 percent are housed in institutional settings or group homes.

These children are typically taken by officials they have never met, without warning, then subjected to intrusive interrogations, medical examinations and sometimes strip searches, wrote Paul Chill, a law professor at the University of Connecticut, in a 2004 article about practices that experts say continue today.

Some three-quarters of cases nationwide involve not abuse, but neglect, a “really broad umbrella” that “often just looks like poverty,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University who studies the effects of paternal incarceration and foster care. “There’s no consistent evidence that removing kids is, on average, beneficial, and there’s substantial evidence that it does harm,” he said.

Martin Guggenheim, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a child welfare advocate, said many of the cases prove unfounded, and child protection agencies disproportionately go after poor black and Latino parents. Parents who lose their children are not entitled to legal representation.

#family separation #separating children from parents

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anntyler3 · 6 years ago

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5 Common Homeschooling Legal Questions

Approximately 1.7 million children are homeschooled in this country each year, and that number is on the rise. People homeschool for a variety of reasons, most notably providing a better education than local public schools, a better curriculum, or a difference in moral values.

If you are interested in homeschooling your child, before you take the leap, here are five common homeschooling legal questions, and answers, to get you started.

1. Is Homeschooling Legal?

Education requirements are mandated by state law. Each state allows homeschooling, but in different ways. Some states specifically grant parents the right to homeschool their children, and provide a host of regulations regarding the manner in which the homeschooling is carried out. Other states, like California, do not have homeschooling laws, but rather require parents to either establish themselves as a private school, or to enroll their children in a private school that allows homeschooling, or a state mandated Independent Study Program, or private tutoring by a certified teacher (which can be the parent.)

2. Do I Have to File Any Forms With the State?

Most states requires some sort of forms to be filed, notifying the state that the child will be homeschooled, either one-time or annually. Check with your state and local public school district for a complete list. Most likely, these forms will include a report of the subjects being taught, periods of instruction, and certification of the administrator.

3. Are There Any Minimums I Need to Meet?

Again, these are dictated by state and local law, so check your state first. Generally speaking, each state sets a minimum number of days (for instance Alabama is 140, California is 175), and minimum number of hours per day (Alabama is 3 hours per day, California is 3.5)

4. Does My Child Have to Get Standardize Tested?

Again, this varies by state. In California, if a parent chooses to homeschool by enrolling their child in a Public Independent Study Program (ISPs.) or a Public Charter School, they must contractually agree to standardized testing. If they opt-out of testing when the testing date draws near, the student may not be allowed to re-enroll with that school the following year. A GED (General Education Development) is not required by most colleges to validate a homeschool high school diploma. However, many do require some form of standardized test results, such as SAT or ACT, as part of the admissions application process.

5. Truancy

Truancy is the one legal issue that can present a sticky situation. As stated earlier, each state has a law requiring a minimum level of school attendance. If this is not met, truancy laws dictate that a police officer, social worker, or Child Protective Services worker contact you about your child's schooling. First contact is usually by letter, followed by a home visit. Certain instances can result in a tip-off to local truancy officials, including if you child was recently:

Removed from a public, private, ISP or charter school

Involved in a custody battle

Became a welfare recipient

If you receive a letter, do not disregard it. Respond to it directly, or contact a local education attorney who can help you with this process.

Related Resources:

Find a Local Education Attorney (FindLaw's Lawyer Directory)

Is It a Crime Not to Send Your Child to School (FindLaw Blotter)

US Chess Federation Sued for Homeschool Discrimination Ahead of 'Super-Nationals' (FindLaw Law and Daily Life)

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246803 https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/08/5-common-homeschooling-legal-questions.html

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donnahwhite · 6 years ago

Text

5 Common Homeschooling Legal Questions

If you are interested in homeschooling your child, before you take the leap, here are five common homeschooling legal questions, and answers, to get you started.

1. Is Homeschooling Legal?

2. Do I Have to File Any Forms With the State?

3. Are There Any Minimums I Need to Meet?

4. Does My Child Have to Get Standardize Tested?

5. Truancy

Removed from a public, private, ISP or charter school

Involved in a custody battle

Became a welfare recipient

If you receive a letter, do not disregard it. Respond to it directly, or contact a local education attorney who can help you with this process.

Related Resources:

Find a Local Education Attorney (FindLaw's Lawyer Directory)

Is It a Crime Not to Send Your Child to School (FindLaw Blotter)

US Chess Federation Sued for Homeschool Discrimination Ahead of 'Super-Nationals' (FindLaw Law and Daily Life)

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246803 https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/08/5-common-homeschooling-legal-questions.html

0 notes

sydneereina · 6 years ago

Text

5 Common Homeschooling Legal Questions

If you are interested in homeschooling your child, before you take the leap, here are five common homeschooling legal questions, and answers, to get you started.

1. Is Homeschooling Legal?

2. Do I Have to File Any Forms With the State?

3. Are There Any Minimums I Need to Meet?

4. Does My Child Have to Get Standardize Tested?

5. Truancy

Removed from a public, private, ISP or charter school

Involved in a custody battle

Became a welfare recipient

If you receive a letter, do not disregard it. Respond to it directly, or contact a local education attorney who can help you with this process.

