I stole this juxtaposition from Racialicious.
Category: Injustice
“Being aggressive about fighting crime, that sounds like a good thing.”
When you tell people you’re passing laws to fight child sexual abuse and child pornography, or when you announce that you’re cracking down on sex offenders who are prowling in your neighborhoods, you are picking low-hanging fruit. There is no union for sex offenders. Even the ACLU is leery of going to bat for edge cases of depictions of child sex. So you can get away with a lot by announcing that if we put this in place, there will be no more coddling of these dangerous predators.
Last November the people of Oregon passed Ballot Measure 73, a law enforcing mandatory-minimum sentencing for people committed of displaying a sexually explicit image of a minor. The second offense gets you 25 years, with no allowance for a judge’s opinion in sentencing. I voted against it even before I knew about the story I’m about to tell you, because I have a problem with zero-tolerance policy. It doesn’t permit tolerance.
There are these two kids from Washington County, in the Portland metro area, named Antjuanece Brown and Jolene Jenkins. Brown is 20, Jenkins is 17, and they met about a year ago. They fell in love. They had the misfortune to do so while on the bottom rung of every social ladder: female, gay, black, working-class and, crucially, young.
Naturally it was in the best interests of the citizens of Oregon to throw one of them in jail.
“On Oct. 12, Tigard police arrested Brown on suspicion of creating child porn, for ‘knowingly subjecting’ Jenkins to sexual intercourse and for ‘luring a minor’ by ‘arousing and satisfying’ Jenkins’ ‘sexual desires.’ The evidence? Provocative photos of Jenkins and someone police identified as Brown, plus an exchange of suggestive text messages.
Washington County’s prosecutor blocked release of the evidence. Therefore, it’s not possible to say with precision what the cell phone images show. Jenkins and Brown say they both agreed to the photos. Jenkins called them ‘silly things that all teenagers do.’“
That’s from the Willamette Week cover story “Sext Crimes,” which is how I learned about all this. The pictures weren’t sold or distributed; they were on Jenkins’s cell phone, which her mother turned in to the police. (She hadn’t minded when Jolene dated older boys.) I knew this kind of panic over sexting was a problem in a lot of places, thanks to a combination of clear-eyed legal discussion on the topic by the EFF and hyperbolic, hyperventilating stories published in news media. But the WW article was the sharpest and most personal I’d seen.
Because she didn’t want to risk becoming a registered sex offender, Brown pled guilty to a lesser charge, with a fine and three years’ probation, that still made her a felon. Her family didn’t have the money for bail, so she spent a month behind bars before trial, and she still owes thousands of dollars in court fees. She lost her job and her future career is wrecked. She’s forbidden to have contact with Jenkins until she turns 18.
Most of the time I’m proud of my government in Oregon; I’ve been grateful to see Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley actually vote the way I want in the Senate, and I’m even a fan of mayor Sam Adams, tarnish aside. But I hope Lew Frederick and Chip Shields, my state congressmen, read the letters I’m sending them, because this is unconscionable. Whose life is better for the prosecution of Antjuanece Brown?
I got in touch with Jolene Jenkins through Antjuanece Brown’s lawyer when the Willamette posted her email in a follow-up blurb to the news story. Jolene in turn pointed me to the site she’s created to support Antjuanece and raise the money to pay off her fine and legal fees. I gave what I could because Jolene is doing a good thing there. She used to want to grow up to be a lawyer, though seeing what the legal system did to her girlfriend is making her reconsider. I think that’s a shame.
I hope Jolene does pursue a legal career, and that Antjuanece gets to do social work like she’s wanted to. I hope Jolene and Antjuanece have a happy reunion in July, even if their relationship doesn’t last forever. I mean, why should it? They’re young. They should be allowed to try things, to make mistakes.
Except those photos weren’t a mistake. They were an expression of love between two innocent people. The mistake was that people who had no business seeing them did so, and that Washington County DA Bob Hermann exploited them to screw up somebody’s life so that he could ge re-elected for being Tough On Crime.
The mistake was his, and when we pick low-hanging fruit without considering the consequences, the mistake is ours.
Pathetic
Hey, remember how the Washington Post took down a president thirty-five years ago? They’re still riding on that little laurelmobile, and yet their current policy, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, is to censor themselves based on the likelihood of an argument from the administration. The merit of that argument is never even considered. Cameron W. Barr:
“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding.”
Coates says these are the compromises one makes for a marriage. He’s right, and there was a shotgun-equivalent at the wedding, namely the threat of access withheld. Even Coates’s own house is a bit glassy in this regard, with Atlantic Political Editor Marc Ambinder bouncing around in castles with the Bidens. (Yes, castles. I’m not sure these people know what symbolism is.)
Among the biggest exposés of the past year was Matt Hastings’ infamous McChrystal article, published in Rolling Stone, of all places. Hastings is a freelance reporter whose highest-profile work was in covering the Iraq war for Newsweek, yet his piece ended up in Rolling Stone, which has spent the past decade sucking heartily on anything you have available.
The loudest media reaction to that article was not “oh hey, there’s dissension in the highest ranks of our government about the running of the longest war in American history,” it was “how could he risk losing his access?” When our military actually murders journalists, the people who tell us about it get arrested; meanwhile, news outlets are astonished at the use of journalistic currency to actually do it for a change.
