To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.
You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they're wrong, and that they're not always wrong.
But we can also never forget what moves us to gratitude, and so what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America's unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom--of ordered liberty--built up over centuries of hard work.
We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable, because they weren't fated to happen, and they're not certain to survive. They need us--and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them.
Recently in Social Factors Category
Much of the criticism of the criminal justice system takes root in the belief that America is a fundamentally flawed country -- racist, classist, beset with the inequities of capitalism and callous (or, worse, cruel) to those who suffer from them. This belief suffuses criminal defense, which scarcely ever anymore contests whether the accused did it, and concentrates instead on the poisonous social forces that led him to do it.
A different view of our country was presented last night by Yuval Levin, as he accepted the Bradley Prize at a ceremony at the Kennedy Center. His talk was not directly about criminal law, but bears repeating as an antidote to the dim view of America I described above. Mr. Levin said, among other things:
In recent days, here for example, I have criticized the reigning theory of Political Correctness. The theory takes root in what is called "white privilege." The main idea, in the abstract at least, is that white males have spent almost all of American history pushing everyone else around. The result is that women, minorities and, most recently, (domestically) smaller religions such as Islam have suffered discrimination.
The criminal law implications of this theory are clear and important. One specific manifestation is the argument that crack cocaine offenses, committed disproportionately by blacks, have been penalized with excessive harshness borne of racism. Another is that our reaction to Jihadist attacks, on 9-11 and in Ft. Hood and at the Boston Marathon, has unfairly targeted the huge majority of American Muslims who, like everyone else, want only to live in peace and safety. Thus we need to be, uh, careful about what we say.
The most ambitious goal of Political Correctness as applied to criminal law goes a great deal farther, however. It is, by ginning up guilt, to erode the moral confidence we need to remain resolute in dealing with violent and dangerous people, whatever their race or religion. It is in no way to dismiss or diminish the cruel abuses of Jim Crow or of religious bigotry to understand that it is no favor to minorities to be timid in confronting crime -- crime that, it should be noted, disproportionately and grievously injures them.
But the PC crowd is in a sense correct in pointing out that white males have shoved their way to the front of the line. Today, June 6, is an apt occasion to remember yet another place where they are over-represented.
Continue reading A History of Discrimination.
The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Legal Studies (42:1) arrived in my mailbox today. (Punctuality is not their long suit.) Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll have an article titled Assessing the Contribution of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill to Growth in the U.S. Incarceration Rate, pp. 187-222. Here is the abstract:
Continue reading Transinstitutionalization.
I wrote recently about US Attorney Bill Killian's snarling threat to demonstrate "what the consequences are" to those with the temerity to say anything "offensive or inflammatory" about Muslims. If President Obama, who appointed Killian, has done anything to rebuke him, I haven't heard about it. (Not that rebuking him would be sufficient, and not that Obama has any desire to rebuke him, either).
As if going after the ordinary citizen who might criticize Muslims, fairly or unfairly, were not enough, we now see that the PC crowd will go after federal judges, too. Thus, when Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones said at a University of Pennsylvania Law School talk that blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites, a consortium of civil rights* organizations filed a complaint. The complaint calls for stern discipline, on the grounds that the remarks were "discriminatory and biased."
So far as I have been able to discover, it makes no mention of the fact that they're true.
* I am old enough to remember that civil rights used to include the First Amendment.
We saw in the Christopher Dorner case that an Internet subculture grew up to cheerlead for the multiple killer. We now have something even crazier, or more disgusting, I'm not sure which. I'll just give a sample from this piece in gawker.com:
#FreeJahar resists describing itself as a "fandom." Because #FreeJahar is mostly young and largely female, its habitués struggle with the perception that their interest in the Tsarnaev's case is mostly about Tsarnaev himself. "i've noticed the only thing the haters can say is: all the people on this tag are young horny girls [and] we are only defending Jahar because he's good looking," one blogger wrote. (The fact that dedicated #FreeJahar blogs routinely reblog posts calling Tsarnaev "the world[']s hottest terrorist" or collecting tweets about Tsarnaev's good looks doesn't help.)
Yes, it's all true. A certain segment of 9th grade girls has temporarily abandoned cliques to swoon for Dzhokhar because.....well.....because.....he's so cute.