Related Resources:

Find a Local Education Attorney (FindLaw's Lawyer Directory)

Is It a Crime Not to Send Your Child to School (FindLaw Blotter)

US Chess Federation Sued for Homeschool Discrimination Ahead of 'Super-Nationals' (FindLaw Law and Daily Life)

from https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2018/08/5-common-homeschooling-legal-questions.html

0 notes

clubofinfo · 7 years ago

Text

Expert: Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a lot of serious problems. Neoliberal reforms have been imposed against the will of the people here and it is only our pride and our racially informed sense of kinship with imperial power that keeps us from recognising that we are a neocolony – a privileged neocolony perhaps, but a neocolony nonetheless. Recent decades have been an affront to our sovereignty and our progressive and socialist history. We were the first country with a 40 hour working week, the first to allow women to vote, the second to have a comprehensive public health system, and the first welfare state. It cuts against the grain, therefore, that in 30 years we have gone from a country with no poverty or unemployment and near the worst income inequality in the OECD (7th worst in 2014). With relatively low wages and one of the highest costs of living in the world, neoliberalism is ripping apart our social fabric. We have a housing crisis that is worse than those hitting the US, UK, Australia and Canada, but it is even more of a shock because 30 years ago the idea of homelessness and of people begging in the streets was simply alien to us. Make no mistake, neoliberalism has fucked this country, and I do blame the US and the UK along with those traitor scum politicians who serve the empire and not their own people. But in one key respect, neoliberalism was pushing against an open door. Neoliberalism seeks to shrink the social support offered by the state but it also seeks to grow the coercive powers of the state – the police and the prisons. The latter harmonises much more easily with traditional Aotearoan values. We are a punitive people. We are not ruled by fear of malefactors to the extent that the US seems to be, but we still have a strong attraction to “law-and-order”. Our prison population has traditionally been high, but as incarceration rates have grown in other countries we have kept our place in the leading pack (excluding the US which is in a league of its own). We imprison people at nearly twice the rate of Canada; 45% higher than England and Wales and 30% higher than Australia. The punitive culture in Aotearoa is partly the product of settler-colonial relations. The nature of colonialism is to obliterate autonomy. In Aotearoa the British achieved this in the same manner in which they did in India. First is the process of dividing the locals, using diplomatic trickery, and co-opting collaborators. The second is military conquest, which is only achievable because of native forces. The third is the realm of police, judges, truancy officers, land surveyors, bureaucrats, and lawyers. It is a telling part of our history that the reputed “last gasp” of the decades-long New Zealand Wars was when a column of 120 armed men was sent to arrest a leader, Hone Toia, who refused to pay a dog tax. The judge who imprisoned Hone Toia made it clear that he was demonstrating the reach and power of the government. The story thereafter will be familiar to other settler colonial societies, Compulsory schooling became the mechanism for literally beating and torturing the language and culture from Māori children. There was a school-to-borstal pipeline, particularly for Māori boys. This was the beginning of a self-sustaining circle of institutional racism. The result is that even though Māori are only 15% of the total population, they make up more than 50% of the prison population. Even Al Jazeera has made a documentary about the “Locked-Up Warriors” of our country. However, at the risk of weakening the sense of crisis (which is very real in absolute terms) I feel obliged to point out that in proportion to indigenous populations Aotearoa actually has a lower indigenous incarceration rate than Australia and Canada. Australian aboriginals are the most imprisoned people in the world, ahead of US African-Americans. None of this should detract from the significance of Māori imprisonment here, where indigenous people make up a much larger part of the total population. The prison is clearly being used as an ongoing tool of colonial control, even if it is only the momentum of the past that keeps it so. Yet I would argue that treating this as a race issue alone will not help. The racism of the system shows that it is an unjust system, but getting rid of the race element will not fix the injustice. We have a massive social problem with Māori incarceration, but if we fix the racism inherent in the system will it really fix a system that is so open to racism? Where would that leave us with regards to class and poverty? In this day and age do we really think we can address a racial disparity if we don’t also address inequality? Native Affairs Māori TV is a gift to all Aotearoans because it is our only public service mandated TV broadcaster. They produce some very good television – albeit at the cheap end of the spectrum. Yet I was sceptical of the Native Affairs episode on “Locking Up Māori”. I had the strange feeling that they would acknowledge the role of racism and poverty but then circle back around to the normal mindless position of showing stories of individual prisoners finding redemption with the help of guitar-toting redeemers. Well, colour me un-fucking-surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for reminding people that structural and personal racism are real factors behind imprisonment rates. When Marama Fox recently dared to use the term “racism” as a cause of Māori incarceration in The Spinoff’s “Great Debate”, the audience guffawed in incredulity. Clearly some people out there need a bit of educating. Therefore it might seem like a good deed to highlight the structural racism and social drivers that lead to high rate among Māori, but viewers of Native Affairs are probably not the ones that need telling. If you are not familiar with Native Affairs, it is just what it sounds like – a current affairs programme dealing with issues relating to Māori. The name is an ironic reference to the Ministry of Native Affairs – an historic institution of racial paternalism, land theft, and ethnocide. Marama Fox (Māori Party Co-Leader) was quite expressive in the “Great Debate” Given their viewership, it is less significant that Native Affairs addressed structural issues, so neglected in the mainstream, than that they took that as a starting point for a narrative that herded people back into alignment with mainstream thinking – like a sheepdog ensuring our wayward brains don’t wander too far from safe pastures. First they identified the empirically proven drivers of incarceration as being poverty and poor education. Crucially they assert, without the same evidential backing, that “in Aotearoa cultural disconnection is a third factor.” They may or may not be correct in this. As I will discuss later it is not whether the latter is true or not that is at issue, but rather the way in which adding the element of cultural alienation sets up a narrative centred on the individual offender. It is a path back to old habits of thinking; the modern equivalent of the 19th century Samaritan’s self-righteous efforts to save the souls of the benighted sinners who have fallen from the Godly path of lawfulness. Soon after this introduction the programme also broaches the subject of structural racism in the justice system. Māori are more likely to be stopped by police. Under the same circumstances they are more likely to be charged. If