One of the few things our divided America agrees on is that our criminal justice system is failing. That the explanation and solution would be polar opposites is a separate matter. Leftists point at the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting, Righties point at the Darrel Brooks vehicular mass murder spree. In the billions of words of cyber-ink spilled in the explaining solutions, this blog offering is worthwhile because it addresses the real question covered over by the coverage, forest-through-the-trees style. America locks up more people than the rest of the developed world combined (throw in China and Russia for good measure).
The real question is: Are we doing that because Americans are too wild to be free? Or because we lock people up for things that other nations do not?
It has to be one, or the other. Pause to ponder it…
This libertarian says that incarceration is the wrong tool for most of the things we use it for. Between half of and a third of all American prisoners are mentally ill. The lion’s share of people jailed in America are for illicit substance abuse. Every other country in the Western world has a less-criminal approach to both.
In my generation of clinical experience dealing with the people afflicted by these issues, I can testify that mental illness and illicit drug use are twisted together like a DNA helix. Trying to parse them apart within a framework of morality, much less through a criminal/non-criminal legal distinction, is much of the reason why we are so far down the road of system failure. We know that the finest of us, people in combat serving the US military, can have mental illness induced by repeated trauma. Prisons are just as stressful, if not worse. We are taking mentally ill people, and inducing PTSD.
Given this task (impossible, IMHO), the legal system has also failed to adapt itself into an efficient tool for the purpose. Nor have we changed our notions of punishment, we should do both.
Police statistics reveal that the majority of police activity involves things having nothing to do with real crimes, the definition of which would be agreed upon by any society on our earth today (or millennia ago). Those would be taking people’s stuff, hurting them unlawfully, etc.
On top of criminal justice maladaptation, we have sensationalist media distortion that compounds our mistakes, and inhibits our ability to differentiate between crime/not-crime. In a piece I wrote about the rise of Mayoral candidate Eric Adams, I showed how just one infamous incident in Times Square boosted his political appeal. His candidacy was itself a reflex against a distorted “Defund the Police” meme. “Adapting the police,” because they rarely do real police work, because most of their “clientele” are not doing anything really criminal,” would have been a useful definition of the problem that might have brought some progress towards reform (once again, as always, thanks for nothing, radicals).
Now we have millions of Americans wanting to alter the most baroque legal system ever, which is already clogged up with flights-of-folly-fashion-based outlier cases, the notoriety of which were created by media distortion in the first place. Crack vs cocaine of the snorting variety, for example. There is no real objective distinction in terms of medical effects. Hell, this describes the whole drug war.
There are millions of criminals (or “criminals”) who go about their business, with all sorts of legal sanctions against them, who do not commit anything like Darryl Brooks’ outrage. One out of three men of color are under some form of state control. The DA who advocated for the bail reform that affected the Brooks case knew there would be consequences. He knew it because there is no way to read a person’s mind to figure out what danger they might present in the future, and he was just speaking that fact out loud. I watch psychiatrists agonize over things like this in a medical setting all the time. As they say in finance: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Many criminals/psych patients get worse, most are redeemed (aging is a great redeemer). We either accept outliers as such or we incarcerate more people than we already do (which would be way, way more than anyone else). If you feel you have the expertise to predict which, out of these millions of people, will be dangerous in the future (not by 20/20 hindsight behind your newspaper in your study), stop reading this blog, establish the foundation of your scientific discipline, and then go collect your Nobel Prize. Because what we are talking about is mind-reading.
There are 1.2 million outstanding warrants that had to be waived in Brooklyn alone. 99 percent of these are for nuisance issues, like being out in public with an open container of alcohol (the police have special squads for hunting down crime-criminals). Bail reform was needed the way we had to discharge really sick patients from the hospital to make way for COVID cases (and remember, COVID was some of the impetus behind bail reform: in prisons and jails virus hygiene and social distancing is impossible; the virus would have wiped the prisoners out. Put them all back in prison, and the virus thrives again).
Kyle Rittenhouse himself said that he supports the BLM complaints of strong-arm prosecuting. Doubly-so, you have to imagine, now that he was the target of a prosecution chockablock with misconduct. He conceded that he had the financial means to defend himself in court, just as well as he did against the rioters. His day in court was another outlier: most defendants will have a prosecutor stack up as many charges as possible and make them contest each and every one as a [pressure tool for a plea-bargain][8]. But the coercion to bargain is what makes our system run, necessitated by the job we are making it do, under the conditions we make it work under. Which is continually piling crimes/non-crimes on their desks.
