Between Anarchy and Order: Law, Freedom, and the Possibility of Justice

Between Anarchy and Order: Law, Freedom, and the Possibility of Justice

Ecological Criminal Report

Table of Contents: 1. Issues at the Nexus of Green Criminology and Critical Security Studies: Feedback Cycles in an Era of Climate Change 2. Lessons for Legitimacy: An Outsider’s Perspective on the Intelligence Community 3. Rethinking the Thin Blue Line: Working Toward Permeability between Anarchy and Totalitarianism 4. Sketches for a (Green Criminological) Research Project: Can Encoding a Bioregional Ethic Reduce Criminality by Increasing Carrying Capacity?

5. Reflections on the Geoeconomic and Sociopolitical Context of a Militant (Criminological) Activist Ethnography 6. Consensus and Conflict: Changes in Marijuana Laws from Perspectives of Competing Models of Crime 7. Contrasting Classical Criminology with Positivist Theories of Crime: Two Myopic Theories That Probably Do More to Create Crime Than Anything Else 8. Heroes Raping Heroes: An Attempt to Understand Sexual Assault and Silence in the Military through Nested Crime Triangles 9. Society as an Asylum 10. Perceiving a Spectacle, Dreaming Reform: The Wire, Amsterdam, and Political Possibility 11. On Resisting the Suffocating Trauma of the Cityscape 12. Sketches of Transformative Justice: Rage, Restoration, and the Blindness of Lady Justice 13. Casualties in the War on Drugs: Humanity, Dehumanization, and the Conspiracy of Capital 14. On Prison Abolition: Searching for a Logic to Destabilize the Economic Forces of History 15. Shifting Blame: Benevolent Paternalism and the Conspiracy to Fail our Youth 16. Civilized Repression, Wild Reaction: A Green Cultural Criminological Perspective on the Animal Enterprise and Terrorism Act 17. Reflections on the Elusivity of Justice 18. Lessons in Extremism from an Unlikely Source: Contrapoints, Controversy, and the Failure to Engage Conflict Civilly 19. A Tale of Two Anarchies: A Dialogue between Contemporary Anarchist Criminology and The Politics of Attack

Issues at the Nexus of Green Criminology and Critical Security Studies: Feedback Cycles in an Era of Climate Change This essay is not meant to do much more than point out a single idea, namely that theories of criminology have perhaps relied for too long on “classical” or even magical ideas of what constitutes underlying causes of crime, that breaking the law is simply a choice, or based on some sort of evil causing it. In the last century or two, a move to more psychological or socio-economic theories have certainly expanded the field, but have still left out a vital aspect that tends to remain unconscious, yet remains inextricable from human societies—that is, the ecological context in which crime is necessarily situated in.

This has enormous implications as we try to integrate an ecological perspective into our current understanding of criminal justice and crime control. That is, if police, homeland security, the national security state, and the military are designed to suppress and “defeat” crime (and criminals), then perhaps it is critical to first determine the causes of that crime and what factors induce criminality. Here the relatively recent field of “green criminology,” along with critical security studies may offer insight into some of the underlying factors: ecological protection, human engagement with the environment, animal advocacy, eco-racism, eco-genocide, economics, globalization, human rights, capitalism, activism, and the rights of animals in their ability to systematically cause both harm and crime.

Fragments of a Green Criminology Green criminology is a relatively new field, emerging in the literature of the 1990s and has since yielded interesting and innovative writing by environmental scholars, lawyers, criminologists and public policy experts. Green, or environmental, criminology, essentially examines the intersection of criminal justice and environmental law, widening the context of the leading theories of crime, while including topics that include climate change and social conflict; abuse and harm to animals; illegal wildlife trade; pollution, toxic waste, and corporate malfeasance; environmental perpetrators (who counts?) and victims; the International Criminal Court, environmental “crimes against humanity”; enforcement and liability; environmental forensic studies; and environmental crime prevention. As we face the unique juxtaposition of declining governmental attention to impending environmental harm and the rise of traditional conservative “tough-on-crime” approaches in a complicated political setting, theories of law, environmental ethics, crime, regulation, litigation, effectiveness of criminal punishment, corporate responsibility, victim standing, and similar aspects of environmental criminology offer insights into both domestic and emerging international law on environmental crimes.

In Dr. Gary Potter’s “Pushing the boundaries of a Green Criminology: Environmental harm as a cause of crime,” he offers the idea of green criminology and conservation criminology as more than simply an analysis of crime through an environmental lens, or environmental harm through a criminological lens. Rather, his point is more radical, suggesting two main types of “green crimes,” primary and secondary: 1. Primary green crimes, including those which inflict harm on the environment and thus those that suffer harms as a result of land, water, or air degradation ((crimes of air pollution,

deforestation, species decline, water pollution). These may or may not have laws prohibiting or addressing such harms.

2. Secondary green crimes might include symbiotic crimes that grow out of the “flouting of rules that seek to regulate environmental disasters,” for instance state violence against ecological resistance groups, abetting of ecological harm, smuggling endangered species, etc. Corporate crime might be included, for instance white collar or fraud that side-steps pollution restriction, corruption to avoid environmental regulations, etc.

This is to say, that there is more to green criminology than “mere” environmental crime, for instance the criminal context that emerges from the justice system’s attempt to criminalize environmental harms in the first place.

Moreover, the question of whether environmental harm may in fact do much (if not all?) to cause crime in the first place cannot be understated. Robert Agnew, for instance, writes that climate change could “become a driving force of crime rates over the next century,” arguing that climatic shifts are, “likely to increase crime by increasing strain and conflict, weakening social supports and controls, and increasing criminal opportunities,” as well as fostering beliefs favorable to crime, while contributing to strains conducive to crime. (Agnew and Shannon, 2012) Potter similarly goes on to list a number of ways in which ecological harm directly contributes to crime: 1. Conflict over scarce resources (land, water, minerals, food…), resulting in theft, violence, riots, wars, state repression, forced depatriation, genocide…

2. Conflict over enforcement of environmental protections, leading to pressures on local economic activity and threats to livelihoods due to lack of alternative employment, resulting in civil unrest and riots.

3. Crime committed as a response to environmental harm, whether by victims or sympathetic activists, including illegal direct actions, ecotage, monkey-wrenching, arson, violence, and intimidation directed at those perceived as being responsible for environmental harm — “ecoterrorists”.

4. Crime and criminalization as a response to environmental protest, civil disobedience that is restricted by criminal laws when state, corporate, and other actors commit crimes to neutralize protestors, including attacking, assassinating, assaulting these actors, carried out or supported by powerful interests. This may include kinetic actions (killing) or soft power, illegally surveilling or infiltrating such groups.

Beyond the above direct linkages between environmental harm and criminal activity that would likely fit within the “secondary crime” characterization, are those less direct contributions of ecological harm to crime, namely how environmental victimization may itself lead to crime: 1. Links between environmental conditions like the weather and crime have long been demonstrated, as when heat provides a factor in some types of violent crime (riots, domestic

violence, assaults, etc.) Recently, a study linking rising rates of suicide has also been linked to rising temperatures. Here, mood and disposition and behavior is affected by climate, both individually and in groups.

2. Degradation of environmental conditions may increase domestic violence, as when breadwinners can no longer support their families due to, for instance, farming conditions being compromised, food supplies running low, etc; or when home-makers struggle to provide sufficient firewood or clean drinking water due to polluted or dried up rivers.

3. Displaced and dispossessed populations, removed from native lands or those whose traditional lifestyles are disrupted may turn to crime as an economic necessity, due to culture clash, or a culture simply cultivates a “deviant” subculture in radical opposition to an oppressive dominant one. This might include poor locals stealing from tourists seen as corrupting traditional ways of life, or different concepts of property, etc. or simply because they are suddenly exposed to consumer culture they cannot participate in. Further, the relationship between drug addiction or alcoholism and crime is well established in criminological literature, as is its connection to ecological dispossession and cultural disruption as well.

4. Links between urban decay and crime have been made, with environment, happiness and behavior recognized as important factors. That is, the decreased interaction with nature (“naturedeficit disorder”) increases unhappiness and correlates with various mental health problems, relating psychological factors to crime.

5. The relationship of diet to crime and anti-social behavior has been established, with those with poor diets more likely to engage in violent behavior, not even to mention the atrocities committed on animals to provide for the food many times in the first place. This in turn may have traumatizing effects, or desensitize individuals to killing, maiming, or otherwise torturing living beings. Moreover, food production in general is implicated in environmental damage at larger scales as well.

6. Pollution, for instance lead poisoning, correlates with crime hot-spots, and alters brain chemistry and behavior. Polluting industries are often sited near residential populations that face deprivation already, but instances of lead poisoning, like Flint, Michigan’s water crisis may prove to be key factors in urban crime as well.

Beyond these, future research might focus further on those “harms” that should be considered crimes but are not yet; how best to move them into such a legal framework; how best to prosecute or defend green criminals; what those barriers preventing green crimes from causing harm or being prosecuted are; methodologies; and speculations as to the future developments with regards to the nexus between green criminology and critical security and terrorism studies. These might include environmental offences, both contributing to climate change and consequences of climate change), associated offences (civil unrest and criminal activities), as well as regulatory offences (arising from policy responses to climate change), etc. (White and Heckenberg, 2014) Not only are the sources of environmental damage potentially causes of crime, but indeed they may often become targets of crime, as victims become more discriminating with acts of vengeance. In this regard, the security state has increasingly been investing in tools meant to suppress such crime, without actually addressing its roots. Black market values, eco-threats, indirect costs, environmental

crime markets and organized gangs, financial aspects of environmental threats, the proceeds of crime and money laundering, and environmental issues in the context of economic systems, production methods, supply chains, etc., as well as on indirect costs such as the displacement of humans, fauna, and flora, along with conflicts caused by environmental problems provide evidence of grave risks that threaten the integrity of human systems, let alone ecological ones.

Security or Sustainability?

Todd Miller points this out in his book, “Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security,” when he points out that while estimates project tens if not hundreds of millions of climate refugees will have to migrate to those industrial countries that are largely exacerbating the ecological crises in the first place, such countries are more apt to militarize police, stockpile ammunition, build detention centers, spy on citizens, develop crowd control techniques and biometric ID readings, along with surveillance technologies, armed checkpoints, enhanced interrogations, and generally fund more cameras, radar, drones, roving patrols, paramilitary forces and militias, buns, bullets, and armored personnel carriers, ultimately establishing ever-increasing authoritarian dominating governments that enforce and militarize border zones, where practices of arrest without charge, expulsion, indefinite detention, torture, and killings have become the norm.

Such catastrophic convergences are likely to only be aggravated by climate cataclysms, but similarly such climate cataclysms will likely continue as our world increasingly finds itself living in a militarized world of surveillance, razor wire, border walls, armed patrols, detention centers, and relocation camps that only worsen economic processes as volatile political and social situations impoverish many while enriching a few. Yet this is merely a by-product of climate change–a process that is only fed as none of the core reasons are addressed–that colonial powers pay, train, and equip soldiers and police to protect the processes that cause them in the first place.

With the wholesale looting of regions, land surveys, photographs and slides, maps, field notes, and natural resource reports will be critical in establishing blueprints for understanding how and why the environment is changing to reverse the damage. Here, enforcement and security forces tend to treat the symptoms rather than the root causes of the violence. Climate change will only impose heightened economic demands on those not prepared to meet that challenge, hurting economic development and contributing to a number of major physical, economic, health, and social effects.

Environmental changes, sparked by conflicts over natural resources, lead to violence, poverty, war, and clan conflicts, in turn leading to further environmental destruction and more violence. To break this deadly cycle, retrieving the historical information (and will) to understand ecological processes of change can reduce both land degradation as well as conflict, providing the baseline data on vegetation, water, soil, and erosion to recognize the carrying capacity of the land and work to distribute resources in equitable ways—not only sharing life-support systems with human communities, but the wider non-human earth community as well.

Criminal Justice in a Changing Climate This not only means robust environmental laws, but perhaps more importantly an effective enforcement agency with the necessary expertise and resources, insulated from immediate financial, political, and economic pressures, to investigate criminal conspiracies, corporate crimes, and those systemic processes that give rise to ecological damage and with it, criminality itself. Lessons from

enforcement agencies might appear fruitful—for instance, like the war on drugs, authorities must approach poachers and smugglers not simply by attacking supply lines, but also providing alternative economic activities, while understanding local political and cultural situations that find trafficking elephant ivory, rhino horn, or other animal products acceptable, for instance through situational crime prevention, routine activity theory, or developing computer models that map decision making processes to understand where they’re likely to strike next, deploying wardens accordingly. (Potter, 2012) Global Environmental Crime, valued at perhaps more than a quarter trillion dollars annually, is only increasing, with more than 60% of surveyed countries stating they are witnessing new environmental crimes, indicating growing sophistication and adaptation by transnational organized criminal groups, with 84% reporting a convergence with other serious crimes, such as corruption, counterfeiting, drug trafficking, cybercrime, and financial crime. (Interpol, 2016) Non-state armed groups, terrorist groups, and criminal networks fund their activities exploiting natural resources in conflict zones, with 40% of internal conflicts linked to natural resources. “Environmental crime is transnational in scope and insidious in nature. It robs governments of much-needed revenues, people of their livelihoods, and communities of peace and security. The international community needs to support a comprehensive approach by following rhetoric with action, policy with implementation, and law with enforcement. (Ibid) As of now, the cost-benefit balance is strongly against the conduct of an investigation, giving official sanction to multinational corporate wrongdoing and other ecological harm in the future. More than 64,000 facilities are currently listed in agency databases as having violated federal environmental laws, while fewer than .5% of violations trigger criminal investigations. As one paper points out, “The federal government should be enhancing its enforcement of the thousands of unchecked violations. ‘A more robust regulatory scheme with appropriate criminal and civil enforcement for violations may do more to deter risky behavior than a record-breaking criminal prosecution.” (Kates, 2014). Information sharing across sectors, implementing environmental policy, enhanced protection of civilians, better enforcement, increased financial support and training, and a deeper understanding of the drivers of conflicts can all help provide a multidisciplinary approach to engaging environmental crime. Innovative and cross-disciplinary ways of analyzing online marketplaces for illegal trading of endangered plants with policing practices can further aid enforcement in the detection and investigation of illegal trades of endangered plants, animals, and extracted resources which threaten to destroy species as profits are used to finance new forms of trafficking.

For instance, a recent focus on making ecocide a crime against humanity might create a “preemptive responsibility to prevent ecological damage in the same way that “superior responsibility” or “strict liability” enables people to be prosecuted whether or not they intended to cause damage.”

(Carrington, 2011) Because the extensive destruction and damage to ecosystems to such an extent that the peaceful enjoyment and ecosystem services have become severely diminished, the recognition by the UN of ecocide as a human rights atrocity can help to foster peace and prosecution through the international criminal court. Perhaps then, while lawmakers are wrestling with anthropocentric notions of who legal rights should extend do, as well as wrestling with the realities of a legal system based in the settler-colonial paradigm of the constitutions they derive their power from, they can at least begin to see environmental crimes as crimes against humanity. This is not to suggest that the International Criminal Court is likely to ratify a treaty that enables the

prosecution of ecocide along with other international mass atrocities like genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, but it is to suggest that if the state’s goal is presumably to protect the population from extermination and forcible transfer or enslavement, it would do well to incorporate the same ecological lens through which the crime it legislates against may in fact be a result of that same legislation.

Here, powerful profit-seeking entities, governmental actors, and everyday activities by individuals themselves converge in large scale processes that threaten biotic processes and the climate as a whole. Perhaps then a completely different system is warranted, a justice system specifically for green crimes alone. Both of these however may ignore the government itself in shaping the structural conditions of an industry, where “criminogenic industry structures” are constructed by the government that result in harm, for instance the offshore oil industry.

Cutting the Branches Beneath Us The powerful continue to attack the powerless, and the legal framework in which it does so must be understood to delegitimize its own supposed justification, in that it simply cannot adequately address the environmental harm it causes or mitigate the unequal environmental burden it subjugates its citizens to, and, in doing say, in fact heightens the criminal nature of the societies we exist within.

That is, the true devastation of environmental harm is both a cause and consequence of the national security state itself, as it continues to exploit countries, denying protections to citizens, effect deportations and a myriad of environmental harms, ultimately catalyzing the criminality of the society it seeks to secure.

It is by no means a stretch of the imagination then to see climate change, with the myriad effects it will have, not least of which will be the potential for crime, to represent the greatest security threat of the 21st century, and likely many more after.

Agnew and Shannon, Robert and Sarah (2016) “Climate, Crime, and Coping Strategies.” The Society Pages. 2/16/2012 https://thesocietypages.org/specials/agnew/ Carrington, Damian (2011) Test Trial Convicts Fossil Fuel Bosses of ‘Ecocide.” The Guardian.

10/5/2011 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carringtonblog/2011/sep/29/ecocide-oil-criminal-court?CMP=twt_gu Heaton, Laura (2017) “The Watson Files.” Foreign Policy. 5/31/18 https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/31/the-watson-files-somalia-climate-change-conflict-war/ Interpol (2016) “Environmental Crime Threatening Peace and Security, Finds New INTERPOLUN Environment Report.” Interpol. 12/8/18 https://www.interpol.int/News-andmedia/News/2016/N2016-165 Kates, Graham (2014) “Environmental Crime: The Prosecution Gap.” The Crime Report.

7/14/2014 https://thecrimereport.org/2014/07/14/2014-07-environmental-crime-theprosecution-gap/#

Miller, Todd (2017) Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. City Lights Books: San Francisco, CA. Peoples, Columba and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2010) Critical Security Studies: An Introduction.

Routledge Retrieved 8/16/18 at https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2017/BSS405/um/Columba_Peoples__Nick_Vaughan-WilliamsCritical_Security_Studies__An_Introduction-Routledge__2010_-__1-88_.pdf Potter, Gary (2016) “Save the Elephant: what we can Learn from Failures of the War on Drugs.”

The Conversation. 9/15/2016 https://theconversation.com/save-the-elephant-what-we-can-learnfrom-failures-of-the-war-on-drugs-64839 Potter, Gary (2012) “Pushing the Boundaries of (a) Green Criminology: Environmental Harm as a Cause of Crime.” The Green Criminology Monthly. 11/1/12 http://www.greencriminology.org/monthly/nov2012/The%20Green%20Criminology%20Monthly %20-%20November%202012%20-%20Pushing%20the%20boundaries%20of%20(a)%20Green %20Criminology,%20by%20Gary%20R%20Potter.pdf White, Rob and Diane Heckenberg (2014) “Climate Change and Social Conflict.” In Green Criminology: An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm. Routledge: New York, NY.

Lessons for Legitimacy: An Outsider’s Perspective on the Intelligence Community “Welcome, youth, who come attended by immortal charioteers and mares which bear you on your journey to our dwelling. For it is no evil fate that has set you to travel on this road, far from the beaten paths of men, but right and justice. It is meet that you learn all things — both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is not true belief. Yet none the less shalt thou learn these things also—how passing right through all things should judge the things that seem to be.” –Parmenides “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” –James Madison “I need good intelligence...We gotta step up security. If that means we have to pay more money for intelligence, then we pay more money.” –Jimmy Reardon Origins of Inquiry: For much of my life, I thought a democratic society tended to be based on three fundamental institutions: schools (an educated population), media (informed citizens), and good government (knowledgeable politicians). Yet what is missing from that equation is the role of those “guardians” that protect those institutions from external threats. That is, without those who could defend these institutions against those enemies that would seek to do them harm—first and foremost the intelligence community (IC) upon which defensive actions are premised upon—these institutions will likely be overwhelmed, with a democratic society falling to a technological authoritarianism that substitutes freedom and justice for efficiency and obedience…

I chose education as the field to participate in, primarily because I assumed people’s behavior was based to a large extent on how they perceived the world around them. Teach critical thinking and people will have the tools to become knowledgeable about the threats around them and actions with which to approach them. As students pursue noble endeavors, they can help revitalize different institutions and industries as intelligent citizens to inform and remake the world around them, resolving conflict wherever it is found. To a degree, one can analogize the fields of education and intelligence: Education is for the streets and civil society, Intelligence is for the battlefield and warzones.

Today though, I see this largely as a losing battle. When these institutions are under attack daily from nation-states with the express concern of waging information and political warfare, it doesn’t make much sense to try ignore it and hope it goes away. When the street becomes the battlefield, and when enemies design attacks against the democratic and cognitive infrastructure, education needs to change.

For that reason, I determined this summer to read thirty books on the intelligence community (below) with the intention of compiling a list of crucial findings and general themes [thank god for audiobooks!] that could help approach the IC in a more constructive way:

1. The Primacy of Trust Reading through former CIA and NSA director Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence Clapper, and Former FBI director Comey’s memoirs, three quotes generally stuck with me in particular: that a “post-truth era is a pre-fascist one,” that it is absolutely critical for each and every individual to “speak truth to power,” and the most important resource the intelligence community has available to it are the “reservoirs of trust” it cultivates.

Putting aside for a moment the paradox the IC presumes that the American people are not trustworthy (as evidenced by the security clearances) yet demands they trust them to protect them against threats, simply because those individuals engaged in the IC are not held accountable to the people themselves, but rather various intelligence oversight committees who themselves are beholden to their particular districts or states, each with their own needs and values apart from those of the nation as a whole, every IC member needs to be ethically sound; otherwise, as Comey points out, “without [the reservoir of trust and credibility], we are just another partisan player in a polarized world…” In this regard, the IC cannot be a tool of politics, but rather politics must be a tool of effective intelligence analysis. The IC are, in an information war, the frontlines of defense, their values and leadership providing the core premises around which entire strategic plans are crafted and implemented.

For this reason, one can see why any enemy would seek to undermine this trust through campaigns meant to question and confuse people as to the true intentions and competency of those institutions at the heart of a free society—voting machines, political parties, congress and the presidency, the media, universities, the justice system, etc. of course, but also basic thought processes of the population itself. If we can’t trust our own ability to determine what is real, we are required to either rely on others or deny any truth can be understood at all.

In a world without truth, anything is permissible, no matter how abhorrent.

2. Institutions Reflect the Social Values They Operate Within There can be no doubt that the intelligence community has a lot of baggage associated with it, including the death of innocents for questionable motives.

While this is so, it must be considered that this may primarily be due to the “cocoon of alternative reality” the status quo busily wraps around it, due in part to the reigning political ideology of the day. As I’ve come to understand the difference between worldviews, liberals tend to believe in the fundamental goodness of people, with institutions corrupting them; whereas conservatives tend to believe humans are decidedly corrupt, and it is the institutions –family, church, government, etc— that are responsible for keeping them from abusing others.

Now imagine for a moment how this premise affects intelligence analysis and actions then. The IC and law enforcement in general is well known for being a conservative bastion.

People themselves are then targeted as enemies and threats against the prevailing social order, made up of good institutions that should be protected at all costs—even if that might mean “getting dirty” to operate on the same level as corrupt enemy soldiers. Here we move to looking at certain

ideas and ideologies as inherently corrupt and worthy of being stamped out, whether because they are “radical,” “communist,” “leftist,” “criminal,” “terrorist,” or simply “evil.”

Building back into intelligence organizations curricula that address and reflect upon core values and how they manifest and are applied might help to question enforcement of a prevailing political agenda that fuels injustice in the first place. Similarly, protecting the independence of such an organization would need to be ensured so that it can repel influence operations by political parties and foreign operations in the first place.

3. Effective Transition Between Intelligence and Policy No doubt many of us have heard the term, “intelligence failure,” and certainly this is a political expedient term for politicians to use so as to deflect criticism of how they chose to use that evidence. There are three needs I can see in particular, namely of course the proper collection, analysis, integration, and presentation of intelligence in the first place, and effective policy making based on the intelligence in the second. Perhaps more importantly however is the rigorous engagement by both actors (IC and politicians) of one another, so both can see how the other have made decisions, come to conclusions, and can understand how the other is critically ascertaining what actions to take place as a result. That is, not only should the IC’s tradecraft be a systematic process of best-practices, along with political science expertise informing policy creation, but the integration and dialogue of both with each other should be held to account, where structured discussion should be utilized to ensure the transition from intelligence to policy is measured for success.

Throughout these writings a common idea was simply that intelligence analysts should stick to technical, “objective” analysis, and leave the policy making to policy makers. To a degree I can agree.

But there is no doubt that self-interest and party politics comes into play here.

Without effective dialogue between these separate groups, a strategy session on intelligence can devolve into one on messaging—how to position the findings in a way that maximizes political advantage, emphasizing elements that seemingly advocate for a political position instead of one that accommodates critical positions. On the other hand of course, blurring the boundaries between the IC and politicians will ultimately undermine public trust in the work the IC does, describing policies as arising from the “deep state.”

For this reason, IC analysts must approach their work in ways that systematically integrate best practices while paying attention to cognitive pitfalls; politicians must be able to put the common good over party interest; and a balance must be struck, with each actor having a degree of investment in each other’s work, while maintaining a degree of autonomy, expertise, and control that is accountable, both to politicians and the people in whose name they do their work. As Robert Jervis points out, “The different needs and perspectives of decision makers and intelligence officials guarantee conflict between them. For both political and psychological reasons, political leaders have to oversell their policies, especially in domestic systems in which power is decentralized, and this will produce pressures on and distortions of intelligence. It is then, not surprising that intelligence officials, especially those at the working level, tend to see political leaders as unscrupulous and careless, if not

intellectually deficient, and that leaders see their intelligence services as timid, unreliable, and often out to get them…Decision makers need confidence and political support, and honest intelligence unfortunately often diminishes rather than increases these goods by pointing to ambiguities, uncertainties, and the costs and risks of policies. In many cases, there is a conflict between what intelligence at its best can produce and what decision makers seek and need...it is the very need to claim that intelligence and policy are in close harmony that produces conflict between them.”

4. Political Parties Are Antithetical to Intelligent Analysis In a world where it is near political suicide to admit fault, reforming institutions and processes seems at odds with political parties and the ideological purity they purport to espouse. There is a real difference between the cold hard truth and the public relations campaigns that are effected to downplay those facts that are determined to be boundaries or pitfalls for a political campaign, whose preference bubbles might be popped. To varying degrees, intelligence will necessarily discredit certain platforms. Political positions would necessarily dismiss certain analyses if seen to be detrimental. For this reason, intelligence reforms would be feared as “political” if they came to conclusions that pointed out the political failings of these parties and politicians.

This is really to point out again the paradigms in which all of us are trapped within, and the inability to distinguish ideology from reality, but also the fear and unwillingness, perhaps simply intellectual impoverishment that goes with critical thinking, or poor tradecraft when it comes to learning and teaching the truth, and convincing an audience the epistemological foundations when it comes to how to approach and act upon those truths. Good strategic policy is not made by subjugating all data to a pre-ordained program, but rather programs should be made to accommodate the data that fluctuates data so as to remain flexible, dynamic, precise and decisive, responding to circumstances as a complex, adaptive, and responsive system.

5. The Premises of Intelligence Analysis must be Reconsidered in Each New Era There is no doubt that implicit biases will lead to certain assumptions, many of which can dead end in unjust and cynical conclusions. If this is the case, a philosophical gut-check must be commissioned, looking at the root causes of crime and, assuming of course the intelligence community itself is not a major factor in those causes, addressing those causes from the ground up.

To a real degree, this necessitates reform not just within the IC or law enforcement alone, but within the entire criminal justice system, and the wider socio-economic systems as well and the values that underpin them. That is, the very ground of being must come under observation, to determine the source of activity.

In this regard, such a “back-to-the-beginning” analysis that reconsiders every item upon which intelligence is based must be conducted from the values, causes, the sources, methods, operational coordination, the approaches, and the endgame. The nation-state itself, for which the entire IC labors, has its own paradigmatic constraints and restraints that may generate the factors that create the conditions for those elements the IC must contend with. If so, how likely and possible will it be for the IC to deliver intelligence reports and products that address the core issues that policy makers can and will implement? Does it have the capability to meet its objectives if the ends and means are not proportional?

To be direct: if the IC operates to defend and uphold the Constitution, which arose in the context of a settler-colonial genocidal and theocratic nation-state, is it capable of neutralizing threats if it is working to generate the conditions from which its enemies arise?

6. Cultivating Transparency This has been touched upon both either implicitly and explicitly in most of the other points. Really, it speaks to on the one hand, a kind of intelligence checklist that is not only determined and updated frequently and can begin to offer insight into how knowledge is determined, one endorsed by the IC community itself, and understood by all stakeholders alike, but also cultivated widely in the public itself. To privilege only those with security clearances with the kind of tradecraft in intelligence analysis while disallowing such a skill in those not trained in the IC is to maintain an elitist hierarchy of Gnosticism – the ability to understand how the most critical decisions of national security and civilizational continuity is monopolized by one privileged group.

Might the threat evolve then from various nations’ Intelligence Communities against each other to the various Intelligence Communities working together against national populations, brought together by a common dissatisfaction with power held to no account?

To foster the kind of thinking that allows each person to determine how matters of war are determined can help build trust for those who analyze information for the simple reason that the methodology is transparent, and therefore a degree of understanding and awareness of how issues are objectively assessed will insulate and inoculate citizens from distrust of institutions that seek to represent their best interests.

Beyond tradecraft and methodology with regards to intelligence analysis, the process and institutions themselves need to be fully articulated in simple ways. Civic education and participation can go some way to doing this, along with simplifying processes and allowing for a degree of integration between civilians and intelligence officers. This can help address the fundamental disruption between the IC and the population by helping navigate the complex bureaucracies so that the degree of information is not so watered down as to cultivate a degree of suspicion or a completely distorted picture.

7. Co-Evolution Births New Problems, but “It’ll be Okay” At a certain point, even if the above themes were to be addressed or resolved as fully as possible, there would no doubt still be failures and threats at all levels, necessitating reforms that themselves lead to other failings. It seems to me this can be seen to a degree in the evolution of the IC over the last twenty years.

Part of the trauma of 9/11 seemed to be the degree of “randomness” that the attack played on.

How many had heard of al-Qaeda before that day, or were focused on American foreign policy in the middle east? A kind of ignorance or lackadaisical attitude immediately gave way to a kind of inability to assess intelligence in any other way but a “worst-case-scenario” point of view, in which the mere possibility of the Iraq-al-Qaeda connection was enough to warrant a preemptive invasion, leading to the occupation and counter-insurgency operations that became the quagmire which in turn necessitated a scapegoat, and ensuring intelligence analysis would slow down and depend on diplomacy in the case of Iran, while at the same time preventing for expedient or commensurate

reactions so that a political solution or reaction to the type of information and political warfare that Russia used could not be formulated in time to prevent the election of an individual who represented potentially the worst intelligence failure in modern history – an enemy landing an asset into the top intelligence position, the commander in chief.

Again, this is to say nothing apart from the fact that the IC, like the society it operates within, reacts and responds to threats, seeking to reform contradictions and resolve conflicts, which in turn creates the conditions for newer and more complex threats to emerge to respond to.

The cycle of war continues, necessitating a cycle of intelligence analysis to sustain it, and the devotion of resources and talent to ensure such threats are contained to a level that doesn’t get “out of hand.”

Personal Experience of an “Intelligence Failure” I remember in the wake of 9/11 having to make a case as to whether the war in Afghanistan was warranted or not. Without necessarily believing it, I made the case that indeed it was: ideally, a democratic government was justified in invading another country if that country’s leadership was protecting a terrorist organization because it shared values of oppressive, tyrannical, and theocratic governance that were antithetical to basic human and civil rights; both could be destroyed to liberate those oppressed. To some degree, I think this mirrors another early position I held on the death penalty – namely that not everything that lives deserves to continue living, if for instance they cause the death of those who do, i.e. serial murderers, terrorists, etc.

(The logic that killers should be killed to reduce killing.)

My thinking changed I believe when I realized that “ideals” don’t actually play out in the complex mess of reality. A preemptive invasion of another country that harbors terrorists requires the occupation of that country, which in turn breeds insurgency against foreign occupiers, cultivating more insurgents, terrorists, and therefore the justification of extending that occupation indefinitely, in turn reconstituting the type of warfare employed, and shifting the nature of the initial objectives entirely. Similarly, to effectively argue for the death penalty requires a criminal justice system that works, namely that does not target, imprison, or execute innocent people, or cause conditions that generate capital offenses in the first place. With these other factors that exist in the real world but not the ideal world, the analysis is changed.

That realization changed my conscious thinking of the Middle Eastern wars and death penalty perhaps, but not my unconscious thought processes. I remember advocating for missile strikes on Syria and Libya for instance for the exact same reason: the Arab Spring was due to the repressive policies of authoritarian dictators, and destroying their ability to maintain their dictatorships would allow democratic factions to remake civil society in more participatory ways. (This of course says nothing of how to approach those anti-dictator factions that would seek to impose an equally authoritarian regime of course, and indeed came in the form of the Islamic State.)

Drone strikes, like preemptive invasions on a terrorist-harboring countries, would liberate the oppressed by killing oppressors. The same analysis, if perhaps the details are different.

Indeed, the relationship of insurgency to terrorism was present in this relationship: allow terrorists the opportunity to operate in a region and an insurgency would embroil the region; attack the insurgency with missiles and drones and the insurgency fractures and goes into hiding, reverting to a fragmented terrorism that proves difficult to address merely through counter-terrorist operations.

As with any situation, the problem is ever more complex than we can hope to ascertain without good intelligence. And without access to good intelligence, it is simply impossible to address the problem in any effective way whatsoever. Moreover, such ideal analyses discount the role of the subject of both policies as participating in the same kind of oppressive role it supposedly seeks to degrade elsewhere – is a settler colonial state responsible for the injustices such terrorists seek to stop with their attacks, or installing the authoritarian dictators that give rise to such oppression and subsequent resistance?

One can see then the problem of keeping quality intelligence segregated and, to come full-circle, why educational, media, or governing institutions that are “unintelligent,” are simply unable to operate in an environment where information warfare is perpetrated on a daily basis. How can people make a decision if they have not learned the critical information? How can politicians craft intelligent policy if they are elected by unintelligent constituency who believes the intelligence in question is aligned to their own ideological preferences?

Moreover, even if teachers, journalists, and politicians have the necessary intelligence to understand reality and how to act accordingly, can they do anything to really address the threat at the scale necessary without structural reform, and buy-in from the other two industries?

Addressing this threat will have to be done then through an overarching, integrated approach that takes into consideration all of the institutions, along with the IC itself, and the tradecraft it abides by.

It will take a reconstitution and revitalization of diplomatic missions that have come under threat as violence and an increasingly military-approach to foreign policy eclipses and disintegrates nonmilitary options in a highly partisan climate where the high-stakes nature of realpolitik increasingly lead to fear-based belligerent and extremist policy proposals meant to posture more than provide resolution.

Analyzing our Worst Threat Let’s consider one final threat the IC has been speaking to. Recently it seems the severity of cyberattacks are becoming more apparent to the public. In his book, The Perfect Weapon, Sanger offers several examples of how digital code has been weaponized to pose an existential threat.

Beyond the various cyberattacks and thefts of intellectual property, the reality of a Stuxnet (“Olympic Games”) virus that went beyond attacking a single target like a power plant, attacking all aspects of a target’s industrial and electric infrastructure is becoming increasingly recognized as a real existential threat. “Nitro Zeus” as it is referred to, offered “a plan—using cyber and other methods—to shut down the entire country, preferably without firing a shot. If Olympic Games was the cyber equivalent of a targeted drone strike on Iran, Nitro Zeus was a full-scale attack…Nitro Zeus would be the opening act of the war plan: turning off an entire country so fast that retaliation would have been extremely difficult. It was also, in the minds of some of its creators, a glimpse of the future. The idea was to plunge the target country into blackness and

confusion from the very beginning of a conflict…placing implants in key strategic systems that could, later on, be used to inject destructive code or simply turn the networks off…[It] would be considered an act of war…the things you need to run a modern society and oil economy…all depend on electricity, valves, and pipelines.”

