Samir Chopra's Blog, page 57

Richard Feynman on Philosophy of Science and Ornithology

Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, in his usual inimitable style, that “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Cue chuckles from scientists and grumbles from philosophers. Science is useful! Philosophy is useless! Go back to counting angels. Or something like that. 

The persistent disdain that distinguished scientists–like Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, and Richard Feynman–level at philosophy in general, and philosophy of science in particular, should be embarrassing for the scientific community at large. At best, it shows an ignorance of the history–and thus, the foundations–of the discipline, and at worst a deliberate, anti-intellectual obtuseness. (Some previously expressed thoughts of mine on this matter can be found here and here.)

Let us grant Feynman his point. (I’m not inclined to, but let’s press ahead.) What follows? Consider his analogy. Perhaps the branch of zoology that studies birds is indeed useless to avians. What then? Should ornithologists put away their binoculars, cancel all conferences,  burn their journals, and enter a prolonged period of mourning? I think not. Ornithology is not just for the birds.

Ornithology informs us, its students of a great deal: avian behavioral patterns, speciation, migration, ecological niches, learning etc. Those who study philosophy of science–and its study is inseparable, almost conceptually, from that of the history of science–learn a great deal too. They learn about science’s metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological presuppositions; they come to understand the dynamics of theory change in the sciences; they learn how inductive and abductive inference generate conclusions, which though not deductive, can still count as knowledge. And so on. If such students are interested in the workings of a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon called ‘science’ which has been supremely successful in helping us interact with, and control–to a limited extent–our physical environment, and that is capable of generating testable hypotheses about the world that surrounds us, they will find a great deal of value in the philosophy of science. Which, to repeat, cannot be studied without studying the history of science (something which reveals a great deal about the sociology and political economy of science too.) Perhaps Feynman would have us believe that the history of science is also useless to scientists.

Perhaps Feynman meant to say that philosophy of science does not result in the discovery of new scientific laws, or perhaps that no philosopher of science ever devised a new scientific principle. But why is this a disqualification of the philosophy of science? Science does not just need to be practiced; it needs to be studied too–from the inside and the outside. The society it is embedded in needs to understand how such a vastly productive and tremendously successful system of knowledge functions; those who study its history and methods aid in this enterprise. They help distinguish science from other practices and prevent both encroachment on, and overly aggressive expansion of, its epistemic boundaries; they may provide means by which its metaphysical and implicit and explicit moral claims may be evaluated.

Many years ago, in talking to a senior mathematical logician about one of his students, I said the student was ‘absolutely brilliant.’ My interlocutor said, “Well, I don’t know; he’s certainly very talented.” I didn’t quite understand what he meant. When I see folks like that illustrious trio above disparage the philosophy of science, I know exactly what he was getting at.

Vincent Simmons: ‘The Innocent Burn When Falsely Accused’

A few decades ago, while watching a Bollywood potboiler at home with my parents, I saw a central character react sharply to a concocted accusation–perhaps of theft–by the movie’s villain, out to frame him and send him to jail so as to clear the way for his other nefarious plots. As our hero responded to this charge with loud, anguished protestations, his body shook; he seemed to be possessed by a demon of some kind. Unable to take my eyes off this acute reaction, I asked my mother, “Why is he so upset?” My mother replied briefly, “The innocent burn when falsely accused.” (Something is lost in the translation here.) Her language seemed apt; this man was aflame, suffering the agonies of being burned on the stake.

A few years later, in boarding school, a slimy weasel lodged a false complaint against me with the school prefects. Apparently, I had abused and hit him. I was lucky; the prefect who received the complaint let me off with a warning. As I stood there receiving his sonorous lecture about the need to behave better, to restrain myself and show some manners, I seethed with anger. What if I had actually been punished–perhaps by a caning or a punishment drill, or even worse, by suspension or expulsion? (Bullying, if found to be occurring, was a severely punishable offense.) I dared not even imagine what my response–helpless in the face of such injustice–would have been.

Last week, as I watched The Farm: Angola, USA, Jonathan Stack, Liz Garbus, and Wilbert Rideau‘s 1998 award-winning documentary set in the infamous maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, and discovered the story of Vincent Simmons, still serving a life sentence–hundred years–for the attempted aggravated rapes of a pair of teenaged twins in 1977, I remembered my mother’s words all over again.