convicted they receive harsher sentences and are more likely to be imprisoned. Cumulatively it is this layered racism that is probably the biggest factor in Māori imprisonment. So if poverty, under-education, and racism among police and judiciary are the best known significant drivers of Māori imprisonment then a documentary should surely focus on changing social policy, ending structural and personal racism in education, reforming the police and judiciary. The prisoners (referred to constantly in the programme as “these people”) are not the real authors of their fate in this regard. Yet instead of having the intellect and the guts to embrace what the statistics tell us, the participants cleave to facile moralism – depicting the narratives of each prisoner as being driven by transgression and the consequences that follow from it. The social science shows clearly that focusing on changing prisoners is stupid. It tells us unambiguously that we are not being honest about what acts do or do not deserve punishment and why we expect prisoners to embrace guilt, remorse, and the need to change themselves. People are married to the fictional reductionism of crime stories in books, TV, and cinema. Through constant sensationalism in the news people are made overly fearful of the capacity for violence among convicted criminals, feeling safer if they think that people are being locked away. This is a heuristic error that vastly exaggerates the ability of any prison system to enact what is called “specific incapacitation” by isolating the offenders from society. It also fails to account for the ability of the prison system to engender violence. Native Affairs should have shown the efforts to reform those in authority, and highlighted where such efforts do not exist. The onus should have been on police, politicians, teachers and judges. We should have seen them struggling to overcome their racism and their moral and intellectual failings. Exemplars should have described their journey of overcoming their unthinking abuse. In the documentary we meet the victim of a cruel self-righteous and almost certainly racist judge. This judge ruined a young man’s life. He caused immense harm and pain. but where was that judge or one like him talking about their journey to redemption – complete with guilt and remorse for destroying futures, for ripping apart social bonds, and for wasting inordinate amounts of taxpayers money? I am aware that our prejudices are deep. It is easy to see a tattoo-covered ill-spoken prisoner as a wrongdoer, but few people can envision the judge as being a dangerous and vicious parasite, profiting from suffering that they help perpetuate. Yet if you strip away our personal fears and our social prejudices; if you judge the judges on the fruits of their actions rather than their benevolent rhetoric and evinced good intentions, it is authorities such as these that need fixing, not our prison population. So, dear reader, I am going to walk you through some things. I am going to show you that incarceration and criminality are not strongly linked; and I am going to help you learn to fear and loathe the genteel. Regardless of the existence of individual dangerous prisoners, collectively those in prison are the victims of violent injustice, not the other way around. Lipstick on a Pig On the surface, The Opportunities Party has an admirably progressive criminal justice policy. They aim to reduce our prison population to half the projected number in 2027. There are two problems with this: arrogance and reductionism. The arrogance comes from presenting evidence already widely understood and proclaiming that other politicians are too stupid to get it. The reductionism is in reducing a complete socio-political problem to a single track of statistics without any sort of critical self-awareness. I don’t want to be unfair to TOP, who do link criminal justice to broader issues of poverty and inequality, but even that is a very narrow way of looking at much more profound questions of guilt and innocence; justice and injustice; transgression and obedience. The weakness of their position is easily demonstrated with a question: if it is so stupid and counterproductive to lock up 10,000 people, why do you want to keep 6000 people in prison? TOP are trying to solve a “problem” without asking why it arose initially. Why are we so punitive? I have suggested that some of it comes from our colonial past, but it has a contemporary and historical scaffolding that exists independently of that. We blame our populist right-wing politicians fear-mongering at election time and emotive pressure groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust; we blame talk-back radio and racist muddle-Nu Zillind, but it takes two to tango. Our politics are not shaped by one side of a political divide, they are shaped by the way our political discourse divides issues into two vested camps and creates a static establishment orthodoxy that serves both. While Hegel, followed by Marx and Engels, proposed that social forces create a dynamic “dialectic”, it is far more common in our time for “opposing” ideologies to become entwined in mutually sustaining inertia. Arrayed against the self-righteous sadists who demand that convicts must suffer are an equally facile bunch of liberal journalists, left-liberal politicians and NGO do-gooders who (by choice or by constraint) are mainly about looking as saintly as possible without really rocking the boat. Our problems run much deeper than the attitudes of right-wing people. The rituals that surround our criminal justice system should be a clue that something is wrong. Rationality does not need to don special robes and use dead languages to give itself gravity. The system itself is not a measured and enlightened social institution, it is a quasi-religious instrument of authority. On close examination it maintains a strange irrational pretence of omniscience and still functions as if the court and the judges within it were touched with divine power. Fixing our criminal justice system will require much more that a white-hatted technocrat Sheriff riding in on his high-horse to tell all us dumbshit yokels how to live our lives. The problem with people like Gareth Morgan is that their disdain for the intellects of others makes them incredibly naïve about social institutions. Just because a given institution purports to serve a given function that does not mean that that is it’s sole function, or main function, or even a real function. Some social institutions do the opposite of their pretended function. To put it another way, Gareth Morgan wants to put “evidence-based” lipstick on a pig that he is too stupid to smell. Controlling and Punishing Social Inferiors Our institutions have multiple historical roots but the tendency to echo the past (even when we can see clearly how inhumane and unjust the past was) has to be explained in contemporary terms. We are not so different than our cruel, stupid, superstitious and hypocritical forebears and much that we think of as the cast is actually still as much with us as it has ever been. To begin with there is the religious and pseudo-religious moral impulse to view matters of criminality as an expression of sin – a form of moral transgression. This comes from the belief that the law is a moral framework and even when it fails to be so obedience to the law is a moral imperative in itself. This is an authoritarian viewpoint that is not actually morally sound. It is an irrational impulse and you do not have to delve too far into history to see that morality and obedience to the law are distinct and may be at complete odds with each other. By consensus we now recognise many laws from different places and times as immoral – for example, race and gender legislation that make chattels of racial groups, wives