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Wednesday, 23 June 2021

Why does Aya Gruber hate Black Women?

 In a place where women get raped, men get robbed. For this reason, men- even if they are utter misogynists- want those who make women feel unsafe to be punished severely. Why? If women are unsafe there will be less economic activity and this affects men. Moreover, those who pick on women will also try to bully or harass men. Punish those who prey on the vulnerable before they grown bold enough to prey on you.

Feminism of the 'Second Wave' type made things better for men as well as women. Indeed, since women were working harder for lesser reward, it may be that men benefited more than proportionately. But many women, purely through their own hard work and enterprise, could then overtake their lazy, complacent, male rivals. This in turn inspired young girls to aim higher and higher. We haven't yet reached an equal society for women but we are getting closer. Meanwhile, we are all better off.

Sadly, third wave and fourth wave and fifth wave Feminism have all been useless. Since the early Seventies, crazy Female academics have been denouncing each other in the shrillest possible terms. No doubt, the Left also degenerated. Scientific Socialism was replaced by 'Grievance Studies'. The billionaires laughed all the way, first to the Bank, then to the White House. 

Aeon, whose- hopefully unconscious- racial bias I have frequently pointed out, has an essay attacking 'carceral Feminism'- i.e. the notion that rapists and wife-beaters should be locked up. But, the truth is, men- including blokes who hate Feminism because they believe that 'Fat is not a Feminist issue- penis size is'-  hate rapists and bullies. We want to chop their goolies off or give them a good kicking. Why blame Feminists for doing what most men want to see done? Men don't rape because they are men. They rape because they are evil bastards. Punishment makes rapists feel very sorry for themselves. They substitute self-pity for active evil the way losers ought to do.

In the past few years, Americans have begun to recognise that the United States, with fewer than 5 per cent of the world’s population and more than 20 per cent of its prison population, has a mass incarceration problem.

But longevity and health outcomes improve for certain cohorts if they receive long sentences. This is not to say that there isn't a lot wrong with the American judicial and penal system- notoriously so, in some States- but the fact is a richer country can afford to jail a bigger percentage of the population. Poor countries may just beat and kill bad guys 'off the books'. Rich countries, determined to stay rich or get richer, should make incarceration about improving productivity and life-chances. My plan for my own old age is- like many elderly Japanese people- to go to Jail for some victimless crime so as to finally get me some of that edumication everybody is talking about. But prisons need to get a lot nicer fast- coz I'm not getting any younger you know. 

People from across the political spectrum agree that criminal law has been the solution to too many social problems, that the state cages too many people, and that the penal system – from patrol to parole – is infused with racism.

The systemic racism must be tackled through patient, pattern and practice investigation and 'consent decree' based reform. African American economists, sociologists and jurists have worked very hard to develop the tools needed and there is good evidence that this approach succeeds. However, the power of vested interest groups- police unions, owners of private prisons- as well as racist attitudes and the desire to economically exploit marginalized communities means that there has to be constant vigilance. This may seem an uphill struggle but African Americans are confident that they can make things better for their own community as well as the country as a whole. 

There’s a real question whether Americans’ nascent turn against incarceration can be squared with MeToo, the progressive social movement that became so popular in recent years that the press dubbed it a new civil rights movement and the country’s ‘cultural revolution’.

Anything can be squared with anything by stupidity. 

The MeToo chapter of feminism came to prominence following reports of the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long abuse of female celebrities, and it calls for zero tolerance of violence against women. Reflecting the tension between anti-incarceration and MeToo sentiments, many have responded to Black Lives Matter protesters’ calls to defund the police by asking: ‘What about rape and domestic violence?’ The main messages of the two movements can’t easily be reconciled.

Sure they can. Lock up racist cops and also lock up rapists and pimps and so forth.  

MeToo, like the feminist anti-violence movements that preceded it, is at its core ‘carceral’, or incarceration-centric,

Actually, we'd prefer to chop the goolies off the bad guys. This is not to say that prisons can't be improved or that they can't turn convicts into better people. Indeed, they might pay for themselves if properly managed.  

while Black Lives Matter and associated movements are anti-carceral.