Simmons has been burning for thirty-eight years now. He was railroaded into jail, and there he stays. No physical evidence linking him to the rapes was ever prosecuted by the prosecution; his alibis were discounted; his counsel provided him inadequate legal representation by failing to question state witnesses about their testimony; the victims professed to not knowing the identity of their attacker because “all niggers look alike”; he was identified and picked out of a line-up in which he was the only handcuffed person; it took sixteen years for him to be granted access to “the evidence file pertaining to his case, including police reports, arrest reports, victims’ statements, trial transcripts, the medical examiner’s report”; in The Farm, a parole board, which reviewed his case in 1998, summarily dismisses the compelling evidence he presents to them without so much as a discussion of the merits of his appeal; the legal and moral atrocities go on and on.

Many Americans remain unaware–blissfully so–of the catastrophe that is our penal system. The indigent innocent go to jail all the time, there to face further brutalization and diminishment of their life’s prospects. The book is too often thrown at them; that done, they are left to rot behind the walls. Racism, the war on drugs, and the vicious retributive streak that informs our notions of punishment have resulted in a collective perversion of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

The horror of what is happening today, under our noses, should keep us awake at night. It should induce nightmares, visions of innocence falsely condemned.

Note: A proper review of The Farm will follow anon.

Is “Black Lives Matter” Aiding And Abetting Criminals?

This is a very serious question and deserves a serious answer. It is so serious that the New York Times has asked: Is “police reticence in the face of such protests, some led by groups like Black Lives Matter causing crime to rise in some cities”? The first answers are in. Those honorable folk, “the heads of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration said they believed that this so-called Ferguson Effect seemed to be real.” (The Ferguson Effect, which sounds like an atmospheric condition that produces high winds and heavy rain, is capable of creating law and order crises.)

In general, whenever black folk get uppity, crime increases. See, for instance, the wave of crime that spread through the American Deep South after the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era when freed slaves went on a rampage, killing, raping, and looting. Some folks blame that on white racists worried about the imbalance in the old power equations of the American South, but we should remind ourselves that the folks conducting those terrorist campaigns were riding around on horses while wearing white robes and hoods, so we will never, I mean never, know whether they were white or not.

We need not debate this question for too long. The FBI and the DEA–fine, upstanding defenders of civil liberties, and really, the first folks we should check in with when it’s time to evaluate political protest conducted by minorities–would never speak falsely on such matters. Besides, they have better things to do–like entrapping young Muslims in terrorist plots, arresting folks smoking that dangerous chemical, marijuana, and listening to the phone conversations, and reading the emails of, American citizens. (Some pedant will say I should be talking about the NSA but in this post 9/11 intelligence-sharing era, what’s the difference?)

We should be curious though about what such “police reticence” amounts to. Perhaps it means the following. Police officers will not be able to: fire sixteen bullets–known as ’emptying a clip’, I’m told–at black teenagers walking on a highway even ones with knives; come scrambling out of a car and begin firing, assaulting-a-Pacific-Beach style, at a twelve-year old playing with a toy gun in a children’s playground; shoot black men in wheelchairs; drive around a city with a ‘suspect’ in a paddy wagon, and then beat him to death; place sellers of illicit cigarettes in fatal strangleholds; shoot black men in the back, whether during an undercover drug sting or after a traffic stop; shoot black men who have knocked on doors seeking help; search, randomly and roughly, hundreds and thousands of young black men and women in their neighborhoods for looking suspicious.

The ultimate ramifications of such handicapping of our armed forces–sorry, police–are as yet, only poorly understood, but the contours of the resultant landscape are perhaps visible. Black folks will once again walk the streets; they will stay out late at night; they will go into white neighborhoods and mingle with the populace there. Of all the chilling effects of this new police caution, the last one, surely, is the most chilling. Black folks will be set free among us. The horror.

Reflections On ‘Imagined Communities’ – I: Children And Humanity

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, New York, 2006, pp. 10-11), Benedict Anderson writes:

[R]eligious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child’s conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of ‘continuity’?

During the time that my wife became pregnant with our daughter, gave birth to her, and began the long process of rearing her, I began to be aware of an entirely novel sensation as I walked the streets of this city, took the subway to my various destinations, and taught classes to my always-diverse student population: all around me were strangers, their personal histories entirely unknown to me, and yet, I knew something–which felt deeply significant–about them.

