#its almost like book louis and show louis are operating differently in two different narratives with different goals in mind

[infinitelyweary]

Louis Unreliable Narrator Rant

It rly does piss me off bc some ppl with 100 percent sincerity refer to Louis as “a liar”. I keep scrolling past a fanfic on ao3 that called him “the duke of deception” or some shit

What does Louis ever lie about???

(besides armand/rashid but a. obvs that was an armand decision since armand is The Canonical Liar even though ppl don’t always act like it for some reason, and b. that doesn't concern Louis's veracity in telling the story of his past cuz armand/rashid is in the present)

Anything Louis gets “wrong” about his story are details he’s suppressed due to trauma/misremembered/or interpreted differently from others ("lestat") due to his state of mind. None of these things are lying. Unreliable narrator does not mean LIAR bc thats not how stories work. MEMORY IS A MONSTER is the tagline of his story. MEMORY IS A MONSTER - You FORGET, it doesn't. Not "MEMORY MAKES YOU LIE ABOUT THINGS" or "LYING IS A MONSTER" or "LOUIS LIES A LOT AND LOVES IT BC HE'S A MONSTER"!

~Louis' more prominent discrepancies:~

-Was it raining: He doesn't remember. Not a lie

-Claudia's reaction after Lestat's "death": Louis is demonstrably traumatized by the attempt to kill Lestat and has repressed some of the aftermath of that night due to that trauma. He literally doesn't remember Claudia's objections/choking her. When Daniel points out that she sounds upset with him in her diaries, those memories come flooding back - as we see in little jarring bits of flashback. Those jarring flashbacks are Louis REMEMBERING WHAT HAPPENED. If Louis was purposefully "lying" those flashbacks wouldn't resurface in that way: the show is (very effectively) presenting that information in the same way you would be confronted with a traumatic memory. Louis is visibly rattled by this and has to run and kneel in his traumagarden to process this bc HE LITERALLY HASNT PROCESSED IT BC HES BEEN REPRESSING IT FOR 80 YEARS Not a lie

-Could Claudia dream or not: She wrote in her diary that she couldn't and he believed her. Not a lie

Then the trial flashbacks

(For the sake of argument I’ll assume "Lestat’s" versions of events we see flashbacks of in the trial are more accurate depictions than Louis’ original descriptions bc that is essentially the way they are framed and Louis tells Daniel to use that version in the book)

ALTHOUGH IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE: THESE ARE ALSO A PART OF LOUIS’ DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS!!!! Lestat is not present at the interview, Louis is. Lestat is not turning to the camera and breaking the fourth wall to tell us his version; Louis says that as Lestat spoke he felt transported back to those events and was seeing them differently. That's why we see them in flashback. We cannot have a true flashback from Lestat's perspective in s1-2 bc Lestat is not here to tell his story (and it would break the entire structure of the show). Any flashback we see is Louis' recounting. In the case of the trial, Louis is literally recounting Lestat recounting a version of events that Louis is then recalling and processing with added context (this show is a mindfuck).

So even the more “”TRUE”” version ppl like to use as evidence of Louis’s “”lies”” is also coming from Louis!!!!! Louis is the one correcting his own account!!!

The show is built around Louis telling Daniel/the audience his story. Anything we see of the past storyline (New Orleans-Paris) comes from Louis's mouth or Claudia's diaries (and sometimes Armand). Lestat is not a part of any of this. People who frame Lestat is some truth-teller revealing the "REAL story" behind Louis's "lies" is forgetting that Lestat is not part of the interview. Any ""truth"" Lestat tells is coming from LOUIS.

Some quotes from 207 bc I don't have a disc drive on my macbook to screenshot my blu-ray lol

This is our transition into the first nola flashback

<Armand: Lestat stood on that stage, took all the familiar pieces of Louis's life, defiled them, bent them into a Lestat-shaped effigy.>

(Including this to show that even though Armand is co-narrating this part of the story, Armand was ready to discount everything Lestat said. He frames Lestat as taking 'familiar pieces of Louis's life' aka the events as Louis recalls them, and 'defiling and bending them' aka changing/misrepresenting them to make Lestat look better. Any representation of "Lestat's perspective" being valid/"true" is coming from Louis's mouth)

<Louis: But some...Some of it now...

Daniel: What?

Louis: I remember...being out of my body at the time. I was in Paris, but also in New Orleans. Lestat took me there.>

The flashback is Louis remembering things differently, not Lestat's own memory.

