Abandoning the Debate

In the last four days there have been five separate attacks on Democratic party offices apparently by right wing extremists.

Since the 2008 election, when GOP rally audiences started yelling "kill him" at every mention of Barack Obama, I knew this was coming. These extremists are now abandoning the debate for violence. No doubt, this is terrorism. I'm not surprised, but I'm worried.

Click here for a detailed listing of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right since the Oklahoma City bombing, and now I'm going to outsource the rest of this blog post to Rachel Maddow:

Criminal Mastermind Fail

"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." - Benjamin Franklin.

And one could keep a secret, if he's not a cocky idiot. Virginia recently executed a killer who sent a prosecutor a taunting, profanity-filled letter admitting to a brutal rape and murder after he assumed that he could not be tried again for the crime after a reversal. In his letter, the killer explained explicit details that the investigators didn't know:

"Since I have already been indicted on first degree murder and the Va. Supreme Court said that I can't be charged with capital murder again, I figured I would tell you the rest of what happened on Jan. 29, 1999, to show you how stupid all of y'all ... are," wrote Powell, who is white.
...
"I guess I forgot to mention these events when I was being questioned. Ha Ha!" he wrote in 2001. "Do you just hate yourself for being so stupid ... and saving me?"

Note to would-be murderers: please take a moment to understand double jeopardy in your country.

Father Polanski

In 1977, a 44-year-old man plied a 13-year-old girl with drugs and alcohol and then raped and sodomized her. The man was charged with several crimes including lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under 14. The charges were dismissed when he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. When the man learned he might face imprisonment instead of probation, he fled to France, where he held citizenship and could therefore be protected from extradition to the U.S. Thirty-something years later, the man may finally do time behind bars.

If this man were a Catholic priest, a Father Polanski let's say, do you think so many celebrities would be spinning wild explanations and doublespeak in his defense? Of course not. But the real man is not a priest. He is Roman Polanski, a good-looking, talented artist! His famous friends (mostly European actors, writers, and whatever) demand that we unsophisticated Americans free Polanski out of "good sense and honor." This petition certainly is a masterpiece of arrogance:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute-of-limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honor, require it.

Bernard-Henri Lévy
Salman Rushdie
Milan Kundera
Pascal Bruckner
Neil Jordan
Isabelle Adjani
Arielle Dombasle
Isabelle Huppert
William Shawcross
Yamina Benguigui
Mike Nichols
Danièle Thompson
Diane von Furstenberg
Claude Lanzmann
Paul Auster

Polanski wasn't apprehended like a terrorist. He was apprehended like a child rapist. And so the crime was committed a long time ago? It's still rape. You think there is some kind of statute of limitation? Not for sex crimes in the state of California. Not for failure to appear in court. And certainly not for a crime the man already pleaded guilty to!

And let's not forget the most absurd defense: he is an artist! A genius even! Of course, I'm only hearing this crap defense from other so-called artists. Why is that? Defending their own? They're better than lowly nobodies? Or they just don't care that a girl was raped?

I'm tired of the rich and famous getting away with crimes. No award winning filmmaker nor high-ranking government official can ever be given a free pass for egregious acts. We are a nation of laws... I hope?

Being Counted

(YouTube video)

The United States has been taking a decennial census since 1790. It's mandated by the U.S. Constitution, and the statistics are needed for anticipating our country's needs. The planning of schools, hospitals, roads, housing and employment all depend on census data. It's supposed to improve our quality of life.

But of course, now that Barack Obama is president, Republicans think the census is some kind of vast conspiracy. Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann is fear-mongering again, and she is exhausting in her stupidity. Think Progress highlighted most of the glaring idiocy in Bachmann's hysteria.

But here is what I want to scream at the know-nothing Bachmann: "Census data are used to distribute Congressional seats to states!" If you're a member of Congress, you want your state counted if only to save your own job!

And the last thing any representative wants is to be even remotely associated with the death of a census worker. As the details of Bill Sparkman's death are revealed, the case seems more and more like a homicide spurred by anti-government vitriol.

I had no idea a boring bureaucratic survey could lead to this kind of hate.

Why Aren't You in Jail?

Are we really becoming this short-sighted? Debtors' prisons are back:

Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.

In 1970, the Supreme Court ruled that it violates equal protection to keep inmates in prison extra time because they are too poor to pay a fine or court costs. More recently, the court ruled that a state generally cannot revoke a defendant’s probation and imprison him for failing to pay a fine if he is unable to do so.

This is another example of our nation repeating history because we didn't learn the lesson the first time. Of course, the major flaw of this system is that by putting indebted people in prison, society prevents them from contributing their labor and thus makes it harder for them to pay it off and thus makes it harder for creditors to recoup their investment.

And of course, you won't see the Wall Street types going to jail even though the banks they run seem hopelessly insolvent: "The International Monetary Fund has estimated that U.S. banks will require $275 billion to $500 billion in additional capital."

It's a case of one set of rules for rich people, and another set of rules for the rest of us. It's a bit like drug prohibition. We have over half a million drug offenders incarcerated, and yet look at all the politicians who can admit to drug use and still go free.

So when we get around to rethinking these laws and prison terms regarding debt, drugs, and other crazy stuff, one question we should each ask ourselves is "self, why am I not in jail too?"

Columbine Lessons

I'm sure you've heard that today marks the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. The predictable sensationalism proved to be too much for Oprah Winfrey who pulled an already-taped episode about the tragedy saying it "focused too much on the killers."

I suppose that move is respectable considering the number of mass shootings this country has seen lately. However, there are lessons to be learned and relearned from Columbine. Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, dispels a prevailing myth about school shooters:

The first lesson is really one that we have unlearned, which is that there actually isn't a distinct psychological profile of the school killer. Pre-Columbine, teachers, parents, journalists, and the general public were pretty clear on where we thought the danger lay: loners and outcasts, troubled misfits who could not figure out how to fit in. Harris and Klebold were mistakenly tagged with all those characteristics in the first hours after their attack. Every characterization of them was wrong, both in their case and for shooters generally. The FBI conducted a ground-breaking study to help teachers assess threats in their classrooms. Oddballs were not the problem, the FBI concluded. Oddballs did not fit the profile, because there was no profile. In a surprisingly empathetic report, the bureau urged school administrators to quit focusing on the misfits. These were not our killers, and weren't they having enough trouble already?

That's how we slide into a classic moral panic -- believing that public morality or safety is threatened by the activities of a stereotyped group.

The only people I feel comfortable stereotyping are psychopaths. Eric Harris was most likely one. His own journal entries document his contempt for everybody. But the most revealing passages describe his goals: "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible, so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."

In order to kill his classmates, he first had to consciously kill his own humanity.

Hellhole

"Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?" — The Bet by Anton Chekhov

There is something about the name SuperMax that seems so doublespeak. There is something about our idea of punishment that seems so primitive. There is something about solitary confinement that is, no doubt, torture:

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

The story of Bobby Dellelo, told in this penetrating New Yorker article, is not unique. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in solitary confinement -- confined to a cell for at least twenty-three hours a day without experiencing any physical human contact.

Before you react with the worn-out argument that solitary confinement provides discipline and deterrence, please do read that article. There are better strategies for dealing with the most violent criminals. The British have had success with providing prisoners with opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills.

I was going to end on the note that people are mostly hooked on vengeance and politicians can't succeed without some level of tough-on-crime posturing, but then I was impressed to read that Senator Jim Webb has introduced a new bill calling for prison reform. I wish him luck in this politically risky endeavor. He is not only up against private profit-driven companies but also a public faith in a counterproductive system.