#and it's a really good program with a low recidivism

[love-r-boy]

okay i fixed the antigone uquiz result! the result is different now because i hadn’t saved anything in a document (fool me once) but i think i like this one better anyway. thank you to the wonderful anon who let me know!

[ofdinosanddais1]

Working List of Media to Engage with if you want to get a start in Prison reform/abolition

The Holes book/movie (especially the sequel Small Steps) - It does not really get into the heart of the prison system especially with how racism shaped it but it's a good introduction to the basics of the US prison system. I can't find this one video essay that goes into depth about its commentary on the prison industrial complex but there are a lot of other essays about it that aren't hard to find should you research the topic. Not only that but it also is a fairly accurate representation of wilderness therapy programs without intending to be.

Angela Davis - Angela Davis is probably the best person to learn about the prison industrial complex. She was formerly imprisoned so she is a primary source on what prison is like especially about being a Black woman in prison. She has many articles and books about it and she also discusses Palestinians and their struggle with Israel.

The Innocence Project - the Innocence Project is an organization about liberating people from Death Row especially Black men who were falsely accused and forced onto Death Row. It focuses on how the death penalty is used as a tool in white supremacy while also working hard to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and they provide legal representation FOR FREE.

The Meow Mates/Mutt Mates Program - I want to clarify that the prisons that employ programs like these do still require immense reform but these programs showcase what prison SHOULD be: rehabilitation. The participants in this program not only get to have a companion in prison but it displays a lot of compassion that imprisoned people have and does a good job of humanizing incarcerated people. The prison industry thrives off people assuming that prison is made up of the worst of the worst. Meanwhile, these inmates have gone the extra mile of what was expected of them. In this video that I linked, there are men who paid attention to the behavior of their cats, noticed something was wrong, and they examined the cat's feces and discovered a worm problem. Most pet owners I know would not go to the lengths these men have gone to care for these cats. Not only are incarcerated people people but they also are learning important skills. These people can take these skills when they leave prison (if they are not serving a life sentence) and apply that to jobs in the real world with something they are truly passionate about. This program sets them up for success and to make sure they don't come back which reduces recidivism which PROTECTS people.

Research prison systems that have low recidivism rate like Norway's prison system - These prisons focus on the principle that the punishment is being locked up. They don't punish people further than that and focus on why the crime happened in the first place and how to prevent that in the future. The COs aren't in a separate walled off room watching incarcerated people like they're zoo animals. Their station is out in the open like a nurse's station would be. This builds a rapport between the COs and the incarcerated people where they can trust each other and work toward rehabilitation. It treats crime like both an individual and social issue instead of this prophecy that anyone who does crime will forever be a horrible irredeemable person.

Try and understand how recidivism reduction and prison reform protects people - We can talk till we're blue in the face about what people deserve prison and what people don't. But prison reform is not merely about making prisons better but it's about preventing people from going to prison in the first place. A lot of laws in place are there to protect people whether that be traffic laws or even something like criminal negligence. Obviously you don't want people killing others. Obviously you don't want people stealing from others. Obviously you don't want people joining gangs and hurting others. But a lot of this stuff can be prevented. That means supporting former foster children. That means supporting after school programs and summer programs for children whose parents work too much to help them. That means supporting a living wage. That means supporting unions. That means affordable healthcare and stronger social welfare. If someone has enough money to afford to eat and own a home and not be one paycheck away from homelessness, they're not going to need to steal. If a child has friends and mentors and a healthy support system, they're not going to need to join a gang. If a former foster child has a safety net should they fall on hard times and need support, they're not going to be thousands of dollars in debt and selling drugs. If sex work is legalized, then sex trafficking victims aren't going to worry about getting arrested for prostitution when they ask for help.

Understand that you ARE allowed to see some people as irredeemable but understand that those people make up a very small percentage of the prison population - It's okay to admit that some crimes are unforgivable. I think rape is unforgivable. You can never justify rape. Murder can be justified such as people killing their abusers or people defending themselves. But you can't justify rape. You can't rape someone out of self defense. You can't rape someone to escape a hostage situation. It is an irredeemable crimes at least in MY eyes and it's okay to see some crimes as inherently bad. You can have that opinion. I do. But the prison system we have today does not protect people from rapists. And if you want society to protect people from rape and murder and abuse, the prison system needs to change. The US prison system is not about justice, it's about vengeance. Particularly vengeance against Black people for the audacity to deserve freedom. Vengeance against trans people for the audacity to exist as their authentic selves. Vengeance against unhoused people for the audacity to not being able to survive a capitalist hellscape. Vengeance against gay/bi/pan people for the audacity to love. Vengeance against trafficking victims for the audacity to be threatened with their life for not selling their bodies to meet the whim of a person who doesn't give a shit if they live or die, just as long as they get paid. This system isn't about protecting society or avenging victims, it's about silencing minorities and controlling the population. This system will not save us, it will kill us if we don't change it.

[petelonesome]

Speech given at the “Breakfast with the Mayor” event hosted by the West Appleton Chamber of Commerce

Good morning everyone. I did not know until this morning that I would be introducing the Mayor. I had actually just last week joined this august chamber, and am honored and excited to be with you this morning, even if only because of my wildly creative and partially false LinkedIn profile. So as a newcomer to these environs, my comments perforce with be brief. Or perhaps extensive. I have no idea.  I have no written comments. This will be more of an appreciation than a dissertation. I thank you for this opportunity and will therefore strive to give life to this moment with appropriate exuberance.

Well what can I say about her honor that has not already been said? I really cannot say because I have never met the mayor. Is that her there? Hello. But to be sure—when a regal presence such as Mayor Grimsby enters the pantheon of the legendary leaders of West Appleton, one is immediately cognizant of the shoulders of the giants upon which she stands, and thus upon her shoulders are we all perched. Those small, fine-boned shoulders of freedom—though small of stature, she is mighty! And we will be hearing from her later, no doubt to update us on the excellent work they’re doing to fix the overpass, and the excitement surrounding the potable water initiative. No more crying children. Such progress!

When entering West Appleton, one is immediately struck by the flowering nature of this humble berg. Children, their tiny backpacks strapped to their compact bodies, line up for the bus, to take them past the treatment plant—and I think we can all agree that the superfund was a complete success in creating several lovely acres for them to play in. Three solid feet of non-toxic topsoil. There is nothing quite like the laughter of children.

Driving past the majestic falls, just off the interstate, one is struck by the lack of garbage and the old foaming green runoff that once sluiced in from the municipal department of neighboring Newton, is now a glinting pale yellow under the morning sun. The tax money for the litigation has certainly paid off there. Soon there will be a place for the old folks to sit and watch the falling water, and think of days gone by. Bygone days when that entire landscape was a horror show of industrial waste. And we have the mayor to thank for this.

Now I know the mayor is too humble to brag of this next achievement, but by donating the old Chandler place (that big old building by the post office that was just costing so much to maintain) to the Boys of Tomorrow halfway house program, she is providing a second chance to three entire floors of young men who will no longer be violent criminals, but instead will learn to be good citizens while taking classes and nature walks all around the main byways of West Appleton. Mayor Grimsler—Grimsby! Mayor Grimsby has approved programs for them to repay society by caring for the smaller children, working part-time in the cafeteria, and some of the larger boys will be put to work clearing brush. And we are all aware--all of us here in this room--of how much brush there is still yet to clear. So much brush! So by removing the handcuffs and security bars, they will learn the value of personal responsibility, with a very low….well, with a relatively low recidivism rate. Let’s beat 50-50! That’s the West Appleton way.

As I stand before you this morning, I’m suddenly overwhelmed. I see that several of you are checking your phones—it’s an exciting itinerary and I know you’re eager to learn what’s next. And what’s next, ladies and gentlemen, are my expert celebrity impressions and animal sounds. I know, this is a serious gathering, but once you hear my imitation of Brad Pitt making the sound of a rutting baboon, ok maybe we’ll save that one for Happy Hour. I already feel I’m one of you!

Aaaah-oocha! Ha ha ha. More of this tonight at the Rotary Club’s Dance for the Blind Society. I hope to “see” you there! Ha-ha. Ha. Oooh. Ha.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my honor to introduce…..Mayor Glimsley—Grimsby! Grimsby. Thank you. Good morning.

[currentfandomkick]

Marinette did not sign up for this part 4

hey, so OG chapter 4 will now be chapter 5 as the gremlins hijacked this chapter.

part one here   previous part here   ao3 here

--

            Damian stared in quiet horror as he looked over Ladybug’s exploits after hacking into Paris’ servers. His sister—the one he took down with little effort—had been defending the city for a month before he appeared. From the video of “Stoneheart” he could tell she was given no training. And her partner was flirting with her! When he should be focusing on the mission!

             What gathered from further research was the following: his sister and her ‘partner’ were untrained. Their teammates were also untrained. A team of ten untrained teenagers—perhaps younger—were tasked with keeping a villainous coward from stealing their magic artifacts, and with stealing his in turn. A team lead by his sister. A very alone, scared girl from his one interaction with her. Smart (he saw now she knew how to save her own skin. Redirecting his attention was a good move at the time). She is smart and creative because if she isn’t, then her city and her will lose. Be under the control of some madman.

             He had to get there, and he doubted he could convince Jon to help him at the moment—why are kyptonians always fighting one another when you need the assistance of one?

             Father would stop him.

             The League was keeping Father in Gotham and he didn’t have individual access yet…

             He was stuck for the moment, and did not like it. Perhaps Grayson could prove useful? He’d ask once the man was done resting from patrol.

---------

             Cass was enjoying Paris. She spotted the possible sister at the bakery with her adoptive mother. They were happy. Cass likes that.

             Cass moved quickly through the crowd, managing to make it to the bakery.

             Marinette ran into her.

             “Ah! Sorry!” the girl managed to catch her things before they hit the ground.

             Cass waved her hands, indicating there was no harm or foul. The girl was no clumsy—Shifu Cheng was ill-informed. Those reflexes and her expression before indicated nothing but an intense focus on something else. On what, Cass wasn’t sure.

             Yet.

             For now, Cass took a seat in the bakery, smiling at the kind woman working the front. Sabine Cheng, the woman who raised the maybe-Bat.

             Cass began doing her own research, messaging Babs that she saw Soup Girl for a moment, and would be assessing her parents. She knew of cases in Gotham where things weren’t always right, and she wanted to be certain that this girl was safe, regardless of if she’s a Bat or not.

--------

             Tim decided to ignore Babs offer in the end. The possibility of owing Jason was low given both him and Cass are on the Case. Jason is good, don’t get him wrong, but the chances of Jason actually talking to the girl in a real conversation before the rest of them? As Red Hood?

             This is a calculated risk and the odd are in Tim’s favor. (Well, not in Jason's.)

--------

             Steph hummed as she went over the designer pool she was looking over. Shockingly low given its Paris—granted 200 girls is a lot to investigate… she didn’t give the others all the information she had though.

             According to Damian, she “posts a disgusting amount” which means she’s posting or tagged often. When she used some of Babs old filtering program with social media involved, it brought the candidates down to 30. She could go through thirty teenage designers social media and comb over who at least has some genes that are dominant from the Wayne side. Her natural hair had to be medium brunette at the lightest, so the natural blondes took out seven candidates right off the bat. While blue or green eyes would give them more priority on the list, eye color genes are weird. Weirdly, five of her candidates had attached earlobes, so she only had 18 left after that filter was put on… Bruce’s hair isn’t curly, so two girls with intensely curly natural hair were taken off the list. Bruce’s thin lips only knocked out two more candidates.

             That left Stephanie Brown with 14 designers in Paris to find and investigate in the right age range, because she doesn’t think Bruce started having sex at 15, unlike Tim who is allowing college kids into his ‘could be Bruce’s daughter’ mix.

             Stephanie is also going to need a plane ticket to meet these girls, and that means getting help from one of Wayne kids… Or stowing away on the private jet that she knows Tim can and will be using sometime today to do ground work himself.

             She’s cool stowing away—Babs is covering for her on principle since Tim wouldn’t take the deal. Steph was smart enough to relinquish one piece of blackmail in total in exchange for use of Babs filtering tech—she has more than that thanks to one Supergirl spilling a number of things Babs has done over the years. Has Stephanie mentioned she’s the only one of the Bats to listen to Oracle, Queen of Technology, in this bet? She is, and she is better for it.

-----------

             Marinette managed to make it to the Agrests Mansion with little issue this time. Today she was going to one of the production lines with Gabriel to learn how to reset the machines and program them to follow any simple stitch pattern she wanted. It was good.

             She also noticed that during none of her times with Gabriel, was there a single akuma sighting. Not an attack—those never happened anywhere near their time together. It was an… interesting pattern. She was beginning to suspect that if Hawkmoth wasn’t Gabriel (he was akumatized, it can’t be him. Get that theory out of your head Marinette), then it had to be someone who worked for him, and high on the food chain.

             She made sure to memorize each of his ‘supervising managers’ and partners’ names. One of them had to be Hawkmoth. And Gabriel had to be someone that this Hawkmoth either really respected or really didn’t want handle re-scheduling with. Which would be all of them…

             She really wished she had more time to dig into their lives herself. For now, she had to trust Max and Markov to do the research… which reminded her, her name had been pinged on multiple searches in Gotham last night. From numerous devices. If the Bats were planning anything…

             Marinette gripped her purse a bit tighter. Her team has her back. She just doesn’t want them caught up in this mess too. She wishes that Aquaman never showed up. If he hadn’t, then the Bats wouldn’t be looking into her civilian life, the one they already knew about but only now deemed worthy of their attention.

             She wished they would just stop—she won’t look into the Great Detectives. She knows she’s not one of them. That she wouldn’t hack it in Gotham. But Damnit, in Paris? Her Territory—she does more than hack it. Sure, she may have blown herself up that one time, and yes, there is the timeline where as Princess Justice she may have sort of broke the world by forcing it to conform to that akumatized version of hers’ idea of Absolute Justice (apparently she was ruthless, made no exceptions and took out a third of the Justice League using Multimouse at the time on top of it all). Yes, she is not a perfect leader. Or hero. But Damnit, her (admittedly two) supervillians have been almost caught twice. Her re-akumatazation rate is much lower than any of the Justice League’s heroes’ normal villain or general crime recidivism rate by more than a little. By a lot. She’s not some Detective but she’s a damn good strategist, a champion at improvising and she and her team do work with the public and victims and reworked so much of Paris’ social culture to lower akuma-creating circumstances and keep the public emotionally healthy.

             She’s no detective.

             She’s a Guardian. That means caring about the details that shift the bigger pieces. That means adaption with what is there and creating what she needs. That means knowing her limits and getting help—to set an example and prove that not even her or Chat are an island. That even superheroes need help, need others and need to work together.

            She’s no detective. Detectives work alone.

            Her? She’s forged a team that (she hopes) could become the new Order of Gaurdians with her… some day. For now, they’re heroes with the same mission and different roles to play.

            Marinette just wishes that she could shut up this hunch since its been disproven. Her instincts on guilt and possible baddies aren’t the best—Adrien’s job is to sense what’s wrong and take them out. Hers is to make whatever is needed to help fix things, to push someone forward and help them grow. Her job to craft a better tomorrow today… and to do that, she lost the parts of her that picked up Danger. She can still find Caution signs (and her anxiety will always invent danger) but real Danger detection went to Adrien when she agreed to become Ladybug in the first place… And until both her and Adrien renounce their roles as the pair wielding the Ladybug and Black Cat miraculouses, she’ll always be missing it.

            The same way Adrien is missing his ability to think outside the box—seeing things as what they could become to help them went to her. He can only see potential threat and act on them. She can only see potential aide and act on that.

---------

            Jason grinned when he managed to make it into Paris. The second there was some damn akuma attack, he was grabbing the baby Bat and hunting Hawkmoth his way—she need the jewelry? Fine. She can have it. The guy brainwashing kids? The one that slaughtered the city? He’s Jason’s. ---------

            Bruce didn’t like being benched. He doesn’t like not knowing he had another child. He especially doesn’t like that this one is constantly preventing an apocalypse and his allies can’t be bothered to even send him anything about it. Not even a basic ‘she’s not living on the streets’ like Jason did. Or ‘she’s got parents here, calm down’ so he could get this stupid instinct to storm Paris and take on the bastard threatening his family that he didn’t know he had.

            Apparently Barbra has a hunch, but isn’t sharing until she has “conclusive evidence” of his daughter’s identity. Damian just isn’t speaking of it. As if being someone’s father biologically gives him a built-in alarm system for when he’s had a child and the ability to track them down at birth. Damian being raised in the League of Assassins should be enough proof to the contrary there.

            The others were… he wasn’t absolutely certain, but fairly certain his self-proclaimed ‘middle kid club’ were tracking his missing daughter down themselves. Possibly to claim her as part of their group, specifically.

            God, she was so young, It was before he even heard of the League that she was born. In that lifetime before becoming Batman. Would she like him? He was absent her whole life—did she want to meet him, meet the family? They’re a mess, he knows it. But they’re his—he chose them and they chose him. Would she chose him too?

            He watched another video of Ladybug in her early days, before she and her partner (dear god he’s cat-themed. Is it genetic? Should he test her and himself for some ‘drawn to dresses-as-a-cat’ gene?) were given any kind of training.

            She blew herself up to stop her city from being taken over by ‘Animan’ and his creatures.

            His daughter.

            Exploded.

            (She died. She died and he didn’t know. God he’s a horrible parent, and he hasn’t even parented her yet.)

            She died.

            To keep her city safe.

            She somehow reconstituted. But her face, in that video, she was shocked.

            His daughter should be dead but she’s not.

            Magic, he’s so glad his daughter uses magic.

            He. He’s going to need to consult someone. Raven? Raven should work. He can’t talk to the Justice League—nothing wrong with talking to the half-demon all of his Robins that lead the Titans has worked with.

            Loopholes.

            The Justice League is horrible at closing them.

---------

            Dick wanted to be mad when Damian came clean to him about the needles. He wanted to freak out over almost losing a sister he hasn’t met.

            He did.

            But.

            But this is Damian.

            Damian who still has trouble connecting. Who still flinches at certain tones of voice and phrasing. Damian who desperately wants to do Good but… struggles.

             Damian who has all of Bruce’s communication problems and then some.

             So no, Dick did not scream when he found out Damian only sparred “the blood daughter” because she looked too frail and weak for her to be considered anything resembling a threat to him. He did not sigh when he found out that Bruce didn’t know when Damian assumed he did. He did not hit himself when Damian discussed the various weapons he’d gifted her as a apology with the bouquets over the years and their meanings.

             He did take a deep breath, and begin explaining from this baby bat’s stance what had happened.

             “Imagine for a moment that it was me before I became Robin, and I was almost killed by someone who only let me live if I never contacted a shared parent or that parent’s known family. How do you think Pre-Robin me would have responded?”

             “You would have feared for your life and done whatever you could to prevent contact.”

             “Now, imagine I wasn’t told who to be avoiding, only aliases.”

             “You would avoid everyone with an alias that you did not help them create, and keep them from unknown aliases.”

             Dick snapped his fingers. “Exactly. That’s what this sister, what are we calling her?”

             “Her alias is Ladybug.”

             “Yes, that is what Ladybug was going through before Aquaman made contact.”

             Damian was quiet for a moment. “She must be on edge.”

             Dick nodded at that. “She probably is.”

             Damian furrowed his brow. “Do you think the League would allow me to contact her and end our agreement?”

             Dick rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not sure, but we can try.”

             “… And if they refuse?”