Another threat is the explosion by terrorists or a foreign power of a nuclear weapon high enough in the atmosphere to generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry all electronics in North America—microchips, computers, financial records, furnaces, refigerators, police dispatchers, hospitals, telephones, cars, trains, planes. Here the electrical grid would be destroyed because its computers would be inoperative. Transformers critical to it would take years to replace, the vast majority of Americans would starve or freeze to death, as virtually nothing has been done to address the effects of such an attack on civilian sectors.

Bill Clinton, in his novel, similarly imagines the effect of Nitro Zeus as the fictional virus, “Dark Ages,” the virus that will send American back to a pre-electric existence. In his book, (spoiler alert) a cyber terrorist group, funded by a Saudi government faction, and supported by the Russian government, attempts to launch an attack that destroys all electronic infrastructure so as to allow space for its enemies to capture strategic positions.

As he points out, Americans—and really, any modern nation—while at the height of technological power, is more reliant than ever on that power. Automation relies on electricity and the power grid; imagining it suddenly went down, chaos would ensue as there is simply no substitute for electricity or the internet. Its functions can only be performed with it, otherwise every aspect of modern life would stop working. An undetected virus in the server provides then the subject of our greatest fear: as it invades service providers, infecting every node in the country, every device and customer connected, each business would be knocked offline, every industry would be crippled, all facets of daily life would be disrupted as all data, every server, router, and device would be wiped. There is no fallback—water, health, food, medical operations, transportation, government and financial records, police and military capacity…all would stop immediately, presumably inciting mass panic, looting, rioting, crime, unemployment, disease, etc. as all semblance of civil would be gone in a heartbeat, lasting for months as systems were rebuilt. Even so, the country would be vulnerable to attacks as all critical sectors were destroyed, with irreparable damage that left mass death and impoverishment in its wake.

And beyond the scope of the storyline, the question of how NATO would retaliate against such an enemy that deployed the virus offers equally terrifying prospects. Would a world war ensue that blacked out each and every region on the planet? Would a cyber attack on the United States ensure every other country would go down with it, plunged into the “Dark Ages” as well?

To an extent, this can be predicted from the trajectory of several books that look to the present and future of war. In Unrestricted Warfare, CounterInsurgency Handbook, as well as the 5GW (5th generation warfare) Handbook, we can see the evolution of warfare in the sense of gaining a position of full-spectrum dominance with regards to different domains of war—land, sea, air, cyber, the electricmagnetic spectrum, and increasingly psychological, financial, information, legal. These books together provide an important analysis: whereas in the post-gulf war of American military supremacy, where no nation will be able to stand against the United States in a conventional war, unconventional asymmetric warfare tactics will be increasingly relied upon. Moreover, while this

development represents a “fourth-generation” of military history, where counterinsurgency is perfected against such an asymmetric enemy, this poses the question of what a “fifth-generation” of warfare will look like. That is, whereas the most “complete” or “effective” approach to counterinsurgency might be the complete genocide of the population to “cleanse” the landscape of all insurgent forces, a fifth-generation might evolve to counter even state-sponsored genocide, namely super-empowered individuals who are able to defeat entire states within those domains of warfare.

Here, fifth generation warfare techniques might essentially become a kind of technology so sufficiently developed as to have become indistinguishable from magic, with hidden cores of networked individuals conducting campaigns that can defeat and disrupt entire nations, attacking the enemy’s capacity to perceive at all, so they cannot even orient themselves to determine and act in ways other than those such hidden cores have already determined for them to take.

With this in mind, the worst threat we might face may be less the complete destruction of a system we have outsourced all of civilization’s functions to and rendered ourselves dependent on, but instead our inability to perceive reality correctly—indeed our persistent unwillingness to take steps to do so—and in doing so, inviting those hidden “occult” forces to threaten us with a new kind of perception warfare that renders us just as incapable of understanding reality as if all our systems were turned off.

Actionable Intelligence – “What is to be Done?”

Whatever the threat, I would like to suggest that the only realistic way of addressing this greatest of threats is, rather than preventing it, preparing for it. That is, in the case of the existential threat of every piece of infrastructure suddenly being rendered obsolete and unusable, cultivating an education, community, and inquiry process that no longer depends on electricity, specialization, and subcontracting critical skills.

This is essentially to say, eliminating the idea of outsourcing key processes and techniques to specialists; moving from an “intelligence community” to an intelligent community. Transitioning toward this will require a paradigmatic shift from a world of competing nation-states, to a world of collaborative supranational state and non-state blocs that have a number of strong horizontal and vertical links to establish an integrated network of transparency and trust that, if perhaps not sharing common values, are at least able to cultivate tolerance and respect for competing values.

It is certainly true that in the past, men and women were only able to make sense of crime by analyzing actions in terms of good and evil, with spirits and demons taking possession of souls and commanding them to do some evil deed. Intelligence was commensurate to a good theological background, knowing scripture and authoritative texts that could help to prescribe divine remedies.

This assessment of “actionable intelligence” led to the famous witch burnings and persecutions, religious wars, and heresy huntings that plagued the last millennia. Indeed, conducting policy based on this kind of magical thinking is arguable responsible for those closed ideological systems that were supposedly what all of history had led to—totalitarian ideologies that left no room for critique and would violently suppress and deviance from orthodoxy.

I want to point out one other issue I have noticed in looking at the Intelligence Community, political system, and perhaps the criminal justice system at large from my perspective primarily as a

philosopher. Two key branches of philosophy I tend to hold high in esteem include methodology and epistemology, which I generally regard as the roots of wisdom, from which all other branches derive and to which they connect.

At a deeper level, both education and intelligence necessitates a simple question: why are we here, and to do what? Such a question demands digging into other questions of ideology, cosmology, and ontology, among others. Politics rests ultimately on how we construct our narratives of identity and how well that identity stands up to the test of time—reality, in all its messy forms. The political economy might change marginally, to be sure, but the cosmology, ideology,…epistemology and the methods to recognize the nature of reality tends to remain.

There is a role for different methods when it comes to truth, wisdom, knowledge, and meaningmaking. Scientists for a long time were simply natural philosophers, looking at the complexity of the natural world through an empirical lens they could use to systematically make sense of the world around them. In this regard, the need for evidence-based methods for data collection, intelligence analysis, and policy proposals is critical.

Intelligent Superpowers or Intelligence as Superpower?

And yet all of this depends on the idea that American politics, and democracy in general “works.”

That is to say, unless democracy operates effectively, where laws and policy are enacted that correspond to what the populace believes to be fair and true, and does so in a timely, fair, and transparent fashion, then there will always be the sense that the government is illegitimate, unrepresentative, and therefore an enemy of the people.

Consider for a moment the role of corporations in subverting democratic processes at time, with the Justice Department choosing to overlook white collar crime perpetrated by the ultra-rich for the low hanging fruit of those street level criminals without the kinds of resources available for defense.

The fear of prosecuting corporations stems from a general unwillingness to punish stockholders, the citizenry, and ultimately the country for the simple reason these companies are “too big to fail.” That is, a national identity has become inextricable with the profiteering of its institutions (at the expense of non-stockholders and non-citizens), who demand the rollback of regulations and establish revolving door relationships with those who are tasked with enforcing their compliance, offering them salaries that dwarf what they make in public positions…if of course they comply with private sector values. Is it any wonder then why such organizations would be targeted as symbols of a corrupt and ungodly order, with the state that depends on such corruption for its tax-base as equally complicit in perpetrating crime and its own foreign influence operations that terrorize others?

Here, an existential question emerges at the heart of any analysis. Who is America?

People create their own enemies, and their conscious and unconscious rage can be directed towards them, finding a number of scapegoats for that rage who are targeted in the chaos of a war that infiltrates all aspects of social life. Take for instance the classified National Intelligence Assessment on the geopolitical implications of global climate change. When corporations are responsible for systematically causing the climate to change to states that do not allow for the continuity of socialecological systems, America empowers them to undermine the life-support systems, and the Intelligence Community is responsible for providing those who govern America with data that only

serves to inform those who govern America with data that they in turn employ to maintain their own hegemonic power…who can we really blame, other to say that the system is not working, remembering of course it is we who participate and direct the system?

For this and other reasons, America at large, being the superpower it is and continuing to declare itself to be the shining beacon on the hill, the democratic experiment to which the rest of the world should defer, must recognize that all people, not just voting citizens are invested in its decisionmaking process, and therefore the Intelligence Community as well. In an interconnected, interdependent world, perhaps not only the American have a right to know what their government services are doing—where their money is invested and why its important the IC have the kinds of capabilities they do—but perhaps the international community should have a vested stake in how the IC comes to its conclusions if they will inevitably be affected by those very decisions.

Denying this reality will no doubt leave factors out of the equation that will continue to work against the very conclusions the Intelligence Community may come to, corroding the truth to the point it is indistinguishable from and interchangeable with the most base, uninformed opinion.

Bibliography: · Abbott, Daniel—The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War? · Beebe, Sarah and Randolph Pherson- Cases in Intelligence Analysis: Structured Analytic Techniques in Action · Bergen, Peter – Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad · Bilton, Nick – American Kingpin: The Epic Manhunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Roads · Clapper, James – Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence · Clinton, Bill and James Patterson – The President is Missing: A Novel · Coll, Steve – Directorate S: The CIA, and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan · Comey, James – A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership · Eisinger, Jesse – The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives · Farrow, Ronan – War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence · Fagin, James – CJ 2017 (Justice Series) · Fingar, Thomas –Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security · Friedman, George – The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

· Gaddis, John Lewis – On Grand Strategy · Grann, David—Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI · Hayden, Michael – The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies · Holden, Henry—FBI 100 Year History: An Unofficial History · Kessler, Ronald – The Secrets of the FBI · Kittrie, Orde – Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War · Jamali, Naveed and Ellis Henican – How to Catch a Russian Spy: The True Story of an American Civilian Turned Double Agent · Jervis, Robert—Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War · Lang, Qiao and Wang Xiangsui – Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America · Rice, Condoleezza – Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom · Sanger, David – The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age · Staniland, Paul – Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse · Talbot, David – Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government · U.S. Army/Marine Corps -- Counterinsurgency Field Manual: No. 3-24 · Watts, Clint – Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News · Weiner, Tim – Enemies: A History of the FBI · Zarate, Juan – Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of New Era of Financial Warfare

Rethinking the Thin Blue Line: Working Toward Permeability between Anarchy and Totalitarianism “…I acquired my first enlarged knowledge of the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court and its opinions as the source of political culture in America.”

–Eric Voegelin, refugee “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

–Noam Chomsky, dissident “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

–Lawrence of Arabia, intelligence officer Fight or Flight?

Many years ago, I seriously considered becoming a paralegal due in large part to my interest in promoting social and ecological justice. I took a few paralegal classes (intro and environmental) and almost immediately dropped the idea of law as the professional field that could promote these interests, choosing to go into education instead.

Despite my romantic notions of Law as Logos, which I determined to be the earthly manifestation of a divine principle of natural order (I had focused largely on philosophy and religious studies prior), the legal system itself was something else altogether. It was a battle, not for justice, but to merely establish fault, to monetize that fault, and compel the party determined to be at fault to pay damages, or worse, sit in a prison for years doing nothing but become repeatedly subjected to an institution seemingly designed to reproduce injustice daily . There was no sense of rehabilitation of the perpetrator, or any attempt to restore a sense of justice to the victim. Worse, the entire system was unbalanced due to financial motivation, with the wealthy tending to ensure the “best” lawyers were able to ensure their innocence while the poor pled out and took prison time to avoid longer sentences.

Essentially, it was class combat in the form of a trial, the loser subjugated to imprisonment and fines, or for some, death, with all parties forced to respect coercive state power or face being held in contempt.

Years later I took a Criminal Justice course, found inspiration, and a month later sat for the LSATs. My questions still remained: why is the criminal justice system—which I characterize as the multiple systems and institutions at local, tribal, state, federal, and international levels that include police, prosecutors and courts, parole and probation agencies, and prison and corrections systems—built for failure? Why does America have the largest, most expensive, and fastest growing prison system

in the world? Why do we perpetuate a system where there is, as one textbook pointed out, an “inverse relationship between time in prison and successful reentry back into the community?” All of my hatred for corruption remained, as did my reservations about a field that seemed corrupted at all levels, but I had become convinced that whereas I had for the last decade assumed such a “battle” to be repugnant and therefore to be avoided, I now realized that battle would proceed without me and that what was necessary were ethical warriors able to approach and defeat injustice in ways that systematically toppled corrupted institutions and remade the legal system in the image of those divine principles of natural order.

I realized that America’s greatest problem was the disconnect between truth and implementation, so that the public’s fear overwhelmed their representatives’ policy crafting to prevent intelligent decision-making when it comes to crime-control and crime prevention. It was for this reason I sought to do two things: enter a Ph.D. program to focus and develop criminological theories, as well as pursue a J.D. with the intention of being qualified to implement those criminological recommendations throughout the system as I saw fit.

With these goals and hesitations in mind, I here focus on 8 core themes that I believe are not only at the heart of the criminal justice system’s inability to prevent crime, but in fact cause crime, with some directions that might address them.

1) Magical Thinking in the Criminal Justice system as a Feedback Mechanism Increasing Crime The justice system is based on magical thinking that only serves to catalyze feedback cycles that increase conditions for crime and punishment, the criminalization of communities, and the reinforcement and perpetuation of criminality in society. · From the earliest criminological theories that criminals were victims of demon possession to even later theories that are marginally less superficial, being out of touch with reality, and therefore not able to address the core reasons for which crime exists in the first place, there is therefore no chance these legal rulings will address the core issues at the heart of criminality but will instead provide a system in which the symptoms will fester and spread. The entire penitentiary system draws on monastic traditions, premised on the idea that rehabilitation demands isolation and prayer for penance, when it demands structural reforms prayer and magical thinking simply cannot address. · Such a system of criminal justice is further predicated on natural rights, given and enforced by government, specifically through the magical utterances of a judge operating under the assumption of a divine right granted to him or her by way of those magical spells that make up the Constitution.

For this reason, the law becomes whatever a judge declares it to be, so that the coercive nature and compulsion of an individual’s words are based on the idea that a magical operation can be performed on the souls of men which alone will have the effect of producing an effect on human nature. This is essentially a magical worldview divorced from reality, not unlike the ideological political religions of the 20th century, such as fascism, Nazism, communism, and the like all professing an ultimate system that would perfect the souls of men (or use violence against those that disagreed with this perfect system).

· Notions of “inherent criminality” similarly provide an irrational emotional fear that suppresses actual factors causing crime. Instead, “free will,” a typically religious premise, provides the most common reigning ideology behind theories of crime commonly integrated into the criminal justice system. Here, personal and cultural values become misconstrued as an objective reality on which to base a system of ethics. For this reason, it provides a theoretical paradigm to understand crimogenic phenomena that simultaneous discounts those unacknowledged realities in the real world that are actually driving crime. · In questions of legality, the tendency to make laws that forbid, control, safeguard, give fair warning, and differentiate create a context of overcriminalization, where victims of such a worldview, set up on the pretenses of mandating “orderly behavior” becomes an imminent threat to entire populations, the harms to which cannot be undone. Not only this, but the front end (up front) costs to reduce criminality/imprisonment or that would reduce post prison and recidivism costs are ignored, with punishments to restrict freedoms advocated over community based prevention and treatment programs. Whereas incarceration is ineffective to changing behavior or preventing recidivism, it maintains a state in which criminals remain unprepared to reintegrate, with little support or job skills. · Here, the intentions of deterrence (general and specific), incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration with regards to society’s decision to imprison its citizens are suppressed for both retribution and revenue, with none of the original factors being addressed; rather, these factors are intensified as a criminal moves through the justice system.

Perhaps it is for these reasons and many others that studies have found that there is no effect of a judge, the court systems, or the criminal justice system in controlling crime—simply because it offers no intervention that has any real effect. Rather, the inefficacy of magical thinking is foundational to our system of justice, and as such, provides none.

2) Evidence-based reform prevents biased (magical) thinking Insulating a justice system from the political and ideological biases of politicians and the public who are equally trapped in a magical thought process will help to develop reforms that break out of the second reality and foster a return to true justice. · In large part, criminal justice programs are not built on research or science. In particular, while looking into any aspect of the criminal justice system, one can too often read some version of a statement, “despite statistics that show otherwise, the public perceives…” This typically demonstrates the degree of ignorance of those voting for politicians tasked with addressing such problems; and thus, the unconscious willingness to ignore solutions that may otherwise effect the very outcome that public demands. · Whether the above indicates a failure of the justice system or our education system is most likely irrelevant since the school-to-prison pipeline is well established, but it is important to note that, “lawmakers often fund dysfunctional and ineffective delinquent treatment programs because they do not have the data and research to discern which programs and policies yield the best outcome.”

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One can only surmise then what a justice system made up of informed citizens would look like.

Indeed, one could even hypothesize that it is so systematically enmeshed and inextricably tied to our many other social sectors, a complete reversal and transformation of society would follow.

3) The principles upon which the justice system is founded upon (that is, magical) inform our wider domestic and foreign policies, and as such, similarly serve to increase criminality, e.g. terrorism, war on drugs.

That is to say, our foreign policy initiatives are homologous to our domestic views. Tasked with ensuring our “security” then, any attempt at reducing criminality, for instance terrorism or war, will similarly be regarded as necessitating the same responses to these phenomena as is done with domestic crime, so that our responses to both only serve to increase criminality around the globe. · We should perhaps begin with the fact that our police systems began with slave patrols. That is, the view of people as property, to be used for the purposes of extracting a profit for the purposes of self-enrichment, determine our understanding of police force. In this regard, police fundamentally protect property at the direction of property-owners, that is, the wealthy. · The perception of injustice and inequality tends to breed conflict, including civil war and violent extremism that has as its goal the overthrow of that very system, regardless of whether that system is defined as “democratic.” Even more worrisome is the tendency of those in republican or democratic governments, like theocratic ones, to identify their particular form of government with divine sanction. That is, as Samuel Adams states, “Revolution against Tyranny is Obedience to God,” but “Revolution against republicanism is treason.” Or some variant. That is, state’s tend to see themselves as fully representing the will of the people, and therefore any attempt to attack them is denounced as terrorism (domestic, international, homegrown, or lone-wolf), no matter how insulated from the needs and wishes of the people that government is. · Terrorism, in this way, is rooted in Marxist theories of class warfare, providing a strategy of violence for political ideologues against non-combatants—those who tacitly support the legitimacy of the unjust state. For this reason, so called “radical divisions,” tasked with responding and preventing crimes against persons and the state, without regard for reasons or motivations for those crimes, are empowered to preserve state power and the conditions for injustice, against radicals, communists, anarchists, and other “terrorist” threats. · Not only is the power of law enforcement increased, with “peace” officers turned into soldiers and militarized accordingly, but constitutional rights are diminished; and all with the consent of an ignorant public who base their decisions on fear. · Because prisons are promoted as violent environments, where the guard-inmate power dynamic establishes violent relationships, with guards often times untrained, unqualified, or criminals themselves and authorized to direct violence, prisons are not deterrents, and similarly do not rehabilitate inmates. That is, prisons and even parole have been shown not to be effective, because they do not respond to treatment or imprisonment. · For the same reason as criminals do not respond to crime control methods, we can understand why America, playing the role of the world’s policeman, will likewise not be effective in countering

international crime, terrorism, or conflict. The same power-over dynamics remain, leading to the same policies of increased law enforcement (establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, international and national military aid programs, arms dealing, and the creation of task forces like the TTIC, JTTF, or Fusion Centers), aggressive foreign policy (war on terrorism, war on drugs, rendition, enhanced interrogation/torture), and the suspension of civil rights (programs like USA PATRIOT Act and CONSPLAN) creating the very conditions that cause crime in the first place.

Here, we can ask a very simple question to demonstrate the failure of such “tough-on-crime” attitudes: namely, why would you want to overthrow the state and influence policy through violence if there are easier ways? The nation-state/government can hardly concede the point that it may not represent its constituency (or else acknowledge reasons for its own illegitimacy).

4) Successful treatment of terrorism can provide a roadmap for criminal reform. In the same way, the successful treatment of domestic crime can provide a roadmap for addressing terrorism.

As terrorism perhaps offers the most extreme crime our nation recognizes—mass murder for the sake of overthrowing or attacking the state itself—addressing this and finding success may provide avenues for reform in addressing criminality in less extreme circumstances, and vice versa. · We have only to recognize the “inverse relationship for prison-successful reentry” to recognize our values are antithetical to cultivating just and safe communities. Our dependence on these institutions that in fact promote criminality should further give us pause in promoting such “common sense” policies that harsh sentences will naturally deter crime. In the same way, programs like “scared straight” similarly promotes criminality no doubt by promoting contact and immersion to criminal cultures. · In Juvenile systems, roughly 67% of those in detention facilities have mental health issues, with 50% suffering from substance abuse. Our criminal justice system specifically operates with the idea that these children, unlike adults, are capable of reform, with treatment centers providing the kind of support necessary to prevent future crimes. Can adult criminals, even terrorists be suffering from similar mental health issues, substance abuse, or other deprivation of treatment services that would otherwise help them find some other delivery mechanism to with which to integrate into society rather than continuing to let them influence communities negatively · Moreover, is it any wonder that governments, engaging in their war on terrorism through torture, invasions, and drone strikes, would similarly give enemies the very justification they need to cultivate loyal followings that similarly buy into doctrines of class warfare and the need to rebel against tyrannical authoritarian governments? · Consider that criminals, suspected of terrorist connections can be denied due process, be held in indefinite preventative detention, with no constitutional guarantees, such as trial, right to an attorney, or defense as the government in question has declared a state of war with a stateless enemy without even a declaration of war.

In reality, the criminal justice system reflects the state of our changing social values. Without a democratic mechanism to correct the offending policies that in fact promote injustice and create the conditions of suffering and crime, there is seemingly no way to correct offenses without resorting to more crime, rebellion, or terrorism. Unfortunately, to provide aid that might address the factors that spawn criminality may itself be illegal under terrorism laws, so that health, social welfare, and legal assistance are all considered substantive aid to terrorist groups.

5) Addressing key leverage points offers applications of substantive reform Surveying the justice system, identifying key leverage points to address, and extrapolating these conclusions to apply to an international strategy for terrorism will offer justice reform solutions that move away from magical worldviews towards empirically based strategies. · Even examining the fundamental cultural values that justify the criminal justice system should be a first step, so that the premises can be determined to be legitimate or not. Is retribution or providing a revenue to the state a legitimate reason for incarceration? · Whereas we can reconsider the underlying motivations behind society’s willingness to incarcerate, we can similarly reconsider those factors that help change criminal behavior. If prisons and jails lack the capacity to manage re-integration, or need programs to overcome obstacles or provide education, then simply addressing these will have more of an effect on efficacy of the criminal justice system than anything else. · Focusing on providing healthy early events in childhood are similarly one of the biggest factors in determining criminality. For that reason, there is a need to ensure delivery of multiple services to children and ex-felons, a need that is impossible in a fragmented community with ineffective social programs, where community based supervision or substance abuse treatment centers are available and accessible. Considering that near 50% or inmates suffer from substance abuse or mental health issues, is it any wonder that without addressing such factors recidivism rates will remain at similar rates?

There has long been the acknowledgement that there are certain services that any person will need for successful reintegration in society: jobs, clothes, education, transportation, healthcare, housing, support systems, etc. If our criminal justice system is based on the deprivation of such rights and services as part of criminals’ punishment, can we really expect them to make that successful transition?

6) Failure to incorporate such data creates opportunities for totalitarian systems that cause more crime, while fostering and breeding new forms of criminality.

While delving into the reasons and meta-influences of crime and the criminal justice system can provide data aimed at legitimate reform, ignoring such data and refusing to incorporate such findings is a recipe for ideologically motivated totalitarian systems, out of touch with reality, and susceptible to tyranny, abuse, torture, and dehumanization…conditions that systematically cause the crime and terror sought to be controlled and prevented in the first place.

· Our court system, like the very Constitution it derives its power from is based in imperial, colonial, settler laws, which themselves are based around subjugation for the purpose of extracting profit.

This may even foster a disregard of natural principles, egalitarianism, and the willingness to find intrinsic value in other lifeforms. Crime correlates in large urban socioeconomic conditions detail the effects of deprivation on communities. · Prisons provide total institutions that do not promote effective treatment. Rather, they encourage prisonization, or the inculcation of prison subcultures by forcing inmates to conform to prison codes or risk ostracization (and likely, death or assault). The consequent maladaptive, antisocial behaviors these violent environments promote are due to the wider cultural desire to create institutions that provide minimum protection and maximum harm to such individuals. In the pursuit of retribution at the expense of rehabilitation, we in fact promote injustice in the justice system, so that inmates will experience even more illegal or unjust punishments in prison: whether slavery, exploitation, rape, etc. This in turn triggers depression and suicide, not to mention an environment that reproduces such values and ensures difficulty reintegration. · It should be pointed out that less than 50% of people in prison are imprisoned for violent crimes.

With 20% of nonviolent crimes due to drugs (perhaps 40% of all crimes due to drugs?), and the highest incarceration rate on the planet, do we have a crime problem or a mental health/substance abuse problem? · It should also be recognized that the prison industrial complex provides livelihoods for millions who have become dependent on it. With this in mind, is substantive reform likely when those who are in fact dependent on the maintenance of its injustices would pressure their representatives to ensure their jobs are protected against such reform? · At an international scale, the military industrial complex is prone to similar pressures. We have already touched upon enemy combatant executive orders, deprivation of Geneva rights, indefinite detention and rendition, military tribunals, denial of Constitutional and civil rights like habeas corpus, denial of revealing evidence, private trials to ensure such “radical ideologies” will not be promoted, more racial profiling, less judicial review, expanded secret searches, warrantless surveillance, gags, and the ability to demand information on any citizen, for instance library information, access to bank accounts, credit histories, medical records, academic records, travel plans, or internet and cell communications. Beyond these, we could include contractors for the Intelligence Community, development of urban fortresses, contracts going to seal the borders, security and surveillance technologies, employer verification systems, and the ever increasing populations detained by ICE in private prisons, or “training” programs that utilize counterinsurgency techniques on a nation’s own populations, for instance with “Urban Shield” programs. · These criminals are further targeted by the political systems by further being deprived of the right to vote (and so, being unable to be represented by the system that affects their lives in ways detrimental to them. Prisons are similarly detrimental to low income neighborhoods as well, normalizing criminal identities or making such targeted communities dependent on such an industry where rights are violated, sexual violence and assault are endemic in a system characterized by overcrowding and cruel and unusual punishments.

· In the co-evolutionary race by techno-authoritarian states to ensure “full-spectrum dominance” of various battle spaces and domains, both against rival states but increasingly against their own populations that are marginalized with epithets like “terrorists,” “radicals,” etc. technology is developed that present existential threats meant to coerce each other. Not only do these include the nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons of yesteryear, but state-sponsored cyber-attacks that can wipe out entire industries, electrical grids, or information systems have surpassed even terrorism as top concerns.

When an American citizen can be attacked by a drone for advocating violence against the government without due process, and constitutional protections can be denied to any citizen who is declared to be a terrorist, pressured in turn by various industries that have a stake in ensuring criminals, prisoners, and terrorists exist so they can profit off of the technologies and policies in place meant to control and kills such people, one can be forgiven for turning towards violence as a last resort in an attempt to ensure their voice is heard. Here, the choice between the “ballot or the bullet” is made easier when political representation is denied.

7) For these reasons a commission to study theories of crime should be empowered and insulated from politicians and public, and allowed to implement their recommendations autonomously.

Such a commission might determine goals, aggregate data, identify abuses, design new research studies, offer hypothetical solutions, convene ethical experiments to test, advocate evidence-based policies, and publicize them in peer-reviewed journals. · Meta-influences (anti-war movement, loss of confidence in police, recognition of mass incarceration, terrorism, criminology movements) can provide us with examples of phase-changes in our understanding of how to approach the criminal justice systems. By including the demands of meta-influences so far as they are grounded in reality as opposed to mere emotional backlash, the ability to undo harms and address the reasons for crime can help us move beyond the simplistic notion that criminals and terrorists are “inherently evil.” Similarly, we can even recognize the validity behind desires to commit treason and sedition at times. This is not to excuse or tolerate such activities, but rather to establish mechanisms by which to provide aggrieved parties with, or ensure those mechanisms are appropriate, available, and accessible. · In further developing criminological theories, we can begin to treat the whole subject of criminality. Containment theory, differential association theory, deviant reaction formation, social bond theory, institutions, social disorganization theories, concentric zone theories, strain adaptation theory, labeling theory, conflict theory, feminist theories, radical criminology, supervision/outside forces, poverty in the neighborhood, early onset aggression, genetic, personality, parenting……all of these criminological theories provide evidence by which we can begin to prevent, reduce, and respond to crimes in productive ways. While the criminal justice system does not have the money or resources to address these factors. Only a society does; one that can ensure effective social programs through an integrated community with healthy institutions that can deliver multiple services.

Moreover, green criminological theories may further work to identify the source of deprivation, as harms to the environment may lead to deprivation of those services that are derived from the world around us, aggravated the conditions that work to catalyze criminality in the first place. For that reason, one may be more likely to commit crimes if they are exposed to degraded environments.

· Consider perhaps the final conclusion such a commission might come to, namely that punitive facilities and asylums don’t work; rather, self-government, interdependent with supportive systems do. What would this mean for how our societies are set up? Such a finding would necessarily depend the complete upending of not only the systems that in fact do the very damage they supposedly are designed to protect, but the very values and thought-processes behind them, that justify them. Such findings would be antithetical and abhorrent to the public and politicians who are not versed in the empirical findings that would necessarily lead such studies and scientists to such radical conclusions.

And yet, why should systems and policies based on empirical findings be held hostage to vindictive dogmas by those who would preserve their notions of retributive sense of old-testament eye-for-aneye politically religious policy at the expense of a just society?

Here in fact is the greatest question, namely that all-too-human ego-centric pressures that incentive profit at the expense of dignity, or revenge at the expense of safety, or power at the expense of justice will likely derail any and all attempt for substantive reform that addresses the root causes of crime. We can certainly hope that dialogue and philosophical persuasion will be enough to change mindsets and allow for the implementation of change. But with such an emotional subject, can this conversation seriously be undertaken in ways look past individual investments towards the improvement of society at large? If not, there need to be ways in which such evidence-based approaches can be implemented without being micro-managed by political ideologues who are more sensitive to industry lobbyists, traumatized victims, and ignorant citizens in a short-term timeframe than the longer-view that addresses the factors driving crime in the first place, new industries, future victims, etc.

Toward the Obsolescence of Government?

For that reason, I come down simply with the opinion that those who have access to data, information, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, truth…should be empowered to act on it, to effect and implement changes as a result, and be insulated from those who have a vested interest in opposing pragmatic revolutions, simply because their personal philosophical values cannot abide them.

On the other hand, I recognize that if this were to take place, we may no longer be living in a Constitutional democracy, where the (possibly) ignorant majority is able to overwhelm not only the rights of the minority, but the self-interest of the majority itself. Just as I cannot even fathom what a criminal justice system that has abolished the factors for injustice so far as it can would look like, I cannot presume to know what form the wider social organizing processes of such a society would look like, where unjust systems are turned on their head.

Elsewhere it has been stated that anarchy is not simply the absence of law, but rather the state in which law is no longer necessary. In such a social state, basic practices, behaviors, mindsets would be reexamined, with mindsets and emotional states perhaps cultivated to respect the basic dignity of one another. Why choose, for instance, to bomb or inflict terror upon one another when one is able to achieve a political state in which one’s own values are able to co-exist with all others? To those ends, it will be necessary to determine effective persuasive and dialogical techniques that diminish terror and preserve civil liberty and human rights. That is, to effect those divine principles of natural order in an earthly political realm (law).

Reevaluating Premises I might end by pointing out the very notion of separation of powers is premised on fallibility. This in turn demands a degree of humility. Might we be wrong in our predispositions and conclusions?

Democracy itself is premised on the idea that the law must reflect the will of the people or it is illegitimate. Similarly, this necessitates that the democratic processes, the political parties, along with the cognitive infrastructure it takes to formulate arguments all need to be invested in to ensure they not only are effective, but can very quickly turn the will of the people, subjected to critical processes that ensure the validity of such propositions, into policy and law.

At such a point as the time between individual perception and law is reduced to such a degree while maintaining a just context in which such perception can be determined to be aligned with the truth of existence (that is, not having derailed into second reality but rather remains true to reality) perhaps democracy will have evolved into an anarchistic state that ensures self-government as opposed to an external coercion. Here, we can determine law to be both a vehicle and barrier to justice. In such a state, each individual must understand best practices as regards to data collection, analysis, policy making, judgement, and execution, at the same time trusting others to point out any judicial errors along the way, and maintaining an openness towards critique.

I am not sure if merely abolishing the 18,000 law enforcement agencies, 2 million officers, hundreds of incarceration locations, the millions of weapons strewn across this country, or simply overthrowing the government will necessarily move us towards a just society. People’s motivations are myriad, and become desperate to preserve those interests, engaging in terrible acts to do so. They bring their own emotional baggage and traumas, taking revenge against those they determine to hate and mistake their modus operandi for sanctioned behaviors. Dependency onlivelihoods creates patterns difficult to break out of, with subcultural rules that must be obeyed or are enforced through violence with wide open interpretations as to when and how such violence should be implemented.

We lack control variables to experiment with the unconscious biases and internalized roles that reproduce harmful relationships.

Perhaps it is inevitable that laws will be broken. Perhaps people are predisposed to want to play, with the law as merely another domain for this—overstepping boundaries and daring the other to do something. Many of the rules of these games are either unenforceable, or intrinsically disrespectful, demanding undue deference, or unjust, abusive, or ambiguous directions. If we choose to enforce these unjust laws to the extreme we risk creating a system managed by “dirty, rotten, shitty, fucking Nazi pigs.” Can we instead circumvent individual moments of crises and deescalate tensions? Do we seek to provoke crisis, rewriting rules and using torture to coerce and compel obedience while paying lip service to the duty to “maintain law and order for the peace?” This potential is always present, and while the 400-year philosophical theory of the social contract might be what academia uses to justify law enforcement and imprisonment, individuals have never actually signed that contract and so they more than likely have not internalized the idea that they voluntarily give up their freedom for security, or when they break the law, they are justified in having their rights taken away.

For that reason, it seems problematic to assume people will follow the law voluntarily, especially when they, perhaps naturally, find some laws in conflict with their own values.

My goal in this essay has been to give insight into some of the problems today, for instance why unarmed suspects are shot and killed, why inmates are abused, and why “enemy combatants” in the

war on terror are tortured. All of these individuals are put in a paradigm where they are qualified as threats, and by extension have broken the social contract, and therefore deserve no rights, and are thus subject to cruelty and violence, so that “safety is #1,� and law enforcement and the criminal justice system is forced to protect what amounts to a magical experiment. This in turn has led to a state of emergency, where people are imprisoned, hospitalized, tortured, raped, and killed.

Unfortunately, just like our experiment with democracy, if the fundamental principles are too vague, or overridden, this experiment will be cut short as well.

Rather, it may be that to sufficiently defend the land and the life within requires something else, a willingness to engage in such defense against unthinking dogmas to dismantle those forces of injustice wherever they arise.

Sketches for a (Green Criminological) Research Project: Can Encoding a Bioregional Ethic Reduce Criminality by Increasing Carrying Capacity?

Overall Interest: I would like to design a research project that looks at the role of environmental degradation on crime rates. My hypothesis would be that the rate of environmental degradation of biodiversity hot spots would increase the rate of crime in the vicinity, due to loss of ecosystem services and therefore increasing deprivation of natural resources, security, and the myriad benefits species derive.

Further, I would be doing this to get a baseline in order to further research the degree to which religious codes are able to reduce violence, by reducing environmental degradation.

Put simply: Is there an inverse relationship between criminality and carrying capacity, and in what ways does an encoded ethic serve to influence that equation?

For a while now I’ve looked at religion as a perceived cultural order by which communities attempt to align themselves with divine principles to manifest a sacred order. That is, the socioecological order becomes an ethical encoding that seeks an optimum distribution of righteousness on all of its constituent parts.