Lastly: anyone reading a libertarian blog cannot be surprised when the government fails to apply wisdom and judgement which would be basic common sense to everyone else (the government banned COVID tests). This scribbler wonders how much of the perverse growth of the system was to adapt to its own lack of wisdom and judgement. Darell Brooks mowed down scores of people, and snuffed out the lives of six, as he fled from being arrested for running over a woman (a different one) earlier (a woman of color, of course). This running of people over is very much who he is. His rap sheet is terrifying.
Somehow, we can have a “three Strikes you’re out” approach to drug crime, and have a professional predator released on a $1000 bail, after he had jumped a low bail (a different one). The “somehow” is: this is the same system that would not allow you to buy a COVID test at the outset of the pandemic of the century, and then mandated you get one. This is the same system that thought invading and forcibly re-educating the Middle East was a good idea.
But the other “somehow” is the inevitable consequence of prisons overcrowded to bursting. And that is because the criminal justice/carceral system is our only tool for addressing our social ills. The system is overburdened to where we had no room left for an obvious goblin like Darrel Brooks. And that is because we fail to discriminate between what is really criminal, and what are black marks on the human condition, which no putting people in cages can correct.
When everything is a crime, nothing is.
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We’ve had an affirmation that it remains against moral law to attack an armed person with bare hands, rocks, kicks and a skateboard.
…with a mob, one of which pointed a handgun at his head.
I watched so much video of that night. Rosenbaum was out of his mind (maybe in his normal mind from what I read about him). His mental illness was hidden by the culture he lived in. He was the instigator of the nights events. At one point he demanded, “shoot me nigga”. Those in “his” crowd tried to calm him saying “it’s not worth it”, and “you’re going to get us all shot”. They knew what he was doing. Twice he had attempted suicide in the previous couple of months. Non of this covered.
Yup, as I said in the article, there are legions upon hordes of mentally ill people out there (so is Darrel Brooks, BTW, with bipolar disorder documented since adolescence). Yes, such people can set off tragic chains of events. That is an argument for trying to heal the mentally ill with all the science we have (but some, like Brooks and Rosenbaum, should probably never be let free).
My take is that a crowd dynamic took over. As Rosenbaum chased KR, someone fired a shot. Nobody knows who or why. If you have never been shot at (I have), know that can color your fears, irrespective of the baying mob that also tried to corner KR.
IMHO, the “original sin” of the KR shooting was that he allowed himself to get separated from his tribal mob, where he was safer. He was a target of opportunity, Rosenbaum tried to pick him off, and events then overtook everyone. I have no problem believing that skateboard guy (name escapes me at the moment), and Gaige believed they were stopping an active shooter. One of the militia organizers conceded as much.
None of this has bearing on KR believing he was fighting for his life. That, I think is also true.
This really comes down to “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Not one of those people should have been where they were. When the police issue a statement like: “we cannot control the town, you all must stay home.” Then STAY HOME. The town kinda devolved into a lawless arena. But everyone there chose to enter that arena.
Still and all, I think KR had better intentions than most of the other “stupid players.” There is a difference between someone being in chaos because they want to put out flaming dumpsters, and people being there because they want to set dumpsters on fire. Let’s talk soon.
KR testified that he didnt react to the shot that was fired as he ran away from the deranged JB, overwhelmed maybe from the emotion of being pursued and knowing that he was ultimately going to have only option to stop him, but the shooter is well known and has been arrested. His name is Joshua Ziminski. He’s also a bad dude and was with JB in so many of the videos that night. He lit and fueled the dumpster fire as a matter of fact.
The initial instigation to be in Kenosha was irrelevant. The sides were 1.
those that want to create chaos and mayhem and uproot a society that they dont feel they fit in and 2. those that want to take control for the first time of a society that they feel may be slipping away from them.
OK, thanks for the correction.
Agreed, when the police are forced to stand down (out of political considerations, IMHO), normal and average people will then step forward and try to keep their towns from being burned. No doubt.
I agree that this is a basic fact, but it’s a very regrettable one. Mobs will not do justice, Right or Left. It is the State’s fault for shirking their duty (but the way modern politicians see it, political calculations ARE their duty), but that is not the same as saying the outcomes of the people filling that void will be positive (it just so happened to have not be terrible, in the KR case, but it could have been so much worse, there was a lot of god luck there).
No doubt, law enforcement is better trained and equipped to keep tragedies like this to a minimum: I was working Times Square for New Years one year. And saw a line of five mounted police absolutely and decisively manage a crowd of over a hundred: the worst louts at the front got pushed back by the horses (that does not go on long, since no lout born can out-push a horse), until they were roughly in line with everyone else. The horses then turned sideways, making a line, and cantered sideways, herding the huge crowd back into their containment pens. No fuss, no muss, easy peasy, almost effortless. Police all through Europe manage hundreds of thousands of football hooligans this way. This is what the police are for.