and daughters; apartheid laws; or the Third Reich’s racial laws. Then there are the politicians, bureaucrats and social workers who see their jobs as being the imposition of their will on the behaviour of others. At base any attempt to change an individual or group of individuals is an attempt to control those persons through the exercise of one’s own will. This may be both a personal inclination that attracts people into positions of such power and a situational product of our institutions of power. Our society hands people in these situations hammers and instructs them to treat certain individuals as nails. For example, social workers may as a group lobby for social change, but their day-to-day hour-to-hour activity is to try and change individual people however futile that may ultimately be in the bigger picture. By contrast, some politicians have a clear pre-disposed inclination to enjoy exercising power over others. Bill English was recently asked what cause he would take to the streets to march for, and he responded that he would march for the right to govern us. This is just a small glimpse into the state of derangement that veteran senior politicians fall into. They do not see governance as the exercise of shaping institutions in order to allow the will of the people to rule, but rather see governance as creating and using institutions to control and “govern” the people. To them that is what governing is, and they see no contradiction between that and what they refer to as “democracy”. These contemporary controlling impulses find rich and fertile soil to flourish in our inherited criminal justice system. Centuries of penal reform have changed the sharp brutality of sadistic 18th century barbarism, into the duller grinding inhumanity of today. The criminal justice system that we have today may be the most gleamingly polished turd in human history, but underneath it is still an inherited institution of class warfare (repurposed to serve also as an instrument of racial oppression). When the historian George Rudé examined early 19th century English “criminal justice” system, he found an institution devoted to perpetuating the social order of class and ethnic division, not an institution of “justice”. This was occurring at a time that saw an increasing conflation of poverty and criminality. The enclosure of common land and the loss of small-holdings, along with agricultural reform and industrialisation, had seen a growth of poverty in England and a breakdown in the medieval “Poor Laws”. Not coincidentally, this era saw the creation of the first professional police force. Many of the lower classes were transported first to North America and then to Australia and there was not a great deal of distinction between committing a criminal act and being criminalised and punished due purely to indigence. The end of the transportation era saw the rise of a three-part system of prisons, debtor’s prisons, and workhouses. The workhouses were cruel and exploitative. The clear, if irrational, ideological foundation was that the poor must be made to suffer if they were to receive sustenance. The moralism of the era demanded that they redeem themselves through suffering, tinged by Calvinist beliefs that poverty was a sign of sinfulness and God’s disfavour. Trapped in the “Safety Net” Social reformers worked to end this inhumanity, and seemingly they succeeded. Yet they did not succeed as well as they might have hoped. Decades after the abolition of workhouses George Orwell lived the “down and out” life in England and what he found was a new form of cruelty and a new way of trapping people in poverty. Those who sought shelter and nourishment were forced to prove that they were not merely lazy scroungers living the high life at the expense of their betters. Thus they were forced to remain imprisoned in locked cells for their shelter and then forced by law to walk many hours to get shelter for another night. Needless to say they could not work and could not have social or family connections. With no way of earning money their attire, and particularly footwear, was appallingly poor for those who had to spend each and every day walking and exposed to the elements: One could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walking from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road. There must be at the least several tens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy – enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses – in mere, useless walking. Each day they waste between them possibly ten years of time in staring at cell walls. It was an expensive and self-defeating exercise. The sadism of it was less newsworthy (or Dickensworthy) than the workhouses, but was it really much better? Things may have improved now, but maybe not as much as people think. In many ways we are slipping back. Poverty and its effects are intensifying and incidents of people trapped in implacable cycles of futility and suffering are on the increase. We have never gotten over the idea that those who need help can and should be controlled. We think it acceptable that unemployed beneficiaries should be drug tested (and sanctioned for failing) and an overzealous campaign against “contamination” has seen many people lose tenancy in social housing due to traces of methamphetamine being found. Effectively that means that the less fortunate in society have a greater degree of state control in their lives than the more fortunate. Many people undoubtedly think that it is beneficial for the unfortunate to have the guiding hand of a benevolent state to guard them from their own self-destructive impulses. It is for their own good, after all. In reality that is as much of a self-righteous delusion as the Victorian missionary’s belief in reforming the sinner. There is an increasing recognition that the neoliberal state systematically produces homelessness and that forcing special conditions on recipients of housing or other welfare acts to reproduce the vicious circle enforced on tramps in Orwell’s time. One response to the structural injustice created by neoliberalism is the movement known as Housing First. Even PM Bill English proudly claims credit for “Housing First” initiatives. Unfortunately English is about as capable of grasping the essence of Housing First as Vlad the Impaler would be capable of grasping Nonviolent Communication. In theory, though not as it is widely practised, Housing First is supposed to provide unconditional tenure. Yet under 3 terms of National Party government, with English as leader or deputy, the government’s own social housing agency has been going in the opposite direction. Neoliberalism reproduces the trap enforced on Orwell and his down-and-out compatriots, but with a much greater masquerade of benevolence. It actively encourages the underlying cause of social ills through deregulation, austerity, erosion of worker conditions and the devaluation of labour in relation to capital. Neoliberalism helps poverty, precarity and socio-economic exclusion to flourish, encouraging the disease but making a show of treating the symptoms. The long walks and the cold cells of 1930s England are replaced by the equally futile system of grants and supplements, constantly exposing people to a capricious and arbitrary system where they must pointlessly engage in a bureaucratic struggle to gain the money and service required to live in a system that is designed to give minimal support. The basic “safety net” support is insufficient in itself and yet is still contingent on conditions and impositions that can be extremely difficult for destitute people to live up to. On the Native Affairs programme they revealed that the Howard League works to get inmates their driver’s licenses. This is a crucial and worthy effort, but it is a piecemeal step. The need