Participative justice

Crime is what is done by the criminal classes

From the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan

… Murder is not antisocial. If you want a demonstration that we are governed by society even when breaking its rules, homicide is one of the best and grimmest examples…

In a remarkable 2010 study published in the American Journal of Sociology, academic Andrew Papachristos took these findings to their logical conclusion and conceptualized each murder over a three-year period in Chicago as a social interaction between groups. Surprisingly, the pattern of homicides resembled an exchange of gifts. One gang ‘presents’ a murder to another, and that group must reciprocate the ‘gift’ or risk losing their social status in the criminal underworld. From this perspective, murder is perhaps the purest of social exchanges as the individual is left in no position to reciprocate on his own.

In our society it seems that crimes committed by white collar criminals are notoriously hard to prosecute and sentences are easy and served in “country club” prisons. OTOH for the “criminal classes” the book is regularly thrown hard and fast.

In addition, sentences for “low class” crime, for example, possession of crack cocaine (favored by people of color) are disproportionately high compared with sentences for powdered cocaine (favored by the upper class) (even after the Fair Sentencing Act the disparity, which used to be 100:1 is still 18:1 – meaning that the 5-year minimum sentence for trafficking 90g of powdered cocaine, is the same sentence for mere possession of 5 grams of crack).

This suggests that the “criminal classes” are not served well by mainstream law enforcement. It is unlikely that justice will be served if the members of first gang reports the first murder to the police or the courts. Thus, self policing makes more sense.

Participative justice