Anyone who believes in tidy ideological solutions to messy social problems like crime and homelessness should read this article. Boudin's policies were a disaster. The current regime of incarceration is also a disaster. If we are going to decriminalize theft, then we also have to change the social/economic system that motivates theft to begin with. Theft is a symptom. Normal policing and incarceration suppresses the symptom. Boudin's policies leave the symptom untreated. But neither one addresses the cause.
As the(adopted) mother of an addicted, homeless, thirty year old (raised in an affluent and loving home) I know that my sons addictions, homelessness and continual incarcerations are a direct result of his early life traumas, adoption and eventual reunion with his biological "drug addicted" birth father. Trauma is never talked about as the reason, in our broken and pathetic system as the cause of all of this. The reason that most homeless individuals are on the streets is TRAUMA, plain and simple. We must deal with this in a logical, methodical and humane way...these are human beings, they have people who love them, loved them, grew exhausted from their addictions and the idiotic policies that make getting them treatment IMPOSSIBLE and now here we are.....streets filled with broken and tragic human beings and families Heartbroken and angry. Thank you for this essay, it was beautifully written and I am so happy I found your writings.
My most frequent training partner in a martial arts class I take is a Baltimore city police lieutenant. I hear some frustration out of him that is the cop take on what many in San Francisco have expressed: since the Baltimore City state's attorney isn't prosecuting a number of crimes anymore, they basically have no response for people who call them in many instances. The police hate both the state's attorney and mayor. At least some of that hate is earned, since they're placed in the untenable position of being expected to reduce crime while also being told to ignore crime...and being the people that have to actually tell the public, "sorry, we can't do anything about your problem."
As you point out, many of these people are poor, working people: replacing a window isn't an insignificant cost; a stolen bike means they can't get to work. This leads to other downstream impacts: they catch fewer people with outstanding warrants, for instance, because pursuing people for lower level crimes is one way they found people hiding from those warrants (it's also important to note that stops for probable cause are shown to have a positive effect on reducing crime and they are not the same thing as stop-and-frisk). If one pays attention to council meetings in some of these poor and working class neighbors, you'll find they're often asking how to get more police into their neighborhoods, how to get them to respond faster, etc.
I've never been particularly sympathetic to the police. But the notion that simply giving up policing will make society better is nuts. If someone's hand has been amputated, you don't just pull the tourniquet off and expect the problem to be resolved. Economic protections, public health reform, and coherent cultural institutions to support the population are absolutely what's necessary. You can't leave people in despair (whatever the source - trauma, poverty, etc.) to just fend for themselves and see what happens.
I would like to see a different sort of society built in the US. Ill-conceived reforms from the nominal left, though, guarantee that won't happen.
You mention cohesive cultural institutions where you are now... I'm curious, what are those, exactly? One of my long-term interests is the role religion plays in developing social cohesion; I've been researching how the medieval church, by allowing older "pagan" customs to exist in a Christianized form, helped to preserve some degree of social continuity, ancestral wisdom, and connection to the land, particularly in Britain. Much of this was lost with the Protestant Reformation as peasants became unrooted and communities were atomized; the English Reformation particularly was driven by the desire of aristocrats and gentry for more land with which to implement newly developed methods for increased productivity. Dissolving the monasteries freed up land for acquisition and destroying the joyful, festal culture of Medieval Catholicism dissolved the social ties that kept people rooted.
Of course, feudal Europe was not an ideal society, there were deep class inequalities, people were often tied to the land by serfdom and religious cohesion was maintained not only by a patriarchal hierarchy but also, to some extent, by scapegoating and persecuting Jews. But there were some things that worked well and might be worth reclaiming.
Given that Europe, particularly Northern Europe, is largely secularized now, I'd love to hear more about what sorts of institutions remain and how they work.
Oh I have all kinds of things to say on this as I find it fascinating. Unfortunately, I've limited time at the moment to respond, but I absolutely think you're looking in the right direction there. And to be clear, though it's "officially" secularized Europe really isn't, especially anywhere outside of the major cities.
The first purpose of the entire religion of Leftism (and esp in the case of the homeless in Cali) is the social, emotional and psychological needs of the activist class. The need to feel like a noble savior of the downtrodden, the need to feel like a righteous rebel fighting the evil greedy capitalists, the need to preen in public as virtuous, the need for a larger outlet for your own personal frustration and alienation, the need to believe in a utopian Promised Land where no one is poor, commits crime, or ever goes to bed with their feelings hurt. (Basically all the same needs for meaning, purpose, tribe and narrative that religion provides.)
