Every so often a story comes along that demands too long a quote, and covers too many categories, to fit neatly into a news column. The always-awesome Elizabeth Nolan Brown recently published such an article; though at first glance it belongs in “Top Cop“, it also covers a great deal of material I’d file under “Greeks Bearing Gifts” and “Counterfeit Comfort“, and…oh, to Hell with the introduction; here’s a generous taste:
…Kamala Harris…is currently painting herself as a criminal justice reformer. Last night, a voiceover introducing Harris even described her as having fought “to end mass incarceration.” That would be news to the countless Californians she fought to lock up or keep locked up…Harris’s record as a “progressive prosecutor” is one of continually cracking down harder on “quality of life crimes” like drug use, prostitution, and truancy. Overall, Democrats seem confused about which way they want to go on law and order issues. The 2020 convention has seen some nods to “racial justice,” policing…and Black Lives Matter, but…even as Democrats make nods to change, Harris, Biden, and other prominent party members speak of new arrest and incarceration regimes they want to put in place—for guns, for speech, for sex, and more. Out of one side of their mouths, they talk of ending racist and discriminatory policing and our over-reliance on jails and prisons…but out of the other side of their mouths, they push policies that would lead to more surveillance…more ways to extract fines from people and cage them, more reason for contact between law enforcement and those they’re policing, and more opportunities for violence, abuse, and targeted harassment of ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities…
…various voiceovers and speakers mentioned Joe Biden’s role in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—widely considered one of the biggest policy disasters in modern U.S. history and a huge driver of our country’s mass incarceration problem. Of course, they didn’t mention the crime bill by name, just one specific part of it: The Violence Against Women Act…several aspects of [which] were just as problematic as the rest of the cursed legislation. Along with the Jacob Wetterling Act, a component of the ’94 crime bill that required the creation of sex offender registries, the VAWA “laid the foundation of the current, overwhelmingly carceral—and increasingly overwrought—response to sexual violence,” write Judith Levine and Erica Meiners in their new book, The Feminist and the Sex Offender…Among VAWA’s “chief provisions were mandatory arrest in domestic violence situations…and ‘no drop’ prosecution, which prohibited the alleged victim from retracting charges…some [prosecutors]…began to subpoena women to testify against their partners or jails them until they comply…child protective services sometimes charge mothers with neglect or ‘failure to supervise’ for allowing the children to witness their mother’s abuse“…(Aya Gruber’s new book, The Feminist War on Crime, is a great place to read more about all this…
Americans’ addiction to Manichean thinking, one-size-fits-all pseudo-egalitarianism, and worship of authority figures has created this mess, and no politician has the ability to end it…especially because they’re highly motivated to continue it so as to increase their own wealth, power, and social capital.
