Public Defenders for All

Imagine if our criminal justice system had no private attorneys, only public defenders. Anyone who is accused of a crime would be represented by lawyers who are assigned and paid by the state. I think the outcry against this would be predictable, and in that outcry are ironically the arguments for why it is necessary. A typical argument against it might go something like this: by requiring me to accept a public defender for my defense, the state essentially requires me to accept substandard representation and limits my chances for an advantageous outcome. Do you see it there? If you don't want to be forced to use a public defender because you believe they aren't as effective but the system currently grants public defenders to those who cannot afford private counsel, the system is by definition unjust as it offers justice only to those who are affluent enough to afford it.

There are two solutions to this. First, we could make it so that no one is so poor that they couldn't afford a private attorney should the need arise. (This isn't really a solution at all, though, because legal representation would still be stratified, with those who are more affluent being able to afford, on average, attorneys with better training, experience, and resources than those who, while not poor, are still relatively worse off.) Second, we simply force all defendants to use randomly assigned defenders who are paid by the public. There are definitely discussions to be had about, perhaps, more stringent requirements for those lawyers and ways to ensure adequate resources (e.g. paralegals and discretionary funds), but other issues, like the paucity of lawyers currently serving as public defenders and the motivating factors that lead public defenders to encourage their clients to accept plea agreements, would solve themselves as lawyers would either become public defenders or give up their practices and increased resources and changing norms would reduce plea incentives.

These same principles, however, apply just as well to other kinds of justice outside the criminal justice system, schools for example. How can we justify private schools? (Religious education might seem like an exception, but religious institutions are still bound by the same educational standards and tend to do surprisingly little actual religious education. The religious indoctrination could more efficiently be done outside of regular school hours, say on Sunday mornings. Hey, we could call it "Sunday School!") How can we justify private medical insurance? Private security?

Racist Policing without Racist Police

I read a blog post recently at Gin and Tacos, a blog and Facebook feed that I recommend, that got me thinking. It's worth a read first.

I find myself disagreeing with Ed. We know that individual level racism has been in decline for decades. Implicit bias and institutional racism, however, are persistent because they are subtle (i.e. difficult to recognize). I don't see any reason to believe that police officers and police departments are any different from the rest of society. The proportion of police officers who are overtly racist have likely been in decline for decades even as most remain implicitly biased against people of color and even as police departments organize in ways that unintentionally lead to racist outcomes (e.g focusing policing on "bad" neighborhoods). If we envision the disproportionately unjust experiences of people of color with police (including but not limited to being killed) as attributable to "bad seeds," we miss the larger social trend, but more troublingly, we miss the opportunity for actually make things better.

See Racism without Racists.

Out of (Symbolic Interactionist) Order

A random thought on criminal justice today. In the United States, our trial system is one that is based on evidence and witness testimony. It is also adversarial. What this means in practice is that we end up with two sides who present their own evidence and witnesses and attempt to challenge the other side's evidence and witnesses. The intention of the system is that the evidence and testimony of one side stands up to scrutiny, while the other does not, and the truth becomes obvious to a judge and/or jury who decide the case. Good attorneys, however, (and in particular good defense attorneys) attack not just the opposition's evidence and witnesses but also the base epistemological assumptions the trial system makes about evidence and testimony. To abuse an old cliche, they put the system on trial. It's one thing to question a person's recollection of events; it's another to question people's general ability to remember. It's one thing to question a lab tech's proper handling of DNA; it's another to question the reliability of DNA testing. Essentially, each trial whittles away just a little bit at what courts do. This is a smart strategy in the short term and for individual clients, but in doing so, it fundamentally erodes the credibility of a social institution at the expense of social benefits. There are certainly a lot of problems with the trial system as currently conceived, but I'll leave for another day the discussion of how we might repair or replace it.

Friday Music: "Prison Song" - System of a Down

I give you System of a Down's "Prison Song":



This song deals with the "War on Drugs" and the rise of the prison industrial complex.

