Category: Justice

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Governor George Ryan of Illinois

One of the most amazing news stories of the past few years is the story of Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan. Apparently Ryan is about to issue pardons for all of the inmates on death row in Illinois. If you’re like me, you have to read that twice to believe it, in this era of hardline punishment freaks. Yes, a Republican governor is going to issue a blanket commutation for the death sentences of 156 inmates.

Ryan has been investigating the investigations of these men for about two years, ever since it was discovered that a substantial number of them were wrongfully convicted. A law professor in Chicago had made it a personal hobby to reinvestigate capital cases and had remarkable success in showing police incompetence, brutality, and deceit in these cases. After looking at all of them closely, Ryan simply lost confidence in the system. He didn’t believe that he could believe, with any degree of certainty, that any of the men it was his job to have executed was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of.

In spite of my sympathy for their losses, I always find it repulsive when the families of a murder victim express their horror, shock, and dismay, that they won’t get to see the murderer fry. There are loads of euphemisms for that desire– one of the ugliest and dumbest is the word “closure”– but it always strikes me as nothing more than a passionate desire to do unto the perpetrator the very horror he has visited upon us, and that is illogical. Murder is horrible and evil and obscene, and the evil that it does to us is not undone by repeating the action.

It is undone by acts like those of George Ryan, which show that occasionally we humans can be better than murderers.

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Those Crazy Finns!

While the rest of the world…. well, while the West…. er… while the United States has come to it’s senses and has stopped molly-coddling criminals and has given up the utopian myth of rehabilitation, those crazy Finns are practically letting their criminals off scot free.

If I were President Bush, I would add them to the “axis of evil”. There is no greater threat to the American way of life than cool calm reason and enlightened self-interest. Damn them all! Damn them to hell!

You see, those crazy Finns have the lowest rate of incarceration in Europe. For every 100,000 people, they keep about 52 in jail! Fifty-two! By golly, the Americans know how to get rid of crime! They keep about 750 people in jail for the same 100,000 citizens. And it ought to be more, by golly, because we still have lots of crime out there in the streets.

And do you know what their prisons are like? Do they make up for the light sentences and the easy parole by exacting harsher punishments in shorter periods of time? Force labour?  Floggings?  Solitary confinement?  Not a chance! Their prisons are like dormitories, their guards are unarmed, and the the prisoners are sometimes referred to as “clients”.

Are they mad?

The Finns were not always so crazy. Back in the 1950’s, they were pretty well like everyone else in “civilized” Europe. But the crime rate was high and there was lots of prison violence and escapes and stuff. They didn’t like it. Do you know what the fools did? More of the same, like the Americans? No, no, no. They consulted the “experts”. Right. The eggheads. The nerds. Those pinko eastern liberal establishment types. And you know what they recommended? They recommended that the prison system be structured to rehabilitate rather than punish! God help us, Satan has taken over the government!

Naturally, the general population was outraged and demanded a return to capital punishment.

Well, no, they didn’t.

They said, okay, let’s try it. Fortunately the results proved the folly of their ways. The crime rate went down and the prison population went down and there was less violence in prison and fewer escapes. Wait a minute…

Even the Finns admit that their approach might not work in the U.S. For one thing, you have the victims of crimes who demand brutal retribution for offenses committed against them. Apparently those push-over Finns get compensated for crimes by the government, and kind of pathetically chill out, and seem to take the view that the long range health of their society is more important than any personal satisfaction to be gained by seeking revenge. Oh the godlessness of it all!

Let us hope that the Soviet Union (over 600 individuals imprisoned for every 100,000 population) invades them soon to knock a little sense into their crazy little heads. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be likely that a vicious crime wave will come along and sweep the public up into a new frenzy of paranoia and hysteria. You see, it seems that the crime rate is way down. Rehabilitation seems to actually work.

Not as much fun as sending someone to prison for fifty years for stealing a box of cookies, is it?

We know one thing. The Finns must be godless, because it is the Christian Right that leads the charge for stiffer sentencing in the U.S. Something about someone’s traditional family values.

Or just hatred. I don’t know.

