Angela Davis in Aotearoa
those of us lucky enough to hear Prof. Angela Davis in Auckland on Monday night or Wellington last night are likely to still be buzzing from it - Frog certainly is.
The turnout itself was inspiring (possibly not so inspiring if you were one of the almost 200 people turned away from her Wgtn lecture!). The fact that so many people were so keen to hear this amazing thinker that they’d turn up more than an hour before on a helluva wintery wellington evening gave one hope for the future.
Amongst the lucky select few who actually made it into the main lecture theatre to hear Prof Davis in the flesh was our Nandor (though she very graciously popped in to address us lesser souls in the overflow room, and apparently spoke briefly to some of the unlucky ones who were still optimistically queueing the foyer).
Here’s his thoughts on the evening:
Went to see Angela Davis speak this evening. I’ve been looking forward to it since I found out that she was coming to Aotearoa to speak. So was half of Wellington it seemed because the lecture theatre in Rutherford House was full and they has to turn some 200 people away. They had an overflow room where her speech was broadcast live and she took the time before she spoke to go and have a word with those who missed out.
Which I guess was the first indication of a great generosity of spirit that clearly came through her talk. A woman who faced capital charges in the USA three times for her work for justice, a woman that (then Governor) Ronald Reagan vowed would never teach in a university in California again, now a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. But it wasn’t just her piercing intellect and profound analysis, but also her warm humanity that really shone through.
She focussed first and, in summing up, last, on the strength of ordinary people, when committed and organised, to change the world for the better. She spoke of the enormous international solidarity of progressive people that has been demonstrated at times, including in campaigning against her unfair detention and trial in the 60’s, and asked why anyone would think it is not possible to display that again, and in a consistent way. She spoke of how by building community, we can take back our world. And she highlighted her point by talking about a subject that has been the core of her work for the past four decades – the abolition of prisons.
I won’t try to reproduce her analysis – that would need considerably more time and care than this quick post would allow. What I will say is that she presented a cogent, intelligent and penetrating analysis of the functions of prisons in western democracies and made a strong case for their abolition.
She pointed out a number of facts around the massive growth in the prison population over that past three or so decades, connected to the increased social dislocation, alienation and economic disparity of the period. She pointed out the structural racism inherent in the prison industrial complex, as evidenced by a visit to any prison in the western world. She also pointed out that women are the fastest growing section of the prison population.
Prisons, she said, are a dumping ground for people, as a means of control and maintenance of economic domination and conceptually, as a way of disposing of the unacceptable face of capitalist society - the other side of the affluent coin. She pointed out the tendency to create simple and false stereotypes about who is in prison and the way this is used to deny real debate about what purposes prisons serve.
She highlighted the constant policy cycle of ‘tough prisons, rehabilitative prisons, tough prisons, rehabilitative prisons’, a cycle which we are seeing in action right now in this country, and which ignores the more fundamental point that PRISONS DO NOT REHABILITATE. As both the Roper Report and Moana Jackson’s report into Maori and the Criminal Justice System clearly demonstrated, a different approach entirely is needed.
Most of her talk was totally relevant to this country, where the excessive demonising of prison inmates (think politicians language about ‘criminal scumbags’, ‘domestic terrorists’ etc etc) has an equally numbing effect on rational discourse. All in all, a great talk and refreshing to hear such a lucid and profound critique of the prison industrial complex.
Massive respect to those involved in getting her out here, and to all those would attended: a veritable who’s who of the activist and radical communities in Aotearoa.
June 27th, 2007 at 10:20 am
“this is another post-event production/promotion from frog inc..”
phil(whoar.co.nz)
June 27th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I agree most people in prison should not be there. Jeffrey Archer is just one of a number of conservatives who has come over to this point of view after being inside himself.
But what should we do about the few violent, psychopathic criminals who cannot or will not be rehabilitated? How do we protect society from these people? I would be interested to read some ideas.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Kiore1…
Maybe if we give them enough drugs they’ll just leave us alone ?
I don’t have any better answer than that actually. I think that it is impossible to have a society without having some means of dealing with those who are completely anti-social, but I understand the difference between that and incarcerating everyone who doesn’t quite “fit” into the society as is done in the USA and increasingly, here.
respectfully
BJ
June 27th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I kind of read the demand for the abolition of prisons as a counterpoint to the unrestrained expansion of them. One of her arguments was that prisons are self perpertuating, and create the conditions for their own expansion, through the vested interests that make up the various elements of the prison industrial complex. Even corporations far removed, one would think, from penal policy gain significant advantage from becoming monopoly suppliers of clothing, services etc etc. That’s without touching on the expansion of private prison / security firms like Group 4 that I highlighted during the debates around the Corrections Act 2004. That’s why its important to think about how we might go about abolishing them.
Yes we do need to find better ways of dealing with people who commit serious violent crime but in the USA as in this country those people are a very small minority of inmates. The majority are in for non-violent offences, and as she said even what is catagorised as a violent crime depends on how charges are laid ie the same crime could be catagorised differently according to the charge laid. Of those in for violent offences the proportion in for seriously violent crime is tiny.
If we actually focussed on creating a just world, if we did all the things we know we need to do to stop people getting on the prison treadmill - and we know very well what kinds of thngs work - and if we focussed on habilitation rather than inprisonment, how much of a problem would we still have I wonder?
In a way her challenge was to dare to dream of a world where things could be different. It’s a light worth shining on the issue. Yes it throws its own shadows, but its good to be talking about having a policy based on the bulk of non-violent offenders, with serious violent crime recognised as the exception. Currently we base policy around the most serious offenders then wonder why we have systemic problems.
June 27th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Well said Nandor… heres hoping for double digits in the next election.
respectfully
BJ
June 27th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
So what is the Green Party policy on the abolition of prisons? Does the party support Angela Davis’ position of abolition? Or does it sit on the fence?
My understanding is that the Green Party is pro-Prisons but wants some progressive adjustments made. But I’m ready to be corrected.
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
June 27th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
In terms of cultural theory. there is a strong link between the criminality and mental health. Both are necessarily preoccupied with behavioural norms.
“Prison” in the context of this discussion is just a word meaning “state sanctioned institution for the treatment and holding of criminals”. So, in order to deal with the inevitably violent or incurable extremes, it’s not about how to get rid of them, so much as what sort do we want.
Prison as high security psychiatric hospital wards, anyone? Occupational therapy (no jokes, please), bit of counseling, ethnic/cultural integration programmes …
June 27th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
“A woman who faced capital charges in the USA three times for her work for justice..”
We’re not biased here are we???
If someone is breaking into your house you call the police, who apprehend them then let them go????
I’ve forgotten the word for all this> peoples actions are the result of external conditions. Crims are the result of injustices> you brought it on yourself victim!
jh
June 27th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
are there any statistics on the relivant composition of the prison population in New Zealand in relation to the crimes they commited?
i imagine there would be alot fewer if weed was legalised, both through direct convictions and because of the gateway effect that weed being illegal causes.
i would not advocate the complete abolition of prisons as there are a few who should not be allowed to walk free in society, those being rapists and murderers aswel as a few others. i would arguee that a few other crimes do require some form of short term imprisonment for rehabilitative purposes, if that can be brought about, and of course as a deterant.
i think alot of luxeries need to be removed from imprisonment situations, punishment should be punishment.
Sapient
also; is Fairer a word? im not quite sure but i think it to be incorrect english?
June 27th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I wonder if you will censor this post Frog?
I find it interesting that the Frog should be so keen on hearing a woman speak who is suspected of murdering a Judge.
Leaving that aside, I find the comments from many of my fellow frogblogers to be a bit worrying, I have often accused the Greens of being more interested in the rights of criminals than the rights of the victims, sadly this post seems to confirm that suspicion.
Those who support the “no new prisons” or ‘alternative justice” (which is not justice at all) are obviously people who have never been the victim of serious crime.
What you have to appreciate is that the vast majority of the people here in New Zealand are not interested in spending money trying to rehabilitate criminals, the vast majority want criminals punished, the vast majority want safe streets and safe neighborhoods free from the likes of the Salt family.
These people need to learn that it is their fault they are in prison, it is not the fault of the “system” nor is it the fault of the white man who came and settled in NZ all those years ago, when we stop making excuses for criminals and treat them they way they treat the rest of society (with no respect or compassion) then they might start to get the message.
as we’ve told you many times before, we don’t censor anyone’s views, unless of course they are offensive or advocate violence
June 27th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
BJ
I think you should be more worried about making the 5% threshold than dreaming about double digits.
