Thread by @SethAbramson

I studied Criminal Law at Harvard Law School under Alan Dershowitz and went on to be a criminal defense attorney.

The post below is one of the most ignorant posts I’ve ever seen about Criminal Justice and I only just now learned this man is faculty at Harvard Law.

How? No idea.

Crime is a key driver of public policy—almost always to the detriment of society—a fact that explains why everything tied to it is supposed to be described and defined in exact (and exacting) terms: e.g. statutes, crime data, Constitutional amendments as interpreted by precedent.

As it happens, I also have a background in Sociology—and even in the allegedly softer of the social sciences (including those, like Sociology, often affiliated with the study of Criminal Justice and the Law) the phrase “pervasive social disorder” would be considered preposterous.

To attempt to situate at the heart of discourse on Criminal Justice an ersatz academic term so nebulous, subjective and pseudoreligious as to be not just meaningless but the sort of quackery we associate with alchemy, charlatanism, cults, astrology and voodoo is deeply nefarious.

The term this yokel who somehow stumbled into a position at Harvard Law is looking for is “irrational fear.”

It goes by other names in other settings, from superstition to urban legend, mythos to animus, vile prejudice to willful ignorance.

It’s a salve for idiots and cowards.

If someone wants to stay indoors to avoid lightning strikes, Mill tells us that’s their business unless they hurt others—even as those of us who are empathetic hope to see that person get the psychiatric help they need.

*This* guy wants *those* folks to govern our public policy.

MAGAism has always been neo-Medievalism—a cult hoping to turn the light out on the Enlightenment and return us to prestidigitation and jesters. But the idea that the Law *and* Politics *and* Criminal Justice should turn its back on reason... coming from *HLS faculty*?

Holy shit.

My job as a lawyer and criminal justice professional is to spread the truth about crime, justice, and the law, not pander to prejudices or the shitty wizardry of those uneducated persons who aim to transmute their ignorance, cowardice, and fear into a prideful, boastful “wisdom.”

Fact: you don’t have insight into what’s happening in strangers’ lives from their zip code.

If you think you do, you’re a mental child who should put cork on the end of your fork before you sit down to eat because you’re liable to injure yourself from sheer stupidity, otherwise.

A house in ill repair can and often does have a loving but simply financially strapped family inside it. A mansion can and often does have a pack of jackals inside it. Keats taught us that “negative capability” is essential: feeling comfort in the face of *not* knowing something.

No human worth a damn cares about how an arrogant idiot sees the world. He’s free to presume things about people or neighborhoods based on nothing but unearned gumption and a mistaken sense of his own intellect—until he hurts others. And influencing public policy is exactly that.

That’s the topline view. It explains why discussing crime data matters and—yes—it *must* control public policy debates, not anecdotes, wishcasting, or bigotry.

It also explains why the far right lies ruthlessly about crime data and allege a conspiracy to fake it when they can’t.

But at *every level below the topline* this HLS crank is an imbecile, too. First, we never—*ever*—speak of laws “in the strict sense” in America, because if we looked at how statutes are *actually* written it’d reveal that every one of us is *technically* committing crimes daily.

Every criminal justice professional knows that we’re not really a nation of laws but policing policies. The laws are written so broadly they could be applied almost anywhere at anytime—where the *magic* happens is in deciding who’s going to be policed, and how, and when, and why.

I mean this *literally*. Example: in my state, *every act* of unprivileged physical contact is punishable by up to a year in jail. Push someone in a bar? 12 months. Knock someone’s hand away from your plate? 12 months.

It’s madness; we know we can’t live like that.

So we don’t.

What we do is create an overlapping matrix of middle-class-or-above people who decide how the rest of us will live: judges, prosecutors, cops, politicians, and so on. And what they do is create *policing strategies* for *other* communities they would *never* accept for their own.

Historically the most draconian policing strategies are applied to the poorest communities, as in a capitalist system they’re deemed the most dangerous—they have the least to lose materially and most reason to be angry. So arrests skyrocket. *Not* because they commit more crimes.

This creates a vicious cycle: more arrests, more poverty, more folks on easily violated probation, more arrests, longer sentences, more poverty and so on. Meanwhile, the crimes with the *most victims* and *most societal effect* are almost exclusively committed by rich men.

Fact.

Sometimes these rich criminals—mostly male, mostly white, mostly right-wing, but not always—find a corrupt academic to carry water for them so this tottering system of falsehoods, bigotry, and nonsense can survive.

That’s what Adrian Vermeule is: a shill for the worst men alive.