#i mean i didn't even talk about the segregation that happens as a result

[sojourner-between-worlds]

Criminal Markers and how they were so seamlessly integrated in NDC/Satellite culture with little fuss or blowback

I'm sure it all started with a "good idea."

(It wasn't good, it was never good, but politicians are pros at making remarkably terrible ideas seem good.)

The idea of being able to recognize a dangerous criminal on sight would seem to be desirable if taken only at face value. Consider: You're taking your kid to school and you see someone with the mark identifying them as an abuser within a mile of said school? Well, you don't want that person hanging around and potentially hurting kids, right? So you call the cops. All well and good, you may have just saved some kids some trauma. Or maybe you're driving around looking for a parking spot and see someone hanging around an open space with a grand theft auto mark? Well, you're not going to park there now and risk your car being gone when you get back. The person walking towards you on the street has the mark of a murderer? Give them a wide berth or cross the street so you won't be the next victim!

At face value, it seems great, right? So the politicians peddling it keep it that way, distract from anyone trying to look to too deep, get their bill passed, everyone is happy.

But the problem is that "good ideas" are very slippery slopes.

They start out only marking the "big offenders": murderers, sex offenders, "those" kinds of people. But prosecutors and judges alike slowly begin to push the bill. Murderers and sex offenders...and major theft. And they push a little more. Murderers and sex offenders and major theft...and illegal narcotic sales.

They do it slowly, one crime at a time, always with "good" reason -- so slowly that no one questions it because if x is punished this way, why not y? And the people who never questioned it in the first place don't stop to question it now either because why would they when it makes perfectly logical sense?

And they keep pushing, one crime at a time, right down the line.

And then, 15 years later, they find themselves marking an 11-year-old for shoplifting a candy bar. Because theft is theft, and it doesn't matter that this is a literal child or that the purchase price is barely anything at all. There is no line anymore of what "deserves" to be marked for because time has whittled it away and now this child has a past they will never be able to outrun because its literally written on their face.

It didn't start like this. It wasn't supposed to go this far. But it did anyway, and now there's no one to question the morality of it because everyone has been entirely (achingly slowly) desensitized to a process that is entirely dehumanizing and never should have been put into practice in the first place.

It doesn't matter that people can change.

It doesn't matter that sometimes a mistake is made.

And there's no one left to care to change it.