             “Then we find another way. We’re Bats,” Dick reassured Damian. He just hoped the missing members weren’t doing anything too rash…    

-----------------

             Marinette made a (painful) decision. Adrien and her would swap miraculouses—at least until there were less pings on her sites from Gotham. For added protection, she kept the Mouse miraculous on. Chatte Noire was less known, and she doubted Wonder Woman or Aquaman informed Batman about the miraculous of Creation and Destruction’s particular… refusal to let anyone but a pair chosen together to wield them at any point.

             Chatte Noire would only be on call for a day or so… what’s the worst that can happen?

--------

the characters are jinxing themselves, and procrastinating the (vague) plot of Shenanigans. i swear. 

if anyone can message me on how to add in a read more, that’d be great since i know these can get long to scroll past for mobile users.

@heldtogetherbysafetypins @laurcad123 @raisuke06 @chaosace @jeminiikrystal @toodaloo-kangaroo @kris-pines04 @laurcad123

[omgjasminesimone]

Happiest Place on Earth

Logan x MC (Ellie)

Summary: Logan and Ellie go to Disneyland.

Now with Epilogue

Word count: 2500

Ellie lounges in her childhood bed, already dressed in her sleep shorts and tank top despite the fact that it’s only 8 pm. She’s currently unemployed, so her sleep schedule is a little off. Ellie really wishes she could land a job. Being out of her father’s house for four years and then returning to discover he still treats her like a child makes her wish she could afford to pay rent and move. Ellie lets out an impatient sigh as she continues to wait for her Grubhub order to finally arrive. Sure, LA is notorious for its terrible traffic, but this wait is ridiculous! She regrets pre-tipping the driver in the app.

The doorbell rings. “Finally.” Ellie mutters to herself, quickly running down the stairs and flinging the door open. She freezes, eyes widening as she takes him in, just casually standing on her father’s door step.

Logan smiles sheepishly. “Hey troublemaker.”

Ellie wants to simultaneously kiss him and slap him, but she’s rooted to her spot. It’s been over 4 years since she’s heard a word from him, since he ran after promising her he was done running.

Ellie crosses her arms over her chest, feeling defensive as she drinks in his manlier frame, the light stubble on his chin, the weariness in his eyes. “What are you doing here Logan?” Ellie questions.

Logan shoves his hands in his jean pockets. “I wanted to see you.” He replies softly.

“You wanted to see me?” Ellie asks incredulously, tears welling in her eyes. “You left me Logan! You ran and stayed away for years without even so much as a letter to tell me you were okay! I loved you so much, I would have run with you if you just asked.” Ellie whimpers, wiping furiously at the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Logan takes her face in his hands and wipes her tears away with his calloused thumbs. “You had to go to school, get back on the right path. And I didn’t run. I would never run from you.” He reveals.

Ellie looks up at him with watery eyes. “What?” She questions.

Logan smiles sadly, his thumb brushing over her bottom lip. “I turned myself in Ellie.” He explains. “I served my time. I just got out two days ago. I’m in a halfway house now, it’s an anti-recidivism program I got into because of my good behavior when I was in jail. They hook you up with a job with a company run by a former felon, someone who gets it.” Logan adds.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have visited you, I would have written you letters every day. I would have waited for you Logan.” Ellie insists, burying her face into his chest and hugging his waist as she pictures him all alone in jail while she was out enjoying college.

His arms encircle her shoulders, returning her embrace. “I know troublemaker, that’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to imprison you too.” Logan responds. “But now I’m out, and you’re done with school, and if you’ll have me, I’d like to start fresh.” Logan offers sheepishly, loosening his hold so he can look down at her. “Assuming you’re not seeing anybody. I checked your Facebook, and it said you were single. I don’t know if that’s current though…” Logan trails off.

Ellie lets him sweat for a moment before answering his question. “You’re in luck. I recently broke up with my ex-boyfriend. He said he didn’t want to do long distance after graduation, even though he got a job in San Diego. I guess 120 miles is too much to overcome.”

“He’s an idiot to let you go. If you give me another chance, I’ll love you the way you deserve.” Logan says reverently.

“And no more secrets? You promise this time?” Ellie prompts.

“Secretly turning myself in is the last secret, I swear.” Logan responds, feeling encouraged when he starts to lean down to her lips and she doesn’t pull away.

Ellie closes the distance, pushing herself onto her tiptoes and weaving her fingers through his now shorter, but still long, hair. Both their mouths open and their tongues tangle together as he grips her waist, hauling her completely against him. It’s like all the time they’ve spent apart melts away as they kiss. He left an imprint on her, and now, back in his arms, she finally feels whole again.

Logan pulls away when he needs to breathe, but he can’t stay away for long, pressing a quick peck to her kiss swollen lips. “Is your dad home?” He questions, hands slipping under her tank top and trailing over the soft skin of her lower back.

“He’s working a night shift.” Ellie replies, watching the glint that appears in Logan’s eyes when he realizes they have the place to themselves.

Logan steps into the house, making sure to lock the door behind him before gathering Ellie into his arms and hurrying up to her room.

30 minutes later, Ellie’s food finally arrives. But she’s a little preoccupied, so the delivery driver leaves it on the porch.

…

..

6 months later

 “I thought you said the lines wouldn’t be bad in February Ellie.” Logan complains, leaning against the railing as they continue to wait to board Space Mountain.

“This isn’t bad at all. In the summer, these lines can be up to 3 hours.” Ellie responds, and then she tries to soothe his slight irritation by looping her arms around his neck, leaning up to kiss him softly “I promise you it will be worth it. I wouldn’t lead you wrong on your very first trip to Disneyland.”

Ellie had insisted on getting them tickets for his birthday after finding out he had never been. Logan had tried to convince her that the money would be better spend saving up for rent for when they got an apartment together, but his girlfriend was undeterred. He only has 3 more months until he can leave the halfway house, no more curfew, no more parole, he’ll be truly free. Ellie got a job a few months ago, working as a consultant. She doesn’t love it, but it pays pretty well. Her income coupled with what he makes as a mechanic means they can afford a one bedroom in a LA suburb. To Logan, it feels like things are finally starting to fall into place.

Logan smiles when Ellie breaks the kiss, pulling her back in for another more passionate one. Ellie pulls away after a few seconds. “Watch the PDA. There are children present.” Ellie gestures to the little girl waiting in line in front of them with her mother. The little girl’s attention is firmly on the pair of them as her mother seems to be busy on the phone. Logan smiles at her and the girl blushes and looks away.

“No, that’s not what I told him. I don’t know where he got that price point, it’s way too low, it’s not going to work.” The stressed out mother mutters into the phone, massaging her temples. “I’m aware of that Charles.” She spits out, pressing her cell phone more firmly to her ear in an attempt to drown out the loud sounds of the theme park. “What? I can’t hear you. Wait, one second.” The mother turns to Ellie and Logan. “I hate to have to ask this, but can you keep an eye on her for a few minutes while I take this call? You guys look like a wholesome couple.” The mother pleads.

Ellie nods. “Of course, we’ll take good care of her.”

The mother offers an appreciative smile at the young pair before she hurries off. Ellie turns to Logan. “Did you hear that? Wholesome! We should report that back to your parole officer.” She whispers, smirking at him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been called wholesome before. Forget my parole officer, we need to tell your dad.” Logan retorts quietly. Detective Wheeler still isn’t a fan of Logan. He’s spent quite a bit of time trying to talk Ellie out of moving in with him, to no avail.

“I bet it’s our matching Disneyland sweatshirts and the ears giving off the wholesome vibe. Isn’t that well worth the $150 you had to spend, since you insisted on buying mine for me?”

Logan winces slightly as he remembers seeing that ridiculously high number come up on the gift store cash register. “That was a little steep for the apparel, but if it makes you happy it was worth it. Your happiness is priceless.” Logan’s charm comes through, as always.

Elle grins at him, giving him a chaste kiss. Normally, a sweet comment like that would have earned him a steamy make out session, but they’re in the middle of babysitting.

Ellie squats down to the little girl’s level. “Hi, I’m Ellie. And he’s Logan.” Logan offers a wave when Ellie points at him.

The girl smiles at them.  “Hi, I’m Katie.” She says shyly.

“So Katie, what’s your favorite ride?” Ellie asks.

Katie grins. “It’s A Small World. What’s your’s?”

“I can’t possibly pick just one, that’s like asking me to pick a favorite child. I love Disneyland in general.” Ellie answers.

“What’s your favorite?” Katie directs her question at Logan, who rubs behind his neck sheepishly.

“Well, so far I’ve been on the Pirates of the Caribbean one and It’s a Small World, so the Pirates one I guess.”

Katie’s jaw drops. “This is your first time at Disneyland? But you’re old!”

“22 – I mean 23” Logan corrects when he remembers that he is in fact 23 today “isn’t that old.” He says somewhat defensively, but he’s just playing at being offended. He crouches down next to Ellie to be eye level with Katie. “How old are you?” He asks.

Katie puts up 5 fingers triumphantly.

“Have you started school yet?” Ellie asks, and Katie nods excitedly. “What’s your favorite part?”

Katie has a lot to say on the subject, and the conversation flows until her mother returns. “Thank you.” She mouths at the pair as she and Katie turn away from the pair to continue waiting.

Ellie turns back to Logan, trying to decipher what the look he’s giving her means. “What?” She finally asks when she realizes she has no idea why he’s looking at her like that.

“You’re going to be a really great mom when we have babies.” He comments, pulling her into his arms.

Ellie loops her arms around his neck, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. “When? Not if? You’re awfully confident.” Ellie teases.

“I know that you love me, you’re not going anywhere.” Logan teases back, kissing the bridge of her nose. It tickles a little, causing Ellie’s nose to wrinkle. He smiles softly, allowing his eyes to close before capturing her lips this time.  

She pulls away slightly after a few moments, speaking against his lips. “How many kids will we have?” She asks.

“I don’t know, I think a lot though. Like, 8 or 9.” Logan answers.

Ellie steps back in surprise. “8 or 9? That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to carry them around, or push them out.”

Logan smirks, gripping her hand and pulling her to him again. “Not all biologically our’s Ellie. I do want 2 or 3 biological kids though. I want them to look like you, and be smart like you.” Logan reveals, resting his head atop her’s as he hugs her to him.

He can feel her smile against his neck. “I hope they’re kind and brave like you. And I hope they get your hair.” Ellie responds, tangling her hands in his soft locks. He’s growing it out again.

“Oh, they will. My hair genes are strong.” Logan teases, dropping a kiss to the top of her head.

Ellie looks up at him. “So what about the other 6 or 7 kids? Adopted?” Ellie asks.

“I was thinking fostered, actually. So it’s not like we’d have 9 kids in the house at one time. That would be a lot. I was placed in homes with 8 other kids sometimes, and it definitely wasn’t ideal. I think we’d be great foster parents, and there are a lot of bad ones out there, trust me on that one.” Logan reminisces on his own childhood in foster care, and Ellie squeezes him comfortingly.

“How does foster care work? If they wanted to stay permanently, could we adopt them?” Ellie questions.

“Well, the hope is always that their parents get their stuff together and reunite with their kid, but that doesn’t always happen. So in that case, we could adopt them out of foster care.” Logan answers.

“This is important to you, isn’t it?” Ellie asks.

“Yeah, it is. I want to give a foster child the kind of loving home environment that I wanted.” Logan replies.

“Then I’m 100% on board. Although we have a lot of steps to go before we start seriously considering kids. We have to move in together first, make sure we don’t actually hate each other.”

“I could never hate you. I love every single thing about you Ellie Wheeler. You think I would wear these stupid Mickey Mouse ears for just anyone?”

Ellie laughs, leaning in to kiss him. “I love you too.” She promises between increasingly passionate kisses. As they kiss, Ellie starts to envision the future he’s painted. Their future family. Family trips to Disneyland. Tears prickle at the back of her eyes with the knowledge of how much she wants that with him, how much she loves him.

Ellie pulls away from him. “Let’s get out of here for a little bit. I want to be alone.” She says suggestively.

Logan gestures to Space Mountain, they’re almost to the front of the line now. “I thought you wanted to ride this.”

“I’d rather ride you.” She whispers in his ear, delighting in the way he shivers at her words.

Logan grips her hand, leading her out of the line and to his car with the dark tinted back windows.

…

..

.

An hour later, the two lay cuddled up in the backseat of Logan’s Devore GT, their clothes scattered all over the car. “You ready to go back in there?” Logan asks, idly tracing patterns over Ellie’s ribcage.

Ellie gently runs her thumb over the smudged stamp on his hand to allow them re-entry to the park. “I want to stay here for just a little bit longer.” She answers.

Logan kisses her forehead. “No complaints here.”

They lay in contented silence for a few moments before Ellie breaks the quiet. “You know, it’s funny you skipped marriage talk and went straight to kids.” She comments, gazing into his eyes.

Logan arches an eyebrow. “I thought marriage was implied. Let me clarify for you, I do in fact want to marry you Ellie Wheeler.”

Ellie blushes despite herself at hearing him admit that so earnestly. “I want to marry you too.” She returns, kissing him softly. “But don’t think that that counts as a proposal Logan. I want the whole thing, big public romantic gesture and all.”

“Like a Disneyland proposal?” Logan questions softly, smirking when she looks at him with wide eyes.

taglist:  @choicesarehard @ifyouseekheart @brightpinkpeppercorn @regina-and-happiness @drakexnadira @flyawayboo @fairydustandsarcasm @alesana45 @umiumichan @maxwellsquidsuit @lahelable @god-save-the-keen @mrsmckenziesworld @paisleylovergirl @iplaydrake @sinclaire-made-me-sin @hazah @lovehugsandcandy @desiree-0816 @cora-nova @justdani14 @lady-dianelewis @emceesynonymroll @emichelle @badchoicesposts @client-327 @riverrune @liamzigmichael4ever @princessstellaris @mrskaneko 

[bluewatsons]

Morris Hoffman, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Neo-Rehabilitationism, and Judicial Collectivism: The Least Dangerous Branch Becomes The Most Dangerous, 29 Fordham Urb L J 2063 (2002)

Introduction

The movement that calls itself "therapeutic jurisprudence"' is both ineffective and dangerous, in almost the same way that its predecessor—the rehabilitative movement that became popular in the 1930s and was abandoned in the 1970s—was both ineffective and dangerous. Drug use, shoplifting, and graffiti are no more treatable today than juvenile delinquency was treatable in the 1930s. The renewed fiction that complex human behaviors can be dealt with as if they are simple diseases gives the judicial branch the same kind of unchecked and ineffective powers that led to the abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s. In fact, this new strain of rehabilitationism has produced a judiciary more intrusive, more institutionally insensitive and therefore more dangerous than the critics of the rehabilitative ideal could ever have imagined.

I. The Real Face of Therapeutic Jurisprudence

In a drug court in Washington, D.C., the judge roams around the courtroom like a daytime TV talk show host, complete with microphone in hand.' Her drug treatment methods include showing movies to the predominantly African-American defendants, including a movie called White Man's Birth.3 She often begins her drug court sessions by talking to the "clients"4 about the movies, and then focusing the discussion on topics like "racism, justice, and equality."5 The judge explains her cinemagraphic approach to jurisprudence this way:

Obviously they need to talk about their own problems and what leads to them, but I also think that it's good to have distractions in life. I've found out that if there are periods of your life when you are unhappy, sometimes going out to see an interesting movie or going out with a friend and talking about something else, or going to the gym to work out, these kinds of things can help you through a bad day.6

After the film discussion, the session begins in earnest. Defendants who are not doing well are scolded and sometimes told stories, often apocryphal, about the fates that have befallen other uncooperative defendants or the drug court judge's own friends and family members.7 Some defendants are jailed for short periods of time and/or regressed to stricter treatment regimens, and eventually some are sentenced to prison.8 The audience applauds defendants who are doing well, and the judge hands out mugs and pens to the compliant. The judge regularly gives motivational speeches that are part mantra and part pep rally. Here is a typical example:

Judge: Where is Mr. Stevens? Mr. Stevens is moving right along too. Right?

Stevens: Yep.

Judge: How come? How come it is going so great?

Stevens: I made a choice.

Judge: You made a choice. Why did you do that? Why did you make that choice? What helped you to make up your mind to do it?

Stevens: There had to be a better way than the way I was doing it.

Judge: What was wrong with the way you were living? What didn't you like about it?

Stevens: It was wild.

Judge: It was wild, like too dangerous? Is that what you mean by wild?

Stevens: Dangerous.

Judge: Too dangerous, for you personally, like a bad roller coaster ride. So, what do you think? Is this new life boring?

Stevens: No, not at all.

Judge: Not at all. What do you like about the new life? Stevens: I like it better than the old.

Judge: Even though the old one was wild, the wild was kind of not a good wild. You like this way.

Stevens: I love it.

Judge: You love it. Well, we're glad that you love it. We're very proud of you. In addition to your certificate, you're getting a pen which says, "I made it to level four, almost out the door."9

This is the real face of therapeutic jurisprudence. It is not a caricature. Except for the movie reviews, this Washington, D.C. drug court is typical of the manner in which this particular kind of therapeutic court is operating all over the country. Defendants are "clients"; judges are a bizarre amalgam of untrained psychiatrists, parental figures, storytellers, and confessors; sentencing decisions are made off-the-record by a therapeutic team10 or by "community leaders";11 and court proceedings are unabashed theater.12 Successful defendants-that is, defendants who demonstrate that they can navigate the re-education process and speak the therapeutic language13—are "graduated" from the system in festive ceremonies that typically include graduation cake, balloons, the distribution of mementos like pens, mugs, or T-shirts, parting speeches by the graduates and the judge, and often the piece de resistance—a big hug from the judge.14

Drug courts are the most visible, but by no means the only, judicial expression of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement. The idea that judges should be in the business of treating the psyches of the people who appear before them is taking hold not only in drug courts but in a host of other criminal and even civil settings. Some therapeutic jurists see bad parenting, domestic violence, petty theft, and prostitution as curable diseases, akin to drug addiction, and argue that divorcing parents, wife-beaters, thieves, and prostitutes should therefore be handled in specialized treatment-based courts.15 The objects of the treatment efforts include not only the litigants in civil cases, and the criminals and victims in criminal cases, but also the "community" that is "injured" by the miscreant. Petty criminals in many so-called "community-based courts" are in effect sentenced by panels of community members, typically to perform various community services as deemed necessary by the panels, in order to "heal" the damage done to the "community.”16

It is curious that the existing scope of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, with the exception of drug offenses, is limited to relatively minor petty and misdemeanor criminal offenses.17 We might ask ourselves why the movement ignores the entire spectrum of violent felonies, so many of which have an apparent psychiatric component. We don't have specialized child molester courts in which "clients" are hugged and pampered and cajoled into right-thinking. Why not? My suspicion, as discussed in more detail below,18 is that what much of therapeutic jurisprudence is really about, at least in the criminal arena, is a de facto decriminalization of certain minor offenses which the mavens of the movement do not think should be punished, but which our Puritan ethos commands cannot be ignored. Supporters of the movement recognize that as a political matter they cannot go too far blurring the distinction between acts and excuses.19

True to their New Age pedigree, therapeutic courts are remarkably anti-intellectual and often proudly so. For example, the drug court variant is grounded on a wholly uncritical acceptance of the disease model of addiction, a model that is extremely controversial in the medical, psychiatric, and biological communities.20 All of the therapeutic jurisprudence variants presume that the underlying problem in virtually all kinds of cases—drug abuse, domestic violence, delinquency, dependency, divorce, petty crimes—is low self esteem, despite the fact that many psychological studies have shown that violent criminals tend to have high self esteem.21

The question asked in these new therapeutic courts is not whether the state has proved that a crime has been committed, or whether the social contract has otherwise been breached in a fashion that requires state intervention, but rather how the state can heal the psyches of criminals, victims, families, dysfunctional civil litigants, and the community. The goal is state-sponsored treatment, not adjudication, and the adjudicative process is often seen as an unnecessary and disruptive impediment to treatment.22 Because the very object is treatment, rehabilitated criminals deserve no punishment beyond what is necessary to restore them, their victims, and the community to their prior state.23

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not only anti-intellectual, it is wholly ineffective. The treatment is a strange combination of Freud, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Amway, whose apparent object is not really to change behaviors so much as to change feelings.24 Drug courts are a perfect example. The success of drug-court treatment programs is measured more by a defendant's professed attitude adjustment than by the sort of concrete measures one might expect of such programs, such as whether the defendant stops using drugs. As long as defendants are compliant with treatment ("buying into the program," as addiction counselors say), they are moved from treatment phase to treatment phase, often irrespective of whether the treatment is actually working. As James Nolan puts it, drug court success "is evaluated in large mea- sure by whether or not clients adopt a particular perspective.25

The particular perspective required is the disease model of addiction. Compliance is almost always measured by a defendant's willingness to admit that his or her drug use is a disease. Any resistance to the disease model is reported as "denial," a crime apparently much worse than continued drug use.26

The therapeutic jurisprudence literature is almost completely devoid of any empirical discussion of whether litigants, defendants, and victims, let alone "communities," are actually being helped by all this perspective-changing treatment, and understandably so. The imprecise words common to the therapeutic language—words like "healed," "restored," and "cured"—are simply incapable of being subjected to rigorous testing.