for a driver’s license is a symptom of poverty, social exclusion and racism in the education system. It is not the only barrier affecting inmates and if they have to keep reaching out for help over each thing the process itself becomes demoralising and debilitating. We have begun to have real conversations about the reality facing those on benefits today, and with luck that will continue, but for the last 40 years the gravitational pull has been to become ever more and more aligned with the US. By withdrawing support from the most needy due to infringements of a pseudo-moral code of behaviour we risk following the US footsteps of creating a criminalised underclass, a “school-to-prison pipeline” and a racial caste system. In many aspects the US is already in a Dickensian state. For example, Eric Garner, who was killed by NYPD, was a career criminal who lived by breaking the law – he sold loose untaxed cigarettes and lived off the meagre profit margin. He wasn’t selling them at the time of his killing. He wasn’t even on his normal turf and was doing nothing wrong, but a cop recognised him from his own neighbourhood. Garner got angry at being harassed when minding his own business, and the police reacted with brutal and escalating violence that intensified when Garner was struggling for his life. It feels as if we are not far away from the point where we too will tolerate the life and death of our own Eric Garner, seeing both the “criminal” and the poor person as somehow less human, not worthy of a right to a dignified life and ultimately not even worthy of a guaranteed right to life of any sort. In the NZ Herald Paul Little has recently asked how Dickensian we have become: Under the so-called three strikes law, Raven Campbell, a prison inmate who pinched a guard on the buttocks – his third offence – was sentenced, as that law required him to be, to the maximum term of seven years jail. Social housing agency Tamaki Housing issued an eviction notice to the five children of Mabel Pe just weeks after her death. They were given three weeks to vacate the home where they had lived for 10 years. Housing New Zealand issued an eviction notice to a family of seven, including two blind children, after their grandmother died. [3 of the children also suffer PTSD after losing a mother to cancer and a father to suicide shortly thereafter.] In the last quarter of 2016, the number of people applying to Work and Income for hardship grants to buy food was 112,000 – an increase of 14 per cent over the equivalent period in the previous year. Wendy Shoebridge, who was discovered dead in her home the day after she was told she faced charges over benefit fraud, was later found not to have committed any fraud, according to evidence presented at the inquest into her death. We are seeing the rise of conditions of ever greater social division, a restructure in the relations of capital to labour and a massive upward redistribution of wealth. The transformation is akin to that of the mid-19th century, described by Karl Polanyi as The Great Transformation, and the response of our welfare and criminal justice systems is the same. It is not to ameliorate the conditions of those who are suffering the most under the change, but to preserve the social order. In effect this usually means inflicting greater suffering, hence the rising prison populations and the growing precariousness of those on benefits. If we don’t face up to those facts, how can we hope to make things better with our evidence-based culturally-sensitive “progressive reforms”. Quite apart from the fact that much of the “reform” only seeks to get incarceration rates back to where they were decades ago we cannot hope to effect positive change if we do not face up to the in-built malevolence and injustice in the system. Crime Rates and Imprisonment Rates are not the Same Thing To return to Native Affairs: Almost immediately after having established that Māori are imprisoned at rates disproportionate to their offending, without skipping a beat the narrator of “Locking Up Māori” reverts to the mindless conflation of imprisonment and crime rates, almost as if the journalist is incapable of processing the meaning of what is coming out of her own mouth. The disconnect between crime and punishment is something that we as a society are not dealing with at all. It is far greater than the disparity in offending rates and imprisonment rate between Māori and Pākehā because there is also a massive class dimension that reinforces the racial dimension. Everything about our notions of crime is freighted with class disparity. To begin with there is a much larger problem of prejudicial enforcement than merely who gets stopped by police more when driving or walking. Whole sectors of society are virtually invisible to law enforcement when it comes to certain sorts of crime. Most notably, bourgeois and wealthy people can reliably get away with committing drug offences. Many politicians have used illegal drugs, but few of those oppose prohibition. They are not volunteering to be punished themselves, but they are happy for others to be punished for doing the same thing they were not punished for. The system is incorrigibly unequal and unjust. Ironically, many prisoners are victims in childhood or adolescence of serious criminal offences against them. Many, as we now know, were abused while in state care. Repeated offences of sexual abuse and severe physical abuse against vulnerable children in one’s care are amongst the most serious crimes we can imagine, yet those who perpetrated such heinous offences are afforded effective impunity while the victims often end up imprisoned for far less grave crimes. Our need to see certain infractors punished is shaped far more by our sense of social order and hierarchy than it is by legally defined criminality. Researcher Emily Baxter conducted research for a project she called “We Are All Criminals”. In interviews with people she draws out the crimes they have committed and maybe spared little thought for because they suffered no consequences. She then gets them to reflect on how their lives might have been different had they been apprehended and reflect on the role that class and race play in making the difference between what might have been a youthful adventure for them, but could be the start of a descent into social exclusion for others. The fact is that we are all criminals. Only a miniscule number of people have not committed crimes that individually or cumulatively could bring about a custodial sentence. If you think you are one of the rare innocents, then you probably need to interrogate you memory more vigorously. There are also crimes which are hard to detect and prosecute. Nobody disputes that rape is a very serious crime, but the great majority of rapists will never see the inside of a court, let alone a prison. We accept that reality because we cannot change it, yet it is hard to say how it can be just to imprison a minor thief or a cannabis user when rapists walk free far more often than not. Further still there is the massive disparity in prosecution and even in the legal status of equivalent crimes that corresponds with differences in socio-economic status and power. The most obvious example at the moment is the disparity between those who commit tax evasion and those who commit benefit fraud. Tax evasion costs the government 33 times as much as benefit fraud, but the response is the inverse of what should be rational. Academic Lisa Marriott gives us these points: * We investigate a higher rate of welfare recipients than taxpayers. Around 5 percent of welfare recipients are investigated in an average year, compared to around 0.01 percent of taxpayers. * We have greater numbers of criminal prosecutions of welfare fraudsters than tax evaders. In a typical year, there are 600–900 