No. Lock up killer cops the same as you lock up cop killers. There may be people who want to abolish prisons but, surely, that has nothing to do with either Feminism or BLM. 

The latter maintains that the US criminal system is not ‘broken’ but functions as intended: protecting landowners’ property interests,

Rich landlords can hire guys to kill those who fuck with them. They could also extract their organs so the the thing pays for itself. The problem is, history shows, rich dudes use their private armies to extort money from everybody- not just bad hombres. Indeed, they might become the new 'stationary bandit'.  

maintaining racial hierarchy,

Again, this can be done very well by rich dudes and their private armies.  

legitimating state violence and neoliberal governance,

Why legitimate shit? A sufficiently violent psychopath don't need no stinkin' legitimization.  

and vindicating regressive moral codes.

The last thing people with regressive moral codes want is 'vindication' by libtards.  

The tide is finally turning against mass incarceration, and MeToo movement feminists should get on board.

Why? Tides turn all the time. Should everybody have got on board with pussy-grabber Trump? 

They should rescue their important anti-violence agenda from the US policing, prosecution and punishment apparatus that has captured it.

Anybody can have an agenda. If some mean kids kidnap your agenda, just get a new one. They don't cost money, you know.

Anyway, people with a anti-violence agenda should be trying to ban the army and boxing and mugging and so on.   

The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein coined the term carceral feminism to describe some late-20th-century feminists’ unyielding commitment to law and order, and feminism’s larger ‘drift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals’.

Most people would agree that it is crazy to keep fining street prostitutes because they then have to go back to work to pay the fine. It remains to be seen whether punishing the buyer, not the seller, will have a better effect. It must be said that Communist countries did have much lower levels of sex work. It is certainly possible to have a Society where no one is compelled to do this type of work- but boys would also benefit.  

Of course, many in the MeToo movement focus on workplace equality and women’s political empowerment,

which is good for males as well as females.  

but the movement generally remains committed to the criminal law response to violence against women.

Most people- male or female- want to see them bastids locked up. 

Its early formative achievement was Weinstein’s sentence of 23 years behind bars. Feminist reformers continue to propose broad criminalisation programmes, despite their recognition that they’re enforced by anti-Black masculinist police officers and condemn individuals to prisons to suffer sexual and other violence – and now coronavirus. Across the political spectrum, this carceral impulse is powerful.

So, the solution is to get rid of racist, misogynist, cops- lock them up if they commit a crime- while making prisons fit for purpose.  

When I was a law student and aspiring public defender, I instinctively equated prosecution of gender crimes with justice, so much so that I worried more about defending a man charged with a misdemeanour crime of domestic violence than someone charged with murder.

Good for her.  

But then I practised in a specialised domestic violence court that feminism built and received a stark education on how criminal reforms made in the name of gender justice often produce neither gender equality nor justice.

This was the Washington DC Domestic Violence Division where people apply for Civil Protection Orders. The sort of people who would go to jail anyway for something else, also go to jail for violations of these orders. Studies show about 80 percent satisfaction with the outcomes. Violence goes down. Security goes up. The thing works most of the time. Thus it isn't going to go away any time soon.  

I saw a revolving door of incarceration for poor people of colour

but this existed anyway. Feminism isn't to blame. 

that didn’t serve victims very well – many called me to help them stop prosecutions.

If prosecutors refuse to listen to 'victims' and get their partners- who happen to be poor and black- thrown in jail so as to burnish their reputations then the fault lies with the prosecutors not with Feminists. On the other hand, a victim might well tell her abuser's lawyer that she doesn't want to go ahead just to be on the safe side.  

I saw prosecutors proceed with cases against women’s wishes,

that by itself would not be misconduct but it is the sort of thing the defense attorney should latch on to 

and judges refuse to lift stay-away orders, imposing de facto divorce on families.

rather than waiting till a violent death doth part batterer and victim 

I saw immigrant women lamenting that their call for help triggered an unstoppable penal machine that made their spouse deportable.

