Being tough on crime has two faces.
The first is that you are fired up by force and violence as deterrents to crime. The second is that the idea of redemption or rehabilitation leaves you cold.
The other day the front page of my newspaper ran with the headline: “A life based on hate is no life at all.” Pretty eloquent, I thought. Who said it? Gandhi? Martin Luther King? No, it was Buford Furrow - the white supremacist who murdered a Filipino letter carrier and wounded a total of five people - three children, an adolescent camp counselor and an adult staff member - at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. It turns out that he had done some soul-searching and repudiated his violent past.
I thought that was commendable. And then I read the subheading of the article. “REGRET: Relatives of victims say gunman’s apparent change of heart is welcome, but it won’t undo his deeds.”
Won’t undo his deeds? Are you kidding? Is there anything in the world that can do that? Er, no. What’s done is done. All we can do is to look forward and hope to do better next time. But the bias of our system is such that it cannot allow that to happen with good grace. Marry the man to his deeds and make sure that he pays for all eternity with no hope of divorce! In Furrow’s case, eternity amounts to two consecutive life sentences and an additional 110 years running consecutively with the life sentences.
Can anyone say overkill? If turnaround is fair play, I guarantee that you will never see this headline: “Relatives welcome throwing the book at hate criminal, but it won’t undo his deeds.” That might be just a tad too subversive for words. We don’t want to be reminded that our system of justice is nothing more than a vindictive judgment on that which cannot be undone.
Anyone feel like beating a dead horse?
Take the case of Steven Anthony Jones. Jurors called him a killing machine. Prosecutors said he was like a submerged crocodile lying in wait for his prey.
Even one of his attorneys professed to being taken aback by his resume of crime. When he came before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy in his orange jail scrubs, she sentenced him to death for killing one man in an execution-style robbery and bludgeoning a woman to death.
But not before she recited the highlights of his long career of violence, torture and rape, stretching from Lancaster to Arizona and back to LA County. As one by one the relatives of his murdered victims walked up to the stand and confronted Jones with their expressions of anger and grief, Jones turned to the audience in the downtown LA courtroom and said he understood he had ruined lives and was sorry.
He blamed an abusive childhood and an addiction to drugs for his violence. “From the bottom of my heart, I apologize. I never knew about love. I never knew about family. All I knew was violence.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that as self-evaluations go, that one is spot on.
You cannot fault a child for failing to speak French when he grew up learning to speak Farsi. If physical violence is the only language you know, how can you be expected to become fluent in non-violent forms of communication? The judge begged to differ. She set no great store by his newfound awareness of his past. She told Jones that she was skeptical of his claim that he was a changed man. “I hope that your apology was sincere. However, these apologies do not make up for the horrific crimes you committed.”
This begs the question. What would make up for these horrific crimes? Injecting a man with a cocktail of toxic chemicals? Gassing or electrocuting him to death, and then resuscitating him so that he can gassed or electrocuted all over again? Rinse, repeat??
Aside from that, change is the real issue. Times change. Societies change. But people? Can people change? If the criminal justice system is to be believed, the answer is, who cares. No institution on earth is more threatened by the implications of genuine change than the criminal justice system.
If criminals can experience regret and remorse, they are on their way to being changed from a violent mindset to a kinder, gentler one.
But here’s the rub. Change works in both directions. If human beings can change from a hateful, violent mindset to a loving one, perhaps they can be changed from an innocent loving mindset to a hateful, savage one.
Now that is something that the criminal justice system cannot stomach. The idea of someone going from bad to good - that blindsides it and leaves its representatives shaking their head and sniggering with doubt and suspicion. But what leaves them positively apoplectic is the prospect that someone can go from being innocent and sweet to a violent criminal. That human beings can be born warm, cuddly, needing to bond, needing to connect - and then, through being routinely neglected, rejected, abandoned - through being viciously beaten, tortured and trashed - they can grow cold and insensitive, they can lose their vulnerability and bottle up feelings of anger and grief and grow mad and lash out against society…that's a non-starter. The system is shut off to that possibility!