*The Purge*: Crime, Violence, and Ritual?

I just saw the preview for this movie today for the first time.



I'm excited about it because it has that same Lottery/Hunger Games-thing going on. Am I unrealistic in my hope that this film might be a statement on the criminal justice system and violence and perhaps even race?

Polite Right's Violation

I'm back from a few weeks off over the holidays. I wanted to share this travel tidbit with you all. When my wife and I returned home from a week and a half away visiting family, we found the flyer pictured below in two of our checked bags:

At least the TSA was polite about violating my civil rights.

"Beyond Scared Straight" and the Reinforcement of Deviance

A&E has a series titled Beyond Scared Straight. Check out this clip:


There are several other clips available, much like the one above.

Ironically, as the Justice Department takes steps to make prisons safer for inmates, this show and the program it follows encourage inmates to threaten at-risk youth with violence in order to scare them into reform. It seems likely, however, that such psychological violence and physical threats serve to reinforce the very violent, hyper-masculine posturing that leads young men (and, increasingly, young women) to be incarcerated. These kinds of approaches satisfy the audience's conservative desire for crime deterrence but might actually be perpetuating the problems they hope to allay.

Here is a comical take:

Clash of Perspectives

Just a quick thought on the progress in the Trayvon Martin case. It is being reported that Trayvon had marijuana in his system and that both Martin and Zimmerman had obvious signs of being in a violent altercation. The pictures of Zimmerman appear to indicate that he got the better of it from Martin. The news media seem to be implying that this complicates the situation beyond the "unjustified white on black crime" narrative. I don't see it this way. None of the new information changes the basics of the case. A black boy was unduly targeted and ultimately killed by a white man. Let's change the facts to give us some perspective. Imagine a white teenage girl was walking home from a friend's house one night when a white man began following her in his car, then exited his car, and began pursuing her on foot. Now, what if the terrified girl pulled mace or a Tazer from her purse and incapacitates the man? Was her use of violence against what she thought was a rapist not understandable? Trayvon didn't have mace or a Tazer; he had his fists. Zimmerman got that broken nose, black-and-blue eyes, and gash on the back of his head because he was un-empathetic; he could not put himself in the other's shoes. Zimmerman's perspective--and that of the larger society--was that an unidentified young black man in a predominantly white, gated community did not belong. Martin's perspective--one shared with most subjugated peoples--was he was being targeted, potentially violently, because of his identity. It was the clashing of these perspectives that led to a tragic outcome, but only one of these perspectives is justifiable. None of this changes the criminal nature of what Zimmerman did. Ironically, Trayvon was just "standing his ground."

The Risk of Stop and Frisk

The New York Times has a nice piece on so-called stop-and-frisk police practices and their racial/ist implications. Here is the sociological punchline:

The Police Department has said that it conducted a record 684,330 stops last year, and that 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic. About 10 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has examined police data. 

The very next paragraph in the story, however, offers the police's reframing of the numbers that is at best speculative and misleading and at worst intentionally deceptive. The reporting demonstrates the challenges that "balanced" journalism presents. In trying to avoid the perception of bias, journalists potentially (and ironically) set an agenda that runs counter to social realities. Here are a couple links to other takes on the ineffectiveness of racial profiling, both intentional and unintended.

Free Pass for Financial Fraud

This is pretty disturbing: prosecutions over financial fraud has fallen markedly over the very period when we suspect that financial institutions have been pushing the boundary between the "merely" unethical and the patently criminal; all the while, non-financial criminal prosecutions are at an unprecedented high.

The connection between social class and the prosecutions should be obvious: white collar financial crime is done almost exclusively by the privileged, while all that other crime is done disproportionately by the disadvantaged.

To put it in OWS language, we're letting the 1% off, while we're cracking the whip on the 99%.

Onion: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult

Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult

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via The Sociological Imagination