I did say that the Greens should have forced an early election some months ago when they had the chance, you face the real risk of being ‘out greened” on the environmental issues by Labour and the Nat’s.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
10. big bro Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
>These people need to learn that it is their fault they are in prison, it is not the fault of the “system� nor is it the fault of the white man who came and settled in NZ all those years ago, when we stop making excuses for criminals and treat them they way they treat the rest of society (with no respect or compassion) then they might start to get the message.
I don’t really know much about prisons, but I suspect part of the problem is prisoners failing to see it as their fault that they’re in prison (except for innocent people like David Dougherty, of course - it really wasn’t his fault). Alanis Morissette wrote a song with the lines ‘it’s not fair to remind you / of the mess you left / when you went away.’ I think part of punishment has to be the opposite - to remind prisoners of exactly what they’re being punished for, whenever they start feeling sorry for themselves.
I would also add in some public humiliation, like the old English tradition of putting prisoners in the stocks and letting people throw rotten fruit at them. All the images on TV of prisoners holding jackets over their heads so their face doesn’t appear on TV shows that public humiliation does mean something to a lot of these people.
With the exception of preventive detention, where people are locked away for ever, I don’t see much value in particularly long sentences. If someone’s not deterred by the threat of 5 years in prison they probably also won’t be deterred by the threat of 10 years, because they’re not thinking about getting caught.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Frog
Come on!, I find half of what is posted here to be offensive, some just need to develop skin that is a little thicker don’t you think?
No. We have terms and conditions, and if you don’t like them, then you are welcome to leave us and go to another forum that has terms and conditions that are more acceptable. Meanwhile, if you find viewpoints that are alternative to your own “offensive”, then I would worry about you.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
JamesL, I think you are correct. Prisons should really address issues like addication, education and self sufficiency to achieve rehabilitation and the psyche/training approach is a good take on that.
I believe that would work for a large number of our prisoners but to acheive it you may have to stream the hopeless away from the unsaveable. Criminality is sometimes explained away as mental health. I’m not convinced that is true enough to be a generalisation but see that it can often be true. The last segment of recidivest and violent offenders I can see no other alternative than just locking them up. Does evil exist? Maybe.Lets keep it away from our children to be sure.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Kahikatea
Of course you are right about Dougherty and people like Arthur Thomas, sadly there will always be a few innocent people who are wrongly convicted and a few guilty people who are set free, we have seen this over the last few weeks when a mass murder was set free pending another trial but that is another matter.
I read what you had to say with some interest and assuming you were serious I would make the following comment about long sentences, I agree with you that the length of sentence is not going to be a consideration when a criminal commits or is considering committing a crime but that is not the issue.
By even suggesting that we consider shorter sentences because they are not a deterrent is admitting that we are more interested in the criminals rights than the victims, long sentences are great for many reasons, chiefly that society does not have to put up with the criminal for a very long time.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I guess her background as a communist, supporter of the East German police state and belief that political opponents of the former eastern European communist regimes should have been imprisoned, slipped by - or did nobody ask her whether she is sorry for supporting the communist bloc?
No less than Solzhenitsyn reported that “a group of Czech dissidents addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?’ Angela Davis answered: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’â€?”
Clearly then when “she presented a cogent, intelligent and penetrating analysis of the functions of prisons in western democracies and made a strong case for their abolition.”
She didn’t think the same about them in one-party dictatorships run by communist parties.
Maybe she’s changed her views, but this soporific nonsense about “progressive people” when she campaigned openly for the USA to become a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship is sickening.
Frog, you’re either naive or purposely evading the facts? How much “warm humanity” did she show when getting her Ph.D in East Berlin, while border guards at the Berlin Wall got rewarded for shooting people fleeing the prison of the Iron Curtain, and the Stasi were snooping on citizens?
June 27th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
BB
We don’t do “censorship” here. You have a conflicting idea, we’ll argue. We DO however, have a policy about advocating violence, a pretty standard set of obscenity and spam filters and a short way with people who abuse others ad-hominem. If you can’t express yourself without falling afoul of the filters your messages will have to be vetted by a human and that can take a while.
As for your assertion about Ms Davis I suggest you look up her biography proper, as she was tried and found not guilty, even of the accessory charges, in spite of Herbert Hoover’s antipaty. The tenor of the times was such that the US was on the verge of revolution. The VietNam war had come to campus, and the disillusionment and vast distrust that has split the country ever since, was a newly opened wound. Kent State is part of that history, and I remember the period well. I doubt anyone who was not there could possibly understand the turmoil throughout the country.
Finally we get somewhere near to your “main” point and the one which is the real topic here, which is who goes to prison, why they wind up there, and what good it does.
You may have noticed that none of the people who commented advocate doing away with prison entirely. All of us recognize that there are people who cannot be permitted to run lose by a sane society. All of us however, also recognize the enormous pressure the incarceration industry places on the people it engulfs, and the utter uselessness of putting people in jail for marijuana offenses.
“These people need to learn that it is their fault they are in prison, it is not the fault of the “systemâ€? nor is it the fault of the white man who came and settled in NZ all those years ago”
That wasn’t particularly useful.
BJ
June 28th, 2007 at 12:18 am
BB, there most eloquent rebuttal of prison as an effective punishment was penned by Johnny Cash.
“San Quentin what good do you think you do?
Do you think that I’ll be different when you’re through?
You bend my heart and mind and you warp my soul.”
June 28th, 2007 at 7:05 am
BJ
So let me get this right, the Greens support the anti smacking bill as a supposed way of protecting our children but you are more than happy for them to take illegal drugs?….I am sure that you can see the double standard in that.
I am astounded that you can think my statement about prison was a wind up, I am also deeply worried that any member of our society could be concerned about the “enormous pressure the incarceration industry places on the people it engulfs”, I can assure you that the vast majority do not care, all they want are safe streets and safe communities, once again your comments only highlight the fact that the Greens are more concerned about the rights of the criminals than they are about the rights of the victims.
Can you tell me why the Green party did not answer the questioneer sent to them by Garth McVicar from the Sensible Sentencing trust?, I suspect it is because the Greens are not concerned about the rights of victims.
Finally, “These people need to learn that it is their fault they are in prison, it is not the fault of the “systemâ€? nor is it the fault of the white man who came and settled in NZ all those years agoâ€?…I stand by this statement, until Maori stop using this as an excuse and the left stop accepting this as an excuse for the extremely high level of criminal behaviour the better.
June 28th, 2007 at 10:37 am
“Those who support the “no new prisonsâ€? or ‘alternative justiceâ€? (which is not justice at all) are obviously people who have never been the victim of serious crime.”
Wrong again - I’ve been the victim of serious violent crime and it never once occurred to me to demand the perpetrators be put in prison. It doesn’t follow that wanting safe streets et al means people want more prisons. I haven’t seen much correlation between putting people in prison and safe communities - the USa being the odvious example.
I was very briefly in prison before the trumped up charges were dropped and I must say the prospect of spending several years there was terrifying, but then I have a life and lots to do. Thus I’m always stunned by people who don’t seem to care about the prospect of going to prison - it seems to me that there are quite a number of peole out there for whom freedom doesn’t mean much.
If we have a society in which quite a few peoples lives are so meaningless they don’t mind losing years of them, incarceration is hardly going to be a deterrent anyway. This is the problem we need to sort out.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:23 am
BB… I am staying out of the S59 debate. The very worst outcome was avoided and the bill went through with both Nats and Labour supporting. In a few years we’ll understand the result.
Protecting my kids from drugs isn’t something that gets done by laws making relatively harmless drugs illegal. It doesn’t get done by putting them at risk of jail for youthful experimentation and it doesn’t get done by supporting the gangsta culture by keeping the distribution of those drugs and profits from that in the hands of the gangs. It gets done by example and by bringing them up to respect themselves and helping them to understand the risks of each drug with absolute truthfulness. Same thing with sex.
If I never tell them a lie (and I don’t) then I must rely on their judgement.
I have no idea of what Garth McVicar asked, or how he asked who, or why (if he asked something) nobody answered. Not my job. If you wish you can link to the question somewhere and I’ll have a look at it. The prisons aren’t an issue of massive interest to me, but I will look.