prosecutions of welfare fraudsters and 60–80 prosecutions of tax evaders. * A higher proportion of prison sentences are given to welfare fraudsters, for a lower level of offending, compared to tax evaders. For an average level of offending of $76,000, 67 percent of welfare fraudsters received a prison sentence. For an average level of offending of $229,000, 18 percent of tax evaders received a prison sentence. Marriott also compares two cases: “To summarise: welfare fraud of $3.4 million, where all was repaid (and more [$6.7 million was paid]), resulted in 10 years in prison — while white-collar crime of $4.3 million, where none was repaid, resulted in less than two years in prison.” Another disparity is in the treatment of employers who steal from employees and vice versa. “Theft as a servant” is considered very serious because it is a breach of trust. Stealing from your employees, though, is a different story. I guess the logic is that because employees don’t have a choice to entrust their wages to their employer there is no breach of trust when the employer steals from them. Wage theft is commonplace in Aotearoa yet criminal penalties such as imprisonment, home detention or even community service are unknown. There is a push to impose criminal penalties such as prison on offenders, but not because we treat all other thieves in this manner, but because the offending is now reaching such a level of exploitation that it is linked with enslavement – yes, enslavement, another thing we could not have imagined happening here even ten years ago. Stealing hundreds of thousands from people poorer than you, who have no choice but to trust you, and whose labour is the source of your own wealth isn’t even treated as criminal. That is how fucked and how biased the system is. And then there are those who more or less get to decide for themselves what the law is and whether or not they are allowed to steal from others without penalty. Meteria Turei, co-leader of the Green Party, bravely admitted to having lied about having flatmates in order not to lose some of the benefit she received while she was a single mother studying law. This was to raise awareness of poverty and precarity. She was hounded by the media relentlessly and felt compelled to resign just a week and a half after Andrew Little’s resignation (another party leader resigned the next week, by the way, just to keep the journalists on their toes). People asked why Turei had to go for taking a small amount so that she could afford to raise a child, while our wealthy PM Bill English took much more by deception. A “fact-check” assured people that Turei was naughty, because she broke the law, while English did not. Simon Wilson then “sense-checked” the fact-checkers comparing the crimes of Metiria Turei with the perfectly legal acts of PM Bill English who claimed hundreds of thousands of dollars as a member of Parliament in order to cover the cost of living in a place he clearly did not live. Some of Wilson’s conclusions: * Bill English must have known that he and his family did not live in Southland. But the system allowed him to pretend that they did, and he took advantage of that. * He got away with it by arguing that his lawyers had told him it was OK. * When he was found out, the system continued to protect him. In fact, as Wilson further explains, the legality of the acts was not actually tested strongly: “He denied he had broken the law and the auditor general agreed. She appears to have been particularly persuaded by the fact he had relied on legal advice that his position was tenable.” But wait, there’s more! Because ultimately the most criminally guilty people in the world don’t just go free, they are rewarded for their crimes. The worst criminal bankers on Wall St and in the City of London are not jailed, they are paid handsomely to retire, to stay on, or to work in government. Corporations can become a law unto themselves, causing thousands of deaths in Third World countries though pollution or using government forces to massacre those who stand between them and profit. From the days of United Fruit in Guatemala, to Shell’s involvement in the slaughter of people in the Niger Delta. No criminal charges. Nor are there charges for murders carried out by the CIA, let alone other crimes. The whole existence of the clandestine action arms of agencies such as the CIA is based on lawbreaking. One old pre-digital estimate suggested that the CIA was committing crimes at a rate of 80,000 per day, dwarfing any non-governmental organised crime outfit. With computerised surveillance there is a near unlimited potential for individual crimes to be happening at dizzying speed. Then there are the mass murderers. Since the death of Stalin, those with the most blood on their hands have mostly been Western political leaders. Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger – even Ford and Carter – Brzezinski, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush(es), Clinton, Blair. It is estimated that 20 million have been killed due to US-led aggression since World War II, frequently with crucial UK participation. They also have high levels of involvement in other acts of mass-murder. They backed the slaughter of 1 million in Indonesia and the subsequent genocide in East Timor. They gave diplomatic cover to the genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). They trained and backed those carrying out the genocide in Guatemala. Third world dictators cannot even compare in terms of the number of dead they have caused. Yet Henry Kissinger, perhaps the biggest murderer of them all, is a fêted elder statesman, treated like a rock star guru by the political elite. These people are by any reasoned standard more despicable and fearful than the very worst of our prison population. So, when you see the stats that show that social forces such as racism and poverty are the main causes of imprisonment, do not immediately think, yeah, but people need to be held accountable for their actions. The worst people in the world are not held accountable for their actions. Normal people are not held accountable in the way that those who fall foul of the criminal justice system are. It is a capricious system full of racial and class prejudice and rampant injustice Argument from Consequences As mentioned, the Native Affairs programme that fulfilled my low expectations of journalistic endeavour included “cultural disconnection” as an unproven third factor driving Māori incarceration. How much it is true that “cultural disconnection” causes imprisonment is definitely an interesting topic, but in the programme it becomes the central factor – the focus of the programme’s call to action. Without seeming to be aware of what they were doing, the makers of the programme use the topic of “cultural disconnection” to leave poverty and poor education as background factors in a narrative driven by notions of individual reform. There is certainly something quite powerful in the question by one prisoner who asked why it took coming to prison for him to find out about his own identity. The colonial system literally stole the sense of self from many Māori and it is heartbreaking that it might take imprisonment for some of those to benefit from reconnecting. But now the viewers have been taken back into their comfort zone, the place where no one can see the forest because they are too busy looking at all the trees. Unlike those factors of class and race which allow for the actions of others to be a cause of imprisonment, “cultural disconnection” can only be interpreted as a cause of criminality in the prisoner themselves. The notion leads us back to the belief that it is still their criminal transgression that drives their fate and what we really need to do is to help them to stop being so angry and naughty. It is