-Claudia's turning: Louis's and "Lestat's" account actually don't differ that much. Lestat has a few extra lines of dialogue and is more emotional, Louis tries to turn Claudia himself and begs more profusely, but the basic events are the same. Louis brings Claudia in as she is dying, begs Lestat to turn her and Lestat does it. Louis was near hysterical in this moment so he didn't recall it with complete accuracy. Not a lie!

<Lestat: But he was in a terrible panic. Guilt had seized reason. Claudia on the ledge of death.>

...

<Louis (at the trial, to Claudia and the audience, looking visibly confused): It's not how it happened.

Louis (in Dubai): It is how it happened. I didn't think it at the time. But...yeah.>

As Louis realizes he misremembered events, he corrects himself. We see him do this several times over the series. We also see him insist he wants to get "every detail right" and "wants to remember". Where are people seeing a lying liar who delights in lies???? The whole purpose of the interview is "truth and reconciliation"?????????

-Coffin room exchange: This is one of the most traumatic events in the series/Louis's life so I think it goes without saying that he wouldn't be able to recall it with complete accuracy BUT ALSO!! We see the domestic abuse in 105 recounted from Claudia's perspective. We go from Louis narrating Claudia's diary entry about realizing she was made to be Louis's sister, to her returning home and the ensuing violence as it was witnessed through her eyes. She can hear snippets of an argument but was not privy to what happened in the coffin room. The only part of this that is from Louis's recollection is when Lestat takes Louis into the sky, and we return to Claudia's perspective after Louis is dropped.

The coffin room exchange was omitted in Louis's original telling because it isn't in Claudia's diary entry. If you think about it in-universe, Louis is reading Claudia's diary to Daniel describing the violence breaking out - then they go into the coffin room, Claudia is slumped on the floor outside the room trying to catch her breath, and then Lestat bursts through the wall with Louis - when Claudia watches Louis taken into the sky, Louis would naturally feel the need to fill the gap of 'what happened' before he plummeted to the ground, bc Claudia is certainly wondering what happened in her diary entry. It wouldn't necessarily make sense for Louis to interject over Claudia's entry (describing her feelings at hearing them through the wall, being convinced the violence was over and attempting to recover and then her fear at seeing violence break out again) to say "hey also me and Lestat exchanged words in the coffin room", there just isn't a natural narrative gap there like there would be for Louis/Lestat vanishing into the sky.

But I think more likely Louis doesn't remember the coffin room exchange BECAUSE we see a flashback of it in 207 and as I've established, these flashbacks are Louis remembering things. They are not a direct line to Lestat's memories, because Lestat is not in the interview to recount his own memories, and even a memory he recounts during the trial is being recalled by Louis in the Dubai present. Outside of Claudia's diaries, we only ever have access to Louis's memories of things (barring 205). There is a clear slant towards Lestat's POV in the coffin room memory, so I think it's safe to assume it's Louis recalling the memory as Lestat presents it during the trial. Part of why I think this is the basic framing, but also there are a couple lines of dialogue from Claudia's POV in 105 that we don't hear in 207 specifically when she is sitting outside the coffin room:

this part we hear in both POVs

<Louis: It's okay. We're done. It's over. Stay where you are, okay?>

this part we only hear in Claudia's POV

<Louis: We had it out*. We just...[coughing] need a moment here. [coughs] Just...[gasps]>

The second dialogue time-wise lines up with a moment in Lestat's 207 POV when Lestat is panting on the ground and sitting up for a few seconds and all we hear is silence before he says "You're gonna leave me." The show could have had Louis's second dialogue here muffled or in the background or something but it omits Louis's words entirely to show that this is Louis's recollection of Lestat's remembered version of events, and is not entirely "accurate" either. Why would Lestat focus on/acknowledge Louis comforting Claudia in this moment, when he is thinking about Louis leaving him? He wasn't thinking about that, and his POV reflects that. I don't think the show forgot these extra lines or something, cuz they have the script and easily could have inserted them in the space where Lestat is silent but they did not. A deliberate choice to show Lestat's account is not the omnipotent "truthful" account, but is just one perspective.