The vast majority of prisoners are not there because they are big risks to the public health and safety. A fair few are in for victimless crimes and the drug laws are a big part of that. I don’t want to go looking for absolute numbers. Others will know them. I am sure the thread will fill with them in short order.
We lock them up but we don’t teach them anything at all in doing so. It is antiseptic punishment, cleansed of the opprobrium of the society and without meaning or meaningful results. A timeout without any proper connection to the disapproval of the society for the act, and more likely to teach avoidance of the error that got them caught than any other thing.
=======
I didn’t call your opinion a “wind up”. Surely not. It sounded just like you
I think you skipped over a couple of words and the meaning shifted. I was discussing who winds up in prison…
========
That you see Maori the same way some Americans see black people is not a surprise. It is not something I can ever be inclined to agree with in any way, but it is not a surprise.
I think you need to consider just what it is you are advocating here… because the prison culture doesn’t rehabilitate and the use of prisons as punishments is significantly off the mark. Prison should be reserved for those who cannot be safely out in the society. Pedophiles, Murderers, Rapists…
For the rest, the treatments for addiction and education about real risks of drugs are one side, and on the other the public humiliations that Kahikatea favours find me receptive to the message.
I have seen it enough, that kids find peer-pressure a larger incentive to behave than any number of time-outs for bad behaviour. Which is the problem with the cops-court-into-the-clink cultural solution. Noplace in that system is the tagger, vandal, pickpocket, shoplifter or whatever antisocial but non-violent crime you identify… noplace in that system is that person forced to confront the members of the public who are affected by their criminal misbehaviour. There is no “peer pressure” put on them. They are however, tossed in the slammer, where they learn from their peers.
Racist rants are not a useful answer.
BJ
June 28th, 2007 at 11:29 am
The higher the Gini the less happy that society seems to become overall and the more trouble it gets into with disaffected youth ?
Meaningless lives as a function of overpopulation?
There are so many potential connections here!
respectfully
BJ
June 28th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I managed to be a registered attendee at Prof Davis’s lecture, and I can only say this was the best lecture of my recent academic career.
Her discourse on ethnicity, class, gender and poverty as factors in the prison populations, and her understanding of the delineators of democracy as applied to incarceration, just took my thinking to another level on this topic.
The ‘prison industrial complex’ is a phrase we’re going to hear more of in the vry near future, I expect.
Just as anti-war campaigners speak of the US Military Industrial Complex, which is the intersection between capital profit and death via military contracts for production of everything from war materiel to toilet paper for the military, so we are going to find out how many fat capitalists are making money out of the ever-increasing effects of the Patriot Act in constraining the lives of working-class citizens in the USA.
A disturbing feature of this is the USA’s interest in exporting it’s crimes against social justice to other countries; their Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay prisons are templates to be feared, and under no circumstances should they be allowed to establish such instituions on the soil of a sovereign nation such as ours.
Tena Koe, e Nandor, mo too tino aroha i tena maahi.
Tena Koutou Katoa, nga tangata Amokura i whakatu ai tena hui.
naku nei, katie
June 28th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
BB: “I find it interesting that the Frog should be so keen on hearing a woman speak who is suspected of murdering a Judge.”
That’s a bit duplicitous BB - she is not suspected, she was acquitted of that charge. Or are you saying that there should be no free speech for anyone who has ever been charged with an offence but then acquitted?
BB: “So let me get this right, the Greens support the anti smacking bill as a supposed way of protecting our children but you are more than happy for them to take illegal drugs?”
No, you’re incorrect (or perhaps being duplicitous again):
1. the Greens support the decriminalisation of only one illegal drug not many drugs and
2. we only support decriminalisation for over 18s not kids.
So we are not more than happy for kids to take drugs. In fact we want kids to take less drugs not more drugs and we think that our decriminalisation proposals will help in this regard.
We feel that cannabis prohibition actually encourages kids to take more drugs and harder drugs - so we could equally turn it around and say that you BB, by advocating prohibition, are “more than happy for kids to take drugs” because that’s what prohibition does, it increases the harm caused by drugs, not lessens it.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
libertyscott Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
No less than Solzhenitsyn reported that “a group of Czech dissidents addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?’ Angela Davis answered: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’��
Why don’t you Reds stop hiding under green!.. Cowards!
jh
June 28th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
as is usaly the case i find myself in agreement with BJ and katie.
as BJ says and as america found out when they outlawed the sale of alcohol; prohibition does not work, it just drives the industry underground.
by driving the industry underground it creates the gateway effect. i will admit that i have many friends who use weed and i myself have used it periodicaly, i have seen afew friends, through having to make contact with dealers, move onto harder drugs because the dealer just happens to sell that drug also, harder drugs tend to be highly addictive and although afew of my friends have managed to get off those harder ones through alot of ingroup counseling and support others have not because since they are illegal it is questionable as to weather they can seek profesional help and weather they can afford to. many of those afforementioned friends are younger than 18, i have a fair number of friends in their 20’s who use weed and would never think of using harder drugs, it is not the weed that causes the gateway effect it is the prohibition, and the prohibition prevents recovery once the gateway is steped through.
another thing to consider would be that in having to go to dealers one funds the underground and there is no quality controls in the underground. if it was legal atleast eh quality could be monitered, the distribution regulated and the product taxed without any income going to funding criminal behaviour, it would also lighten up the loads on the prisons.
as for what katie said about the prison-industrial complex that is so rampant in america, i do not think it likley to come into play here unless our prisons are privatised or our prisons start obtaining funds from other places through letting out prisoners for work. the military-industrial complex that runs america is a disturbing spiral which will likley see america colapse in the not to distant future, the one questions are when and if they will decide to, in a last despirate attempt to survive and gain resources, take us all with them.
all empires eventualy colapse, many get very violent in the death throws, the american empire is no different and its demise is soon to come, brought about by itself.
jh, the green party, although it is not strictly a socialaist or libertairian party, does, through the policies that it sees to be best for new zealand and support the four pillars, find itself in in a position that many would place on the left and as libertarian, just because it does not support the exploitation of people and the environment that the right endorses so much it does not mean it is a red party.
I am an eclective, i choose policies and stances that i see as best for New Zealand and the world as a whole, i am not a socialist but i would be placed on the left, look at the problems of the world, the vast majority have been caused by the imperialism and expansionism of the right, of the capitalist way.
it may pay to look at this, it was for the 2005 so oviously some parties have changed their positions, particulary national and labour which are now closer together. http://www.politicalcompass.org/nz2005
my ratings were:
Economic Left/Right: -6.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.90
Sapient
June 28th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Agreed BJ, Sapient and Katie.
Decriminalize. Certainly a Green policy with which I agree, as prohibition merely shifts the revenue stream underground.
I see Anderton is banning BZP. Yet again, the nanny state shoots itself in the foot.
I guess teenage Jacks & Jills will be off to the dealers for the real thing, now….
June 28th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
[Warning> reading this will produce howls from the left (usualy with a touch of a plum in the mouth)]
jh
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
in his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the so-called “progressive” views prevalent within Western intellectual circles minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and undermine traditional values, contributing to the formation within rich countries of an underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity, welfare dependency, and drug abuse.
He contends that the middle class abandonment of traditional cultural and behavioural aspirations has, by example, fostered routine incivility and ignorance among members of the working class. Occasionally accused of being a pessimist and misanthrope, his defenders point to a persistently conservative philosophy in his work that is anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple
“This rise [in crime rate] provides no support for liberal theories of crime, no sustenance for the kind of person who proves the strength of his compassion by conceiving of those less law-abiding than himself as automata, mere executors of the dictates of circumstance.”
“People who deny responsibility for their own actions use a language that portrays them as passive victims of circumstance.”
“I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/counterpoint/stories/s1553062.htm
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_2_oh_to_be.html
Cheers
jh
June 28th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
It is unfortunately true that many innocent people are convicted, sometimes by prosecutors who bend the law (often by hiding evidence) to gain those convictions. There is significant documentation of such improper convictions, in a series by the Chicago Tribune, in a study by Columbia Law School, in the book “In Spite of Innocence,” and in the marvelous work of Barry Scheck and his colleagues in the Innocence Project.
It is a serious blemish on the American criminal justice system that too many prosecutors abuse their power, and get away with it.
I have just published my 2nd novel, “A Good Conviction,” which features a detective from Manhattan North Homicide working to untangle what appears to be a wrongful conviction in a high profile Central Park murder, brought about by a prosecutor who knew the defendant was actually innocent and hid the exculpatory evidence that would have led to a not guilty verdict.