I once saw a bird shit on the head of an elderly Bengali gentleman. I now understand this was the fault of Feminism.  I later learned that the Bengali gentleman in question had been jailed by the Brits. This proves Queen Victoria invented carceral Feminism. Fuck you Feminism! Why are you causing birds to shit on the heads of an elderly Bengali? Was it not enough that you jailed him in his youth?

My experience working as a cog in the great wheel of US criminal punishment made me wonder why, for all those years, I indulged the false equivalence between prosecution and gender justice.

The bigger question is why she thought US prosecutors weren't the slime-balls they are depicted as being on every other TV show.  

In the fight against gender violence, criminal law should be a last, not first, resort.

Because gender violence isn't real violence coz women aren't real human beings. If a guy is beaten and raped, the criminal law should be the first resort. But if it happens to a woman one should spend all one's time virtue signaling about Racism and Neoliberalism and Global Warming. 

Many feminists embrace criminal law because

they are just as smart as men not because of  

of a set of presumptions:

of great stupidity 

law always tolerated, if not encouraged, crimes against women;

the same way the law always encouraged people to shove their heads up their own butts 

few alternatives outside of criminal law have been available to feminists;

coz feminists are as smart as men. They get that vigilantism aint a good thing. 

and feminist engagement can transform the uncaring, racist, sexist criminal justice system from within.

by channeling the power of crystals to rebalance chakras 

However, in researching a variety of feminist criminal law reform efforts in the US through the ages, from the anti-‘white slavery’ crusade at the turn of the century to the Brock Turner saga of a few years ago, I discovered that these presumptions are not warranted.

Because those 'presumptions' were as stupid as shit. The fact is everybody- not just Feminists- thinks raping unconscious people is wrong. If the law won't punish the criminal, people will get together to kick the fucker's head in. That's not a good thing. A mob may get hold of the wrong guy.  

Historically, legal authorities didn’t under-enforce laws against sexual and domestic violence so much as selectively enforce them depending on the class, race and other statuses of the parties.

D'uh! Monopolists go in for service provision discrimination to maximize their rent. That's why it makes sense for their customers to get together to exercise a countervailing power. 

During the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, Southern whites cited women’s protection from rape as ground for their campaign of terror against Black men.

Who cares what they cited? It was fucking obvious that the guys who thought slavery was worth fighting for would think Jim Crow was all they could manage to enforce. Why isn't this stupid woman blaming Trans-Atlantic slavery on Feminism? Everybody knows us darkies got huge shlongs. Had there been no slavery what would have prevented guys getting erections in Nigeria which ended up inside women in America? It was Feminists- protesting against being perennially pumped by African cocks who caused the Slave Trade. Similarly Feminism caused anti-Semitism. Aryan maidens were constantly sitting down on what they thought were large mushrooms but which were actually itinerant Jewish cocks. Incidentally, the Twin Towers were actually Neo-Liberal cocks and Al Qaeeda was actually a Feminist outfit.  

In the past, powerful feminist groups

launched two world wars and developed thermonuclear bombs and ICBMs to deliver them.  

repeatedly chose criminal law as the remedy for gender violence, despite non-carceral alternatives and numerous cautions from within and outside feminist ranks.

Sadly feminist groups aren't powerful at all because other feminist groups keep pulling their hair and scratching their eyes out. There may be some men who claim that evil Feminists have too much power. But the truth is, everyone- not just women- wants sex pests to be locked up.  

To be sure, these reforms provided protection and justice to many women, but they imprisoned other women – disproportionately marginalised women of colour.

Why jail prostitutes (presumably that is what is meant) or other vulnerable people whom Society can profitably train to be much more economically productive and thus able to live a happy life?  

Feminist criminal law reforms interacted with larger social phenomena from slavery to sex panic, and often reinforced racism, classism and indeed sexism.

Feminists can take credit for some law reforms and it may be that some of these measures have backfired. But that is true of every type of law reform, not matter who sponsored them. Why single out Feminism? 