(We also know that the coffin room exchange was included in the trial script to make Louis less sympathetic to the audience, because when Lestat says "I am burdened with my maker's temper" Santiago corrects him back on course by saying "Uh, no. You were teased until you toppled." The coven wanted this exchange in the trial script to frame Lestat's drop as an escalation brought on by Louis aka to victim-blame him and make Lestat look less culpable. So even if this is "truth" it is being presented with bias)

Also it is interesting that we get no reaction shots/commentary from Dubai Louis during this entire part. We see Paris Louis once before the "You're gonna leave me" starts and he's shaking and looking confused as Lestat speaks, but there is no assertion on Louis's part of "this is how it happened" or not the way he did with Claudia's turning. We don't even get a shot of Dubai Louis again until after Lestat goes off script to take accountability for the violence.

It actually looks like Armand was the one narrating this entire part to Daniel (Lestat's account of the violence-the coffin room exchange-the apology) because the next time we cut back to Dubai, when Armand tells Daniel that the projections went off-sync, Daniel is already sitting facing Armand and Louis is sitting silently with his hands in front of his mouth. It looks like Dubai Louis hasn't spoken at all since he told Daniel to go with Lestat's version of Claudia's turning. He doesn't speak again until Daniel asks him what he thought of Lestat's apology.

I'm not totally sure what to make of Louis's silence here...because I don't think Lestat fabricated the coffin room exchange. I think because this comes on the heels of "You should go with Lestat's version" of the other flashback we see, this is another instance of Louis going oh, okay I guess it happened like that, you can put that in the book too. But it is a more significant departure from what we were previously shown than Claudia's turning, so idk why they don't have Louis comment on it at all. Either way, Louis doesn't object to what Lestat is saying, which is at least a passive acknowledgement of the events as he presents them as reflected upon by Louis after the fact so NOT A LIE!

Anyway Louis has basically never lied in his entire life so I'm gonna need ppl to stop calling him a liar :)))) it would also completely undercut the main fucking theme of the first two seasons for Louis to be characterized as a ~~~~liar~~~ vs. a person who is being Monstered by Memories so if you call Louis a liar you are calling Rolin Jones a liar and I'm gonna tattle on you to Sir Jones so he won't let you watch the show anymore <3

*netflix subtitles this as "we had enough" but that doesn't sound like what he's saying to me and the netflix subs match the AMC subs which are notoriously inaccurate so!

[bargewall99-blog]

A Road to Ending Mass Incarceration?

DECEMBER 15, 2018

NEARLY ONE IN 100 adult Americans is behind bars. That means approximately 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States. The US has more people imprisoned than India and China combined, and the US per capita incarceration rate is eight and five times higher than Germany and Australia, respectively. Norway and Los Angeles have about the same population, yet Norway has roughly 3,000 people incarcerated, while Los Angeles has 50,000.

These are some of the background facts offered by Greg Berman, director, and Julian Adler, director of policy and research, of the New York–based Center for Court Innovation, in their cogent book, Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration. While concern about mass incarceration has been increasing and various state, municipal, and nongovernmental programs promote imprisonment alternatives, Berman and Adler underscore that judges, prosecutors, and police officers generally have a constrained array of choices for the accused. Stiff 1990s and 2000s sentencing laws are still in place that also incline prosecutors to charge defendants with felonies. The result is that “[t]he United States locks up more of its citizens than any other country on earth.” Moreover, Berman and Adler stress that undue jailings and prison terms are “accelerants of human misery” because individuals are often traumatized while incarcerated and become entrenched with distrust for the halls of justice. “If you are poor or mentally ill or struggling to keep your family together, when you enter, the chances are that all of these conditions will be markedly worse when you come out,” Berman and Adler write.

The challenges for reducing mass incarceration are complicated and nuanced, and Berman and Adler offer a smoothly written survey of the background conditions and the responses that different jurisdictions and advocacy groups are trying — for example, risk analysis for detention and sentencing decisions; cognitive therapy programs for accused or convicted offenders with aggressive or addictive traits; raising awareness within the judiciary of counterproductive fees and fines; and alternative legal venues for drug users and young adults. They state and restate that it will take sustained effort on many fronts and gradual cultural shifts, but that there are enough effective responses and instances of culture change to demonstrate that significantly reducing incarceration can be done.

Another cross-cutting truism that Berman and Adler reiterate is that treating the accused with a humane touch can make a huge difference. How a defendant subjectively experiences the criminal justice system will affect his or her future behavior; empathic corrective treatment can go far in raising an individual’s ability to handle future life challenges in a law-abiding manner. “In our experience, the best way to change the behavior of defendants is by creating caring relationships with social workers, judges, mentors, clergy, family members, employers, and others,” Berman and Adler write. “Almost no one transforms their life without positive connections with their fellow human beings.”