Several prosecutors and appeals attorneys helped me with the legal aspects of a Brady appeal in New York State, and all of them agreed that what I portrayed was both realistic and all too possible.
If you go to my amazon.com page …
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Conviction-Lewis-M-Weinstein/dp/1595941622/ ref=sr_1_1/103-7341421-1865416?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180587686&sr=8-1
… you can learn more about my novel and others’ reaction to it.
LEW WEINSTEIN
June 29th, 2007 at 1:34 am
I think there are two important reasons why prison doesn’t reduce crime and why they are mainly filled with minority races.
Firstly, modern prisons aren’t the dark, dank, dungeons wherein prisoners rarely saw daylight and shared their cells and swill with rats and cockroaches. Importantly, they needed to be this bad to be worse than conditions in the outside world.
Secondly, our laws are often simply the social mores or societal norms codified. The more laws we have the fewer law abiding citizens we have and the less respect there is for “the law”. Since laws reflect society’s norms it follows that they reflect the values of the majority not the minority. Therefore the conversion of these norms into laws can also convert minority values into crimes. Anti-social behaviour then becomes criminal behaviour. Social outcasts can become outlaws.
When this happens it can create the situation where living in “normal” society is more frightening and more of a punishment than living in prison society. The attitudes that make a person a “loser” on the outside can make them a kingpin on the inside. The relief of being an insider rather than an outcast.
Prison as a punishment for social crimes is a reward, not a punishment. PD can also have that reward of inclusiveness.
Perhaps the first step to reducing prison populations is to review all of our laws to decriminalise all those things that should never have been criminalised in the first place. We have already done this with buggery and prostitution, which proves that common sense can prevail where there is the political will to allow it.
Then we need to confront the extent to which our laws are based on past social engineering aimed at making minorities acceptable to the majority.
Finally, and this may be drawing a very long bow, is prison psychologically an escape from the forced urban migration back to the traditional life on marae? I don’t mean Maori are dumb enough to seek imprisonment rather than seeking out their roots and taking that journey of discovery back to the ancestral marae, but simply is imprisonment less of a psychological hardship for those whose recent ancestors lived in close knit communities than for Pakeha with their lineage of individual “freedom”?
Whether any of this is right or wrong, it still doesn’t get around the problem that prison has always been more about incarceration than rehabilitation and that prisons may be best described as universities of crime. After a few months or years in prison a person would have to be very stupid not to learn a few “tricks of the trade”, especially about how to avoid getting caught again.
June 29th, 2007 at 1:50 am
From my experience working in the government it is no joke when people talk about empire building and measuring a department or department head’s success by the size of its budget or number of workers. The various parts of the “justice” system (actually it’s increasingly just a law enforcement system) really do have as big an incentive not to rehabilitate offenders as the private sector with its long term profit maximisation. The difference is the private sector will cut costs to maximise profits whereas the public sector tends to do the opposite as long as there is a bottomless pit of “government” money to spend. It’s not really surprising that we spend more on prison than prevention, there is a well organised bureaucracy for catching, prosecuting and imprisoning “criminals” but only an adhoc group of voluteers, academics and charities actually working at prevention. CYFS job of protecting children doesn’t currently go as far as protecting them from becoming adult criminals, at least not in an organised systematic way, jast in an ad hoc way if you get the right social worker in the rigt place at the right time.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:56 am
I notice everyone’s studiously avoiding the bad smell LibertyScott let in the room. So, did anyone get up on their hind legs and ask Davis whether she still thinks prisons are OK after all, if a totalitarian dictatorship is running them? Kind of a significant question to ask before giving her opinions on prisons in democracies any credence, surely?
What next? Ex-Nazis?
June 29th, 2007 at 10:11 am
jh
A classic (and hilarious) example of the arrogance and moralising of the priviliged, conservative middle class who love pointing the finger at their “lessers” without realising that they’ve got fingers pointing right back at them.
“After all, they are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera, actually.” On people “at the lower end of the social scale” in Britain” Very presumptous of him. What can you expect after the darling of the Right and neoconservatives asserted that “There’s no such thing as society” and ensured its breakdown with her “reforms” during the 1980s and that the working class had no say in the “transcendental purpose” of their country”.
“This rise [in crime rate] provides no support for liberal theories of crime, no sustenance for the kind of person who proves the strength of his compassion by conceiving of those less law-abiding than himself as automata, mere executors of the dictates of circumstance” Please explain why the crime rates have doubled since the “structural reforms” of the 1980s?
“I learned early in my life that if people are offered the opportunity of tranquillity, they often reject it and choose torment instead. My own parents chose to live in the most abject conflictual misery and created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg. . . Though they lived together, they addressed not a single word to one another in my presence during the eighteen years I spent in their house, though we ate at least one meal a day together . . . ” Essay “A Taste for Danger” (1998) in “Our Culture, What’s Left of It,” No wonder why his world view is so pessismistic. Poor guy. I thought I had it bad.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:40 am
BB
You say that the vast majority of people don’t care, all they want is safe streets. It follows from that that if people want safe streets and they dont care how that is achieved, then that makes any method which contributes to safe streets ok. Using that rationale you can explain away torture, wire-tapping, domestic spying, all of that by saying “it makes the streets safe”.
Also, just because the people don’t care doesn’t make it ok. If no-one cared during the Spanish Inquisition, would that have made it acceptable?
June 29th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Indeed, Psycho Milt.
There might be a former member of the British National Front, or South African National Party who can wax lyrically about vegetarianism and animal rights, I look forward to the same people fawning over the same.
How easy it is to whitewash the support for bloody murderers, and people who DID egregiously use “torture, wire-tapping, domestic spying and the rest” that you so oppose?
How gutless it is that apparently no one at “Professor Davis’s” lecture asked her whether she stood by her previous comment, and what view she now has of one-party states that imprison those who publish leaflets, newspapers and websites without state permission? Given her warm feelings towards Cuba (and she is hardly alone on that), I doubt she has changed much, and it calls into question how much the Greens give a damn about civil liberties - Angela Davis campaigned for a system that would virtually abolish them.
but that’s all forgotten now… even though NZ taxpayers helped bring her here.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Kind of a significant question to ask before giving her opinions on prisons in democracies any credence, surely?
No…
Explain why it is of significance.
The consequences of sending non-violent and non-dangerous people to prison here are at issue. Political statements of 30 years ago are a bit less relevant…
BJ
June 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
“Explain why it is of significance.”
Gladly. This is a person who’s reported as having in the past expressed enthusiasm for totalitarian dictatorships throwing their political opponents (or anybody they just happen to take a dislike to) in prison. This same person is now here telling us that democratic countries are misusing prisons and we should stop that misuse. So, the question of whether she stands by her earlier reported comments re prisons in totalitarian countries is highly relevant to a decision on how seriously we should take her views on our own prisons.
“Political statements of 30 years ago are a bit less relevant…”
Or, to put it another way, “The fact she was full of shit 30 years ago doesn’t mean she isn’t talking sense now.” Well sure, but I’d recommend the precautionary principle.
June 29th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I think you’re being a bit over the top given that there is no proof that she had an “enthusiasm for totalitarian dictatorships throwing their political opponents in prison”, beyond a single attribution that someone else made about her. I mean Solzhenitsyn may have mis-quoted her and her actual words may have been different.
And choosing to study at a university in a country does not automatically equate to support for the civil rights abuses conducted by that country’s secret services. Or do you think that people who choose to study in the USA therefore support the bombing of Afghanistan, detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, or the CIA trying to overthrow democratically elected governments? Do people who choose to study in France therefore automatically support the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior?
Unless of course you can point me to some references where she damns herself in her own words. Then I’ll listen to your argument.
June 29th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Lets see.. the quotation referred to is attributed to her by Solzhenitzyn who has a pretty fair memory but there is no indication that HE was there when the question was asked, or where SHE was when the question was asked (would you risk prison in the GDR after getting out of prison in the USA?), or how the question was actually phrased, or what she actually said vs what her translator said she said…. in other words, hearsay.
Thirty years old.
That vs the current problem of locking up a hell of a lot of people when we could be treating the addictions, teaching them how to integrate into the society or giving them more meaningful actual punishments (I still like the idea of bringing back public humiliations).
You are all too quick to seize on any excuse to avoid the actual message, choosing to attack the messenger.