In this context, the question of violence, and with it notions of crime, is perplexing: what function does it serve? For this reason I am interested in seeking a kind of “equation” that looks at the relationship between reality, consciousness, and language in the ecology of transformation. To simplify, do codified religious directives affect violence/crime in relation to increasing or decreasing levels of carrying capacity?

I am assuming the environmental degradation of biodiversity hot spots (the Carrying Capacity_ would be the independent variable while crime rates and ideological violence would be the dependent variable.

Toward an Equation I am not entirely sure about the relationship between religious ideology and carrying capacity however. For instance, I would like to hypothesize that ideology is the independent variable while carrying capacity is the dependent variable, in the sense that a religious speech could cause the restoration of a biodiversity hot spot that would simultaneously decrease violence. However, I would also hypothesize that environmental degradation could be the independent variable that causes religious groups/ideology to become violent and cause crime. I think this can be rectified with what I have elsewhere called an “Archetypal Resonance Theory” in which the two variables (religious ideology and carrying capacity) are actually reflective of one another, with religion being an “interior” correlate to the “exterior” manifestation of a biodiversity hot spot’s carrying capacity.

Perhaps this will become clarified further on…

An equation might look something like the following: Carrying Capacity = Religious Code/Ideological Violence.

Or perhaps, Religious Codes = Ideological Violence/Carrying Capacity Etc. We might complexify this a bit by seeing Carrying Capacity as the Impact of an organized society (usually described by some equation like Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology *Social Ethics) over the ecological biodiversity and the “ecosystem services” it provides.

Religious Coding might be more difficult to qualify, but something that connects the imagery, symbols, and archetypal principles and psychic energy, along with the degree to which it can “hold” the society together, i.e. its “ordering effect” in the sense it can align the socioecological form through sociopolitical influence on the religious tradition.

Finally, violence, or crime might tend to be easily describable, but in this context we might open up the definition to include harms and laws in the sense of decreasing biodiversity/depleting ecosystem services or creating some other social harm, including the resilience of the society in general.

Further Hypotheses Some general hypotheses that would precede any such study would include: 1) An increase in the carrying capacity reduces violence overall 2) Certain language reduces violence by increasing carrying capacity.

3) Crackdown on violence may increase violence, as they do nothing to address the underlying causes of violence, which is the carrying capacity. In fact, it may impose an artificial carrying caity.

4) Education may paradoxically increase violence due to increased perceptions of inequality and unconscious stressors.

This is to say that religion may be a mechanism to prevent or catalyze violence in its ability to intervene in the degradation of the surrounding bioregion’s carrying capacity. That is, violence is based on the relationship of a society’s ability and fidelity to the carrying capacity it aligns to and upholds.

If for instance we consider that V = R/CC, then If V = 0 à There is an inability to do violence, as decreasing violence means less actors If V = 1 à Then violence is at the capacity at which equilibrium is achieved

If V = 1+ à Then the violence has exceeded the capacity of the bioregion’s ability to absorb, leading to an overshoot and perhaps even a feedback mechanism that promotes more violence.

Studies to Draw From The following represent other research I’ve come to that help drive the theoretical foundations of the project: A) Insurgent forces as ecological rhythm B) Cities as living organisms C) Constructal law/Kleiber’s law D) Big History: Energy flows increase complexity E) Global trends 2025 F) Global Threat Assessment G) National Intelligence Assessment: Geopolitical Effects of Climate Change H) The Sky’s Limit I) Why Civilization’s Collapse J) UN Report: Agroecology can feed the planet Using the lessons of these studies, we can begin with the point that complexity depends on energy flows, so that cities and ecosystems mimic living organisms unto themselves. Here, energy blockages might signal either neglect or intention, cutting off energy to regions of the organism.

A Political Typology of Energy Circuitry I might point out four different kinds of systems that could come about as a cause/result of such a phenomenon to address the situation: 1) Need for political participation or representation. Here, the reason for blockages is simply because the larger organism has not acknowledged a blockage exists. The remedy then is to make the larger systems aware of it so they can act accordingly.

2) Austerity. That is, the wider organism acknowledges that such a blockage exists, but there is no excess energy for the locale so the blockage remains.

3) Corruption/Insurgency. Here, the locale circumvents the blockage to ensure the energy flow against the directives of the wider organism.

4) Genocide. The intentional degradation of the energy flows to the locales against their wishes.

Developing a Paradigm Let’s look at food as the basic energy unit representing the wider ecosystem services of the bioregion. The following paragraph will represent basic statements to understand the ecological context any social struggle takes place within. This model assumes people will struggle to survive, and that struggle is a biological mechanism to open energy pathways that ensure maximum equity in energy flows throughout the organism: · Food is energy. · Ecology is the study of the flow of an ecosystem’s energy dynamics. · Health is the full participation of an organism in sufficient, necessary, and equitable energy flows. · Community resilience is the population’s full participation in these energy flows. · Climate is the ecological context of both community resiliency and health. · Security is the communal activity to maintain participation in energy flows. · Intelligence analysis is the processing of data to determine the necessary communal activity to maintain security. · Ethnography as data collection methods that provide intelligence analysis of relevant data. · Activism as community action designed to influence decision makers in terms of redirection of energy flows. · Insurgency as community action designed to eliminate the need for decision makers by redirecting energy flows · Crime as an individual decision to immediately redirect energy flows.

To summarize the relationship of these phenomena in a criminological perspective, crime reduction takes place when equitable energy flows be maintained; that is, crime is an expression as inequitable energy flows.

General and Existential Questions and Topics to Consider This brings up a number of follow up questions: - Can we quantify or qualify a diversity of energy sources?

- Is civil society robust, with many mechanism for energy distribution?

- How is government responsiveness to open/maintain energy pathways when needed?

- What are the reasons for blockage?

- Where does excess energy go?

- What is the degree of fluidity between government responsiveness, capacity, and willingness to respond to community concern?

Moreover, several existential questions arise as well: - What new energy sources can a system expect?

- How much energy can a community expect?

- What sectors should be cleaved as energy flows as disrupted?

- How can locales and governing systems more effectively dialogue and use persuasion to ensure maximum equity with regards to energy flow?

- How is energy defined? (physical and psychological poles) - What pressures drive decentralized energy flow, or the willingness to deprive energy flows?

- What psychological pressures would induce energy concentration Beyond these questions, certain solutions (or topics of activism) seem to also present themselves: - Democratic governance to increase political participation - More effective land management techniques - Birth control - Decentralization of capital and productive capacity - Local living practices - Sustainable energy systems - Critical and compassionate thinking - Other education programs Thinking through Rival Causal Factors

With regards to Internal Rival Causal Factors, these might include history (as hot spots are affected by factors beyond environmental degradation at the same time), instrumentation (in that not all degradation or crime rates might be measured in the same way) and selection bias (perhaps looking at certain degradation or crimes as opposed to others). It may be the case that in terms of external rival causal factors, multiple treatment interference could come into play if a multidisciplinary approach skews some analysis due to prior utilization of methods.

Also, if I were to look at individual religious ideologies or groups, I could see maturation and testing would become rival internal factors, with reactions constituting a major rival external factor.

I think I would probably have to determine what possible factors there were that contributed to crime rates besides degradation, I would have to develop common techniques that could be applied to each hot spot that help measurement, and perhaps group different hot spots together to establish equivalence, and work to determine relevant factors.

If crime rates are dependent on the biodiversity of ecological hotspots, in that ecosystem degradation drives crime rates, studies of the following topics should proceed: -Urban vs. Rural crime rates near biodiversity hot spots -Major ecological restoration/degradation projects -Comparison of conflict zones -Historical ruptures -Cultural approaches to land management -Effects of 1-5* change -Crime centers related to various phenomena (property value, income, employment, proximity to nature or # of species, concentration of capital/wattage, divorce rate, age, etc.)

-Major conflict flashpoints -Nature of terrorist/guerrilla attacks -War regions -Rates of incarceration -Democratic vs. authoritarian -Change in carrying capacity between paleo, agricultural, industrial, and future baselines.

-Collapse scenarios

-Relationship bwetween commitment to religion and religious practices and environmental health.

-Degree to which Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are fulfilled in various places -Degree to which hierarchy of needs are fulfilled based on ecosystem services/energy distribution.

-Degree to which education programs deliver optimum sustainable ordering. (Gross National Happiness) Branching Patterns: From the Root to the Many (Many) Branches Because the above research design project may be quite enormous in its aims, there might be smaller “experiments” worth undertaking. Related studies at a smaller scale might include examining crime rates in relationship to the density of city parks or urban wildlife, or the relationship of ecological restoration programs on recidivism rates as compared to other programs. In each of these cases (as with the overall project), I would be hypothesizing that “nature-deficit disorder,” i.e. lack of access to nature/ecosystem services will “naturally” lead to more crime.

Here, independent variables would be access to nature (i.e. the density of nature in the neighborhood, or ecological restoration programs of ex-prisoners), with crime or recidivism rates providing the dependent variable.

Rival factors would include history, maturations, and testing/testing effects, due to competing factors in the subjects’ lives or in the neiborhoods, life-changes, or simply acting differently due to the fact they know they are being observed.

I could eliminate these rival causal factors by increasing the sample size to all demographics in multiple locations, conducting quantitative and qualitative research with an array of mixed methods to determine the effects on the community and individuals, and not tell the subjects they were being observed in the first place.

Research Styles: Pitfalls of "Going Native?"

I think if I could I would probably use both attitudinal and behavioral research for my studies, due primarily because I am interested in the discrepancies between what subjects think and do. However, due to time or resource constraints I think I would be more likely to focus on behavioral research, simply because while attitudes would be important, my research would hypothesize that their behavior may be directed by subconscious and unconscious factors that would likely not show up in any attitudinal research. However, it might, hence my willingness to engage in both research styles.

Of all the methods learned so far, I would likely choose to do an experiment, participant observations, and case studies. At the smaller levels, participant observation (preferably complete observation, though perhaps observer as participant) would likely be an important method so as to get a chance to focus on each of the subjects individually, and to chart any difference in the ecologically-based recidivism program.

I would certainly like to also conduct case studies with regards to either the program in question, or, with regards to ecological hotspots, either urban parks or wildlife corridors, or larger, regional scale biodiversity areas. I think this would be helpful in that the nuance and details of any fluctuations would be more likely to give context than an experiment could, and would be more systematic than just participant observation could on its own. This might also help to mitigate against internal and external rival causal factors that would introduce problems with regards to validity.

Finally, I would definitely want to conduct experiments, specifically to try to compare different areas or programs in their effectiveness of reducing crime. I don't think this could happen with just participant observation or case studies alone, but all three of these methods together would probably help to establish a degree of integral methodological pluralism that the study would benefit from.

One of the things I have been considering is the idea of "Complete Participation," and the idea of "going native" with regards to an ethnographic study. For one, I actually think the idea of "objective observer" is a myth. One can point to quantum physics for more on this, but there is a necessary role in the observer, who necessarily participates in the creation of reality as a result of their observation, in that it causes a state of reality. Even neutrality is a political position that is chosen, and does not convey any more "objectivity" than another as neutrality holds its own bias.

For that reason, I wonder if complete participation may be a useful approach. There is an entire field devoted to "militant anthropology" or "activist ethnography," that might be useful to draw from here. Especially if I am focusing on the hypothesis that environmental degradation causes crime, and how ideological leaders can contribute to increasing that violence/crime or reducing it, it may be worthwhile to help direct the direction of group activity to a degree so as to de-escalate violence, prevent environmental degradation, and prevent crime by addressing the causal factors.

Here, one might develop strategies that take this "Shroedinger's Anthropologist" conundrum into effect, both acknowledging the subjective, participatory role of the researcher, while also being able to direct any data collected into methodologies that account for this dual role. There appears to be an ethical problem with not acting, if one can reduce harm by taking the action in question. Perhaps I will come back to this in the Ethics section...

I actually don't think surveys, interviews, telephone/internet based conversations would be especially helpful apart from maybe developing a qualitative nuance that might help to deepen some of the quantitative research that would be found in the other three methods. Again, my research would be focused primarily on how crime is affected by ecological concentration and proximity, and this would likely have an unconscious or subconscious effect. For that reason, attitudinal surveys would likely not provide the data I would need, though it would certainly bolster any results by deepening the theoretical nuance that would accompany any behavioral changes.

Looking Forward to Data: Measures, Calculations, Conclusions For my studies, I would likely choose archived and existing data, because all of the answers would likely be able to be determined without actually talking to any of the participants. Data like crime rates and numbers, number of parks, recidivism rates would all be able to be found through data that is already around. That said, in order to get a better understanding of qualitative data and the attitudes that led to the behavior, I might engage in simple observation or disguised observations in

terms of trying to figure out why certain rehabilitation programs worked, or why crime did or did not take place in certain areas.

The only research study I would have maybe some difficulty with would be the larger one, which describes the effect of environmental degradation on crime, and how ideological leaders influence both violence/crime and degradation. For that aspect, I might engage in disguised observation or, potentially after initial studies, I might be able to discern some relationships that could help to formulate simulations that could create conditions that would simulate real-world conditions.

In terms of statistical calculations, I would want to determine crime rates in proximity to biodiversity hotspots and their increase or decrease due to both environmental degradation or the nature of ideological leadership, proportions and percentages with regards to success rates of environmental rehabilitation programs on recidivism as compared to non environmental programs, the distribution of crime in a region and its proximity to hotspots, and the ratios of crime/violence in terms of the likelihood of crime being committed near a biodiverse area vs. a barren environment, or even the likelihood of an individual's propensity to commit crime based on their past immersion in an ecologically diverse area. I would predict crime rates fall in places where biodiversity is high, the proportion and percentage of successful rehabilitation programs similarly increase when the environment is a major factor, the distribution of regional crime is concentrated in non-environmental areas, and the ratios of crime are more likely to be committed where biodiversity is minimal.

In terms of some conclusions I hope to make from this study, because I am hypothesizing a positive causal or correlative relationship between the degree of biodiversity present in a persons life and their willingness to forego crime, I am hoping that the results bear out, so that there is an increase in success rates for rehabilitation programs that focus on nature, a drop in crime where parks or wildlife corridors are present, and an increase in violence where environmental degradation increases, as well as an increase in violent ideological framing. The conclusion I hope I could draw from this, is that, a) there is a relationship between concentration/density of biodiversity and crime, so that criminological theories as to the cause of crime will be aggravated where biodiversity loss exists b) specifically, individuals are more likely to commit crime if there is a "deficit" of nature in their lives c) to address crime and violence will necessitate a solution that includes systemic change that reduces domination and marginalization through system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of the system that degrades the environment and in doing so reproduces the conditions that produce opportunities and incentives for criminality.

The Primacy of the Ethical in Any Engaged Research Ethnography To be honest, I can't think of any ethical concerns with regards to the ecological rehabilitation programs or mapping crime in relation to density of wildlife/nature. There is a question of "withholding" nature, or experiencing biodiversity I suppose, but I don't imagine this would be problematic, since there would be no instance where people would be removed from or deprived of

biodiversity hotspots, natural areas, or environmental services and dumped in an environmentally destitute area (which would be another interesting study if people did that on their own accord).

Where ethical concerns do arise I think might be in cases where environmental degradation is occurring, if researchers were to essentially allow such processes to continue unabated, or refuse any environmental rehabilitation if it were possible, for the sake of maintaining a "control group." For instance, if I uncovered an activity that was depleting or poisoning a community's resource base, but did not communicate this to them due to fear of impacting the study, that could lead to a great deal of harm. On the flip side however, would it then be ethically obligatory to tell the community about this? I bring this up, because if a researcher is communicating and "educating" the community about an ill that will inevitably be acted upon, this to some degree seems to be a form of activism and participation for the sake of manipulating/intervening for a definite objective. If this is the case, then is it ethically concerning to go a few more degrees, and help the community more effectively act so as to more effectively defend against the poisoning, more effectively educate, and more effectively advocate for change? Here is where I think research might move into "militant anthropology," or "activist ethnography," the kind of complete participation I do not have an answer for with regards to problems of research design, validity, and reliability, along with how to analyze data that takes into account ones own invested stake in the community one is advocating on behalf of. At the same time, is it possible to combine a total participation AND total observation, not letting a community in question know they are under observation while at the same time participating completely in the study, even going so far as to influence events, reducing environmental degradation, reducing crime, intervening to shift the rhetoric...?

Also, because there is a geopolitical element to this, in that climate change causes environmental scarcity which can cause criminality, there is likely to be some interest with regards to defense, security, surveillance, and intelligence groups. If climate change is considered to be the greatest threat of the 21st century since it is a "threat multiplier," great care should be taken so that such groups will not use the ethnographic and anthropological research to simply understand how best to mitigate such threats for the objectives of a nation-state, as they have been charged with doing with regards to their use of anthropological methods to collect intelligence on targeted cultures for the sake of counterinsurgency operations via "human terrain systems."

Moreover, since at this larger study I would also be attempting to collect information on the degree to which ideological leaders become more militant or violent with regards to their rhetoric as the environment is degraded or rehabilitated, there is a chance that I would be observing the incitement towards violent activism. In both of these cases (watching environmental degradation or increasingly violent rhetoric), I wonder whether or not a researcher would be violating their duty to do no harm

by NOT engaging, intervening, or participating. This contradicts the "value-free" aspect of the researcher in that it suggests that watching a community become impoverished or destitute holds its own set of values and subjectivities. For instance, while one is supposed to be "objective" and "politically indifferent," in the case of a bioregion being depleted and violent rhetoric becoming more pronounced, if a fascist political party came to power that advocated genocide against a population, on the one hand, that would confirm the hypothesis of my study, but would it not be better to intervene in order to prevent the genocide from happening or depriving that political party of power? If so, why not hinder the environmental degradation in the first place that would potentially lead to both?

Another ethical concern I would have is simply, if I am trying to identify crimes or violent rhetoric, would I be obligated to report those speech acts/crimes and risk losing data, or not report and risk a more violent community?

In terms of steps to avoid ethical quandaries, I could first stick with archived and research materials that would eliminate the possibility for participation in the first place. I could gain consent from participants and have a second or third set of eyes review any work I did. In terms of the larger ethical problems I alluded to, I would likely seek out advice of professional groups to determine adequate safeguards. Perhaps this could help to establish commitments before hand that would help me to stick with throughout the course of the study.

Perhaps I should forego the study altogether, if I cannot properly control my own subjectivity? That sounds a bit problematic however, since I feel this data is important and perhaps being open about proclivities towards subjectivity and honest about limitations can still be helpful for later researchers.

Making sure any financiers/sponsors have no say in the research design/interpretation/presentation phases would also be good.

A final way to avoid some of the problems inherent in real-world situations where environmental scarcity might contribute to violence, crime, and suffering is by simply designing simulations that construct some of the same conditions that would be present in these real-world scenarios. I wonder however if this would be more of a risk than a possible benefit, as on the one hand it would create a state of non-nature that would induce crime and violence, while at the same time would seriously impair the validity and reliability of the study I would think, thus bringing into contention any proposed benefit.

In terms of my study, major conflicts would be: a) depriving participants of natural experiences in their rehabilitation programs b) maintaining confidentiality with regards to crimes in the face of law enforcement c) remaining objective and non-participatory when serious threats are present or underreported d) if choosing to do complete participatory research, directing conditions in ways that may be problematic or deleterious, albeit unconsciously. e) ensuring the research design, interpretation of results, or presentation remains insulated from special interests, and that conclusions are drawn independently and fairly, while not contributing to reactions and responses that do more harm or do not logically follow. This might include for example, the increased securitization of ecologically degraded areas; here, whereas the an assumed finding would certainly be that environmental degradation leads to more crime, the proper response would not be that more security forces (police, militarization, etc‌) are able to address the problem, but rather that more environmental restoration would be the proper response based on the findings.

f) ensuring the findings remain public knowledge, not monopolized as private property g) choosing alternative methods (e.g. simulations) that may at face value present fewer ethical problems, but may in fact introduce new ones that either exceed those present in natural conditions or generally compromise the reliability or validity of the study in the first place.

A specific example I think that relates to these problems is on the one hand Rik Scarce’s refusal to provide law enforcement with information from his research on radical environmental groups, as well as the Minerva Consortium and the Human Terrain System that asked anthropological specialists to map communities and advise the military in effective ways to subjugate those populations through “waging a smarter counterinsurgency war,� potentially justifying imperialism, contributing to human rights abuses, militarizing universities, and even contributing to the deaths of researchers or participants. A further example might be the AIDS research in Africa and Asia that denied treatment to a control group. If, as I hypothesize, experiencing nature (concentrated biodiversity, more parks in urban settings, ecological restoration, wildlife corridors, etc.) is an effective treatment for reducing crime, then depriving one community of such programs might be seen as contributing to crime. Further, in an experiment that intervened in environmental degradation in one area, providing resources for restoration and rehabilitation, but not in another, it seems to me that would be ethically problematic as well, in that one community would be treated, whereas the treatment would be withheld from another to maintain a control group, rather than treat both.

Feedback?

As you can see, this has mostly been a kind of stream-of-consciousness sketching of some basic ideas with regards to possibilities. Please do feel free to offer any feedback to better clarify any (and all!) of these points at activefolklore@gmail.com Green Criminal Report #5: 198 Methods of Bioregional Reinhabitation: From Degradation to Biocentrism

Reflections on the Geoeconomic and Sociopolitical Context of a Militant (Criminological) Activist Ethnography “We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power.

Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

-Jack London, The Iron Heel “…[God] gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”

-Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address In the last few chapters, I’ve put together some of the core directions: 1. Issues at the Nexus of Green Criminology and Critical Security Studies 2. An Outsider’s Perspective on the Intelligence Community 3. Thinking through the Justice System’s Insulation Mechanisms Against Reform 4. Sketches for a Green Criminological Research Project on Ideological Violence as Indicator for Degradation of Carrying Capacity 5. Methods for Establishing an Ecological Ethic to Reduce Criminality However, while these ideas represent what I consider to be critical work with regards to addressing the systemic abuse of human rights and seriously jeopardizing the assumed continuity of the human species and earth community, I do think it’s extremely important to take a step back in order to reflect on and meditate upon the wider context within which such a project takes place.

Three developments in particular seem of particular relevance, in that the complex nature of states, and their willingness to adopt and deploy technological innovations for the sake of their own national interests, will necessarily affect, even stifle (suppress?), the project in question: 1. Increasing Integration of Geoeconomic and Military-Industrial Influence in Statecraft 2. Techno-Authoritarians Leveraging the Surveillance State for Counter-Insurgency

3. Weaponizing Automated Data-Processing and Machine Learning for Political Dominance What follows is a brief description that details some of the trends within these wider social developments.

1. The Increasing Integration of Geoeconomic and Military Industrial Influence in Statecraft A geoeconomic strategy is one that employs “the use of economic instruments to promote and defend national interests, and to produce beneficial geopolitical results; and the effects of other nation’s economic actions on a country’s geopolitical goals.” Such a strategy offers states the ability to wield substantial economic and financial muscle through the systematic use of economic instruments to accomplish geopolitical objectives.

That is, by leveraging resources to pursue policies damaging to enemy national interests, geoeconomic policies supplement military industrial policies in the process of statecraft, shaping the behaviors of states through an empirical, inductive, and verifiable set of international activities that drive foreign policy. For instance, by determining these modern instruments, the reason for their efficacy, and their present use in a changing international system, an understanding of how geoeconomic tools have been historically integrated within foreign policy and what a more geoeconomic strategy to defend and promote national interests looks like and requires provides the field of Geoeconomics its scope of inquiry.

Geoeconomics drives the foreign policy of rising powers as the “preferred means of conducting geopolitical combat,” in that these geoeconomic and political military dimensions of statecraft are mutually reinforcing, changing the logic and operation of foreign policy to give leaders new options and diplomatic tools to integrate and utilize seven leading instruments in particular to achieve particular geopolitical objectives, interactions, and tensions between and among them: a) Trade policy b) Investment policy c) Economic sanctions d) The Cybersphere e) Foreign aid and economic assistance f) Financial and monetary policy g) Energy and commodity prices With these tools at the disposal of nation-states, two questions emerge: does geoeconomic coercion used to influence policy statecraft work (the answer is “yes,” with real destabilizing consequences), and how can we recognize geoeconomic pressures at work to think about the phenomena and construct debates?

Four lessons one can be determined by studying the subject of Geoeconomics: I. National power derives from economic power II. If national and economic power drive foreign policy, attention should thus shift to the geoeconomic III. The most difficult geopolitical challenges apply Geoeconomics as their primary tool IV. Confronting these powers requires geoeconomic and national security decisions.

That is to say, as nations utilize economic instruments to advance their geopolitical interests, a strategy must emerge distinct from either economics or geopolitics. The effective use of different forms, policy choices, structural features, tools, markets, and the very nature of Geoeconomics in this regard bolsters regimes, reinforcing security and economic tensions alike, and so, requires a comparative understanding and implementation of geoeconomic principles, with a number of policy prescriptions: i. If economic growth promotes geoeconomic agenda and strategic future, then the executive branch should speak to geoeconomic policy, adopting new rules of engagement with congress to work together to use economic tools to further shared geopolitical objectives, and establishing a geoeconomic understanding developed across all agencies. ii. Passing trade agreements that engage partners with geoeconomic measures, rebooting alliances for geoeconomic action on shared geoeconomic challenges, remaking geoeconomic investments in emergence of developing countries while refocusing development aid towards cultivating the next generation of emerging markets in third world countries, and shoring up rules governing geoeconomic playing fields. iii. Constructing geoeconomic policies dealing with enemies over the long-term, blunting the threat of state sponsored geoeconomic attacks, reinforcing economic foundations for democracy and peace in conflict zones, shifting funds from war departments to promote national interests through geoeconomic instruments, and exploiting the geoeconomic potential by creating the right signals and bureaucratic structures in government to the international community. iv. Meeting the test of climate change with geoeconomic climate provisions while converting the energy revolution into lasting geopolitical gains.

In all of these cases, a geopolitical imperative emerges to advocate for increasing general awareness and specialized knowledge with regards to Geoeconomics, necessitating developing university programs around the subject while institutionalizing derivative policies at all levels of government so as to seamlessly leverage geoeconomic power for the national interest.

In this regard, understanding the effectiveness, capacity and capability, attributes, structural features or “geoeconomic endowments,� and other factors that determine the effective use of these geoeconomic tools and their ability to influence the international geopolitical landscape for strategic purposes is the goal, whether that comes through a nation’s ability to use or control outbound

investments, domestic market features to dictate terms of entry/import levels, influence commodity and energy flows, etc. the role of such geoeconomic warfare becomes incredibly powerful in that it capitalizes on aspects central to the global financial and economic systems the international community is dependent upon for its own survival.

2. Techno-Authoritarians Leveraging the Surveillance State for Counter-Insurgency Along with the increasing use of geoeconomics in maintaining control at an international scale is the increasing use by what I will call “techno-authoritarians” in leveraging the security and surveillance state for counter-insurgency purposes and operations against threats that are increasingly including their own populations.

In opposing the increased push to establish multimillion dollar city-wide “Domain Awareness Centers”—police surveillance centers linking real-time video feeds from thousands of cameras across the city and funneling them into a unified control hub to allow for facial recognition and vehicle tracking systems, watching locations in real-time and winding the clock back, plugging into social media feeds, and generally enhancing police data processing capabilities as information comes in from other local and federal enforcement agencies—one should first recognize that this is not a new development, but rather a logical outgrowth of the internet’s origins as a counterinsurgency weapon against the anti-war and anti-capitalist counterculture movement from its outset, yet now simply hidden by our growing commercialism-linked cultural amnesia.

The original ARPANET sought to compile and make available to military analysts and behavioral scientists information datasets on: · Public opinion polls from all countries · Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world · Archives on comparative communism · Files on contemporary world communist movements · Political participation of various countries · Voting, membership in associations, activities of political parties… · Youth movements · Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change · Data on national integration, particularly in “plural” societies; the integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or splitting of present political units · International propaganda output · Peasant attitudes and behavior

· International armament expenditures and trends Today, as cities partner with powerful tech firms that contract with intelligence agencies to build police surveillance centers that spy on and monitor local protestors, labor unions, and marginalized minority and religious communities through data mining, analysis, and mapping technologies, index intelligence databases, we can see how the internet is rooted in the “dark military arts of counterinsurgency, and America’s fight against the perceived global spread of communism,” often by police departments with their own violent and unaccountable histories on behalf of those seeking to oversee the gentrification of neighborhoods to become quieter, whiter, less frightening, and generally wealthier.

Developed as computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch neighborhoods in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval, a networked computer system that seeks out and shuts down social and political threats by intercepting them in much the same way traditional radar did for hostile aircraft, it is not a far stretch to draw parallels between current technology and the Nazi administrative state that used computer technology like the IBM punch card tabulators that operated and managed slave labor, calculating bodies to do the necessary work. That is, the Nazi’s technological nerve center provided an accounting system stretching across Nazi occupied Europe that controlled and commanded every major concentration and labor camp, establishing an electromechanical information networked web that fueled and sustained its war machine as a surveillance tool to track down and enslave or kill people…a technology originally developed to help the United States count immigrants in its census bureau count.

3. Weaponizing Automated Data-Processing and Machine Learning In war, victory is achieved by whichever side can first complete a cycle of observing and searching for targets, orienting themselves to detected targets, decision making processes to engage targets, and acting to engage targets. As weapons systems are developed to complete these OODA loops (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) faster, or to get inside and disrupt one’s opponent’s OODA loop, the result has meant the externalization of humans from such processes whose decision making processes—applying outside information and context, situational awareness, rules of engagement, authorized engagement, or choice to abort—would only serve to slow this cycle.

In such a context where there may be little time to make a decision before being targeted, a system designed so that the human operator can no longer halt engagement has meant the rise of autonomous weapons systems in battlespaces and arenas of war. Here, the goal-oriented, selfdirected deep neural networks of machines are increasing in sophistication and intelligence, able to accomplish more complex tasks in increasingly open-ended environments in unpredictable ways.

This has meant for instance the reduction of the so-called kill chain from the time it takes to detecting enemies to eliminating them. Imagine for a moment, with the proliferation of drone warfare, the time reduction that takes place as radars pinpoint threats, feeding back images to an engagement control station where the decision to launch a missile is coordinated with battalion headquarters that is synchronizing multiple control stations with a database of known and approved targets to provide engagement authority to carry out kill orders, after which tactical ballistic, antiradiation, or cruise missiles, etc. intercept the threat, or may be given new orders in the air so as to

counter the range of threats from enemy aircrafts, missiles, or countermeasures—all in the time it takes for information to be sent electronically without any room for human friction.

Next, consider the myriad of malware software (viruses, Trojans, worms, botnets, and the whole taxonomy of digital diseases) that make up the list of available digital weapons in cyber warfare, and the potential automating these devices would have.

Stuxnet, or “Olympic Games,” for instance, offered an automated cyberweapon that sought out Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) used in industrial applications (controlling power plants, water valves, traffic lights, factories, etc.), specifically the centrifuges used in nuclear enrichment facilities; and destroyed them while at the same time signaling normal operations to human operators. Similar automated cyberweapons might scan opponent’s software for vulnerabilities and exploit systemic weaknesses to gain root access before stealing, destroying or creating new information, even attacking any of the 20 billion digitized and connected devices that make up the so-called internet-of-things, or any (or all) of the various industries modern societies have come to rely on today.

This has essentially meant an arms race, where autonomous processes can leverage flaws or detect predictable patterns, finding vulnerabilities and redirecting weapons systems, gaining control of these processes, or losing control, so that companies could be destroyed, markets could be crashed, and crises might be unintentionally escalated to undermine the stability of economic and political systems, with no possibility of intervention as runaway, self-replicating processes cannot be stopped, mutating and adapting, evolving to self-modify, preventing or reacting to countermeasures, and persisting inside networks while developing resilience to robust cyber-defenses, automatically escalating conflicts in milliseconds before causing a flash cyberwar that no one can stop, simply because humans are no longer involved. Further add to this the development of ultra-intelligent machines that surpass all of the intellectual activities of humans and follow a rational drive for acquisition, self-improvement, self-replication, and self-protection, that may even resist being turned off.

Here, the arms race in speed and lethality, funded at the behest of the Pentagon and other war departments, bridges the artificial superintelligence with cyberspace whereby missiles, drones, robot swarms, and digital weapons are enmeshed in a global weapons system that can automatically target any individual without so much as a human thought.

A Threatening Context for Anthropologists Looking at these three threads—the rise of geoeconomic warfare, cyber space as a counterinsurgency weapon, and the development of fully automated “super-intelligent” weapons systems— one has only to understand them in the wider socio-political climate where a recent lurch to popular right-wing “economic nationalism” in the still-larger ecological context where climate change and global warming become threat-multipliers catalyzing social strife, means a general sense of peril for those attempting to institute social justice reforms or even revolutionary or insurrectional opposition in a hostile political landscape.

Consider the likelihood of right-wing regimes’ desire to scapegoat vulnerable populations as economic sectors break down in the face of ecological collapse, in turn seeking to weaponize

information defense systems to automatically target and neutralize activist “threats” as they emerge, leveraging geoeconomic resources while simultaneously pressuring international cooperation to these same ends. Here, it is not too far of a stretch to see how the 21st century war on terror is a mere extension of the counterinsurgency strategy of the Cold War era, a global civil war in which people are pitted against governments—or rather, individual liberty and human rights are set against national security and the social contract itself. In such a world, would a philosophical anthropology that challenges the basic precepts of the reigning regime survive? Or, perhaps more likely, would it instead be declared dangerous and criminalized, with its adherents imprisoned or put to death?

For a Militant Activist Ethnology In such a world, there is no difference between offensive and defensive technologies. Such techniques are merely tactics employed in specific operational campaigns. Yet such operations are not conceived of in a vacuum. Rather, the tactics and operations exist as part of a wider military strategy, conceived of to mobilize all of the resources in a national strategy with the intention of effecting policy. That is, as the war theorist Clausewitz might contend, the very minutia of warfare cannot be extricated from, but itself is an extension of, policy, which is guided by the political and economic interests of the constituency in question.

Policy, in this regard, serves as its own weapon, where the laws of war are created, where morality is applied to its development to maintain stability, ensure the control of arms and codes of conduct to govern human behavior in war alike, and to provide conscious restraint that would preserve value and basic notions of decency. Policy and economic interest themselves are further created on the basis of value and meaning, a product of cultural conditions which are themselves constrained by geographic and ecological realities.

For this reason, there is a real need for two projects.

The first is in “studying up,” to a degree, where the specific geoeconomic vision for foreign policy, translated into initial lines of action that demand policy solutions and recommendations, can be better understood. Here, lessons applied to national interests must be uncovered as the compass utilized in discussions of pathways for external behaviors, grand strategy, and how instruments and tactics promote these interests…and what geoeconomic forces drive them. Knowing this geoeconomic vision is critical, because any technology employed cannot be separated from the culture it operates within. Rather, it is an expression that reflects socio-political, geoeconomic, and psycho-cultural forces and values that dominate the ethnographic assemblage in question. Just as the internet may be run by spies and powerful corporations, or our weapons systems may be increasingly automated for the sake of military-industrial competition, so too is our society governed by such forces; and as such, we must do everything we can to know better the hidden forces foundational to the world we live in, as well as the very value-sets and moral compass of those with their fingers on the triggers so to speak, and the policies that guide and direct those fingers.

The second project stems from this one. Not only must we “study up” on the forces we are governed by, but we must be actively engaged in the co-creation of the values such forces will be empowered and directed by. A militant activist ethnography can ensure that if these technological instruments are to remain, they do not threaten the people themselves, but rather are employed to ensure compliance with regulations, prevent fraud, force fair taxes, monitor the quality of food, air,

soil, and water. This is to say that tools of surveillance and control may not even be problems in and of themselves necessarily, but rather how they are used depends on our geopolitics and geopolitical culture. If, for instance, an ethnographer’s or subculture’s values are fundamentally at odds with the dominant society, it may be that strategies must be formed beyond the normal arenas of political participation or civil society, where even insurrectionary violence might emerge as well. In all of these cases however, the ethnographer must still explore the means, strategy, organization, and source of political conflict, which are necessary to encapsulate and ultimately resolve them by realizing a new set of values.

