OZblog

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Saturday, October 29

The Politisation of Crime

I am going to be nostalgic for a bit as I sip my coffee this chilly Saturday morning.

I miss the good ol' days. The days when Reagan was building more prisons. The days of mandatory Federal senancing guidelines. The days of good old law and order republicans.

If you can't do the time,
don't do the crime...

Yes, I miss that. Those were the days when I tended to vote republican. I have always leaned a bit towards populism [I voted for Lawton Chiles when I lived in FLA, for example], but back in the day I did like law & order candidates. No more mollycoddling criminals, they said, and I responded with my vote. There was no way I could vote for Dukakis and his running mate, Willie Horton, for example. So, I proudly voted for Bush. GHW, that is.

It's not like I was a saint. I got away with a few minor acts of vandalism as a teenager, and I probably could have gone to jail for DUI a time or two [or 3], but I think the primary reason I never got into drugs was a strict law & order thing--I did not want my money going to criminals, so I never once have bought illegal drugs, to this day.

My first legal job was with a small law firm in West Columbia, SC. A general practice firm, they handled everything from domestic to accidents to criminal defence. I did mostly personal injury work, mainly a few high-exposure medical malpractice cases [the newborn baby that lost both his hips due to infection before that baby ever left the premises of the hospital he was born in would make even a grown man cry], but I got stuck with a couple of criminal cases to help out the partner who did most of the criminal work. I've been in a woman's prison, and let me tell you, it is not the sexy place of lesbian antics, nubile showers and erotic cat fights shown in the movies; it was a dark and sad place. My strongest memory is of a woman charged with prostitution [third offence], who asked me as her lawyer what she should tell her 14 year old child? The child was staying with her grandmother, and had no idea her mother [who, not in cruelty but in all honesty I cannot imagine having sex with after my most drunken frat party, let alone paying for] was probably going to be in jail for a year, due to her soliciting a cop. I never wanted to be out of a place as badly as I wanted out of that prison that day.

Yes, I can feel sorry for someone who makes a mistake, as I did for that woman that day. But, as I told her, she probably needed to explain why she was going to be missing for her daughter's freshman year in high school, because the State of South Carolina was not going to go easy on her.

Those were the days when the difference between the USSR and the US included the fact that in the US, the leaders were accountable to follow the law. Nixon was forced by his own party to resign or face an impeachment trial for what can best be described as something Stalin would have not thought twice about. We were good; they were bad. Our leaders followed the law; their leaders ignored the law when it got in the way of their political plans.

Now, we are in a new century. And, we have new morals and new priorities. Crime is now A-ok with the aging law & order crowd, as long as the crime is done for political reasons, right here in the USA. People say on TV news shows that we should feel sorry for Scooter Libby, the very same people who, less than 10 years ago, said that we should throw a US president out of office for the very same crime. How said it is that he is going to have to spend perhaps millions of dollars to fight his charges, and how he might go to jail.

Yes, I wax nostalgic for the days when G. Gordon Liddy, who I happen to think is one cool dude, did not take to the airwaves whining about how his criminal lawyers were going to wipe out his savings. He took it like a man, no grimacing, just like he held his hand over the candle without flinching from the pain.

Those were the good ol' days.