I am not greatly interested in this issue, I leave it to Nandor and others to pursue and generally support their efforts, but people who think that this 30 year old not quite a quotation somehow negates the problems IN THIS SOCIETY that she is pointing at, need to examine their reasoning.
respecfully
BJ
June 29th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I think this is a botched discussion from the start. If the topic is criminology what is it Angela Davis has that the other academics don’t …. or are we just showing our ideological bias?
jh
June 29th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Not too many have been IN jail JH, and not so many were ever subjected to the sort of discrimination that she’s seen. Further, she is a bit of a celebrity, like it or not, and it STILL isn’t the point. Is it?
Why are we all so worried about who she IS, or who she was 30 years ago, instead of what she says?
respectfully
BJ
June 29th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
What she says is what Sue Bradford says as an apologist for the Kahuis:
http://blog.greens.org.nz/index.php/2006/09/06/sue-b-on-poverty-2/
Greg Newbolt has been in jail and I heard him say that prisons are full of people who “aren’t guilty” (sarcastic remark). Dr Anthony Daniels is quoted in Wikipaedia for his most outrageuos remarks, however, I think he has a point in that today there is too much excusing peoples behaviour, and maybe as a downside of welfare-ism and nanny state a lack of responsibility for ones own actions.
Here’s Green Criminology 101:
RADICAL-CONFLICT THEORY: Social change and redistribution of wealth. Some rehabilitation emphasis in empowering employees to see exploitation inherent in capitalist system. Social change to include decriminalization of consensual crimes and drug offenses, dismantling of bourgeois therapies, institutions, and Police State. Redistribution of wealth through employee ownership of corporations. Eventual move toward strict equality and socialist or communist society. Tendency to be trivialized as Marxist ideology, and does not explain high crime rates in more socialist countries.
FEMINIST THEORY: Social change and elimination of power. In general, seeks to replace gender-based power structures; i.e., patriarchy, with matriarchy, which focuses upon women’s principles of care, nurturance, connectivity, community, and ethics. Elimination of power involves decentralized socialism providing equal access to the process of decision making. Tendency to ignore women as offender as well as unique qualities of persons of color, and retreats into diversity issue subsuming all differences as examples of women struggling to define themselves.
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOConnor/criminology.htm
I would like to see creative punishment such as the stocks> youths who smash bus shelters could be put in them and we could “tut, tut, snigger, snigger…” Justice comes naturally to human societies when people live in small close nit communities…. The civil libertarians could enjoy a day or too in the stocks as well, for annoying the good law abiding citizens (Some factions of the Green Party could spend some time in the stocks as well for miss-representing themselves as Green when Red and Green have well recognised (commonly understood) meanings).
jh
June 29th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
“choosing to study at a university in a country does not automatically equate to support for the civil rights abuses conducted by that country’s secret services. Or do you think that people who choose to study in the USA therefore support the bombing of Afghanistan, detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, or the CIA trying to overthrow democratically elected governments? Do people who choose to study in France therefore automatically support the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior?”
Oh PLEASE! Wilful blindness to the differences between totalitarian East Germany and the relatively free USA and France. You honestly think an American could study in Humboldt University in East Berlin, a university that was run by the Socialist Unity Party of the GDR - the ruling (and only party), the university that prohibited students from going on the protests in 1989 and which had to be completely purged after reunification, without being a sympathiser for it?
Humboldt University didn’t just accept anyone as students, they were screened to be politically acceptable - I’m sure Davis with her calls for the violent overthrow of the US government, and being a card carrying pro-Soviet communist fitted this nicely.
As she cuddles up to Cuba, which I know is the preferred “cuddly toy” version of communism (rather than the “sharp and nasty” North Korean version) that is trendy these days, because he confronts America, though you (and her) remain willfully blind to how Cuba treats anyone who threatens the regime’s monopoly on speech and politics.
I don’t believe that any of this, in itself, negates the arguments she makes, it simply makes all the vapid nonsense about her “fight for justice” and “humanity” rather dodgy.
“the quotation referred to is attributed to her by Solzhenitzyn who has a pretty fair memory but there is no indication that HE was there when the question was asked, or where SHE was when the question was asked (would you risk prison in the GDR after getting out of prison in the USA?), or how the question was actually phrased, or what she actually said vs what her translator said she said…. in other words, hearsay”
Notice she hasn’t sued for defamation, as this is in a book, and widely republished. If it WERE true (and frankly Solzhenitsyn holds more credibility than she does, and let’s face it she campaigned to recreate the USSR in the USA), then it is disgusting and she should be asked whether she still believes this. It also makes her a hypocrite to be going around the free world campaigning to get rid of prisons, when I am sure she didn’t do the same in the communist bloc, and doesn’t visit Cuba telling Castro to do the same.
June 29th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
jh
You’re painting a diverse range of people with a very broad brush. Communist indeed! Sam Buchanan is an admitted anarchist I believe and I myself can be broadly described as a anarcho-syndicalist.
I personally consider government to be a necessary evil at least for the moment. The less government the better is my preference. The conservatives don’t mind government intervention when its in their interest or into the affairs of those that it considers to be “degenerate” and there are many examples of that. Government subsidies, Homosexuality was illegal until quite recently, bailouts of failed, favored corporates/finance companies etc etc.
People no longer live in tight nit communities. The “Reforms” of the 1980s ensured that.
Tendency to be trivialized as Marxist ideology, and does not explain high crime rates in more socialist countries.
What socialist countries do you refer to? Denmark? China? Germany? Vietnam? Sweden? Cambodia? Hmmm. Three of these countries relied on coercion of the populace to achieve their aims and thus can’t be considered socialist as they are heavily dependant on central planning/control, which is the opposite of socialism and all the resultant inefficiencies and excesses that it entails.
June 29th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
I meant.
…..and prone to all the resultant inefficiences and excesses that it entails.
June 29th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Stuey: “Do people who choose to study in France therefore automatically support the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior?”
False analogy. A more accurate one would be: “Did foreign fascists who visited Nazi Germany and spoke admiringly of it automatically support the concentration camps?” I believe the answer is “Yes, they did.”
bjchip: “…people who think that this 30 year old not quite a quotation somehow negates the problems IN THIS SOCIETY that she is pointing at, need to examine their reasoning.”
The alleged quote refers to something more like 40 years back, given the Czechs in question were probably banged up in relation to the Prague Spring of 1968. Could well be that Solzhenitsyn was talking out his arse - wouldn’t be the first time. But the bottom line is, someone with a long history of support for totalitarian dictatorships probably isn’t someone we ought to trust to advise us on our own system.
Sleepy Treehugger: “Communist indeed! Sam Buchanan is an admitted anarchist I believe and I myself can be broadly described as a anarcho-syndicalist.”
This makes your endorsement of the perspective of an old-school totalitarian only the more confusing. It may be perfectly true that Davis’ support for totalitarian dictatorships doesn’t render her analysis of our prison system wrong. It renders it pretty damn suspect though. It certainly doesn’t make us “lucky” to hear it.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
SleepyTreehugger, Homosexuality has never been illegal in this country. It was the offence of buggery that was removed from the Crimes Act by the Homosexual Law Reform Act. When this offence was introduced in the Police Offences Act in Victorian times it was an almost direct copy from British law. This is at the core of the myth that Queen Victoria never outlawed lesbians because she didn’t think it was possible for women to be lesbians.
Nevertheless, it is not the states role to legislate what consenting adults do in private or what they read, watch or listen to.
Our love affair with quarter acres sections did away with our tight knit communities long before the rogergnomes got the chance. The rogergnomes failure to permanently depopulate rural communities just proves how resilient New Zealanders are in the face of bad governments, whether of the left or right, Douglas or Muldoon.
June 30th, 2007 at 2:58 am
So … how would you guys feel if a neo-NAZI who’d campaigned for election in the 1980s was invited to NZ to speak to right-wing groups on the topic of crime & punishment? I think, rightly, you’d all have a fit.
And yet apparently Communists are A-OK.
June 30th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I don’t see why the Greens can’t be committed to the environment but more open minded on “social justice”. The problem seems clear> too many members with a narrow perspective are putting others off.