Danish incarceration rate: 52
American incarceration rate: 750
(per 100,000 population)

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Heartless Merciless Bastards

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states. New York Times, December 28, 2002

In the 1990’s, the Christian government of the United States put its heart into getting “tough on crime”, because they loved everyone. One of the things they did was pass a law that deprives convicted criminals of access to social programs intended to help people trapped in the cycle of poverty and social dysfunction.

Well, who are they intended to help? I don’t know. The U.S. government often acts as if it should be a crime to be poor, period. But let’s think about this. Most robberies are committed by people who need money. Most people who need money are poor. If a poor person commits a crime, steals money, because, after all, they have none, then let’s make sure they are always poor.

Not that welfare amounts to anything that could be interpreted as helping anyone get out of poverty in the first place, of course. But the logic is clear. The way to get rid of poverty is not by sharing the fabulous wealth most of us possess, or by making it easier for the poor to access education and social services, but by making your life on earth as hellish as possible, and one of the things we can do to ensure that is to make sure that you will never get any help again if you steal once.

States can opt out of the lifetime ban on welfare, but only two, New York and Connecticut, have.

The law is the brainchild of former Senator Phil Gramm, now vice chairman of UBS Warbuck, the investment bank. Well, we knew he wasn’t going to join Habitat for Humanity after his little lucrative stay in the Senate. It’s payback time for Mr. Gramm. After years of passing laws that are monumentally beneficial to the rich and to corporate interests, the corporate interests have put him more directly on their payroll. And it’s probably cheaper for them than it was when they had to contribute to his election campaigns instead to keep him in servitude.

In many states, convicted felons are barred from jobs like plumbing, teaching, health care, or security. I’m not making this up. In Pennsylvania, theft of two library books is sufficient to ban you for life from working in a nursing home. A man who was convicted of possession of marijuana (and received probation) when he was 18 recently discovered that, after 30 years of working in the health care field, he could not get a new job in the same field because of that previous conviction.

This is because our leaders love Jesus.

“The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States, according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.”

[2011-03: that figure is now 10%]

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The Decline of Violent Crime

In 1963, the City of New York had 25,500 police officers, and a murder rate of less than 600 a year. In the mid 1980s, the murder rate about 2,200 a year. Today, for the first time in almost 40 years, the murder rate will be below 600. The number of police officers: 38,000. The number of 911 calls on an average day: 1,000. What are the other 37,000 officers doing? I don’t know.

Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Why is there a huge decline in the murder rate? Did people become good? Have we executed enough criminals now that we are finally safe? Has all that harsh law and order finally started to have a beneficial effect?  Abortions?

The murder rate increased in connection with the widespread distribution of drugs. But drugs don’t cause crime. They don’t. Drugs cause people to waste their lives, and they cause people to do stupid things, and they are addictive, but there is no particular reason why someone using drugs would be more criminal-minded than, say, the CEO of Enron corporation.

But when drugs are illegal, and the cost to an addict increases to a preposterous amount, and the drug trade is hugely profitable because of the high prices caused by interdiction, crime will increase because of the illegality of drugs.

The truth is that drugs are not illegal in America. They are practically obligatory. Prozac, Lithium, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil– you name it, you need it. The difference is that some drugs are not patented. Like marijuana, hashish, opium, and cocaine. So drug companies cannot profit from them by providing exclusive access to them. So they must be illegal.

I’ve already made my arguments for legalizing drugs. What I’m concerned with here is that New York’s murder rate is down to about the lowest number it’s been in 40 years. So if you believe that the world is rapidly heading to hell in a hand basket, and that our morally bankrupt nation is sliding into a hellhole of perdition and depravity, you’ll have to explain why it doesn’t show up in the murder rate.

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Hurricane Carter

Hazel Tanis, who survived the shooting for 27 days, looked through police mug shots and picked out two men., Walther Rhiels and Charles Gilbert. She helped police create a composite drawing of one suspect, whom some claim looks like Artis. The logic here is inescapable. Confronted with photographs, Tanis did not identify Carter or Artis. She identified someone else. The drawing could not be accurate if it looks more like Artis than Rhiels and Gilbert.

What is the best evidence here? That it was not Carter or Artis.

Haggins — they used hypnosis and lie detectors. Haggins’ evidence is now worthless as a result.

