Head-Spinning Political Shit!

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by betenoire

I have no idea what island you grew up on (I can't tell if that was a metaphor or not?) but it doesn't sound like somewhere that I would want to be, if you really do get to just run around killing people for doing you wrong.

Revenge sucks.

Whenever I hear someone talking about how much better it would be if we just shucked the messy legal system (with its rights of the accused, etc.) in favor of a more ad hoc and informal system (read vendetta) I am always brought back to a familial story on my mom's side of the family. One of her brothers had up close and personal experience of this kind of 'justice'. To put it bluntly my uncle was lynched for bumping into a white woman in small town Alabama in the 1920s. From the point of view of the people in the town at the time, my uncle had 'done something' to this white woman and he had to pay for his life. There was no trial, he was not 'charged', he ran home and later on some people came to my grandfather's farm, surrounded it and threatened to put the house to the torch if he did not give up his son. Here was 'justice' as done by people who get to determine when a crime had been committed and what punishment there should be for that crime.

Now, some might argue that this isn't what they mean when they talk about frontier 'justice' but it is rarely said what is actually meant. Since the whole idea behind the ethic of taking an eye for an eye is that there are no *laws* to be obeyed there is nothing to prevent some family from deciding that, for instance, the Hispanic family next door *must* be criminals and therefore burning them out of their home. Another objection might be raised that my family could have taken revenge on the people who lynched my uncle. However, that would only have meant the absolute obliteration of my mother's family. So a world of ad hoc 'justice' is a world that favors the powerful over the powerless and defines powerful as whoever can have the most guns still held by people with breath at the end of the day. Justice, then, becomes 'whoever won the gunfight'. It reminds me, a bit, of the story of Kaiser Soze in 'The Usual Supects'. After his family is murdered, Soze kills the perpetrators and then goes after the families of the perpetrators, people who live in the same neighborhood as the perpetrators, people who owe the perpetrators money, etc. This leaves no one to take revenge against Soze.

(Also - overcrowding in prisons has NOTHING to do with not getting to just willy-nilly kill all the bad guys. It's got everything to do with a fucked up legal system that locks people up for stupid shit (drugs, really?) and locks some (not white) people up faster and for longer than others.)

You make a great point. So why on Earth would I, a black woman, defend the criminal justice system over a system of vendetta-based 'justice'? Because legal systems have rules--I understand that we're supposed to find those rules distasteful because it gets in the way of engaging in emotionally cathartic but cruel behavior--we can't torture people and we can't just shoot people without trial--but *at least* those rules offer up the prospect of fairness and redemption. For all its flaws, if reasonable doubt can be established in my trial then I go free. Even if I was mistakenly convicted, if new evidence comes to light then I will be exonerated. I won't get my years of incarceration back but if I'm dead I can't even be exonerated. It is also demonstrably the case that the *sole* reason for prison overcrowding is the inconsistent application of drug laws in our absolutely insanely stupid 'war on drugs'. When the only other countries that are in the same neighborhood as you when it comes to locking up prisoners (and I don't mean absolute numbers, I'm talking about percentages) are nations that are either totalitarian dictatorships (China) or theocratic dictatorships (Iran) you *know* you are doing something seriously wrong.

Cheers
Aj