If we choose to ignore politics and remain apathetic to the study of culture, we leave the most malevolent and powerful forces we are indeed subjugated to intact and in charge of the built-in potential for surveillance and control of ourselves, at the behest of values that are in no way representative or indicative of our own. Instead, an ethnographic method in solidarity with its subject, agitating for the values and defending against the abuse of the community one finds themselves participating in and on behalf of, will necessarily deploy its power in the service of the community, attacking the inevitability of a politics based on the fatalistic surrender to tyrannical oppression.

Direction for Further Study In light of what I have spelled out in the prior pages—my writings up to now, the geopolitical context I find myself writing in, impacted by geoeconomic warfare, super-intelligent counterinsurgency, automated weaponized systems, the challenges this provides, and my own move to adopt what has been called a militant activist ethnography—I am now in a sense compelled to reconceive of my project in light of these developments…or at least take them into account so as to ensure a bit more sophistication and nuance as I embark on this project, taking protective countermeasures, designing relevant research plans, and identifying ways in which to approach the subjects of inquiry in effective ways that do not compromise myself or those cultures and values I wish to study and remain in solidarity with.

In the next book then, I hope to have the following projects completed: -A Formula for Determining Carrying Capacity and a Metric to Display the Relationship between an Ideology’s Ordering Effect and Religious Violence. I bring this up because first and foremost, this project hypothesizes violence and crime to be dependent on the degradation of ecological carrying capacity, which manifests to the degree to which a culture has ordered itself, with religion providing a totalizing system from which its various social processes emerge. As a culture loses the source of its ecosystem services, it spirals into deprivation and with it, disorder. Similarly, it can encode an ecological ethic that shores up the ecological integrity. Developing a mathematics, or at least empirically verifiable principles surrounding these realities is a central goal of the project.

-Decisive Ecological Lawfare. Here I look for a plan of action commensurate to the problem at hand. In investigating a number of theories as to how to address and resolve the various sociopolitical-spiritual-psychological-economic…crises that together enact the ecological ones—climate change, habitat destruction, species extinction, etc—I can only suggest that in a milieu where institutions are dysfunctional if not corrupt, and there is a question of values that will determine whether the human species both survives and is capable of retaining some living standard worth

fighting for, any social justice or ecological resistance movement will necessarily have to reframe their struggle in the context of warfare, and as such, use the court system as a major battle domain with which to destroy the enemy’s capacity to wage war in systematic and legitimate ways.

-An Intelligence Checklist. This follows from my own curiosity in how the Intelligence Community chooses targets, collects data, analyzes information, and takes action with regards to its own notions of national security and military defense. This may further include research design methods, structured analysis techniques, formulating battle plans, and even how policy is crafted on the basis of these other milestones, with the intention of constructing a checklist able to insulate its users from intelligence gaps and failures, preparing to engage in perception warfare while potentially offering opportunities for using what is increasingly described as fifth-generation warfare to attack the cognitive infrastructure of the enemy and force enemy decisions detrimental to their objectives.

-A Militant Activist Ethnography Providing Notes on the Aims and Capacities of Local Movements in their Wider International and Historical Context. This may be especially crucial as well as difficult for the simple reason that anthropology is increasingly militarized for the sake of neutralizing the cultures in question. (See the CounterInsurgency Field Manual, for instance). For this reason, insulating the subject from those security forces that seek to criminalize and disrupt dissent will be important. And yet, it is critical in the sense that without understanding the actors, there can be no way to provide aid or support. For this reason, understanding such movements in the context of the harms they seek to address, the ethical foundation and moral obligations they operate with, the cultures they construct around and against these harms, the laws they seek to enact or break during the course of their movement, the consequences and constraints that emerge, and ultimately the natural principles that drive the ecological context in which they operate will all be subjects in any description of such a group.

An Integrated Sustainability Curriculum. There is not much to say about this, other than the idea that education may be our cosmic legacy, in that it provides an evolutionary adaptive mechanism that allows for the collected knowledge of the human species to pass to each new generation. For this reason, it seems likely that even with finding success in the geopolitical arena, until the cultural shift imbues our educational and learning processes with necessary lessons, skills, and techniques, the future of humanity and the earth community will still remain in question. This requires a deep view of civilization on the one hand as itself an assemblage of crime and harms; and on the other, recognize education as a way to address those harms and the wider context in which criminals and crime emerge. Whether this means reevaluating our notions of food, national boundaries, and fragile sense of identity, we can look to our collective rage as an evolutionary force that gives direction with regards to what phenomena to address and how best to do so with regards to any subject of inquiry.

With these points or topics in mind—socioecological metrics of health, domains and strategies of ecological warfare, intelligence processes and policy crafting, notes on militant activist ethnographies, and an integrated sustainability curriculum—I will continue with the “Ecological Criminal Report” as I will call it, which will no doubt change as I do along with the context I find myself within.

A Final Note:

Thank you for reading this. If you do, it suggests you find value somewhere in these words. I cannot tell you how much that alone means to me, and I hope to do everything I can to make this worth your time and energy.

Bibliography: Blackwell and Harris, Robert D and Jennifer M. (2016) War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA Levine, Yasha (2018) Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. Public Affairs: New York, NY Scharre, Paul (2018) Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. W.W. Norton and Company: New York, NY Loadenthal, Michael (2018) The Politics of Attack: Communiques and Insurrectionary Violence.

Manchester University Press: Manchester, Great Britain

Consensus and Conflict: Changes in Marijuana Laws from Perspectives of Competing Models of Crime

“There is, in short, a huge chasm between the reality of crime, the public’s perception of it, and the information being disseminated to the public by law enforcement agencies, the media, and politicians.”

–William Chambliss In America, crimes are considered acts that violate criminal law, punished by criminal sanctions.

(Gaines and Miller, 2018) Two models, the Consensus Model and the Conflict Model, are helpful to understand how society determines acts to be criminal in the first place. This essay will look at how certain acts, in this case specifically with regards to activities related to marijuana use, possession, and sale, have changed with regards to being criminalized, decriminalized, and legalized, how these two particular models view such changes. Following this analysis, I speculate about what this means in terms of our understanding of the American form of democracy, and end with a brief discussion about how to move forward to address some of the concerns and implications that stem from such a reading.

A Tale of Two Models When a majority of any particular group comes to a general agreement with regards to shared norms and cultural values, they may enact laws (taboos) against those activities which are perceived to pose a threat to the larger social group. Those laws that are passed are done so with the intention of condoning acceptable behavior and rejecting unacceptable behavior, for the sake of the safety and well-being of society. This in turn institutionalizes morality and ethical activity within the wider society, which in turn evolves and adapts to the needs and demands of the society in question over time. This process is characterized as the Consensus Model.

The Conflict Model in contradistinction suggests that due to the fact that moral attitudes are in constant flux or are relative and therefore not fixed, criminal laws are therefore not determined by consensus, but rather are enacted when politically powerful segments “impose their values on the rest of the community.” (Gaines and Miller, 2018 pg. 6) For this reason, law may not be based on shared values at all, but rather the whims of political power and as such, may not serve the wider society’s interest in the slightest.

With these models in mind, we can begin to view crime itself as those actions that are criminalized, prosecuted, and punished by laws determined by those who are capable of exerting political power within the criminal justice system. With this understanding, we can focus on one particular issue with regards to a wider context of crime, criminal justice, and the political system.

Marijuana: A Case Study in Reclaiming Political Power?

While the criminal justice system is meant to wield power and effect justice in a society and community, this objective is complicated within the complexities of a realpolitik where different social factions with varying levels of access to power are set up to determine criminality. That is, law and justice are not synonymous, and as such, there may be examples of both injustices that are not addressed by laws as well as laws that may themselves perpetuate injustice.

In the United States for instance for instance, whereas the psychoactive drug marijuana is federally criminalized, over half of state governments have allowed medical use of marijuana, while a third of states have decriminalized its use. Four states, along with Washington, D.C. have even legalized small amounts of marijuana sale and possession. This is to say that roughly three-fourths of the population of the United States allow for an activity that is outlawed by the highest law of the land.

How are we to understand this discrepancy?

Interpretations of Changes within the Two Competing Models Using a Consensus Model, me might see such a phenomenon in a more neutral light: whereas initially American citizens were exposed to a drug that modified biological, psychological, or social behaviors, and agreed that the shared values of the community should dissuade individuals from participating in some kind of action, laws were created to punish these actions. As morality and ethical concerns shift over the course of decades, these social values change as well and as such, so too do the laws. In this Consensus Model, laws are therefore a mere reflection of public sentiment: as our thinking changes, so too do our laws.

A slightly more nuanced view however, represented by the Conflict Model, offers a more suspicious view of these changes. That is, a politically powerful segment of society, in wanting to preserve their particular sense of what society should look like, enacted laws that may have targeted those who wanted to participate in certain behaviors but did not have access to political power (due to class, income, age, and race) and therefore could not defend themselves against politicized laws and subsequent enforcement actions. In that regard, over the course of decades, as various politically disempowered social segments were prosecuted and incarcerated for engaging in actions deemed unacceptable by the politically powerful, it has only been recently that such groups have been able to achieve the political power necessary to modify these laws so that their own moral principles have only recently begun to be integrated within the criminal justice system. Moreover, even now, with a majority of U.S. constituents supporting marijuana decriminalization, different states as well as the Federal government are still unwilling to integrate the moral principles of historically disempowered segments into the political and criminal justice systems.

Rethinking the Criminal Justice System in light of Political Economy and the Culture Wars As Marion and Oliver state in The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice, there exists a “dichotomy between what the people want and what the politicians are willing to pass.� (5) This is to say that policy, and therefore criminality, is more rooted in political feasibility and pragmatics than the greater good, or an ethical imperative to address public concerns. Fear, ignorance, and careerism for instance, can incentivize politicians to vote against the interests of their constituency, perpetuating cycles of oppression and injustice. This paradox of political leaders who vote against the interests of their constituency is compounded by the idea that we live in a democracy, or republic. That is, whereas in a previous age we could justify rebellion against a constitutional

monarchy so we might have more democratic representation, today that argument does not hold weight in that we theoretically already have representation. In this regard, are we to choose to resign ourselves to a democracy or republic where political elites represent their constituencies in name only, while enacting laws that criminalize and punish their constituencies for some politically expedient motivation? Or should these constituencies simply engage in revolution to remake a government to better reflect their own interests, perhaps through a more direct democracy, dictatorship of the proletariat, or discard government altogether for an anarchistic system? Perhaps we no longer need representation, as technology has even made it possible where we can all represent ourselves?

Here we might find refuge in synthesizing both models, that is, recognize that the criminal justice reflects a consensus of those with access to political power. We cannot ignore the reality that the political participation rate in the United States is abysmal. If only people who are politically engaged vote, and those who are politically engaged are for instance more conservative, racist, or closeminded when it comes to psychoactive drugs (or the communities that utilize them), it will be no wonder that the government does not reflect the wider society, as it instead reflects the voting constituencies who have access to political power, based on factors of income, class, age, and race.

For this reason, we might recognize an impetus to remain politically engaged, building alliances and uniting factions to persuade constituencies and politicians to craft law and policy more attuned to the needs of the wider society, not just some self-serving interest. This however necessitates an understanding of the political, economic, social, religious, cultural, and ecological context within which law and policy is crafted, as well as develop a willingness to engage in discussions about right and wrong, even good and evil with those whose definitions are markedly different from our own.

For this reason, politics can even be considered a kind of spiritual warfare of sorts, in which different social sectors vie for political power to assert their own sense of what is morally permissible in society. In such a situation, it is not hard to see how the history of American politics has often left a bloody wake in its path, carried out by those willing to die or kill for the values and beliefs they are so devoted to and invested in.

Bridging the Divide: Remaking Policy aligned to Public Interest This essay has reviewed two competing models for understanding crime as well as how public attitudes toward crime can change. Further, it has focused on a specific example, marijuana use, and how changing laws surrounding use of the psychoactive plant can be interpreted from the perspective of two competing models. In doing so we compared a more neutral interpretation of such change as simply the objective reality of changing opinions, contrasting such an interpretation with a politics of suspicion that considers whether such change may in fact be a response to unjust political power dominating disempowered communities.

Further, we asserted the necessity of public participation in the political system if we hope it will someday reflect our own interest, while leaving open the possibility that political participation will remain mired in conflict, sometimes violently so, and as such demands a nuanced, strategic, and tactical approach to make political gains, while recognizing the deep injustice that abounds where structural change is dependent on fallible political whim.

While identifying ways to “solve” the political contradictions our form of democratic republicanism is subject to, several important proposals are evident: 1) Provide civic education that teaches constituencies about the political structures available to them, while inspiring them to engage with them, while also understanding the wider context in which they are inspired to participate in these structures.

2) Develop and maintain a political system that is flexible and responsive to constituent needs in a timely and effective way, as well as a criminal justice system informed by evidence-based policy and reform.

3) Seek out and institutionalize alternatives for when government is antithetical to the interests of the people and needs to be circumvented until such time as it is not.

If these political contradictions are not addressed, it may be the case that faith and participation in our political system continues to remain scant, so that the criminal justice system continues to serve the needs of only those who are politically represented, leading to an erosion of faith in political engagement, justice, peace and order, as well as threatening the stability and continuity of the American form of democracy as a whole.

In this regard, one can see the relevance of deepening and synthesizing both models with regards to any criminal behavior in question. That is, as is suggested, criminal justice policy scholarship is critical to solving practical problems, “in order to know where the process breaks down or experiences roadblocks as well as understanding the entry points to the policy process for those seeking access to the criminal justice policy process.” (Marion and Oliver, 2012 pg. 29) References Gaines, L.K., &. Miller, R.L (2018). Criminal Justice in Action: The Core. Ninth Edition. Cenage Learning. Boston, MA. Marion, N., & Oliver, W. (2012). The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd Edition).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 13: 9780135120989

Contrasting Classical Criminology with Positivist Theories of Crime: Two Myopic Theories That Probably Do More to Create Crime Than Anything Else “When the fox hears the rabbit scream, he comes a-runnin’, but not to help.”

“Well Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?”

-Hannibal Lecter Overview: Applying the scientific method to questions as to what causes crime, the field of criminology has come to a wide range of competing theories that diverge widely as to the reason. This paper contrasts liberal and conservative ideologies with regards to crime, pointing how their formative beliefs inform party politics, and thus are institutionalized in the legal and justice system. Moreover, these competing ideologies are suggested to be correlated with two models of crime, due process and crime control, as well as criminological theories, rational choice theory in the conservative case and a positivist (at times sociological) theory of crime in the liberal case. After looking at how both frameworks might approach the phenomena of serial killers, I point to the fact that “the theory that wrongdoers choose to commit crimes is a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system” may suggest that while conservative ideology is the dominant force informing our justice system, it is incapable (or simply unwilling) to acknowledge the complexities that together generate crime.

(Gaines and Miller, pg. 46) Thus, this paper ends with a proposal to reconsider the underlying factors upon which the American criminal justice system is based.

Two Ideologies of Crime and the Criminal Justice System As is pointed out in Marion and Oliver (2012)’s The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice, the goals of the criminal justice system are multiple: deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, rehabilitation, reintegration, to teach morality, restoration, and pragmatic. (45) Without focusing on whether any of these goals are actually achieved (and recidivism rates might say they are not), the authors move to the formative institutional influences on the ideological forces behind these goals (family, schools, civic structures, political activities, mass media…) and suggest that despite “various ideological viewpoints, most [Americans] tend to side with one of two perspectives: the liberal or the conservative ideological perspective.” (47) Whereas liberals “strive to protect individual rights,” and are “willing to allow government to intervene in both social and economic aspects of American life in order to rectify deficiencies,” tending to “focus their attention on the conditions of social arrangements and environmental structures,” conservatives in contrast “believe that people are responsible for their own behavior and that they choose to commit crime or, conversely, choose not to commit crime,” believing a “limited government ensures order,” and that “morality is critical to the ordering of society and that government should adhere to moral principles by legislating against those things that are considered immoral.” (48-50) Thus we can see that liberals, defending the individual, align with a due process model where “protection of individual, and thus constitutional rights, is paramount.” Further, the due process model is described as “always being skeptical of the morality and utility of the criminal sanction.” This compared to the crime control model, which attempts to repress criminal conduct

by focusing on the “speedy prosecution of the offender. To this end, individual constitutional rights must often be seen as secondary to the effective prosecution of offenders.” (38) As the authors state, “a presumption of guilt exists prior to a suspect becoming a defendant.”

These competing models of the justice system, being “ideologically driven,” inform competing political perspectives of crime in general: “the crime control model is adhered to more often by conservatives, and the due process model is more often attributed to liberals.” (38) This is to say, the criminal justice system, or the various networked agencies that function as the criminal justice system, operate according to the goals that have been set up for it by both ideological frameworks, yet leaning toward whatever ideological party is in power; or rather, the ideological predispositions of those operating the criminal justice system within the networked agencies. Here we understand ideology as being institutionalized into policy, so that we can understand the “criminal justice ideology” that is applied to any particular crime.

Applying Two Criminological Theories to Serial Killing As alluded to, conservative ideologies may tend toward rational choice theory when it comes to crime—as when individuals choose whether to commit a crime by weighing the benefits against the expected costs. Whether for sensual “rushes” of a criminal experience or financial motives, the individual has chosen to become a criminal and thus law and the criminal justice system would necessarily be designed for deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and to teach morality to the criminal in a crime control model.

A liberal on the other hand, seeking to use the state to intervene on behalf of the individual, might be more predisposed to a due process model, following positivist theories of crime, whether biological, psychological, or social. That is, such an ideology rejects that any criminogenic choice happen in a vacuum, but rather crime is a product of “systemic causation,” in that a range of factors contribute to criminality. Here, theories including biological, psychological, and genetic causes would include trait theory, while extending to social disorganization theory, strain theory, social conflict theory, social process theory, learning theory, control theory, life course theories, or other environmental theories. In this case, whereas a liberal would not necessarily work to eliminate the conservative goals of the criminal justice system, for them rehabilitation, reintegration, and restoration would be more aligned with the paradigm that sees criminals as victims of conditions that cause (or are correlated with) them being more prone to crime, along with state interventions in the social conditions giving rise to crime in the first place.

This tension between liberal and conservative ideologies, models and goals of the criminal justice system, and seemingly competing theories for crime are helpful to understand in light of the phenomenon of serial killing. For instance, the documentary “Serial Killers: The Real Life Hannibal Lecters” explains that of all the serial killers, 76% reside in the United States, while 17% reside in Europe. If we are to take the fact that 92% of these particular criminals reside in western democracies to be true, then we are faced with either a choice of believing this to be a complete coincidence, or some “systemic causation” is occurring, meaning conditions within America or Europe that systematically cause serial killing. Moreover, the documentary states that over 90% of serial killers are white males from unstable families that suffered some emotional abuse or other trauma during their childhood and as such, crave power, dominance, and control, but can’t achieve it

so they violently kill because it feels good and its enjoyable. Are these social conditions specific to America and Europe, or is something else going on?

From a conservative perspective, such killers are simply making a rational choice, weighing the benefits of killing (and eating) a child in the case of Albert Fish, or bombing and maiming industry leaders in the case of Ted Kaczynski. Yet this idea of rational choice belies a religious and moralistic view that assumes free will is a fact of life, a largely western philosophical notion that, besides being contested, is very much ingrained in Christian religious systems and thinking as well. In this case the conservative perspective may even be considered to be “pre-classical,” relying on such notions of crime that logically deduced certain criminals were “evil,” and “possessed by the devil,” or were “witches,” and thus should be burned at the stake or tortured, their testimony providing the basis for capturing new “criminals.” This is to say, there is no attempt at understanding the depth to what is causing such morally repugnant behavior. The analysis remains at a superficial level that requires circular reasoning: these people must be performing wicked actions because they are wicked. Simply including in an essentialist perspective (“it’s because it’s their nature”) the idea of choice (“they choose their evil nature”) doesn’t logically hold, yet it is prevalent in the way we talk about “enemies” today, whether terrorists (“evil”), gang members (“animals”), or immigrants (“rapists” and “drug dealers”). After all, is it the essential nature of white men from western countries to be evil and kill and eat children or set off bombs or shoot up schools and churches? Conservatism would take this at face value – white men in America and Europe are simply more prone to choosing this evil than others, and so a criminal system should be devised to repress this “instinct.”

From a liberal perspective however, the analysis allows for a greater degree of complexity. As mentioned, many of the serial killers were economically disadvantaged, causing a psychological strain in a disorganized social environment. Moreover, if they are from broken homes, a breakdown of social controls may occur. If they are abused by their family, a degree of cultural transmission, social process, or learning theory could explain this. Perhaps such pressures are due to the economic system they reside in, which could be addressed in social conflict theories. And of course, if they are being abused as children, or there is a degree of violence present in their life and they are killing animals or hurting others, self-control theory or other life course theories can potentially explain the reasons for crime later.

Of course, even these systemic positivist theories have critiques leveled at them, namely that to discredit any theory that cannot be verified with quantitative data therefore derails into scientism, another ideology where anything not able to be measured, reproduced, or verified is therefore not true. This too misses the mark in many ways. For instance, can a scientific test be done to demonstrate the role of love as an independent variable that can intervene in a potential serial killer’s life? Is love reducible to the amount of parents around, or time spent with them, or a teacher’s influence despite a broken home, or a devoted partner, or even the ability for self-care, etc.? The positive data that is derived from a particular paradigm simply reaffirms the paradigm itself, without allowing for that which cannot be quantified, the nature of individual experience, to be understood.

The system is better understood in terms of its complexities, but the individual’s reaction to their circumstances is still unknown.

For the liberal perspective, the individual is a depersonalized statistic, a product of a set of structures who is imbued with the very tendencies arising in a reified deterministic system. Any attempt to rehabilitate still assumes systemic causation, where subjugated objects will be “perfected”

by tweaking the wider system and structures through magical operations. For the conservative, the individual is a decontextualized scapegoat which such magical thinking has no answer for except to banish them to confinement. And since rational choice theory is the primary theory underlying the criminal justice system, it, being incapable of addressing systemic issues, must rely purely on these simplistic magical operations like strict minimum sentences, incarceration, and the death penalty to attempt to appease their partisan ideologues, not even attempting to address any root issue. In either case, the criminal has been objectified as either a product or pariah. Perhaps it is then both of these ideologies that generate the conditions for the human subject to rebel against these ruling paradigms, rebelling against both forms of thought that do not see the individual as holding both moral worth and agency. That is, the worst aspects of both ideologies are concentrated and amplified in the serial killer, who inverts the moral framework while attacking the system and the individuals who embody the very structures they loathe that they see as conspiring against them.

A Proposal: While there is no definitive proposal I can suggest, I will point out that there is much that can be done to further develop the positivist theories, while at the same time integrating them into the conservative based rational choice theory. Perhaps creating a Venn diagram or algorithm that overlays all theories upon one another can point out zones of probability where individuals are most likely to commit crimes. This might lead to empathetic programs being designed and implemented specifically in these areas where “systemic causation” might occur. This said, it cannot be discounted that America, and western capitalist democracies in general may need to undergo some radical transformation as well if such zones are to be systematically addressed and eliminated. As such, pragmatic solutions that are based on evidence (“what works”), not ideology, should be integral to formulating policy. There are ethical considerations beyond the criminal and victim, and a holistic, systems view should be taken, one that seeks to balance the needs of society with the rights of individuals, as opposed to appeasing ideologues and dogmatists but do nothing to address causes or individual well-being.

Further, the relationship between crime, violence, inequality, trauma, and the environment is being explored through the field of green criminology which may further help to provide consideration as to the causes of serial crime and murder. That is, the ecological exploitation and degradation of natural resources may deprive large segments of ecological and social services, as an increasingly complex and specialized society destroys more of its land base. This theory is developed in two models (Crank and Jacobi, 2015), one by Homer-Dixon where violence is dependent on environmental scarcity: for instance, environmental and climate-induced scarcity leads to migration and refugees and constrained economic activity, leading to strain and inequality, social segmentation, and a hardening justice system. In turn, this leads to increased crimes by the state or by state elites, ethnic conflicts, terrorism, insurgency, individual-level criminal activity, gang strengthening and migration, organized crime, and human trafficking. That scarcity leads to socio-economic contributions to crime and violence is further compounded by social disorganization, and makes theoretical contributions that contextualize environment as a critical, if overlooked factor in other criminological theories.

The other model is Robert Agnew’s "Dire Forecast" which makes a similar model where climate change (rising temperature, rising sea level, extreme weather events, and changing patterns of precipitation) and human impacts (habitat change, negative health effects, food-water shortages, loss

of livelihood, migration, social conflict) aggravate criminogenic mechanisms (increased strain, reduced control, reduced social support, beliefs/values favorable to crime, traits conducive to crime, opportunities for crime, and social conflict), that in turn lead to higher levels of individual, group, corporate, and state crime.

In these cases, environmental offenses contributing to climate change (illegal felling of trees, emissions of dark smoke, unlicensed pollution, destruction of habitat, reducing biotic mass) or consequences of climate change (water theft, wildlife poaching, illegal fishing), associated offences (food riots, eco-terrorism, trafficking, violent offenses), or regulatory offenses (carbon trading fraud, misreporting, unauthorized use of gmos, collusion or regulatory corruption) provide an impetus to develop the field, since initial studies provide empirical support for a negative link between vegetation and crime or other incivilities, including aggression and violence. (Kuo and Sullivan, 2001) As these studies explain, “the more vegetation, the less crime.” The greater sense of safety in green places is here suggested by three mechanisms: increasing informal surveillance (community exists where ecosystems are present), ecological/economic services, and mitigating psychological precursors to violence (ecotherapeutic services). That is, greener spaces receive greater use, thereby increasing informal surveillance, economic services, and higher levels of vegetation systematically predict lower levels of aggression.

Moreover, levels of income, education, and employment among residents may correlate with greener environments, producing conditions where lower-class neighborhoods are deprived of mitigating factors that would lower crime. That is, we might see impoverished neighborhoods as, in a sense, undergoing long-term collapse (and the factors listed above increased), both in terms of the ecological services that are necessary for economic activity, as well as the informal surveillance and psychological factors that reduce crime both absent. For this reason, interventions that contribute to increasing ecological density may be the best way to reduce crime and violence.

In a more explicit example, Ted Kaczynski began his serial killing campaign after he found the land he lived near being destroyed by heavy industrial machinery. While this provides an extreme example of one person consciously murdering people due to the environmental degradation experienced, we might find that others, especially in these western democracies, or a more explicitly capitalist country like America, are succumbing to unconscious pressures where the suffocating trauma of cityscapes have depleted entire areas of the psychological de-stressors and social services that intact environmentally rich areas provide. Here, environment, ecosystems, nature, biodiversity…are all understood to be the source of our contact with our very humanity. Whereas the framework of a modern industrial civilization will violently destroy wild spaces, in reaction, those wild spaces will violently attack civilized frameworks as well to keep the last semblances of free, noninstitutionalized experience (determined by impersonal systemic forces) intact, spurning the civilized rationale that itself emerges from a particular set of institutional pressures.

No doubt states and police forces will continue to draw the wrong conclusions and continue to crack down on serial killers or "criminal insurgents" without addressing the larger ecologicallydefined contextual issues that give rise to collapse, crime, violence, etc. in the first place, or the multifaceted social systems and networked structures that contextualize the individual’s “inhuman” behavior. This is only natural, as to do so may likely result in their own dissolution: to seriously address these environmental and structural forces that inform and motivate behavior might in turn represent an existential threat to the continuity of their own organization, if it is they themselves

who are responsible for the symptoms they are tasked with treating. That is, if serial killing is the phenomenon of lashing out within these western capitalist democratic systems due to the very effect that they are responsible for, then to adequately address the conditions that cause crime in the first place would mean effectively undergoing a radical transformation, if not their own abolition altogether.

References Crank and Jacoby, John P. and Linda S. (2015) “Crime, Violence, and Global Warming.” Taylor and Francis Publishers.

Gaines, L.K., &. Miller, R.L (2018). Criminal Justice in Action: The Core. Ninth Edition. Cenage Learning. Boston, MA. Kuo and Sullivan, Ming and William C. (2001) “Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?” Environment and Behavior. 33. 343-367. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249624302/download Marion, N., & Oliver, W. (2012). The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd Edition).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 13: 9780135120989 “Serial Killers: The Real Life Hannibal Lecters Documentary” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=D-_j8iEDOxU

Heroes Raping Heroes: An Attempt to Understand Sexual Assault and Silence in the Military through Nested Crime Triangles In looking at “Why Soldiers Rape,” it helps to view the phenomenon through the lens of nested crime triangles to more adequately understand and address the issues. In doing so, we can see that any crime will depend on a target, an offender, and a place. This goes some way in understanding why the military might have a systemic aversion to addressing institutional rape. Since the place of rape is controlled by the institution, the military itself would have to assume responsibility and blame.

This means either that to solve the problem the place must be managed more effectively (costing more money) through new security, surveillance, retrofitting material designs, etc. or that the rapists (or rather, potential rapists, i.e. everyone) will have to go through some program or analysis to lessen the probability that they will rape.

This is further problematized because the “effect” of rape may look similar to consensual sex, and therefore can be disputed. This is to say that whereas the effect of assault may leave physical marks evident of a crime, and robbery would similarly provide an effect of stolen property, rape is categorically different in that there is much difficulty in differentiating the physical evidence between consensual and nonconsensual sex often times. This in turn puts pressure on the investigators or “guardians” to “harden the target,” so to speak, focusing on the victim (“what were you doing,” “what were you wearing,” “what were you saying,” “how much were you drinking…” etc.) with the assumption that the victim doing something different would have changed the outcome.

As the act of rape is nested within these three aspects or elements of crime, it thus requires intimate handlers for the rapist, capable guardians for the target, and a place manager for the area. What is more, each of these elements/overseers are nested within a larger context, the “super controller.” In this regard, “At least 10 different types of super controllers capable of regulating the framework within which first level controllers operate. Included in this list are formal, diffuse, and personal agents exerting various types of influence, including but not limited to: organizational, financial, political, media, and market that exercise social, legal, or financial authority to stimulate and encourage first order controllers to dissuade crime by enhancing their supervision over the elements of a crime that are within their sphere of influence…”

This “super controller” then, functions as the wider culture upon which the socio-political, legal, and moral-ethical framework is overlaid, providing the context within which the three elements converge to cause the rape in the first place. Culture, or the interlocking structural forces that together establish an ideological disposition, naturalizes the phenomenon. Thus due to the complexities of this issue, there may be an unwillingness, or simple inability to systematically address these factors, so that the presumption of innocence, compounded with institutional loyalty, means the victim, women, end up being the ones to suffer the focus of these crimes. Moreover, because nothing can really happen, they are ultimately forced out.

This may be similar to other industries, where priests, educators, psychologists, etc. engage in improper and unethical sexual encounters, but it is seemingly more prevalent in the military. As

suggested, the answer to why soldiers rape “appears to lie in a confluence of military culture, the psychology of the assailants, and the nature of war.” (Benedict, 2008) Benedict goes on to suggest military culture is more misogynistic than many suspect, where language reveals a hatred of women, pornography is endemic, and femininity is derided as weak in an institution that glorifies violence. For this reason, whereas these may be outlets for the stress of war, perhaps it is the case that in a culture where violence, power, and coercion are all cherished and enacted by the military itself, the individual may in turn reproduce these relationships on a microlevel. Thus, we might ask why the culture exists in the first place that may condition or justify rape.

The relationship of murder to sex is similarly a topic worth discussing, especially in light of psychoanalytic theory which suggests the “id” might prompt violence towards these ends, with an inadequate superego (military culture) not only unable to hold this id back, but actively encouraging it on the battlefield. Thus, the author suggests that women have been seen as “sexual booty for conquering soldiers since the beginning of human history,” and it thus “should come as no surprise that the sexual persecution of female soldiers” has occurred in the military for decades. Moreover, the lack of a support system, the unwillingness to destroy an enclosed hierarchical community, the fear of being attacked, and the wider culture of repressing physical and psychological pain may all factor into the underreporting of rape.

Not only does the military then implicitly promote a rape culture, according to Benedict, but this culture is reinforced by the type of men who gravitate toward the military, as well as the type of war that is being fought. For instance, drawing from positivist criminological theories, we can see that the same factors that contribute to crime in the first place are similarly those present in impoverished neighborhoods and family lives—the very same from which many soldiers come from so as to escape poverty and a violent home life. Similarly, the fact that the war they now fight in is one of occupation, were violence is committed against civilians, torture is sanctioned, and women and children are shot, there may be a connection between the perpetual violation of the home-life of enemies, and especially women who take care of the home, and the rape of women at home.

This is to say that war is being conducted in a moral vacuum, where soldiers are conditioned to experience dehumanization as normal, and the inferiority of women is naturalized. Further, this type of war is being conducted and carried out by soldiers who often times are suffering from their own psychological injuries, reproducing them both in war, and against their colleagues during times of rest from war.

This short essay has sought to point out how rape in the military can be better understood through the lens of nested triangles, where target, victim, and place converge to cause the crime. However, by expanding and complexifying these elements, we have a more holistic sense of what is happening: rape is being perpetrated by soldiers who are prone to criminality due to the social and psychological factors inherent to their backgrounds. Moreover, the place where these crimes take place are such that morality is virtually absent where the objective to kill the enemy, occupy territory, and coerce the citizenry through power is glorified, rewarded, and promoted by a “super controller,” the military culture itself. Beyond this, an aversion to taking responsibility due to the requirement of either paying for reforms, or targeting the very soldiers the military institutions rely on for success means that the only course of action on which to base any semblance of “reform,” tends to mean the women are the target of focus; however, due to the difficult nature of differentiating rape from sex,

and the presumption of innocence in terms of their assailants, and the culture that acts as a negative feedback mechanism, such courses of action are usually unsuccessful and therefore the women are in turn forced out.

The prospects for institutional reform are therefore not bright. Not only is there a question of what necessary reforms would cost, and what evidence these reforms would be based on, but the idea that military counselors should be hired to treat childhood abuse and sexual assault belies a greater question – why not have those services available to people before the join the military in the first place?

Moreover, Benedict’s suggestion to end the war in Iraq (and perhaps with it, all wars of occupation), while I agree, may be the most controversial, but speaks to a greater question. By ending an immoral war that is based on power and the extraction of resources, perhaps we are going some way to end the same kind of factors that are present in the relationships where sexual assault and rape is similarly condoned. In this regard, why not just end the military while we’re at it, doing away with the very elements that create the conditions for occupation in the first place, and with them, rape.

This would of course require lasting, radical structural transformation at an international level, but it may be a more likely prospect than waiting for the military to solve this problem.

References Benedict, H. (2008, August 13). “Why Soldiers Rape.” Retrieved from http://inthesetimes.com/article/3848 Bichler, Gisela and Malm, Aili (2015). “The Routine Nature of Transnational Crime.” In The Criminal Act: The Role and Influence of Routine Activity Theory Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269411288_The_Routine_Nature_of_Transnational_Cri me

Society as an Asylum A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws.

-Erving Goffman, In Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates When looking at who is to blame for so many mentally ill people ending up behind bars, I think one has to recognize it is a systemic failure. Often times, imprisonment will be a consequence of a psychotic episode, or where an individual will come in on minor crimes or parole violations. Because they cannot comply with minimum security however, they are moved to maximum security institutions where, as one prison official says, “prisoners will do what they’re told to, whether they want to or not.”

Is this type of attitude conducive to mental health? Of course not. But as is pointed out as well, prisons don’t exist to provide mental health or psychiatric relief. Rather, they exist to “provide safety and security to the community.” What’s more, prisons are further tied to other political and economic interests and values, and often times, prisoners are very often not prioritized when it comes to social programs or health care services. Why should the tax-payer pay for services for a prisoner, when they could pay for services for citizens who have not been convicted of crimes?