If the police really believe that the lie-detector tests showed that Carter and Artis were the shooters, why did they release them? Why didn’t they obtain a search warrant (using the other “compelling” evidence to get the warrant)? Why didn’t they interview the witnesses at the Nite Spot the night of the killing, when the stories were least likely to be shaped by subsequent issues?

The ammunition recovered from the car– was not properly vouchered with the police property clerk until five days afterwards. Five days! The police claim that witnesses can fill in the five day period with some kind of reconstructed chain of possession. Why would they need to? We require the police to follow certain procedures to ensure that evidence is not planted or manipulated to fit the suspect. When the police fail, through sheer incompetence, to perform these duties to a minimal level of professionalism, we throw the evidence out. Some day, we might learn to fire or train the police officers as well. In the meantime, we throw that evidence into the garbage because it is valueless.

From the prosecution’s Response to Judge Sorokin’s Reversal:

“Rubin Carter’s car was quite distinctive. It was all white. It was shiny and new.” (And it went “beep, beep”.) It is ridiculous, in the totality of the evidence, to suggest that two cars looking like this car traveled down 12th Avenue within a minute or two of one another.

All right. Go drive to a commercial district in your local town at 3:00 a.m. Watch the cars go by. How many similar cars can you see?

Criticism of polygraphs is nothing new, according to Brandeis University professor Leonard Saxe, who served as a staff member of the Polygraph Validity Advisory Panel, created by Congress in 1983. The panel concluded that polygraphs’ ability to detect lies was only slightly better than random chance, and that errors were possible. In 1998, the panel’s findings were cited in a U.S. Supreme Court case, United States vs. Scheffer, as support for the conclusion that “to this day, the scientific community remains extremely polarized about the reliability of polygraph techniques.” The American Medical Association says that more research is needed, and until additional studies are completed, testing “shouldn’t be undertaken in the private or public sector.”

From http://www.graphicwitness.com/carter/lietest.html

Note:  Carter was driving a White 1966 Dodge Polara.

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“Recovered” Memories

Feldman-Summers, S., & Pope, K. S. (1994). The experience of “forgetting” childhood abuse: A national survey of psychologists. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 636-639.

Abstract: “A national sample of psychologists were asked whether they had been abused as children and, if so, whether they had ever forgotten some or all of the abuse. Almost a quarter of the sample (23.9%) reported childhood abuse, and of those, approximately 40% reported a period of forgetting some or all of the abuse. The major findings were that (a) both sexual and nonsexual abuse were subject to periods of forgetting; (b) the most frequently reported factor related to recall was being in therapy; (c) approximately one half of those who reported forgetting also reported corroboration of the abuse; and (d) reported forgetting was not related to gender or age of the respondent but was related to severity of the abuse.”

This passes for scientific research? It is taken from http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/#bc, a website dedicated to “proving” that memories of traumatic childhood experiences can be recovered.

If you believe that there is scientific evidence in support of “recovered” memories, you ought to read this paragraph very carefully. This is what is passed off as “scientific” proof. A poll of psychologists asking them if they had been abused as children and then if they had repressed the memories of it and then if they felt it was corroborated.

In other words, can you “remember” being abused as a child, and did you lose the memory of it. In other words:

Do you have faith in God above?
If the bible tells you so.

Now, the writers of this hoax are dimly aware of the issue here, so they ask how many of these psychologists who remember that they didn’t remember they were sexually abused “recovered” their memories in therapy? And how many now claim that they can corroborate the abuse? This article doesn’t detail the nature of “corroboration”, but we can imagine. Well, we can, but we shouldn’t, I suppose. By “corroboration”, they could mean… well, what could they mean? Other than some kind of confirmation from a non-witness– since the abuse is almost never witnessed– or by someone else who was also abused by the same person, which is not corroboration by any definition of the word. (In fact, in how many cases did they hear the alleged corroboration first, and perhaps were moved to “remember” that they too were victims?)

There is no record of anyone producing any kind of physical evidence in support of the recovered memories. There is a lot of evidence of “recovered” memories that were demonstrably false. There is a lot of evidence that the human mind is exceptionally creative when it comes to memory, combining them or altering them in amazing ways.  There is lots of evidence that human memory is subject to suggestion and manipulation.