Just when I start to renew my faith in kids by talking to my friends' children, something like this shows up. Yikes.
Continue reading Teenie Boppers for Dzhokhar .
I've been blogging about a lot of serious and heart-wrenching stuff. Time for something on the light side. This headline should do:
Woman Calls 911, Asks Police for Help GettingRefund from Her Drug Dealer
This is the story:
After handing over her last $50 to a drug dealer for cocaine and marijuana, a Florida woman suffering from buyer's remorse called 911 and asked cops for help in securing a refund.
Katrina Tisdale, 47, explained to St. Petersburg police that she would be penniless until her next Social Security disability check arrived. Hence the pressing need to recover her $50 from the unnamed narcotics salesman.
Despite Tisdale's explanation for her two calls to 911 Monday evening, officers arrested her for misusing the police emergency system...Tisdale was booked into the Pinellas County jail, where she is being held on $100 bond.
According to jail records, Tisdale has been arrested many times over the past several years, including six arrests for cocaine possession. Tisdale was convicted in mid-2011 of calling 911 to falsely report that she had been robbed by her drug dealer.
Campbell Brown has this op-ed in the WSJ:
There was something missing from President Obama's Wednesday speech in Denver about gun violence. He focused almost exclusively on passing gun-control laws, and not at all on one of the nation's biggest promoters of violence: the entertainment industry.
The president's campaign against gun violence has produced a stale debate marked by lots of speeches with little achieved. A more creative chief executive would have used this moment to widen the discussion by drawing attention to the increasingly graphic violence so pervasive in television shows, movies and videogames. Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media world's elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.
It's a staple in the anti-incarceration movement that the money we spend on prison would be better spent on education. If we had better education, we'd have less crime, so we are ceaselessly told.
The people pushing this line are almost always the same ones pushing the new lingo that we should have "evidence-based" this and "evidence-based" that. Conspicuously absent from their advocacy, however, is any of the much vaunted "evidence" that prison isn't working, or that education is. Maybe it would be a good idea to take a look.
As I have noted, the evidence is that prison works. It works quite well -- a big success story our adversaries prefer to sweep under the rug. I guess it's an "inconvenient truth," to coin a phrase.
And what is the evidence about how our education dollars are working?
Continue reading Leave No Crook Behind.
Kent posted a piece recounting Juan Williams' honest assessment of the black hip-hop, violence-prone subculture that lurks, mostly unmentioned, behind the problem of what is called "gun violence." The reason it's mostly unmentioned is that the ever-present charge of racism lies at the ready. Few want to be on the receiving end.
But the truth needs to be faced, or the problem of violent crime cannot effectively be addressed. The truth is not, principally, that racism drives blacks to higher violent crime rates. Racism still exists, and it's still poisonous, but it's the internal culture of differing minorities, not their victimization by bigoted whites, that tells the tale.
Asians were (and to some extent still are) also victimized by white racism, but have a very different representation among the criminal population, to wit, little to none. When you try to research the racial breakdown of inmates, as I just did, it's hard even to find a category for Asians (it's all whites, blacks and Hispanics).
Why is that?
Continue reading It's the Culture, Another Angle.
Juan Williams has this op-ed in the WSJ, titled Race and the Gun Debate. I often disagree with Williams, but he is an independent thinker, and he has the courage to call attention to the elephant in the living room, the huge problem that everyone knows about but is afraid to mention.
The debate over gun control too often seems a matter of abstractions about the meaning of the Constitution and the permissible capacities of ammunition magazines. Why is so little time spent on a question of more immediate concern--namely, why are so many young black people using guns to kill their neighbors?* * *
Continue reading It's The Culture.
Marc Fisher has this article in the WaPo regarding the dramatic decline in crime since the peak of the 1980s and the puzzlement and debate over the reasons.
It has become de rigueur in such discussions to briefly acknowledge that the tough sentencing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s are a substantial part of the reason but then immediately say something to detract from the import of that conclusion: "Most studies agree that increases in incarceration explain part of the decline in violent crime, though Solberg and many criminologists say the warehousing of young men convicted of nonviolent crimes causes as many social problems as it solves." But the people quoted in the story who actually live in a cleaned-up area don't seem to think so.