I’m not the first parent to report this, and I won’t be the last. (Anderson wouldn’t be making that claim above if I was.) It’s almost a cliché really. Have a kid, and come to realize how you are caught up in the cycles of life and death, how all humans had parents, how they were born naked, helpless, and hapless, how we owe our present lives to the nurturing care provided by others (admittedly, not all of us lucked out in the sweepstakes of loving and attentive parental care), how we all come to be and pass away, how we add a link to the ‘continuity’ of existence.

For all of that supposed banality, my sensations did not feel in the least tired or retreaded; there was a novelty to my experience of them. There were new emotions at play: a warm benevolence of a kind; a peculiar melancholia too, when I would see the unfortunate and the downtrodden, their luck having long run out. I felt in possession of a new vision of sorts: almost as if in the case of every human that I encountered, I could run the film of their time here on earth backwards, all the way back to their first appearance on this stage. I had seen pregnant women before; I had seen countless photos of newborn babies (and even held and cuddled several); but my partner’s pregnancy and the presence of my own child–a mortal from the moment of her birth–told me my place in the world was now different for having gained a connection with not just the community of parents, but indeed with all who had been babies once. That is, with the entire human community, past, present, and perhaps even that of a not-too-radically reconfigured-by-science-and-technology future. A wholly imagined community.

Note: This post kicks off what should be a series of riffs on passages drawn from Anderson’s Imagined Communities. There will be no attempt to provide systematic exegesis (not that I ever have done that here): just brief comments on sections I found provocative or entertaining.

My First Nightmares

There are times when my almost-three-year-old daughter will wake up in the middle of the night, crying inconsolably. Calming her down and putting her back to sleep is a trying business at best. We have been reliably informed that this age sees the child experience her first nightmares; perhaps those nocturnal visitors are responsible for these startled and frightened reactions. I wonder what she makes of them: these strange phenomenal experiences that occur during a period of ostensible unconsciousness.

My daughter’s experiences remind me of my first nightmares (the ones I can remember.) I was then a little over five years, used to sleeping in a bedroom with my elder brother. The nightmares followed two templates; one was of being buried alive. The other is a little harder to describe–and yet, its bare details are still clearly visible to me after all these years.

As the dream began, I would find myself in a boat, moving slowly through a large expanse of, not water, but some other mysterious substance. Sometimes it looked liked pebbles, on other occasions, it might well have been little metallic spheres. I do not remember how I was propelled through this ‘sea’ but there were no oars to be seen. Some mysterious force moved me onwards; as it did so, I could see the furrows our path made, trailing out behind my mysterious vehicle. This by itself, would not have been overly frightening but the setting made it so. I was surrounded on all sides by an encroaching darkness; only the boat, and its immediate surroundings were lit up. Not from on high; there did not seem to be a spotlight shining down on me. There was just a mobile island of light that moved through this otherwise Stygian night. I could sense terrors lay in the darkness around me; I could feel them press in on me, but I could not discern their shape or form.

I found this recurring nightmare terrifying; so much so that I confessed to my parents I did not want to go to sleep for fear of traveling to that god-forsaken body of water. I sensed that one night whatever lay behind that surrounding veil of darkness would reach out and draw me in, never to return to the light.

My mother did what she could; she sat by me as she tucked me in for the night, whispering reassurances in my ear about the unreality of my visions. She assured me I could always wake myself up from a dream, that I could remind myself it was only a dream, that I could always call her if I needed. I do not remember if these words of comfort helped during the actual experience of the dreams that followed. They did make it easier to fall asleep. The nightmares, as might have been expected, ceased after a little while, and my still-developing mind found new preoccupations.

I have never attempted an analysis of this still-vivid experience; someday, perhaps on a couch with an attentive listener nearby, I will. (Or perhaps I’ll just take a crack at it here.) In the meantime, I can only hope that I will be as much of a comfort to my daughter as my mother was to me.

Teaching Self-Evaluation For The Semester That Was (Almost)

Classes for the fall semester ended last week; finals and grading lie ahead of me. It’s time for another self-evaluation of my teaching. As usual, I find myself earning a mixed grade for my efforts.

This semester I taught three classes: Philosophy of Law, Political Philosophy, and Introduction to Philosophy. (Interestingly enough, this is the first time in my thirteen years at Brooklyn College that I’ve taught Introduction to Philosophy.)