Partisans would argue that it’s because of the nature of the crime– there never is physical evidence. There are just these long-suppressed memories.

The fact that 56% of these people “recovered” their memories in therapy, of course, is highly suspect. First of all, we’re dealing with psychologists here. These are people who already have faith, presumably, in psychology, and the various beliefs, structures, and assumptions common to the practice of psychology. A keystone of Freud’s theories is “repression”: memories of traumatic events are buried somewhere in our psyche but can be “recovered” through psychoanalysis.  Memories are like a tape recording: once found, they are an accurate record of what happened.  More recent research shows that this is patently false.

In other words, that there is such a thing as an unconscious, and a location for things that are repressed, and such a thing as repression. Maybe they all read “Sybil”, which, for a time, was the bible of hack psychology.

It’s like asking people if they believe in angels. You have to choose only people who also believe in the bible. If they say yes, you proceed to ask them if they have ever met one. I’ll bet 25% of that group have, in one form or another. An angel, for example, saved me from a serious car accident by waking me up when I was falling asleep on the freeway. That may sound strange to you, but a lot of people out there believe that such things really happen.

So a lot of psychologists, in therapy– with a psychologist, presumably– are led to “recover” memories of abuse which, apparently, they had repressed. So how do they know these memories are valid?

The study looks at corroboration, which consists of:

  • people who knew about the abuse confirmed it
  • someone else reported abuse by the same perpetrator (if you know someone who was robbed, does that mean that the robber probably robbed you as well?)
  • The abusers acknowledged some or all of the abuse. (I’d like to hear that conversation.)

None of this is really scientific by any stretch of the imagination. You just have to have a lot of questions about a person who “knew” about the abuse confirming it. How did they know? What did they really know? What kind of conversation led to this disclosure?

On to another facet:

Just as technology evolves, social consciousness and hence the definition of academic freedom is evolving. And this is coming about as people, particularly members of less powerful groups, speak. Dr. Jill Vickers, a Professor at Carlton, for example, recently “urged CAUT to come to grips with and to understand how the principles of academic freedom and institutional authority, ideas that legitimize the university, can also be used to perpetuate the status quo and sustain those who are more powerful and privileged – in most cases white males” (Riseborough, 1993). Along similar lines, UNESCO is currently reviewing an international proposal regarding academic freedom (International Conference of University Teachers’ Organizations, 1993). The text of this proposal makes it clear that there can be no academic freedom without social responsibility.

by Connie M. Kristiansen, Carleton University, Newsletter of the Section on Women and Psychology, Vol 20, No 2, page 7-16.

Read that chilling line again: “There can be no academic freedom without social responsibility”. Sound like an old communist plot? It’s a feminist plot, however, aimed at those would deny that memories can be repressed and then “recovered”.  Who believe that there is such a thing as a false allegation.

It’s idiotic, to be blunt. Free inquiry should be suppressed in the name of a greater social good, which is, to be able to expose the institutionalized oppression of women that is so pervasive and encompassing that women are justified in suppressing freedom of speech in order to fight it.

If I have to explain why that’s a bad idea, I’d have to admit that our society is hopelessly ignorant about the fundamental basis of freedom, democracy, and human rights. It probably is.

And if radical feminists are so stupid as to believe that this very weapon, the suppression of free and open discussion and deliberation, is not sure to be turned and used against them in the future, as it has been in the past, then they are greater fools than even I imagined.

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Lie Detectors Lie

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard some prosecutor or detective or lawyer tell us that someone is a suspect for a particular crime because he failed a lie detector test, I’d be rich.

But the truth is, according to a panel appointed by National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, lie detector tests are worthless. Actually, it’s worse than that. They are worse than worthless.

Just how useless are they? If you took a sample company or organization of 10,000 employees, of which 10 were spies or saboteurs, and you required every one of the them to take a lie-detector test, you would have 1,606 suspects.

That narrows it down considerably.

Two of the 10 spies will have escaped detection completely. There is no way to distinguish the 8 remaining genuine spies from the 1,598 innocent employees. Among the 2 would be the infamous mole Aldrich Ames who passed twice.