This is why "Social Justice" policies usually end up doing more harm than good to the people they're supposedly trying to help, because the Compassion Givers don't really see or hear the Compassion Needers, they're usually too high on their own self-righteousness (another Cali epidemic) and blinded by a cloud of utopian fantasies. Once you commit to any kind of fundamentalist dogma or prefabricated thought, you have all the same answers to every question and your fealty is to holy dogma instead of real people and their needs.
The first rule of all politics and political interventions should be: try to fit your ideas to people, don't try to fit people to your ideas.
When looking at the rise in US overdoses for the last few years, I suspect it is more likely that Boudin and similar are simply putting a nice face on what they can't control. The drug epidemic in the US is beyond control. We have doctors trying to switch chronic pain and cancer patients from opiates to ibuprofen and refusing to prescribe reasonable amounts of opiates to people who have verifiable medical conditions and yet the numbers of overdoses keep rising. I agree with the left that more policing is a bad idea- not least because the amount of policing being done even in conservative, pro-cop/ law and order areas is terribly insufficient. The roots of this crisis are not in drug availability or dealers or pushers either corporate or street level. However, the roots are also way deeper than some new murals and an expanded school budget will fix. If we are being honest, America is a failed state. And there is no way of fixing the problems. Things are going to get worse before they get better. And I think the leftist knee jerk reaction is based in this knowledge- that we can't stop what is happening and giving the State more power will only hurt us. Of course, most leftists can't admit that there is no hope. But they still know it just as much as the junkie shooting up knows it. So they each cope in their own self-destructive way- the activist in spinning his wheels trying to stop the unstoppable and the junkie numbing his pain until he never feels anything again. And both have the potential to do great harm in their delusions. Personally, I know a lot of people involced in the more "vanilla" side of the drug trade. They trade weed and maybe drop acid and have tried herion once or twice. And a few of them went down the rabbithole and ended up dead of an overdose. But for the most part, I suspect one of the social forces which will alleviate some of America's problems will be the community side of the drugs trade. About the only people I know who have in person friends and aren't churchies are casual drug users. Even cigarettes used to be a great way to get to know people before we quit. Cause you know, tobacco kills. Now we all check Facebook instead of lighting up. I'm starting to question whether quitting was so healthy as I thought it was. I'm not trying to excuse or defend fentanyl dealers, but I think it's worth pointing out that while the drug trade you hear about on the news is the fentanyl and herion dealers killing people, American drug culture is way bigger than that and a lot of it is benign. Any human relationship, whether that's a parent-child, religious group, marriage, whatever, can be predatory and evil. Or it can be humans being social which is normal and natural for us. I'm hesitant to associate with the law and order types. All too often it's a prayer and hope for personal safety. A belief that drug addiction is a bad choice that can be avoided. And that is a true statement. On an individual scale, drug addiction can be avoided and abstaining from drug use can have positive outcomes. On a society level it's becoming clear we lack the ability to end the drug epidemic without a cure that is worse than the disease. And ironically, I have a lot more faith in the kids who went to jail for selling weed and dropping acid than I do in either the church-goers of the PMC community gardens to actually make things better.
Starting from step 50 when you haven't started step 1 never ends well.
This is the thing people seem to keep forgetting, an alternative structure is required before the tape is removed, or it falls apart. (Or if the goal was to destroy everything, be ready for the backlash.)
Abolish the Police first requires abolishing Property (or at least an considerably different culture for a transitory understanding of Property).
So while I can probably find an answer to the "un-answer-able", there's a fair amount of work required to get to create the dependencies for the solution to work, and by which point the solution will not even register as something that needs to be considered.
Its a political tragedy. Unfortunately some of these ideas are permeating more and more into other countries, although in Europe the anarcho-punk wave that still inspires many anarchists already succumbed to this kind of mindset that irresponsibly trivialises drug use and criminality (and I really am talking about frivolity, not acknowledging and understanding the causes in a responsible way). Explaining isn't the same as justifying, which for some apparently also means tolerating. I've seen a grown up orphan to two heroin addict parents regularly buy hash from a local dealer that also does coke and gods know what else.
