While ruminating (as I usually do) on my personal perspectives on crime, justice, and the people associated with these terms, I, with characteristic thoughtfulness, suddenly remembered that others have probably also been wondering about my personal perspectives on these subjects. I realized it is terribly selfish to hoard my thoughts away in the shimmery veneer of my goldmind, where no one who actually does things of any consequence might find them and subsequently ensure that the future will be formed upon my philosophy, which I’ve come to, as the most successful lawyers do, without ever leaving my study. Allow me to make up for my earlier negligence by granting you the items I gathered during my latest and most epic dig at goldmind. If anyone aside from my mother reads this, you’ll have to share these gems.
If your lover has ever sent you on a shopping spree at Tiffany & Co., you may have some idea of what to expect. For those trying to forget the fact that your (ex?) lover never did, don’t worry. This is much better. Just like your next lover will be.
But enough about you. My personal perspectives on crime, justice, and people associated with these terms are built upon, and more or less entirely based on little more than absolutely no reasonable knowledge, and two deeply held assumptions:
1. “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
Michel de Montaigne, French essayist (1533-1592); and
2. “I am who I am and I believe what I believe because of where I grew up and who raised me” (or something like that; I couldn’t find the exact quote and might have made it up entirely).
Franz Boas (allegedly), the German “Father of American Anthropology” (1858-1942).
I think it significant that the foundations of my personal perspectives are in quotations, as I didn’t articulate these ideologies any more independently than I arrived at the cognitive observation deck from which one might see the world from this angle without asking directions.
Speaking of which, haven’t you ever found that the more you ask for directions, the more answers there are regarding contemplative places you might go, and things you might see through the binocular machines provided, for fifty (or some nearby multiple of twenty-five) cents?
Those who have successfully completed seventh grade algebra (and, I now realize, apparently even those who didn’t) know that altitudinous viewpoints are requisite to the vista of a broad horizon. The broader one’s vista, the higher one’s viewpoint, and the greater the perspective’s dependence on the people who built the ladder of ideas to reach it. You might take an elevator, but even those are man-made.
Before your hopes of accruing some sort of independently attained originality are dashed to the wind, I assure you that these hopes are, in fact, hopeless, but even the sexy, likeable Montaigne and Boas didn’t articulate the ideologies I’ve quoted independently. True, they did write them down. But they (as everyone must) wove their perspectives with thread they found along the paths they traveled, and the people, places, and possibilities they encountered while figuring out where, exactly, they were going before they were gone. I adopt the two assumptions they wrote down but didn’t write, based on the unique pattern of my experiences, which began the day I was born to a protestant minister who had decorated the nursery without thinking to consult me on what color thread to use for the baby blanket I would be wrapped up in for the first year of life.
Like time spent in infancy, time spent in prison engenders the experience of being wrapped up in a blanket made of thread one didn’t choose. Aside from that metaphorical indulgence, however, infanthood and prisoner hood have little in common. The point is that we all, at least once, end up in places where we never meant to be. Right now is an example.
The winds that blow us into any place we experience are complex. Promises of gold and other falsities (and sometimes truths, but not in this case) impact the strength of an otherwise pure or natural wind force upon the one who was lied (or sometimes not) to, that is, the one being blown in whichever direction by external (i.e. any and all) forces.
The strength of these winds are not exclusively dependent on an individual’s free and natural will (as the little girl who wanted to play discovered one rainy day, nature has a tendency to ruin plans); nor is the intended route pre-selected by the traveler who wished to arrive somewhere of much relevance to wherever they actually end up, since most “viable” routes have already been outlined by maps and guidebooks, and if you don’t follow the signs, you’ll get pulled over and might end up in jail, or if they can’t stand you there, in an anthology of personal essays.
Since you were wondering how my route has managed to avoid both prison and any possible hope of publication, I tell you that I’ve ricocheted down a route with signs covered in select Bible passages (mostly the ones about loving your neighbor), lines from plays (mostly the ones about recognizing yourself in your neighbor), and intermittently, the odd hand-written poster that reads, “YOU CAN DO IT!”
I’ve picked up thread along the roadside. Interwoven in each stitch I’ve made in the random pattern I’ve been working on are those three words, all in caps, always with an exclamation point. Thanks, mom.
