Five Posts You May Have Missed in 2014

These posts didn’t get as much love. Sadly, none of them is out of date.

1. Criminalization is Pretty Harmful Too

Here is some push back on the idea that decriminalization of things will lead to harms, as if criminalization isn’t a massive source of harm.

Is prison harmful? Is ripping apart families harmful? Is the endemic sexual assault found in prison harmful? What about the risk of violence, or the torture of solitary confinement? Or overcrowding, or lack of medical care? How about the collateral consequences of imprisonment–unemployment, being barred from public housing, food stamps, federal education aid and a whole host of professions or voting? What about the impact on communities where many people are shuffled between prison and the neighborhood? What about the police harassment that comes with hyper-aggressive law enforcement?

[Speaking of which, High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime h/t Gerry Canavan.]

2. Charter Schools’ False Promise

Criminalization is Pretty Harmful Too

It’s a pretty standard thing to see: in an argument about whether we should either decriminalize or legalize some thing, oftentimes the argument revolves around one thing. Is this thing harmful? The best example, although it’s not the only one, is drugs. Obviously, if the argument in favor of criminalizing something is that it’s harmful, than evidence that it is not supports ending legal prohibitions.

Is prison harmful? Is ripping apart families harmful? Is the endemic sexual assault found in prison harmful? What about the risk of violence, or the torture of solitary confinement? Or overcrowding, or lack of medical care? How about the collateral consequences of imprisonment–unemployment, being barred from public housing, food stamps, federal education aid and a whole host of professions or voting? What about the impact on communities where many people are shuffled between prison and the neighborhood? What about the police harassment that comes with hyper-aggressive law enforcement?

Few things we criminalize because they are ‘harmful’ are anywhere close as harmful as prison.

Blacks are Everyday People: Baltimore and the Drug War

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In a post perhaps better entitled “Official makes offensive, ludicrous claim,” but actually entitled Batts: Crime dropped for “everyday citizens” in 2013, Justin Fenton ‏points us to this statement by Baltimore top cop.

With murders, non-fatal shootings and street robberies up in 2013, Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts emphasized in television interviews Monday that crime affecting “everyday citizens” was moving in the right direction.

“It’s not throughout the city as a whole,” Batts told WBAL-TV of the violence. “It’s very localized and unfortunately, it’s with African American men who are involved in the drug trade and 80 to 85 percent of the victims are involved in the drug trade going back and forth.”

As Fenton points out, “Batts also said that ’80 to 85 percent’ of victims of violence were African-American men involved in the drug trade. But overall, only 84 percent of city homicide victims are black men” and “police determined a drug motive in just 3 of 224.” Three.

I am outraged at David Brooks’ continuing execution of the War on Drugs

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[If you read my piece entitled I’m so outraged at Kim Kardashian for maintaining the 5th Fleet in a human rights violating autocracy, some of this may be familiar.]

Someone who doesn’t have any lawmaking or prosecutorial power

One of the strange things about our politics is the disconnect between what sorts of things lead us, collectively, to express outrage and what sorts of things we don’t notice.  I’m thinking specifically of how a statement can set off outrage while the background behaviors, activities or policies that the statement expresses or seeks to justify do not.  So Mitt Romney can, as the nominee of the Republican Party, run an entire campaign on policies that are designed to better distribute wealth to the wealthy while ignoring the concerns of large blocs of voters, but it takes him saying that he only cares about half of the voters to really get people outraged.

I think this dynamic is a product of two things.  First, a great deal of our politics concerns people’s motives and character, which are largely unknowable, as opposed to assessing their actions on their own terms.  So when someone says something, potentially revealing their intentions, it seems powerful.  Second, and I suspect more importantly, it’s hard to get upset about long-standing, entrenched conditions.  We do better trying to oppose some deviation from the norm, or at least, things that are understood that way.  Thus we see a great deal of arguments over precedents outside the courtroom, where they may well seem misplaced. Similarly, the nonstop efforts to paint people and positions are “extreme” without attending to the merits of the position. Politics is in many ways largely an effort to decide whose positions are considered speakable and whose are not, which is fairly antithetical to both the idea of progress and the ideal of democracy.