Signal boosting: “The Disappearing Trial”

fairtrials.org is documenting a 300% increase in the use of plea-bargaining across the world, suggesting that the United States’ practice of over-charging suspects for intimidation followed up by a “bargain” that looks good in comparison is spreading.

What is the Problem?

The trial is the archetype of criminal justice: just think of the dominance of court-room drama in film, TV and literature. But, in reality, the trial is starting to disappear. People are increasingly being incentivised to simply plead guilty and to waive their right to a trial.

The use of trial waiver systems like plea bargaining, abbreviated trials and cooperating witness procedures have increased about 300% since 1990. It’s also happening in more places than ever before. Of the 90 countries studied by Fair Trials and Freshfields, 66 now have these kinds of formal “trial waiver” systems in place. In 1990, the number was just 19.

We are not opposed to this in principle but these out-of-court mechanisms can impact fair trial rights and the criminal justice system more widely in serious ways, including:

  • Innocent people can be persuaded to plead guilty: an estimated 20,000 innocent people are in US prisons alone, after taking a deal.
  • Easier convictions can encourage over-criminalisation and drive harsher sentences.
  • Inequality of arms and a lack of transparency where “deals” are done by prosecutors behind closed doors.
  • Public trust in justice can be undermined.

fairtrials suggests ways to mitigate the troubling disadvantages of plea-bargaining here. Their position, in summary, is that the concept is potentially defensible but needs safeguards.

…But that’s often the case with institutional power, isn’t it. I’m not 100% sold (my experience is that “the safeguards” need safeguards), but I thought y’all might like to check out their findings anyway.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: “The guards were organized criminals”

Concern over the treatment of inmates is generally my litmus test for how thought-out someone is with the concept of social justice. They’re an incredibly easy group to demonize–hell, even being accused is all it takes for some juries to condemn some defendants–and once that work is done, otherwise knowledgeable people can fumble and overlook the human rights abuses. Often the temptation is to immediately think of the unrepentant serial criminals, especially the violent ones, rather than appreciating that a wide range of individuals are imprisoned for a wide range of activities, some of which have relatively low social cost.

Even so, I have objected to the mistreatment of high-profile murderers in my local prisons because I have good reason to believe it doesn’t stop there.

Susan Ashline, on behalf of an inmate named Jon Fontaine, posted Fontaine’s writings on his lawsuit against the prison that housed him. What’s quite remarkable is that Fontaine screencapped his former guards’ public Facebook postings, which actually helps him corroborate some of his accusations.

Over the past four years, I’ve communicated with a few dozen people by mail, most wanting to know what prison is like. I’d tell them if they’ve seen any “reality” shows about prison, New York prisons are nothing like that. There is no professionalism, no respect. I’d write them, “They literally put unconvicted criminals in charge and let them do anything they want. It’s legal organized crime.”

I’d go on and list all the things officers do, from singular assault to gang assault, murder, rape, planting weapons and drugs, selling weapons and drugs, extortion, and more.

Some believe me, some don’t.

If the public isn’t convinced by the criminal prosecutions now that the Office of Special Investigations was formed to replace the Inspector General’s Office (which was made up of former corrections officers);

If they’re not convinced by the federal charges brought by the US Attorney General’s Office, which stated brutality in New York’s prisons has reached critical levels;

If they’re not convinced by the tens of millions of dollars New York pays out each year to settle lawsuits brought by inmates;

Just look at the corrections officers’ own public statements. They’re playing their positions.

Many thanks to those officers for contributing to my credibility.

Read more about it here.

Parent’s perspective on BBC’s “Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?”