When investigators have looked at less imprecise measures of success-like recidivism rates-the therapeutic promise has proved wholly ineffective.27 For example, the very first effectiveness study performed on the very first modern drug court—in Dade County, Florida—showed that drug defendants treated in the drug court and drug defendants processed in the traditional courts suffered statistically identical rearrest rates.28 Virtually every serious study of drug court effectiveness has reached similarly sobering results,29 leading the General Accounting Office to declare in 1997 that there is simply no firm evidence that drug courts are effective in reducing either recidivism or relapse.30

Drug courts not only do not reduce recidivism or relapse, they have the unintended consequence of dramatically increasing the number of drug defendants sent to prison. The reason is massive net-widening, that is, the phenomenon whereby new programs targeted for a limited population end up serving much wider populations and thereby losing their effectiveness. In Denver, Colorado, for example, the number of drug cases nearly tripled two years after the implementation of its drug court.31 That fact, coupled with typically dismal recidivism rates, led to the entirely predictable result that Denver judges sent more than twice the number of drug defendants to prison in 1997, two years after the implementation of the drug court, than they did in 1993, the last year before the implementation of the drug court.32

If therapeutic jurisprudence were just a trendy idea that did not work, we could let it die a natural death. But it is not just trendy and ineffective, it is profoundly dangerous. Its very axioms depend on the rejection of fundamental constitutional principles that have protected us for 200 years. Those constitutional principles, based on our founders' profound mistrust of government, and including the commands that judges must be fiercely independent, and that the three branches of government remain scrupulously separate, are being jettisoned for what we are led to believe is an entirely new approach to punishment. In fact, this new approach-state mandated treatment-turns out to be a strangely out-of-touch return to rehabilitative ideals that gained popularity in the 1930s, but were abandoned in the 1970s because they not only did not work but, in the bargain, armed the state with therapeutic powers inimical to a free society.

There are four main reasons why the new therapeutic judges are most dangerous: 1) they are amateur therapists but have the powers of real judges; 2) they act in concert with each other, their communities, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the self-interested therapeutic cottage industry, contrary to the fundamental principle of judicial independence; 3) they impinge on the executive branch's prosecutorial and correctional functions; and 4) they impinge on the legislative function by making drug policy.

Before I address these four dangers, let me briefly review the history of punishment and the scant theoretical underpinnings of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement in the context of this history.

II. A Brief History of Punishment

The idea of punishment as moral retribution may have its roots in what some anthropologists have called "defilement," the process by which primitive societies interpreted and explained human suffering as punishment by the gods.33 Such an explanation for otherwise inexplicable suffering can be deeply comforting. It means that our suffering is not meaningless and, more practically, that if we abide by the laws of the gods we will be protected from their wrath.34

As humans began to imitate the laws of gods with the laws of men, we also imitated defilement. Punishment became one of the methods by which we not only enforced our common codes of conduct but also comforted one another with the idea that no one would have to endure man-inflicted suffering so long as the codes of conduct were honored. Indeed, in its most profound sense, the rule of law necessarily requires the tyranny of gods over man, or of the many over the few, and that tyranny in turn requires some form of theocratic or group disapproval when norms are violated.

Interestingly, imprisonment as a form of punishment is a relatively recent invention, in contrast to custodial detention pending trial. In the ancient world, most crimes were punished either by banishment, various forms of corporal punishment such as beating or mutilation, or, most often, death.36 Imprisonment was reserved as punishment only for disobedient slaves, whose execution was uneconomic; political criminals, whose execution risked martyrdom; and petty criminals, whose execution was unwarranted.37 Even as late as the 1780s, in a society as fully touched by the Enlightenment as England, death was the sanction for virtually every crime, including crimes that we would today deem misdemeanors.38

There were many precursors to the modern prison: jails for pretrial detention and short sentences; workhouses for debtors; almshouses for the poor; reformatories for minors; convict ships for banishment; and the gallows for most other crimes.39

In fact, the prison-that is, a jail for serving long sentences after conviction—is a uniquely American invention. Prisons were first used by Pennsylvania Quakers in the late 1700s, primarily as a humane alternative to corporal punishment and execution.40 The first prison was Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail, which the Quakers opened in 1790 as a "penitentiary" for criminals convicted in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.41 The Quaker notion of a penitentiary was the product of the fortuitous confluence of the Quakers' theological beliefs and their knowledge of Cesare Beccaria's retributionist monograph On Crimes and Punishment.42 The Quakers hoped that long periods of isolation, which provided an opportunity for reflection and solitary Bible study, would ultimately lead to repentance.43 New York adopted this system in 1796, and prisons soon flourished across America and Europe.44

The modern debate about punishment revolves around the primacy of four components: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.45 In the late 1700s-precisely at the time when the Quakers were experimenting with prisons and, more importantly, when our founders were debating our form of government—the German philosopher Immanuel Kant constructed a philosophy of retribution, giving a rational foundation to what had been the retributional basis of all punishment since the dawn of civilization.46 He argued that the preeminent goal of criminal law must be retribution, and that punishment should be an end in itself.47 Kant's view was that to punish the criminal defendant as a means to any other utilitarian goal-deterrence or rehabilitation, for example—was to de-humanize him by reducing him to an object.48 Moreover, Kant viewed punishment as a purely retributive reaction to the crime itself, therefore, the punishment had to be proportionate to the crime.49

Georg Hegel concurred with Kant's retributionist ideal, adding the notion that punishment annulled the crime.50 In Hegel's construct, crime is the negation of moral law, and punishment is necessary to negate that negation to restore the moral right.51 Hegel continued the Kantian view that criminals themselves are moral beings, entitled to have their crimes negated by proportionate punishment. As Hegel stated:

[P]unishment is regarded as containing the criminal's right and hence by being punished he is honoured as a rational being. He does not receive this due of honour unless the concept and measure of his punishment are derived from his own act. Still less does he receive it if he is treated either as a harmful animal who has to be made harmless, or with a view to deterring and reforming him.52

Cesare Beccaria is generally credited with the first systematic exposition of proportionality.53 His version, much heralded in Western Europe and the American colonies, took a decidedly political view. Beccaria believed that requiring criminal sentences to be proportionate to the crime was an important limitation on the powers of government.54

Thus, retribution not only survived the Enlightenment, it achieved an important philosophical structure, both in its own right and as the basis for proportionality. It continued to flourish in both Europe and America and was consistent with the spread of the Quaker penitentiaries. People were sentenced to penitentiaries to be punished; there was nothing "rehabilitative" about them, except the repentance that was expected to come from enduring the punishment.

The retributionist paradigm lasted thousands of years and did not come under serious philosophical attack until the early 1800s, when a group of English utilitarians led by Jeremy Bentham began to challenge it.55 For the utilitarians, the only purpose of punishment was to prevent crime, that is, to be a deterrent.56 Bentham, and in America, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., saw the prospective criminal as a rational bad man, who weighed the benefits of his crime against the risks of detection and the costs of punishment.57 The purpose of punishment under the deterrence model was simply to make the costs of crime so high that they outweighed the benefits.58

The utilitarians believed that morality has nothing to with punishment. Bentham argued that if he could be assured that a particular criminal would never commit another crime, any punishment of him would be unjust.59 Richard Posner has argued that aside from the problem of judgment-proof criminals, all criminal sanctions could be replaced with a system of fines.60

Naturally, if punishment is viewed as a utilitarian tool to deter future illegal behavior of potential criminals, then it can also be used, though less efficiently, to shape the behavior of the particular defendant being punished. Not only would punishment deter him from engaging in future crimes, but it could also change him. The early beginnings of what became known as the "rehabilitative ideal" thus started, on their face, as a rather simple extension of the deterrence model.

But it was hardly a simple extension. It represented a profound change in the way human behavior was viewed. Criminals were no longer ordinary people, cursed like all of us with original sin, whose own humanity demanded that their crimes against moral consensus be purged with proportionate punishment.61 Rather, they were morally diseased, quite different from us, and they needed to be cured.

By the end of World War I, this rehabilitative perspective was becoming dominant in American penology, and it remained dominant until after World War II. It is probably no coincidence that the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal coincided roughly with the rise and fall of the welfare state.62 Among the state's increasing New Deal responsibilities toward its citizens was the responsibility to cure all the social ills that were believed to lead to crime, and to treat criminals whose as-yet unreformed social circumstances led them to crime. There was a distinct moral fervor in the early rehabilitationists, as there is in its current devotees, similar to the tenor of the temperance movement: There is a right way and a wrong way to live, and lost souls who choose the path of crime, whether as a result of social circumstance or not, must be shown the right way.

The attacks on the rehabilitative ideal came primarily from the political left, beginning with the jewel of the rehabilitative ideal—the American juvenile court system. With its progressive origins in Chicago in 1899, the juvenile court movement was based on the belief that young offenders were not only ripe for rehabilitation, and needed a more individualized and sensitive justice system in order to maximize rehabilitative efforts, but also that, unlike adult criminals, they suffered from the curable sociological disease of "delinquency.”63 The function of juvenile courts was not to punish or to deter, but to cure delinquency. The juvenile court movement took the nation by storm, not at all unlike today's drug court movement.64 By 1920—just twenty years after their invention—juvenile courts were in place in all but three states.

But the sensitive paternalism of the juvenile court movement had an ugly statist face. Commentators began to write about a system in which gentle persuasion was giving way to unchecked judicial powers, and where an abject lack of basic due process "helped to create a system that subjected more and more juveniles to arbitrary and degrading punishments.66 Even the Supreme Court entered the fray, ruling in 1967 that juvenile defendants are entitled to the protections of the Sixth Amendment's guaranty of counsel.67

Critics of both the juvenile and adult rehabilitative ideal also began to express concerns about a governmental regime in which defendants are simultaneously treated and punished. In 1971, the American Friends Service Committee published a scathing attack on rehabilitative penology, and included in their criticisms a fundamental objection to coerced treatment: "When we punish the person and simultaneously try to treat him, we hurt the individual more profoundly and more permanently than if we merely imprison him for a specific length of time."68 The Quakers' recantation of the rehabilitative ideal was particularly influential, given their seminal role in the invention of the American penitentiary.

By 1970, forty years after its ascension, the rehabilitative ideal was in theoretical and empirical shambles.69 Uncoupled to any concept of proportionality, its primary theoretical failure was that it gave the state unchecked powers to "cure" that were unrelated to any notions of criminal responsibility and fundamental justice. If it takes ten years of prison, or any other form of state-imposed therapy or re-education, to cure Jean Valjean of shoplifting, then ten years is what must be imposed. This threat to individual liberty, acceptable to pro-government progressives of the 1930s, was decidedly unacceptable to a post-World War II, post-Nazi, cold war generation becoming increasingly wary of state power. As Norval Morris put it: "[T]he concept of just desert remains an essential link between crime and punishment. Punishment in excess of what is seen by that society at that time as a deserved punishment is tyranny.”70 He further stated: "We cage criminals for what they have done; it is an injustice to cage them also for what they are in order to change them, to attempt to cure them coercively."71

The real death knell to the rehabilitative ideal, both in general and in its juvenile incarnation, came not from the theoreticians but from the empiricists. Rehabilitation simply did not work. Crime was mysteriously immune to the entire liberal regimen, from anti-poverty programs to prison reform.72 After four decades of experimentation, the studies rather dramatically illustrated that all of our idealistic efforts to rehabilitate had virtually no effect on the propensity of juveniles or adults to commit crime.73

The fiction that imprisonment, even in its most rehabilitation- friendly form, has ever been successful in rehabilitating inmates has come to be called "the noble lie" by some critics.74 David Rothman, who coined the term, argued in 1973 that it was long past time to abandon the noble lie:

The most serious problem is that the concept of rehabilitation simply legitimates too much. The dangerous uses to which it can be put are already apparent in several court opinions, particularly those in which the judiciary has approved of indeterminate sentences . . . . Moreover, it is the rehabilitation concept that provides a backdrop for the unusual problems we are about to confront on the issues of chemotherapy and psychosurgery .... This is not the right time to expand the sanctioning power of rehabilitation.75

With a swiftness rarely seen in complex institutions, the American penal system dropped rehabilitation almost overnight. What had, as late as 1972, been described in the criminal law treatises as the central justification for punishment,76 was by 1986, being described in the past tense.77 This was much more than a theoretical rejection by academics and textbook writers. Correctional officials across America were also abandoning rehabilitation in their day-to-day operations.78

The extraordinarily sudden abandonment of the rehabilitative ideal gave way to a kind of fusion of retribution and incapacitation, dubbed by some as "neo-retributionism.”79 The modest goals of punishment as a just dessert, and prevention as the simple act of taking criminals out of society, replaced rehabilitation as the dominant penal theory.80 These ideas ultimately resulted in the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing schemes and eventually to the controversial Federal Sentencing Guidelines.81

Almost all modern criminologists acknowledge that each of the four traditional justifications for punishment—retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation—must continue to play some role in the criminal justice system.82 However, integrating them into a coherent and sensible system has not been easy, in no small part because they represent incompatible goals.83 If deterrence and incapacitation were the only considerations, then perhaps all crimes should be punishable by life sentences or death.84 If rehabilitation were the only consideration, then all crime could be considered forms of social disease, treatable in hospital-like settings, never in prisons.

Only retribution connects the crime with the punishment, treats criminals as moral beings rather than diseased subjects in a utilitarian social experiment, and imposes proportionality limitations on the government's right to punish. As a result, despite all their machinations about a synthesis, most modern criminologists have found their way back to retribution as the pole star of punishment.85

In 1979, Francis Allen delivered the Storrs Lecture at Yale Law School on the topic of the demise of the rehabilitative ideal. That lecture was published in 1981, and it has become a kind of obituary for rehabilitation.86 Allen impressively documented both the theoretical and empirical failings of rehabilitation. He concluded his lectures with this prediction:

[A]ttitudes toward [the rehabilitative ideal] are likely to be wary in the closing years of this century. A statement made by Lionel Trilling over a generation ago still possesses acute relevance to the present: "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the object of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then our wisdom, ultimately our coercion. ... " Given the history through which American society has recently passed, it is hardly possible that the total benevolence of governmental interventions into persons' lives will be unthinkingly assumed .... It is just as well. For modern citizens of the world have learned that the interests of individuals and society are frequently adverse and that the assumption of their identity supplies the predicate for despotism.87

Sadly, Professor Allen's prediction could not have been more wrong. Less than ten years after rehabilitation's obituary, the gurus of rehabilitation were back, this time with a vengeance, fueled by a zeal to treat the psychiatrically less fortunate, and in particular to win the war on drugs. These neo-rehabilitationists are pushing judges into unprecedented extremes that Professor Allen could not have imagined. In the flash of an eye judges have become intrusive, coercive, and unqualified state psychiatrists and behavioral policemen, charged with curing all manner of social and quasi-social diseases, from truancy to domestic violence to drug use. By forgetting the most profound lesson of the twentieth century—that the state can be a dangerous repository of collective evil—therapeutic jurisprudence poses a serious risk to the kind of individualism and libertarianism upon which our republic was founded.

III. The Theory Behind Therapeutic Jurisprudence

Although therapeutic jurisprudence descends directly from the long-rejected rehabilitative ideal, its proponents rarely talk about its theoretical heritage. The movement is almost devoid of anything resembling serious theoretical self-examination. The questions that have plagued philosophers and criminologists for a thousand years, and whose answers have come to define all major schools of criminology, are questions therapeutic jurisprudence devotees seldom ask.88 But the movement does have a short history, if not a terribly satisfying theoretical one.

It owes its beginnings to mental health law, where, by definition, the current and prospective mental states of the participants are the primary inquiry. Its initial insights were neither terribly profound nor particularly original: in a system whose very function is to judge the mental state of its subjects, we should think about the mental health effects of the actions we as judges take. Thus, for example, when we remand a criminal defendant for a competency evaluation, we should think about the effects the remand and evaluation might have on the defendant's competence.

These initial formulations about a therapeutic judicial perspective were limited in several important respects. First, they were focused on empirical questions: what effects are our rulings having on the mental health of the chronically mentally ill, insane or in- competent? Proponents, at least initially, never suggested that we should begin to change our rulings or the way we make them in anticipation of effects before we measure what those effects might actually be.

More importantly, these therapeutic ideas were originally proposed exclusively for application to mental health law, where the state has already crossed that thorny boundary of paternalism and already has its hands uncomfortably inside the heads of the unfortunate participants. Of course, many aspects of mental health law involve the judiciary's positive obligation to ensure treatment of the mental conditions of the people appearing in court as a precondition to moving into its more traditional truth-finding role. By expanding the therapeutic model into nonmental health areas, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only intrudes without any basis for intrusion, it profoundly changes the judicial function. Trials are no longer processes to investigate factual guilt and discover truth, they are mere opportunities to treat.

This therapeutic perspective is completely inimical to the judicial function. We should conduct trials guided by the rules of procedure and evidence that have been crafted over centuries to maximize the reliability of the result, not to ensure that the litigants have a meaningful mental health experience. We should impose sentences and assess damages guided by well-settled principles of responsibility, not by fretting about whose feelings will be hurt or how the community can be healed.

The profound and dangerous expansion of the judicial role represented by the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is just a small part of a broad therapeutic trend in all aspects of government and indeed across the entire spectrum of our culture. James Nolan has labeled this trend "the therapeutic ethos."89 Government's new role is to treat, not to enforce norms. Its success is measured by how it makes us feel, not by what it actually does. And because the couch of State needs patients, citizens are no longer individual participants in a free republic, but sets of victims with complicated diseases in dire need of state-sponsored treatment.

In this "postmodern moral order," as Nolan calls it, suffering is no longer viewed as a part of the human condition, but rather as the inevitable consequence of some disease or injury. Almost all of human behavior has become pathologized. We speak of "addictions" to all manner of behaviors that we would have called "choices" just thirty years ago.90 Today, cancer and alcoholism are both "diseases"; heroin use now shares an addictive moral equivalence with things like gambling and eating chocolate. Of course, this externalization of behavior is just a new version of our old friend defilement: once we blamed phantom gods for our suffering;91 now we blame phantom diseases.92

In the particular context of drug courts, James Nolan has called this process of pathologization the "eradication of guilt":

The drug court's eradication of guilt has been a subtle and insidious process. Guilt is not so much challenged as ignored. It is not so much disputed as it is made irrelevant. But it is the making irrelevant of something that has long been regarded as the crux of criminal justice.... The jettisoning of guilt may well represent the most important, albeit rarely reflected upon, consequence of the drug court. If, as Philip Rieff argued, culture is not possible without guilt, one wonders what will become of a criminal justice system bereft of what was once its defining quality.93

Blaming the pathogens has become the raison d'etre for the judicial system, both in criminal and civil cases. An African man who murders his wife blames his anti-divorce culture;94 a fired employee blames "chronic lateness syndrome."95 Of course, the judiciary takes its cases as it finds them, and judges cannot be blamed entirely for acting like psychiatrists when the parties insist on it. But the therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to act like psychiatrists even when no litigant is insisting on it, and indeed even when all the litigants object (that is, they are in "denial"). It is this aspect of mandated judicial intrusion that makes therapeutic jurisprudence so dangerous and so utterly unacceptable in our constitutional scheme.