This study did not take into account the fact that when evil corporations or governments realize that all employees are being screened with a polygraph, they can actually do their own screening and train their spies to pass the polygraph.

The “lie detector”, of course, doesn’t actually detect lies. It records various bodily functions like respiration, blood pressure, and sweating. The “expert” polygraph administrator (like an “expert” witch doctor) calibrates the responses by comparing the results to those obtained from known factual truths.

As any amateur would guess, it is quite possible for a nervous, upset, or annoyed employee to “fail” the test simply because he is nervous, upset, or annoyed, as I would be if my employer demanded that I participate in this exercise of quackery.

There is no such thing as a lie detector. Polygraph examinations don’t work. Forget about it.

In Fort Jackson, N.C., your Department of Defense has a “Polygraph Institute”, where expensive and useless research is conducted into this joke.

I’ll bet you’d be really upset if those dollars ended up going to welfare mothers instead. The army would probably argue that some day the lie detector might work. As might the welfare mother, but I think her odds are better.

I believe the police understand that lie-detectors don’t work. They certainly know that you can’t use the results of a lie-detector test in court. So why do it? It seems obvious: to intimidate suspects. It is not all that unusual in cases of wrongful convictions to find that the police actually told the suspect that he might as well come clean because the lie-detector showed that he was lying.

It also seems likely that some suspects will be spooked enough by the process to simply confess.

And we also know that some suspects will actually believe the lie-detector over their own memory. They will actually make a false confession.

2011-06-06

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Your Fingerprints: Junk Science

When we were little children watching police shows like “The FBI” and “Adam-12” on TV, we became convinced, along with everyone else, that if a criminal’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, it was case closed, proof-positive, open and shut.

Why? Because no two fingerprints, in the entire world, could be alike. How did we know that? How did we know that that was true? Because everyone acted as it it was true. Everyone acted as if no two fingers in the entire world could have matching patterns on them. Everyone acted as if this was the product of years of sound, thorough research conducted by revered scientists.

It is very odd, then, to discover, that there might never have been a good reason for believing that the evidentiary value of fingerprints has ever been established with any kind of scientific rigor. There really is no body of systematic research or scientific proof that fingerprints really are unique to each individual, at least, not in the way the movies and television would have you believe. In other words, nobody has ever systematically compared fingerprints to each other to establish just what the odds are that any two, from perfect strangers, might match.

In 1995, a proficiency test was administered to 156 law enforcement examiners. These are the guys called in to court to testify that the suspect’s prints — don’t forget, we could be talking about Lee Harvey Oswald here, among others– were found on the murder weapon, or a door knob, or a table surface, or something. Only 44% of these “experts” could correctly identify all five of a set of test prints. Read that again: less than half of the “experts” were proficient. And again: half of these guys got at least one of the prints wrong, out of five. Twenty percent. One in five.

I don’t know the details of the test, but I do know that the people who administered it considered the performance of half the experts to be inadequate and unreliable.

What has happened is that the Supreme Court of the United States has recently made some rulings that require courts to establish that “scientific evidence” really is scientific before it is allowed in the courtroom. What you have to imagine is some “expert” talking in obscure, difficult language about some scientific information which the jury doesn’t understand. The jury takes the guy’s word for it. The jury figures that the “expert” knows. The jury figures that he wouldn’t be testifying this way if he didn’t have a solid body of research and knowledge behind him. Think about fiber and hair analysis. Think about fingerprints. Think about those difficult cases where the prosecution actually has very little evidence so they scrounge around for “matching” fibers and hairs and semen and spots of blood. We have been trained by television and the movies to regard such evidence as definitive and decisive. Now we are beginning to know that such evidence can be constructed around a suspicion.

In France, 16 points of similarity, between fingerprints, are required before a “match” can be asserted. In Sweden, the number is 7. The FBI, in the U.S., won’t tell us how many it considers decisive. The FBI says it decides on a case by case basis. I thought that justice is exactly the opposite of that. Blind and impartial. Consistent. The FBI says, “trust me”. I wish I could.  Science does not provide standards that apply on a “case by case” basis.

