Justice in Jeopardy

ABC news is reporting on our local crisis, as well as the financial problems facing public defenders in Kentucky and Minnesota.

Defense attorneys tend to get a bad rap from the angry public.  Public defenders, at least in my own experience, tend to get somewhat more respect, at least so far as comments on our personal integrity goes.  (Although I always field questions about "how can I do that for a living?")  Oddly enough, stick a traffic ticket in someone's hand and they can't wait to treat a public defender like the local librarian - "Can you help me with this or that/What can I do/What should I say to the judge?"  Can you imagine, dear reader, if instead of a traffic ticket's fines you were looking at a portion of your life in jail, plus all the attendant costs that entails?

The really odd thing about the situation, odd because no one is really talking about it, is that we're looking at a failure of leadership in this country.  Bad choices (more war/less taxes/less social programs) lead to bad economies.  Bad economies lead to (in our secular and materialistic society) incredible social pressures.  Those pressures lead to crimes.  The legislatures try to curb crimes by criminalizing more and more activity and stiffening the penalty.  That leads to more and more arrests, which leads to more and more defendants.  It's a vicious cycle that has resulted in the US being the world's leading jailer of its people.  The bottom line is that the upper crust in the country can't keep taking financially, and we can't keep holding onto puritanical laws. 

If, as a people, we're serious about controlling crime, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, hunger, and the host of social ills we face, we need to strengthen our communities, create work, fund projects, better educate our children (and our neighbors' children), and jettison our conspicuously-consuming attitude in favor of a more creatively engaged and tolerant interaction with our fellow citizens.  All that takes time, money, and (perhaps most difficult for us and thus also the most demeritorius) simple hard thought about who we are and what we want to accomplish as a culture. 

In the meantime, we'll be sending out heavily armed police officers to arrest our young people for smoking the occasional joint.  And our politicians will keep saying that we need to tighten our belts, suck up budget cuts, let our kids go without teachers and our accused (that's potentially you, dear reader, your children) twist in the wind without a legal counselor who can spend a proper amount of time on their cases. 

Comments

[EdinTally]

Those people who truly enjoy the benefits of the status quo, care nothing for the rest of us. As long as they believe they can insulate themselves and their children, they are more than happy to sacrifice the rest of us to our own fate.

[Atomic]

Seriously, if you're going to depress us with a cold bitchslap of reality, the least you could do is give us a kitten update.

[Lisa Winett]

This is an interesting post in light of the current presidential election coming up. I used to be a democrat who believed in helping all the people and commiting my life to being part of the solution. Then, through a certain circumstancial complications became a componant of the "problem." I'm a single mom raising a boy in a dangerous world full of married couples doing life the "right" way all the while feeling like they care about people but still leaving us in need to fend for ourselves. However, I don't favor the traditional democratic view point of more social programs or the "let's all work together" attitude of solving the worlds problems. I have friends and family entrenched in the San Fransisco "activist, social reform" community and when a tree fell on my home three hours away, noone came up to help rebuild my barn. I passed out flyers to my son's little league team asking for help and no one showed up or called. Instead, everyone sent money or drove to New Orleans, over 1000 miles away, to help total strangers rebuild there homes. When the tradgedy hit me, where was the help?

I'm Green forever, but I get depressed when the good spirit of social reform falls prey to the timeless pitfall of the popularity contest.

What is the solution to our domestic social problems? How 'bout get off your ass and make peace locally with the war mongers, the capitalist executives, the "take care of my family firsters", start your own small buisness, take the money, and make what you want with it. Even if the people with money don't want to be friends, the least we can do is try. Bitching gets boring.

By the way, who ever came up with the idea of the Earned Income Tax Credit, that is by far the best solution to the agony of not having enough money for I've had the pleasure of partaking in ever. I don't recomend staying in a state of poverty for a long time, but if that is where you are, then this little bootie is nice. I hope who ever wins next doesn't take that away.

Thanks for the blog, you're a great character for the world, a poet gone public defender, well done.