This is the junkie’s mindset–I can’t do anything they wouldn’t like with it, or they might take it away! Access generates pageviews, and pageviews sell ads, and ad sales are an addiction as hard to kick as heroin or oil. This is what I was trying to say in my post about comments last month: a race for the bottom is a race we lose.
More on transparency versus regulation
Aaron Swartz has a better essay than I could have put together on why transparency alone is ineffective and even harmful.
Attention conservation notice
I know I’m kind of harping on this, but I remain really upset and angry about the Citizens United decision, and it would appear I am not alone. Public Citizen and three other organizations have launched Free Speech for People, a campaign to fix the problem, constitutionally or otherwise. Even if you don’t feel like signing their petition or throwing some money at them, they’ve got a blog that I hope will be a good clearinghouse for news on the fight.
Uncle John has made the case that requiring full disclosure of corporate campaign spending would be a good compromise solution–that transparency would allow voters to simply turn away from candidates if they didn’t like where their money was coming from. I respect that opinion, but I really couldn’t disagree more.
We already have disclosure requirements that the decision didn’t affect, and they haven’t yet solved anything. Disclosure didn’t keep Max Baucus from getting the tiller on health care reform after taking four million dollars from the health care industry. It didn’t keep Mitch McConnell from taking three hundred thousand from coal and then, coincidentally, fighting to keep mine owners from having to measure mercury discharge. It’s already a shock when an entrenched politician manages to say a few stern words about a regressive, destructive industrial backer; actual voting that way is unheard of. Doesn’t that indicate our ingrained acceptance that our representatives’ ballots are already purchased?
About half the people who voted against Obama didn’t believe he was born in the United States. A quarter of those, in turn, believed that he was born in Hawaii, but that Hawaii was not a state. What does that mean? That people don’t vote on passive facts; they vote on what they hear and see. Money isn’t speech, it’s volume, and when you turn the volume up too high, it distorts.
I have been sick all week about this
So the Supreme Court made a very bad decision and now we have to deal with the consequences of this inexplicable belief that corporations have a pulse. This gives very rich people the ability to exercise unlimited political influence through partial human beings, using other people’s money. One would think we would have learned that lesson, but no! The right to free speech must be defended, where by “defended” I mean “contorted into hideous shapes.”
This is a nonpartisan issue, kids. No actual human beings are well served by infinite money being poured into politics, which is why even the people who get that money kept trying to make laws against it. If that’s like 535 heroin addicts trying to collectively decide whether to accept, y’know, a bunch of free heroin, then the Citizens United decision is effectively a mandatory heroin prescription that comes with an IV bag and drip stand. Except they’re not ruining their own lives with their addiction; they’re ruining ours.
The only way to legislatively overturn a Supreme Court decision is with a constitutional amendment. I’ve seen that proposed as one route forward, but not very convincingly. I think I have a better one, and what’s more, it’s one that the party (sort of) in power should be familiar with.
Tax campaign contributions and political spending. Tax the living fuck out of them. I’m talking five hundred, six hundred percent. Not on everything–just contributions from corporate general treasury funds, and just the ones that exceed the old McCain-Feingold limits. There’s plenty of precedent: we already do this to discourage behavior we consider legal but harmful, like smoking or self-employment. And one couldn’t very well argue that it restricts “free” “speech,” given that the production and purchase of political news or entertainment are already taxed in all kinds of ways. Want to make it popular? Promise to throw the money raised at the deficit or Social Security or tax breaks for plumbers. You don’t even have to actually do that, guys! Nobody will ever contribute enough to pay the tax unless they get caught cheating.
This is called an economic disincentive. Disincentives are about 80% of the reason government exists. It’s really, really past time we remembered how to create those and use them for good.
I think the engine is on the beach. The metaphor might have gotten away from me here
It really was pretty disorienting last year, having the television tell me that the thing I wanted from politics was actually happening. I didn’t know how to handle it. The guiding keel of my cynicism ran up short on a beach of unexpected joy.
It wasn’t really a beach, of course: it was a sandbar. Now, as we watch the you-know-what bill being painstakingly converted from a mild rebuke for the insurance industry into a roaring engine of fellatio, it’s almost soothing. Yes, yes. This is what it’s supposed to be like.
Warning: religion + politics below
I really liked this. Logic!
“So, is universal health care a religious issue? … I think a church that says yes to this question has two options. Either the church supports a state mandate for health insurance for all, or the church offer to provide health care for those who can’t afford it.”
Jon also introduced me to Dancer in the Dark. Jon likes to hurt me.
Almost exactly three years after I started Sad and Happy Movie Day, Jon and Amanda finally maneuvered me into actually watching Hotel Rwanda. We didn’t even have a happy movie to chase it with, but a couple episodes of Arrested Development made do.
I could have sworn that was Julia Sawalha playing the Red Cross worker, but IMDB says I am wrong. Dang. Oh, also the world is going to burn and we all deserve it.
We’ve officially been in Louisville long enough to hit a residency landmark: The Favorite Restaurant That Always Seems Packed But Now It’s Closing. That’s right. The Mayan Gypsy is going away in a little over two weeks, and the world will be poorer.
To get in while we can, Maria and I are telling you to come eat with us there at 6 pm EST this Sunday, June 25th. Update: Not Sunday, they’re not open on Sunday. Monday? Call, email or comment if you want in on our reservation. We’ll get corn cakes and chocolate. I envision a pitcher of sangria and an 18% gratuity. Walls will tumble. Men will die.