Nor have feminist criminal laws operated outside of or tempered the criminal justice system’s entrenched masculinism, racism and cruelty.

So, Feminism is not the problem.  

In fact, they have often exacerbated them. Feminists’ repeated turn to and success with criminal law helped establish prosecution as the key to gender justice, and has stunted the development of our non-penal imaginations. It’s never been more important to think of addressing serious problems with measures other than incarceration.

Locking people up costs money. It is obvious that we need to do better 'mechanism design'.  

In the end, feminism shaped the modern US penal state, just as engagement with the penal state shapes modern feminism, including MeToo.

But the Academy shaped Feminism. So everything is the fault of stupid professors- like this author.  

As recently as the late 1960s and early ’70s, antipoverty activism and litigation were prominent within activist circles, among Black feminists, and in established feminist organisations. Examining the antipoverty movement of that era, the historian Marisa Chappell concludes: ‘The broad range of organisations fighting for more generous welfare reveals how 1960s social movements and federal activity expanded visions of the possible.’

Thankfully, voters rebelled. That's why the US didn't descend into hyperinflation.

Students, people of colour and women had taken to the streets to protest the Vietnam war, segregation, poverty and unequal rights. Images of militarised police and federal officials beating protesters made the rounds in the media, and the police found themselves under fire for excessive force. Many police departments, seeing their social capital diminishing, vowed to reform and embrace ‘problem solving’ and ‘community’ approaches to policing, but even that wasn’t enough. In the Left-protest mindset, police were at root a ‘fascist’ arm of the state. It was from this milieu that the so-called ‘battered’ women’s movement emerged in the 1970s.

England didn't have a Vietnam. It did have a battered women's movement. Erin Pizzey made the distinction between 'violence prone women' and the innocent victim of a bully. Pizzey was subjected to death threats and harassment by more radical feminists and had to move to America. Later she became a sponsor of the 'Men's Rights' movement.  

Originally, feminists in this movement were deeply anti-authoritarian. Organisers of battered women’s shelters saw these shelters as part of a larger programme of alternative egalitarian women-only societies, freed from the patriarchy and the authoritarian government.

Back then, every ideology has a lunatic fringe. My own Iyer-land Liberation Front split with the more radical People's Front for the Liberation of Iyer-land over the issue of sex with leprechauns. To be clear, I'm against it, but- obviously, if female leprechauns look like Smurfette and are at least 5 feet tall then an exception might be made.

These shelter feminists were reluctant to take money from state bureaucrats who were, in one activist’s words, ‘embodiments of the top-down hierarchical, imperialistic, war-mongering society’. If the state welfare system was bad, the criminal justice system – an institution of ‘domination based on race, class, and sex’, as the activist Susan Schechter called it – was worse. Feminists in the welfare rights movement and Black feminists such as Johnnie Tillmon often characterised battering as a matter of economic precarity and white supremacy.

Not to mention leprechaun hegemony. 

They tended to regard police as agents of a racist and war-mongering state.

which installs cameras in toilets so as to watch you poop. 

Aside from feminists, family violence researchers such as Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, and psychologists such as Morton Bard, also linked abuse to social stressors, and they too rejected a law-enforcement approach. The varied proposals to address abuse included welfare reform, social services, family law changes, therapeutic interventions and economic programmes such as workplace accommodations and housewife wages. They had nothing to do with criminal law.

Or reality. 


Yet, by the mid-1980s,

people sobered up. 

feminists had embraced the ‘law enforcement model’ approach to domestic violence. Two important predicates made possible this important change. First, powerful feminists, including constitutional lawyers, judges, authors and members of the upper echelon of NOW (the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966) were eager to link battering to patriarchal social and marital norms, and rejected the contention of antipoverty activists and feminists of colour that economic insecurity and racial inequality contributed to violence. Second, having decided that individual bad men and not larger social structures caused abuse, activists aggressively pursued policing and prosecution to assure the arrest and imprisonment of these men.

There is econometric evidence that such incarceration improves outcomes for families. There is none for the other side.  