Many of you hopefuls will be waiting a long time for the rest of the population to agree with you on your “social justice” models of society.
jh
June 30th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Nandor, as you made this argument, I couldn’t help but think this is along the same lines as anarchists and libertarians propose when viewing government:
I kind of read the demand for the abolition of prisons as a counterpoint to the unrestrained expansion of them. One of her arguments was that prisons are self perpetuating, and create the conditions for their own expansion, through the vested interests that make up the various elements of the prison industrial complex. Even corporations far removed, one would think, from penal policy gain significant advantage from becoming monopoly suppliers of clothing, services etc etc. That’s without touching on the expansion of private prison / security firms like Group 4 that I highlighted during the debates around the Corrections Act 2004. That’s why its important to think about how we might go about abolishing them.
Seems to me big prisons are a symptom, not the cause. Abolishing prisons pre-supposes society will somehow correct itself by putting more dysfunctional people out on the streets. We already have people with over 20 convictions for the same illegal behaviour continuing to escape prison, ignore paying fines and continuing to offend with virtual impunity.
When society increasingly tolerates, endorses and facilitates destructive behaviour, in the name of liberal freedom, then a long hard look at abolishing prisons is doomed to failure, because the same people were incapable of seeing the problem that got them there in the first place.
For example, decriminalizing prostitution may be making some women free, but it the main, I see it just makes it easier to exploit them.
June 30th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
One of the main reasons the prisons are overcrowded is that so many people in jail are there for victimless ‘crimes’, like drug use. If drugs were legal, as they should be, overcrowding would be a non-issue. Especially as once legalised, they wouldn’t be produced & traded by organised crime, leading to lower crime rates in general.
June 30th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Duncan, Is there any reason to expect that legalising recreational drugs will have different results than legalising gambling?
June 30th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Kevyn “Homosexuality has never been illegal in this country. It was the offence of buggery that was removed from the Crimes Act by the Homosexual Law Reform Act.” Really? Depends on how you define homosexuality. Regardless I wasn’t merely restricting my comment to New Zealand Conservative, but meant to include Americans and British conservatives as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_Law_Reform_Act_1986.
Our love affair with quarter acres sections did away with our tight knit communities long before the rogergnomes got the chance. It also depends on how you define close knit. You don’t have to live in each others pockets to be a close knit community. What would I know in any case, because I was still in primary school during the “Rogernomics” era.
June 30th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Kevyn
The demographics of the addictions are different. The nature of the criminal supply chain for the two is different and the physical consequences are different. A criminal enterprise supporting gambling is typically a numbers racket. The machines are too hard to hide and run in secret. Not portable…. yet. In addition, the gambling addiction exists because it provides “variable ratio reinforcement”. This makes it harder to break a habit once formed. So legalizing gambling in some ways, would be expected to be worse. In particular with respect to the machines which are extremely addictive. The tradeoff is that it gets some regulation and there are some restrictions on access to minors. Those characteristics are shared. Diseases transmitted by gambling are basically nil or common cold viruses on the handles of the pokies. Diseases transmitted by drug injection are serious crippling and sometimes fatal.
On the drugs side, the hit is fixed ratio. It happens every time, and the chemical side effects are not completely benign, even for weed. In all cases of the drugs we consider candidates for legalization or normalization, there are no strong physical addiction effects and the toxicity is low. The benefits here include quality control. The legal stuff is not going to be laced with P.
I personally advocate going further still. I would provide for clinics where heroin addicts could get their fixes without concern for the street price of the drug. A nominal fee to cover My experiences tell me that the addiction itself is not nearly as damaging as the jail terms, the constant struggle for money to supply the next hit and the lying associated with it.
Somebody wanting their FIRST hit would have to find it somewhere else… but the suppliers don’t make any money on the first hit. They only profit from people who are already hooked.
This points up another subtle difference. The legal gamblers who have problems are still gambling with their own real money. Possibly this is necessary to achieve the rush when the numbers fall their way. The addict does not need money to support a habit if the state provides the injectable.
For the non-addictive drugs of course, the addiction related arguments don’t apply, and none of those are injected.
…
So yeah… there’s a lot of differences.
Sorry for the rambling nature. I’ve been interrupted a lot by my kids today…
respectfully
BJ
June 30th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
BJ
Good points, thanks. IMHO “addiction” is too often used to refer to compulsive behaviours. That’s going to be very dangerous in this debate as lot of people will aks the question I asked but they wont get your answer from the media or most politicians.
regards
Kevyn
June 30th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
SleepyTreehugger, Fair points.
I was a child in the 60s so I did experience the sense of community you seem to be refering to. Blaming one thing is never a good idea so I’ll add motorcars and TV to quarter acre sections. Its not really surprising that that sense of community was a lot less obvious by the late 70s. But you can still find it in country towns that haven’t become dormitories for the big towns and cities.
July 1st, 2007 at 3:59 pm
55. Kevyn Says:
June 30th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
> I was a child in the 60s so I did experience the sense of community you seem to be refering to. Blaming one thing is never a good idea so I’ll add motorcars and TV to quarter acre sections. Its not really surprising that that sense of community was a lot less obvious by the late 70s. But you can still find it in country towns that haven’t become dormitories for the big towns and cities.
We had it when I was growing up in the 1980s, in suburban Dunedin. The existence of cars and television didn’t stop it (in fact, the existence of video recorders slightly increased it, when only one family in the street had one). The average section size was well under a quarter acre, so maybe that had a bit to do with it. But basically, it does seem to have been unusual.
July 1st, 2007 at 10:50 pm
kahikatea,
I think sense of community seems to be strongest where the urban design encourages walking. Even when country towns have big sections they tend to to be layed out so that the shops are in the center and the roads have very wide berms and very little traffic so its still safe and easy to walk. If the small sections in your Dunedin suburb had narrow frontages then walking distances to shops and bus stops would have been shorter than in suburbs with big sections. I feel that walking gives you much more of a sense of “ownership” of your street; a sense of belonging and responsibility towards your neighbours that you only get from having the time to see whats there and talk to your neighbours. You can’t do that in a car or, to a certain extant, on a bike Isince you’re on the road instead of being on the footpath.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:56 am
Thinking about your post while out jogging Frog. Short answer: What a load of (again). You must realise most people disagree and there needs to be some explanation (eg how do the capitalist institutions benefiting from supplying prisons ensure prison numbers are kept up???. Did you think your audience was just the left-wing lackeys at Green HQ?
To Nandor who decides what is just???
What are the “raft of measures” [term used by politicians] instead of incarceration. Lindsay Mitchell would have a few suggestions. The first obstacle to implementing any alternative measures would be Kieth Locke, Tony Ellis etc. Emoticon :booing:
jh
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:08 am
Does anyone know how to make do a booing emoticon for Frogblog??
jh
frogmaster says: sorry we only have these ones
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 am
“Sleepy Treehugger: “Communist indeed! Sam Buchanan is an admitted anarchist I believe and I myself can be broadly described as a anarcho-syndicalist.â€?
“This makes your endorsement of the perspective of an old-school totalitarian only the more confusing.”
Not sure if your using the word ‘your’ in the plural here - but just in case you are, I didn’t endorse Angela Davis’ perspective. I was planning to go to the lecture just out of historical interest, but reading Angela’s bio put me off, so I didn’t. I wouldn’t always avoid people with a commitment to Leninism and post-Leninism - they may still have interesting things to say here and there, but it certainly puts me off them.
I’d reiterate that prisons are pretty useless when life outside is so miserable for some people that they don’t appear to be seen as a bad option. Nor does a system that needs to keep people in line by use of fear seem worth holding on to - though I guess I’m in the minority here.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:39 am
bj said..
“.. the chemical side effects are not completely benign, even for weed…”
um..hate to disagree etc etc..
but just the other day i published a rebuttal to the latest ’scare-tactic’ being used in an attempt to demonise the humble weed….
this is a new movie i re-named ’son of reefer-madness’..
it is called the ‘the purple brain’..(whoar..!..eh..?…gimme some..!..)
and trys to perpetuate the myth that pot today is sooo much stronger than it used to be..in the sixties/seventies..
(a thumbnail-rebuttal is ‘yes..there has always been strong and weak pot..nothing much has changed..eh..?..getting the ‘good stuff’..is just ‘getting a good deal’..)
and part of that rebuttal included this snippet on recent research into the health consequences from the recreational consumption of cannabis..
“..Finally, despite claims that marijuana alters the brain..
..it is important to note that THC — regardless of its potency —
– is surprisingly non-toxic to the adult as well as the teenage brain.
Recently scientists at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research reported that..
“..they could find “no … evidence of cerebral atrophy or loss of white matter integrityâ€? attributable to cannabis use in the brains of frequent adolescent marijuana users..(compared to non-using controls)..