I'll never forget a scene from one of my favourite anarchist works, Rebellion in Patagonia ("La Patagonia Rebelde", 1974), an Argentine movie based on the novel "Los vengadores de la Patagonia Trágica", which I deeply recommend.
Halfway through the film, some (a small minority though) of the rebel Gauchos and ranch workers eventually become drunkards and bandits that deviate and abandon the inspired and conscious ideals of their strike. Some raid other estates, killing and raping people of their class (other poor ranchers in their very same situation of utter servitude). One of the "leaders", an old school German anarchist fleeing any involvement in WWI, goes into the local "saloon" in one of the estates and after watching some of the drunkards laugh at him and dismiss his concerns, he starts smashing all the bottles on the shelves as he yells in frustration that "alcohol is a poison" for the masses.
I'm not going to spoil the film but it correlates to what you've written here, pretty much...
That sounds great--I'll try to find it. Also I owe you an email reply--I read yours during my honeymoon but never replied and am very behind on correspondence, but it's coming!
Bff, chill mate, a wedding, a publication and a honeymoon are all reasonable excuses ;D
Keep it up.
Btw I just read the title of your latest piece and thought to myself "geez, don't get me started!". My ex-partner would spend 90 to 95% of her time on social media and chats (which was most of the time we spent together) on petty feuds between different groups or factions. Most of which were initiated and propagated by her ("I do love a good fight!" she'd explicitly admit). Untill one day I got caught in the crossfire trying to please everybody - replacing a friend at a foodbank one day after an emergency or posting a request for help by a homeless camp -, which made me an accomplice of "the enemy" since they were a "rival"? group. I didn't even know at the moment, but that didn't matter. No apologies allowed.
Friendship should always be above partisan infighting.
Then I started realising how ressentiment is fracturing any possibility for a consistent and responsible response from the working classes.
I guess, as you've already stated, it's simply human nature...
“the necessity of traditional cultural forms” !!!! You fascist! :) Iwas raised in the closing days of the functioning small town, small farm, local businesses rural culture of Wisconsin in the 1950’s and 1960’s. .In the 1970’s and 1980’s it faded under economic changes, a mere shell remains. How to recreate a rooted traditional culture which it was is a conundrum.
Anyone who believes in tidy ideological solutions to messy social problems like crime and homelessness should read this article. Boudin's policies were a disaster. The current regime of incarceration is also a disaster. If we are going to decriminalize theft, then we also have to change the social/economic system that motivates theft to begin with. Theft is a symptom. Normal policing and incarceration suppresses the symptom. Boudin's policies leave the symptom untreated. But neither one addresses the cause.
As the(adopted) mother of an addicted, homeless, thirty year old (raised in an affluent and loving home) I know that my sons addictions, homelessness and continual incarcerations are a direct result of his early life traumas, adoption and eventual reunion with his biological "drug addicted" birth father. Trauma is never talked about as the reason, in our broken and pathetic system as the cause of all of this. The reason that most homeless individuals are on the streets is TRAUMA, plain and simple. We must deal with this in a logical, methodical and humane way...these are human beings, they have people who love them, loved them, grew exhausted from their addictions and the idiotic policies that make getting them treatment IMPOSSIBLE and now here we are.....streets filled with broken and tragic human beings and families Heartbroken and angry. Thank you for this essay, it was beautifully written and I am so happy I found your writings.
My most frequent training partner in a martial arts class I take is a Baltimore city police lieutenant. I hear some frustration out of him that is the cop take on what many in San Francisco have expressed: since the Baltimore City state's attorney isn't prosecuting a number of crimes anymore, they basically have no response for people who call them in many instances. The police hate both the state's attorney and mayor. At least some of that hate is earned, since they're placed in the untenable position of being expected to reduce crime while also being told to ignore crime...and being the people that have to actually tell the public, "sorry, we can't do anything about your problem."
As you point out, many of these people are poor, working people: replacing a window isn't an insignificant cost; a stolen bike means they can't get to work. This leads to other downstream impacts: they catch fewer people with outstanding warrants, for instance, because pursuing people for lower level crimes is one way they found people hiding from those warrants (it's also important to note that stops for probable cause are shown to have a positive effect on reducing crime and they are not the same thing as stop-and-frisk). If one pays attention to council meetings in some of these poor and working class neighbors, you'll find they're often asking how to get more police into their neighborhoods, how to get them to respond faster, etc.
