Reading Democracy in America: That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal 11-1-2010 (2)

 [Continued from Reading Democracy in America: That Manners Are Softened As Social Conditions Become More Equal 11-1-2010 (1). sch 7/22/23].

It could well be that the computer age has made many sorts of bad behavior easier to accomplish thanks to the anonymity of the internet. The issue then becomes how do we deal with this problem? At my sentencing, there existed a too easy correlation between talk and action. [Enough of the former, none of the latter. sch 7/23/23.] I agree with my sentencing judge that my talk might create an atmosphere of r others to act. I did not think this at the time - I was too bent on my self-destructive path. Looking back, I think there is a place for pressure to be brought that can change online behavior. - a reminder that there are real life consequences for online blather. [Typing this with the news on, I wonder what the January 6 defendants think now of their online behavior: do they see now that online life is not reality and real life requires payment for online born irresponsibility? sch 7/23/23.] There must be government engagement with online communities. Except that the government relies more on punishment than on education. Meanwhile, the online world carries on thinking this is a self-contained game - that no one takes online behavior seriously enough to take real world action. [Oh, boy, did I ever get that wrong. Which probably says more about my own tunnel vision, or the premises of my own behavior, but hindsight is always 20/20. Now, looking back to January 6, 2021 and before that to some people I met in prison, I know there are people who do think their internet fever dreams correspond to the real world. Pizzagate comes to mind as much as anything when I say mental health is an American problem. Yes, there are people who are taking what I call internet BS rather seriously.  sch 7/23/23.]

Another idea: could our love for vindictive justice be an excess of Anglophilia? We tried to emulate the English for too much, particularly during the Victorian Era. We took on the idea of Austin's theory about law as an order from the authority in charge, without noticing the difference between the English and American governments. The people are the source of authority for American governments. Our constitutions are the law the people put over their authority and, therefore, their government. I used to get so annoyed when some lame brain reporter talked or wrote about a legal technicality, setting free some criminal defendant. When our constitutions are to protect our lives, liberty and pursuits of happiness, calling those laws a technicality denigrates our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Such thinking endangers this country.

Or did Tocqueville miss the mark about American bloodthirstiness? The government described me as a predator-in-waiting. Which seemed without any basis in fact, while quite grounded in a prosecutorial need for a monster needing killed. Except this was a representative of the American people. He got me wondering about myself. Was the fool talking trash on yahoo the real me, or was what came of out of the AUSA's mouth? I am certain whatever audience he played to relished this vindication of their fears. It would seem to me, our high-mindedness about the law masks a frightened, barbarous citizenry smitten with capital punishment, three-strikes laws, and mandatory minimum sentencing. In bashing, smashing criminals there is felt a certainty when it is only a false security.

Or maybe our national bloodlust masks something else. What if underneath lurks a great national cowardice about facing the failures of American culture and society? People here mutter threats, mistaking us for something else, failing to notice their own immorality is in question. Drug dealers, whose incarceration the public thinks will rid the country of drug addicts. Drug dealers do not see themselves as causing the problem of addicts, and the public fails to ask why Americans want the escape of drugs. We like our victims, they make good newspaper copy, lurid TV shows. We have become a nation with a creed of victimhood, small children crying over a stubbed toe, whiners awaiting someone bigger to give them back their lollipop.

I think some sense can be made of the Yahoo chat rooms (the place I had the most experience) by replacing "aristocrats" with the denizens of those chat rooms in the following:

...Amongst an aristocratic people each caste has its own opinions, feelings, rights, manners, and modes of living. Thus the men of whom each caste is composed do not resemble the mass of their fellow-citizens; they do not think or feel in the same manner, and they scarcely believe that they belong to the same human race. They cannot, therefore, thoroughly understand what others feel, nor judge of others by themselves....

The online world needs reminding they also belong to real world communities and their online activities have consequences in the real world.

sch

[Jan. 6 sentences are piling up. Here’s a look at some of the longest handed down. sch 7/23/23.

 7/24: 40 years ago, the US started sending more and more kids to prison without hope of release, but today, it’s far more rare – what happened?  

Nevertheless, a sea change has taken place in legal thinking, as psychologists have argued that teenagers are less culpable than adults because of the nature of adolescents’ brains.

Starting in the 2000s, the U.S. Supreme Court began to acknowledge that child offenders are different from adults. In 2005, the court banned the death penalty for people under 18, and in 2010 outlawed life sentences for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide offenses.

Two years later, in Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that, even in homicide cases, mandatory sentences of life without parole for minors violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” The justices did not ban life sentences completely, however – simply mandatory sentencing laws that require them for juvenile homicide offenders, without consideration of the particular mitigating factors of each case.

In each of these decisions, the Supreme Court recognized that a lack of brain development makes adolescents, even those who commit serious and violent offenses, less culpable and more capable of change than adults. In Miller v. Alabama, the court emphasized that teenagers are impulsive, cannot escape abusive home environments, cannot properly assist their attorneys and have inherent capacity for rehabilitation.

Maybe we can be better to some of our criminals. sch 7/24.]