IV. The Most Dangerous Branch

The judicial branch was specifically designed to be the least dangerous of the three branches. Hamilton coined that famous phrase in this classic description of the circumscribed powers of the federal judiciary:

[T]he judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.... The judiciary ...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE NOR WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.96

Federal judges are not elected, but appointed for life, helping to decrease the chances they will be influenced either by corrupt forces or, often more subtly, the vagaries of popular will.97 The case or controversy requirement helps decrease the chances that judges will make abstract law (that is, policy) in the guise of deciding a case.98 The very architecture of the federal and state systems leaves the judicial branches without the power either to make or enforce laws and further dissipates federal judicial power by imbedding it in a system in which individual states continue to operate in their own spheres of sovereignty.

One might ask why the founders were so keen on such a comprehensive institutional clipping of the judiciary's powers. The answer is that they appreciated, from their own English history, that unchecked judicial power is an evil to avoid at almost any cost. Both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were acutely aware of the failings of the English system, in which all judges were appointed by the Crown and served at the Crown's pleasure, and in which Parliament was invested with supreme appellate jurisdiction in all cases.99

The founders were even more acutely aware of the failings of the Confederation, under which there was no federal judiciary at all.100 Hamilton wrote extensively about the need for an independent judiciary to house judges capable of defending the new federal Constitution against incursions by the other two branches.101 Madison's expositions on the separation of powers doctrine were designed to allay the fears of the anti-Federalists that the existing constitutional plan did not do enough to separate the three branches.102

Our commitment to judicial restraint is not limited to the constitutional design. The mootness103 and ripeness104 doctrines give meaning to the case or controversy requirement, and help insure that decisions by judges will be a recourse of last resort. Indeed, the whole paradigm of the common law is built around the notion that precisely because judges have extraordinary powers in single cases—the power to incarcerate and the power to bankrupt—those powers must be limited to single cases and will operate beyond single cases only after surviving the judgment of judicial history.105

Along with these structural limitations, judges have developed a powerful ethos of restraint. Although some might say the ring of that ethos has become rather hollow in the years following the New Deal and Warren Courts, the restraining rules have for the most part remained quite vigorous, especially in trial courts. Deference to appellate court precedent effectively constrains even the most independent-minded trial judge, as it does the appellate courts themselves, though of course to a lesser degree. At all levels, we are loath to decide issues we need not decide, are generally committed to deciding cases on the narrowest grounds, and will almost always follow controlling precedent.

All of these constitutional, common law, and normative principles have blended together to create a profound commitment to restraint in responsible judges. We are unrepresentative, mostly unelected, independent magistrates whose function is to decide no more than the necessary issues in the single cases thrust upon us, in accordance with laws and established rules of evidence and procedure with which we may or may not agree. Juries tell us the facts, appellate courts may tell us we were wrong on the law, and legislatures may avoid most effects of our decisions by changing the laws. We have no more valid insight into public policy than the members of any other particular occupation.106

Yet it seems to be an occupational hazard for judges and other members of the public to confuse our simple role as gatekeepers of the truth-finding function with anything at all having to do with the will of the governed. We do not make public policy; we do not even enforce it. We are, as Madison put it, only the "remote choice of the people.”107 That very remoteness is what both prevents us from becoming, and tempts us to become, the most dangerous of the three branches.

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement requires us to become the kind of involved, hands-on, right-thinking, sure-footed activists that the judicial branch was specifically designed to exclude. It requires us to accept, in a collective fashion entirely inconsistent with the fierce independence of the judiciary, a therapeutic paradigm that is not only a matter of public policy, but about which reasonable public policy makers differ. It is forcing us to collaborate with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists in a fashion that is entirely inconsistent with our adjudicative role. In its most virulent drug court form it requires us to send people to prison not because they violated the law (since the real engine of drug courts is the unstated belief that possession should not be a crime), but rather because they resisted our enlightened treatment efforts. In short, therapeutic jurisprudence is a code phrase for a kind of one-stop shopping system populated by judges who believe that they have such powerful insights into public policy (insights that have apparently escaped mere legislators) that they cheerfully act as parents, best friends, doctors, psychotherapists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, legislators and then, only if all of that fails, judges. I cannot imagine a more dangerous, or sanctimonious, branch.

A. Real Judges as Amateur Psychiatrists: Acts Versus Excuses and the Paradox of Reverse Moral Screening

One the most disturbing consequences of the therapeutic jurisprudence movement is that while therapeutic judges get to play amateur psychiatrist, in the end the command of the law requires them to punish the patients they cannot cure. Imagine going to see a doctor about a disease, knowing that the doctor might not only be unable to cure you, but will be required to send you to prison if you are not cured. Now imagine a whole system of justice based on that notion, and you will have captured the essence of therapeutic jurisprudence.

State-coerced treatment does not work,108 and even if it did, it is simply immoral for the state to treat and then punish acts it claims have a disease component, as the critics of the rehabilitative ideal demonstrated thirty years ago.109 The "diseases" to be treated are not diseases at all, but rather complex behaviors that fall within a broad continuum between "voluntary" and "involuntary" behaviors. If we really believed that all human behavior is the product of the relentless and involuntary spasm of genes and experience, and that free will is a quaint mirage, then the state would have no moral right to punish anyone for any crime. The disease of "chronic armed robbery syndrome" would merit no more punishment than cancer. But of course we don't believe that.

The very existence of law is a reflection of deep-seated and shared notions of free will and individual responsibility. That is not to say, of course, that the retribution demanded of crimes cannot take into consideration all of the specific circumstances of the crime, including the criminal's complete background. Indeed, we must take all those circumstances into consideration to fulfill the requirement that retribution be proportional, and therefore just. But it is one thing to say we will consider an armed robber's I.Q. and childhood in crafting the amount of retribution, and quite another thing to say that the disease of chronic armed robbery syndrome should be treated rather than punished. Therapeutic jurisprudence blurs, and is intended to blur, this fundamental moral distinction between act and excuse.

Even if treatment worked, and could be justly combined with punishment, the therapeutic paradigm punishes the wrong people. For example, if drug addiction really is a disease, then the most diseased addicts are precisely the ones most likely to fail many, if not all, attempts at treatment. Drug courts are thus performing a kind of "reverse moral screening."110 Truly diseased addicts end up going to prison, while those who respond well to treatment, and whose use of drugs may thus have been purely voluntary, escape punishment.

B. Judicial Collectivism

Therapeutic judges not only act ineffectively and immorally as amateur psychiatrists, they also act in a dangerous collective, wholly inconsistent with fundamental axioms of judicial independence. They act in concert with, and therefore abrogate their independence to, each other, their "communities," prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists.

One of the starkest examples of the kind of group action that dominates the therapeutic model can be found in the intense political machinations undertaken to create and sustain drug courts. Unlike other legal reform movements, that began with a handful of individual decisions, commentaries, or experiments, and then spread through the power of their own persuasion, the drug court movement has a decidedly top-down pedigree. Though they began as a single experiment in Miami, drug courts spread because of centralized federal funding, not because they were effective. Drug courts exhibit a remarkable uniformity because they must now meet a host of specific federal criteria in order to qualify for federal funds."' What once was an opportunity for state and local governments to experiment with drug court reforms has, to a great extent, turned into a lockstep ersatz federal program.

Drug court workshops across the country are "heavily scripted and staged events," designed to give drug court officials an opportunity to "strategize with each other and educate those new to the scene about how best to present the program to sometimes skeptical audiences for the purpose of garnering public support and financial resources to further the movement."112 There is a five-part liturgy to the drug court movement's rigid political doctrine: 1) convince prosecutors that drug courts are not soft on crime; 2) start off with only low-level drug offenses while building public support; 3) cultivate relationships with the media; 4) hold graduation ceremonies in open court as public relations events; and 5) constantly perform evaluation studies to justify continued funding.113 This is mindless public relations mantra, not creative judicial reform by independent-minded judges.

When the federal funds run out, as they inevitably seem to do, drug court judges then participate in lobbying legislatures, city councils, and even the private sector for funding. Their partisan enthusiasm crosses even the most forgiving boundaries of judicial propriety. A Las Vegas, Nevada drug court judge set up his own tax-exempt nonprofit organization through which to solicit private funds for his drug court.114 A Rochester, New York drug court judge used the local United Way to dispense the private funds he raised for his drug court."115 A 1997 Justice Department survey showed that nine drug courts had solicited a total of nearly half a million dollars from private sources.116 Therapeutic jurisprudence is turning some of us into embarrassing hucksters.

The development of so-called "community-based courts" is another example of judicial collectivism at its worst. Modeled after New York City's Midtown Community Court, these courts have been started in many urban areas to deal with what proponents call "quality of life crimes. '117 Generally, defendants convicted of crimes such as shoplifting, prostitution, and some low-level drug offenses are "treated" by being put on probation or given deferred sentences and by performing certain community service obligations. Typically, the precise community service obligations are determined in each individual case not by the judge but by a "community advisory board" consisting of various community leaders.118 This way, the criminals are not only cured of their rude behaviors by having to do the penance of community service, but the criminal tear in the fabric of the community is also healed. Two therapies for the price of one.

The community service options can be rather interesting. They include not only what one might expect from traditional community service, such as clean-up activities like graffiti removal and trash pickup, but also "stuffing envelopes for non-profit organizations."119 Through community courts, judges abdicate their sentencing authority to self-described community leaders and their pet projects, including their favorite charities.

In addition to the usual therapeutic misanthropy inherent in all therapeutic courts, community-based courts raise particularly disturbing problems about the role of judges and their place in the political firmament. Why are some crimes labeled "quality of life crimes" and others not? Surely a murder effects the "quality of life" of the victim, witnesses, and other members of the community more than shoplifting does. Why does the torn fabric of the community need to be repaired after a shoplifting, but not after a murder? The answer, of course, is not that the former is any more damaging than the latter, but rather that the former is more widespread than the latter. It is this widespread nature of "quality of life crimes" that makes community-based courts so politically attractive. They generate an army of involuntary servants to do free work pleasing to a maximum of community voters. Fundamentally, community-based courts are machines of political payoff, dressed in the garb of the judiciary.120

The most widespread, and in many ways, most disturbing, form of judicial collectivism occurs in all therapeutic courts, and is embodied in the very term "therapeutic jurisprudence"—the unholy and wholly unconstitutional washing out of the judge's role in an adversary system. All therapeutic courts presume factual guilt. What is called "the presumption of innocence" in traditional courts is called "denial" in therapeutic courts. The judge, prosecutor, therapist, and to a great extent, even the defense lawyer,121 join together to "help" the patient over his or her denial in order to concentrate on treatment.122 As a result, the judge, prosecutor, therapist, and defense lawyer thus form a kind of "treatment team," designed to do what is best for the reluctant patient, not to discover truth in the fires of advocacy.

This joining together is so critical that it is common advice to anyone contemplating the development of a drug court that it will not work without the "cooperation" of judges, prosecutors, police, sheriffs, and public defenders. When judges "cooperate" in the formation of drug courts, what is really happening is that they are agreeing to abandon their roles as neutral gatekeepers of the truth- finding process, and instead to join the therapeutic team for the good of the diseased defendants.

In many drug courts, the team participates in daily rituals euphemistically called "staffing sessions."123 At these staffing sessions, the judge, prosecutor, public defender, and some representative of the therapeutic community, but typically not private defense counsel, meet together in chambers to discuss that day's upcoming matters. The judge, after hearing from everyone, reaches presumptive decisions. Defendants are not present and the staffing sessions are not on the record. Apart from the obvious constitutional concerns,124 these staffing sessions symbolize what is wrong with having judges join with prosecutors, defense lawyers, and therapists: substantive decisions are being made about a felony defendant by some inter-branch committee acting more like a support group than a court of law.

Judges are not psychiatrists, and psychiatrists are not judges. Whenever judges enter the therapeutic arena we must choose be- tween two unpalatable options: either act beyond our expertise or abdicate our judging to therapeutic experts. Most therapeutic courts are designed to do the latter. Although therapeutic judges typically put on a counseling show in open court,25 the real therapeutic decisions are often made out of court by members of the therapeutic community.126 This unelected and unaccountable "new priestly class," as James Nolan describes it,127 has destroyed what small vestige of independence therapeutic judges may have left after already doling out large chunks of it to one another, to prosecutors, and to defense lawyers. Judges may be comforted by pretending to function as a therapeutic team acting in the best interests of defendants, but what is really happening is that they have abdicated the judging role to the new therapeutic priests.

There may be an argument for sacrificing some judicial independence in minor cases to achieve significant therapeutic results, and indeed judges have been trying to do just that for a long time with things like safe driving classes and anger management programs.128 It may not be terribly troubling to expand these ideas to misdemeanor shoplifting, graffiti offenses, littering, and other kinds of minor offenses with which most community-based courts deal. But applying them to felony drug charges that can result in a defendant going to prison for decades should be wholly unacceptable. If we are going to continue to treat drug use as a crime, and some drug use as a felony, then we must treat felony drug cases seriously, not like parking tickets in a mill in which the judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and therapist spend their days trying to push as many people through as possible.

C. Impinging on the Executive Function

Besides violating the doctrine of the separation of powers by forcing judges and prosecutors to work on treatment teams together, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement impinges on the executive function in two more direct and discrete ways-by demolishing prosecutorial discretion and by interfering with corrections.

It is the long-established privilege of prosecutors to decide what crimes to charge and what plea bargains to offer.129 Therapeutic courts, especially drug courts, substantially eliminate both of these jealously-guarded areas of prosecutorial discretion.

Before drug courts, prosecutors retained their broad discretion to charge or not charge small possession drug cases, and indeed the realities of our system drove many prosecutors, and even police, to ignore some low-level drug possession and even some drug dealing. But in the postmodern therapeutic world, drug offenders are not wrongdoers whose transgressions might be overlooked if they are sufficiently minor, but rather diseased citizens in need of treatment. Thus, we see massive increases in drug filings after the institution of drug courts,130 and those explosions correspond directly to police and prosecutors agreeing at the front end to arrest and prosecute every drug offender, regardless of circumstance, in order to meet the therapeutic demand for reluctant patients.

At the plea-bargaining end, prosecutors have likewise abdicated their traditional discretion. Most drug courts recognize only a few different kinds of cookie cutter plea bargains, and the decision to offer a particular plea bargain is driven entirely by a few objective criteria, and not by the exercise of any meaningful prosecutorial discretion.131 After all, this is treatment, not adjudication; triage, not prosecutorial discretion.

Therapeutic courts also impinge on the executive's corrections functions. Providing medical treatment to persons convicted of crimes, and even to persons in custody awaiting trial, is an executive function, not a judicial one. When therapeutic courts mechanically impose treatment conditions on all defendants, both before and after conviction, they blur the fundamental distinction between the accused and the convicted, and therefore between the judicial function of determining guilt and the executive function of carrying out sentences and treating prisoners.

It is entirely inappropriate and inimical to our adjudicative role for judges to be deciding whether defendants have been cured of their diseases and whether for that reason no punishment should be imposed. Criminal courts exist to determine whether the state has met its burden of proving that the defendant has committed a crime, and if so, to mete out appropriate and just punishment. The product of a criminal case should be a verdict and a sentence, not a decision whether John Smith should be treated at Acme House or Metropolis Hospital, or whether he truly suffers from borderline personality disorder or is just a jerk.

If we are really serious about treatment, we should direct our treatment resources to the executive branch's corrections facilities, both pre-conviction (jails) and post-conviction (jails and prisons). That is where the push for treatment, voluntary and semi-voluntary, belongs if it belongs anywhere. If we continue to believe that possession of some drugs is serious enough to warrant incarceration, then we should impose that incarceration without further therapeutic hand-wringing. Prisoners can then take advantage, or not take advantage, of intense in-custody drug treatment programs tied to parole eligibility.

D. Judges as Legislators

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement not only forces judges to act in concert with each other, with their "communities," with prosecutors, with defense lawyers, and with therapists, but it also profoundly subsumes the legislative function. By assuming all manner of human behavior is the product of some set of sociological pathogens, therapeutic courts ignore the principles of free will and individual responsibility upon which the criminal law rests. That is, it is for legislatures, and not self-described therapeutic judges, to decide not only whether certain behavior is a crime or a disease, but also in many circumstances to set a range of punishment. On these matters, the legislatures have spoken. We no longer punish adultery, but we do punish the possession of certain drugs. We no longer execute petty thieves, but shoplifting is still a crime.

In many respects, the therapeutic jurisprudence movement, especially its embodiment in drug courts, is simply a judicial reaction to laws some judges do not like. Some judges do not believe certain crimes should be punished by incarceration, and in fact do not think certain crimes should be considered crimes at all. Thus, crimes become diseases, defendants become patients, judges be- come therapists, and laws are repealed by therapeutic judicial fiat. There may be good arguments for and against decriminalizing some existing crimes, including some drug crimes, but in the end that debate must be settled by elected legislatures and not by judges who think they have some special insight into either medicine or public policy.

Conclusion

The therapeutic jurisprudence movement is not being driven by evil judges thrilled at the prospect of exerting unwarranted and unprecedented control over the private lives of fellow citizens, or even entirely by naive judges suckered into the therapeutic newspeak. Instead, the therapeutic road we are running down has been paved with the good intentions of judges reacting to the flood of dysfunction we see every day in our courtrooms, hardened with a dash of the kind of judicial hubris that positions us to think that because we control our courtrooms we can control the lives of everyone who appears in them. The unprecedented and unwarranted powers assumed by judges in the name of doing psychological good will make us both profoundly dangerous in our own right and hopelessly incapable of protecting citizens from the therapeutic excesses of the other two branches, just as it did when we tried the more general rehabilitative experiment in the 1930s.

The next time a group of "problem solving" activists tries to set up one of these intrusive courts in your community, remember what the Quakers tried to teach us about the dangers of mixing well-intentioned rehabilitation with well-deserved punishment. Remember that we have met failure in a similar fashion in the past. When we tried to treat crime as if it were a disease, and criminals as if they were moral in-patients, the only thing we accomplished was to create a dangerous judiciary that felt authorized to exert power over these diseased patients for as long as it took to cure them. If we repeat these rehabilitative failures, we will continue to de-humanize the objects of our humanitarianism, to fill our penal system with our therapeutic failures, to short-circuit what should be the real legislative debate, and to devalue punishment as its own clear social object.