I've never been particularly sympathetic to the police. But the notion that simply giving up policing will make society better is nuts. If someone's hand has been amputated, you don't just pull the tourniquet off and expect the problem to be resolved. Economic protections, public health reform, and coherent cultural institutions to support the population are absolutely what's necessary. You can't leave people in despair (whatever the source - trauma, poverty, etc.) to just fend for themselves and see what happens.
I would like to see a different sort of society built in the US. Ill-conceived reforms from the nominal left, though, guarantee that won't happen.
You mention cohesive cultural institutions where you are now... I'm curious, what are those, exactly? One of my long-term interests is the role religion plays in developing social cohesion; I've been researching how the medieval church, by allowing older "pagan" customs to exist in a Christianized form, helped to preserve some degree of social continuity, ancestral wisdom, and connection to the land, particularly in Britain. Much of this was lost with the Protestant Reformation as peasants became unrooted and communities were atomized; the English Reformation particularly was driven by the desire of aristocrats and gentry for more land with which to implement newly developed methods for increased productivity. Dissolving the monasteries freed up land for acquisition and destroying the joyful, festal culture of Medieval Catholicism dissolved the social ties that kept people rooted.
Of course, feudal Europe was not an ideal society, there were deep class inequalities, people were often tied to the land by serfdom and religious cohesion was maintained not only by a patriarchal hierarchy but also, to some extent, by scapegoating and persecuting Jews. But there were some things that worked well and might be worth reclaiming.
Given that Europe, particularly Northern Europe, is largely secularized now, I'd love to hear more about what sorts of institutions remain and how they work.
Oh I have all kinds of things to say on this as I find it fascinating. Unfortunately, I've limited time at the moment to respond, but I absolutely think you're looking in the right direction there. And to be clear, though it's "officially" secularized Europe really isn't, especially anywhere outside of the major cities.
The first purpose of the entire religion of Leftism (and esp in the case of the homeless in Cali) is the social, emotional and psychological needs of the activist class. The need to feel like a noble savior of the downtrodden, the need to feel like a righteous rebel fighting the evil greedy capitalists, the need to preen in public as virtuous, the need for a larger outlet for your own personal frustration and alienation, the need to believe in a utopian Promised Land where no one is poor, commits crime, or ever goes to bed with their feelings hurt. (Basically all the same needs for meaning, purpose, tribe and narrative that religion provides.)
This is why "Social Justice" policies usually end up doing more harm than good to the people they're supposedly trying to help, because the Compassion Givers don't really see or hear the Compassion Needers, they're usually too high on their own self-righteousness (another Cali epidemic) and blinded by a cloud of utopian fantasies. Once you commit to any kind of fundamentalist dogma or prefabricated thought, you have all the same answers to every question and your fealty is to holy dogma instead of real people and their needs.
The first rule of all politics and political interventions should be: try to fit your ideas to people, don't try to fit people to your ideas.
When looking at the rise in US overdoses for the last few years, I suspect it is more likely that Boudin and similar are simply putting a nice face on what they can't control. The drug epidemic in the US is beyond control. We have doctors trying to switch chronic pain and cancer patients from opiates to ibuprofen and refusing to prescribe reasonable amounts of opiates to people who have verifiable medical conditions and yet the numbers of overdoses keep rising. I agree with the left that more policing is a bad idea- not least because the amount of policing being done even in conservative, pro-cop/ law and order areas is terribly insufficient. The roots of this crisis are not in drug availability or dealers or pushers either corporate or street level. However, the roots are also way deeper than some new murals and an expanded school budget will fix. If we are being honest, America is a failed state. And there is no way of fixing the problems. Things are going to get worse before they get better. And I think the leftist knee jerk reaction is based in this knowledge- that we can't stop what is happening and giving the State more power will only hurt us. Of course, most leftists can't admit that there is no hope. But they still know it just as much as the junkie shooting up knows it. So they each cope in their own self-destructive way- the activist in spinning his wheels trying to stop the unstoppable and the junkie numbing his pain until he never feels anything again. And both have the potential to do great harm in their delusions. Personally, I know a lot of people involced in the more "vanilla" side of the drug trade. They trade weed and maybe drop acid and have tried herion once or twice. And a few of them went down the rabbithole and ended up dead of an overdose. But for the most part, I suspect one of the social forces which will alleviate some of America's problems will be the community side of the drugs trade. About the only people I know who have in person friends and aren't churchies are casual drug users. Even cigarettes used to be a great way to get to know people before we quit. Cause you know, tobacco kills. Now we all check Facebook instead of lighting up. I'm starting to question whether quitting was so healthy as I thought it was. I'm not trying to excuse or defend fentanyl dealers, but I think it's worth pointing out that while the drug trade you hear about on the news is the fentanyl and herion dealers killing people, American drug culture is way bigger than that and a lot of it is benign. Any human relationship, whether that's a parent-child, religious group, marriage, whatever, can be predatory and evil. Or it can be humans being social which is normal and natural for us. I'm hesitant to associate with the law and order types. All too often it's a prayer and hope for personal safety. A belief that drug addiction is a bad choice that can be avoided. And that is a true statement. On an individual scale, drug addiction can be avoided and abstaining from drug use can have positive outcomes. On a society level it's becoming clear we lack the ability to end the drug epidemic without a cure that is worse than the disease. And ironically, I have a lot more faith in the kids who went to jail for selling weed and dropping acid than I do in either the church-goers of the PMC community gardens to actually make things better.