Our system of justice– adversarial– encourages both sides to become advocates for their clients’ interests, rather than the truth. The police don’t just present facts– they invest in the suspect’s guilt, and advocate for it, and do whatever they feel needs to be done to “win” their case. It is apparent that often they feel that they know who did it– they just need to muster the facts necessary for a conviction. They sometimes regard the law as an impediment to justice.

They almost never willingly admit a mistake, even when DNA analysis proves they were wrong.

Occasionally, it is clear, they manufacture the “facts”. An expert, for example, will testify that a fiber found in the suspect’s car exactly matches a fiber taken from the victim’s sweater. So how do you assess the real degree of similarity, and the real likelihood that these fibers could have matched fibers from almost anyone else’s sweater? The lab is not presented with five samples and five potential matching fragments of evidence, and then asked to identify which ones match. They are presented with a set of fibres from the suspects home or clothing, and a set of fibres found at the crime scene. Do they match, yes or no? If no matches are found, we’ll find more fibres, and then more. The lab technician knows that the police will be happier if a match is found.

A suspect’s car– or any car– is loaded with smells, particles, dust, fragments of things, scraps of paper, coffee stains, oil and grease, residues, maybe even bodily fluids. If you took thousands of samples of every substance in a any car, how hard would it be to find something– anything– that matches something that can be linked to a victim– any victim? I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard at all.  Look at the Azaria Chamberlain case.

The Supreme Court is right. We should demand very high standards of “expert” testimony, before allowing smooth-talking partisan professionals to try to bowl over a jury with analysis that might well be nothing more than “junk science”.

Random Notes:

Until the 1880’s, the commonly accepted “age of consent” in America was 11.

2011-06: in the case of Casey Anthony, the prosecution is actually presenting “evidence” that traces of the smell of a decomposing body can be detected and analyzed from the trunk of Ms. Anthony’s car. This has all the hallmarks of the good old fibre analysis presented at so many cases by discredited forensic “scientists” in the past.

I hope her defense attorney has the intelligence to ask the prosecution to produce evidence of the smells of hundreds of cars compared to the smell captured from Ms. Anthony’s car and then have the “expert” blindly identify which one had the body in it.

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Mel Lastman and the Bikers

Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino nearly had a fit when he heard that Mayor Mel Lastman went down to a local hotel that was hosting a biker’s convention and shook hands with a member of a motorcycle gang.

Didn’t he know, by golly, that these bikers are criminals? What the hell was he doing shaking hands and smiling with a gang of known felons?

My question is, what was Julian Fantino doing sitting on his duff while known criminals were frequenting a Toronto bar? Why didn’t he get into his new police helicopter, race down to the hotel, and arrest them? Quick– before they hurt the mayor!

Possibly because the police didn’t happen to have any evidence that any one of these particular persons shaking the hands of the mayor had actually committed a crime.

In other words, these were merely unsavory characters, with whom respectable men– like Julian Fantino– would never associate.

Fantino knows that some members of biker gangs commit crimes. He also knows very well that some do not, just as we know that not all business executives cheat and lie and then sell off their stocks and retire with millions in ill-gotten gains. But I’ll bet Mayor Lastman doesn’t get any flack for shaking hands with Enron executives.

Mel Lastman should never have apologized. He should have said, look Fantino, if you have evidence that these people committed crimes, go ahead and arrest them. If you don’t, then respect the fact that like any other citizen they are entitled to the assumption of innocence, and to visit our fair city and spend their tourist dollars here like any other tourist.

The image of a supposedly respectable public person shaking hands with a felon, though, calls to mind an image from last year: Margaret Thatcher embracing Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator and torturer-general.

I don’t care if you call it “stereo-typing” or “profiling” or any other euphemism for prejudice. It’s wrong. Fantino is the one who should apologize. His statement is the one that should be garnering loads of disapproval from the so-called liberal media.

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Give Peace a Chance

There was a moment a few years ago when some Republican leaders in Florida came to a startling realization.

As Republicans they held two cardinal values. Well, “cardinal” to Republicans. Firstly, they were in favor of small government, efficient, and free of wasteful extravagance. Secondly, they were strongly in favor of an effective, strict criminal justice system that promoted law and order and reduced crime.