This is an interesting question and reflects more than anything the failure of the systemic logic that is perhaps tied up with our social arrangement as it stands today. Often times, these “criminals” are imprisoned because they did not have the right support system outside of prisons. They may not have been getting the right medication or services, and so prison represents the ultimate failure of the system, in its inability to provide these social services, and moving the people who need them into an asylum where they are heavily controlled but still cannot get what they need.

Prisons do not and cannot provide effective psychiatric care. Moreover, I would argue this is not just because they are not adequately funded. It is not even that they have not adequately found the correct balance between psychiatric needs and safety or security concerns, nor is it that people are simply unaware of how to treat these people as they do not have funding for training programs.

Rather, it is because prisons, and asylums in general, are not conducive to psychiatric wellness.

This I think is the crucial point. People have certain psychiatric needs, and the prison system is meant to punish people. People can not get what they need when they are being punished, and so, there is an internal contradiction, where the needs of the community are placed against the needs of the individual, so that retribution becomes a more important value than restoration or rehabilitation, so that the individual’s mental wellbeing is sacrificed for the mental state of the community at large.

This I think further drives people “mad,” which has the unintended effect of making them “bad.” If people are constantly driven to insanity, they will likely lash out at the system that is making them insane.

One thing that seems clear is that American politicians don’t know how to help. They have ideological positions that appeal to voters, but their interventions tend to create more problems than they solve. Prisons seems to be one example of this. However, what is more interesting to consider is that while prisons may be asylums unto themselves, now charged with taking on other responsibilities of other asylums that have lost funding or support, the prison system at large might itself be a microcosm for society. That is, we are setting up our institutions and our wider society as an asylum itself, one that systematically causes the problems by driving people to insanity in the first place.

Gaines, L. K. & Miller, R. (2017). Criminal Justice in Action (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

“The New Asylums.” Frontline. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showsasylums/

Perceiving a Spectacle, Dreaming Reform: The Wire, Amsterdam, and Political Possibility “You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? Nigger with a library card.”

-Brother Mouzone Watching HBO’s The Wire: Season Three Episode 4: “Amsterdam,” I am struck by the political possibilities the network and writers play with, critiquing the dominant culture of political gamesmanship, while using their platform to propose what might be the most politically potent reform America could ask for.

From the Corner to the Screen The Wire is a television (sorry, “it’s not television, its HBO”) show, where police are tasked with suppressing the drug market in Baltimore. The name comes from the legal processes that are undertaken to get a “wire” up, meaning have a court sign off on the police request to listen in on otherwise private calls for the sake of disrupting the drug trade. What’s important to know about The Wire I think is that the creator, David Simon, spent years with the Baltimore detective unit doing an ethnography of sorts that became the best selling book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. In his “Post-Mortem,” Simon writes, “I had been granted access to a world hidden, if not willfully ignored, by all of that dispassionate journalism. These weren’t murders as benchmarks of a day’s events. Nor were they the stuff of pristine, perfectly rendered morality plays…this was death investigation as an assembly-line process, a growth industry for a rust-belt America that had long ceased to mass manufacture much of anything, save for heartbreak.” The book prompted his research for the miniseries, “The Corner,” the two combining to form “The Wire.”

The main theme that seems to run through all five seasons of the Wire is the catalyzing effects drug dealing has on violence, in the sense that people are killed due to gang violence, trying to take territory, losing product, in confrontation with police, or randomly through the proximity to weapons or the daily grind of city life. What’s more, the police simply cannot seem to stop this violence, which seems intrinsic to the prohibitive policies they are forced to abide by, enforcing laws that incarcerate kids for decades. The series is essentially about both sides “learning and adjusting” to the other, in an attempt to score in “the game.”

Amsterdam For this reason, the episode “Amsterdam” is quite unique. Because people are being killed due to the drug trade and one police major’s career depends on reducing the murder rate, he takes the drastic step of what he calls political compromise, unofficially telling drug dealers and gangs they will not be arrested if they contain their criminal activities to a specific area, effectively legalizing drugs.

The episode begins with a community meeting where a police officer begs a hostile crowd to give police information on “criminals,” who tell him not only is there virtually no difference when they do, but they risk being retaliated against for snitching. An audience question starts the episode: “so what’s the answer?” “Tired of the bullshit, the major gives a response: “I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it can’t be a lie.”

Apart from the city councilman’s politicking over how to leverage crime rates to attack an opponent, the detectives talk with their informant about where major gang operates now, a former felon considers whether to go back to a life of crime or work legal jobs, another detective tries to flip suspects to see who shot an officer saying he will make any future charge disappear, addicts buy heroin, Major Crimes Unit attempts to build a case on the leader of a gang who insulates himself form illegal activity by running down property information, the captain considers what to do after he retires, a police lieutenant talks with the District Attorney he’s sleeping with about a gang leader he put away who he hopes will not be granted parole, a new gang leader is identified, cops can’t pay alimony to failed marriages and broken families, burner phones become the hot new technology, a drug dealer collaborates with the state senator to make political contributions to launder money …

This sets the stage for the critical line: “As of today, you can sell drugs in West Baltimore, but only where we say.” Police in turn teach the kids where they can and cannot sell drugs, telling people they “don’t give a shit” if they sell drugs in the “free zone,” calling it “Amsterdam.” “We’re trying to give you a break. Consider it amnesty.” What’s hilarious is that none of the kids get it. “We grind and you fuck with us. Why you gotta go and fuck with the program?” Eventually, the police rents yellow school buses, pick them all up, drive them to a school gym, where the Captain tells them how to operate in Amsterdam and the free zone.

Performance and Analysis Because the show is based on Simon’s experiences, the show seems accurate in its portrayal of criminal proceedings. This episode, while did not share the specific classification of crime in terms of the penal code associated with the crime, demonstrates the various police responses to dealing drugs. Further, it seems to critique the myth that prohibition is effective by accentuating the reality that both police and criminals are caught in a cycle of crime surrounding the drug trade. For this reason, the realities are put front and center: a police officer is killed buying a very small amount of drugs, four boys are killed by a rival gange, the city is outraged which creates political pressure on the police department, whose hierarchical politicking means certain leaders lose their jobs. As a result, the pressure to do something different provides the excuse and opportunity for one individual to try something out.

The idea of Amsterdam/the Free Zone comes from a particular compromise of police needing to enforce a zero-tolerance public intoxication, but realizing that the community needs a place to relax, and so allow them to drink if they put a brown bag around the bottle, in a kind of “see-no-evil” approach to crime. Similarly, the police know drugs will continue to be sold and death toll will continue to rise if the cycle of violence is not broken.

For this reason, The Wire does something revolutionary, in the sense that they create a performance in which law enforcement refuses to obey the law for the good of the community. Murders go down, incarcerations go down, public outrage goes down, police retain their jobs, kids make money, adicts get their fix, and everyone seems to be happy. This seems to be an example of promoting policies of decriminalization, all the way back in 2004, over a decade before states begin to decriminalize drugs like cannabis.

Further, books like The Wire and Philosophy: This America, Man portray the show and city as demonstrative of an American tragedy. It is a critique of the justice and legal system, the futility of

crime prevention and law enforcement, and the incitement to lambast our politicians for refusing to achieve systemic reform. For this reason, we can see why one chapter, “Stop Snitching, Screw the System,” suggests that the breach of justice is hardly reserved for the criminals. In fact, the police tend to break rules just as much, abusing suspects, lying on paperwork, failing to abide by department policies…it is called, as the author says, “evangelical nihilism,” a poetic way of saying “those who have power believe that they are always right simply because they have the guns and badges.” This appeal to authority simply reifies the slave-master relationship, while the show encourages audiences to identify with the plight of criminals in order to push back on this relationship. Police don’t protect, as evidenced by the numerous individuals who are killed after collaborating, their inability to follow search and seizure rules, forcing illegal confessions, manipulating crime statistics, police brutality, etc. For this reason, respect is complexified, given to those individuals on both sides willing to stand up for what they believe in and intervene in a disastrous system created by the collapse of accountability, refusal of reform, and monotony of selfinterest.

Future Experiments…

The Wire tells the story of what everyone seems to already know, but everyone refuses to acknowledge: prohibition doesn’t work. The refusal to acknowledge this reality leads to death, imprisonment, addiction, violence, broken homes, suffering, and ensures a drain on resources preventing city government from accomplishing much of anything. The Wire also experiments with interventions meant to reduce this suffering: criminals come together in a joint co-op so as to prevent inter gang violence. Police refuse to enforce drug laws. As is repeatedly stated, “no one does shit anyways.” The Wire, and Amsterdam in particular, provides an imaginative break in the cycle of violence, a novel possibility where the community’s interest is put before either side, where evidencebased policies take precedent over the politics of fear, where prohibition is recognized for the failure it is.

The question it seems, now that the show is off-air, is where else can the imaginative capacity generate new possibilities for intervention in a world in desperate need of change.

References Bzdak and Crosby (2013) The Wire and Philosophy: This America, Man. Open Court Publishing: Chicago, Illiois.

Simon, David (2006) Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Owl Books: New York, NY Gershowitz, Adam M. (2013) The Wire: Crime, Law, and Policy. Carolina Academic Press.

On Resisting the Suffocating Trauma of the Cityscape Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one never uses against himself.

-Honoré de Blazac Lost Illusions At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom the most archaic.

-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

–Gospel of Thomas One idea that came up for me last week was the importance of a kind of cognitive archaeology in uncovering the beliefs and schematic patterns people operate from. From beliefs we can begin to understand the attitudes that drive those behaviors and habits that characterize social relationships and the ethical-moral forms we enter into as we approach larger political economic structures. For this reason, focusing attention on the sensations, emotions, and experiences that arise in our daily interactions can help to clarify the nature of reality in order to understand where people stand within these realities and the stories they tell themselves and each other. Precarias a la Deriva’s drift within the “circuits of feminized precarious work” similarly explores the stratigraphic layers of the urban spirit through a psychocartography that looks for conflicts to map territories of struggle, deriving hypotheses from the experiences they generate in their research for a “primary material for politics,” seeking out propositions and points of attack with which to make more effective their socio-political defenses against capital (e.g. the general strike).

Theory here is built intimately, from historically marginalized voices, testing generalizations against personal experiences of living practice and action. Methods of radical organizing provide both mechanisms of truth-making against oppressive epistemologies, as well as critical weapons with which to attack and break down the paradigm that produces such realities, generating new knowledge to be adapted to the goals of each struggle to design action plans and demands rooted in the experience of (militant) action embodied within the research process itself. Researcher and research becomes a catalyzing element, attending with care to those various planes of subjectivity whose transformative social action, able to generate a new and more just reality, is both object and result of the study, generating action that itself challenges the epistemological basis of science as a set of abstract, formalized methodological rules divorced from concrete realities; rather, it is now

situated as a tool to empower social struggles by experiments designed to empower such struggles against the work of everyday life.

The proposals arising out of these hypotheses, drawn from concrete experiences, in service of social transformation, thus articulate various tendencies within the mapped relations, offering insight into how best to produce social wealth and “extract from care its transformative force.” Precariousness, for instance, is defined by the research as the “juncture of conditions, both material and symbolic, which determine an uncertainty with respect to the continued access to the resources necessary for the full development of a person’s life.” What must be confronted with this definition in mind then are the conditions that provide the certainty with regards to what resources are in fact necessary for the full development of life.

On this point, care is identified as a critical factor: Because care is what makes life possible (care generates life, nourishes it, makes it grow, heals it), care can make life happier (creating relations of interdependence among bodies) and more interesting (generating exchanges of all types of flows, knowledges, contagions), care can give life, definitively, some meaning. (41) The focus on care as a constituent element of the militant research process helps demonstrate the basis of its revolutionary potential to reconstitute social relationships and replace the logic of security and profit that increasingly determine public and private life by attending to our basic human desire for freedom. In this regard, we might speak of, rather than a violent CapitalColonization-Exploitation continuum, a Love-Beauty-Self-Actualization continuum of care, the material basis and source of community wealth that is constantly under assault and eroded by the relationships we daily enter into throughout the city.

This is a critical insight because it demonstrates the poverty inherent to an urban landscape that constellates around power, capital, and the state, where every physical environmental dynamic and relationship is imbued with a paternalist, possessive, and dominant “care,” external to the individual they (we) are made dependent upon, and as such can be deprived by institutional mediations unless the logic of domination is internalized and reproduced by the individual (“get a job, slacker!”). That is, it is We who consistently create the conditions we describe. We outsource those necessary tasks we are dependent upon to others and so the very basis of our lives depends on a specialized hierarchy of labor that mediates our own lives back to us: we are separated from the land by a layer of concrete and so, must import what nourishes us and in so doing sell what is personal invaluable in return (granted, this is the result of a historical process of domination not chosen), our lives in turn driven by logics of money, profit, commodification, alienation…work. That is, while we may assume the source of oppression to be externalized, in fact it is our relationship to these external processes where exploitation arises.

In this regard, we can perhaps approach resistance to capital through an anamnetic method that radically relocates the source of oppression to an internal logic, simultaneously drawing on a preexisting knowledge of the body’s experience of reality and what it needs to find a different (more natural?) logic able to subvert and overcome an inferior epistemology to transform one’s sense of value and meaning, and thus the personal and political world that manifests out of them. This retrieval of primacy (drawing from a Love-Beauty-Self-Actualization continuum of Care rather than the Capital-Colonization-Exploitation continuum of violence) may in turn be most effective in

resisting corrupting relationships in that it reconnects one to what is primary for life: care, as was articulated, and the land, from which the energy and power necessary to sustain this care bubbles up.

Here then, an anamnetic method of resistance reestablishes psychological roots into both body and land, so that a community can reconstitute itself through a resonant psychophysical-osmosis able to overcome the mediating structures parasitizing this pre-cultural relationship we may instinctually gravitate towards.

Political laboratories then potentially represent moments where such reconstitution can take place, points where “radical experimentation with our bodies and precarious life conditions become manifest.” The Occupy movement in general, and the Oakland Commune in particular, provide examples of where this type of revolutionary praxis can take place, reconstituting individuals at a molecular level, in so doing producing maps where new radical modes of subjectivity are generated, communicated, explored, and compared with similar resonances across geographies, histories, and spacetimes.

One question for research: “why bother with any of it?” This is less a pessimistic retort or critique of the ineffectiveness of various political experimentations, but rather to hone the methodologies, make explicit the reasons behind the experimentations, and make more effective experimental coalition-building by identifying or producing common ground.

For instance, why is shutting down ports and organizing for general strikes important? Is it to create a symbolic display of power? Is it to practice disrupting the flow of capital? Is it to catalyze a decomposition and recomposition for those not yet radicalized? To me, this action in particular represents a kind of schizo-affective cartography of desire in that there is activity, but for a thousand different reasons, many of which are antithetical to one another: whereas the insurrectionists for example might seek to intervene in the motion of circulation of goods in order to bring the flow and production of goods to a halt (and with it factory-life altogether), port-labor, radical as it may claim to be, is necessarily opposed to this faction, as their very identity as portworkers assumes they have a stake in keeping the port open, even if they agree to close it to leverage this power for their own narrow objectives. Here, “moments of connectivity” represent a synthesis through dialogue that is achieved in specific actions and events, where barricades can become “a powerful dynamic of subjectification; they provide images, sounds, waves, even oceans.” Yet the battle may be against the very identity of the working class, who are accomplices in the struggle, rather than capital.

Similarly, the question, “what do we do with this center?” must similar ask to what purpose any center will exist for. Will the activities it organizes (libraries, screen printing, radical theory workshops…) reconstitute and subjectivize individual identity? In a sense, there is a remaking of social relationship, at least in these radical pockets. But ultimately, the center realizes that while there is a need, its revolutionary potential must dissolve to service it: “OK, we need to find a place that we can rent, so we have to do a bit of fundraising, so it shifted from an occupation – which was road blocked—to a social center that we’d actually have to fund, and sustain.” Once more, an internal identity and relationships are coopted by a system that feeds off of the continuum of care, able to accommodate and subjugate revolutionary impulse within the relational field of capital.

In a way, then, Occupy and perhaps the Oakland Commune as a form of Occupy provides an example of this schizo-affective cartography of desire in general: that is, it provided glimpses of

subjectification and recomposition, a retrieval of the wealth that is generated by the pre-cultural creativity and care that is remembered during certain radical moments; but, resisting capital, the desire for relationships uncontaminated by capital dissipates by reproducing capital.

One example: I remember when I lived on Van Ness and Turk in San Francisco, walking by an abandoned building everyday with my dog and imagining all of the potential present in that building.

It could be a community center, or housing for homeless, or a free skool, a community coop, a postcapitalist revolutionary warfare research institute, or...anything. It appeared Occupy San Francisco also had been thinking this way, because they marched from Market Street to this building opposite, broke open the locks, occupied it, declared it liberated, “decorated” it, and tweeted out their success.

As police arrived, occupiers climbed on the roof and threw bricks at them. After some time, the police went in after the occupiers with a Special Weapons and Tactics Team and emptied the building at gun point. What was the effect of this insurrectionary occupation? From what I could see, a shiny new fence was installed, a security guard was hired, the individuals who threw bricks were incarcerated for a couple of years, and a number of individuals were traumatized from the ordeal.

Several months later I happened to connect with one of the organizers of that action. I shared my critique and listened to a response that reified capitalist relationships and argued for insurrection to abolish capitalism and liberate land for the people. I didn’t disagree, but posed the question that, since the property in question was owned by the Archdiocese, and their mission was not unlike Occupy’s (feeding the poor, caring for the needy…), why not dialogue with them, “rent” the place for a dollar a year until the owners determined what to do with it, and conduct the services they sought to enact for free, without engaging in the kind of activity that “necessitated” state repression and led ultimately to the reproduction of capitalism, both psychologically and materially. It appeared the goal had been more symbolic than pragmatic, so as to subvert the dominant logic of capitalism and undermine the authority of the state through a temporary autonomous zone. I still wondered… why is transience and impermanence the goal? Together, we listened, spoke, and found common ground.

To be fair, I am not above insurrection as a strategy—indeed, in certain circumstances, I consider it imperative. My own affinities probably lay more with the insurrectionary anti-civilizational green anarchist wing of the Oakland Commune than any other faction described. What I am against is losing your life for a symbol or signifier when what is signified is impossible to attain (at least by one’s particularly chosen method in the moment). What I am for then, is attaining the signified, and determining a strategic and tactical pathway to do so. And I did not see this theory of action, or theory of transformation playing out well, in this moment, certainly, but also generalizing to the wider Occupy movement, and anti-capitalist struggle either. “(Listening is not only a mere cognitive act of deciphering signs, but also involves a flow of signifiers that resonate beyond the intellect.)”

This I think was what was so difficult about Occupy as a whole. It seemed to attempt to monkey wrench capitalism with symbolic weapons, while at the same time producing a creative space where various potentials could be realized. Yet it sought to capitalize on the anger of individuals at a system that produced a 1%, by targeting the 1%, while reifying and reproducing the system that produced a 1%. It relied on charity and gifting, appropriating from the capitalist system those necessities it needed to sustain itself, and as such, collapsed in the face of repression because it had no roots, or sustaining material base that could stand up to such repression. It didn’t refuse to

integrate itself with the dominant system (so considered by the absence of demands)…it refused to recognize it was integrated and dependent on a capitalist system external to it, upon which it depended for housing, for food, for medicine, on the good graces of the police in allowing them to stay for as long as they did, for all of these things, attempting to circumvent the mediating institutions through donations, before collapsing under the weight of those forces charged with enforcing their dependency on mediating institutions. That is, it seems to me that even Occupy’s critique, by the end, was recuperated into the logic of capital, ghettoized, and finally destroyed and scattered. Did it improve the conditions of the precariat or create pathways out of the system?

Perhaps temporarily, at times, impermanently. (This is of course my analysis having only interacted with Occupy sporadically and at a distance) And yet, the counter-consciousness that perhaps developed in the moments that characterized Occupy and the Commune—the normalization of refusing domesticated forms of imposed life— may have reconstituted social forms and relationships that will serve as a foundation for whatever movement comes next, the next generation of wild, anti-capitalist activity, of pre-cultural affective relationality. Perhaps it created the kind of subjective discontent necessary to eventually overcome capitalism, bypassing a mediated society through the establishment of another.

“The resonance and/or articulation of the imaginaries unfolded by these types of subjectifying forms affect the fields of expression in which struggles are shaped, as well as the subjectifity and praxis of the newly politicized subjects.” (60) One can certainly hope…

I would however push back on this, suggesting that in the city, there is no wildness, and thus the “preservation of the world,” to reference Thoreau, is impossible in the city. There is only the urban aesthetic dictated by capital and managed by the state. Even our traditional forms of resistance seem to reproduce capital, cracks seemingly only proving the rule. Thus, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to see different results, perhaps we can characterize both capitalism and (at least the traditional forms of) anti-capitalist resistance as a mental illness. The spontaneity these movements evoke in the “auratic insurrectionary gesture,” and the “insurrectionary images” they produce are merely “stereotypies,” repetitive, invariant, and seemingly pointless behaviors hypothesized to exist when a biological need cannot be expressed (for instance when captured gophers dig holes to feel safe, or captured carnivores pace intensely for hours on end). The persistent repetition of these “senseless habits” suggests the animal is suffering in a barren environment, so that these abnormal repetitive behaviors help protect emotional stability through coping mechanisms to the horrible stress of being removed from a natural environment (and primary relationships) into the artificial, hyper-civilized life of concrete and capital. Protests, confrontations, occupations, etc. then represent “performative moments of visibility,” where one attempts to cope with their alienation by reconnecting with a similarly alienated community, producing “pointless” symbolic activities meant to satisfy the biological need of the suffering subject through coping mechanisms, repeated over and over, not because those actions are effective, but simply because they remind one they are alive, and rebellion remains a necessary task to preserve one’s sanity.

Against such insanities, we can seek to find other methods of analysis that break with traditional analyses: in particular, a militant co-research that nurtures a self-empowering method whose process

focuses on the self-awareness of feelings and experiences about one’s own generative capacity to promote a reinterpretation of social relations while establishing the possibility for transformation.

The source of wealth is not external to oneself, but derives from the logic of care, a continuum of Love-Beauty-Self-Actualization and the relationship one has to “others,” including the land and community of life. For this reason, Occupy the Farm seemed to me to be one of the very few examples where such a relationship was being explicitly reconvened, where mediating institutions were overcome, and the sustaining relationships of care were nourished and protected, returning to the continuum of love-beauty-self-actualization through direct action that brought the individual back to the core skills and relationship one needed to enter into to survive again—no longer depending on the flow of capital, but instead closing a loop and generating energy through the most basic elements of survival: water, energy, food, land, sun, soil, plants, community, care. It is this type of relationship I think that represents the internal recomposition able to address the crisis, subverting it by realizing the possibility for negating precariousness resides in self-reliance, the breaking of concrete, and the regeneration of soil and modes of subsistence lifeways. If not, the slave-master will remain dependent on the slaves that grow and cook, while the slaves have only to strike, and refuse to share or show up to regain their freedom as the master, like the state, “withers away.”

As a final point, on the idea of revolutionary leadership, there seems to be a tendency to conflate reformist and revolutionary projects, while depending upon others to discern the differences (again, the outsourcing of leadership, the specialization of power, the externalization of criticality). Here, one must ask oneself how necessary controlling (or influencing) the state is for realizing a liberatory/liberated praxis, and whether doing so may in turn blunt the efficacy of such praxis altogether. To see the state and capital as primary entities we exist in relationship to (and must therefore struggle against) may prevent the possibility of recreating social relationships where these entities are absent, since they condition the struggle (and thus freedom) a priori. Refusing work (or at the very least, redefining it so completely it is unrecognizable), opening up spaces for playfulness, and engaging in a politics of enrichment with which to achieve an authentic life strikes me as more worthwhile and of ultimate value far exceeding attempts to struggle against that which I do not care for. To do so requires a recomposition of identity, of relationality, of community, and of experience, mapping the cracks in the system where life is remade in accordance with novel subjectivities, where concrete, mediation, and the logic of capital are broken, and a primacy is restored, learning to live in a natural state once more. (One might think of a wild animal, captured, caged, and at some point, freed, it’s identity shifting as its experience changes) To wrap this up, I am arguing that the Capital-Colonization-Exploitation continuum and the violence it does to us is due to a logic that depends on the externalization and outsourcing of basic skills and needs, inherent to a “civilized” or specialized society where individuals are alienated from the land and the energy and power that comes out of it. Yet this logic is preceded by a logic of care, where a continuum of Love-Beauty-Self-Actualization has generative capacity to create new forms of joy. This prior logic and continuum is the material basis necessary to reject the alienating logic of capital and refuse the identity of “dominated,” simply by instinctually remembering through anamnesis the assets we have available to ourselves and each other. The cognitive archaeology or militant co-research can prompt this anamnetic remembering, while equipping individuals and communities with the necessary questions, elements, tendencies, hypotheses, propositions, points of attack, forms, relations, tools, and logic required to recompose the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors,

habits, patterns, and schema of everyday life to restore the primary ethic and relationship that precedes (or eventually eclipses) alienated existence.

In this regard, I will end will Jon Holloway, who I have been enjoying immensely recently: “Once we say this social cohesion is actually constituted by our own alienation, by our own alienation from ourselves, our own abstraction from ourselves, then we are immediately opening up another possibility and saying maybe we can actually give expression to the antagonism that is within our own activity, maybe there are ways in which we can say we will not labor. We will not subordinate our activity, at least not totally, to the dominion of capital…When we read that richness exists in the form of the commodity, when it sinks in what that means and the death and the misery it involves, we scream with anger, with the rage of entrapped dignity. The dignity is there, our richness, entrapped but also not entrapped, not entirely contained, existing in but also against-andbeyond the commodity form, as struggle, as creative experiment….our rage burns within us as the rage of entrapped dignity: rage against the society that entraps us, rage against ourselves that construct the society that entraps us.” (Holloway, 2016)

Sketches of Transformative Justice: Rage, Restoration, and the Blindness of Lady Justice “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”

-James Baldwin That justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes.

-Langston Hughes, “Justice” No one ever judges anyone else without finding him guilty, no one ever understands another without being in sympathy with him.

-Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life Where the Blind Lead the Blind To answer whether victims or the state should prosecute criminals is problematic in its framing, because it suggests a one-way trajectory of justice and legal application. Victims on the one hand might prosecute a criminal from positions of emotion trauma, thereby promoting values of retribution; the state on the other hand might prosecute a criminal from a position of overrationalized deterrence. Neither of these approaches however necessarily seek to restore or rehabilitate the offending criminal. More problematic however, neither approach is capable of understanding society’s own culpability in generating the criminal offense in the first place. For this reason, it is my suggestion that the prosecution of criminals by either state or victim ignores the deeper questions that preclude us from truly determining the drawbacks or benefits of either.

Rather than ask the somewhat inane question, “are laws just?” I propose we ask a deeper question that perhaps lies at the heart of both law and justice: “does Democracy work?” I ask this in response to Professor Herbert Packer’s statement that punishment and sentencing (and therefore the legal and criminal justice systems) serve two purposes—the “deserved infliction of suffering on evil doers,” and “the prevention of crime.” And yet, beyond notions of “deservedness,” the degree of acceptable “suffering,” and the capacity for “prevention” are the fundamental premises of “evil” and “crime.” Who is it that defines these? I will not here go into the disparity of sentencing, nor the overrepresentation in prisons of certain races, classes, or a number of other well-known characteristics. Rather, I will attempt to instead point out the danger of legislating one’s morality into codified legal doctrines, and remind the reader that bourgeois morality is quite different than other forms that are systematically disempowered and repressed, and therefore cannot adequately represent themselves. That is to say, “evil” is a specifically religious term, enshrined and enforced by

a particular group of politically empowered factions, and to enforce one’s notions of what constitutes a “good” life at the expense of another already sets us on the path to theocratic repression, while ignoring the underlying evils inherent within that supposed good life as well.

Power, Participation, and Collateral Damage “Drugs” for instance are known to be “spiritual technologies,” or “entheogens (literally: evoking the divine within)” in a number of indigenous cultures and communities, so that to suppress the impulse to utilize these aids with minimum sentences, life sentences, even capital sentences amounts to repressing a religious impulse to connect to the divine—thereby sanctioning only certain gods may be worshipped, and only in certain ways. It assumes a political elite can represent a People’s impulse and desire better than they can themselves. In these instances, minimum sentencing laws that legislate codes of conduct, and even judicial discretion can, if misaligned to the citizens own belief system (and sense of “good and evil”) can have disastrous consequences. To then say, as the Supreme Court did, that if a majority believes a law to be reasonable, then the judicial branch is in no position to disagree, since such a law would not be “so ‘objectively’ unreasonable that it violated the Constitution” belies notions of true democracy, misinterpreting it as the tyranny of the majority instead. (Gaines and Miller 2017, pg. 279) Such a perspective is not far from a “might makes right” doctrine, where the majority wields the power of the law against any minority opinion, without regard for the sub-culture’s autonomy and sense of identity.

This view amounts to assuming public “norms and standards” will change, and with it the legal and criminal justice systems accordingly. While some may take heart, I personally do not. Imagine saying to someone in a concentration camp, “I know it’s terrible now, but history will show the cultural logic that tortures you daily is unjust, and years from now this system will end.” So what, should we merely sacrifice the rights of individuals upon the alter of some future progress, justifying the collateral damage of ruined lives as the cost of shifting sensibilities? Their unjust enslavement within the justice system is part and parcel of democracy?

This section is meant to call to attention the fact that firstly, the law is a battleground where spiritual warfare is waged, and secondly that there are casualties whose only crimes are to not hold the doctrines prescribed by the powerful as dear to them as the political elite do. Moreover, the mightmakes-right doctrine should seriously call into question the legitimacy of any and all law-making endeavors as a result, and guide us to question what is being protected in the first place. Should we seriously consider the fact that the only reason why slavery was “just” one day and “unjust” another is because a law finally reflected into the political landscape the “changing norms and standards” of those able to make the laws in the first place?

Restorative Justice: A Restoration of What Exactly?

The question of reparations to the victims of historical circumstance is controversial, especially when its residual effects are everywhere present while funds are not. Are such victims to be restored to social positions where they are able to participate in determining what constitutes social norms, as well as what constitutes “deviation” from that norm? Are they restored to positions where they are able to determine what constitutes a crime, what punishments are to be meted out, and what principles are to be valued? Of course not. As one incarcerated criminologist suggests,

“In short, those who have a monopoly on influence, wealth and power use the criminal codes as a tool to keep the rest of us in our places, to maintain our obedience to their system, to compel our conformity to a set of behaviors that has, for thousands of years, perpetuated wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful. Somehow, the great majority of us have been persuaded to identify with the continuation of this larger program even though, by any reasonable analysis, the larger program is a vast and monumental swindle, with the great majority of us being the swindled.” (Swain 2018, pg. 132) I might suggest then, that restorative justice, often touted as promoting offender, victim, and community involvement while promoting interactions and problem-solving practices, are not so interested in addressing the causes of crime, so much as addressing the erosion of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system at large. In this regard, might it be simply to restore our (and by “our” I mean voting citizens’) faith in those systems that conceivably cause crime in the first place, without addressing the crime-creating problems that underlie those systems in the first place?

Perhaps then, rather than restoring the functionality of a carceral system that justifies dehumanizing punishments, levels huge debts under the guise of restitution at those without the economic resources to pay, etc. we can consider the culpability of the political economy in creating the conditions by which community bonds are destroyed in the first place. Further, might it be possible to structurally transform the special category of those elite who ordain what qualifies as social norms, and determine what constitutes “crime” and social deviance as well?

“The elimination of “crime” by eradicating influence, wealth, and power would also likely decrease the instance of social deviance, as the elimination of wealth and power monopolies would likely eliminate those social and political forces that drive many people to deviant behavior in the first place.” (Swain, pg. 133) Here then we can see something else with regards to what can be restored, namely a vision of a social order more aligned to human dignity, community participation, and mutual respect than the one at present. This is to say the logic of the system must be transformed rather than merely restored if the logic serves to uphold unsustainable conditions that generate social harms in the first place.

Engaging the Logic of Capital and the Prison-Industrial Complex I began this paper suggesting the question of justice in the law is really a question of democracy and political engagement. Those who vote have the power to manifest their vision of politics into reality.

Moreover, this vision is not “just” according to those it impacts, if this vision upholds a particular religious, or ideological sentiment with regards to evil, suffering, crime, harm, deviance, and social norms—values that are constantly in flux and not held by those without the political power to affect them themselves. For this reason, the drawbacks or benefits of having criminals prosecuted by the state or victims is somewhat arbitrary. The state prosecutes the criminals on behalf of the victims— both immediate and potential future victims. Yet, because the state maintains its power through the participation of those victims who vote, they respond to the demands of the victims (retribution) and social order (deterrence) rather than those of the offender (rehabilitation) and the immediate community (restoration).

This in turn gives rise to the so-called prison-industrial-complex, so as to service the state and public’s desire to see punitive justice enforced. And yet, just as the desire to make profit from the enslaved bodies of a disempowered political faction was unjust, so too perhaps is the legacy that has been enshrined in this new complex.

The problem with democracy is that, for justice to exist within it, the people must know how to discern between justice and injustice and participate in equitable ways—a political condition often under assault by competing interests, such as the political disenfranchisement of incarcerated individuals. Such insight and engagement, I will argue, demands philosophical introspection, sustained inquiry, and ultimately a spiritual determination that borders on the very problem that legislating morality presents: namely, a moral relativism in which notions of good and evil vary as per each cultural group that seeks to produce such a state of reality in the world. Moreover, if we are to take a cultural material perspective, one might even consider the very ideologically presumptions one holds dear are themselves produced by the economic structures one resides in. (Marx, 1990) Thus our notions of sentencing and incarceration may stem from the very economic conditions that produce those instances of “deviance” from the social order; what is more, crime itself may in turn stem from these very economic conditions. If this is the case, it makes no sense for either the state or the victims to prosecute the offender, because the state is not interested in anything more than reproducing its own power to protect capitalist economic relations, while the victim, like the offender, is both subjugated to this power that causes the crime and simply acts on behalf of the state (and capital) in a personified, microcosmic form. The only difference is that the victim unknowingly promotes the power of the state while the offender is now at its mercy. Thus, whether the victim or the state prosecutes the offender is arbitrary.

However, what should be reconsidered is the ability for the offender to prosecute the state, and indeed, the very socio-economic order the state is charged with protecting through the criminal justice system. This process alone may help lend support for the potential of restorative justice, if not simply redirected to uphold systemic power through “solutions” that serve only distract from such an order: “In linking microlevel and macrolevel crime problems, restoration becomes an overarching goal of community improvement over status quo conditions: When victims have been harmed, they are to be healed; when property has been damaged, it is to be fixed; when disorder undermines community-level functioning, order needs to be restored; when institutional failure, such as joblessness, poor schools, family disruption, or inadequate housing, creates conditions that foster crime, institutional investment is indicated. Thus, restoration is a response to identifiable problems in the community that need resolution—problems of both individual community members and the community as a whole.” (Karp and Clear, 2000, pg. 347) What must be stated explicitly however, is that institutional investment, structural resolution, and the restorative solutions that are proposed in such matters cannot be done in a criminal justice system that operates on the assumption that only the individual is to blame in any crime. Rather, if a community cannot meet the basic needs of the individual, provide a sense of membership or help that person contribute, provide emotional connection, and help them participate in developing agendas for improving their own qualities of life in partnership with the community itself, then it has failed the individual, deprived them of critical resources to act in accordance with the social norms expected of them, and has in fact created the very crisis that manifests wherever a crime is

committed, as it directly contributes to the social context and state-of-mind that is rooted in the deprivation the prison-industrial-complex is both founded upon, and is an expression of. To paraphrase Frantz Fanon then, the inequalities of cultural, social, economic, and political realities cause oppressed people to fill with rage, develop mental illness, turn upon themselves, strike out, and commit crimes against one another.

Abolition or Restoration?

Abolishing the prison-industrial complex that is dependent on incarceration, slavery, dehumanization, and retribution then can only occur by changing the logic of the very system it is an expression of—restoring a different vision and expectation for communities to the forefront of our political consciousness and activity. Yet for that transformation to occur requires people who are persuaded by another logic to engage with it, redirecting the energies and moneys into new fiscal realizations better suited to promote new visions of justice. This will of course require political engagement far surpassing simply voting. Rather, this change must occur in the immediate decisions and activities of those already immersed within the legal and criminal justice systems. Perhaps there are ways for creative sentences to address structural changes, for instance, or juries can simply nullify laws they disagree with, prosecutors can refuse to try drug cases, etc.. The problem of course, is that while we can intervene in real ways able to transform our sense of justice and the structures that derive from these changing sensibilities, we do not. The moral, economic, and political “costs” of transformation are not yet such that it is “worth it” for laws to embrace more encompassing definitions of justice. In this case, has democracy “failed,” or is it doing exactly as it is designed to do – repress justice for the few (or rather, a majority who either does not vote, or does not inquire into the nature of justice, power, and freedom) for as long as a majority opinion is empowered?

To end with Paul Harris’ notion of the “Black Rage Defense,” a legal strategy that seeks to put on trial the cultural context and conditions into which one is born and raised, that shapes him, while seeking to interpret and explain the life experiences to provide a jury with a better understanding of the link between such experiences and the criminal act the defendant commits…

“Although there are essential differences in the ways people grow up, there are profound underlying similarities in their responses to deprivation, violence, and injustice. Closing our eyes to the impact on social behavior of factors such as racism and poverty takes us down the path to ever more prisons and executions. We will be locked into these and other fruitless responses to crime unless we cross racial and class barriers in order to understand the social forces that contribute to crime.”

(Harris 8) May we then do so, and do so quickly. The cries of our brothers and sisters who remain exploited, tortured, murdered, and enslaved in the name of control, punishment, and domination ring out to us across generations, from the depths and confines of power that in no way can deter their (and our) struggle for justice.

References Karp, David R and Todd R. Clear (2000) “Community Justice: A Conceptual Framework,” in Boundary Changes in Criminal Justice Organization Volume 2. Westview Press. Retrieved 11/18/18

from https://www.skidmore.edu/campuslife/karp/book-chapters/Community-Justice-AConceptual-Framework.pdf Gaines, L. K. & Miller, R. (2017). Criminal Justice in Action (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Harris, Paul (1997) Black Rage Confronts the Law. New York University Press: New York, NY Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: Volume 1. Reprint. Penguin Group: New York, NY Swain, Sean (2018) “On Crime and Deviance,� in Contemporary Anarchist Criminology. Eds Anthony Nocella, Mark Seis, and Jeff Shantz. Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY

Casualties in the War on Drugs: Humanity, Dehumanization, and the Conspiracy of Capital Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit. ― Mumia Abu-Jamal While incarceration has become the go-to solution to every social problem American politicians seem to encounter, it seems clear that prison simply doesn’t work as a deterrence mechanism. Likely, this may be due to the fact that prisons are places where crime and drugs may be most concentrated.

In “Prisoners of the War on Drugs,” one estimate is that 75% of inmates are selling or taking drugs.

And why not? Not only has prohibition artificially inflated the prices, but the highly controlled nature of prisons means that, as one inmate states, one can make $4,000 per week selling drugs.

(Levin 1996) Considering there are hardly any job prospects for convicts in legal fields of work, why wouldn’t they take this economic opportunity? Moreover, it seems like prison life would likely lead one to the type of “escapism” that drugs can perhaps provide, even if it means the potential of six months in solitary confinement.

Even solitary confinement may not seem so bad to those who may be victims of the sexual violence or slavery that is rampant in the American prison systems. With weapons prevalent, racial tensions high, murder an omnipresent potential, and the deterioration of human relationships, to paraphrase one inmate, “you better hope we have drugs to sedate us.” In this regard, criminals are in such high concentration that it seems obvious it would be in such places that they would learn to normalize crime, learning how to mix the chemicals necessary to make drugs to possibly become the next millionaire when they get out, or taking new drugs that are smuggled in. In this regard, there is virtually no safety in prison; even the architecture is meant to torture and dehumanize the individual: “the longer you stay in prison, the more of an animal you become,” says one prisoner.

And yet, this does not seem like an accident. The warden of the prison states that the war on drugs, while not able to stop drug crimes, have been the “best economic boom that we have ever seen,” ensuring new jobs for police, lawyers, judges, gun manufacturers, private prisons, and other related industries. With this in mind, it seems obvious why a state would level sentences at drug users at such long lengths, sometimes up to 1000 years: for as long as drug demand is inevitable, supply will be too. People, a female inmate suggests, have been trying to change their consciousness forever throughout history. The only question really, is who is going to get rich servicing that demand. At the moment, it seems as if prison companies and the criminal justice system will be those who do.

So much money is made on incarceration, it even seems like prisons and lawmakers are attempting to ensure recidivism rates stay high to keep the money flowing, even cutting Pell Grants so that no education or rehabilitation programs will be available to break the cycle of crime and incarceration.

In reflecting on this the warden states, “I don’t know if the country really wants me to help or not.”

Perhaps, he suggests, the prison should turn back into “a gladiator school.”

One recurrent theme with regards to the War on Drugs is that it is a “failure,” both in terms of the fact that people keep using drugs, people keep being arrested and incarcerated for it, and the

economic costs of waging the war and housing the prisoners it collects in seemingly unsustainable.

Indeed over $2 billion is spent housing drug related prisoners, who make up 13% of all arrests.

(FEE, 2011). Whereas $25 billion and $15 billion is spent at the state/local and federal levels respectively to house these criminals, 82% of which are there for simple possession, with half a million people killed over two decades across the American border in Mexico, it seems this country is ideologically predisposed to ensuring they are punished at any cost. This in turn suggests that either the fundamental failure of the American criminal justice and prison systems are that they are unscientific in that their methods are not based on any evidence that they work, or they are indeed working exactly as they are designed to, and the era of mass incarceration, due in large part to the drug war, was predetermined. Those locked up due to tough on crime approaches to sentencing like three strikes, mandatory minimums, mandatory parole, compulsory return, etc. may be victims of a system that is dependent on their incarcerating.

While “more humane and cost-effective responses to non-serious crime than imprisonment” certainly exist, feasible policy alternatives that are widely supported should be considered critically so as not to simply reproduce the same historical structures that dehumanize the population in a new form. Rather, even in considering electronic monitoring, reporting programs, drug courts, and drug treatments, it is important to reconsider the purpose of criminalization and punishment, and whose values such determinations reflect. Moreover, where will all of the financial resources that are saved from these alternatives go to? Militarizing more police? Increasing their salaries? As one study mentions, alternatives can provide savings of over ten billion dollars. (Vuong et all 2010) But if these alternatives simply redirect their monies back into dehumanizing structures, systems, and processes, without addressing the cause of crime in the first place, what good will it do? This should be stated even of such “free-market solutions” to the drug war like decriminalization as well. What good will taxing such commodities do if the size of the military budget or corporate subsidies increase by a greater percentage as a result?

Perhaps we can even challenge the assumption that incarceration is “an effective way of protecting public safety and is necessary for serious offenses.” Yet if incarceration also has “adverse impacts on the offenders, their families and their communities due to lost jobs, neglected children, broken relationships, and cycles of poverty, crime, and incarceration,” all of which may cause these serious crimes in the first place, how can these two statements be reconciled? In this regard, perhaps we would do well to actually listen to the voices of the prisoners themselves, and what they want. Prison riots, like the Attica revolt, suggest abysmal conditions are intolerable, and may lead to even more crime. “By infantilizing criminals as not knowing what is “good” for them or demonizing criminals as evil or dangerous, the prison regime attempts to undermine the legitimacy of prisoners’ political personhood.” (Hackett and Turk 2018) For this reason, maybe a more effective approach would be to empower prisoners to assert their capacity for political agency, through writing or study groups that promote political analyses and issue demands. As work stoppages and organized national prison strikes have shown, the costs of prison rebellions “in terms of finances, public legitimacy, and ability to maintain order are unsustainable in any correctional institution,” such that “ a well-supported prisoner work stoppage lasting more than 30 days would likely bankrupt most state budgets.”

(Hackett and Turk 2018) I bring this up because in watching Prisoners of the War on Drugs, inmates were, despite the attempts by the prison to exert maximal control over their lives, still able to regain their humanity, through participation in religious traditions like Islamic prayer, gospel singing, drum and guitar

circles, and laughter. Not only is human survival a basic instinct, but living a good life is a natural extension of that instinct. By helping prisoners to understand the role of the state and capital in determining their lives, imprisoning them, and enslaving them to produce commodities that shareholders profit from cheap consumption, perhaps prisoners can again regain their humanity and begin to establish affective bonds by engaging in solidarity with one another, refusing to be victims of the oppressive relations they are subjected to, so that, in cooperation with communities outside the prison walls, they can work to transform the very society that has produced the conditions for their suffering—those that may even produce the conditions of alienation we may find drugs and crime are simply a response to.

References: Hackett, Colleen and Ben Turk (2018) “Freedom First: Pursuing Abolition Through Supporting Prisoner Resistance.” In Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment. Anthony Nocella, Mark Seis, and Jeff Shantz. Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY Vuong, Linh et al. (2010) “The Extravagance of Imprisonment Revisited.” Judicature; Sep/Oct 2010; 94, 2 Research Library.

Levin, Mark (1996) Prisoners of the War on Drugs. HBO. Retrieved 11/25/18 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmAuExCoPKo&has_verified=1 Foundation for Economic Education (2011) The Cost of the War on Drugs. FEE. Retrieved 11/25/18 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLIRqv0wZY&noredirect=1

On Prison Abolition: Searching for a Logic to Destabilize the Economic Forces of History “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

-13th Amendment, United States Constitution “This monster—the monster they’ve engendered in me will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit…They won’t defeat my revenge, never, never. I’m part of a righteous people who anger slowly, but rage undammed. We’ll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will make the earth tremble…”

-George Jackson, Soledad Brother In the other discussion, I pointed to the idea that the criminal justice system is either unscientific, in that it is not succeeding with regards to its aims of preventing crime, or the values inherent in the criminal justice and prison system may actually be achieving its goals, in locking up those it determines to be “criminals.” Here I expand on that second point a bit more…

Retrieving the Historical Context Three strikes legislation, truth in sentencing, the war on drugs, the “Get tough on crime” slogan, etc. contributes to the overrepresentation and incarceration of African Americans by targeting vulnerable classes who have been systematically oppressed over the course of history in the United States, particularly due to the fact that these classes were an integral part of the economic production system the United States depended on. Unless we are willing to assume that African Americans are simply “more prone” to committing crime as the reason for their overrepresentation in the justice and prison systems, this fact cannot be understood otherwise.

It is important to recognize however, that slavery as a structural reality was conditioned by the particular mode of production within America (capitalism) which in turn justified itself through a rapacious ideology concretized in various propaganda. Howard Zinn for instance writes in A People’s History of the United States that racism emerges out of particular historical conditions: “We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.” (Zinn 1999)

For this reason, an economy of large-scale extraction, production, and mercantilism became the form by which colonization began. Early colonists needed to pay back the joint-stock companies or sponsors that provided the capital necessary to make the trip to America in the first place, and thus needed to make a profit. Further, the combination of Eurocentrism and Christian supremacy, combined with the tendency for these first colonists to not be very interested or capable of growing their own food, prompted these early colonists to look for alternative sources of labor—whether indentured servants or enslaved natives (who tended to either die quickly, rebel, or escape) or Africans—to produce the cash crops and subsistence techniques necessary to survive. This is to say that the political elite required slavery to maintain their power, so much so that some of the early “policing” institutions were actually the slave patrols needed to control or disrupt any rebellions that would threaten the power relationships taking form.

I bring this initiatory history up for two reasons: 1) because the pressures of capitalism are structurally embedded into the Constitution, so that the colonial, settler approach to political economy and socioecological relationship defines our legal and criminal justice apparatuses in the first place; and 2) because these pressures in turn become explanatory tools to understand the fear of leaders who can mobilize resistance to these economic relations, and thus the criminalization and demonization of such people, and ideological techniques weaponized to promote a fear of crime and justify punitive and carceral approaches to so-called criminals.

Slavery by Other Means Maurice L. Graham, in “Actual Connections to Slavery in the Prison System,” thus identifies the prison system, like slavery, as a “profit-making mechanism in the face of popular discontent.”

(Graham 2018) As slavery was abolished, a convict-lease system was instituted to recoup lost profits due to coerced labor, enforced through open white terrorism, black codes, and legal loopholes—so that by 1870 90% of convicted felons in the South were blacks. It should be remembered, he points out, that Rutherford B. Hayes, awarded the presidency by acquiescing to the Compromise of 1877 that withdrew U.S. troops from the South, was in fact the original president of the National Prison Association and facilitated former Confederate power over the judiciary and legal apparatuses.

Graham points out that the logic of prison in fact is the same as the logic of slavery, and requires the degradation of human rights which is at the foundation of prison policy. Because of this, due process must be understood as a security threat, not only for the criminal justice and prison systems specifically, but for the American colonial-settler economic form as well.

It is this complex historical context that is necessary to understand black migration out of the south to urban centers, the establishment of Jim Crow segregation and the criminalization of civil rights leaders, the conflation of crime and race through programs like the “Southern Strategy,” “law and order,” and the “total wars” on crime and drugs, the economic assault on social institutions, mass incarceration, particular policies and crime bills, and the targeting of entire communities and black power organizations to destroy movements and strip these communities of leadership, the rise of the American Legislative Exchange Council to lobby lawmakers on behalf of corporate interests (for instance the Corrections Corporations of America) to generate profits that go to shareholders, the potential privatization of bail and parole, etc.

In these cases, the systems of oppression are homologies of an economic model dependent on mass incarceration and slavery, systematically destroying resistance to a system that upholds racial caste.

Here, such systems are both cyclical and durable, invisibilizing the nuance through a revisioned historicity that naturalizes and normalizes the prison industrial complex and wider socioeconomic system that produces racism and the structural violence necessary to endure against and overcome instances of resistance and reform.

The New Abolitionists How is it that we can address the systemic injustices? As Michelle Alexander writes, “if your strategy for racial justice involves waiting for whites to be fair, history suggests it will be a long wait. It’s not that whitepeople are more unjust than others. Rather it seems that an aspect of human nature is the tendency to cling tightly to one’s advantages and privileges and to rationalize the suffering and exclusion of others. This tendency is what led Frederick Douglass to declare that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” (Alexander, 2014) I would argue though that addressing racial divisions and resentments, mass incarceration, the cultivation of an ethic of genuine care, etc. needs more than simply a demand, or else racialized economic control will simply refuse that demand. That is, if the goal is not just to reform these structures, which might only mean the reshaping of these mechanisms and systems which would lead to new iterations of further repression, but to in fact abolish the prison-industrial complex, there needs to be a coherent strategy that can take aim and deliver those demands, rather than rely on those who uphold and manage the colonial settler capitalist system that implicitly drives exploitation, incarceration, enslavement. Put otherwise, how can we restructure the socioeconomic system so that this tendency is put out of existence?

In the last discussion I highlighted the role of pursuing abolition through supporting prisoner resistance, specifically where “prison rebels are creating counterhegemonic civic spaces” where the “foundational eliminatory logic” that excludes those unable or unwilling to conform to a white supremacist heteropatriarchal society is itself eliminated. (Hackett and Turk, 2018) Moreover, work stoppages are effective tactics in removing the economic motive behind prisons, making them unsustainable and bankrupting state budgets should they attempt to continue these practices. Such a confrontational insurgency can take many forms, but ultimately making prison facilities untenable.

At the same time, citizens outside of prisons must realize we are essentially tolerating the modern form of lynchings today, so that many of the commodities that are consumed are produced by prison (slave) labor, and engage in boycott, divestment, and sanction campaigns to deepen the crisis.

Defense lawyers in concert with their clients could refuse to plead out and insist on a trial, so that the whole system would effectively be “shut down,” with the 97% of people who are not granted a trial bring the system to a halt. As Hackett and Ben Turk point out, “eroding the logic, credibility, and power of prisons is a matter of defiant survival and asserting personhood on a daily and hourly basis for prisoners.” (ibid) This is to say that the campaign to abolish prisons cannot be an economic argument, but must be one grounded in human rights, dignity, and compassion.

Consensus, Critics, Radicals, and Rebels

What has helped me to understand the approaches to crime is tracing the criminological branches of theory. Understanding the different assumptions between conservative and liberal approaches to crime (that crime is a deviation from a justice system rooted in consensus, or the failure of social institutions), the conflict model (that the justice system’s process is itself problematic), and more critical and radical criminological theories that look at the conflict as being primarily a matter of economic class. (Bernard 1981) All of these have very different solutions to a problem that is recast according to whatever political perspective is operationalized.

The film 13th perhaps, more than anything shines light on the idea that the Constitution is itself problematic, an ideological manifestation based on an economic system rooted in capitalism, profit, and the slavery and other coercive measures necessary to ensure their survival. In this regard, advocates of prison abolition might do well to seek to abolish profiteering as a corporate directive the state legislates on behalf of, rather than seek to simply find alternative methods of correction that these same corporations can profit from once mass incarceration has been found to be passé.

Marxist, or radical criminological theories further suggest the solution to crime is a socialist state.

One of the reasons I have been recently focused on anarchist criminology is because I wonder if it is the state itself, with its need to stay in power, its requirement to expand and protect its territory, its assumption it speaks for the people and thereby has a legitimate monopoly on power and violence, etc. is that it critically puts both the state and capital on display and critically assesses their role in creating crime in the first place. And yet, with regards to Parkinson’s Law, the idea that bureaucracy (or worktime) will inevitably expand to accommodate any particular task should suggest that perhaps a socialist state is not the answer. Instead, perhaps it is society, not politics, where revolutionary approaches should focus. As Harold Pepinsky states, “the growth of crime reflects both a failure and deterrence and a failure to leave people free to tend their own affairs…increasing the force of criminal justice and generating resistance to criminal justice workers both promote crime…If Americans have enough faith in deterrence to help people to act without government intervention, and enough faith in freedom from government compulsion to give dignity to government workers, crime will become less of a problem for them.” (Pepinsky 2018) References: Alexander, Michelle (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

The New Press: New York, NY Bernard, Thomas J. (1981) “Distinction between Conflict and Radical Criminology.” In Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Volume 72 Issue 1 Spring, retrieved 11/15/18 from https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=6223&context=jclc Zinn, Howard (1999) A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. HarperCollins Publishers: New York, NY

Hackett, Colleen and Ben Turk (2018) “Freedom First: Pursuing Abolition Through Supporting Prisoner Resistance.” In Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism. Eds: Anthony Nocella, Mark Seis, and Jeff Schantz: Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY Pepinsky, Harold E. (2018) “Communist Anarchism as an Alternative to the Rule of Criminal Law” In Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism. Eds: Anthony Nocella, Mark Seis, and Jeff Schantz: Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY Graham, Maurice L. (2018) “Actual Connections to Slavery in the Prison System,” In Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism. Eds: Anthony Nocella, Mark Seis, and Jeff Schantz: Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY

Shifting Blame: Benevolent Paternalism and the Conspiracy to Fail our Youth “We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.”

-Hillary Clinton Vicarious Liability Vicarious liability transfers the actus reus and mens rea from one person to another, or from one or more persons to an enterprise, due to their relationship. For instance, vicarious liability can be found in business relationships, political or economic institutions, and the family unit, as when parents are held liable for their children’s crimes. The assumption then, is that the supervisory party bears responsibility for a subordinate or associates’ activity based on the relationship. For instance, a conspirator can be held vicariously liable for those crimes committed by co-conspirators that were carried out with the intent of furthering the goals of the conspiracy.

This relationship I will argue, while serving perhaps the economic and retributive goals of the criminal justice, prison, and legal systems, does in fact locate the liability to an “individual” so as to deny culpability of the wider socioeconomic system that individual is located in. That is, the wider “ecosystem” that may in fact generate the conditions needed to commit the crime in the first place are left in place, scapegoating this individual while reproducing the conditions that are themselves liable for the harm and damage caused.

Society against the State While it is perhaps liberal, even progressive, to believe that an individual’s actions are due to the environmental factors they were raised in, the logic derails when it comes to prescription. For the “solution” in such a case is to separate the child from this environment, and so, break up the family that is assumed to be the cause of the crime: crime is a product of cycles of abuse, neglect, and violence and so, breaking that cycle requires removing the child from that cycle.

What this logic fails to grasp however is the question of what the cycle of abuse, neglect, and violence is itself a product of. Thus, an uncritical approach to such crimes and their solutions might tacitly uphold the doctrine of parens patriae—“the doctrine that holds that the state has a responsibility to look after the well-being of children and to assume the role of parent if necessary.”

(Gaines and Miller, 2017 Pg. 383) Yet while such “child-saving movements” can be commended for their admirable objectives in wanting to protect the child from criminal-producing environments, we should also question the outcomes and effects of such interventions.

In particular, two-thirds of children will either become homeless, go to jail, or die within one year of leaving the foster care system at 18; moreover, 80% of the prison population once was in foster care. (Nunn 2012) Such statistics should prompt us to reconsider whether at-risk youth are being put in less risky environments at all. Further, if the state (on behalf of society) determines that the

parent in question is “unfit” to care for their child, but places the child in an environment that is also correlated with homelessness, crime, prison, violence, and death, should not society reconsider whether the state, assuming the role of parent, is similarly “unfit” to care for a child?

This is to say, if “vicarious liability” is a legal definition that states a parent is responsible, and parens patriae is a legal doctrine that states the state may assume the role of parent, can vicarious liability be used to extend vicarious liability to the state, when the child commits crimes during those times the state assumes parental responsibility for them? Even further, is the state itself liable for the very logic motivating any particular crime?

A Conspiracy of Systemic Causation?

Beyond the simple fact that the state may fail in its own duty as a parent, we should also ask what role the state has in prompting the failures of other parents as well. Strong links have been found between child maltreatment and alcohol use, which in turn is associated with “marked increases in the risk of hazardous or harmful drinking in later life.” (WHO 2006) Similarly, individuals with lower socioeconomic statuses “seem to bear a disproportionate burden of negative alcohol-related consequences…[so that] members of further marginalized communities, such as racial and ethnic minorities and homeless individuals, experience greater alcohol-related consequences”; To add, “adult unemployment was associated with increased levels of alcohol use…nearly independent of gender, age, or race/ethnicity.” (Collins 2016) This is to say that socioeconomic status is inversely related to negative alcohol-related consequences, which may in turn be linked to child maltreatment, which in turn increases the risk of later forms of antisocial behavior, including violence and crime.

(NIJ 2017) And yet, if we assume that government is responsible for preserving the socioeconomic status of its citizens, then should we not understand the conscious dismantling of a social safety net as not simply a way to “cut costs,” but in fact an intentional assault on the very socioeconomic institutions necessary to avoid harms, provide support, and generally ensure individuals are better adjusted to exist within their communities (and families) while having access to care and resources?

In this regard, the same state that is “unfit” to be the parent of children is intentionally creating conditions that generates socioeconomic harms to families, so that other parents are also “unfit” to care for their children as well. And while it is easy enough to state that, “you can’t hold a government responsible for the policies implemented by individuals,” isn’t that in fact what the whole concept of vicarious liability is about? That the institution or enterprise itself is responsible for the actions of its constituent members, and thus the state must be held responsible for its policymembers who conspire against the socio-economic well-being of its citizens and as such, are responsible for the very crime it purports to hold people accountable for?

The Transitive Property of Cultural Logics I have here argued that if parents are held responsible for the crimes of their children, then it is not illogical to transfer responsibility up through the entities they are constitutive members of. That is, a parent is responsible for their child; an institution is responsible for its members; a government is responsible for its policy(-makers) and citizens. This is to say that such relationships should be

recognized as held within a wider system—a system that is governed and regulated by particular cultural logics.

Thus cultural criminology can help to understand the role of how these logics are produced and expressed, while also potentially suggesting ways to disrupt this logic. By looking at the conflict in question (juvenile or delinquent crime), we can begin to see such phenomena as subcultural. Further, if such subcultures, characterized by crimes, are driven by socioeconomic conditions themselves produced by the institutions and state that implement and enforce policies that erode the support systems necessary to avert crime in the first place, then it is important to study the mediated construction of these harms, and explore the contradictions of modern consumer cultures and the state policies meant to uphold their logics, which may generate the harms in the first place. (Brisman and South, 2014) That is, these subcultures are organized around a logic of capital that is produced by (and thus reproduces) the system they are constituent members of, their responses (crime) expressing such a logic at a micro level, perhaps through what is called in Marxist thought, “primitive rebellion.” However, as subcultures, they are targeted by mediating technologies that scapegoat them while preserving these logics they express through media and political forces that demonize them as “superpredators,” “without remorse,” etc. willing to extend the liability to the families they grow up in, but not so far as the wider political-economic systems that produce the conditions that aggravate criminogenic mechanisms, or justify the fear, frustration, and anger at the children and parents who may both be victims of the society that criminalizes them.

In the same way, we can say any social institution will reproduce the cultural logic of the society it is embedded in. It is easy enough to say that a parent is responsible for the actions of their child, or a fraternity is responsible for the actions of its members, for instance sexual assault; but it is much more difficult to identify the cultural logic that normalizes sexual assault, or creates conditions that implicitly and unconsciously promote sexual assault. For instance, why would we disband a fraternity for the actions of its members, when school is meant to help students integrate into a society—a society who holds itself to laws that are to be judged by a Supreme Court justice that himself was accused of raping women at parties? It is certainly easier to hold one person with relatively little power responsible, or even blame the institution they are part of, than address the wider culture both may simply be expressions of.

Indicators, Accountability, and Social Failure Teachers do not give students failing grades as punishments. Rather, they are indicators, meant to show students where they have failed with the intention of helping students do better next time. In the same way, we should perhaps look at crimes as indicators, where individuals have failed to care about the harms they inflict upon others. Yet perhaps similarly to the classroom experience, it may be that this failure is due in some part to the teacher, in that s/he did not in fact teach the student.

In this regard, perhaps we should look at crime as a feedback mechanism for society and the state, that we are failing to teach empathy or alternatives, or even to create an environment in which our children can succeed. This would of course be to flip the table in terms of assigning blame and holding participants responsible.

Just as we do not assume punitive measures are effective in learning, but rather try to intervene in ways to help students succeed, it may be the case that justice systems may find more success in creating plans of action to help children learn how best to function in society. But it would be

problematic to punish the teacher for a student that fails, because it is the relationship itself that has failed, within a wider, sometimes unseen cultural context. Rather, we should seek to empower the parents and work with them to determine pathways towards success, while also providing material resources and a context of care in which any learning is to take place. This requires scientifically sound interventions, not those based in ideological or moralistic impositions of retributive or punitive justice by those who do not even understand the factors involved in success or failure. It is a sign of a fixed-mindset to assume a child is a natural failure – or likewise perhaps, a “superpredator”—a mindset that itself is a barrier to justice and unscientific. As such, it is important to go beyond simplistic definitions to better understand the complexities involved in any one case or problem. Without looking at the political, economic, educational, religious, cultural, social, psychological, and environmental factors that logically produce subcultures characterized by crime and harm and depriving such cultures of the resources needed to raise healthy, physically and psychologically supported children; without questioning whether the state itself is qualitatively more “fit” than the parent it attempts to separate the child in question from; and without disrupting the logic that conspires to deprive the family of resources and support while the state remains insulated from judgement and the same measures it serves to others, then children (and the adults they grow up into) will remain subjugated to an abusive guardian, addicted to the logic of capital, that cares not for the well-being of its “children.”

Here, we would do better to transcend such simplistic determinations of who is culpable, and recognize that culpability transcends the boundaries we try to limit it within so that we can avert our eyes from recognizing we, our society, and our state, the systems we participate in and the relationships we reproduce daily, that might themselves be at fault in any particular failing. To do so would necessitate a different way of seeing and addressing crime, one based on care, prevention, empowerment, and a wider understanding of justice—values not yet incorporated into the criminal justice system.

References Nunn, Brittany (2012) “Statistics suggest bleak futures for children who grow up in foster care.

Amarillo. Retrieved 12/2/18 from http://amarillo.com/news/local-news/2012-06-24/what-comesnext Gaines, L. K. & Miller, R. (2017). Criminal Justice in Action (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

World Health Organization (2006) “Alcohol Violence: Child Maltreatment and Alcohol.”

JMU/WHO Retrieved 12/2/18 from http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/factsheets/fs_child.pdf Collins, Susan (2016) Associations Between Socioeconomic Factors and Alcohol Outcomes.” In Alcohol Research Current Reviews 2016; 38(1): 83-94. Retrieved 12/2/18 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4872618/ National Institute of Justice, “Pathways Between Child Maltreatment and Adult Criminal Involvement” October 12, 2017. NIJ.gov: https://nij.gov/topics/crime/Pages/Pathways-betweenchild-maltreatment-and-adult-criminal-involvement.aspx

Brisman, Avi and Nigel South (2014) Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide. Routledge: New York, NY

Civilized Repression, Wild Reaction: A Green Cultural Criminological Perspective on the Animal Enterprise and Terrorism Act “If crime and war become indistinguishable, then “national defense” may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of state governments and criminal justice systems to protect their citizens diminishes, urban crime may ‘develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines.’ As small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to shrink, being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West Africa, and by urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who may be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to local inhabitants.

“Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades—and with it the state’s ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states—peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them. Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples.”

-Robert D. Kaplan, in The Coming Anarchy Abstract: This essay looks at the Animal Enterprise and Terrorist Act (2006), and specifically how the issue of eco-terrorism became made into law at the behest of corporate power. However, there are certain steps that need to be taken to better understand this process. As such, I first locate the particular criminological lens necessary to view the process— specifically a green cultural (anarchist) criminology. Next, I explain how environmental harm is intrinsic to modern society, and a theoretical model for how society’s activities, specifically ecological harm and crimes, in fact cause crime.

This then provides the framework for understanding the conflict between corporate culture and the anti-capitalist animal rights subculture, after which I provide a brief summary. The relevance of such a paper is to identify a core issue (ecoterrorism) within criminological theory while suggesting new avenues for addressing the phenomenon through ways not usually promoted in classical criminal justice approaches.

Locating a Relevant Criminological Lens within Competing Theories In his article, “Distinction between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” (1981) Thomas Bernard distinguishes liberal and conservative criminological perspectives, while differentiating them from conflict and radical perspectives on crime. Simply put, while conservative criminology assumes rational choice and liberal perspectives assume social institutions as the cause of crime, conflict theories differ in their willingness to suggest social factions are in conflict with one another, so that criminal justice processes and systems are in fact determined by the political and economic interests

of those factions in power. However, radical criminology differs from conflict theories in that they explicitly point to the capitalist economic system as generating those conflicts in the first place.

Indeed, there is a moral aspect to radical criminology that is not present in conflict theories, namely the willingness to assume this conflict is not inevitable, but rather can be addressed through certain conscious actions that are taken on behalf of those subjugated classes.

Radical criminology then offers a critical perspective (“critical criminology”) of both criminal justice and law-making processes which can be further broken down into different types. Under this umbrella for example, are both green and cultural criminologies, the intersection at which Brisman and South (2014) provide theoretical foundations for understanding how environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide are constructed by empowered political and economic actors—all factors involved in the lead up to, implementation, and effects of the Animal Enterprise and Terrorist Act and the criminalization, indeed terrorization of, ecologically motivated political dissent.

Civilization as an Assemblage of Crime Green Criminology posits different types of crimes as related to the environment, specifically primary and secondary, or symbiotic harms. That is, primary green crimes involve crimes of air pollution, deforestation, species decline or those against animal rights, and crimes of water pollution. Secondary, or symbiotic green crimes on the other hand, include those such as that of hazardous waste disposal, perhaps as when organized crime gets involved, or state violence against oppositional groups, such as during the French bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.

Beyond these categories of environmental harm, it is important to understand the motivating forces underlying these crimes against the environment. Green criminologist Rob White goes someway of exposing this, when he writes in Crimes Against Nature (2008), “the search for profits demands exploitation of humans at the point of productions (through struggles over wage costs, production methods, welfare befefits), exploitation of nature (in the form of using up ‘natural resources’ and commercializing exotic environments) and pursuit of new consumption markets (so that the extent and flow of money exchange is kept at high levels)…Built in to the logic and dynamics of capitalism is the imperative to expand...the nature of consumption under capitalism is inseparable from the nature of production. It creates the material for consumption. It determines the manner of consumption. It creates the product in the form of a need…thus social tensions and ecological crisis are inevitably outcomes of the dominant mode of production globally.”

While White takes a generally Marxist interpretation of green crime, anarchist criminologist Anthony Nocella expands the critique of environmental harm, in his essay, “Theorizing the AETA: A Green Criminologist Perspective on Eco-Terrorism,” to “the Five Cs of human domination of the planet: civilization, colonization, capitalism, corporatization, and commodification. (2014) On this, he states plainly, “A particular cultural system seeks to impose a worldview where nature is converted into resources and owned goods. The highly unequal industrial world is reinforced by institutions such as the

medical-industrial complex that supposedly cares for the common good while it actually keeps the public safe and orderly for the benefit of elite economic and political interests.”

This is to say that the capitalist world system is in fact a world-ecology, where power, nature, and accumulation are joined in a unified culture, constraining the relationship between humanity and nature within the logic of capital. The endless accumulation of capital thus transforms landscapes with its own particular purpose—a teleological process that is revealed as a producer and organizer of a new web of life, dependent on cheap nature, cheap labor, cheap energy, cheap food, and cheap materials: “wherever primary commodity production penetrated, however, the tempo of landscape transformation accelerated.” (Moore 2016) Ecological Criminals Here, we can look at the primary ecological crimes as inherent to the nature of civilization itself, a side effect of an agrarian-based culture of cities that impose a particular logic of exploitation on the surrounding bioregion to control and import resources to an ever increasing population. The effect of this is to produce a culture that is alienated, dissociated, complexified, stratified society that overshoots its landbase. Moreover, the highly stratified society generates an oligarchy that maintains and promotes a “false consciousness” by which wealth is concentrated, corruption and criminality are institutionalized, and the denial of such cultural contradictions are virtually assured as poorer classes are inevitably distracted by the daily grind of surviving in an system that is virtually assured to collapse. (MacKay 2017) Certain studies have confirmed this line of thought, that social collapse is based on two factors, social inequity (oligarchy) and environmental degradation (ecocide).

(Motesharrei et al. 2014) This in turns helps us contextualize two different models of the relationship between environment, violence, and crime. The first, developed by Homer Dixon looks at how environmental scarcity and climate-induced scarcity lead to constrained economic activity, social inequality, and the hardening of the justice system. In turn, these “routine activities” (i.e. resource capture) lead to crimes by the state (or state allies), ethnic conflicts, terrorism, insurgencies, individual-level criminal activities—perhaps even “primitive rebellion”—gang strengthening, migration, organized crime, human trafficking, etc.

That is climate-induced scarcities generate socioeconomic factors which in turn contribute to crime and violence, leading to other criminogenic mechanisms like social disorganization, strain theory, etc.

The second model comes from Agnew, who suggests the effects of climate change (rising temperature, rising sea level, extreme weather events, changing patterns of precipitation…) create social impacts (habitat change, negative health effects, food-water shortages, loss of livelihood, migration, social conflict, etc) that exascerbate criminogenic mechanisms (increased strain, reduced control, reduced social support, beliefs/values favorable to crime, traits conducive to crime, opportunities for crime, social conflict…) which, finally, generate higher levels of individual, group, corporate, and state crime. (Crank and Jacoby, 2015) A further listing of these harms and crimes can be found in White and Heckenberg’s “Green Criminology: An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm,” including conflicts of environmental resources (water, food, energy), those linked to global warming (climate refugees, demographics, loss of territory and border disputes), differential exploitation of resources (biopiracy, subsistence vs. industrial production, energy supply), transference of harm (pollution, transborder movement of toxic waste, circulation of pollution and waste); these then are conflicts

and crimes contributing to climate change (those primary crimes against air, land, water, and species habitat), consequences of climate change (water theft, wildlife poaching, diminishment of stocks, etc), associated offenses (eco-terrorism, riots, arson, homicide), and regulatory offences (collusion, fraud, etc).

This section has sought to detail the relationship between the 5 Cs (civilization, colonization, capitalism, corporatization, and commodification), environmental harm, and crime. Moreover, this section has tried to establish the relationship of environmental harm, or ecocide, as inherent, or characteristic of, civilization, which is itself unsustainable, will inevitably collapse, yet will hold off such collapse so long as it can maintain its ecocidal exploitation through green crimes, uninhibited by resistance.

Here then, we can see how a green cultural criminology is relevant both in understanding those corporations seeking to do harm to nature, those environmental resistance movements seeking to prevent harm to nature, and the media construction and framing of the conflict. This is to say, power, inequality, and distributive justice can be understood as a conflict over the meaning and symbolic control of urban spaces, but also mental spaces as well. The production of the consumer “needs” through advertising, the naturalization and normalization of the ecocidal consumption (and therefore the specifically capitalist form of production) that in fact leads civilization towards disaster, and the neutralization of oppositional groups through narratives sanctioned and distributed by powerful agents. In this context, we can understand why therefore “green criminologists need to recognize that ‘where there is domination, there is resistance to domination; where new forms of domination, new forms of resistance ultimately surge to act upon the specific patterns of domination.’ As environmental problems have become more varied and more pervasive, a growing number of activists have come to believe that ‘change will be brought about, not through the mediation of professional politicians, but by individual and collective participation in social affairs.”

In understanding the contradictions and rhythms of civilization and its logic of capital, we can see a document like the United States Constitution as itself a regulating ideology of a colonial settler economic system—one predicated on socioecological exploitation and (thus) the repression of forces that resist such a logic. Moreover, we can begin to see how they dynamics of mass media and political and economic power present narratives that present certain arrangements (production) as normal or other phenomena (protest) or subcultures as problematic, violent, criminal, or ultimately, terroristic.

AETA as the Criminalization of Dissent and the Terrorization of Ecological Resistance The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (2006) changed the way America responds to activists who damage or interfere with the operations or property of an animal enterprise, or places an individual in “reasonable fear” of injury, by prohibiting certain conduct, broadening the definition of “animal enterprise,” and increases existing penalties, includes new ones, and allows animal enterprises to seek restitution. Originally enacted to amend the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (a law criminalizing a conspiracy to commit economic damage to animal enterprises that exceed $10,000), the law gave the Department of Justice more power to “apprehend, prosecute, and convict individuals committing animal enterprise terror,” specifically targeting animal rights activists after the

FBI declared animal rights activists and radical environmentalists to be the “number one domestic terrorism threat” to the nation. The problem however is that “this Act does not concretely define or properly explain what is actually meant by that phrase —‘animal enterprise terror.’ The first part, ‘animal enterprise,’ can refer to any endeavor that uses nonhuman animals for earning a profit. The second part, ‘terror.’ Can refer to any action that interferes with that profit-seeking enterprise. Thus, in brief, anyone interfering with a company’s ability to make a profit from the exploitation of animals can be considered a terrorist.” (Gandio and Nocella 2014) As corporate industries, earning their money in such ways, began lobbying Congress in the 1980s, the bill was passed in response to the so-called SHAC-6 (six members of the group “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty,”) who were charged and put on trial for an activist campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, who operate an animal testing laboratory by crippling their business, targeting their buyers to boycott their products. The activists were indicted for alleged harassment, intimidation, and violent acts at the homes of professors doing the animal testing and research. In the “Eco-Terrorism Specifically Examining Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (“SHAC”)” Hearing, before the Committee on Environment and Public Works in the United States Senate on 10/26/2005, James M. Inhofe described these activists as “a radical animal rights organization that relies on crimes of violence and a campaign of fear to convey their message of animal liberation.”

Thomas Petri, Dianne Feinstein, and James Inhofe introduced the bill after the Animal Enterprise Protection Coalition (AEPC), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) and other well-funded industries claimed the law was necessary since existing state and federal laws “failed to curtail such acts,” and that the attacks “disrupted vital services relied on by millions of Americans.” (CCR JUSTICE) The final bill was passed by the Senate by unanimous consent, and passed the House (“pushed through late at night, with inadequate notice, and with only a fraction of Congresspersons present to vote on it.”) with one lone dissenting voice vote by Dennis Kucinich who emphasized that 1) existing federal laws were adequate, 2) the bill created a special class of crimes for a specific type of protest, and 3) the broad terrorist label would repress free speech, as well as urging Congress to pay more attention about the humane treatment of animals and consider legislation that would adequately respond to these concerns. The bill was signed by President George W. Bush.

With regards to the SHAC 6, the Third Circuit upheld convictions due to the membership status of the individuals, their political participation in protests, and subsequent speeches, interviews, publications, etc. that were assumed to be “sufficient circumstantial evidence” to be a conspiracy.

One individual was convicted for providing “technical assistance” for the group’s website, which was used by others to organize unlawful acts, while at least one individual was confined to a Communication Management Unit, reserved specifically for inmates considered by the government to be terrorist threats.

Four other members were indicted for harassment, intimidation, violent acts, trespassing, attempted forcible entry of a private residence, and it is claimed by the FBI they distributed leaflets that led to the firebombing of two homes against professors conducting animal testing and research. Though these charges were eventually dismissed, the individuals were placed on house arrest for nearly a year.

While the U.S. Congress passed this law at the height of the Iraq War, when fears of terrorism were high and eco-terrorism was considered the “#1 domestic threat to the United States of America,” and ostensibly to appease pharmaceutical and agricultural interests, there is a question as to the constitutionality of this law. For instance, Kevin Johnson released 2,000 minks from a fur farm—a place where nonhuman animals are caged, tortured, gassed, and skinned—was convicted by the 7th circuit court of appeals of violating the AETA federal statute and imprisoned for three years. His home was raided by the Joint Terrorism Task Force three times, police with assault rifles were present at protests, following activists to their cars to photograph license plates.

Because the law federalized non-violent property crimes to be punished as terrorism, specifically when activists are guided by the political belief that animals deserve to live free from cruelty, the act seems to have been successful, in that it accomplished the goal of chilling free speech, reducing activism, and providing enterprises with mechanisms for restitution. However, the law also seems to criminalize free speech rights while unfairly brands activism as terrorism.

Though a case was filed in 2011 in the U.S. District Court in the District of Massachusetts challenging the constitutionality of AETA in that the law violated the First Amendment, and was appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in 2013, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s dismissal of the case and the U.S. Supreme Court denied the petition for writ of certiorari in 2014, on the basis that their prosecution was not “certainly impending,” contradicting decades of Supreme Court precedent allowing plaintiffs to challenge a law when their speech is chilled, even without imminent threat of prosecution.

Flipping the Script: A Final Analysis While the profit-seeking activities of corporate power that exploits animals and nature are likely closer to “terrorism” than the activities of animal advocates, they are also aligned to the cultural logic of a civilization that depends on violence towards animals, much like it relied on slavery two centuries ago, to maintain the social arrangements and racialized class hierarchies that characterize it today. For this reason, the collusion between corporate industries and the political and legal systems –those that commit criminal acts on a daily basis—produces a rhetoric to manipulate the public into believing animal rights advocates are terrorists while the billion dollar companies are the victims of terrorist violence.

Critical criminology, and specifically a radical, green cultural criminology can do much to understand those corporate cultures that depend on violence against the natural world, those subcultures seeking to decrease the profits of animal enterprise businesses, and the legal system that criminalizes either. What is perhaps most important to consider is this: “If these laws existed forty of fifty years ago, then perhaps Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been considered terrorists and punished as felons. They did, after all, engage in illegal civil disobedience for the purpose of decreasing profits of busing and lunch counter businesses.” (Stanescu 2014) By framing political and economic dissent as a domestic threat, “the terrorization enacted by the AETA may have been officially passed by Congress, but it was lobbied into law ‘by wealthy biomedical and agri-cusiness industry groups such as the Animal Enterprise Protection Coalition (AEPC), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and

the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), with bipartisan support from legislators like Senator Dianne Feinstein and representative James Sensenbrenner.’” (Nocella 2014) The law, in protecting economic interests, is in fact guided by those interests, so that corporate power has essentially hijacked the legal and criminal justice process, protecting the interests of the possessing classes.

Yet in confronting their overexploitation, creating alternative narratives to the intergenerational tyranny that the alienating production (extractive) economy generates, relocalizing autonomy and recomposing our sense of desire to demand alternative goods and services that don’t require environmental destruction or complex supply chains, we can perhaps address the “hierarchically organized governments fostering and protecting social systems of stratification,” and realign any social system to natural principles as opposed to participating in “the relentless struggle between the [irreconcilable] contradictions of consumer capitalism and efforts to maintain a clean and healthy environment.” (Seis 2018) Until governing apparatuses, and indeed the logic of civilization, are altered to reflect principles of justice that are expanded, much like they were to slaves, labor, women, etc., to nature and nonhuman life, conflict will continue unabated. More than this however, we can understand environmental activists and animal rights advocates as engaged in something beyond a so-called single issue causes.

That is, namely, the willingness to confront civilization and the unsustainable nature of modern society. It is no wonder then, that such organizations and movements are considered to be threats— indeed, they represent a rupture with the reigning cultural logic that prevails in mainstream society and as such, threaten the continuity of corporate power and the system that upholds that power.

For this reason, perhaps it is not necessary for these groups to shirk the label of “terrorism,” but instead embrace it, both as a willingness to point out the corruption of a state that is willing to side with profiteering at the expense of humanity, decency, and natural rights, while also acknowledging the wider implications of battling, quite literally, for the future of humanity and the Earth community. At the same time, such groups will need to find strategies that will allow them to confront such blatant disregard for anything beyond their own economic interests, engaging in novel ways to integrate their own values into a political, legal, and justice framework that better represents the values they organize their own cultures around.

References “Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992.” Government Publishing Office. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-106/pdf/STATUTE-106-Pg928.pdf “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.” Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Enterprise_Terrorism_Act “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006.” Government Publishing Office. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-109publ374/html/PLAW-109publ374.htm “Blum vs. Holder: Historic Case” Case Timeline. CCR Justice. Retrieved from https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/blum-v-holder

Brisman, Avi and Nigel South (2014) Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide. Routledge: New York, NY Crank, John P. and Linda S. Jacoby (2015) Crime, Violence, and Global Warming. Routledge: New York, NY “Eco-Terrorism Specifically Examining Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (“SHAC”)”. Government Publishing Office. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG109shrg39521/html/CHRG-109shrg39521.htm Gandio, Jason Del and Anthony J. Nocella II (2014) “Introduction: Situating the Repression and Corruption of the AETA,” in The Terrorization of Dissent: Corporate Repression, Legal Corruption, and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Eds. Jason del Gandio and Anthony J. Nocella II. Lantern Books: Brooklyn, NY Jarboe, James F. (2002-02-12). "The Threat of Eco-Terrorism". Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Archived from the original on 11 March 2008.

Johnson, Kevin (2017) “I released 2,000 minks from a fur farm. Now I’m a convicted terrorist.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/15/i-released2000-minks-fur-farm-convicted-terrorist Kaplan, Robert D. (2000) The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. Vintage Books: New York, NY MacKay, Kevin (2017) Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization Between the Lines: Toronto, Ontario Meisner, Jason (2014) “Lawyer plans constitutional challenge in mink farm sabotage case.” Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-activists-pleadnot-guilty-in-mink-farm-case-20140729-story.html Moore, Jason W. (2016) “The Rise of Cheap Nature” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism Ed. Jason W. Moore. PM Press: Oakland, CA Motesharrei, Safa, Jorge Rivas, and Eugenia Kalnay (2014) “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies.” Ecological Economics. Volume 101, May 2014, Pg. 90-102. Retrieved 12/2/18 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615 Nocella, Anthony J. (2014) “A Green Criminologist Perspective on Eco-Terrorism,” in The Terrorization of Dissent: Corporate Repression, Legal Corruption, and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Eds. Jason del Gandio and Anthony J. Nocella II. Lantern Books: Brooklyn, NY Potter, Will “Analysis of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act” Green is the New Red. Retrieved from http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/wp-content/Images/aeta-analysis-109th.pdf

Rutmanis, Renada R (2006) “Detailed Discussion: The Rise of Ecoterrorism.” Animal Legal and Historical Center. Michigan State University. Retrieved from https://www.animallaw.info/article/detailed-discussion-rise-ecoterrorism Seis, Mark (2018) “An Anarchist Criminology for Understanding Environmental Degradation.” In Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment. Peter Lang Publishing: New York, NY. Stanescu, Vasile (2014) “Kangaroo Court: Analyzing the 2006 “Hearing” on the AETA” in The Terrorization of Dissent: Corporate Repression, Legal Corruption, and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Eds. Jason del Gandio and Anthony J. Nocella II. Lantern Books: Brooklyn, NY White, Rob and Diane Heckenberg (2014) Green Criminology: An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm. Routledge: New York, NY “The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA).” (2007) Retrieved from https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/tools-resources/fact-sheets-and-faqs/animal-enterpriseterrorism-act-aeta

Reflections on the Elusivity of Justice It was interesting to me to hear Wall Street Journal's assertion that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had been "plunged into anarchy." In fact, due to the collapse of infrastructure, the absence of law enforcement, and the rise of right-wing racist militias searching out people of color to murder for sport, the Common Ground Collective, an anarchist commune was created to fill the void, building autonomous projects, programs, health clinics, and neighborhood assemblies, as well as self defense networks to protect people from police brutality, illegal home demolitions, and evictions.

To me, this suggests that government may in no way be correlated with social order, since the socalled "social disorganization" following Katrina simply highlighted tendencies that were already present, yet masked by the facade of supposed tranquility. Martin Luther King Jr. stated outside of a California prison, "There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice, I believe absolutely that justice in indivisible; and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I want to make it very clear that I’m going to continue with all of might, with all of my energy, and with all of action to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam."

In fact, what is stated here is that government in no way has a monopoly on justice, and while its systems may carry out a particular kind of justice, it may be a completely different "justice" than its citizens may seek and hope for. This conflict, between individual rights and public order is difficult to navigate, especially when power differentials come into play. There is not an equal balance of power, and as such, "justice" tends to be defined by certain interests in opposition to others.

It seems that "social justice" then, seeks to address these power differentials, whether in civil matters, criminal aspects, and how state processes are carried out. In looking at the history and origins of the police, court systems, and correctional facilities, one might notice that these were initiated by those in power, usually to control those who did not benefit from the systems at play; and it was only through a course of struggle that these institutions have begun to reflect the concerns of the citizens. Yet one question I find myself wondering is whether these institutions inherently skew power towards one "side" (of course, the question becomes, side of what?).

What I think is so important then, is that at each stage of the American Criminal Justice Process, good honest police are needed to carry out investigation, serve warrants, carry out arrests, and book individuals. Too often you have a politics of suspicion which may inform persons, and people are hurt, abused, or violated during this process. The same goes for the court processes, namely a Judge or Jury may harbor their own prejudices they then operationalize. When the law is, as I have heard lawyers state, "whatever a judge declares it to be," the degree of power vested in one person seems to be jarring. We might use phrases like "due-process" but this is merely an ideal, and not a guaranteed reality.

I do appreciate Schmalleger highlighting the need for "evidence-based practices" in criminal justice.

Unfortunately, I see many politicians promoting a politics of fear, and pandering to their constituencies, rather than seeking to identify what "works." Early criminologists were certainly guilty of this, for instance Lombroso promoting anarchist philosophy as degenerate, "evidence" of

mental defect, and supposedly such traits manifested physically so that he could, by simply looking at anarchists, determine that they were criminally insane based on their cheekbones and shape of their eyes. I don't see much different today--we have a president for instance who calls people "evil" and "animals" --is this much different from the witch-killings of Salem in early American approaches to crime?

In my opinion, no. People attempt to assert, promote, and empower their own value systems and moralities by enshrining them in law, willing them into existence, and mobilizing sectors of society to vote to enforce them. This is to say, that law is not a question of universal rights, natural law, etc.

It is about cultural abstractions, power-differentials, institutions and structures, and being politically savvy enough to know how to use the architecture and levers of government to empower your beliefs, usually at the expense of others, for the sake of self-aggrandizement.

For this reason, as you might have guessed, I am quite skeptical of the criminal justice system, and often wonder if those so-called "radicals" who advocate police and prison abolition, or those who state that crime is a phenomenon due to criminalization, which only takes place when there is an empowered elite who monopolize authority and wield privilege against others, and economic classes must be dissolved so that the law will not be weaponized to preserve and defend capital from those it exploits--that these more "outlandish" assertions are not a more adequate response to crime and injustice that traditional approaches.

The justice system then, and justice in general, is elusive, because is it not real. It is an ideal, a goal, an objective we seek to acquire, despite the socioeconomic forces that every day ensure an imbalance of power that is concretized in real-world effects. Social justice in turn, is a struggle to balance that power, so that these conflicts can be addressed, and laws can reflect a consensus process.

Unfortunately, I see this as ideal as well, for the simple reason that, especially in a pluralistic multicultural society like the United States, there are competing values, whose moral frameworks are at times both antagonistic or mutually exclusive (not even to mention sub-cultures), and so this conflict remains.

I suppose an easy answer to this is to facilitate dialogue and open inquiry with regards to the political process, though I feel as if this is an ideal as well. At the end of the day, perhaps the Common Ground Collective had the right idea, that freedom, justice, equity, etc. can only emerge when people build local grassroots autonomous power for both individual and collective liberation. In such cases, self-reliance, self-determination, and mutual aid and solidarity can achieve what top-down governments can only dream of.

A Tale of Two Anarchies: A Dialogue between Contemporary Anarchist Criminology and The Politics of Attack “The Native peoples of this land are under attack. That fact cannot be ignored, and it cannot be resolved in the courts, because the courts are one of the instruments of the attack.”

-John Mohawk "There is no freedom in ‘wildness’ if, by sheer ferality, we mean the dictates of inborn behavioral patterns that shape mere animality. To malign civilization without due recognition of its enormous potentialities for self-conscious freedom — a freedom conferred by reason as well as emotion, by insight as well as desire, by prose as well as poetry — is to retreat back into the shadowy world of brutishness, when thought was dim and intellectuation was only an evolutionary promise."

–Murray Bookchin “It’s useless to wait for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.”

-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection Nearly twenty-five years after the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was signed into law, Donald Trump has signed the First Step Act, called a “Christmas Miracle,”

by Van Jones. Hailed as the product of a diverse and bipartisan coalition bringing together liberals and conservatives together, the bill gives a “second chance” to those caught up in the criminal justice system. Yet, for all the hype surrounding it, there are still voices that raise critical concerns about it, as well as perspectives absent altogether—perspectives that fundamentally diverge with regards to the premises about criminality, criminalization, and the role of the state in criminal justice.

Does this mean we are again poised for a missed opportunity? Another failure? Perhaps we should simply expect more of the same under the guise of reform?

A System Beyond Repair or Reform?

Typically, in understanding the formative institutional influences on any ideological force behind any goal (family, school, civic structures, political activities, mass media…), most Americans, despite various ideological viewpoints, “tend to side with one of two perspectives: the liberal or the conservative ideological perspective.” (Marion and Oliver, 2012) Whereas liberals, striving to protect individual rights, are willing to allow government to intervene in socioeconomic aspects of life to rectify injustices, conservatives, in contrast, tend to believe in the individual responsibility of people for their own behavior, willing government to legislate against supposed immorality. In this way, liberals, skeptical of morality and the utility of criminal sanction, align themselves with a due process model to ensure the constitutional rights of individuals, while conservatives align themselves with a crime control model, attempting to repress criminal conduct through effective prosecution of offenders so that individual rights are subordinate to the security of the society in question. In this way, we can understand policy to be the result of institutionalized ideology, built upon underlying assumptions behind crime causation (rational choice theory for conservatives, positivist psychosocial theories for

liberals). Further, the goals and aims of these competing perspectives within the criminal justice system tend to fall in stark contrast with one another: a crime control model sees law and order as necessary for deterrence, incapacitation, punishment, and to teach morality; while a due process model seeks to promote rehabilitation, reintegration, and restoration, at times even seeing criminals as themselves victims of conditions that increase the probability of criminality.

The tension and fundamental difference between these are both real and discordant, so that often liberals and conservatives make arguments that talk past each other, mischaracterizing each other’s positions to compare the best version of their own perspective to the worst excesses of the other. Is crime a deviation from a justice system rooted in community consensus, or the failure of social institutions to provide the means to assimilate to such a consensus? Beyond this contradiction however, both perspectives, liberal and conservative, assume the ability of the justice system to be neutral and fair in their ability to dole out sentences that adequately distribute justice throughout society. This ideal “consensus model” can be distinguished from a “conflict model” that suggests that the justice system’s processes may themselves be problematic, since various subcultures do not innately share in the same value systems, degree of political power, and so, are invariably in conflict with one another, especially as they engage with the criminal justice system. This is to say that conflict theories suggest social factions in conflict with one another, so that criminal justice processes and systems are in fact determined by the degree of power any political and economic interests holds.

Put otherwise, within criminology, conflict theorists suggest, unlike liberal and conservative criminology, that there is something inherently problematic in the criminal justice process itself that needs to be resolved and reformed for justice to prevail.

What is missing altogether from any contemporary debate on criminal justice reform then, is the suggestion the criminal justice system is distorted so completely by the needs of power and capital (those most likely to affect any such reform) which dictate the priorities of the state, that any such reform will continue to reproduce and systematically structure bias against marginalized classes or ethnic groups. Such a radical perspective, unlike conservative, liberal, or even conflict criminologies, suggests then that the criminal justice system in turn cannot be reformed until the conditions that give rise to the political and economic pressures that distort the criminal justice system in the first place (i.e. the creation of surplus populations and thus the so-called “dangerous classes” from which criminals tend to derive) are addressed. (White and Haines, 2000) In his article, “Distinction between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” (1981) Thomas Bernard points out the difference between the conflict model of crime and more radical perspectives: “The primary purpose of conflict criminology is objective, nonpartisan analysis of the law enactment and enforcement process. Radical criminology, however, maintains that no criminology, including conflict theory, can be both objective and nonpartisan. All such criminology is said to ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class. The only objective criminology is said to be radical criminology, which explicitly sides with the working class against the interests of the ruling class. No middle ground exists between these two positions.” (377) Thus radical criminologists differs from conflict theorists in that they explicitly point to the capitalist economic system as generating any such conflict in the first place; and moreover, align themselves with the exploited classes to act with and alongside their struggle. Indeed, there is a moral aspect to radical criminology that is not present in conflict theory, namely the willingness to assume such

conflict expressed as crime is not inevitable, but rather can be addressed through certain conscious actions taken on behalf of those subjugated classes against capital and those who maintain relationships imbued by capitalist values.

Here then we can recognize the importance of a book like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology (CAC) for its willingness to provide the first sketches of a radical and critical criminology and inquiry that identifies incarceration, subjugation, power, and the state as itself antithetical to justice and freedom. Moreover, by bringing such a perspective in dialogue with Michael Loedenthal’s Politics of Attack (PoA), the combination of an anarchist criminology with an inquiry into insurrectionary theory is able to create a dialogue that makes important contributions to the field of criminology, critical security studies, and peace studies. In so doing, the interchange offers the opportunity to hear from neglected and marginalized voices aligned to the most systematically oppressed that must be integrated in any conversation about criminal justice reform and conflict resolution seeking to address the very roots of injustice.

Sketches of an Anarchist Criminology The previous sections sought to locate and differentiate an anarchist criminology within the wider tradition of radical and critical criminology, as distinguished from more traditional or orthodox perspectives. Still, discerning what separates anarchist from traditional Marxist criminology is at surface level, difficult to apprehend, yet altogether an important endeavor. To do so we must look first at those theorists who identify as anarchists before reflecting on the critical points they relate to make any sort of substantive claim.

In the first place, the book CAC, after an introduction, sets out its chapters in three sections: contemporary classics, contemporary voices, and finally contemporary prisoner voices, all within an emerging anarchist criminology seeking alternatives to punitive justice. We can see then this discipline as emerging alongside of, as well as within, the social context of resistance movements opposing global neoliberal forces, seeking access to critical resources yet threatened by abusive laws and elite demonstrations of power. Indeed, the integration of a variety of critical approaches to sociological theory—feminism, abolition, radical ecology, and radical criminology, alongside political and economic crisis, characterize the emerging discipline, informing and offering “cutting analysis of social structures of inequity, oppression, exploitation, and injustice…[pointing] to meaningful alternatives to present systems and goes beyond so-called pragmatic concerns within limited reforms to show that radical transformation is realistic and possible.” (2) Moreover, CAC is based in empirical, real world experiences of state violence and social war, aligning with those it targets to produce a militant co-research that seeks to map the battlefield for a more effective warfare, weaponizing its inquiry to erode the fundamental premises upon which power is built and abolish those conditions that generate criminality and criminalization to aid in the liberation of its victims. Thus, the book’s focus on transformative justice goes well beyond the liberal conception of restorative justice, seeking first to break out of the status quo arrangements, empowering individuals and communities to resist effectively and build alternatives informed by mutual aid and ecological justice, disrupting capitalist reproduction by intervening in historical processes that themselves produce these oppressed groups. As such, the authors offer a tool kit for revolutionaries, without assuming any significant division between revolutionaries, social theorists, and the oppressed classes for which the revolution is waged.

The first section locates anarchist criminology in the wider criminological context, built from transformative and abolitionist perspectives and movements. Moreover, the suggestion that crime is caused by criminalization alone gives weight to the idea that state legality reifies and empowers violence and enforcement institutions as indispensable to state definitions of what constitutes peace.

The book thus begins, after an introduction to the project, with Jeff Ferrell’s 1998 article, tracing anarchist critiques of law from early writers and activists like Godwin, Stiner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Berkman, and the IWW to later theorists, demonstrating the cultural relevance of such moments as the Paris Commune, Situationists, the DIY and punk movements, as well as free radio and countercultural experiments. In doing so, he cobbles together an anarchist criminology out of the critical undercurrents anyone is able to participate in, as opposed to formally recognized and professional criminologists. Further, in contradistinction to the broad harms of state legality, he suggests the public has outsourced its own authority in many cases to become reliant on centralized control systems, which in turn perpetuate and amplify crime, increasing the degree of social control in all aspects of sociocultural life. He thus articulates the impulses of anarchist criminology, focusing on criminalized activities from cultural expression to political resistance.

While Ferrell speaks to the various cultural strands anarchist criminology has inherited to better challenge and destabilize an orthodox criminological theory rooted in mainstream assumptions of crime, power, and the necessity of the state, Harold Pepinsky’s 1977 article “Communist Anarchism as an Alternative to the Rule of Criminal Law,” spells out how, while resource deprivation may in many cases necessitate crime, the rule of criminal law, in attempting to maintain swiftness, sureness, and severity in its responses, cannot in fact eliminate such injuries, for the simple reason these three elements are mutually exclusive. Rather, his “logic of the magnet analog” suggests an inverse relation between these elements, where strengthening any ensures the repulsion of the others. The more severe a law, for instance, the less swift it can be implemented as the state must review the increasing complexity to impose any sanction. For this reason, Pepinsky suggests, lowering the severity of penalties makes arrest and prosecution surer. His conclusion is simple: for law to effectively deter crime, community mechanisms must not allow for crime control to “impede the swift, sure, severe application of the law.” (27) With this in mind, Pepinsky points out that the rule of criminal law is symbiotic to progress toward a communist anarchism, so that communist anarchists and criminal justice legalists must collaborate so as to reduce the force with which law is applied in order to better deter injurious behavior from occurring. To do otherwise might in fact be counterproductive: “[those] who seek to defeat the criminal justice system by attacking it defeat their own purposes instead, for the criminal justice bureaucracy expands in response.” (30) For this reason, says Pepinsky, gradual and respectful erosion of criminal justice enforcement must occur, or tyrannical backlash will terrorize and destroy both peace and community security. Such an argument may be counterintuitive for anarchists, who are asked to “empower” the criminal justice system “they now fear to act fearlessly,” while remembering that “law rules more the less it is imposed, and law is imposed less the more its agents are respected.” (34) In the final essay of the “Contemporary Classics” section, Jeff Shantz offers a critical analysis of Cesare Lombroso’s 19th century criminological analysis of anarchists. Shantz, one of the editors of the book and participant in the Critical Criminology Working Group at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, critiques statist criminology by identifying the ideological underpinnings of economic and political power and the social harms that thereby arise. (Shantz 2017) Shantz is thus well able to point out how Lombroso’s unscientific methods toward a positivist genetic criminological theory were used to discredit the political movement, pointing out the class and confirmation biases (and

falsified evidence) used to generate the self-affirming prophesy aimed at naturalizing hierarchy and criminalizing resistance to it. Indeed, by doing so, a distinct understanding of how such perspectives from the standpoint of power and capital may indeed say more about those charged with developing the field in the first place: “[Lombroso] offers, then, no analysis at all…here again, then, his hereditary analysis is really a statement of Lombroso’s own morals…for Lombroso, resistance against economic injustice is simply a mark of some deviance or other (criminality, insanity, immorality, etc.).” (43) Such insight into the mind of persecutor and oppressor thus demonstrates how criminality is in fact often equated with resisting the conditions generated by “systems of economic and judicial inequality and oppression.” That is, the effects of poverty are demonstrated as traits of criminality, engendering criminal potential in any mindset that critiques such conditions. Thus in “Lombroso’s belief that all reforms should be introduced only very gradually,” we are able to see that revolutionary change can only be understood as the effort of the criminally insane. Moreover, such class arrogance, speaking in the language of power, is able to generate the kind of cultural capital necessary to gain access to police and policy-making endeavors of those who fear such radical contagion, so that Lombroso exerted considerable influence on the field at large, inviting legal repression and segregation of those classified as “lunatics” for their political positions.

Indeed, as power conflates crime with the harmful conditions that reproduce social harms and behaviors classified as crime in the first place, the inclusion of these classical anarchist writings then provide a novel contribution, namely identifying counterintuitive insight and elucidations embedded, if concealed, in the discipline at large. Drawing from historical resistance to state constructions of justice, seeking symbiotic ways to erode the legitimacy of criminal justice systems without directly attacking them, and reconsidering criminological theories that, if perhaps unscientific and projecting their own class prejudices on subjects to obscure reality, are at least indicative of the psychology of power, are all helpful in establishing a basis for any anarchist criminology to develop upon.

In the second section, “Contemporary Voices on Alternatives to Punitive Justice Within Anarchist Criminology,” the theoretical basis is expanded to disrupt punitive, dehumanization processes by empowering locales to effectively monkey-wrench an economic slavery, seeking to make incarceration financially impossible through effective prison resistance. Differentiating between mere restorative justice seeking to rehabilitate offenders to operate within an unjust social setting, and transformative justice, and situating crime, power, state violence, and resistance within a hierarchy extending back far further than capitalism per se, the book instead proposes relocalizing autonomy and self-determination to just, ecologically sensitive, and spiritually attuned communities instead.

Hackett and Turk, in “Freedom First” suggest that prison abolition should seek leadership first in prisoner resistance movements, lending support to those who upset and disrupt the settler colonialist logic and the “afterlife of slavery.” In this regard, “prisoners provide an informed and grounded analytic of state repression, carceral power, and resistance that is invaluable to abolitionist thought and strategy.” (54) Even as domination mutates over the course of history, its “core function” of “racialized social control and the preservation of a white supremacist order” remains.

For this reason, prison revolts are able to create new political spaces while resisting the “civil death” that legalized prison slavery creates. For the simple reason that, as the Free Alabama Movement makes explicit, “money is the motive,” economic resistance, removing the economic incentives of maintaining abysmal working conditions, is better suited to address core issues, since the costs of

any response to organized prisoner uprising “in terms of finances, public legitimacy, and ability to maintain order are unsustainable in any correctional institution… More than 30 days would likely bankrupt most state budgets.” (60) The authors then detail ways in which prisoners fight with their bodies and voices in a “confrontational insurgency,” through work stoppages, organized and less organized uprisings, occupations, arsons, and frequent attacks on staff until shifts of correctional officers refuse to come to work, rendering prison facilities untenable by creating crises while competing with officials for credibility. In doing so, the power, logic, and credibility of prisons are effectively eroded, the personhood of prisoners is asserted, and protests against prison slavery, school to prison pipelines, police terror, and post-release controls are sustained by utilizing political channels and popular support.

Laura Magnani similarly challenges the logic of the punitive nature of prisons and the American criminal justice system, undermining the rationalizations in which prisoners not only lose their freedom, but their dignity, humanity, and compassion as well. Thus it may be, she states, that police, courts, and prisons themselves are creating dangerous people, and that by dismantling prisons, one can work “to dismantle the whole punitive justice system grounded in punishment, domination and control, of which the police play a significant part…[Instead] by addressing the underlying causes of street crime…providing people with jobs, adequate housing, and healthcare will cut down on the instances of victimization and make people less desperate.” (78) Hence the potential for real community can occur only where reforms do not merely “prop up the existing system,” in the name of “restorative justice.” The state, if culpable for the violence produced at a micro-level, must then assume responsibility for any harm caused by adequately funding restorative and rehabilitative efforts.

Magnani then points to where disciplinary systems in schools have been replaced with restorative justice systems, transforming its Zero Tolerance Disciplinary Policies to decrease suspensions by 40% while successfully resolving conflicts in over 76% of cases. Moreover, as similar programs are integrated into the criminal justice system, recidivism rates are also reduced, victims report greater levels of satisfaction with the justice process, and post-traumatic stress symptoms among participants are cut. Such systemic changes suggest, for the author, that building parallel systems demonstrating healing methodologies can be done “without expanding the net of the criminal justice system, where the people sent to the parallel system were people who never would have found their way to prison in the first place.” (82) In the final chapter of the section, Mark Seis provides an insightful contribution to the emerging field of “green criminology” with his chapter, “An Anarchist Criminology for Understanding Environmental Degradation.” In it, he draws attention to what is elsewhere called the “treadmill production of capitalism,” namely that the impetus for “capitalist economies to endlessly grow violates the most basic laws of nature,” yet going further to attribute the declining health of our environment to be a product of sedentary agriculture and an alienated civilization that seeks to impose an anthropocentric logic onto the surrounding regions. As neolithic villages and agrarian cities develop “hierarchically organized governments fostering and protecting social systems of stratification” that produce surplus food, a division of labor, and organized institutions of power that in turn produce social forms that exceed carrying capacity, we are here reminded of the Marxist

assertion that law and ideology are structured by an economic system, as “no legal system operating within the confines of consumer capitalism and the ethos of human supremacism will be able to change the suicidal trajectory of pursuing unlimited growth on a finite planet.” (88) This is to say the preservation of inequality through legal apparatuses ensure environmental degradation through an exploitative relationship extended to the natural world. As Seis points out: “the environmental crisis is a cultural crisis and requires a change in our cultural ethos as well as our social construction of economy, governance, and relationship.” (89) In identifying the key characteristics of sustainable cultures then, and drawing from indigenous practices and worldviews, Seis is able to identify the tame/wild binary as a source of spiritual sickness, catalyzing alienation and disenchantment, while advocating for more democratic technics that ensure access to land bases by all. Unlike the kind of alienated production incomprehensible to sustainable cultures, relocalization efforts can work to redesign urban areas through intentional placemaking, decentralizing energy grids and allowing people direct access to nature that allows them to confront the overexploitation and hidden costs of urban and industrial lifestyles. This in turn means injustice is eradicated through equitable social relations and environmental justice efforts, where local communities are able to produce materials, food, energy, clothing, and other basic amenities people need by “building sustainable communities and steady state economies [that] all boils down to scale and a conscious awareness of the carrying capacity of your landbase and the ability of the community to reciprocate and replenish that which is renewable to the landbase.” (90) Hence a local democratic politics, more able to provide for the basic necessities that in turn guide relocalization efforts and cultural transformation through alternative visions of justice is envisaged as an adequate response to reduce the deprivation and inequity assumed to prompt crime and injustice.