The United Kingdom’s exports of trans-antagonism is a mystery as-of-yet unexplained to me, but I know it’s a lot of fact-free nonsense. If the stakes weren’t so damn high, I would be bemused. I’m working on yet another piece on BBC’s trainwreck documentary–a word cloud that illustrates the not-so-subtle prejudice in which the work was formed (hint: if the words “happy” and “trans” are only mentioned as mutually exclusive outcomes, your work is cis supremacist as fuck). But in the mean time, I thought y’all might appreciate a parent of a trans kid’s perspective on the entire pseudollectual ordeal. (emphasis original)

I am horrified with the segment on the distinction of men’s and women’s brains. No-one is genuinely claiming that transgender girls have a girl’s brain filled with kittens and roses as totally distinct from a boy’s brain filled with trucks and beer. The phrase ‘girl’s brain in a boy’s body’ is a colloquial shorthand that some transgender people have used to explain that they feel their identity is an innate part of themselves and not a choice or a whim. No-one means this literally. And the brain is one of the least understood parts of the body, there is a lot we still don’t know. Claiming that transgender advocate are perpetuating old fashioned gender stereotypes and propagating restrictive gender boxes is utter nonsense – I tell my transgender daughter that she can play with any toys she likes, I have no time for minimising her potential through old fashioned sexist stereotypes.

This parent knows their history, that’s for damn sure! Kudos.

The show presented Zucker and Blanchard as experts – it did not explain how widely discredited their work and their approaches are. When it did highlight criticism, it presented it as criticism from ‘transgender advocates’, not including the criticism from respected academics who criticise the quality and robustness of their research and their conclusions.

Yep, I noticed that too!

Who exactly is a ‘transgender advocate’ was never explained – it was presented as the fearsome, mysterious group, so powerful and threatening (if this lobby is so very strangely powerful, why are transgender people’s rights so regularly trampled on in life and in the media?).

Louder for the people in the back please.

Read more here.

-Shiv

When can we apply nature’s toothpaste?

Now? Tomorrow? Next week?

Content Notice: Sexual assault, victim blaming, misogyny.

Like many private religious schools, BYU has an honor code that requires students to live by its standards of morality. BYU’s Mormon-specific version bans alcohol, tobacco, tea and coffee, as well as beards (?!). It requires students to live in sex-segregated residence halls both on and off campus and forbids “homosexual behavior” of any sort. It also forbids sex between students who aren’t married, and that’s where the trouble begins.

According to reporting that first appeared last year, BYU uses its honor code to punish rape victims. Multiple students said that they reported a rape or sexual assault, only to have the school turn around and discipline them for breaking the rule against extramarital sex. Often, it interrogated them about what they were wearing, why they were alone with a man, or if they were acting “unchastely”. One student, Madi Barney, reported the man who raped her to police and faced expulsion as a result:

“I felt re-victimized,” she said.

Madi Barney said she was troubled that the school’s Title IX investigator didn’t offer her any support when she called.

“She only said we need to talk about the honor code. It looks like you violated it,” she said.

This is the same perverse logic as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other brutal Muslim theocracies that punish rape victims on the grounds that, by reporting rape, a woman is admitting to sex outside marriage. When they were called out on this, BYU’s defense was legalistic hair-splitting:

In BYU’s statement to the Tribune, spokeswoman Carri Jenkins pointed to the school’s sexual misconduct policy: “Violations of university policy or the… Honor Code do not make a victim at fault for sexual violence… and will be addressed separately from the sexual misconduct allegation.”

Barney scoffs at the claim of separation.

“‘Separate.’ That’s the word they constantly use to justify sending victims to the Honor Code,” said Barney. “You can’t just chop up the rape into little pieces and take out the parts you want to punish people for.”

BYU’s policy intimidated many rape victims into keeping quiet, since speaking up could destroy their own future whether or not the rapist was punished. They faced expulsion from school, loss of jobs, loss of housing. Even when there was enough evidence to charge the rapist with a felony, BYU refused to relent in its hounding of victims, to the point that a Utah prosecutor asked them to stop because it was interfering with his efforts to get witnesses to testify.

I need to stop wondering how low religious authoritarians can go. It’s not doing kind things to my mental health.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: The damage of abstinence-only sex “ed”

Larisa Manescu writes about her experiences of being raised on Texas’ sex non-education curriculum:

My freshman year of high school, an abstinence speaker compared my virginity to a fragile, delicate thing, like a gift wrapped in paper. There was still hope, he said, if I had already unwrapped my present; I could always re-wrap it by giving up sex entirely. But if I didn’t, I’d probably end up with genital warts. (All roads lead to genital warts in abstinence-only programs. Somewhere buried deep in the minds of most students who grew up in these programs is a repressed memory of passing around a face-down photograph around a giggling classroom, with the occasional gasp as someone dared to flip the photograph to reveal “diseased” genitalia.)