..(this) after performing MRI scans..and other advanced imaging technology.
Separate studies assessing the cognitive skills of long-term marijuana smokers..have also reported no demonstrable deficits..�
(and that’s a ‘whew..!’ from me..to that last sentence..eh..?)
btw..bj..i admire your civilised stance on the treatment for heroin addiction..
(btw..’p'/speed-freaks should be prescribed strong cannabis..to help allay/soften the hard edges of withdrawal symptoms..
oh..!..but hang on..!..that’s right..!..i remember now..!
‘medical-marijuana’ is one of those ‘no-go’ subjects.eh..?
one of those deemed ‘best not to go near’..eh..?..
(btw metiria..how is that ‘cross-party lobbying’ going for your private members medical marijuana bill..?..that one that came up trumps in the ballot..?
it seems..oh so long ago..!..eh..?
the bill that is only waiting for you to present it to the house…?
and can you tell us here if that will happen before the next election..?
or if the master-plan is to put that in the ‘too-hard’ basket..
and hope everyomne just forgets about it..eh..?
and what is the other parties reactions to the idea of medical marijuana..?
btw..metiria..when will you be starting your campaign to change the hearts and minds of the punters..?..
(y’know..’good morning’/national radio..and the like..?
and you..as an avowed non-user..would be in a better position than ..say..nandor..to be able to credibly focus on just the theraputic effects/relief available to those suffering..eh..?
and to be able to steer clear of/sideline the prohiibitionist arguments..eh..?
and just focus on that (urgent!) need to be able to prescribe proven pain relief to new zealanders suffering from a raft of illnesses..including diabetes..aids..parkinsons etc etc..?
i mean..how can we whip up moral fervours about specific prescription drugs not being available here..
and deny this proven relief..
(did you know that one of the symptoms of advanced parkinsons..and diabetes..is shooting needle-like pains in hands/feet etc..
even strong (narcotic) painkillers do not relieve this pain..and only get people addicted to those prescription narcotics..
whereas cannabis is proven top proviude relief from what is described by sufferers as an unimaginable level of ongoing pain/discomfort..
it ain”t rocket science..!..eh..?
so metiria..i know that you know enough about the efficacy of such synthesized-cannabis delivery mechanisms as the canadian developed/prescribed/used ’sativex’..
to know that they do ‘work’..and will p[rovide that pain relief for suffering new zealanders..
new zealanders suffering..as we speak..
so..we are all aware of the urgencies..even on humanitarian grounds..eh..?..
to get your medical marijuana bill before the house..
and to allow doctors to prescribe..
(and hey..it wouldn’t be a good look to go down in the history books as one who just sat on their hands..
when in those hands..was the tool for positive change..
eh..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Phil
The lungs of the smoker aren’t the brains of the smoker, which is one thing I was referring to in this case. The other thing is the tendency towards obesity.
I reckon that when it comes time to warn my daughter to go easy the “it makes you fat” argument is a lot more truthful and will go a lot further than the “it makes you stupid” argument.
… and while you’re more likely to get arrested, you’re less likely to fight with the arresting officer. The LA Cop I once knew said he’d MUCH rather deal with someone on weed than find a booze problem…
As for the cognitive effects, the only one I could discern in my roomies at Uni (back in the 60’s) was that they weren’t motivated to do much when they were bombed out of their minds, they just didn’t care. This is only a problem if someone develops a psychological (not physical) addiction which could lead to them to being stoned in class and not paying attention. I saw that in one guy out of the about 40 I ran into on campus.
I have no problem with legality, but real health effects shouldn’t be discarded entirely and IMHO acknowledging the real ones will give us a bit more credibility with the public when we are disparaging the lies.
respectfully
BJ
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Duncan Bayne said: “how would you guys feel if a neo-NAZI who’d campaigned for election in the 1980s was invited to NZ to speak to right-wing groups on the topic of crime & punishment? I think, rightly, you’d all have a fit. ”
Actually no, there are lots of people who come to NZ to speak whom we disagree with, but we support their right to speak. When Holocaust denier David Irving intended to come here Keith Locke supported him to come, while opposing his views: http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/other7755.html Most people were calling for him to be denied entry, which I think he was in the end.
For those of you who think that putting Solzhenitsyn’s accusation (with all its apparent unreliability) to her was the most important question to ask, well you could have gone and asked it yourself. But that would have entailed actually listening to her talk, and that might have been dangerous eh?
I have as much suspicion of authoritarian communism as any here - with probably more reason. But I also recognise that in racist America in the 60’s, just as at other times and places, communism may have looked like a genuinely liberatory alternative. I also think that anyone interested in challenging power (and I recognise that some on this thread are more interested in benefitting from it) can learn from the experience of people like Angela and the Black Panther Party.
To those on this post who have tried to go beyond snappping at people’s heels, thanks. The reason why her talk was so valuable IMO is that it could be a spur for some intelligent debate. In particular, suggesting the abolition of prisons is a way of forcing us to look at the alternatives.
So to Zen Tiger, yes prisons are a symptom in a sense but they are also a self perpetuating problem. I guess its a bit like talking about zero waste to landfill - when you say you can’t throw rubbish in a dump anymore it forces people to ask what they need to do to deal with things differently. That means better recycling and reuse, and a redesign of the product and production systems.
Zero waste is not about shutting all the landfills tomorrow - its about creating a plan for a transition. And yes, there is a small residual amount that we can’t do anything with but landfill at present but the vast majority of the waste stream can be either designed out of existence or reused productively. Its a pretty good parallel to the people dumps that are our prisons.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:36 pm
um..what ‘real health effects’ are you actually talking about bj..?
could you give us some specifics..a blanket/sweeping ’scare-statement’ dosen’t really cut it..eh..?
(and ..’tendencies to obesity’..?…from smoking pot..?
where did you dig that puppy up from..?
i mean..we have the ‘beer-gut’..
it’s just that i’ve never heard of a ‘pot-gut’ before..eh..?
are you riding the ‘munchies’ connection..?
(heh-heh..!..)
(maybe you should email the producers of ‘the purple brain’..bj..
maybe they aren’t yet aware of your ‘obesity-connection’..there..bj..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm
phil said: um..what ‘real health effects’ are you actually talking about bj..?
Posting on the wrong thread might be one of them Phil. Doesn’t much of the recent discussion on this thread belong over here?
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
toad..i was respondinfg to what bj said..as you will see if you look back..
(so you can place yr thread-hijacking allegations where the
and is ‘over there’ some buried thread..?where this topic never surfaces..?
what do we have to do to get any answers on this subject..?
phil(whoar.co.nz)
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Toad
Phil’s not missing anything… it was in THIS thread that I mentioned in passing that there were some “actual” downsides to smoking weed. I have however shifted my reply to the other thread the topic is a distraction here.
respectfully
BJ
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Wasn’t getting at you in particular, Phil - just that yours was the last post on that topic on this thread - my comments were in relation to all the topics re drugs on this thread. And I didn’t use the term “thread-hijacking” - its clear that the discussion had just wandered off in this direction - I actually support the content of what you’re saying - just that I thought it and the other posts on the topic would be more coherent if it were on the thread that related to drugs, rather than interspersed with stuff related to Angela Davis.
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Nandor said: “So to Zen Tiger, yes prisons are a symptom in a sense but they are also a self perpetuating problem. I guess its a bit like talking about zero waste to landfill - when you say you can’t throw rubbish in a dump anymore it forces people to ask what they need to do to deal with things differently. That means better recycling and reuse, and a redesign of the product and production systems.
Zero waste is not about shutting all the landfills tomorrow - its about creating a plan for a transition. And yes, there is a small residual amount that we can’t do anything with but landfill at present but the vast majority of the waste stream can be either designed out of existence or reused productively. Its a pretty good parallel to the people dumps that are our prisons. ”
I think comparing prisoners to people rubbish/garbage is not a good look what ever prism it is coming from, no matter how well one’s colour and associated bells and whistles serve them, through the state or otherwise.
It shouldn’t be about recycling waste streams, i think an approach that wil yield different results is the social dividend economy of Democrats for Social Credit, that being the approach that won’t require $300 per day jobs, just to achieve middle class living. Reclaiming the state and associated communities for the producing classes and wealth production, instead of finance, is the real prison that needs to be abolished.
Democrats for Social Credit.