Consider the clash in 1978 between Marta Segovia-Ashley (a Latina shelter operator in San Francisco) and Lisa Richette (a prominent judge in Philadelphia) during the watershed US Commission on Civil Rights hearings on ‘wife beating’. These hearings paved the way for various state and federal anti-battering initiatives. Segovia-Ashley’s remarks, read by her colleague Shelly Fernandez, began: ‘The soil of this [domestic violence] cruelty, maiming, and murder is the racism of the Great White Society.’

Strangely, White men were killing their White wives for the same reason that Mexican and African-American and Indian and Chinese men were doing so.  

They went on to describe in agonising detail how, at age 16, Segovia-Ashley was introduced to the horrors of domestic violence when her stepfather brutally murdered her beloved mother, Seferina.

An alcoholic killed his somewhat more successful wife because he was drunk and perhaps upset that her daughter was going to spend summer with her biological dad.  

The Commission on Civil Rights audience would be surprised by Segovia-Ashley’s assessment of the murderer’s character: ‘He was very kind and gentle … He promised my mother the world and in his heart he really meant it.’ They would be more surprised by her diagnosis of what drove her stepfather to uxoricide: ‘The white world slowly and insidiously defeated my stepfather … Racism and despair affected him so deeply that within two years a man who had enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner was a full-blown alcoholic.’ Segovia-Ashley understood the murder as ‘the final act of a racist society which propelled two people to annihilate each other’.

So, nothing to do with the booze then.  

Her remarks ended with a plea:

We need money for teaching sheltered children, bilingual and biculturally.

This nutter should not have been allowed to teach shit 

We need money for the day-to-day operation of shelters, ongoing rent, food, furniture, clothing, remodelling, upkeep, and paid staff. We need money for supplemental housing … When the hell are you going to do something about it? Or are you going to wait until we, like Seferina, are dead?

Sounds good to me. Get drunk and take a breadknife to each other. The Great White Society will get by just fine. Indeed, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan will laugh his head off.  


Richette, a prominent judge and doyenne among the Philadelphia intelligentsia, spoke in firm opposition to Segovia-Ashley’s remarks. ‘I disagree completely … that this is a problem of white society,’ she said. ‘It is a problem of human society.’

The alternative would be to ban immigration from non-White countries so as to prevent nice guys sticking knives into their beloved wives.  

Emphasising that the issue was one of gender, and gender alone, Richette rejected funding to shelters as merely ‘a conscience balm to a society which tolerates the oppression of women’. Richette instead called for an ‘equalitarian society in which sex stereotyping is condemned as surely as racism is condemned today’. These gender-not-race-or-poverty sentiments roused the audience to a standing ovation. The activist Del Martin echoed Richette, testifying:

The practice of wife beating crosses all boundaries of economic class, race, national origin, or educational background. It happens in the ghetto, in working-class neighbourhoods, in middle-class homes, and in the wealthiest counties of our Nation.

The domestic violence expert Beth Richie calls this the ‘everywoman’ narrative, in which feminists described battering as something to which every woman is vulnerable. Then this ‘everywoman’ is envisioned as ‘a white, middle-class woman’.

rather than someone from a culture which, arguably, considers wife beating to be a way of showing wifey how much u lurve her.  

The narrative propelled domestic violence reform in a carceral direction – toward separation and arrest.

Why was the drunken step-father not allowed to marry a few more women and stab them to death?  

Imagining the typical victim as a well-off white woman hiding behind enormous sunglasses at the country club prefigured certain remedies.

Whereas imagining working class 'women of color'  as deriving tremendous sexual pleasure from being beaten and knifed might prefigure letting perverts do what they liked to such women.  

Imagining her as a poor welfare recipient pointed to radically different ones. One expert at the Commission on Civil Rights hearings testified frankly that welfare reform wouldn’t help affluent victims to leave their abusers because of their ‘reluctance to reduce their’s [sic] or their children’s standard of living’ and the ‘welfare stigma’ that ‘prevented [them] from considering AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] payments as a potential solution’. Money wouldn’t break the everywoman’s abuse cycle, leaving separation through arrest as the most promising ‘wake-up call’ to the woman and man.