Footnotes

The term "therapeutic jurisprudence" is generally credited to David Wexler, a law professor at the University of Arizona, who, as discussed in the text accompanying notes 88-89 infra, originally defined the term in a paper first delivered in 1987, but not published until 1992, to mean the study of the therapeutic impacts of mental health law. David B. Wexler, Putting Mental Health into Mental Health Law: Therapeutic Jurisprudence,16 L. & HUM. BEHAV. 27 (1992). He and others subsequently expanded the idea beyond the mental health realm, arguing not only that virtually all court proceedings can have important therapeutic impacts on the participants, but that judges should craft their decisions with an eye toward those impacts. See, e.g., ESSAYS IN THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE (D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 1991); PRACTICING THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: LAW AS A HELPING PROFESSION (D. Stolle, D. Wexler & B. Winnick eds., 2000); THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE: THE LAW As THERAPEUTIC AGENT (D. Wexler ed., 1990); David A. Wexler, New Directionsin Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Breaking the Bounds of Conventional Mental Health Law Scholarship,10 N.Y.L. SCH. J. HUM. RTS. 915 (1993). The phrase "restorative justice" is also sometimes used to connote what appears to be a similar constellation of ideas, though it tends to be used only in the criminal justice arena. See, e.g., John Braithewaite, Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts, 25 CRIME & JUST. 1 (1999); Robert F. Schopp, Therapeutic JurisprudenceForum: Integrating Restorative Justice and Therapeutic Jurisprudence,67 REV. JUR. U.P.R. 665 (1998); Comment, Repairing the Breach and Reconciling the Discordant: Mediation in Criminal Justice Systems, 72 N.C. L. REV. 1479 (1994). The phrase "collaborative law" is also used to describe the therapeutic approach in law, especially in divorce law. See generally Pauline H. Tesler, Collaborative Law: A New Paradigm for Divorce Lawyers, 5 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL. & L. 967 (1999). Finally, the phrase "problem-solving courts" seems to be the most recent way to describe various therapeutic courts, especially so-called "community-based courts." See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text. One cannot help but chuckle, and think of George Orwell's insights into the politicization of language, at a movement that describes intrusive judicial state action of an unprecedented magnitude as "problem solving."

JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., REINVENTING JUSTICE: THE AMERICAN DRUG COURT MOVEMENT 7 (2001).

Id.

It is de rigueur for judges and their staff in therapeutic jurisprudence courts to call parties "clients," even criminal defendants. This is not only consistent with the whole approach of therapeutic jurisprudence—to treat rather than to adjudicate-but is also a linguistic expression of the stunning mixing of roles between judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer. See infra notes 110-31 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 7.

Id.

For a summary of the astonishing storytelling aspects of drug courts, see NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 111-36.

For a general description of the organization, implementation, operation and sentencing models used in drug courts, see Morris B. Hoffman, The Drug Court Scandal, 78 N.C. L. REV. 1437, 1462-63 (2000). As discussed in the text accompanying notes 31 to 32 infra, drug courts are probably sending considerably more people to prison than traditional courts, because of a combination of net-widening and ineffective treatment.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 8-9.

See infra notes 123-24 and accompanying text; see also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524, discussing the off-the-record "staffing" ritual, at which neither the defendant nor private defense counsel is present, yet at which presumptive sentencing decisions are made.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text (discussing community-based courts).

Drug court proponents themselves acknowledge that drug courts are a kind of theater, whose audience includes not only the clients to be re-educated but also skeptical prosecutors, media, politicians, and other influential members of the non therapeutic community. "Drug courts, it has been said many times, are theater. And the judge is the stage director and one of the primary actors." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 73 (quoting Baltimore drug court judge Jamey Weitzman). Indeed, the theatrical aspects of drug court—both as a therapeutic tool and as tightly scripted propaganda—are a focal point of national drug court training conferences. The titles of some of these conferences are telling: "Damage Control: Dealing with the Media," "Getting Local Government and the Community to 'Buy In' to a Drug Court," "Dealing with the Press/Politics." Id. at 62. See infra notes 112-113 and accompanying text (discussing particular points of propaganda spread at national conferences).

See infra note 25 (discussing the fact that therapeutic defendants are well aware that their "treatment" is an attitudinal game they must pretend to play in order to escape the clutches of the criminal justice system).

14. A Compton, California drug court judge's explanation is typical of the parent- child model by which many therapeutic judges see their relationship to their "clients": I let [the defendant] come into my chambers. . . . All she wanted was a hug.... So, I just gave her a hug. I mean, what would you do if your child came up to you, and said, "May I have a hug?" You wouldn't say, "Well, let me think about this now. You have been bad fifteen times." You would just do it. So, that is what I did. And yes, you should [give hugs]. You get a whole lot back. You really do. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 102.

Id. at 149.

See infra notes 117-120 and accompanying text.

But see infra note 120 (discussing proposed extensions of community-based courts).

See infra Part IV.D.

See infra notes 107-09 and accompanying text.

See generally Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1469-73. Many drug court proponents express a certain ironic pride in the fact that they believe they are much more enlightened on the disease model of addiction than medical professionals: It's amazing listening to physicians say, "It's not a disease." It's almost done a reverse. We have people who are normally not trained in the medical field calling it a disease and those who are trained in the medical field saying, "It's not a disease," that it's just a lack of guts or lack of intestinal fortitude of the individual. It's a scary thought. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 137 (quoting unnamed director of treatment at one of the drug courts Professor Nolan visited). It is, indeed, a "scary thought," but not for the reasons this treatment director thinks.

See, e.g., ANDREW MECCA ET AL., THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM (1989); Roy F. Baumeister et al., Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of Self-Esteem, 5 PSYCHOL. REV. 101 (1995). See generally JOHN P. HEWITT, THE MYTH OF SELF-ESTEEM: FINDING HAPPINESS AND SOLVING PROBLEMS IN AMERICA (1998).

See, e.g., NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 141 (quoting Syracuse, New York drug court judge Langston McKinney): By volunteering in the drug court program the defendant has circumvented [the adjudicative] part of the judicial process. . . . "(W]e literally leave all that [judicial impartiality, presumption of innocence, etc.] at the doorstep." In the drug court context, "this issue of guilt/innocence is not of concern." See also infra notes 92-95 and accompanying text (discussing the drug court's eradication of the concept of guilt).

In one of the most telling expositions of the therapeutic paradigm, the appellate lawyer for Karla Faye Tucker argued that the state of Texas had no right to execute her because she was no longer the same person who had committed the multiple murders for which the prior Ms. Tucker had been convicted. The lawyer's argument, flush with therapeutic newspeak, was actually published in a law review after his client's execution. Walter C. Long, Karla Faye Tucker: A Case for RestorativeJustice,27 AM. J. CRIM. L. 117 (1999). Of course, that argument is precisely the same argument made by Bentham and the other utilitarians in the 1800s: if the only purpose of punishment is to deter the punished criminal, then no criminal may morally be punished beyond what it takes to rehabilitate him. See infra notes 55-60 and accompanying text. At least Bentham had the courage of his convictions, which is more than can be said for the current devotees of therapeutic jurisprudence, who are so worried that they will be seen as soft on crime that they would never apply their strange principles to serious crime. See supra notes 17-19 and accompanying text.

In fact, I suspect that it is the improved feelings of the treaters, and not of the treated, that is really driving judges' infatuation with therapeutic courts. The therapeutic jurisprudence movement in general, and the drug court movement in particular, is strewn with discussions of the positive effects therapeutic programs have on the treaters. See supra note 14 (reporting emotional benefits the drug court judge realizes from hugging a defendant).

Id. Nolan reports a stunning example of the extent to which compliance in therapeutic courts is measured more by what a defendant says than by what a defendant does. The Oakland probation department commended a drug court defendant for his compliance in treatment, and recommended that he be graduated from phase 2 to phase 3, even though the defendant had not had a single negative urinalysis in all of phase 2. JAMES L. NOLAN, JR., THE THERAPEUTIC STATE: JUSTIFYING GOVERNMENT AT CENTURY'S END 296 (1998). Defendants understand that they have to play the treatment game to pass through the criminal hoops. Nolan reports on a particularly embarrassing unraveling of a Washington, D.C. drug court session that was being televised live to a large convention of treatment providers. The session began in stock theatrical form, but at one point an uncooperative defendant began to depart from the script. When asked why his treatment program had been so difficult for him, he said "'Cause I had to come and sit here and listen to this crap." NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 69. The dam broke, and other defendants started to complain about the therapeutic game. At one point, laughter began to break out amongst the conventioneers. "When it became clear the judge was not going to be able to regain control of the performance, conference officials just cut the video feed. 'We have to stay on schedule,' an organizer deadpanned."' Id. at 70.

Id.; see also infra note 110 and accompanying text (discussing reverse moral screening). Dade County Drug Court officials report that they have had particular difficulty with the willingness of Hispanic clients to admit they have a disease and suggest that the difficulty may somehow be attributable to a cultural resistance to the disease model. NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 296.

The ineffectiveness of involuntary court-based therapy comes as no surprise to people familiar with the ineffectiveness of voluntary psychotherapy in general, especially in an addiction context. Peer-reviewed controlled studies—which are scandalously rare—are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that there is no evidence that twelve-step programs produce better results than clinical treatment or even better results than no treatment at all. See William R. Miller & Reid K. Hester, The Effectiveness of Alcoholism Treatment: What Research Reveals, in TREATING ADDICTIVE BEHAVIORS: PROCESSES OF CHANGE 121, 135-36 (W. Miller & N. Heather eds., 1986) (reviewing all controlled studies of alcohol treatment programs, finding only two on AA programs, and noting that both of those AA studies showed that members of AA got arrested more often and relapsed more frequently than the control group of untreated problem drinkers). Even clinical treatment seems ineffective. In a famous 1983 study of the effectiveness of inpatient alcohol treatment, the ability of treated patients to stop drinking and stay sober two years and eight years post-discharge was no better than that of the untreated control group. GEORGE VALLIANT, THE NATU- RAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM 284-94 (1983). The data on the effectiveness of drug treatment is no more encouraging. See, e.g., Stanton Peele, How People'sValues Determine Whether They Become and Remain Addicts, in VISIONS OF ADDICTION 219-20 (S. Peele ed., 1988).

In particular, Dade County drug defendants entering the drug court program suffered a one-year re-arrest rate of 32%, compared to Dade County drug defendants in traditional courts, who suffered a re-arrest rate over the same period of 33%. BAR- BARA E. SMITH ET AL., STRATEGIES FOR COURTS TO COPE WITH THE CASELOAD PRESSURES OF DRUG CASES 7 (1991).

Here, for example, are the results from five major effectiveness studies done by independent outsiders in the mid- and late-1990s: See generally STEVEN BELENKO & TAMARA DUMANOVSKY, BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE, U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, SPECIAL DRUG COURTS: PROGRAM BRIEF 2 (1993); Steven Belenko, Research on Drug Courts: A Critical Review, 1 NAT'L DRUG CT. INST. REV. 1 (1998).

See U.S. GEN. ACCOUNTING OFFICE, DRUG COURTS: OVERVIEW OF GROWTH, CHARACTERISTICS, AND RESULTS 7-8 (1997).

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1501-02.

Id. at 1510-11. These exploding prison populations were not the result of a general increase in criminal cases. On the contrary, since the Denver Drug Court began its operations, the percentage of drug cases filed in the court has exploded. Here are the complete figures for criminal cases with the Denver District Court from 1991 through 1998 (the drug court became operational in July 1994): Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1502 n.260.

See, e.g., PAUL RICOEUR, THE SYMBOLISM OF EVIL 26-27 (1967).

The God of the Old Testament was, of course, very much a retributionist. One of the central issues in virtually every religion is how to explain man's discovery that God's retribution does not always appear just.

A few commentators contend that the roots of punishment were in fact restorative, rather than retributive, at least until the Norman Conquest. See, e.g., Braithewaite, supra note 1, at 2. This view stems from an overbroad, noncriminological use of the word "punishment." It goes without saying that humans have always recognized that some wrongdoers can change their ways, hoped that all wrongdoers could, and suspected that some wrongdoers cannot. Naturally, these views found their way into many human institutions, from families to churches. These views do not shed any real light on the question of criminological punishment-that is, what the state should do to a particular wrongdoer in response to a particular crime. Is the wrong-doer one of us, who must be punished to restore his moral standing? See infra notes 50-52 and accompanying text. Or is he diseased, and in need of some kind of treatment? In this sense, it is clear that civilization has always been retributive and not rehabilitative, at least until the 1920s and 1930s, when the confluence of Freud and the Progressives led us to a rehabilitative norm where all people are seen as the diseased products of their past, and therefore fundamentally not responsible for their actions. See infra notes 61-62 and accompanying text.

36. NORVAL MORRIS, THE FUTURE OF IMPRISONMENT 4 (1974).

Id.

4 WILLIAM A. BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND *98 (W.L. Dean ed., 1846). In a famous passage in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens laments that, as late as the French Revolution, English law imposed the death sentence for all manner of criminal offenses, including forgery, bad checks, unlawfully opening a letter addressed to another, stealing as little as forty shillings, and horse theft. CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF Two CITIES 50 (Oxford Univ. Press 1953) (1859).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 5. Some historians contend that the first true penitentiary was the so-called "People Pen" constructed by the Massachusetts Pilgrims in Boston in 1632. See, e.g., PHILIP D. JORDAN, FRONTIER LAW AND ORDER: TEN ESSAYS 140 (1970). In any event, it is clear that it was the Quaker's Walnut Street Jail, and not the Pilgrims' Boston People Pen, that became the model for the early American penitentiary. MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4-5.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 5. See the discussion of Baccaria in the text accompanying infra notes 53-55.

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 4.

Id. at 5.

Id. at 58.

IMMANUEL KANT, THE METAPHYSICAL ELEMENTS OF JUSTICE 101 (Ladd trans., Bobbs-Merrill 1965) (1797).

Id.

Id.

Id.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT 71 (T.M. Knox trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1942) (1821).

Id.

Id.

Id.

Id.

JEREMY BENTHAM, THE RATIONALE OF PUNISHMENT (R. Heward & R. Smith et al. eds. and trans., 1830).

Id.

Bentham and Holmes were very much the progenitors of the University of Chicago-based law and economics movement, which extended these utilitarian principles to other areas of the law. Ironically, Holmes also spawned the left-wing "critical legal studies" movement, which is equally devoid of moral principles. See generally ALBERT W. ALSCHULER, LAW WITHOUT VALUES: THE LIFE, WORK AND LEGACY OF JUSTICE HOLMES (2000); Morris B. Hoffman, Book Review, 54 STAN. L. REV. 597 (2001). Holmes rejected not only the retributionists but also those utilitarians whose view of "prevention" included rehabilitation. Holmes's logic, as usual, was compel- ling: the criminal law will lose all of its deterrent purpose if bad men know they will be treated rather than punished. Indeed, Holmes's notion of the "bad man" was itself a rejection of the rehabilitative ideal. At the very least, Holmes argued that rehabilitation could never be the only purpose of punishment: ("If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is incurable he should not be punished at all.") OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 42 (Little, Brown & Co. 1923) (1881). These observations take on an eerily modern significance when we talk about drug courts as devices for reverse moral screening. See infra note 110 and accompanying text.

HOLMES, supra note 57, at 42-43.

BENTHAM, supra note 55, at 41. "If we could consider an offense which has been committed as an isolated fact, the like of which would never recur, punishment would be useless. It would only be adding one evil to another." It seems to me that this conclusion follows only if one takes an unduly narrow view of deterrence. Deterrence is not only about discouraging the particular wrongdoer from committing additional wrongs in the future, but also discouraging other people by example. And, of course, this second kind of deterrence has the potential to be substantially more effective, because it acts on the population as a whole, rather than on a single criminal. For the very same reason, assuming equal rates of success, deterrence is far more efficient than rehabilitation.

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 85 COLUM. L. REV. 1193, 1203-04 (1985).

See supra notes 50-52 and accompanying text.

See, e.g., R.A. Duff & David Garland, Introduction: Thinking About Punishment, in A READER ON PUNISHMENT 1, 2-3 (R.A. Duff & D. Garland eds., 1994).

See generally ANTHONY M. PLATT, THE CHILD SAVERS: THE INVENTION OF DELINQUENCY (2d ed. 1977).

There are other striking similarities between the juvenile court movement and the drug court movement: both were initially led by charismatic judges; both are based on a fundamental therapeutic paternalism; both have liberal political origins but are quick to deny they are "soft" on crime; both rely heavily on pseudo-scientific social principles; both rely on informal proceedings; and both are designed to decrease the role of the defense lawyer and increase the activism and discretion of the judge. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 174 ("[S]o similar are the two forms of therapeutic jurisprudence that one is tempted to view the juvenile courts as the direct historical antecedent to drug courts."). Nolan also points out significant differences between the two movements, however, including the fact that juvenile courts relied much less on the therapeutic community and that juvenile judges were much less active in defendants' day-to-day treatment. Id. at 174-75; See generally Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1206, 1269-77 (1998).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 171.

PLATT, supra note 63, at 162; see also Janet E. Ainsworth, Re-Imagining Childhood and Reconstructing the Legal Order: The Case for Abolishing the Juvenile Court, 69 N.C. L. REV. 1083, 1120 (1991).

In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 61 (1967).

AM. FRIENDS SERVI. COMM., STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE: A REPORT ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA 147-48 (1971).

See generally FRANCIS A. ALLEN, THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL: PENAL POLICY AND SOCIAL PURPOSE (1981).

MORRIS, supra note 36, at 76.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163 (quoting Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins, Letter to the President on Crime Control).

72. Ainsworth, supra note 66, at 1104 ("Despite several decades of experience with rehabilitative penology in the adult and juvenile systems, however, criminal recidivism stubbornly refused to whither away.")

Id. at 1105.

E.g., MORRIS, supra note 36, at 20-22 (discussing the "abandonment" of the reform of criminals as justification for imprisonment).

David J. Rothman, Deincarcerating Prisoners and Patients, 1973 C. L. REV. 8, 24 (1973).

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 23 (1972) (noting that "there has been more of a commitment to the 'rehabilitative ideal' in recent years than to other theories of punishment").

See, e.g., WAYNE LAFAVE & AUSTIN W. SCOTT, CRIMINAL LAW 28-29 (2d ed. 1986) (discussing the dearth of criticism of rehabilitative theories beginning in the 1960s).

See, e.g., Michael Vitiello, Reconsidering Rehabilitation,65 TUL. L. REV. 1011, 1012-13 (1991) (discussing the abrupt rejection of the rehabilitative ideal of punishment).

See, Elizabeth Rapaport, Retribution and Redemption in the Operation of Executive Clemency, 74 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 1501, 1502 (2000).

See generally MARVIN FRANKEL, CRIMINAL SENTENCES: LAW WITHOUT ORDER (1973); ANDREW VON HIRSCH, DOING JUSTICE: THE CHOICE OF PUNISHMENTS (1976); RICHARD G. SINGER, JUST DESERTS: SENTENCING BASED ON EQUALITY AND DESERT (1979) .

81. The Guidelines began with Congress's 1984 enactment of the Sentencing Reform Act, Pub. L. 98-473, 98 Stat. 1837, 1976 (1984) ("the SRA"). The SRA changed the century-old federal indeterminate sentencing scheme to a determinate one and created the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which ultimately created the Guidelines. WEST GROUP, FEDERAL SENTENCING GUIDELINES MANUAL 1-2 (1999). One can be a neo-retributionist without necessarily being a fan of the Guidelines. The SRA and its Guidelines triggered a whole host of controversies, including constitutional questions about the separation of powers and institutional questions about the role of judicial discretion, the resolution of which do not necessarily depend on one's views on retribution. See, e.g., Charles L. Ogeltree, Jr., The Death of Discretion?: Reflections on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1938 (1988) (criticizing the Guidelines for failing to address the complex issues involved in sentencing, such as individual characteristics of the defendant and racial disparity in sentencing); Note, The Federal Sentencing Guidelines and Confrontation Rights, 42 DUKE L.J. 382 (1992) (advocating that confrontation rights should apply to sentencing under the Guidelines in order to adequately protect defendants); Note, The Standard of Proof at Sentencing Hearings Under the FederalSentencingGuidelines:Why the Preponderance of the Evidence Standard is Constitutionally Inadequate, 1997 U. ILL.L. REV. 583 (1997). In 1989, the Supreme Court rejected constitutional attacks on the SRA and Guidelines based on arguments that they were a delegation of excess legislative authority and a violation of the separation of powers. United States v. Mistretta, 488 U.S. 361 (1989). Commentators have disagreed about whether the Guidelines allow appropriate rehabilitative consideration, especially in drug cases. Compare Note, Sentencing the Reformed Addict: Departure Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and the Problem of Drug Rehabilitation,91 COLUM. L. REV. 2051 (1991) (describing the disagreement over the interpretation of the Guidelines as allowing downward departures for rehabilitated defendants) with Comment, Downward Departures from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Based on the Defendant's Drug Rehabilitative Efforts, 59 U. CHI. L. REV. 837 (1992) (arguing that defendant's genuine efforts at rehabilitation can be a valid reason to justify departure from the Guidelines).