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
yeah..i looked toad..it’s a thread on the merits or not of bzp..
i am talking about the urgent need for action on the medical marijuana issue..
not about that cr*p..
i repeat..where do we have to go to get a simple update on the progress..(or not)..of metirias’ medical marijuana bill..?
is that really such an unreasonable request..?
y’know..the bill was pulled from the ballot..bloody ages ago..!..
and since then we haven’t heard a peep..!
(btw..nandor..seeing as you are lurking on this thread..maybe you could be prevailed upon to answer what metiria refuses to..?..)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:43 pm
to Duncan Bayne, libertyscott and psycho_milt.
I fail to see why communism is equivalent to fascism/nazism. I reckon that communism is comparable to capitalism.
In history there have been repressive human rights abusing communist governments, but there have also been been repressive human rights abusing capitalist governments.
It doesn’t follow that a communist government is automatically evil and that a capitalist one is automatically good which is what you guys seem to think with your McCarthyist witchhunt-esque comments that anyone who is or was ever a communist cannot be tolerated and anything they say is not be listened to, and anyone who chooses to listen to them is morally suspect. Bollocks to that!
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:18 pm
stuey,
You are putting words in my mouth - please top that. Ideas are valid or invalid, regardless of who expresses them. On that we agree.
However, w.r.t. Ms. Davis, she herself stood for the communist party in the 1980s, and explicitly supported the jailing of those who opposed communism in Czechoslovakia. She is, in fact, evil: she supported a totalitarian regime that murdered and jailed political dissidents. There is no escaping that fact.
W.r.t. communism itself, the closer a country comes to implementing communist ideals, the worse the lives of the citizens (subjects?) of that country will be. Consider for example the contrast betwen East & West Germany, and North and South Korea.
The opposite is true of capitalism: equality under law, property rights (including personal ownership - i.e. the idea that you own your own body), free expression, and freedom of association are all hallmarks of capitalism.
May I suggest you have a read of Volkogonov (in particular, The Rise & Fall of the Soviet Union) to get an idea of what life in Soviet Russia was like, and Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand to get an idea of the basis of capitalism?
Also, as an exercise, can you name a communist country that *isn’t* totalitarian?
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Duncan Bayne
The problem with capitalism is that reality is very different to its theory and has been corrupted by the corporate, political, and banking elites through taxation and pretend (fiat) money. If you doubt me research into fiat money and the fractional reserve banking
system.
Capitalism appropriated many core tenets of liberalism of which communism and socialism are branches thereof.
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:57 pm
STH,
Actually, such things as reserve banking and fiat currency are not capitalistic, but in fact originated (in Western countries) back with the fascists in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact FDR, who was a great fan of Mussolini, was responsible for the strengthening of same within the USA. The von Mises Institute has a great series of audio lectures, The Economics of Fascism, which goes over this in some detail.
As for communism and socialism being branches of liberalism, that is patently false. Neither are at all compatible with liberalism in it’s original sense - and if we’re talking the origins of those systems, then we’re most certainly talking about classical liberalism.
Liberalism: In The Classical Tradition explains how the term liberalism was appropriated by those standing for it’s exact opposite (socialists), & explains what classical liberalism actually is.
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Economic Friggin Democracy as represented by our own collective heritage which needs to be reclaimed in part for all those prisoners who will remain political footballs until it happens:
http://www.democrats.org.nz/News/Articles/2007/The-House-That-Jack-Bui lt.aspx
In fact, there’s probably a few John A “Jack” Lees of New Zealand languishing in the clink now, which makes perfect sense given what has been steadily sold out since, since it is people like that who lead New Zealand out of the depression making New Zealand a world leader in Economic Democracy when much of the world was capitulating to Fascism.
FDR an admirer of Mussolini!!! IF you believe it, then it’s true, no problem with that, it’s pretty funny too, right on!!
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:37 pm
DB.
Like I said it has been corrupted. Not that fiat is any worse than gold as both are mere subjective stores of value rather than an inherent store of value, because you can’t eat it, you can’t shelter under it, and its even too rare for everyone to use it to make much stuff out of it.
Actually thats merely HIS interpretation of liberalism. Perhaps he draws inspiration from John Locke for it, but liberalism is older than that and can be classed as libertarianism which is nice in theory, but doesn’t work in the real world.
George Orwell believed that collectivism resulted in the empowerment of a minority of individuals and oppression: Yep, but so does capitalism.
I have to agree with the following statement by Emma Goldman.
‘rugged individualism’. . . is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the [ruling] classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit . . . That corrupt and perverse ‘individualism’ is the straitjacket of individuality . . [It] has inevitably resulted in the greatest modern slavery, the crassest class distinctions driving millions to the breadline. ‘Rugged individualism’ has meant all the ‘individualism’ for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking ’supermen.’…Their ‘rugged individualism’ is simply one of the many pretences the ruling class makes to mask unbridled business and political extortion
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:44 pm
even,
It’s public knowledge that FDR was an admirer of Mussolini, & that the New Deal was at its heart a fascist model.
Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.’” (Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939.)
You should also note that FDR’s politics (esp. w.r.t. economics) were very similar to both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s.
The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act (NRA) attempted to cartelize the American economy just as Mussolini had cartelized Italy’s. Under the NRA Roosevelt established industry-wide boards with the power to set and enforce prices, wages, and other terms of employment, production, and distribution for all companies in an industry. Through the Agricultural Adjustment Act the government exercised similar control over farmers. Interestingly, Mussolini viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal as “boldly… interventionist in the field of economics.” Hitler’s nazism also shared many features with Italian fascism, including the syndicalist front. Nazism, too, featured complete government control of industry, agriculture, finance, and investment. (Revisiting the New Deal. Finally.)
This theme - state control of the means of production - is common & central to both fascism and communism. All that varied was the means by which that control was established.
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I meant ……his beliefs could be classed as libertarianism.
DB.
Actually the totalarian rule in the Soviet Union was only meant to be a transition stage between the revolution and a worker’s state where the workers controlled the means of production rather than Central Government. Stalinist Communism was more fascist than socialist.
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Duncan, simply put, if FDR was an admirer of Mussolini and therefore by extension Hitler’s Germany, you would have to say from their perspective, with friends like that, who needs enemies..
I appreciate your willingness to relate your opinion to what i posted, and to add to that mayby…..it has been said that the winners write the history, that is not true but they certainly write the history that the majority is presented with as having happened.
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
STH,
FDRs beliefs could, for the most part, not be classed as libertarianism. I believe he was a staunch supporter of the right to keep & bear arms, for example, but other than that … ? Can you give some specific examples of commonality between New Deal politics & libertarianism?
As for Stalinism being a ‘transition stage’ … how about Maoism? Or any of the other implementations of communism? Are you arguing that in order to achieve a communist state, one must first pass through a brutal totalitarian stage? Or is it coincidence that that’s how all communist states have started out, and continued?
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm
even,
Again, if you read the histories (in plural; there is little disagreement with this analysis) FDR was a fan of Mussolini but not really Hitler; Hitler on the other hand was a fan of FDR.
The interesting question (which you raise) is: given the similarities between the systems, why WWII at all? The answer is that the best way to (temporarily) deal with the economic issues created by reserve banking, fiat currency, & Government economic intervention is to fight an expensive war, thereby granting the Government further control over the economy, and injecting a lot of taxpayers money into the ‘war economy’.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
DB
I meant that the beliefs of von Mises is best described as libertarianism which INHO is as much of a branch of liberalism as socialism.
I didn’t say that Stalinism was the transition stage between totalarianism and the worker’s state. Leninism was. Stalin seized power over the government, which is why Trotsky, who accused Stalin of forming a deformed workers’ state, was driven from Russia and was eventually assassinated. It was a pity that Kerensky had done and the Provisional Government had done such a bad job or else the Bolsheviks would never had sufficient support to seize control. Maoism was pretty much a direct copy of Stalinism.
The answer is that the best way to (temporarily) deal with the economic issues created by reserve banking, fiat currency, & Government economic intervention is to fight an expensive war, thereby granting the Government further control over the economy, and injecting a lot of taxpayers money into the ‘war economy’ Thats not a good explanation, because America could have stayed out of the War and still profited from it through the Lend-Lease Agreements with the Allies and could have continued supplying the Nazis as a neutral party as well. They entered the war, because their hegemony over the Pacific was threatened by the Japanese and provoked them by freezing Japanese bank accounts in America. What you’re talking about is referred to as military Keneysianism, whi