And so when defense lawyers argued that Jones was just an innocent boy in the beginning, but that he was savagely beaten by his father every day, whether he did anything to deserve it or not, and that may have played a major role in how he turned out, Judge Kennedy will have none of it. “There are many, many people who have childhoods that are less than perfect and they don’t become violent killers as Mr. Jones has become.”
Is this one wise compassionate judge or what? Here she is telling a victim of catastrophic abuse that it's his own damn fault that he didn't grow up to become a decent law-abiding citizen. That's like a doctor telling a patient dying of cancer that it's his own damn fault that he didn't beat the odds to go on to live a healthy, productive life!
It makes sense, doesn't it, in a loopy kind of way. As long as there are all these survivors of abuse who turn our well, those who fail to do so can't blame the abuse for ravaging their psyches and destroying their lives. As long as there are all these cancer survivors who do just fine, those who fail to make it cannot blame the cancer for ravaging their bodies and destroying their lives.
And don't you just love how the judge mincingly refers to all those with "less than perfect" childhoods. As if a less than perfect childhood is the same thing as an over-the-top sadistic childhood.
Here is a system that is treated every day of the week to a parade of people overwhelmed with rage. And it refuses to face up squarely to what it is that makes them so mad that they would as soon strike you dead as look at you.
Love is what regenerates us as a species. Is it so hard to believe that the absence of love turns us into degenerates? Love brings us to life. Is it so hard to understand that the absence of love kills? Love lifts us up to where we belong. Is it so hard to admit that the absence of love drags us down to the level of wild beasts of prey?
Why is that judges and prosecutors choke on the power of love?
Child abuse is at the root of all society’s ills.
Human rights abuses, social abuses, abuses of power and money - all have their origin in child abuse.
And yet the criminal justice system blithely acts as if the breakdown of love does not lead to the breakdown of social order. Love is not all that it’s cracked up to be! You can take it or leave it!
Could it be because if the system copped to the awesome power of love, it would put itself out of business?
Imagine if it did everything to ensure that every child received his share of nurture and affection, understanding and compassion, appreciation and respect. Who would grow up to be homicidally mad anymore? Crime just might be wiped out in a generation!
No, no, we can’t have that. Judges and prosecutors would have no one to throw the book at. And then what would they do with all the punitive hostility that eats away at them from the inside? Take responsibility for it? Well, now, there’s a game-changing thought! A judge who sits in judgment on herself!
You can see why it is easier for the judge to point a finger, without noticing those three fingers pointing back at her robed self.
And so, no, your Honor, not everyone who is abused turns into a killer. You got that right, at least.
Not all victims of abuse become violent killers on the streets.
Some become alcoholics and drug addicts and smoke or drink themselves to death.
Others internalize their rage and fill hospital beds with psychosomatic diseases and auto-immune disorders.
Then there are those who become black-ops killing machines and hit men for those in need of plausible deniability - or they go to law school and put their skill set to work writing legal memos in defense of torture.
There are those who walk the corridors of power and money and dictate Machiavellian policies that unleash waves of bloody repression in faraway countries, along with mass poverty, starvation, malnutrition and disease.
There are those who use bully pulpits on TV and radio to vociferously cheerlead the kinds of unjust policies that result in massacres of the innocents, in the form of the hemorrhaging of livelihoods and wholesale loss of homes or the degradation of national health, education and welfare or the destruction of the American Dream.
And last but not least, there are all those - and they are in the majority - who lounge in easy chairs and living room couches, or perch high on judicial benches, and passively acquiesce or actively rally around institutional forms of violence like war, capital punishment, torture and police and prison brutality.
When you’re right, you’re right judge.
Not all victims of abuse become violent killers.
But who’s to say that those who do are any worse than all the others victims of sadistic abuse who kill themselves, or become state-sanctioned technicians of murder, or slaughter tens of millions of innocent victims in foreign countries for no other reason than because their CO orders them to, or for that matter, just sit back in the comfort of their living rooms or the sanctity of their judicial chambers and blithely allow the state to go on killing in their name.
