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February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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February 21,
2002
American Journal
The Quadruple Axel of Evil
By Alexander Cockburn
The hoofprints of Lucifer are everywhere. And
since this is America, eternally at war with the darker forces,
the foremost Enemy Within is sex, no quarter given. Here are
some bulletins from the battlefront, drawn from a smart essay
on "Sex & Empire" in the March issue of The Guide, a Boston-based
monthly travel magazine, whose features and editorials have "about
the best gay sex politics around", according to Bill Dobbs
of Queerwatch, whom CounterPunch takes as its advisor in these
matters.
In February 2000, 18-year old Matthew
Limon had oral sex with a 14-year old male schoolmate. A Kansas
court sentenced him to 17 years in prison, a punishment upheld
by a Federal court in February.
Last July, Ohio sentenced 22-year-old
Brian Dalton to seven years in prison because of sex fantasies
he wrote in his diary. A woman teacher in Arizona up on trial
last month for a relationship with a 17-year-old boy faces 100
years in prison.
Apropos the triumph of identity politics
across the last thirty years Bill Andriette, the author of "Sex
& Empire", remarks wittily that "In America, your
clout as identity group depends how much of an enhanced sentence
someone gets for dissing you" and then observes that "The
same PR machinery that produces all these feel-good identities
naturally segues into manufacturing demonic ones indeed,
creates a demand for them. The ascription of demonic sexual identities
onto people helps drive repression, from attacks on Internet
freedom to sex-predator laws. Identity politics works gear-in-gear
with a fetishization of children, because the young represent
one class of persons free of identity, the last stand of unbranded
humanity, precious and rare as virgin prairie."
This brings us into an Olympian quadruple
axel of evil: sexually violent predators (familiarly known as
SVPs) preying on minors of the same sex. There's no quarrelling
between prosecutor and judge, jury and governor, Supreme Court
and shrinks. Lock'em up and throw away the key.
I went to a Bar Mitzvah in Berkeley the
other day, and after listening to passages from the Torah transmitting
Yahweh's extremely rigorous prescriptions for his temple, right
down to the use of acacia wood and dolphin skins, listened to
Marita Mayer, an attorney in the public defender's office in
Contra Costa county, describe the truly harrowing business of
trying to save her clients-SVPs--from indeterminate confinement
in Atascadero, the state's prime psychiatric bin within its prison
system.
Among Mayer's clients are men who pleaded
guilty to sex crimes in the mid-1980s, mostly rape of an adult
woman, getting a fixed term of anywhere from ten to 15 years.
In the good old days, if you worked and behaved yourself, you'd
be up for parole after serving half the sentence.
In California, as in many other states,
SVP laws kicked in the mid 1990s, crest of the repressive wave
by hysteria over child sex abuse and crime generally: mandatory
minimum sentences, reduction or elimination of statutes of limitation,
erosion of the right to confront witnesses, community notification
of released sex offenders, surgical and chemical castration,
prohibition of mere possession of certain printed materials,
this last an indignity previously only accorded atomic energy
secrets.
So California passes its SVP law in January
of 1996, decreeing that those falling into the category of SVP
have a sickness that requires treatment and cannot be freed,
until a jury agrees unanimously that they are no longer a danger
to the community. (The adjudicators vary from state to state.
Sometimes it's a jury, or merely a majority of jurors, sometimes
a judge, sometimes a panel, sometimes an (unlicensed) "multidisciplinary
team".
Mayer's clients, serving out their years
in Pelican Bay or Vacaville or San Quentin, counting the months
down to parole date, suddenly find themselves back to jail in
Contra Costa county, told they've got a mental disorder and can't
be released till a jury decides they're no danger to the community.
Off to Atascadero they go for a two-year term, at the end of
which they get a hearing, and almost always another two-year
term.
"Many of them refuse treatment,"
Mayer says. "They refuse to sign a piece of paper saying
they have a mental disease." Of course they do. Why sign
a document saying that for all practical purposes you may well
be beyond reform or redemption, that you are Evil by nature,
not just a guy who did something bad and paid the penalty?
It's the AA model of boozing as sin,
having to say you are an alcoholic and will always be in that
condition, one lurch away from perdition. Soon everything begins
to hinge on someone's assessment of your state of mind, your
future intentions. As with the damnable liberal obsession with
hate crime laws, it's a nosedive into the category of "thought
crimes."
There the SVPs sit in Astasdcadero surrounded
by psych techs eager to test all sort of statistical and behavioural
models, phallometric devices designed to assist in the persuasion
of judge and jury that yes, the prisoner has a more than 50 per
cent likelihood of exercising his criminal sexual impulses, should
he be released.
Thus, by the circuitous route of "civil
commitment" (confining persons deemed to be a danger to
themselves or others) we have ended up with a situation that,
from the constitutional point of view, is indeed absolutely Evil:
held in preventive detention or being locked up twice for the
same crime.
"It's using psychiatry, like religion,
to put people away", Mayer concludes. "Why not hire
an astrologer a goat-entrail reader to predict what the person
might do? Why not the same for robbers as for rapists? What's
happening is double jeopardy. If we don't watch it, it will come
back to haunt us. People don't care about child rapists, but
the constitution is about protections. I think it's shredding
the constitution. I get into trouble because they say I'm into
jury nullification and that's not allowed.
"Most of my clients tell me it's
worse in Atascadero than in the regular prisons. How do I feel
about these guys? When I talk to my clients I don't presume to
think what they'll do in future. I believe in redemption. I don't
look at them as sexually violent predators, I see them as sad
sacks, they have to register. They could be hounded from county
to county. Even for a tiny crime they'll be put away. Their lives
are in ruin I pity them."
But not goat entrails, surely. The animal
rights crowd would never stand for it.
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