Let me get the bad news out of the way. I do not think I did a good job in my Philosophy of Law. I was unable to make headway on the oldest problem of all: getting students to do the assigned readings. And neither was I, by sheer dint of effort and pointed interactions with my students, able to get a robust discussion going in class. I was also too easily distracted and put off by some of the body language on display–bored expressions, slumped posture. It was all too clear to me I was not being able to make the material interesting or engaging and as the semester wore on, my sense of futility grew; I could sense my interest in the class lessening. My students and I were not helped by a classroom that was alternately too hot and too noisy. In an effort to shake things up, I changed the seating arrangement in class, going from the traditional ‘teacher-in-front’ to a square configuration with me sitting down with my students. It did not work. Perhaps I gave up too easily; I should have been more unconventional, and I should have tried individual interventions–by email, or in my office hours–with some of the students most clearly in need of one.

In my Introduction to Philosophy class, I adopted an unconventional tactic to introduce students to philosophy: I would do so via the Stoics. My syllabus consisted of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius; through their writings I would introduce students to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy. I would begin each class by asking my students to write a brief reaction to a verse/chapter/section from the assigned reading; we would then use their responses as the foundation for the class discussion. I had mixed results in this project. I was teaching at night, in one of those terrible 150-minute slots, which are a pedagogical disaster. My students were tired, and sometimes unable to summon up the energy to participate in class discussion. They did, however, find plenty to provoke and intrigue them in the Stoics, and by virtue of connecting Stoic nostrums for a good life to their own personal experiences, I was often able to evoke vigorous responses from, and interactions with, them. Many students spoke with a great deal of feeling about how Stoic insights resonated with them; these responses would, in turn, provoke other students to speak up. Thanks to the Stoics, I was also able to introduce the students to Buddhism (they found the Buddha‘s ‘no-self’ theory of self utterly fascinating.) In retrospect, I would say that I could have dropped one of Seneca or Epictetus and brought in some other readings to supplement this unrelenting diet of the Stoics. I look forward to conducting a class like this again with a modified syllabus.

My Political Philosophy class was greatly aided by a classroom which featured a seminar table, thus automatically introducing a more informal, less hierarchical spatial structure to the class discussion. I was also aided by interesting and provocative readings, by the idiocy on display this election season, and by many students being diligent about the assigned readings. I stayed very close to the texts, and read aloud many passages in class, stopping again and again to discuss them with my students. These class discussions were easily the best I had all semester in any of my classes.

I continued to struggle with grading writing assignments but was happy to note that at least on a couple of occasions students took advantage of my offer of resubmission opportunities and came to see me with revised papers, after working on which they secured higher grades. Some of these personal interactions were very rewarding as I could sense students were able to learn something about the difficulty and the pleasures of the writing process by working with me.

Thus endeth another semester of teaching. (Grading remains though.) More mixed results; more food for thought for the future.

‘A Manual For The Police On How To Conduct Beatings’

Leonard Strickland was beaten to death; in jail, by prison guards. Those who did so, and those who supervised them, were secure in the knowledge that very little would be, and could be, done to bring them to justice. History and the law is on their side.

In 1992, in one of Clarence Thomas‘ earliest cases on the Supreme Court, Hudson v. McMillian, Thomas found himself on the losing side in a 7-2 decision. Keith Hudson, an inmate who had suffered a vicious beating at Angola Prison, had filed suit in a federal court, claiming violation of his Eighth Amendment rights. He won $800 in damages as the judge found he had been beaten “maliciously, unnecessarily, and wantonly.” On appeal, the case had made its way to the Supreme Court, where the decision was “cautiously” affirmed with only Antonin Scalia and Thomas dissenting.  Justice Sandra Day O’Connor distinguished this case from “those cases where deliberate indifference to a prisoner’s health is not a violation unless there is serious injury.” The relevant test was “whether force was applied in a good faith effort to maintain or restore discipline, or maliciously and sadistically to cause harm.” (Note the ‘good faith’ exception.)