as if the journalists are programmed by cliché. They will always find a way back into the comfort of tinkering reformism that maximises the sense of doing good but minimises any real clash with the status quo. In this case, cultural disconnection brings the focus right back to criminal acts by prisoners. It is actually a little bit ridiculous, because as wonderful as it may be for Māori inmates to connect with tikanga Māori, it is not why they are in prison and nor should they be penalised if they do not want to embrace Māoritanga. When you get right down to it, they are suggesting that you can fix a racist system by getting the victims of racism to change, not the racists. There is an obvious parallel here to those who think that the way to prevent rape is for the potential victims to alter their appearance and behaviour. Yet people seem to find it impossible to let go of the notion that prisoners have personal responsibility for their fate. To be reformed they must go through the ritual of penitence and agree that it is they that must transform. It is true that, apart from those wrongly accused, they must have contributed at least one “wilful” criminal act to find themselves behind bars, but between the disparities in policing and sentencing we can see that in most ways the criminal act is not the greatest factor contributing to the imprisonment. It is tempting at this point to separate violent from non-violent offenders. Then, in pragmatic terms, we could abolish drug prohibition and end custodial sentences for non-violent crime. That would lower prison populations and instantly curb the worst injustices coming out of the racial biases of the criminal justice system. But as much as I feel that drug prohibition is morally insupportable (and that too is a conversation that needs to be dealt with in full) I also think that blunting the worst excesses of an unjust system still leaves an unjust system. The fact is that even in committing a criminal act an offender is acting as a product of circumstances beyond their control. People resist understanding this, but it is abundantly clear in the statistics. In violent offending, the unchosen circumstances of birth and upbringing are clear predictors. Growing up exposed to and especially victim to violence does not always mean that a person will become violent, but it is such a strong statistical association that it cannot be ignored. And there are other factors such as sensory deprivation in infancy, exposure to lead and other toxins, traumatic brain injury or other neurological conditions. The more we study the factors that influence behaviour the more we must admit that we are all products of circumstances that we do not control. It is not just the social sciences that problematise our punitive understanding of criminality. While many philosophers still try to justify the existence of free will, neuroscientists are increasingly able to pinpoint the chemical processes of decision-making. If someone spikes you with a drug it will affect your decision-making. If someone controls the information you receive, it will affect your decision making. If you are abused as a child, it will affect your decision-making. Free will is a delusion. Even our current understanding of physics suggests that the universe is shaped by stochastic (individually random and unpredictable) subatomic events. Because these shape the real world and ultimately affect our lives it is impossible to reconcile the nature of the universe with free will. Free will was an excusable explanation for a complex phenomenon in the same way that explaining lightning as bolts cast by a god was excusable before the process was properly understood. It makes sense that we would feel that free will exists even without proof, but it is a religious concept not a rational concept. Basing criminal justice decisions of the concept of free will ultimately makes no more sense than treating criminality as demonic possession. Yet the concept of free will underpins our notions of criminal culpability. We cling on to a model of individual guilt and just punishment because it works so well with our emotions and social conventions. When bad things happen we want a sense of reciprocity and we also want to feel protected from those who might threaten us. On the more sinister side, we also have a tendency to persecute those who are perceived as alien, defective, diseased, or just a burden to our social collective. This is nothing to do with justice. On the contrary, it is one of the ways our evolution has sowed within us conflicts between compassion and brutality; xenophobia and solidarity; inclusion and exclusion. Our sense of reciprocity, however, is perhaps the greatest impediment to a more enlightened approach because this innate tendency is bolstered and magnified by the narratives in which we constantly immerse our consciousnesses. I refer here to books, film, TV and so forth. In our stories transgressions seldom go unpunished, guilt is seldom in doubt to the reader or viewer, and there is almost always the implication that somehow the punishment ends the narrative arc, tying up the story with a nice little bow. However, this is not just true in fictional narratives, it is also the structure used almost exclusively in news reporting and documentary. In reality neither safety nor reciprocity can be achieved through the criminal justice system and social exclusion is both undesirable and harmful. Despite this, they are powerful desires and the reason we cling to the idea of free-will is that without free-will we cannot have individual criminal culpability. Without that sense of culpability, we cannot package reciprocity, safety and social exclusion as a function of “justice”. We cling to the idea of wilful individual responsibility when logic and evidence both tell us it is a delusion. We do not want to deal with the consequences of not having the ability to pronounce guilt because it would deprive us of our ability to see the criminal justice system as having inherently positive outcomes. Ritual Sacrifice There is something disturbing about the way we as a society created a sudden and new official Truth once a judge or jury has pronounced guilt. Suddenly doubt is officially banished, facts are certain. There is a time between the verdict and the sentencing when the convict becomes a species of outlaw. Their penalty and path back to citizenship is undetermined and actions which are not crimes may affect their penalty as much, or more, than the actually criminal act(s). This outlaw status, by some mysterious rationale, becomes retroactive. Everyone has a right to deny charges against them without penalty, but once they are found guilty a magic time machine allows judges to reward “early guilty pleas” because the special powers they have make everything fair (and apparently there is no contradiction at all in discriminating in favour of those who admit guilt because it is not the same as discriminating against those who maintain their innocence). It is just as problematic that once guilt is established there is an expectation that the convict must now align themselves with the official Truth and make a ritual obeisance before the court by admitting guilt and expressing remorse. This is not a rehabilitative process and it is not a parole hearing, this is part of the sentencing, so it is actually quite difficult to say, in terms of justice, why remorse at the time of sentencing is so important. The practical effect of coercing a show of remorse from a convict is that it forces that person, and often their supporters, to readjust their narrative and to reify the Truth established by the court. One of the strangest parts of the ritual, from my perspective at least, is the breadth which judges give themselves in rendering judgments. At this point in the