Even here in NYC, where we had no fatal mishaps, the police were told to “stand down,” again, out of political calculus (even though they had recently procured a whole arsenal of counter-riot gear). I’ve spoken with a few cops about it, and they are understandably outraged. They view it as a disgrace to their oaths to the city. If this goes on long enough, counter-mobs will intervene, sure as the sunrise. That is a bad thing, and will kill more people.
When I wrote to you the first time I hadn’t read your article but I just completed it.
Ive always believed that we are “too free to be free” (I changed your phrase around) but Im considering your hypothesis now and did some research. I dont mean to bely your article because I agree with everything you write but the US is a an extreme outlier when it comes to violent crime and murder. We have cultivated a very violent society here.
We are an outlier in rates of violence because we chose certain policies that make us so (the policies themselves are also outliers, chosen by nobody else in the developed world): the vast majority of violence here is gang-related, and that is centered around the illicit drug trade.
If you take out drug crime, the USA would still have more violence, but nowhere close to as much. That violence is highly concentrated in neighborhoods blighted by the fact we are FIGHTING A WAR there. Hardly a set of conditions where you expect good outcomes.
There are countries that have much harsher drug laws than ours without the violence so I dont think the correlation is there entirely. I say this knowing how complex human behavior is and that it might not even have been studied and also I am not an expert but…
The shootings that are happening in this country are over looks, and clothing, and loyalty, and machismo, and so many seemingly unimportant things. From my very limited experience those that commit violence and die arent high enough to justify their participation in the violence. I still think that we have created and perpetuate a very violent society here from the street culture, from slave origins, from revolutionary origins, and from fierce independance to name a few.
Sorry, one more thing: know what the single strongest predictor of someone being incarcerated is?
If a close member of their family has been. Two terrible conclusions rise from that: 1) crime is a cultural thing, and developing policies to alter culture is incredibly hard. 2) since we throw all the parents in jail today, we will be throwing all the kids in jail tomorrow. This is a generational problem if we get the policies right today.
Here are some links:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded/expandhomicidemain
https://theoutline.com/post/7752/victim-offender-overlap
Keep in mind: the FBI knowingly manipulates the statistic of “Murder victim known to…” They define gang murders in this category. That is, like I said, the lion’s share.
The second link is how often murder victims are also violent felons. This is in keeping with my experience working on the street: I have rarely seen an “innocent” murdered. They are almost always “players” in the drug game, to one degree or another. Hence, the conclusion that violence and murder are more cultural than anything else. Which means these are not statistical inevitabilities, like asteroids hitting the earth.
That also explains why, you are right, places that have severe drug laws don’t necessarily have severe violent crime (but you can’t compare America with, say, Singapore). Then again, I bet Singapore takes better care of their crazy people (Blake needed care, confirmed bipolar).
Even though we have regrettable amounts of violence all over, murders and violet crimes are mainly concentrated in a small number of areas (Chicago, Baltimore). The vast majority of American reporting police precincts have no murders at all, in a given year. In those places, American violent crime gets to looking like the averages for the rest of the developed world.
I concede y0ur point, that America will always be more violent than, say, Denmark. But, there are lots of things we can do to bend the curve to better, or worse. Reforming mental health care, and illicit drug policy would go a long way to improving things.
I love your writing and your thoughtfulness. Thanks for all this information. Now to read it 🙂
So far the data suggests that in terms of murder that it’s safer for women to remain single. This is advice that certain communities are well heeding.
Thanks for loving my stuff.
Men are hugely dangerous. Young men especially. But look at the stats to notice how much they mellow. It’s remarkable.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why (actually, it
Is not really a wonder, it’s a knowing): mental illness manifests in those same years. Teenage to early teens. That’s when mental illness comes out. That is definitely what happened with the Blake-monster. In his history, bipolar actually came out early.
The counter-factual is if these people can be identified and successfully treated. Only God knows what would have happened with him if he had a better support system that made him take his rx, and go to the doctor like he should have. This takes a huge amount of functionality and patience, from the family. Most families in his demo are simply not that functional. Also, often it takes a lot of trial and error to get a psych medication balance right. Also, people outgrow their rx.
*Sigh* The counter argument is: look how resource-intensive it is to let them become mentally ill, then violent, put them through the courts, then become a mass killer.
Sorry, that’s “mellow with age.”
And…”teenage to early 20’s…” when mental illness manifests.
Thanks for playing.