Thomas, in his dissent, claimed that “a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral, it may be tortious, it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution, but it is not ‘cruel and unusual punishment’….The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a National Code of Prison Regulation.” Thomas based his decision on: the culture and values of the eighteenth century, the history of the cruel and unusual punishment clause, the Constitutional Convention and state ratifying convention debates, and of course, the text of the Constitution. He noted the Supreme Court had, for a very long period in American history, rejected all “conditions of complaint ” claims and not held the cruel and unusual punishment clause relevant to prison conditions. He concluded that “Today’s expansion of the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause beyond all bounds of history and precedent is…yet another manifestation of the pervasive view that the Federal Constitution must address all ills in our society….[including] any hardship that might befall a prisoner during incarceration.” Thomas went on to suggest that older cases affirming prisoners’ claims of beatings and torture should be overturned.

Scalia and Thomas lost, but they set the stage for what followed.

In 1996, thanks to extensive lobbying by William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court Chief Justice who, though impatient with prisoners rights claims, for tactical reasons had earlier joined the Hudson v. McMillian majority, Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act, stating prisoners cannot recover damages under the cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause if there is “no permanent damage.” Prisoners cannot recover for pain and suffering even if the beating is “long, brutal, malicious, and wanton.” The Prison Litigation Reform Act was, as Martin Garbus claims, a “a manual for the police on how to conduct beatings and not get sued.”

The immorality and brutality of our prison system is scaffolded by our nation’s laws.

Note: This post is cribbed from Martin Garbus’ Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law, Henry Holt, New York, 2002, pp. 74-75.

One Vision Of A Driverless Car Future: Eliminating Private Car Ownership

Most analysis of a driverless car future concentrates on the gains in safety: ‘robotic’ cars will adhere more closely to speed limits and other traffic rules and over a period of time, by eliminating human error and idiosyncrasies, produce a safer environment on our roads. This might be seen as an architectural modification of human driving behavior to produce safer driving outcomes–rather than making unsafe driving illegal, more expensive, or socially unacceptable, just don’t let humans drive.

But there are other problems–environmental degradation and traffic–that could be addressed by mature driverless car technologies. The key to their solution lies in moving away from private car ownership.

To see this, consider that at any given time, we have too many cars on the roads. Some are being driven, yet others are parked. If you own a car, you drive it from point to point, and park it when you are done using it. Eight hours later–at the end of an average work-day–you leave your office and drive home, park it again, and then use it in the morning. Through the night, your car sits idle again, taking up space. If only someone else could use your car while you didn’t need it. They wouldn’t need to buy a separate car for themselves and add to the congestion on the highways. And in parking lots.

Why not simply replace privately owned, human-driven cars with a gigantic fleet of robotic taxis? When you need a car, you call for one. When you are done using it, you release it back into the pool. You don’t park it; it simply goes back to answering its next call.  Need to go to work in the morning? Call a car. Run an errand with heavy lifting? Call a car. And so on. Cars shared in this fashion could thus eliminate the gigantic redundancy in car ownership that leads to choked highways, mounting smog and pollution, endless, futile construction of parking towers, and elaboration congestion pricing schemes. (The key phrase here is, of course, ‘mature driver-less car technologies.’ If you need a car for an elaborate road-trip through the American West, perhaps you could place a longer, more expensive hold on it, so that it doesn’t drive off while you are taking a quick photo or two of a canyon.)

Such a future entails that there will be no more personal, ineffable, fetishized relationships with cars. They will not be your babies to be cared and loved for. Their upholstery will not remind you of days gone by. Your children will not feel sentimental about the clunker that was a part of their growing up. And so on. I suspect these sorts of attachments to the car will be very easily forgotten once we have reckoned with the sheer pleasure of not having to deal with driving tests–and the terrors of teaching our children how to drive, the DMV, buying car insurance, looking for parking, and best of all, other drivers.

I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords in this domain.

ISIS, US Policy, And Feeding The Bogeyman

In ‘The Unbearable Lightness of America’s War Against the Islamic State‘ Stephen Walt supplies us the following pull-quote:

What is needed is not a single presidential speech, but rather a sustained, all-out effort by top U.S. officials to remind their fellow citizens how safe they actually are. One often hears that fear is inherently irrational and that such a campaign would never work, but how do we know until someone tries? By refusing to tell the truth about the actual (very low) level of risk, presidents and other officials cede the ground to threat-mongers and guarantee that the public will overreact to the rare but dramatic events that do occur.