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 159-64.

Id. at 159-64.

A situation which, as described in the text accompanying note 38 supra, comes close to describing most European criminal systems from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment.

'For example, the utilitarian J.J.C. Smart argues that although deterrence should be the prime consideration of legislators (what he calls "second order" questions), judges should be concerned primarily with retribution (what he calls "first order" questions). J.J.C. Smart, Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment 6 RES JUDICATAE 368 (June 1953). Even Norval Morris, who is associated more with incapacitation than retribution, acknowledges that retribution must play a central role in linking the punishment with the crime. NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 163.

ALLEN, supra note 69.

Id. at 86-87.

The one exception I found was an article about restorative justice written by an Australian social scientist, John Braithewaite. Braithewaite, supra note 1. Professor Braithewaite not only tackles the difficult traditional philosophical and criminological issues underlying punishment, he also attempts to summarize the data behind the claims and criticisms of the model.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 17-21.

See, e.g., STANTON PEELE, THE DISEASING OF AMERICA: ADDICTION TREATMENT OUT OF CONTROL (1989).

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

See generally supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 142-43.

Margot Slade, At the Bar, N. Y. TIMES, May 20, 1994, at B20.

Sch. Dist. of Phila. v. Friedman, 96 PA. COMMW. 267, 270 (1986).

THE FEDERALIST No. 78, at 490 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 1.

U.S. CONST. art. III, § 2.

In The Federalist No. 47, which was Madison's first exposition on the separation of powers, he discusses at length the entangled failings of the British judiciary, and even quotes Montesquieu's criticisms: "Were the power of the judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with all the violence of an oppressor." THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 338 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed, 1996).

"A circumstance which crowns the defects of the Confederation remains yet to be mentioned-the want of a judiciary power. Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation." Id. at 187.

THE FEDERALIST No. 22, at 489-96 (Alexander Hamilton) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

THE FEDERALIST No. 47, at 84 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See, e.g., Three Affiliated Tribes of Ft. Berthold Reservation v. Wold Eng'g, 467 U.S. 138, 157 (1984) ("It is a fundamental rule of judicial restraint ... that this Court will not reach constitutional questions in advance of the necessity of deciding them.").

Id.

See generally OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., THE COMMON LAW 33-37 (Harvard Univ. Press 1923) (1881).

Holmes is perhaps more responsible than anyone for breathing life back into the founders' commitment to judicial restraint. He wrote powerfully and elegantly about the need for judges to judge rather than legislate, and his commitment to that principle was all the more impressive because he personally disagreed with so much of what the progressive Congress was trying to do in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, he suggested that his epitaph be "Here lies the supple tool of power." ALSCHULER, supra note 57, at 82. He also wrote that "[I]f my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Id. (quoting Letter from Holmes to Harold Laski (March 4, 1920)).

THE FEDERALIST No. 39, at 281 (James Madison) (B. Wright ed., 1996).

See supra notes 24-30, 72-73 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 64-66, 69 and accompanying text.

Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1476.

Id. at 1528-29.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 2, at 62.

Id. at 62-65.

Id. at 97.

Id. The judge explains his funding activities this way: Whether you like it or not you as the judge are considered a leader of your drug court team. Your team looks to you for inspiration and guidance. So as a leader of that team you must take a very active part in the raising of funds. For the Rochester court, I went out and raised all the money from local foundations.

CAROLINE COOPER ET AL., DRUG COURT RES. CTR., DRUG COURTS: 1997 OVERVIEW OF OPERATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES 120- 27 (1997).

See, e.g., Judith S. Kaye, Rethinking TraditionalApproaches,62 ALB. L. REV. 1491, 1494 (1999).

Id.

Id.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about community-based courts is that their proponents are seriously proposing that they be extended from petty crimes to the entire justice system. Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals has suggested just such an unbounded extension. "What about a community court for civil cases? For commercial cases? For family cases? For youth crime? .... [T]hese are very very good questions, well worth considering." Id. at 1494. With all due respect to Chief Judge Kaye, what is a community-based commercial court? Would Chief Judge Kaye have panels of community activists decide whether defaulting borrowers should clean subways instead of repay their bank loans? Should negligent surgeons have to lick and stuff envelopes for the American Trial Lawyers Association instead of paying damages to their victims? In the end, if the rights that flow to individuals-from their contracts, from common law, from statute or from the constitution-are nothing but the shadows of communal judgment, and if individuals' opportunities to enforce those rights in courts of law are replaced entirely by a system in which those rights mean nothing but a certain level of symbolic community opprobrium, then we might as well disband the judiciary. Indeed, our modern world has already experienced a most advanced form of such unbounded community courts-the People's Courts in China during the cultural revolution.

For a discussion of the ethical dilemmas drug courts impose on criminal defense lawyers, see Richard C. Boldt, Rehabilitative Punishment and the Drug Treatment Court Movement, 76 WASH. U. L. Q. 1205 (1999); Developments in the Law—Alternatives to Incarceration for Drug-Abusing Offenders, 111 HARV. L. REV. 1863 (1998). Professor Boldt summarized the problem this way: [D]efense counsel [in the drug court] is no longer primarily responsible for giving voice to the distinct perspective of the defendant's experience in what remains a coercive setting. Rather, defense counsel becomes part of a treatment team working with others to insure that outcomes, viewed from the perspective of the institutional players and not the individual defendant, are in the defendant's best interests. Boldt, supra, at 1245.

Indeed, treatment is imposed as a blanket condition of bail in many drug courts, despite the potential constitutional problems with such a non-particularized approach. See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1462 n.7; cf United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 751-52 (1987) (upholding the constitutionality of the Bail Reform Act of 1984 because it required a particularized showing of governmental need); see also Richard B. Abell, Pretrial Drug Testing: Expanding Rights and Protecting Public Safety, 57 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 943, 956 (1989) (arguing that pre-trial drug testing is constitutional).

See Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1524.

Criminal defendants, even those labeled as the system's "clients," have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel and to be present at all critical stages of a criminal prosecution. E.g. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68-72 (1932).

See supra notes 2-14 and accompanying text.

See supra notes 121-123 and accompanying text.

NOLAN, JR., supra note 25, at 7-9.

Even for these kinds of long-established programs, there is virtually no evidence of their efficacy.

Prosecutorial charging and bargaining discretion is a fundamental principle inherent in the doctrine of separation of powers. See, e.g., Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 607 (1985). This broad discretion [afforded the prosecution] rests largely on the recognition that the decision to prosecute is particularly ill-suited to judicial review. Such factors as the strength of the case, the prosecution's general deterrence value, the Government's enforcement priorities, and the case's relationship to the Government's overall enforcement plan are not readily susceptible to the kind of analysis the courts are competent to undertake. Id.

See supra notes 31-32 and accompanying text.

In Denver, for example, the dispositional algorithm for defendants charged with simple possession is fairly rigid: (1) if the defendant has two or more prior felonies, he or she is ineligible for drug court; (2) if the defendant is arrested with a small, so-called "personal use," amount of drugs, he or she is offered a deferred judgment; (3) if the defendant is arrested with more than a personal use amount, he or she gets probation. See also Hoffman, supra note 8, at 1513 nn. 297-98.

[dipulb3]

How making guitars helped save a man from addiction

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/how-making-guitars-helped-save-a-man-from-addiction/

How making guitars helped save a man from addiction

He was 12 years old and hundreds of miles away at his grandparents’ house in Florida when his father broke the news over the phone. When young Moore returned home, his mother was inconsolable.

“I felt like I was unlovable. I really felt small,” the 44-year-old said. “I wanted to do all I could to make the house better, to feel better at home. And I didn’t know how to do it.”

Moore discovered the power of opioids to take that pain away while attending college at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. After a series of minor surgeries for ingrown toenails, Moore ended up with more than 400 pain pills in his medicine cabinet.

“My friend came over and showed me that I could use these pills then to feel better, to study longer, to just have increased performance and it was great in the beginning.”

It helped him feel more comfortable in social situations too — but on the outside, Moore says, he looked ridiculous — slumped over and drooling.

Moore’s addiction lasted more than 15 years — before he finally found the help he needed. It was a nightmare odyssey that led him to steal his grandmother’s cancer pain medication and his police officer brother’s ATM card to pay pills.

He says he tried to kill himself twice and spent nine months in jail where he was beaten in a prison riot.

Moore went through five different drug treatment facilities but always ended up using again.

Not until Moore says he found a 12-step program and a mentor who showed him the art of building stringed instruments — did he find the self-love and confidence that turned his life around for good.

Turning wood into music saves a man’s life

Moore was trying to get clean yet again in 2012 when he heard a master luthier — an expert stringed-instrument maker — was coming to his hometown of Hindman, a tiny hamlet nestled in the lush mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

The town has a quaint main street, but it has been ravaged by unemployment with the downturn of the coal industry and a brutal epidemic of opioid addiction.

Moore had been doing carpentry, building cabinets and had a love for guitars.

The desperate young man made a point of showing up to see a band one night where the luthier, Doug Naselroad, was performing.

“He said, ‘I need to come to work in your studio — I need you to teach me how to make guitars’,” recalled Naselroad.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s no problem. That’s what we do.’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand I need to come and do this.'”

Moore admitted he had a felony on his record and thought that might be an obstacle to apprenticing under Naselroad. At the time he was going through a 12-step program to fight his addictions.

“There was some discussion about the wisdom of bringing people in addiction into our studios,” said Naselroad.

In the end, Naselroad and his employer — the non-profit Appalachian Artisan Center, said yes. Moore was elated.

“I was probably headed for death that time. How many more chances do you get in life?”

Finding peace in a wood shop

Moore found himself in Naselroad’s wood shop nearly every day learning how to craft guitars from Appalachian native hardwoods in a town where the mountain dulcimer was first made in the late 1800s.

“Music has always been a part of this community ever since pioneer days,” said Naselroad.

What started out as a one-year apprenticeship became a six-year journey that brought Moore back to life.

“(Naselroad) would bring in what people would throw away and he could see through the rough grain and see that there was beautiful wood laying underneath,” said Moore. “To be able to do that and see beauty through dark places, is a gift he has and was able to show it to me.”

Moore says he began to see the beauty in himself peering through those dark places and his confidence grew as he built a new skill.

“You don’t realize what you’re capable of until you’re able to produce something in an artistic form. Art releases something deep inside you don’t know you have.”

Since he began, Moore has made more than 70 instruments. He’s sold many of them and kept others. And while building instruments at night, during the day he earned a master’s degree in network security administration.

Eight years later, Moore is still sober and works as the director of information technology at a residential treatment center where a large percentage of the employees are recovering addicts themselves.

One addict’s recovery inspires arts program

Moore’s success inspired the creation of the “Culture of Recovery” arts program at The Appalachian Artisan Center. The non-profit already had pottery, luthiery and blacksmithing studios, and in 2018, with a grant from ArtPlace America, started inviting people in recovery into their studios to work with mentors.

“We don’t do the difficult work that the recovery centers do. We don’t take people in who need to go through detox,” Naselroad said. “What we do is we accept people into our studios when they’ve phased into a place where that’s useful to them; when they’re ready to come out into the light of day. We try to occupy them and mitigate their recidivism.”

The program is voluntary and invites people who are enrolled in local drug rehabilitation programs like the Hickory Hill Recovery Center and Drug Court, which uses a non-punitive approach to recovery.

“There are creative individuals that this just fits like a hand in a glove,” said Kimberley Childers, Circuit Court Judge for Knott County, whose own family members have struggled with opioid addiction.

“The recidivism rate is very low when a person goes through this program — I would consider it to be 10% or less,” she said.

The judge said the program speaks to the soul of the people in a region that has a strong tradition of craftsmanship.

“Our culture is so rich in these things. We’re using what we have.”

So far, a couple of hundred people have taken part in these classes. They come once or twice a week to learn how to make pottery, guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, or chef knives and axes.

Kimberly Patton was one of the Culture of Recovery’s first students who learned how to make pottery. Five years later, she’s now sober and teaches other recovering addicts at the Artisan Center.

“Sitting here, you’re focusing on one thing. It shuts the outside world down. It really helps,” Patton said. “If I get mad or upset I can just come here and everything goes away.”

“When they gave me the key to this place — I was like ‘Wow, I finally got a key to something. I’m gaining back trust.'”

Taking instrument skills to the next level

Naselroad felt that a natural extension of the program would be turning those skills into jobs. Last year, he made it happen.

After turning over the luthiery teaching to one of his best students, he opened up the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company — a factory which builds instruments and hires students trained at the “Culture of Recovery” program.

“The jobs we create are an economic development engine. But they’re also helping to keep our guys off the streets, which is part of recovery,” Naselroad said.

The Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company has only five employees — two of which are recovering addicts — but his dream is to have 50.

“The guitars that are made here, the mandolins that are made here — each one of them has a piece of the life of these individuals in recovery made right into them. And so, in the end result, you have an instrument that’s got a lot of life in it.”

[prelawland]

The First Step Act

By Stefania Valera, University of Rhode Island Class of 2021

August 15, 2020

In 2018, President Donald Trump signed something entitled the First Step Act (FSA), which was provided to aid criminal justice outcomes. Furthermore, the FSA acknowledges that it works towards lessening the prison population while at the same time fulfilling a safe public environment. The Act obtains five goals and permits on those it impacts. Firstly, the FSA focuses on assessing “the recidivism risk and criminogenic needs of all federal prisoners,” meaning it works on guiding prisoners within certain programs so their chances of being reoffended for a crime are low. The FSA also exhibits an incentive program where inmates “can earn up to 54 days of good time credit for every year imposed” rather than each year served. There are of course certain crimes that are prohibited from earning this incentive, which sets up a high standard for many prisoners. Thirdly, the FSA works towards housing inmates “as close to their primary residence as possible,” more specifically within at least 500 driving miles. Lastly the FSA focuses on meeting sanitary needs for prisoners by including the requirement for tampons and sanitary napkins, furthermore officers are to be trained on de-escalating conflicts in prisons. Although federal prisons hold a toxic reputation, the FSA sure does prove to be an operation towards the right direction. However, there is still a high level of reform needed to be complete in order to have an effective federal prison that does not continue to deteriorate the state of its prisoners physically and mentally but prepares them to be sharpened citizens once released [2].

The FSA was signed into law nearly two years ago, but it still has significant implications. The FSA is considered to be “the most consequential criminal justice legislation in a generation” defining its high importance. Recently, Lazelle Maxwell, a 48-year-old inmate is set to complete 30-year sentence for a nonviolent crack cocaine charge. Mr. Maxwell has “no disciplinary infractions” and spends his time “behind bars caring for an elderly… inmate,” while he himself is a survivor of prostate cancer. Mr. Maxwell attempted to receive a deduction of his sentence under the FSA, however a judge requested his request for a lawyer and the ability to apply for such a request. The New York Times reports that the FSA has been beneficial in reducing federal sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and releasing or resentencing prisoners, however “the law gives judge’s discretion in reducing sentences.” Furthermore, the U.S. Sentencing Commission “does not track rejected applicants” so there is no way to view data of those who have requested to apply and gotten a rejection in return. It can be inferred that judges themselves have a huge responsibility in who they decide to accept in terms of re-negotiating sentences. Different judges obtain differing opinions, therefore there needs to be a form of solitude in relation to certain sentences and crimes. It seems strictly unfair that some inmates are treated differently from others simply based off of their location and a judge. There is no widespread acceptance or precedence formed in order to responsibly institute change within the FSA[3].

According to the chart above, it can be estimated that the United States imprisons more people per capita than any other nation. Focusing simply on the FSA and its relation to drugs, there is a staggering number of those in jail for something drug related peaking at 190,000 inmates per year within state prisons. Additionally, 78,000 are locked up in federal prisons making a total of 268,000 people arrested for something drug related. Referring to the chart above, it is slightly difficult to decipher specific charges and the exact number of convictions in relation to drugs, but jails and prisons are overwhelmingly populated. The FSA exists to aid with prison populations, that is why there needs to be an improved core foundation for judges to go off of when making certain decisions for people like Mr. Maxwell. There is an immense amount of reformation to be done, after the FSA it really needs to be focused on the judges calling the shots. They have an intense amount of power over one’s life and it seems as though personal opinions and bias might be getting in the way. The law should be strict and knowledgeable, such serious decisions should be made based off of personal agendas. Certainly, the United States has much work to do but it is definitely headed within the right direction, especially due to the FSA.

________________________________________________________________

1.     Gotsch, Kara, and Ashley Nellis. “One Year After the First Step Act: Mixed Outcomes.” The Sentencing Project, 17 Dec. 2019.

2.     “Federal Bureau of Prisons.” BOP.

3.     Fuchs, Hailey. “Law to Reduce Crack Cocaine Sentences Leaves Some Imprisoned.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 2020.

4.     Wagner, Wendy Sawyer and Peter. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020.” Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 | Prison Policy Initiative, 24 Mar. 2020.

[go-redgirl]

How President Trump Is Giving Hope to Forgotten Americans Timothy Head|Posted: Feb 20, 2020 1:23 PM  

In the past several months, we’ve seen a flurry of state-level policy recommendations and actions aimed at making criminal justice reform a legislative priority. This week, President Trump granted clemency to 11 people whose length of incarceration didn’t fit their crimes. Today, President Trump is speaking at Hope for Prisoners, a Las Vegas organization that provides services and support to the formerly incarcerated as they work to reintegrate into society. There, he will speak to people re-entering the community, highlighting White House efforts to give former inmates new opportunities.

As the executive director of an organization on the frontlines of criminal justice reform, I have witnessed, for years, the personal toll the system takes on the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. In many cases, it breaks them instead of healing them. In others, it alienates them from their support systems. And it often makes it nearly impossible for them to make a living when they have served their time, leading to higher recidivism rates.

Because of this, I applaud the administration’s prioritization of criminal justice reform efforts.

America incarcerates a higher percentage of our population than any other country, but it doesn’t have to. There’s a lot we can do. We can focus our efforts on mental health treatments and effective rehabilitation programs for substance abuse. We can utilize sentencing alternatives for nonviolent crimes. We can create more programs for post-incarceration employment.

Thanks to the president’s leadership, many former prisoners have a chance at a new life. Unemployment is at a 50-year low, making it easier for them to find jobs. Wages are rising, especially among low-income workers. President Trump’s Pledge to America’s Workers has led to company pledges to create employment and educational opportunities for more than 12 million Americans. 

When former prisoners find jobs, or go to school, or find people who believe in their abilities, they avoid falling back into old patterns that sent them to prison in the first place; many of these patterns were a result of unemployment, poverty and unaddressed mental health or substance abuse issues.

With his speech today, President Trump is following up on the groundbreaking FIRST STEP Act of 2018, taking action to make our justice system fairer for all, including scaling recidivism-reducing programs around the country.It will take more than landmark legislation, however, to change the system. And this is where I implore Americans to think about what they can contribute.