Makes sense.  Obviously, if the law won't act, vigilantes could step in. In the very first Superman comic, the Man of Steel punches out a wife-beater. 

Once the everywoman narrative pointed toward separation and arrest, feminists increasingly described domestic violence as a function of individual criminality rather than social conditions. Activists fought openly against analyses linking battering to structural inequality or material conditions.

For an excellent reason. If some men get to beat and knife their wives- provided there are at the wrong end of 'structural inequalities- then those structural inequalities get perpetuated. 

Noting that ‘husbands of all economic levels assault their wives regularly’, the feminist lawyer Laurie Woods in 1979 insisted that addressing ‘economic conditions and working conditions’ or providing ‘counselling’ were inappropriate responses because domestic violence was not a function of ‘job stress’ or ‘psychological abnormalities’.

Laurie Woods launched class action suits against Police Departments which refused to intervene in 'domestic disputes'. Good for her.  

As the battered women’s movement began to focus on legal mechanisms to punish, deter and incapacitate individual abusers, warnings from minority feminists such as Segovia-Ashley that women of colour didn’t experience policing the same way as white women went unheeded.

But this is a problem with policing, not Feminism. The solution is to get in more female cops from minorities and do pattern and practice investigations and then 'consent decree' based reform.  

The domestic violence expert Donna Coker in 2003 posits that feminist law reformers might not have been ‘aware of the degree to which white privilege protects [whites] from police suspicion and surveillance’.

To be fair, many thought that Police Departments were being reformed in the late Seventies and Eighties. The thing was just eye-wash.  

Or as one advocate of colour remarked in 1995: ‘I think white women talked more as if the courts belonged to us [all women] and therefore should work for us where we [women of colour] always saw it as belonging to someone else and talked more about how to keep it from hurting us.’

If the majority does stuff beneficial for itself, minorities may well feel aggrieved. But that's because they are a minority. In the case of people of Mexican ancestry, the unfairness is compounded by the fact that they were indigenous and once the overwhelming majority in those areas. But what happened to them was scarcely the fault of Feminism. 

Woods and other feminist lawyers brought high-profile class-action lawsuits to compel police departments to ensure that officers responding to domestic violence calls made arrests, rather than attempting to mediate the situation.

The complaint was that no 'mediation' was occurring.  

These lawsuits resulted in departmental policies favouring and mandating arrest. In Oakland, California one such lawsuit spelled the end of the police’s problem-solving experiment of directing officers to attempt mediation before arrest in every misdemeanour assault case. Today, all but extinct are police sentiments such as this one from the training officer Glenn Sparks in 1980: ‘Obviously if we can avoid putting somebody in jail and still solve the situation that is exactly what we want to do in most cases.’ Within short order, the police welcomed mandatory arrest policies that they saw as ‘getting them out of the “social work business”’, as Bard put it. In the 1980s and ’90s, police departments and state and city legislatures raced to adopt mandatory domestic violence arrest policies, and these policies largely remain in effect today.

Again this is a problem of policing- not Feminism. 

Even the deeply anti-authoritarian feminists in the shelter movement who initially regarded the police as fascists eventually came to embrace law enforcement. Schechter reported one shelter explaining their reluctance: ‘While we wanted to activate police protection for the abused wherever possible, we were hesitant to support the extension of discretionary powers of arrest so open to abuse, particularly against Third World and low-income people.’ But she and other shelter administrators soon came to see the police as a free security services. One observed that:

When the police do answer our calls at Rainbow Retreat, and we depend very, very heavily on them for security since we [have] an open, published address … we find they’re extremely sensitive to the problem … It’s as if once the woman has made a commitment to do something, they are more willing to work with her.
Imagine, by contrast, that police disbelieved, busted for drugs or otherwise mistreated shelter residents, as they often did with Black women and women who refused to leave the abuser. They would cease to be cost-free ‘security’.