We are used by now to those statistics that make note of how many deaths are caused by causes other than terrorism: drunk driving, falling off a ladder, snakebite etc. As Walt notes, “the odds that an American will be killed by a terrorist are about one in 4 million each year.” Numbers though, have always had little effect in assuaging irrational fears–as generations of scared flyers will attest. (Perhaps an even better example is parents anxious about their children being abducted, an extremely rare and improbable event. They really should be far more concerned about their children getting run over by a reckless driver while crossing a street.) So what will work?

The ‘sustained, all-out’ part of Walt’s prescription is crucial, of course. It is not enough to offer assurances of safety after a deadly incident of some kind; the overwhelming likelihood that the average American citizen will not meet a violent death at the hands of terrorists bears repetition ad nauseam (via a variety of modalities.) After all, if similar repetition can enhance the truth value of a lie, then why not that of a truth?

So why are such reassurances not made more often, more emphatically?

‘Top US officials’ are ‘threat-mongers.’ The latter are not just unhinged presidential candidates–Republican ones–looking to cash in on panicked voters. ‘Top US officials’ are not modest types unwilling to talk up their success in containing ‘terror threats’–rather, when they do slay a dragon or two, they make sure to tell us just how dangerous it was, and just how difficult it was to bring it down. Homeland Security folk, Pentagon top brass, the Secretary of Defense–these ‘top US officials’ are all too happy, when it suits them, to cycle through the rainbow of threat alerts, to speak knowingly of dangerous matters that cannot be disclosed, of lurking menace somewhere out there, waiting only for our guard to slip so that they may sneak across our threshold and slit our throats while we sleep. Budgets and jobs–as Walt notes–depend on such alarmist rhetoric. Well, two–if not the entire Republican candidate field–can play at that game.

The bogeyman of the external threat is not an easily contained genie. This one, having been fed and nurtured for so long, has brought forth its own benighted, coiffed spawn.

Gideon’s Army: Fighting A Just War

The first time I saw Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter‘s documentary about three public defenders fighting a lonely battle in the American South, I watched impassively, even as anger and sadness swirled within me. The second time I did so–yesterday, in a classroom with the students in my Philosophy of Law class–I blinked back tears. (More anon on how the company we keep in our movie-watching experiences changes our perceptions of the work on display.)

I could see horrified expressions in the classroom; I could sense these young men and women were coming to realize–if only in part–the true dimensions of the cruel and inhumane penal system that destroys so many lives everyday. When the lights came on, I asked for reactions. “It’s a disgrace” was the first one. I didn’t need to ask what was.

Here is how it goes. Roughly. If you are arrested, you will be thrown in jail. To be released before you are tried, bond or bail must be posted. If you cannot afford those, you remain in jail–while the remnants of your life, your family and your career for instance, go to seed. Once you go to trial, if you cannot afford legal representation, a public defender will be appointed for you. (Thanks to the Sixth Amendment and Gideon vs. Wainright–the history of which you can find in Anthony Lewis‘ Gideon’s Trumpet, legal counsel is now every defendant’s constitutional right.)

Unfortunately, the numbers are against those accused of crimes. Twelve million Americans are arrested every year; many of them will be represented by an ‘army’ of fifteen thousand public defenders. They are overworked–some have as many as 180 cases on their plate; they are underpaid–they struggle to make rent and pay off loans. Sometimes their clients are grateful, sometimes not. They must navigate through a system that, contrary to its lofty ideals of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ operates instead on the dictum ‘guilty until proven innocent.’ They are attempting to rescue lives from being thrown into the waste heap that is the American prison system; very few institutions seem to support them. Some institutional structures of the society they are embedded in–like poverty and racism, and of course, that monster, the war on drugs–work against them at every step. (So do some matters of legal procedure.) Unsurprisingly many public defenders leave for greener pastures. Who can blame them?

Justice is hard to obtain under these circumstances. Even the guilty do not seem to deserve the savageness of their penalties: Five years for robbing a man of ninety-six dollars? Ten years–maybe even a life sentence–with no possibility of parole for armed robbery? But it gets worse. Sometimes–too often–the innocent plead guilty to crimes they never committed, unwilling and unable to go to trial and take the risk they might go away for even longer.  Let the horror of that statement sink in for a second: an innocent person might be condemned to spend years of their life in a jail, a venue where they will be subjected to violence of many different stripes, only to emerge with their lives shattered, their future prospects irreparably damaged.

This system, this supposed dispenser of justice and keeper of the peace, is anything but. It is immoral and criminal. It does not deserve our allegiance.