proceedings there can be no objections or arguments. It is pure soliloquy. It is quite normal for judges to tell those found guilty what their motives were, what they were thinking, and what they feel currently, as if the judge were some form of omniscient telepath. As with everything here, I do not have to delve deep into the past to find exemplars. A case I find problematic is that of Gustav Sanft who killed his 2 year-old daughter. At sentencing just a few days ago as I write his wife pleaded: “I know people want to see Gustav punished for this accident, I see it everyday in him that he punishes himself. All I can ask is have mercy on Gustav. Our babies need their daddy at home, that is where he belongs.” The judge, however, decided that Sanft was not experiencing real remorse but rather “self-pity”. He sentenced him to 4 years and 4 months imprisonment. The judge said: “Your denial you pulled the trigger is something you have latched onto, perhaps to help explain to yourself, and others, the terrible consequences of that morning.” This leaves us with two unpalatable options. One is that the judge, despite feeling at liberty to characterise the mental states of others, is so ignorant that he is unaware of the effect of adrenaline on short-term memory. If Sanft did pull the trigger there is no reason at all to expect that he would remember doing so. The other option is that the judge doesn’t actually care what Sanft believes. Either way, the emphasis on this detail is disturbing. The prosecution did not rely on his having pulled the trigger and the jury’s verdict does not confirm the fact. If Sanft were more calculating and cold-blooded he might simply have told the judge what he thought the judge wanted to hear. Ultimately he cannot be considered more guilty of the original crime because he refuses to admit to something he may not even remember. I cannot say what sentence might have been given if Sanft had admitted the act, but the judge himself has made it seem that a very important factor in sentencing is submission to the judgment of the court. It is hard not to feel that what is required of Sanft is not completely different to an auto-da-fé – the public penance required and coerced from those condemned by the Inquisition which reinforced to onlookers the righteousness and honesty of the convictions and subsequent punishments. Michel Foucault opens Disclipline et Punir with the horrifying theatrical spectacle of the public execution by torture of an attempted regicide. Foucault made the case that the theatrics of power did not disappear with penological reform, they just became more regular and less overtly objectionable. In that much, at least, he is correct. Much of this ritualised display is a show of power designed to maintain and reproduce the power that is exercised. The Disconnect We understand that the outcomes of our criminal justice system are measurably and demonstrably bad. The individual stories of those caught in the system, though most people are blissfully ignorant of them, can be extremely harrowing. People’s punishment may lead to much greater suffering than the crime they committed. In most cases the family of prisoners suffer despite not having committed a crime, and the cost to the taxpayer is excessive – stealing from the sort of spending that might be genuinely helpful to people. We acknowledge these harms yet we seem to think that the basic system doesn’t need fixing. It has been more than 250 years since Cesare Beccaria wrote On Crimes and Punishments, and yet in many ways we have not yet lived up to his vision of a humane system in which punishments served rational utilitarian purposes. Perhaps it is an impossibility; punishment and humane rationality may not be not reconcilable. We need to end the vestiges of noxious feudalism within our court system, but to do that we may have to go further. We need to end the fictions of guilt and innocence and the even more dangerous fiction that we can safely create an absolute Truth and justly act as if doubt does not persist. We need to move beyond our primitive senses of vengeance and reciprocity and recognise that punishment is never just. We need to abolish prisons. It may be that some people must be specifically prevented from harming others, but in the vast majority of cases we know that imprisoning some people is not a way to prevent harm. Even in a case of “preventive detention”, which aims at the specific incapacitation of those who are deemed an unavoidable danger to others, we have seen recently that the criminal justice system may enable crime instead of preventing it. In another NZ case that was in the headlines just days ago, a man who had been sentenced to preventive detention after having been convicted of raping (on separate occasions) a woman and a girl was found to have subsequently raped three cellmates. One was repeatedly raped for a week. Another was knocked unconscious and then raped. The man threatened to kill his victims and told them he had nothing to lose because he was a “lifer” due to his preventive detention sentence. In other words the attempt at incapacitation seems to have actually become a factor leading to the violence. The double-bunking that facilitated these rapes was introduced under Minister Judith Collins who dismissed concerns over rape, then later made a prison rape joke (as did the PM of the time John Key). These details reveal that the most “law and order” minded people are ultimately, if unconsciously, concerned about social order, not justice. The very reason that they are so assured in their “tough on crime” stances is that they have a Manichean view of Us “good” people and Them “bad” people. Such people often commit crimes, quite serious ones, but they don’t consider themselves to be criminals. Criminals are the racial and class Other. The baddies from the cop shows. Prisons are mechanisms of social control, one of the ways that the neoliberal state is keeping lower class people in their place as the system begins to fail them. You might think that if we get rid of prisons, change the court system, and if we stop singling out some as the officially Guilty, then we will have a sense of broad impunity that will lead to a lawless orgy. It is a challenge, true. Yet we are almost all criminals, and we accept as a matter of course that those who have committed the most heinous acts must continue to live among us. Some, particularly rapists, will never even have to talk to a policeman. Some may be acquitted because of reasonable doubt rather than innocence. Some will have been convicted, but apart from a very small number who die in prison, those people will still be part of society. Prisons can’t change that. They can and do make things worse in a number of ways. The problems of the criminal justice system, and the politics and power behind the discourse of criminal justice, are absolutely pervasive. I can almost take exemplars from the headlines of any day on which I write on the issue, and indeed I did so. There is no cherry-picking here, this gross injustice is the daily reality of our society and it needs to change. This has been my idiosyncratic argument for abolition; born of my frustration at the half-arsed bullshit that journalists keep spouting; born of my frustration at all the things never talked about, the assumptions and the complacency. I hope it adds new dimensions, but I should also point out to readers that there are far more developed views out there. Abolitionism has a very long history with many renowned proponents such as Emma Goldman, Nils Christie, Ruth Morris and Angela Davis. I urge readers to engage with the prison abolition movement, including People Against Prisons Aotearoa. The costs of not abolishing prisons are growing. http://clubof.info/

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