The problem is that people who ran those shelters were very tough and had the backing of smart lawyers as well as some wealthy, upper class, women and men. Thus Shelter residents weren't 'easy targets'. Prosecutions wouldn't stick.  

As Sharon Rice Vaughan, the founder of a shelter in St Paul, Minnesota, wrote, she and the other ‘white, middle-class women’ in charge were ‘not yet ready for a political analysis of why [we] assume that everyone thinks, lives, feels, acts, and responds the way we do.’

This is because those 'white, middle-class women' weren't yet ready to listen to and talk incessant bollocks. They wanted to achieve something tangible, not just virtue signal.  

By the 1990s, several large-scale policing studies revealed that arresting – instead of mediating, offering services in lieu of arrest, or temporary separation – could be criminogenic: that is, it could escalate domestic violence, especially in poor minority communities with high rates of unemployment.

But, longer term, it turned out that long spells of incarceration for violent people meant that their families did a lot better than they would otherwise.  

As it turned out, mandatory arrest polices didn’t affect every woman equally. They were a much better proposition for middle-class white women with employed husbands than for poor women of colour with unemployed spouses.

This is foolish. A guy with a good job gets bail. An unemployed guy goes to jail. The wife gets to garnish the violent spouse's wages. The unemployed guy was a drain on the family's resources.  

Lawrence Sherman, who with his co-authors had conducted comparative studies of policing methods in several large urban areas, observed in 1992:
If three times as many Blacks as whites are arrested in a city like Milwaukee, which is a fair approximation, then an across-the-board policy of mandatory arrests prevents 2,504 acts of violence against primarily white women at the price of 5,409 acts of violence against primarily Black women.

So mandatory arrests prevent violence. Why is this cretin against it? Is it coz Black women benefit twice as much as Whites? Why does she hate Black women so much?

Sherman urged caution to the many police departments and legislatures hastily adopting mandatory arrest policies despite the social science, warning that ‘mandatory arrest may make as much sense as fighting fire with gasoline’.

But this stupid woman has just said that mandatory arrests prevent violence. Thus it is like fighting fire with water, not gasoline. Suppose you don't have mandatory arrest. What happens when the police leave? Does hubby say 'Thank you darling for calling the pigs?' Or does he really let her have it?


Mandatory arrest policies hurt battered women not only because they caused many batterers to become more violent

which is cool if they do it inside jail coz then they get their heads kicked in 

but also because they resulted in women being arrested. In 2007, the state of California issued a report comparing domestic violence arrest data from 1988 (before mandatory policies) with data from 1998 (after the policies). Arrests for domestic violence had increased generally, but the increase was far more profound for women than for men. Thus, while domestic violence arrests of men proportionately decreased in that 10 year period, arrests of women increased more than four-fold.

Good. Speaking generally, men are stronger than women. A woman crazy enough, or drunk enough, to start attacking men is much more likely to be stomped to death real soon. Getting arrested prolongs the life of violence prone women. It can also prolong the life of 'gang-bangers'.  

Stripping police of discretion to decline arrest relieved them of their inclination to mediate domestic violence cases and not arrest men, but it also relieved them of their gendered instinct not to arrest women. And as might be expected, this new willingness to arrest women disproportionately impacted Black women, whom police were more likely to see as ‘mutual combatants’ than victims defending themselves.

Black women may be tough but are they really more likely to win in a physical fight with a man?  

Nevertheless, feminist activists remained unmoved by the clear evidence that more policing was harmful to victims,

there is no such 'clear evidence'. This woman is too stupid to find any. She quotes a guy who says 'mandatory arrests prevents violence'.  

especially poor women of colour.

Who, according to her source, benefit at least twice as much as white women.  