In light of my theatrical, religious, and broke international jet-fretting background, I am convinced that I and even my angel of a mother are capable of thinking, saying, or doing everything anyone else has ever done (“good” or “bad”), though the breadth of our capabilities become fewer and fewer everyday as we gravitate (or are gravitated) toward a particular zone of habit or behavior. (If it isn’t already clear: for the purposes of this paper, physics should be understood as subject to the forces of money or lack thereof; cultural perceptions on gender; skin color; and maybe one’s weight, although it’s a weak indicator since it fluctuates almost as much as does one’s “nature” and unshakable convictions).
Since I’ve just incriminated myself and the woman dearest to me in the world by admitting we’re human (and thus potentially mass murderers), I’ll now share my inclination to consider crime (particularly violent crime) a symptom of a society that fails to provide “legitimate” routes (or means to an end) that are equally accessible to everybody. There are too many discriminatory tolls and too few EZ-passes. Lines are annoying; prisons, except for those who have to go there, are not.
I acknowledge and respect the fact that prisons are an excellent solution to the question of rush hour traffic. But whether we “get rid of,” “put away,” “serve justice to,” or “euphemistically from our Garden of Righteous Eden boot out” those deemed “offenders,” we may ease the pain of families of those deemed “victims,” if transiently. We may ease the fear of EZ-pass holders anticipating a possible merge with the lane of reckless drivers on the route ahead, if superficially. The noblest potential of a perfect criminal justice system that involves incarceration is a negative peace, where there is no physical violence to be seen, at least from the observation deck (whose eight-dollar admission fee is subject to change). In a perfect version of this (inherently flawed) system, those who might resort to violence in order to attain some otherwise unattainable end (i.e. those with little power over the forces that control physics, as listed above) are stripped of what little appreciable power they previously had, most rights, and any opportunity to affect most other people in any way, although the rest of us don’t have to wait in any annoying lines (unless you go to the post office, whose debasement deserves a list of its very own and which I will write before your next birthday). In short, those who threaten to or do destabilize existing power structures are deleted from those structures. Everyone who counts wins.
Until we started counting those who don’t count because we had to figure out how to fit them all into X number of X by X spaces. And we needed to create jobs for people who might otherwise resort to robbery because when the new employees counted those who don’t count, they realized most of them had resorted to robbery because they couldn’t find a job, income to feed their baby or pay for birth control or buy drugs that would convince them for a moment that their lives didn’t suck. Okay, they might be people too. But we can’t turn back time. What’s done is done. Victims have been scarred. Offenders have been sentenced. Most importantly, the Constitution has been written. Those who try to ratify the Constitution risk frustrations of even greater magnitude than those who try to learn anything conclusive from this essay.
Clearly, the prevalence of violent crime is the fault of everyone except those who actually perpetrate it. Unless we’re talking about non-criminal violence perpetrated by the keepers of justice, such as beating or raping institutionalized offenders and administering (you guessed it!) the death penalty, in which case it is everyone’s fault but the victim’s.
You may have (correctly) guessed that I have never met a so-called “institutionalized violent offender,” or a victim of a violent crime that was handled by the justice system. It is with this disclaimer out of mind that I continue with the claim that I know exactly what I’m talking about.
The death penalty implies that when one is inaugurated as a Judge, he is simultaneously inaugurated as a prophet of God’s will and (I welcome submissions of an equally accurate synonym) judgment. This is even more abominably offensive than the consideration that a Judge’s breath, which smells of pesto from the turkey sandwich he had for lunch, should blow harder, and thus push us more bumptiously in one direction or another, than any mother natural wind. Even Adam and Eve were blown out of an enclosed perimeter. To fiddle around with a system of blowing someone in to an enclosed perimeter suggests the fiddler was born, at most, six days ago, and therefore should not be credited with the charge of judging even the issue of which color thread would be best for his own baby blanket.
With this in mind, let me be clear: I don’t know anyone who is in prison and whose presence there benefits anyone as I don’t know anyone who is in prison at all; but I do know people who are not in prison and whose presence there would benefit them, me, society, and, most importantly, my own personal vendettas.
If you weren’t convinced, this latest statement proves the validity of my list of charges entirely. Clearly, I and we are all crazy floozies who do nothing more than drift about in demented gusts of invisible nonsense and the occasional (out)burst of childish vengeance and exceptionalism. Thus, we are all unfit to judge the soundness or suitability of any other human in any context unless we realize we’re crazy and subsequently gain legitimacy, which those who run the criminal justice system in this country have not done and I have, rendering the part of the list that indicates my suggestions for the improvement of the criminal justice system complete, although my uniquely sane mental disposition leads me to refuse the position you were about to offer me as dictator of the justice system, as in my enlightened state, I’d rather run around the goldmind in circles and get started on a list to send the post office.