The realization that they came to was that the same strict law-and-order platform they espoused was at odds with their first goal– small and efficient government. They realized that throwing hundreds and thousands of teenaged hoodlums into jail for long sentences without possibility of early parole or rehabilitation was actually costing the government a lot more money than… gasp… prevention programs.

What they realized was that a relatively small amount of money invested in youth programs in the inner city would actually have the effect of reducing the number of youths that would proceed into a life of crime and violence. It would also thereby reduce the costs of policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, by a very substantial amount. They came to this conclusion on the basis of solid research conducted by– gasp– intellectuals with college degrees.

So these Republicans found themselves in the odd position of advocating greater spending on social programs and prevention– Democrat icons– in order to further their goal of smaller, more efficient government.

They were far-sighted and wise. They foresaw a win-win situation: less crime, and more opportunity for the poor in their community. They were willing to re-examine dogmatic belief in the light of scientific evidence.

National governments today spend over $800 billion on defense. They spend about $10 billion on the primary tool of averting wars, the United Nations.

The Republicans have worked very hard to demonize the United Nations over the past few years. They claim that it is a bloated bureaucracy–which it is–and that it is inefficient and works against the interests of the United States.

What they really see is that the United Nations tries to work in the interests of all peoples of the planet, and that sometimes means that the U.S. is called upon to share, and Republicans don’t want to share. They don’t want to share the fish in the sea, or the profits of pharmaceutical corporations or the responsibility of reducing global warming. They do want to share in the profits to be made by selling weapons to antagonists in local conflicts. They don’t even hesitate to sell land-mines which, more often than not, end up harming civilians rather than soldiers. Thousands and thousands of children. Children with missing limbs. Bill Clinton wanted to sign the International Land Mine Treaty. The Republicans, with a majority in Congress, blocked him.

But these Republicans in Miami realized that their long-range goals are best served with foresight and planning, and with consideration of the causes of the problems they mean to address.

Why is this lesson so hard to absorb on a national level? These terrorists are global thugs and our immediate reaction is to demand death, or long prison sentences. We launch a military attack which, in substance if not formal organization, is similar to the action that provoked it. We bomb the hell out of them.

If we keep waiting for more terrorist attacks and then simply retaliate and punish, not only will we have the very thing we are trying to stamp out– as every retaliation provides righteous fodder for the next generation of suicide bombers– but we will increase it, and it will cost us more and more to deal with.

The United Nations is the world’s inner-city program. It should be funded. It’s not perfect, but it does better than most people think it does. We don’t keep statistics on wars prevented but the truth is that the world is a far more peaceful place today than it used to be. The United Nations should be empowered. It should be employed to resolve the issues that give rise to terrorism. The U.S. will have to change it’s tack from “how can we directly benefit” to “how can we reduce the global tensions and economic disparities that give rise to insurgencies and terrorist acts”.

Redneck America scoffs: what we need to do is kill them all. If you want Ireland or the Middle East, you shall have it. But if the real goal is to reduce terrorism, to reduce death and destruction and violence, we have to follow the path of the British, who decided 20 years ago that the only way to bring an end to violence in Northern Ireland was to end the cycle of attack and retaliation and bring the interested parties to the negotiating table.

And every cop knows that the first step to preventing trouble is to win the trust and respect of the people who might or might not eventually go on to make trouble. The U.S. has to show Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt that it can develop new policies in the region that are principled and fair, and that don’t always only benefit themselves. Step #1 is that Israel must be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, not because they are wrong or because they are at fault or because they are bullies– they might or might not be all of these– but because it is the only way to begin to resolve the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinian issue is at the heart of most conflicts between Islamic fundamentalists and the west.

The U.S. must also review it’s relationships with Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Those nations need to gradually incorporate more democratic elements into their governments or they will eventually be over-thrown by militant Islamic fundamentalists, as Iran was. Most of the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. There is serious resentment in the Moslem world over the conspicuous U.S. presence in this nation that is custodian to the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

The sanctions against Iraq should end. Saddam Hussein, though vilified by the U.S. media, is really no better or worse than most of the other leaders of nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria.