Process
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Highlights
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But I’ve always been really intrigued by the fact that the victims’ rights movement touted the criminal process as one big process of healing. Those of us who’ve worked in the system know it’s anything but healing. If the victim wants the perpetrator put in jail, that’s what you get. But in order for the state to be able to deprive someone of liberty and cage them, there needs to be a process, right? There needs to be proof. In a rape case, the main proof is the testimony of the woman. So anybody who’s ever been subjected to cross-examination knows this is exhausting, depressing, hard stuff. You have a person, a trained lawyer, basically trying to show a group of people that you are a liar, that you don’t remember, that you aren’t credible. To me, that is the antithesis of what somebody needs to heal. But that’s also the best system we have, the only system we have to protect defendants against just willy-nilly being jailed by the government. So the thought that this process could be a win-win situation for victims was always fraught, but that’s how it’s been sold. If something happens to you, here’s what you need: you need this really exhausting, long-drawn-out process where you are interfacing a lot with men, right? Male police officers who may or may not believe you, who may be patronizing to you, or they may or may not treat you in the same way. There are overworked prosecutors. Maybe you’ll have a victim advocate on your side. But this is going to be exhausting. People are going to put you under a microscope. And at the end of it, what you might get is somebody else having their liberty deprived. And that’s what we’re promising you as healing. That always seemed a little bit odd to me.
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if these crimes occur because people have disproportionate amounts of power and wealth, and if people are victimized in part because they don’t have power and wealth, one of the things we need to be doing is thinking about, well, what are the changes in the structure of power and wealth that would prevent these kinds of things from happening in the first place? So a workplace in which there is one guy at the top and everyone around him is a sycophant, and he can do whatever he likes, versus perhaps a unionized workplace, right, where complaints are taken seriously, and someone at the top knows that they couldn’t get away with something because there are accountability mechanisms within the institution that they’re in. The crime doesn’t arise in the first place. Or situations where people have to stay in abusive situations because they’re poor, the abuse can be prevented if you are able to go somewhere else, because you’re not desperate, you’re not poor. So thinking about the things that enable abuse to occur with impunity is just as important as looking after the fact at, well, given that we think they do occur because of these huge imbalances of wealth and power, how can we use this blunt instrument of the criminal legal system to create something that is never going to be justice, but is like the best thing that we could possibly think of?