In the future please divide your comments into small paragraphs. Massive paragraphs are very difficult to read.
Starting from step 50 when you haven't started step 1 never ends well.
This is the thing people seem to keep forgetting, an alternative structure is required before the tape is removed, or it falls apart. (Or if the goal was to destroy everything, be ready for the backlash.)
Abolish the Police first requires abolishing Property (or at least an considerably different culture for a transitory understanding of Property).
So while I can probably find an answer to the "un-answer-able", there's a fair amount of work required to get to create the dependencies for the solution to work, and by which point the solution will not even register as something that needs to be considered.
Its a political tragedy. Unfortunately some of these ideas are permeating more and more into other countries, although in Europe the anarcho-punk wave that still inspires many anarchists already succumbed to this kind of mindset that irresponsibly trivialises drug use and criminality (and I really am talking about frivolity, not acknowledging and understanding the causes in a responsible way). Explaining isn't the same as justifying, which for some apparently also means tolerating. I've seen a grown up orphan to two heroin addict parents regularly buy hash from a local dealer that also does coke and gods know what else.
I'll never forget a scene from one of my favourite anarchist works, Rebellion in Patagonia ("La Patagonia Rebelde", 1974), an Argentine movie based on the novel "Los vengadores de la Patagonia Trágica", which I deeply recommend.
Halfway through the film, some (a small minority though) of the rebel Gauchos and ranch workers eventually become drunkards and bandits that deviate and abandon the inspired and conscious ideals of their strike. Some raid other estates, killing and raping people of their class (other poor ranchers in their very same situation of utter servitude). One of the "leaders", an old school German anarchist fleeing any involvement in WWI, goes into the local "saloon" in one of the estates and after watching some of the drunkards laugh at him and dismiss his concerns, he starts smashing all the bottles on the shelves as he yells in frustration that "alcohol is a poison" for the masses.
I'm not going to spoil the film but it correlates to what you've written here, pretty much...
Another good article, spot on.
That sounds great--I'll try to find it. Also I owe you an email reply--I read yours during my honeymoon but never replied and am very behind on correspondence, but it's coming!
Bff, chill mate, a wedding, a publication and a honeymoon are all reasonable excuses ;D
Keep it up.
Btw I just read the title of your latest piece and thought to myself "geez, don't get me started!". My ex-partner would spend 90 to 95% of her time on social media and chats (which was most of the time we spent together) on petty feuds between different groups or factions. Most of which were initiated and propagated by her ("I do love a good fight!" she'd explicitly admit). Untill one day I got caught in the crossfire trying to please everybody - replacing a friend at a foodbank one day after an emergency or posting a request for help by a homeless camp -, which made me an accomplice of "the enemy" since they were a "rival"? group. I didn't even know at the moment, but that didn't matter. No apologies allowed.
Friendship should always be above partisan infighting.
Then I started realising how ressentiment is fracturing any possibility for a consistent and responsible response from the working classes.
I guess, as you've already stated, it's simply human nature...
“the necessity of traditional cultural forms” !!!! You fascist! :) Iwas raised in the closing days of the functioning small town, small farm, local businesses rural culture of Wisconsin in the 1950’s and 1960’s. .In the 1970’s and 1980’s it faded under economic changes, a mere shell remains. How to recreate a rooted traditional culture which it was is a conundrum.