Indeed, reformers are trying to address defendants’ hardening experience with courts and law enforcement. Berman and Adler point to the “procedural justice” approach, seminally articulated by Yale law professor Tom Tyler in Why People Obey the Law. Its major thrust is “that defendants who experience a justice process that they perceive to be fair and transparent are more likely to be law-abiding in the future.” Berman and Adler further enunciate four key procedural justice criteria that the accused should feel as they go through the criminal justice process:

voice (were you given a chance to tell your side of the story?); respect (were you treated with dignity?); neutrality (did you perceive decision makers as unbiased and trustworthy?); and understanding (did you understand your rights, obligations and the decisions that were made about you?).

The authors describe how Newark Judge Victoria Pratt, who presided over the city’s municipal court and a specially created community court, the Newark New Community Solutions court, employed procedural justice in a setting marked by recidivism, unpayable fines, and distressing and dangerous incarceration conditions at the city’s notorious Green Street jail. “I just get on the bench and treat people the way I would want my family members to be treated,” Pratt says.

Berman and Adler’s organization, the Center for Court Innovation, helped set up the special Newark New Community Solutions court, as well as the Brooklyn alternative court Red Hook Community Justice Center, whose judge, Alex Calabrese, is similarly noted for his articulate interaction with defendants. As part of its operations, the Red Hook Justice Center also “links thousands of defendants to social services and community restitution projects in lieu of jail and fines.”

The book’s narrative is especially vivid when Berman and Adler discuss specific proactive programs in different states that target different at-risk populations. For example, there is innovation even in the difficult area of domestic violence, typified by Iowa’s ACTV (Achieving Change Through Value-Based Behavior) program that focuses on coping skills and features a nonjudgmental elicitation as to what the offenders most value. In the case managers experience, the offenders are surprisingly clear that children, family, spirituality, and work are standout priorities. “A lot of them have just never been asked what’s important to them, and then a lot of them don’t know how to live a life in service of those values,” says Amie Zarling, the Iowa State University forensic psychologist who developed ACTV. While the rigorous 24-session ACTV program had a relatively high drop-out rate, the state’s review found that incidents of domestic violence dropped by two-thirds among those who completed ACTV relative to those enrolled in standard treatment programs, and a violent crime re-offense rate of eight percent compared to 23 percent.

Another interesting program is Seattle’s LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) program by which law enforcement officers who confront individuals with signs of drug abuse can direct them to service providers, avoiding booking and incarceration. LEAD’s staffers work with many challenging individuals, often homeless or suffering mental illness, yet, as Berman and Adler point out, “research to date does show that LEAD participants are significantly less likely to be rearrested than those in a control group.”

To no one’s surprise, drugs loom large, but Berman and Adler point out that, contrary to common wisdom, drug convictions do not make up the bulk of US incarceration. Nonviolent drug crimes account for about 16 percent of state-level imprisonment cases while violent offenses predominate at 53.2 percent, according to a 2014 study the authors cite. However, what is a violent offense is dubious, and Berman and Adler offer robbery, the top charge of 180,000 state prisoners, as a murky example, as reflected in the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics definition — “Robbery is the completed or attempted theft, directly from a person, of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon, and with or without injury.” More to the point, the authors mention that six out of 10 defendants test positive for illegal drugs at the time of arrest, underscoring that problems with drugs figure significantly with mass incarceration.

This has been appreciated for years, and in 1989 Miami legal advocates, including then state attorney Janet Reno, instituted the first of the drug treatment courts, specialized courts with judges schooled in addiction who can prescribe drug treatment and other options for defendants in lieu of imprisonment. The drug court idea has proved attractive, and Berman and Adler report that the nation’s 3,000 drug courts are now in every state. The social science research supports their efficacy, with a 2011 Department of Justice–funded study finding that over an 18-month period, drug court participants were one-third less likely to succumb to drug use and committed less than half the criminal acts than a comparative group of defendants steered through regular criminal justice processing. Yet, drug courts are not connecting with enough individuals, and Berman and Adler cite a 2008 study that “as few as 3.8 percent of potentially treatable arrestees are participating in a drug court.”