It has become de rigueur in such discussions to briefly acknowledge that the tough sentencing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s are a substantial part of the reason but then immediately say something to detract from the import of that conclusion: "Most studies agree that increases in incarceration explain part of the decline in violent crime, though Solberg and many criminologists say the warehousing of young men convicted of nonviolent crimes causes as many social problems as it solves." But the people quoted in the story who actually live in a cleaned-up area don't seem to think so.
The result [of housing policies] is a very different population, said Joyce Robinson-Paul, a 32-year resident and the advisory neighborhood commissioner for the area. "The new neighbors are very quiet," she said. But "the real crime problem didn't leave until many of the dealers were arrested and went to jail."In California, where we have elected a Governor and Legislature who cannot remember history and are determined to repeat it, we are seeing the trend in reverse. In the FBI numbers for first-half 2012 versus first-half 2011 (a clean before-and-after on the realignment that took effect in October 2011), we see crime increases in California while national figures are flat.
A: Children suffer and lives get ruined.
That is the only fair conclusion from this AP story. It's about a father and scouting official who, after he was caught molesting a scout, was kicked out of the troop but not reported to the cops, on the theory that the problem was a manifestation of "mental illness," not a crime.
Not having to worry about the criminal justice system, but deprived of his inventory of scouts, what did he do?
He started in on his own children, a daughter 12 and a boy 7. Both suffered from this for years, and both of course left home as soon as they could. But the damage was done. The daughter attempted suicide at 23, and the son, previously a happy, promising student, got in constant fights and became a desperate alcoholic. He now lives in a village in Africa.
I am not one to jump on the Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church for the abuse scandals in each. That is largely old news. The lesson we need to learn for contemporary purposes is this: When someone starts the lecture that we should turn away from the "punitive approach" of prosecution and jail and instead apply the "humane approach" of therapy and counseling -- someone like a defense lawyer, for example -- remember this story, and remember that victims, not criminals, are first in line for humane treatment. And, if a point be made of it, for justice.
Jane Goodall (the famous chimp researcher), Richard Wrongham, and Dale Peterson have this article in the WSJ. Here is the first paragraph:
Where does human savagery come from? The animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, writing in Psychology Today after last month's awful events in Newtown, Conn., echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh aggression, he wrote, is "extremely rare" in nonhuman animals, while violence is merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only we could "rewild our hearts," he concluded, we might harness our "inborn goodness and optimism" and thereby return to our "nice, kind, compassionate, empathic" original selves.The article proceeds to explain why that is baloney. The "conservative estimate[]" of violent death among chimps is 271 per 100,000, which is over 57 times the 2011 U.S. homicide rate, and the U.S. is high among developed nations. The article concludes:
Continue reading Apes, Humans, and Violence.
One of the more annoying things about the gun control debate is the phrase, "gun violence." The phrase is used by gun control advocates to imply that the problem is the gun, not the person doing the shooting. They might just as well call it "finger violence," since the finger to pull the trigger is needed just as much as the gun. Oddly, I have yet to hear anyone complain about "finger violence."
The displacement of responsibility onto something -- anything -- else is one of the favorite tactics of criminal defense. After all, if the gun did it -- or the brain lesion, or the botched Head Start program 30 years ago, or that one Twinkie too many -- then it would be unfair to send the defendant to the slammer.
Overlawyered has an example of an attempt, fortunately unsuccessful, to blame a barroom fight on what I guess should be called "beer bottle violence":
A Texas appeals court has affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to hold Anheuser-Busch liable for an assault suffered by a bar patron. The suit alleged that the long-neck design of the bottle made it too attractive for assailants seeking a weapon; the court agreed with the brewer that the plaintiff had failed to make out a sufficient case to avoid summary judgment.
You really do have to be creative to think of this stuff.
The Wall Street Journal has published a useful statistical breakdown of murder in America for the decade 2000 - 2010. Among the many interesting facts shown is that, while non-Hispanic whites outnumber blacks in the country by slightly less than 5 to 1, black murderers outnumber white murderers by about 7 to 5 (among the population of murderers whose race is known). I point this out not to disparage blacks, but to rebut the constant, and constantly absurd, charge that the disproportionately large number of blacks on death row, and as prisoners serving sentences for homicide, is a result of an endemically racist criminal justice system.
Baloney. It's a result of the fact that blacks commit a grossly disproportionate number of murders.