 It will take the engagement of faith leaders and the faith community to welcome former prisoners into their churches, offering them fellowship and help to find jobs and places to live. It will take business owners who are willing to take a chance on hiring someone they may not have considered hiring in the past. 

It will take compassionate and forward-thinking lawyers, judges and parole officers who can recognize when someone needs help, not punishment. It will take organizations like Hope for Prisoners that are willing to provide services and training programs, and it will take donors to make their programs possible.  

After so many years in a career at the intersection of faith and justice, I have come to realize something important: What we all really need is meaning in our lives. Some people find this meaning through their spiritual beliefs and their faith communities. 

Others find it through the love of family and friends, through people who care about them. Others find it through the pursuit of meaningful work. There is no question that criminal behavior should have consequences. 

But there are millions of people who also deserve forgiveness. If we give them a second chance at life, at having families, and at finding meaning in their lives, we’ll be living in a far safer, more productive and more compassionate country.

Timothy Head is the executive director for the Faith & Freedom Coalition

____________________________________________________________________

OPINION:  President Donald John Trump is one of the greatest, caring, loving presidents that we’ve ever had. 

He looks out for everyone regardless of nationality, ethnicity, rich or poor.  He is a man that truly cares about everyone, regardless of who you are, what you’ve done, he is there to provide hope, and grant second chances for those who really deserve it.  He’ knows that no one in our World is without sin, confusion, mistakes, but are willings to ask forgiveness because our President knows that only Almighty God is perfect and without sin and we are not.   

President Trump is truly a man of the people.  He once said that he usually could talk and get along with ordinary people, having conservation with taxi drivers when would be taking a cab to a meeting or where ever he was going.

People of a good heart knows what you are looking at when a person does  what they say.  Because talk is ‘cheep’ (Democrats) but results are what our President give us as well as 99.9% of the Republican Party with minus one one person (Mitt Romney) who tried to use his ‘faith’ for his hateful, crowd-ward acts against a President that he ask to campaign for him and the President did, and the ‘snake’ (Mitt Rodney) turned his back on the President gleefully like the ‘snake’ he is and always have been.

In other words, the ‘truth’ came out so ‘NOW’ everyone knows and  witness Mitt Rodney in action and we have the (VIDEO) to prove it.

[womenofcolor15]

A$AP Rocky Addresses Upcoming Verdict During His 1st Concert Since Being Released From Swedish Prison

A$AP Rocky hit the stage for the first time since he was released from a Swedish prison and he addressed the verdict in his ongoing assault case that's set to come down this week. Find out what he said, plus see who he brought out on stage during his set inside...

A$AP Rocky hit the stage for the first time since being released from a Swedish jail earlier this month. The Harlem native's first U.S. show since his release was at the 92.3 Real Street Festival held at Honda Center in Anaheim, California last night.

It was a big night for the "F*ckin Problems" rapper and he brought several of his rap friends to join him on stage to celebrate during his first post-prison concert, including Tyler the Creator, YG, and A$AP Ferg. But, the highlight of the night came when the "Pretty Flacko" rapper addressed his ongoing assault case in Sweden.

“Y’all know how happy I am to be here right now, I wanna say this though. When I was away—hold the mosh please, this a sentimental moment!—what I experienced was crazy," he shared with his fans. It was a scary, humbling experience but I’m here right now. God is good. People who ain’t even f*ck with me felt sympathy. People was praying for me, that uplifted me when my spirits was low. I can’t thank y’all enough, man, that was crazy. Hip-hop never looked so strong together.” 

          View this post on Instagram

                      A post shared by REAL923 (@real923la) on Aug 12, 2019 at 1:24am PDT

  Rocky thanked his fans for keeping him in prayer and said he hopes he doesn't have to go back to jail once the verdict finally comes in (above).

"I know y'all were praying for me. I'm gonna need you to keep praying for me. Hopefully with God's will, I'm not guilty and (expletive). I get the verdict on Wednesday, so I need you to keep praying for me. Hopefully I don't have to go back to jail or anything like that, nothing crazy."

"I don't have anything against Swedish people, because it was Swedish people who rioted outside the police station."

"This is an unfortunate event and I'm just trying to stay blessed, man," he said. "I hope that I'm not guilty, so pray for your boy."

Peep his full speech below at the 18-minute mark below:

The NYC rapper (real name Rakim Meyers) and his two co-defendants - David Rispers and Bladimir Corniel - were allowed to leave the country ahead of the verdict that's set to be announced on August 14th. Rocky and his homies pleaded not guilty to the assault of a man that the rapper said was following him and his crew while he was in Sweden on tour.

  Check out more clips from his show below: 

  Welcome home @asvpxrocky !! #RealStreetFest pic.twitter.com/MlILPwmHwa

— REAL Street Festival (@realstreetfest) August 12, 2019

            View this post on Instagram

                  #asaprocky brought out #tylerthecreator at #RealStreetFest

A post shared by REAL923 (@real923la) on Aug 12, 2019 at 12:02am PDT

            View this post on Instagram

                  #asaprocky and #asapferg putting in work at #RealStreetFest

A post shared by REAL923 (@real923la) on Aug 12, 2019 at 12:18am PDT

            View this post on Instagram

                  #asaprocky put in down for the West Coast when he brought out #YG at #RealStreetFest

A post shared by REAL923 (@real923la) on Aug 12, 2019 at 12:40am PDT

  TheYBF.com recently caught up with Justin Reese, star of Bravo’s “Southern Charm: New Orleans," and he sounded off about Rocky's international court case. Specifically, the alleged treatment of the rapper while he was in custody.

        View this post on Instagram

                      A post shared by Justin A Reese, Esq. (@thejustinreese) on Feb 15, 2019 at 7:12pm PST

Not only is Justin Reece a reality television star, he knows a thing or two about the law as a personal injury attorney and he also knows the ins-and-outs in the sports world as a sports agent.

"International law is completely different. Their constitutional rights are completely different, so it would be really difficult for me to comment on that because I don't know all of their laws," he told TheYBF.com.

However, he has studied Internatinal law and he told us that Swedish prisons are some of the best in the world.

There were reports that orginated from Rocky's camp that said that the rapper was suffering "inhumane conditions" during the weeks he was held behind bars.

"I tell you what though, if you're going to get locked up, Sweden is one of the places to be locked up in," Justin dished.

Oh?

"It might be that one [prison] in particular, but I've actually seen some stuff when I studied some International law. We [the United States] actually can take a page out of their prison reform system because of all of the programs they have and how things are set up. There's less violence in their prison system and there's more trades being learned. The recidivism rate is super low, and so is the chance of repeat offenders."

Very interesting.

  A$AP Rocky and his two co-defendants are set to go before a judge in Sweden in two days - August 14th - for the final verdict. We'll keep you posted.

Photos: Splash

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2019/08/12/aap-rocky-addresses-upcoming-verdict-during-his-1st-concert-since-being-released-from-swe

[hahnscratch-blog]

Classifying A Prisoner

This represents the first in a series of periodic posts in which I explain some facet of the prison system which may be helpful in understanding my stories and, as a result, the penal system as a whole. Feel free to post questions in the comments section.

Perhaps you’ve read a couple of my posts and found yourself wondering how it is that I came to be living with men who were convicted of seriously violent, and at times, heinous crimes. I’m not talking about what I did personally to land in the clinker. We can save that for another post. What I’m talking about is how it is that the California Department of Corrections (and Rehabilitation) decides which prisoners will go where and who they should or shouldn’t live with.

The first thing we need to think about are the four basic security levels that characterize the prisons in California. They are conveniently labeled Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 in ascending order from low security to high security.

Level 3 and 4 are both what can be termed maximum security. In both cases, the prison has a secure perimeter fence or wall, inmates are housed in cell blocks, and there are armed guards in nearly every location of the prison, including the cell blocks, chow halls, and on the yard. The principal classificatory difference between Levels 3 and 4 lies in the locations of the cell blocks. In a Level 3 prison, the cell blocks can be adjacent to a perimeter wall and in a Level 4 they cannot. Obviously, this relates to the security of the prison and the types of prisoners the CDCR wishes to house there. But we’ll get to that in a bit. Old Folsom, where I lived for a couple of years and the subject of many of the stories on this blog, was a Level 3 prison when I was there.

Level 2 prisons are typically called medium security. Prisoners usually live in open space dormitories instead of cell blocks. There is usually an armed, secure perimeter fence and there may or may not be armed guards in the common spaces (but never in the actual housing areas). Sometimes, the back side of the housing units are actually part of the prison walls, as they were at the Level 2 in Jamestown, where I spent a handful months in 2009.

Level 1 prisons are minimum security. Inmates live in dormitories and there may or may not be a perimeter fence. There are no armed guards at a Level 1 facility. Sometimes, Level 1 prisons are called ‘camps’, as they often look more like the summer camp facilities we may have been to as a child rather than prisons. I spent 3 years in a Level 1 fire camp in Southern California, a facility reserved for inmates who are part of the state-wide wild land firefighting program. (Yes, California inmates fight fires.) The camp I lived in had had no walls, no fence, nothing physically preventing the residents from walking away from their prison sentence. Fire camps are a world unto themselves and I will be writing some personal stories about my time in one.

There are other types of prison sub-classifications which aren’t entirely necessary for understanding the inmate classification process, but I’ll briefly mention them. There are protective custody prisons for inmates who would be in danger if they were part of the general population. Also called “SNY’s” (Sensitive Needs Yards), these prisons house everyone from sex offenders to gang drop-outs to snitches to people who got themselves into too much trouble with other inmates in the general population. They have all four prison levels just like the general population, but I don’t know much else about them because I never lived in one.

Many people have also heard of the “SHU” (Secure Housing Unit), most commonly referred to as solitary confinement in the media and elsewhere.  The SHU, pronounced “shoe”, could be thought of as a Level 5 if there were one, and inmates have to earn the ability to live in one. There is a lot of controversy about when, if, and how inmates should be housed in these facilities, but the philosophy of the CDCR is that the SHU is supposed to hold inmates who would present a persistent danger to other inmates if they remained in the general population. Think of it as a prison within the prison. Again, there are a lot of problems with the SHU program but I won’t be getting into that here.

That’s the gist of it. Four levels, minimum to maximum, with the idealized segregation of the really dangerous and really endangered. But what determines which of these types of prisons a person will eventually come to live in? That is where inmate classification comes in to play.

When a person first gets to prison, he (or she) is sent from the county jail to a state prison designated as a reception center. While a prisoner is in reception, he will be locked in his cell 24 hours a day, with the exception of a few hours at the yard per week, while prison staff gathers all of his criminal history into a file in order to determine where to send him. This process can take a little as thirty days, if you’re lucky, and as much nine months, if you’re really unlucky. It usually takes about 3 months. Why it takes this long at all is beyond me, though I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the California prison system still uses paper for everything. Everything. Hence, they have to wait for documents to be retrieved, copied, mailed, delivered, compiled, and refiled before staff can try to make sense of it.

Basically, an inmate’s designation to a prison level comes as the result of a classification score. This classification score is the sum of a number of weighted factors that the CDCR deems to be a threat or security potential. These factors include, but are not limited to, the length of the prison term, the age of the inmate, the number of previous prison terms, gang affiliation, or recent violence against staff or inmates. I’ll use my own initial classification when I was in reception at DVI-Tracy, as an example.

Age at first arrest. 10 points. This is a measure of delinquency. Because I was 18 years old the first time I was arrested, I received the second highest score for this particular measure. Zero points are assessed for a person whose first arrest was after 36, and 12 points are assessed for a person who was arrested for a felony prior to 18. My point total = 10 points.

Age at reception. 6 points. This is the measure of testosterone; the younger the man the greater the threat potential. I was 26 at the time of reception. Eighteen year-olds get 8 points, 36 year-olds get none. My point total = 16 points.

Length of prison term, doubled. 28 points. This is clearly the measure of apathy; the longer the term the more somebody just doesn’t give a fuck. My sentence was 14 years and 4 months, so I had a pretty good bump in points because of this one. My point total = 44 points.

Gang / disruptive group. 0 points. This is fairly self-explanatory.

Mental illness. 0 points. This is an interesting one. A diagnosis with any serious mental illness raises the CDCR’s assessment of threat potential.

Prior jail sentence. 0 points. I actually should’ve gotten a point for this one, but I guess they didn’t read my file well enough.

Prior prison sentence. 1 point. They didn’t miss this one though. I think they are trying to measure whether an inmate has learned the system well-enough to manipulate it. More sentences would equal more manipulative skills. My point total = 45 points.

And that’s where I stood after classification. 45 points. There are other factors that are assessed on a case-by-case basis, such as recent disciplinary behavior, but none of that applied to me. Determining what level prison I would go to was fairly simple after this process had been completed. 0-19 points is Level 1, 20-29 points is Level 2, 30-49 points is Level 3, and 50+ points is Level 4. I was a Level 3 prisoner and was sent to Folsom State Prison in Represa, CA.

Let’s unpack this a little bit. So, I was a nonviolent offender who, because of my prior record and strict recidivism laws in California, received a fairly long sentence. There are plenty of people who might’ve received 5 or 10 years for a violent crime but, because they had no prior prison sentences or were older when they were first arrested, ended up at a Level 2 yard. Similarly, there are plenty of instances in which youngsters getting arrested for relatively minor, nonviolent felonies end up on the Level 3 yard due to the testosterone and delinquency measures. This, alone, means that violent and nonviolent offenders are going to be housed together, but it doesn’t explain why nonviolent offenders would share space with people who received really long sentences, such as murderers.

This happens because of good and bad behavior. Every disciplinary-free year a person spends in prison drops his classification score 4 points (if he is not working) or 8 points (if he is working). Thus, a man convicted of murder may start out with something like 90 points but could find his way onto a Level 3 yard within 10 or 15 years. And, moving in the other direction, bad behavior gets rewarded with additional classification points. Get in a fight, 6 points. Multiple contraband write-ups, 4 points. It only takes a couple of measly tattoo or tobacco write-ups to push a nonviolent offender in a Level 2 prison onto the same yard as that lifer who made his way down to Level 3.

And this is why any given prison is a melting pot of offender types. Of course, Level 4’s will always tend to have the most lifers and the most violent criminals, just like Level 1’s will always tend to have the greatest proportion of nonviolent offenders. It is at the Level 2 and 3’s where you will see the largest variety of offenders and, unfortunately, these are the two levels that most prisoners begin their sentences at. As such, almost every inmate, no matter what they ended up in prison for, must first learn to navigate the social minefield of the higher security level prisons. This is, of course, where people often get ruined.

Note: this classification scheme refers specifically to the way I was classified in 2006 and the way inmates continued to be classified until at least 2012 (when I paroled). It is my understanding that new state laws have impacted the way that inmates are classified, specifically, the number of points that determine which level prison an inmate will be housed at.

© Matthew Hahn and Hahnscratch, 2017

[savvyherb]

Alaska’s licensed marijuana growers cite tax concerns

JUNEAU, Alaska — Alaska marijuana grower Leif Abel considers his business successful but still feels like he’s living “paycheck to paycheck” much of the time.

A greenhouse expansion is behind schedule, and he said the company could have hired more crews to work on it if taxes and other expenses weren’t so high.

“We don’t have enough of a cushion where we could comfortably have a crop failure, and that’s not a very safe place for a cultivation company to be,” said Abel, an owner of Greatland Ganja in the Kenai Peninsula community of Kasilof.

Abel is among a number of Alaska pot growers who have struggled to pay the state’s $50-per-ounce cannabis tax as marijuana prices have tumbled. He said he’s paid his taxes on time, but it hasn’t always been easy.

Forty-five growers in the state are delinquent, compared to six a year ago, according to figures provided by Alaska’s Department of Revenue. For the June tax filing period, more than 160 growers had filed a tax return with the state.

The cannabis tax is imposed on cultivators when pot is sold or transferred from a grow facility to a retail shop or product manufacturer. There is a lesser tax rate for immature bud and trimmings.

Among states that have legalized recreational cannabis, Alaska is the only one whose tax structure is built solely on a fixed dollar amount paid by growers, according to information compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a public policy organization. Alaska has no statewide sales tax, though some municipalities, like Anchorage, levy their own sales tax on weed.

By comparison, California has a fixed dollar amount cultivators must pay and has a 15% tax on retail sales. Local governments in that state can add a levy on top of the state tax on retail sales. Nevada has a percentage-based tax that also applies to growers.

In Alaska, the total amount of late taxes due, with accruing penalties and interest, is about $1 million, according to the department.

“When you get into a hole, it’s really hard to get out when the holes keep getting deeper underneath you,” said Jana Weltzin, an attorney who represents Alaska cannabis interests.

When the industry first started, prices were around $4,000 a pound (0.45 kilogram), said Cary Carrigan, executive director of the Alaska Marijuana Industry Association, a trade group. They have settled around $2,300 a pound, he said.

While the price was expected to decline, “no one anticipated that the floor would drop that low, to the point where if you paid your taxes on time you would not have enough money to pay your employees or your electric bill or something else would suffer,” he said. “That’s why there are so many delinquencies and people that are working on tax payment programs.”

The tax generated anticipated revenue of about $1.8 million for the state in June. Three-quarters of state pot revenue is intended to be used for recidivism programs and a marijuana education and treatment fund.

Kelly Mazzei, excise tax manager with the Revenue Department, in a letter to marijuana regulators earlier this year called the number of late accounts alarming. The tax debt doesn’t go away if a business goes under, she told The Associated Press.

Many in the industry blame the tax, though some also see an unlimited number of licensees as part of the problem. Oregon officials cited that state’s issue with unlimited licenses after a massive oversupply of marijuana led to a freefall in prices.

Weltzin said Alaska is not in that situation yet, but it’s a concern.

“Hopefully, we can get a system figured out where we have a more fair tax structure and a more stringent licensing process, so it will give value to our existing businesses but still encourage new business growth,” she said.

Alaska’s $50-an-ounce (28 grams) tax was set by the 2014 voter initiative that legalized recreational marijuana for those 21 and older. While the initiative allowed the state to establish lower rates for certain parts of the plant, which officials have done, a rewrite of the tax is considered up to the Legislature.

Surveys are planned to gauge industry representatives’ thoughts, Carrigan said.

“We’re trying to figure out … where the sweet spot is with that,” he said, with fairness among growers, retailers and manufacturers a key consideration.

Dane Wyrick said the future of his Anchorage cultivation and retail business is hazy after feeling squeezed by state taxes and other expenses. He said the tax, combined with production expenses and other factors, is too burdensome.

Some industry officials and advocates hope for a sympathetic ear in Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, who has adopted an open-for-business mantra.

Dunleavy frustrated the industry earlier this year by appointing to a marijuana regulatory board a woman who was involved in a failed effort to ban cannabis operations in Fairbanks. After lawmakers rejected the appointment, Dunleavy picked a former board member who supported the legalization effort and who Carrigan considers a good choice.

Assistant Commerce Commissioner Amy Demboski has convened a work group with industry interests, regulators and the Revenue Department to discuss what they see as business impediments, with taxes among the issues raised, Glenn Hoskinson, a special assistant to Commerce Commissioner Julie Anderson, said by email.

“This process is still in its infancy, so it’s too early to know if there is going to be any proposal or anything of substance from this working group,” Hoskinson wrote.

Carrigan sees this as an effort to move forward with the administration: “When somebody holds out an olive branch and wants to move forward, you don’t slap their hand.”

___

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[rolandfontana]

Minnesota’s ‘Hybrid Court’ Offers Addicts an Alternative to Jail

Jason Drift’s drug use seemed to increase every time he suffered a death in the family.

A 44-year-old environmental services worker on the Bois Forte Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, he had begun taking prescription pain pills for knee problems in the early 2000s.