Jailing those awaiting trial or who cannot pay penalty fees is another bloating and tragic aspect of mass incarceration. In contrast to prisons, where individuals typically go for longer than one-year sentences, people are placed in jail for shorter misdemeanor sentences or because they have been denied bail or cannot pay bail and punitive fines. The authors cite that 60 percent of the US jail population is awaiting trial — that is, before a court has determined guilt or innocence. The population rotated into prison is also huge: 11.5 million were admitted to jail in 2014 while in the same year, state and federal prisons combined admitted 700,000 individuals. Berman and Adler further point to federal statistics reporting that from 1980 to 2008, “the number of inmates housed in a local jail on any given day in the United States increased by 426 percent (from 184,000 to 785,500).” Of course, there is the human cost, with jails being overcrowded and dangerous, and many people have their lives and finances significantly impaired with just short stays.

Perhaps most distressing is the common situation in which poor people get roped into fines, even for infractions, that they do not have the financial means to pay for and so end up in jail. Ferguson, Missouri, and the ensuing federal report brought this to national attention. “In St. Louis, recent events have exposed a toxic relationship between communities of color and local government, much of it driven by the insight that the justice system was using fees and fines to balance budgets,” Berman and Adler write.

In all jurisdictions, it will take a culture change and keen attention on the part of judges to redress the injustice of jailing poor people for inability to pay fines. Berman and Adler quote Newark Judge Pratt recounting the absurdity of a prosecutor calling for a 50-dollar fine for a defendant that came to court with only one shoe. “It’s my job as the judge to ensure that the interests of justice are met. It doesn’t serve the interest of justice to give somebody a fine they can’t pay and not give them a way to pay it.”

Yet, there is some significant change occurring, and Berman and Adler point to the example of New York City’s Rikers Island jail, where inmates are geographically separated from support and historically subject to horrendous conditions. New York City has cut the Rikers Island population to 10,000 down from 20,000, and the authors describe the current politics and consensus to eventually close the jail. Berman and Adler also discuss Washington, DC, with the DC jail population 50 percent below capacity, and nine out of ten defendants “released (either on their own recognizance or with supervision) while their cases are pending.” The DC justice system employs risk analysis, which has gained currency and sophistication nationwide, so that judges can tailor the release conditions for each defendant.

Toward the end of the book, Berman and Adler focus on state-wide initiatives for reducing mass incarceration. Many state governments, burdened with huge costs, look to reverse the mass incarceration trend by adding drug courts, treatment and job training programs, and other measures. According to Berman and Adler, the progress is bipartisan, as demonstrated by reform in states run with conservative governors and legislatures, such as Georgia, Utah, and Mississippi. This is all the more critical, given the back-and-forth revision of proposed federal sentencing reform and an acting and nominated new attorney general, whose sympathies for reducing imprisonment are dubious.

A particular challenge for states is to not reverse reform when there is an instance of a parolee committing a horrible crime. When this occurs, the response has on occasion been stricter sentencing and revised laws, some of which are eponymous laws, named after a victim, such as Megan’s Law. This puts reforming legislators and open-minded prosecutors in tight binds. “[T]he immediate aftermath of a unique tragedy may not be the best time to construct new frameworks that will govern how thousands of future cases will be handled,” Berman and Adler write.

For example, they contrast Utah’s and Arkansas’s responses to similar events. Utah, on the one hand, resisted reversing its successful program to reduce incarceration in 2016 after Salt Lake City police officer Doug Barney was killed by a parolee who absconded from a prescribed drug treatment program. Arkansas, on the other hand, reversed its reformed incarceration program, passed in 2011, after a recurrent offender and parolee murdered a young man. The result: “[T]he parole boards shut the door […] [and] Arkansas now has the second-fastest rate of prison growth in the country.” Berman and Adler are emphatic that these reverses are counterproductive and hurt many who would abide by the terms of their release.

Adding critical nuance, Start Here frequently brings up racial injustice, poverty, and other social concerns, highlighting the significant criticism for risk analysis, as it relies heavily on history of defendants, who might very well have faced incidental or systematic racism in their past criminal justice encounters. The authors also offer balanced prescriptions throughout, such as the last chapter’s three overarching fronts for change: crime prevention in communities; treat with respect everyone involved in the criminal justice system; and expand the array of sanctions available for judges. Although the book’s prescriptions are more of a collection of compelling responses than a road map, Start Here contains articulate discussions and narratives that yield a vision for a future United States that will not stand out for its distressing mass incarceration.

¤

Richard Blaustein is a freelance journalist writing on science and environmental and legal developments.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-road-to-ending-mass-incarceration/