{"id":7553,"date":"2014-11-28T15:58:09","date_gmt":"2014-11-28T15:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/11\/28\/spengler-on-the-criminal-rights-movement\/"},"modified":"2014-11-28T15:58:09","modified_gmt":"2014-11-28T15:58:09","slug":"spengler-on-the-criminal-rights-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/11\/28\/spengler-on-the-criminal-rights-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Spengler’ on the Criminal Rights Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

David P. Goldman<\/a> talks sense about Ferguson and the liberal-left threat to civil society and the rule of law:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The argument of what now might be termed a \u201ccriminals\u2019 rights movement\u201d is that the police should not have the right to use force against felons whose crimes do not reach a certain threshold. What that threshold might be seems clear from the repeated characterization of Brown as an \u201cunarmed black teenager.\u201d Unless violent felons use deadly weapons, it appears, the police should not be allowed to use force.<\/span><\/p>\n

To restate the \u201ccivil rights\u201d argument in a clearer way: Young black men are disproportionately imprisoned. One in three black men<\/a> have gone to prison at some time in their life. According to the ACLU<\/a>, one in fifteen black men are incarcerated, vs. one in 106 white men. That by itself is proof of racism; the fact that these individuals were individually prosecuted for individual crimes has no bearing on the matter. All that matters is the outcome. Because the behavior of young black men is not likely to change, what must change is the way that society recognizes crime itself. The answer is to remove stigma of crime attached to certain behavior, for example, physical altercations, petty theft, and drug-dealing on a certain scale. The former civil rights movement no longer focuses its attention on supposedly ameliorative social spending, for example, preschool programs for minority children, although these remain somewhere down the list in the litany of demands. What energizes and motivates the movement is the demand that society redefine deviancy to exclude certain classes of violent as well as non-violent felonies.<\/span><\/p>\n

The logic  of the criminals\u2019 rights movement is as clear as it is crazy: Because the outcome<\/em> of the criminal justice system disproportionately penalizes African-Americans, the solution is to decriminalize behavior that all civilized countries have suppressed and punished since the dawn of history.  Because felonious behavior is so widespread and the causes of it so intractable, the criminals\u2019 rights movement insists, society \u201ccannot afford to recognize\u201d criminal behavior below a certain threshold.<\/span><\/p>\n

If America were to accept this logic, civil society would come to an end. The state would abandon its monopoly of violence to street rule. Large parts of America would come to resemble the gang-ruled, lawless streets of Central America, where violent pathology has overwhelmed the state\u2019s capacity to control it, creating in turn a nightmare for America\u2019s enforcement of its own immigration law.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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David P. Goldman talks sense about Ferguson and the liberal-left threat to civil society and the rule of law: The argument of what now might be termed a \u201ccriminals\u2019 rights movement\u201d is that the police should not have the right to use force against felons whose crimes do not reach a certain threshold. What that … Continue reading “‘Spengler’ on the Criminal Rights Movement”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}