Hydrocodone, Oxycotins and Percocets eased his physical pain.

But then his sister died and he found himself snorting 20-plus of them per day. Pills became hard to come by when users got flagged at pharmacies. So he started spending half his paychecks buying them from low-level dealers in the area.

A blurry two years later, he had turned to snorting meth. In the fall of 2017, after a police officer found marijuana and a gram of meth in his car, he found himself facing imprisonment if convicted of a felony crime of fifth-degree possession of methamphetamine.

But there was an alternative.

He could avoid prison if he were accepted into the 13-month Range Hybrid court program, operated by the Sixth Judicial district in northern Minnesota. The program is designed to provide people accused or convicted of non-violent, felony drug and alcohol related crimes an alternative to traditional probation supervision.

Participants who complete the program successfully can have their charges dropped from the record.

Drift, an enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa in northeastern Minnesota, was accepted as a candidate.

But over a year ago, when he first found himself face to face with Judge Michelle Anderson, who presides over the court in the St. Louis County Courthouse in Virginia, Mn.,—and the team of assistant attorneys, public defenders, probation officers and chemical dependency and mental health experts who told him they were there to help him—he was wary.

“It sounded sketchy,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to be there.”

The Choice: Incarceration or Treatment Court

Judge Anderson has garnered praise from prosecutors and defense attorneys who say it is a proven system that gets adults charged with drug possession and driving under the influence of alcohol out of jails and prisons and into rehabilitation.

The state court administrator for Minnesota Treatment Courts reported last year that 54 percent of statewide participants graduate, while 94 percent receive treatment and 80 percent complete at least one phase of the five-phased program.

New charges and convictions are lower for participants who spend half as much time in prison and two-thirds as much time in jail compared to non-participants.

Since its creation in 2006, the Range Hybrid court served 292 people, of which 67 percent graduated from the program, according to the area court’s recent studies. Eighty-three percent entered the program with a drug felony and 17 percent for a DUI. Fifty-five percent of them were men and 45 percent women. Ages ranged from 19 to 54.

Between 2017 and 2018, the court estimated that 45 percent of the participants were white, 26.21 percent Native American or Alaskan Native; 6.80 percent Latino; 4.85 percent black and 16.5 percent other.

About 91 percent had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders, 70 percent experienced trauma or violence and 65 percent did not have money to meet basic needs.

The program handles a maximum of 50 pre-and post-adjudication cases at a time from Minnesota’s “Iron Range” region, and uses therapeutic principles of addiction programs that have become popular in similar courts across the state of Minnesota and the U.S.

Participants like Drift must agree to weekly treatments with the team.

When asked later about the court proceedings, Drift recalled feeling “a little bit leery” when standing before the judge and hearing her ask him, “How are you today?”

But his feelings have since changed after nearly one year of meeting with her as well as members of the Treatment Court Team, some of whom are open to participants and the HDT about their own experiences in recovery programs.

“When I entered the program, I was still feeling fidgety with meth in my system and the judge could see me because I couldn’t wear my glasses. My pupils looked like two piss holes in snow banks,” Drift said.

“I’d seen a lot of people fail their UAs or have to go to treatment again, but she gives them chances. I think she’s a good judge for the program. She’s fair. She’s honest. She gives you a chance to turn your life around.”

Keep Your Guard Up

Anderson depends upon her legal experience and the Treatment Court Team to uphold the rules of the program and help navigate somewhat contentious issues, such as monitoring the use of medication-assisted treatment, including Suboxone, the most common form of buprenorphine.

Three months ago, the Minnesota Department of Corrections approved a new policy to allow people on parole or supervised release to use medical marijuana. The move has been a hot topic for the judge and her team.

Anderson also depends largely on the court’s two probation officers — Gary Flannigan and Jeff Oja— who increased their typical caseloads to include up to 50 more cases from the treatment court program.

Reflecting on the services, David Holmbeck, a supervisor of Arrowhead Regional Corrections said that the St. Louis County territory covered by his officers, at 6,860 square miles, represents one of the largest counties in the nation.

Because of its vastness, the county is the only one in the state that has chambered judges working in separate courthouses in three cities: Duluth, Hibbing and Virginia.

“Staffing alone is also an issue,” Holmbeck said. “And the caseload numbers are relatively the same, but the involvement with clients has dramatically increased. The level of needs for our clients has increased because of the increase in opioid addiction, meth and mental illness.

“About 25 years ago, it was a DUI offender. Now, we’re running into more people with psychological distress.”

But officers have improved to meet demands.

“We’re better at what we do because we’re incorporating more cognitive-based programming to help reduce recidivism and changing criminal thinking and behaviors,” Holmback explained.

Fifteen years with Arrowhead Regional Corrections has shaped Flannigan into a seasoned officer with enough experience to believe that the “difference between parolees from prison and clients on probation is that instead of being hardened, a lot of the treatment courts participants are desiring to change in life.

“Really it’s an addiction that’s bringing them into the criminal justice system.”

He maintains his outlook despite the Range Hybrid court evolving from taking on low-risk offender to high-risk, high need individuals that might carry longer criminal histories.

“We want people who have serious chemical dependency addictions and are struggling with the disease,” he said. “Some people might opt out and choose jail, but that’s very rare. People are talkers until they’re sitting in jail. In the beginning, a lot of people fight the system. But most of them are thankful down the road.”

During their scheduled and random visits, Flannigan and Oja are seldom paired up together.

Neither of them are permitted to carry firearms. Instead, they arm themselves with bullet-proof vests, pepper spray, radios and handcuffs. Most importantly, they are trained in de-escalation tactics and use of force; yet they are comforted knowing that law enforcement can be called upon when needed.

“We’re mindful and we know we’re not a force like law enforcement is when they kick in doors and make extractions,” Flannigan said. “If we find violations, we make arrests. If someone is extremely violent or belligerent, we are trained to get out of the situation. Our safety is paramount.”

He added: “Do bad things happen? Yes. We’ve had close calls and scary situations. But it’s amazing how rare we run into violent situations.”

Flannigan’s focus in the beginning stages of the program is to establish a rapport with his clients. But trust is difficult when it comes to people often suffering from co-occurring chemical dependency and mental health issues.

“Addicts are some of the most manipulative, tricky, savvy people that I work with,” he said.

“They’re addicted to very powerful drugs and you don’t expect complete 100 percent sobriety. We take a therapeutic approach to relapses and then sanction them if they’re lying or we might put them in jail for a weekend.

“Absconding is common. And when we’ve exhausted every avenue, then they are labeled ‘Not Amenable to Probation’ and are kicked out of the program.”

Why does Flannigan work a job where he always has his guard up?

“People change. We see the transformation in front of our eyes.”

Fatherhood Revisited

During the second phase of the Range Hybrid court program, Drift began Moral Reconation Therapy in addition to attending weekly recovery meetings, bi-weekly court hearings and complying with treatment and supervision.

“I realized then that it’s for the best that I turn my life around and get my kids back in my life,” he said.

After his decision, he was able to secure another job from a supportive group at Fortune Bay Resort and Casino, and worked with a county social worker who helped him figure out the maze of paperwork needed to retain his driver’s license and pay child support again.

She also helped him move out of his brother’s house and into a 12-step house and then into his co-worker’s sober house in Virginia, which is half a block from the courthouse.

“Alex pointed me in the right direction,” he said. “This program is making me more responsible.”

For Drift, the month of July marks nearly one year clean and sober. He owes the court $100 to move into the final phase of the program and sometimes struggles to afford the $1,200 program cost, child support, rent and other bills. But he counts himself lucky to have dodged transportation troubles.

Plus, it beats doing time. If all goes well, he expects to graduate in September.

It was about one year ago when Drift first saw his two youngest daughters again. It had been several years.

“They didn’t barely know me,” he said. “The older one called me Dad. But the younger one didn’t know me well. Now they will call me up to chat with me.”

Drift is now gearing up to celebrate his birthday later this month.

“I reserved a pontoon boat for my two girls on Lake Vermilion so we can have some fun.”

Looking forward, he prays that he can reconnect with his oldest daughter.

Eric Killelea, assistant editor of the Hibbing (Minn.) Daily Tribune, is a 2018-2019 John Jay/Rural Justice Reporting Fellow. This is a condensed and slightly edited version of a story prfoduced for his fellowship reporting project, part of a series examining the state of rural justice in Minnesota. The full story, and other parts of the series, are available here.

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[whittlebaggett8]

What Colombia Can Teach Us About Afghanistan

Two wars, two peace bargains. One particular has held for a number of yrs, after many years of stalled negotiations. The other is however just a “framework” for peace. We’re referring to Colombia and Afghanistan – two nations around the world riddled with longstanding rural insurgencies, prescription drugs, militias, weak facilities, cross-border sanctuaries, and weak governance. Are there lessons from Colombia that can be used to Afghanistan?

In a new report posted by West Point’s Modern War Institute, we argue that in spite of dissimilarities, there are commonalities. In Afghanistan, the push for a peace deal is admirable and arguably the right training course, but the ability to attain a peace offer and a lasting peace will be specially demanding specified lots of of the situations that produced Colombia ripe for peace are not existing in Afghanistan.

The “framework” in Afghanistan was hashed out amongst Zalmay Khalilzad, an American, and the Taliban. However the Afghan government – arguably the most essential participant in Afghanistan – has been mostly slice out of the system. That is hardly a positive omen for Kabul’s future legitimacy. As President Ashraf Ghani noted a short while ago, “The victims of the war are Afghans. So the initiative of peace must be in the arms of Afghans.”

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By distinction, in Bogota, the peace settlement was largely “owned” by the Colombians. Individuals played a little bit of a position in the peace talks in Havana the language and phrases were being the handiwork of Colombian negotiators. Us citizens also performed a minimal supporting role when it arrived to the provision of security. For each and every five cents we expended there on Program Colombia, the Colombians used 95 cents. To quotation T.E. Lawrence, “Do not try to do way too much with your very own fingers.”

Second, the Taliban ought to be offered a voice in any potential Afghan governing administration. This continues to be a thorny difficulty in Colombia. The FARC command a handful of seats in Colombia’s parliament, which was a massive cause why the peace deal was at first turned down when set to a well-liked referendum. Colombians, primarily (and ironically) people from towns that observed the the very least violence (and presumably experienced less axes to grind), felt like the arrangement was as well lenient.

Nonetheless leniency, however hideous and unjust to some, is a essential component of peace offers. The Taliban rank and file must be presented an off-ramp to re-enter modern society – no matter if via official rehabilitation or reeducation is unclear – provided they disarm, demobilize, and really don’t go again to abusing females as they had in advance of 9/11. This will make the institution of transitional justice a sensitive subject matter and riddled with tripwires. Though transitional justice in Colombia has been much from ideal, we satisfied moms of war victims opening art exhibits as war memorials, pushing for higher land reform, and mobilizing against the country’s entrenched oligarchy. Afghan civil society have to also mobilize and similarly agitate from down below.

Colombia reveals the complications of “disarmament, demobilization, and rehabilitation,” or DDR. Disarming the FARC took 9 months and disabled some 9,000 firearms, though huge weapons caches continue being at massive. Whilst roughly 10,000 ex-combatants had been demobilized, massive figures in no way reintegrated into culture. Like the Afghan Taliban, guerrilla fighters in Colombia have small education and learning, weak family members ties, and showcase delinquent personality attributes, all predictors of recidivism, in accordance to the scholars Oliver Kaplan and Enzo Nussio. Roughly 5 to 10 percent of ex-FARC have rejoined the struggle, several of them mid-position cadres. The will cause are complicated, but primarily it is due to a absence of jobs, the social stigma connected to ex-fighters, and threats they facial area from ex-colleagues who refused to lay down their arms.

Despite some hiccups, the in general procedure of collective DDR in Colombia has gone somewhat efficiently. We achieved previous guerrillas attending college, having benefit of govt-funded healthcare, and placing their violent earlier powering them.

A third important lesson from Colombia, and this may possibly look clear, is that the provision of security is paramount. This necessitates that the ministries of inside and defense, along with civilian companies, enjoy ball jointly, as counterinsurgency in failed states needs an alchemy of affected person detective function along with the administration of violence. The latest terrorist assault towards the Santander police academy in Bogota, allegedly carried out by the National Liberation Military (ELN), highlighted the vulnerabilities on this front.

In Afghanistan, there has been longstanding disparity involving the capability of (and distrust among) Afghanistan’s law enforcement and its armed forces. Both are poorly paid out and experience tremendous pitfalls, as evidenced by a spate of the latest Taliban attacks from military barracks – some 45,000 Afghan law enforcement and soldiers have been killed because 2014 – but without cooperation, protection, primarily in rural provinces, is unattainable.

With regards to stability provision, it is also critical to isolate 3rd-get together “spoilers,” which can include things like armed actors that are non-signatories to the treaty, felony gangs, or exterior nations around the world. In Colombia, many guerrilla teams, which include the ELN, keep on being nevertheless at significant (as evidenced by the recent terrorist attack that struck a law enforcement academy we visited in Bogota talked about previously mentioned). Cocaine however fuels the illicit financial state and structured crime, still drug traffickers have gotten wiser that violence is poor for business enterprise. Like Colombia, a peace agreement in Afghanistan will not possible minimize drug trafficking, and may even lead to greater amounts. Farmers encounter perverse incentives as crop-substitution plans are riddled with moral dangers.

Related to Colombia, whose neighboring international locations delivered refuge for Colombia’s guerrillas, the longevity of any peace deal in Afghanistan hinges on its neighbors, most notably Pakistan. Yet, whether or not it performs along, or seeks to participate in the position of spoiler, the United States holds considerable leverage on this front, and need to isolate probable external spoilers to the peace system if it is to make Afghanistan resemble Colombia and not, say, North Vietnam. 

To be guaranteed, there are some important distinctions among Colombia and Afghanistan. Colombia, when harmful, was never ever a safe and sound haven of violent extremists with an internationalist agenda or overseas fighters. The United States’ primary curiosity in Colombia was curbing the circulation of narcotics, not terrorists. In Afghanistan, it is generally reversed.

In Colombia, moreover, the FARC experienced experienced a collection of humiliating defeats, which include the deaths of various senior users of its getting old leadership and a productive hostage rescue mission. While not defeated on the battlefield, they did not have momentum. Nor did they manage some 40 percent of the region, as the Taliban do in Afghanistan nowadays.

As a result, couple were being optimistic about the sixth spherical of peace talks that happened in Doha in early May.

On the other hand, there is a glimmer of hope that Afghanistan may possibly one particular working day resemble Colombia: A edition of what some scholars contact “unappealing steadiness” – pockets of security interspersed by pockets of violence a fragile condition but not a unsuccessful one particular.

In Colombia, a very low hum of violence carries on to continue to keep the country on edge, but expatriates have returned, tourism dollars and overseas financial investment are pouring in, and the illicit economic climate, though still sturdy, does not outline the region or turn complete cities into war zones.

What need to be the position of the U.S. military? In Colombia, we realized “ugly stability” on the affordable, paying out roughly $10 billion above a 10 years. In Afghanistan our yearly military price range dwarfs that, with arguably less final results to clearly show for our initiatives.

Contrary to Colombia, where by the United States has its 3rd major embassy but usually keeps a little armed service footprint of Specific Functions Forces as advisors to coach and assist, the U.S. army should retain some residual presence in Afghanistan to keep away from the security vacuum that led to 9/11. But Afghanistan ought to not resemble Chilly War West Germany, where by we retained hundreds of countless numbers of troops and sizeable armed forces hardware for many years. Nor really should we expect all good points – peace, stability, governance, and reduction of narco-trafficking – to come together.

Peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan may possibly not be ideal close to the corner. But Colombia delivers an imperfect roadmap for how to obtain equally.

Lionel Beehner, PhD, is an assistant professor at the US Military services Academy at West Point and study director of its Modern day War Institute. He is a 2019-2020 Intercontinental Affairs Fellow at the Council on International Relations. Liam Collins, PhD, is director of the Modern-day War Institute. The views listed here are their very own.

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[nancydhooper]

What the Government Shutdown Really Means for Federal Prisoners

Pay no attention to stories about prisoners feasting during the shutdown. The reality is that the shutdown only makes prison conditions worse.

Last week, USA Today ran a hit piece on federal prisoners with the tabloid headline, “Government shutdown: Federal inmates feast on Cornish hens, steak as prison guards labor without pay.” Not to be outdone, The Washington Post followed this up with their own shameful story under the headline, “‘I been eatin like a boss’: Federal prisoners served steak by unpaid guards during shutdown.” The problem here is twofold. First, the shutdown has nothing to do with the food served to federal prisoners and, second, the food descriptions are wildly exaggerated.

I should know. I was a federal prisoner from 2007 to 2013 and ate thousands of meals during that time. Twice a year — usually Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day — federal prisoners receive “special” meals for the holidays. These meals are rare, highly anticipated, and a touch above the low-quality food prisoners get the rest of the year. While the article used “steak” in the headline for impact, it was a little more accurate in the article, referring to the meal as roast beef. Mind you, this roast beef is not the corner delicatessen version but a grey, rubbery, low-cost version.

As offensive and archaic as these articles were, the worst aspect is they conflate a long-standing holiday meal tradition within the Bureau of Prisons with President Trump’s government shutdown. There is no fairness in blaming federal prisoners for the situation BOP staff find themselves in due to Trump’s shutdown — but it sure makes for good clickbait. Unfortunately, the government shutdown has very real impacts on federal prisoners, which the reporters ignored in their attempt to generate outrage.

With budgets frozen, daily life in prison will become even more miserable. Delays in mail being delivered; unstocked commissaries; shuttered gyms; and no classes, visits, transfers, or library access take a toll on peoples’ well-being and the relative peace in the federal prison system. I recall during potential shutdowns in the 2000s that even toilet paper was being parceled out at the rate of one roll per week.

During the current shutdown, the BOP has furloughed a portion of its staff and is making other staff work without pay, restricting many aspects of prison life even more than usual. My experience in federal prison was that during budget crises or potential shutdowns, all programs perceived as extras or nonessential were canceled or curtailed. And I would argue that much of what the BOP perceives as “extra” is actually essential.

According to The Marshall Project, at some facilities, social visits were canceled during the holiday season due to the lack of staff in the visiting room. Visits are a critical part of prison life. They help prisoners connect to the outside world, build and repair relationships with their families, and aid reentry, all of which contribute to reducing recidivism.

I also worry about the prisoners who are waiting for compassionate release. The program has already been criticized by criminal justice reform advocates for how slow it processes applications, and the shutdown will only make this worse. Despite the fact that elderly and terminally ill prisoners’ lives hang in the balance, the BOP will consider compassionate release “nonessential.” The result: People will die in prison while their applications go unread.

Then there’s the mental health aspect to the shutdown. A significant number of people in federal prison also require mental health treatment, which will not happen while the government is shut down. A little-known fact is that all staff at a federal prison can be assigned security details, in my personal experience, and the shutdown will likely increase this. If the psychology staff is required to operate as guards, then there is no staff to run the mental health programs.

Finally, I worry about what it must be like to be in federal prison right now with prison guards and staff upset and angry about the government shutdown. Articles that conflate the government shutdown with holiday meals are grossly inappropriate and will only create an even more hostile environment if guards’ resentment against prisoners grows.

So ignore the stories about prisoners living it up during the shutdown. The reality is that prison conditions have and will only continue to deteriorate as the shutdown deprives the BOP of the resources it needs to be fully staffed. Prisoners will face the worst of the shutdown, a fact the hit pieces ignore. That’s the real story, not prisoners getting a holiday meal that I assure you is just a notch above inedible. 

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[mydiypics]

realbrokenea:

Find Out The Pale truth Regarding A 500 Erg Low-carbohydrate diet

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