Domestic violence policing reform had been one of the signature achievements of the battered women’s movement, if not second-wave feminism. American feminists thus rejected Sherman’s contention that there should be less aggressive policing. They argued that Sherman’s studies were proof that the domestic violence policing programme wasn’t tough enough. The activist Joan Zorza responded to Sherman in 1992 that to deter unemployed Black men – ‘society’s failures’ – the ‘stakes may need to be higher, not lower or nonexistent’. She went on to advance a Reconstruction-era Blacks-are-immune-to-punishment argument: temporary detention wouldn’t work on Black men because ‘in some subcultures of ghettoised people, where imprisonment is all too common, a few hours in jail may be seen as only minor irritation, or even a right [sic] of passage’.

This is why Clinton/Biden's three strikes policy was popular with Black voters.  

This history highlights the danger that modern feminist criminal law programmes will expand the violent, masculinist and racist carceral system without reforming it.

This history shows that smart middle class white women got what they wanted. But it was also what the overwhelming majority of all people wanted. Now you have some woke virtue-signalers talking bollocks in the hope that Kamala Harris won't become the Democratic candidate a few years down the line. The Koch brothers must be laughing their heads off. 

Anti-violence advocates won’t get a magical exemption whereby they can achieve feminist goals without bolstering a racist and classist criminal justice system that has produced a shameful state of mass incarceration, which even some conservatives have turned against.

Mass incarceration is costly. There is a better mechanism to tackle the problem. I don't know what it is. But there are African American Economists and Jurists and Political Scientists who do know the answer. Lets hear from them- not some stupid White Law Professor.  

For too long, feminism has been shackled to the carceral state.

In the imagination of a cretin. 

Arrests and incarceration of mostly marginalised men amount to a meagre prize for the massive expenditure of feminist capital in making criminal law more rigid and severe.

What fucking 'feminist capital' is this cretin talking about? If women- including Kamala Harris, to whose first campaign even Donald and Ivanka Trump contributed- show they are tough on crime, then voters feel they can be entrusted with more and more power.  

The time is here for feminists to resist the carceral impulse, and stop seeking new and broader gender crime laws, more widespread policing, and longer sentences. There are many promising noncriminal programmes that address gender violence and provide more equitable and durable relief for women of all kinds. An infusion of new ideas and activism into the feminist anti-violence movement can help free it from the carceral legacy of its predecessors.

New ideas- based on sound research- can certainly improve 'mechanism design' and thus yield a 'Pareto improvement'. But 'woke' activism based on stupid lies- e.g. White Feminists want to lock up Black Men coz of their super long dongs- does not help anybody- except the Koch brothers. 

If Black Women suffer disproportionately from male violence and if the vast majority of the males dealing out that violence are Black then 'due process' equality entails disproportionate incarceration of Black Males. Of course, there may be other 'cultural' reasons why this may happen. Thus if a particular community is more likely to have 'live-in' rather than married relationships then, because of Crawford v Washington, the abusive male partner may be more 'convictable' because of prior cross-examination of a victim who later withdraws from the case. However, a good public defender may still get the case thrown out. Davis v Washington is also relevant in that 'non testimonial' 999 calls were held admissible. On the other hand, in Hammon v Indiana, the wife's refusal to testify at trial saved her husband as her statement to the police was held to be 'testimonial'- i.e. inadmissible without cross-examination.

One way of reducing disproportionate Black Male incarceration is to overlook certain classes of crime.

Crazy shit, like jailing people for failure to pay court fees or 'selling loose cigarettes' or just 'driving while being Black' must, of course, be put a stop to. But no violence against any Black person for any reason whatsoever should be treated more leniently just for a virtue signaling or cosmetic purpose. Why does Aya Gruber hate Black Women- not consciously, not subjectively, but objectively as an officer of the Court and a Professor of Law? No doubt, as a Feminist, she may have a great animus against fellow Feminists. But what is it about Black Women which makes Aya hate them enough to want them to be denied equal 'due process' rights? It may be the answer has to do with America's 'original sin'. Gruber may be expressing views which she absorbed unconsciously. Or she may simply be as stupid as shit. But stupidity is a type of hate if it is based on 'learned ignorance'. Why not study the works of African American Economists, Jurists and Political Scientists? Or would this white lady, find that too demeaning?

 

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