We didn’t get many details about how, exactly, STIs were transmitted or pregnancy came about, but there was plenty of pressure to remain untouched, or else.

When I missed my period at 16, I jumped to the conclusion that maybe, somehow, my then-boyfriend’s semen was magic and could survive exposure to air. Little flying warriors, those sperm! I remember coming home from school to discover that my mother had seen my panicked online messages and was waiting for me with a pregnancy test. I remember the shameful feeling of peeing with the door open, fumbling for an explanation, trying to say it wasn’t possible…I don’t think? My poor mom must have thought I was either a liar or a fool.

Of course, the test was negative.

Read more about it here.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: You were a misogynist before testosterone

Rae Rosenberg wrote some commentary on the This American Life episode featuring a trans man who used testosterone as an excuse for his misogyny:

Ira Glass introduces an interview of a trans man named Griffin Hansbury with producer Alex Blumberg halfway through Act I of the episode. Ira tells us, “A warning to listeners that they talk about looking at women and wanting sex during this interview”. Provided with this statement, I brace myself for an onslaught of misogyny, but still find myself appalled at how bad it becomes.

Griffin explains how he used to identify as a butch lesbian and came out as trans during his sophomore year of college. Kind of like me, minus the butch, so I relate to that. Alex asks Griffin to explain some of the changes he experienced after taking testosterone, to which Griffin answers an increased libido. Sure, this is a thing that many folks who take testosterone experience, of course to varying degrees. But Griffin elaborates that taking testosterone made him understand adolescent boys and men much more than he had previously. How, you might ask? Well, testosterone seems to have made Griffin empathize with why boys and men objectify and sexually harass women.

Griffin explains that due to his increased libido from testosterone, even the sight of an “unattractive woman’s ankles” would “flood [his] mind with aggressive, pornographic images”.

Even the sight of an unattractive woman’s ankles would lead him to aggressively sexualize a woman. Oh, God.

Griffin then tells a story of walking behind a woman wearing a “tiny” skirt and shirt, and how he kept on staring at her ass. He continues, “And I, I walked past her and this voice in my head kept saying ‘Turn around to look at her breasts, turn around, turn around, turn around.’ And my, my, you know my feminist female background said, you know, ‘Don’t you dare, you pig, don’t turn around.’ And you know, I fought myself for a whole block and then I, I turned around and checked her out.”

A whole block! Imagine the strength it took to walk a whole block without sexualizing a woman. Talk about self-control, because testosterone sure makes it hard to be a respectful and decent human being. You sure this is all because of testosterone, Griffin?

But y’all, it gets so much worse.

Read more about it here. I’ve also previously written about how estrogen is turned into a fable for the perceived increase in emotions for transfem folks when traumatic incidences are the likelier culprit. Causation is such a tricky thing to tease out in this scenario, because taking hormones is something that concurs with a larger psychological event–transitioning. So I am immediately suspicious of the claims that hormones can be safely linked as the cause of these massive attitude shifts when they happen at the same time as an upheaval as meaningful as a transition. In the case of misogyny, everyone learns it to some degree, so it makes sense that trans masculine individuals will know the misogynistic attitudes before they can express them as men.

-Shiv

Signal boosting: Inside Immigration Court

Thanks in part to Marcus, I’ve begun a process that questions many of the functions of the State that I take for granted, even if I am unlikely (or at least less likely) to be affected by most of them. Around the same time that I began this questioning, there was a particular term used by xenophobes on the topic of immigration–“illegal”–that began to strike a particularly unpleasant chord in me. Though written, it struck me as a venomous slur, something you spit at someone. Immigration, sovereignty, even the idea of the State–all these lofty ideals seemed to clash with the gritty details once you stop seeing people as immigrants first and human second.

It’s hard to stomach complicity in these ideas, because once you actually take the time to look, you notice the blood tribute they require. (Content Notice: Violence)

[Read more…]