Part three of the book gives voice to contemporary prisoner voices within anarchist criminology, looking at how economic coercion destroys human relations, compassion, dignity, and humanity. In a sense then, crimes and social harms manifest as oppressive relations, generated by the political economy and reproduced at an individual level. Crime is motivated as a product of alienation and as an increasing sociocultural and economic necessity within the confines of capitalist society – indeed a product of the capitalist fear of rebellion. Thus those most affected by the punitive and retributive values underlying the criminal justice system – the prisoners themselves—offer solutions that imply nothing short of revolution. Not just political revolution, but social revolution, where an empathetic society can begin to restore the socioemotional bonds capital has broken, while the power system itself, defining what constitutes deviance and criminality, can itself be abolished. Social harms, it must be remembered, are not necessarily criminal, but rather may be normalized, naturalized, and rationalized by those who have the most to gain by dominating and controlling those they depend on for their wealth, themselves perpetrating harms and injustices that are ignored or incentivized by the powerful political and economic systems they maintain.

Reverend David “Wolf Eyes” Rose, Sr. thus looks at the specific logic of modern society for “possessing” Mother Earth, while discarding its spiritual elements. This in turn breeds a social values “out of balance, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically,” seeping into our unconscious and extended throughout society through media influence, in turn skewing the justice system by class,

race, and power relationships. Indeed, ensuring justice prevails requires “people who are educated and spiritually developed…[to] help change the balance of today’s moral, ethical and spiritual/psychological imbalances—one soul at a time.” (106) If this does not happen, Wolf Eyes writes, such a crisis will become repressed and isolated without ever being corrected. Indeed, this is what occurs in prisons and society, so that a “total rebuilding of the educational system” is necessary in order to restore justice by teaching responsibility, self-respect, and honesty within any community.

Maurice L. Graham similarly continues on the theme of the spiritual sickness of an unbalanced society by focusing on the connections to slavery in the prison system. He recognizes both slavery and prisons as profit-making mechanisms, implying consumers in a global economy are themselves complicit with the post-abolition re-enslavement of blacks, as business machines find acceptable ways to retain profits to fuel their power to influence and direct the state. Indeed, as he points out, “the degrading of human rights is the only path to slavery,” so that even “due process is a security threat” to those meting out punishment. Here, the corruption generated by profit in slavery is present too in prison policy. For this reason, alternatives to incarceration will need to adequately address profit in order to resolve the dehumanizing processes that control, exploit, and enslave prisoners today.

The final, and perhaps most radical essay of the book is its last, by Sean Swain, “On Crime and Deviance.” This should come as no surprise, considering Swain, mounting a run for Governor of Ohio in 2018, promised to “decommission the Ohio National Guard, empty Ohio’s prisons and turn them into squats, recognize Native American land rights as set forth by the Treaty of Greenville, arm the tribes with national guard weaponry, to include tanks and attack helicopters, refuse to sign any budget causing the government to shut down, and sign an Executive Order making it legal to assassinate him if he remains in office longer than 90 days.” (Swain, N.D.) Indeed, his website explains his predicament and hints at what it will take to change it: “Sean will only be liberated when the illegitimate power of the lawless rogue state holding him hostage [‘without legal conviction or sentence’] is abolished once and for all.” He elaborates upon this position in his chapter by seeking to imagine alternatives outside of the socially constructed realities of “crime,” “justice,” and “punishment” as they are traditionally understood. Thus he challenges the premises of “deviant conduct” and the idea that such conduct should be “punishable” by those assuming a “right to rule,” pointing for example to when the legal practice of slavery in a moment suddenly became “illegal” due to the power of those able to decide (or not) to address an injustice.

Thus, such premises of state legitimacy serve only the interests of the privileged elite of a political economy based on exploitation and suffering. Law, Swain asserts, functions as “a tool to keep the rest of us in our places, to maintain our obedience to their system, to compel our conformity to a set of behaviors that has, for thousands of years, perpetuated wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful.” (132) Moreover, these elite, he points out, have managed to persuade the rest of the population that to remain obedient is in their best interest as well.

In this way, Swain provides perhaps what becomes a fundamental principle of an anarchist criminology seeking to completely eradicate crime altogether:

“To abolish ‘crime’—that is, perceived deviance designated as punishable by those who assume the ‘right to rule’—we need only eliminate the special category of the privileged elite and the special category of those who assume the ‘right to rule.’ If we eliminate both of these categories…there would be no one empowered to distinguish deviance that is not punishable from deviance that is. If there is no one to declare which instances of deviance is punishable, the category of behavior we now know as ‘crime’ ceases to exist.” (133) As Swain suggests, the eradication of influence, wealth, and power would themselves decrease the social forces that drive and label behaviors as deviant, and thus social deviance itself. Law, then, might be understood as obsolete, impotent, and ineffectual, in that it does not in fact prevent those actions it seeks to prohibit. Moreover, it is not meant to address those injustices that in fact cause the most harm in society, but rather is wielded against those least benefited by the systems that maintain their powerlessness. As such, in the absence of hierarchy, local communities operating through consensus would produce fewer instances of deviance by generating “a viable sense of meaning, purpose and connection, rather than compulsion, drudgery and alienation.” Hence to collapse the current system altogether, with its privileges and monopolies of power, would allow for spaces to comprehensively address the conditions that cause “deviance,” in new, more effective ways.

Swain then perhaps captures Bakunin’s sentiment most: “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” (Bakunin, 1842) Analyses, Strategies, Tactics, and Approaches In many ways, the only critique of this book is that it is simply too short and cannot as a result include every element that would be necessary for a field of anarchist criminology to seriously be considered by mainstream criminology or policy-making; though of course, this is not the editors’ intention. While providing a host of theoretical critiques, apart from the first chapter there is little in the way of developing or linking the field to a past lineage or placing it within the wider context of other criminological theories, for instance explicitly differentiating its core tenets to Marxist, Critical, or other radical theories of crime. Admittedly, the authors state that it is a “short, concise text designed to aid in the development of a complex field of anarchist criminological study focused on alternative structures of organization and resistance movements.” (7) Moreover, in producing a book with only nine voices, it is not as inclusive as it could be and so would benefit from diverse viewpoints across various oppressed groups, as is pointed out by the editors themselves.

It is certainly the case, for this reason, that there is a deficit in testing hypotheses, with little attention paid to quantitative research able to substantiate some of the authors’ more radical claims. While those writing certainly base their critiques and suggestions in personal experience, the book is similarly short on implementation and real world examples that seriously close the gap between oppression and liberation. In many ways, then this may contribute to a “willful failure,” as Ferrell describes it, undermining the hope for freedom by stopping short of developing a “master plan” and instead focused on a “useful corrective to encrusted certainty and the desire for domination.”

(1st chapter) Or, it may be a testament to a field in its early infancy, and a challenge to readers to develop its core tenets.

Nevertheless, the book highlights the different pathways and techniques anarchist criminologists can explore within the emerging field. In this regard, the book provides a way to locate any tactics or

strategies anarchist may employ to prefigure a new world. The somewhat useful heuristic below is meant to locate the various tactics, or methods, an anarchist criminology might utilize, based on the assumptions made (whether one accepts or rejects the legitimacy or relevance of the political economy) and the strategy employed (engaging the political economy or seeking to avoid it).

Criminological Typology of Anarchist Strategies, Assumptions, and Methods/Tactics Typology of Resistances in Inequitable Energy Circuitry:

Energy Flow Totality (State/Capital) is Legitimate/Accepted

Energy Flow Totality (State/Capital) is Illegitimate, Rejected

Strategy of Confrontation (Communities of Opposition)

Integration: lobbying by progressives hoping persuasion will direct resources to them.

Insurrection: attacks by enraged terrorists seeking to destroy monopolies on power and energy

-conversation among criminological perspectives

-work stoppages -uprisings

-redirect energy of just causes into legitimate channels

-occupations

-civil engagement

-arsons

-media coverage

-attacks on staff

-rebuild education systems

-protests

-reconstitute law enforcement

-eradicate class system -abolish categories of privileged elite

Strategy of Avoidance (Communities of Exile)

Autonomy: retreat by despairing hippies resigned to live in autonomous, insulated communities

Circumvention: bypass by radicals who evade mediating structures with alternative power

-community mechanisms for self-management

-establish alternative processes for reconciliation

-study groups for education

-restorative justice programs

-prisoner support programs

-alternative ways to address deviance

-relocalization projects

Of course, this chart is ideal in the sense there is no firm boundary between methods, yet what is important to recognize is that while individuals and adjectives might seek to explicitly distinguish each typology from the other, in reality, such divisions are mostly ideological and break down in practice to form more effective campaigns. Moreover, there is a specific relationship between the insurrectionary field and the others—namely, that as each other field finds success, insurrection as a method becomes relatively obsolete, as there is less reason to attack for the sake of liberation. Still, one can assume that if these other pathways become blocked as effective methods of transformative justice, insurrection (direct attack) will become more widely seen as effective and necessary methods of transformation.

It is to this particular field of insurrection then that we will look at by reviewing Michael Loedenthal’s The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (PoA).

A Politics of Attack Loedenthal’s focus on insurrectionary theory draws from queer, feminist, postmodern, and critical theories to approach the insurrectionary violence of the post-millennium period. As such, it represents, like Contemporary Anarchist Criminology, another example of militant co-research, seeking in the written, anonymous communiqué the principles that explain, contextualize, and give insight into this form of anarchist praxis. After reminding the reader that any such analysis of communiqués must first not be for the police to repress such activity, Loedenthal instead encourages readers to look at such objects as themselves legitimate units of political analysis, written by subjects with worthwhile analyses able to contribute to the wider field seeking to understand political conflict.

For this reason, PoA examines the insurrectionary phenomena over the course of history to contextualize, analyze, and understand any insights such militant groups produce that may contribute to any such political analysis: “History must precede strategy, and strategy must precede ideology. Therefore it is essential that readers remain conscious of the historical precursors, but allow themselves to nuance that understanding as it is explored in light of the wider theory.” (132) After an introduction laying out the methodology, paradigmatic assumptions and framework, as well as the scope of the inquiry and its relevance for political theory, critical security studies, and social conflict, Loedenthal uses the first two chapters to create a political and historical context for contemporary insurrectionist activity, demonstrating the broken lineage between Guy Fawkes, early tendencies in anarchist theories (e.g. “propaganda of the deed”), and pre-millennial social

movements, to the post-9/11 activities by clandestine insurrectionary networks of urban guerrillas, laying out a number of groups, cells, and tendencies for consideration.

He is thus able to identify insurrection as a technique within the wider context of “social war,” a tactic meant not to induce the overthrow of state or economic regimes, but rather to “bring about radical social change through initiating conflict,” (99) demonstrating “alternative modes of existence, temporary sites of counter-systemic living.” (106) The insurrectionary tactics in question (arson, explosives, graffiti, animal release, vandalism, assassinations, etc.) are then understood as the materialization of a “socio-political critique of alienation, anti-capitalism, and anger finding a target in the infrastructure of corporate interests.” (103) Moreover, the material structures attacked are done so, not because to do so would ever be effective in overthrowing capitalism or the state, but rather to ensure through demonstration the “socio-political arena of structural control is disrupted and its function temporarily changes from that of structural maintainer to symbol of resistance,” (107) one forcing the state to choose whether to either fail to stop terrorism and appear ineffective in securing the peace, or else to stop “terrorism” through repression and enact tyrannical and violent methods to further polarize the populace. This focus on targets is meant both to attack symbolic targets as well as disrupt the flow of localized manifestations of state and capitalist systems, attacking its “functional logistics” after seeking to “diagram the weaknesses, bottlenecks, and soft underbellies of grandiose targets [that] are common in the post-millennial clandestine networks.”

After looking at the historical lineage of anti-authoritarian insurrectionary violence and its role in revolutionary design, Loedenthal explores insurrection as a strategy theorized in anonymous texts and communiqués. In doing so, he is able to tease out the internal logic of such groups, demonstrating how insurrectionary critique is leveled at a “Totality,” the “totalizing force of everpresent coercion that extends from the material to the spiritual,” (143) suggesting that their strategy is not to create a future utopia, but rather to focus on the present, attacking to show “the erroneous nature of the social spectacle and expose the violence inherent in everyday life.” (146) To do so challenges the hegemonic logic of state monopoly on violence by generalizing revolt to a social war and the entirety of social relations, seeking to paralyze normality altogether. Here insurrection is meant more to rupture the very belief system of state and capital that has been normalized and naturalized, opening up pathways to new social forms by demonstrating a willingness to actively negate the totality wherever it is experienced.

In looking at the histories, tactics, strategies, and texts that are presented by the various insurrectionary actors then, Loedenthal leaves us with at least eight tendencies evoked in the communiqués: (1) immediate, continuous, and spontaneous direct attack; (2) waging this social war to create points of rupture with power and order by exacerbating points of dissatisfaction; (3) extending the idea of intersectionality to confront “The Totality” while seeking total liberation from oppressive systems (classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, speciesism…); (4) unmanaged, temporary forms of contestation that exist outside of any Leftist notion of social movement; (5) rejecting reformist programs for radical social transformation; (6) rejecting civil engagement for illegalist activity; (7) extending the insurrectionary critique to forms of alienation that generate ecological crisis through domestication and industrial technology; (8) and praxis informed by individualist “wild egoism,” evoking a barbaric, pre-capitalist worldview.

As these tendencies are shared and discussed through various communiqués, the temporary disruption of the status quo is able to further critique and political analysis, developing communal

meeting places at “points of ideological, rhetorical, and strategic affinity, and it is on this basis of affiliation that the movement is constituted and reproduced.” (196) Thus Loedenthal is able to demonstrate how analysis by insurrectionary movements evolves its goals and praxis, tying any one strike to a wider historical legacy while seeking to inspire others to follow with new attacks on power and empire by violently rejecting the relations and structures they reproduce, at the same time “adding teeth to critique, and anti-social violence to praxis.” Based on the insurrectionary “canon” that speaks to the history of past attacks through an increasing body of communiqués, statements, letters, and other texts, such attacks are thereby meant to create content for new communiqués which explain, contextualize, and justify each attack, in turn influencing new attacks and all subsequent communiqués. Loedenthal points out this is distinct from conceptions of terrorism, since insurrectionary violence “is a form of asymmetric, decentralized war carried out through networked and ideologically-linked attacks at a non-centralized, fluid target…it does not seek to terrorize, but rather to exhibit dissent and offer critique…the violence of the attack creates the space for the critic to ‘be heard’ and in doing so temporarily disrupts the discourse it is critiquing for example, the infallibility of market capitalism.” (221) This in turn suggests a flow of information from attacker to (often times online) reader, where insurrectionary sympathizers find insurrectionary hubs that receive and redistribute the authored critiques of insurrectionary attackers. Moreover, the increasing popularity of and effective spread and knowledge transmission suggests alternative, radical propositions for how to reduce insurrectionary violence: “If one hopes to quell resistance, one must seek to change the material conditions that oppress the masses and create the conditions for such a critique to develop.” (115) This is further elaborated in Loedenthal’s final paragraphs: “If we were to treat political violence in a manner akin to that of criminal violence, the ‘solution’ to insurrectionary attack is systemic, revolutionary change that reduces domination and marginalization. These solutions would likely be discounted summarily by policymakers who would prefer a list of targets than a list of arguments for better access to education, housing, healthcare, transformation, etc. In other words, to ‘solve’ the insurrectionary critique would require system-level change aimed at a deconstruction of that very system and, as such, is unlikely to be embraced by power elites. Because the critique is aimed at power itself, to embrace its proscription of change would deny the brokers of that power a great deal of influence and control.” (223) For Loedenthal, redefining the political violence of insurrection as, rather than simply “terrorism,” a form of political critique, is to “disrupt the discourse that constructs it,” while changing the logical response which “reconfigures the discourse from system maintenance to system transformation,” no longer making state-centric policy that has the security of the state as a primary goal, but rather uses revolutionary consciousness and the discourse and logic of anti-state attack to articulate “a systemlevel critique which rejects political representationalism, abhors domination, and seeks nothing short of total liberation.” (225) A Tale of Two Anarchies: Bridging the Divide What is most important about these two important books is their shared recognition that the crisis generating crime and insurrection is structural. Loedenthal makes this explicit, pointing to a NASA-

sponsored study that suggests industrial civilization’s collapse may be imminent, due to “unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” Moreover, this rise and collapse is recurrent, where upper classes “downplay the structural nature of the problem” and instead allocate only a small portion of accumulated surplus to the majority of the population at, or just above, subsistence levels. At the same time, he points out how “ongoing climate change is ‘substantially correlated’ to rises in violent crime and group conflict.” (190) Seis says as much, advocating structural transformation as a necessity, that class system is unsustainable, and, drawing from anarcho-primitivist theorists, implicitly suggests civilization, indeed sedentism itself, causes the violence, inequality, oppression, and suffering that prompts criminality.

Thus an anarchist criminology and insurrectionary approach to critical security studies are better able to approach social conflict with the intention of providing more radical peacebuilding strategies. By setting up alternatives to power and domination, through direct confrontation or active avoidance, both books overcome the state mythology and mystification of its bureaucratic and violently coercive role in resolving conflicts it creates itself, pointing out how the unequal distribution of power arrangements are themselves constitutive of the totality of social relations that spawn violent insurgency.

For these reasons, it is imperative to include in public debate such perspectives, integrating their insights, and refusing to allow their repression by a hegemonic narrative seeking to monopolize authority, legitimacy, and violence to such ends. Instead, the transformative strategies for justice that emerge out of these books address wealth, race, patriarchy, and ecocide in more comprehensive ways by addressing the fundamental root conditions that generate these symptoms in the first place —strategies that neither conservative nor liberal, conflict, nor perhaps even more traditionally radical perspectives (i.e. Marxist) have to date offered.

Yet while both books provide a terrific assessment of the various anarchist positions and proposals for how to substantively address power to reduce crime, domination, violence, and coercion in the name of community security, there are certain theses that detract from both. CAC for instance, while searching for an insurgent theory, seems to derail at times into what can only be described as an “anarcho-liberalism,” falling somewhere between anti-capitalist Lefts and the positions of Social Democrats—anti-neoliberal perhaps, yet unable to adequately address the presence of the state and capital, indeed reifying the existence of both. “Solutions” abound that can only be described as liberal, and at times no solutions seem present whatsoever. Thus while the book provides sketches for an anarchist vision of transformative justice, and sets out a kind of program or vision (decentralize autonomy, community based solutions, transformative justice…), it makes few contributions in terms of how to actually move from here to there, lacking empirical results to support its more piercing insights.

PoA also has important contradictions that seem not to be addressed. For instance, insurrectionary thought assumes violent confrontation will lead to more violent confrontation, thereby opening up possibilities to break with the hegemonic logic of the state, disrupt the flow of state power and capital, widen opposition to both, and negate the power totality in the present, by waging armed struggle. Yet as is pointed out, the insurrectionary anarchist strategy, descending from an urbanized form of guerrilla warfare, fails due to the fundamental paradox Pepinsky points out: in violently attacking the state and capital through small, nimble groups who assassinate political figures, free prisoners, destroy symbolic and functional targets, supporting themselves by robbing banks, and

living illegally, these clandestine organizations, armed insurgents, and feral terrorists invite the full weight of political repression upon themselves while at the same time risking alienating others and driving them back to confirm the hegemonic logic of the state and capital which naturalizes its role as defenders of the public order against the violent, perceived “irrationality” of those antiauthoritarian elements whose logic, if it is ever shared to those outside of its sympathetic reader base, itself assumes the futility of armed attack in ever overcoming power. What is the point of attacking then, when attacking undermines insurrections’ own longevity to compromise pathways for liberation?

This question can be answered with a second implicit contradiction, namely that while Loedenthal repeatedly suggests insurrectionism is not an attempt to create a prefigurative politics, this assessment is directly contradicted by the insurrectionists themselves: “The new anarchist urban guerrilla is not a means of struggle, it is our existence itself.” The establishment of an “Informal Anarchist Federation,” where anyone attacking the infrastructure of domination can claim membership, assumes a prefigurative politics that communicates intent through its own praxis. This is to say, the politics of attack exemplifies the insurrectionary logic in its tactics, strategy, rhetoric, and the image of a war waged against a specific target set—in the fires set, the people killed, the banks robbed, the insurrection pursued. Wherever structural and relational power is destroyed, another world is thus not only possible, but manifest.

In this regard, the prefigurative politics of anarchism is present in both books, albeit in categorically different ways. While both are certainly skeptical (to put it mildly) of power and authority, CAC offers the positive vision of social anarchism, proposing community building, communist anarchism and cooperation, prisoner support, transformative justice programs, sustainable relocalization projects, addressing the psychological imbalances of the dominant culture, rebuilding education systems, developing alternatives to incarceration and retribution, and abolishing the class system and power structure completely. PoA on the other hand leaves the “civic anarchism” to the social anarchists, instead developing its own prefigurative politics based on wild egoism and active nihilism, attacking the power that enslaves the individual will, always against real, concrete targets such as machines, buildings, and the humanoid automatons that personify and maintain these power relations. Moreover, the clandestine, armed and violent underground cells, affiliated with the wider insurrectionary milieu, actualizing the various tendencies in concrete demonstrations of praxis, also provide insight into an organizing strategy more conducive to the nomadic individualist anarchies of anti-social anti-authoritarians. Moreover, it takes for granted that civic anarchism is itself reformist, while socialist anarchism cannot effectively address the colonial settler logic inherent in documents like the Constitution (which CAC suggests can be a potentially liberating document) or social arrangements like relocalized sedentary ecotopias, which would potentially subordinate the individual to the collective. Here, violent opposition to immediate conditions is seen as more effective in combatting oppression and opening up avenues for total liberation in the present than is integrating civic solutions and compromising or collaborating with power for the sake of gradual change.

This split, between collectivism and individualism, between reform and revolution, between insurrection and civic engagement, between gradualism and accelerationism, between violence and nonviolence, between pessimism and optimism, etc. are recurring themes present in both books, themes that each author seeks to navigate in contributing to an anti-authoritarian critique of those academic fields (criminology, security studies) usually dominated by conservative and reactionary

perspectives that may themselves create the very paradigms that produce violence, political conflict, crime, and the political and social war that give rise to these critiques in the first place.

As academics, criminologists, militant co-researchers, and prisoners experiencing the very structures, instruments, processes, and relationships that cause and reproduce suffering, the authors of these two books effectively explain the source of criminality, deviance, and violence, providing critical solutions to crime and punishment both counterintuitive to power and at times anti-authoritarian movements as well. In doing so, they point to law itself as a form of class oppression as opposed to a legitimate response to what is superficially perceived as intrinsically criminal behavior, challenging the very methods and assumptions behind responses by the criminal justice system and representative democracy, driven by capitalistic social relations (class structure, ownership, control, rule…). There is a refusal to enter the realm of debate that is not self-conscious of such processes that compromise more comprehensive views of justice, and in doing so embrace the logic of breaking with the severe repression of a bourgeois-driven law itself antithetical to notions of peace, justice, and freedom, while reconsidering the premises on which responses to crime should be derived.

An anarchist criminology and insurrectionary theory are thus more action-oriented critiques, not anti-scientific, but anti-“objective,” highlighting that objectification of individuals and communities as “criminal” invisibilize those conditions that create criminality in the first place. The two books then refuse assimilation into the larger conservative and neoliberal dominated bodies of discourse on crime and security, rejecting the possibility of reconciling the oppressed to imposed political and economic structures that would merely make more effective those structures able to control and suppress those most marginalized by the sociopolitical and economic contradictions underlying crime. The solution both books offer is thus the overthrow of the dominant order, its systems, and structures, creating ruptures in the very relationships that maintain them, albeit through a number of diverging methods, yet always beginning at the micro, personal level of experience. The abolition of crime and criminality then can only be initiated in the individual mind, before it is able to be extended to a macro, social scale. If the solution to crime is the overthrow of a specific type of political economy, this can only occur by supplanting a hegemonic logic of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation with an alternative that confronts, opposes, and abolishes it for another in the immediate moment, extending temporally as conditions become more favorable as they are increasingly normalized and naturalized.

If power assumes resistance, as Foucault suggests, then capital and the state assume attacks as inevitable. Yet rather than utilize criminology, security studies, the criminal justice system, and anthropological fields of political science, economics, etc. as ways to mitigate those attacks and that resistance, anarchist criminology and militant co-research is here used to confront this relationship and imply structural transformation that can make resistance (and thus violent attacks) as obsolete, unnecessary, and irrelevant once the conditions that generate violence are themselves removed from social experience. This then speaks to the revolutionary insight of both books, and as such, their specific points must not be allowed to be adopted by mainstream elements in ways that do not promote the overthrow of capitalism and the state. Already, movements for “restorative justice” and “community policing” seek to defang radical critiques of law and criminal justice, using the rhetoric of radicality without integrating its most radical proposals. As even Lombroso suggested, the “restoration of popular tribunates…to give voice the grievances of the people, [means] just causes would not be abandoned exclusively to the advocacy of extremists.”

For this reason then, an anarchist criminology or critical security study must decide for itself whether it will relinquish control over words and deeds to adequately address the conditions of suffering to those historically, theoretically, and strategically responsible for generating or maintaining those conditions to ask the question: why leverage the power for marginally better conditions when that power can be used to bankrupt the establishment and create radically new conditions altogether?

Both an emerging anarchist criminology and bourgeoning insurrectionary theory provide ways and means to deliver answers to this question, producing structural transformation through a wide range of tactics that prefigures this new reality—by living in ways that at times destroy oppressive structures, or build up new ones. Both however will undoubtedly be required if total liberation is ever to be experienced in the present.

Works Cited Bakunin, Mikail (1842) “The Reaction in Germany: From the Notebooks of a Frenchman,” Marxists.org retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1842/reaction-germany.htm 12/25/18 Bernard, Thomas (1981) “Distinction Between Conflict and Radical Criminology,” in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol. 72. Issue 1 Spring. 362 Loedenthal, Michael (2017) The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence.

Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK Marion, N., & Oliver, W. (2012). The Public Policy of Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd Edition).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 13: 9780135120989 Nocella, Anthony J. II, Seis, Mark, and Shantz, Jeff (2018) Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment. Peter Lang Publishing Inc.: New York, NY Schantz, Jeff (2017) “Anarchists against (and within) the Edu-Factory: The Critical Criminology Working Group,” in Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces. Eds. Robert H. Haworth & John M. Elmore. PM Press: Oakland, CA SeanSwain.Org (N.D.) “About Sean Swain,” retrieved from https://seanswain.noblogs.org/aboutsean-swain/ 12/25/18 White, Robert and Haines, Fiona (2000) Crime and Criminology: An Introduction. Oxford University Press

Lessons in Extremism from an Unlikely Source?

Contrapoints, Controversy, and the Failure to Engage Conflict Civilly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8

I’d encourage anyone with a passing or permanent interest in extremism alike to watch the new ContraPoints youtube videoon “cancel culture” in its entirety. 1 For those not in the know, cancel culture, like call-out culture or deplatforming, is a kind of boycott against someone sharing a questionable or unpopular opinion, depriving those who do of the opportunity and space to do so, leading to financial and social consequences. Indeed, in the modern social media driven culture, at times it seems all too familiar.

For background, the video is self-explanatory, though for purposes here I will merely state it surrounds the controversy of a transwoman “canceled” for refusing to condemn a transsexual man for not aligning himself with the transgender community, and the reaction against her. As a cis white man, I am really quite unlearned regarding the nuances nor language surrounding the debate regarding terms and identity, and am pretty sure the controversy demands more than one line (hence the near two hour video), so I apologize ahead of time for anything I say that may cause offense. I merely point to this video as helpful in providing what I think may be lessons for extremism research and deradicalization.

I have only seen one other video by the ContraPoints host Natalie not too long ago, perhaps when she left Twitter due to this controversy – more reason probably for me to refrain from

commentary. Nevertheless, I was struck in particular by her willingness to engage in the nuance of the given controversies in question and to what appeared to be a commitment to philosophical inquiry into the ethical, sociopolitical, and psychosexual dynamics underlying contemporary issues, and doing so in a fun, fresh, and humorous way. To do so requires I think a willingness to participate in inquiry in good faith, self-reflecting on cognitive bias and logical fallacy, without committing a priori to the ideological premises of any position on the political spectrum through which any judgement might be filtered. No doubt these characteristics are a double edged sword, resonating with those open to investigating controversial phenomena, while infuriating others who take offense at any such investigation.

Without rehashing the entire argument, I would only like to highlight one particular point Natalie makes, and follow the line of reasoning to suggest directions in extremism and deradicalization studies.

One controversial argument Natalie makes is that there is in fact no rational argument for trans identity. “I’m a woman because I’m a woman” is all the justification necessary to live one’s life accordingly. Love it or hate it, there is no need for further rational basis, the way there is no rational basis for explaining why one is in love with another. It just is. Or rather, there can be a rational argument, but they are all equally bad. Identity is a premise, not a conclusion, one that may go through reexamination over a course of time, but one that cannot simply be “disproven.”

A second contribution Natalie makes is investigating the process by which celebrities are canceled, seemingly boiling down to a three part process:

1) A controversial action is taken (someone says something that offends another) 2) That action is abstracted, obscuring the behavior (what is said is qualified as “offensive”) 3) The abstraction is essentialized, creating an identity (the characterization of the statement as “offensive” is linked to the fundamental nature of the person who made the statement, who in turn is characterized as “offensive” and thus worthy of cancellation)

In this case, a celebrity (Buck Angel) sought to differentiate transgenderism from transsexuality (I guess?), in so doing offended the community, which abstracted his comment and qualitatively characterized those comments as essentially offensive, after which the essential offense was attributed to the fundamental essence of the celebrity in question, to be canceled if the safety of the community in question was to be assured. Moreover, Natalie herself, by associating herself with this celebrity, was also canceled, as were her friends for not disavowing their friendship with her for her association with someone who commented according to their beliefs, which Natalie herself did not agree with.

While this may seem like trivial drama in the youtube vlogosphere (and I am not saying it is not), in a sense, this is the exact process of the identity-construction laid out in J.M. Berger’s Extremism, where an in-group defines itself in relationship to another who represents an existential threat, toward which violence must be mobilized to preserve the continuity and safety of the in-group.

Further, it is important because in the same way it makes no sense to rationally dispute trans identity, an essentialist argument, it similarly makes little sense to rationally dispute the

essentialist argument of the extremist and the violence (in this case, canceling, calling out, boycotting, or trashing) that, as Natalie points out, can destroy lives and drive individuals to suicide if they do not have a support network.

Instead, a more effective way to address this phenomenon would seem to be to expose and demystify it, recognizing the so-called “line in the sand,” as operationalizing a duality that eliminates the “grey zone,” allowing for unfiltered rage to be vented, potentially exaggerate harm in order to justify an attack, and indeed lead to violent, coercive, and oppressive relationships in which this binary establishes a hierarchy of moral purity, subjugating those less pure, while potentially destroying their lives.

There is, in a sense, a tendency for mob violence to engage in a kind of mimetic escalation, the desire for moral purity prompting a community to scapegoat an individual to relieve themselves of social stress that is assumed to only exist when the individual victim is purged, excommunicated, and isolated, if not altogether destroyed.

This appears quite successful in the short term. As Natalie points out, our culture feeds on such encounters. They make us happy, giving us a sense of righteousness as we feel we are upholding standards of justice. But ultimately, such scapegoating is unsuccessful in the longterm because none of the structural or systemic conditions generating the social stress and rage needing to be vented are actually removed. To do so requires more than targeting individuals, necessitating open dialogue and good-faith engagement to begin the process.

A larger lesson I think is this, namely that while cancel culture may be utilized primarily by typically marginalized groups who feel they are “punching up,” the culmination of collective

power is incredibly potent and effective in achieving a particular outcome. If a group of people want to destroy an individual’s life, they are certainly capable of doing so, especially if the individual depends on them for financial, social, and psychological support. Yet those most marginalized are less able to resist the potential for mob violence, and as such, are more willing to toe the line of a normalized rule or standard they see enforced, and thus engage in the type of unnuanced groupthink that characterizes extremist discourse – and which in turn provokes oppositional extremist discourse in kind, also with its tendency for potential violence.

Yet such a group is equally capable of achieving a particularly positive outcome, building up the institutional supports and social structures necessary to protect each other from systematic threats. Natalie brings this up when she expresses that while she finds it important for individuals to create their own identities and express their own truth, it should not come at the expense of factionalism that will inevitably be less effective in opposing external threats to the community.

Conflict is not harm, she reminds us, and for this reason invites and encourages us to approach conflict in ways that reduce harm, rather than exacerbate conflict in ways that do harm to all.

I appreciate Natalie, Counterpoints, and those willing to watch the entirety of the video. It may be that she has the right idea to leave Twitter, a place where nuance, tone, and depth are largely sacrificed for brevity, unfailingly contributing to misinterpretations and attacks. Perhaps it is true that only in a medium where we are able to see and hear one another, not just reading an out of context quote, but deeply engaging through active listening processes will space emerge for the type of communication conducive to understanding and collaboration towards shared goals.

My concern on this issue stems, quite apart from the host’s liver, from the fear that should similar events continue, the possibility for continued nuanced engagement in critical issues may disappear altogether from the public forum, replaced only with uncritical mob violence and the threat of excommunication due to expressing personal values, should they be disagreed with or even misinterpreted. As mentioned, being cis and straight (I guess?), I may not have a dog in this fight so to speak, and hearing only from her perspective has surely colored my interpretation of the controversy. As such, I invite others to watch the video (and other videos of hers and on the topic) and respond in kind. To do so I think would model the kind of discourse our culture so desperately needs at this point in time and invite back into our culture a commitment to diverse engagement.

In the Next Issue…

Beyond the Line and Back: My Radicalism.

A personal bio of my own journey into radicalism, the effect of schooling with Marxists, Communists, Black Panthers, far-left resistance, anarchists firebombing the homes of genetic scientists, radical environmentalist activism, and anti-civilizational discourse, and finding my way through scholarly inquiry into a critical frame of reference that situates terrorism and violent extremism within a wider framework. A critique of violence as ineffective and counterproductive. Suggestions for deradicalization.

Religious Nature of Ecological Resistance This article would highlight the totalizing worldview of environmentalism and thus the “no compromise in defense of earth” mindset that prompts resistance up and including violence. That is, according to definitions of extremism, any environmentalism deeper than the “bright green” or “greenwashed” versions will necessarily be included in extremist organizations. A survey of perspectives, organizations, and the religiosity within the language.

Suicide Bombers and Pipeline Resistance: Sacrificing Civility In the same way suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves to affect and influence the larger dominant culture they exist within and orient themselves against, pipeline resistance can be seen to engage in similar theoretical orientation: the resistance of fossil fuels for instance necessarily means the collapse of civilization that requires an energy return on energy invested that can only be achieved through fossil fuels. Suicide bombers, mass shooters, and pipeline resistance can thus be seen as engaged in a similar worldview: accelerating collapse for the sake of an unknown ideal future reminiscent of some pristine past.

Anticivilization Tendencies and the Myth of the Noncombatant This article addresses the issue in radical environmental terrorist groups of civilians who are seen as complicit with industrial society, and therefore uses indiscriminate violence (bombs on busses) as a tactic. This complexifies the traditional definition of terrorism as attacking non-combatants, suggesting in an era of total war where there is no such thing.

Antifa, Acceleration, and the Collapse of State The reason why Antifa is willing to fight fascists, even if it is ineffective and counterproductive. The symbiotic nature of extremist groups. The desire to accelerate the collapse of the state. Challenging the monopoly on violence. Insurrection and violence as a still uncritically examined methods for social change.

Neoliberalism and Fascism as Agrilogistics The green anarchist idea, recently repackaged by environmental philosopher Tim Morton, suggests that agriculture creates a binary in consciousness between culture and the “nonhuman” that leads to opposition and oppression. Agrilogistics – the system needed to maintain agrarianism – itself requires violence and a severance from what he calls the “symbiotic whole.” While neoliberalism is simply the latest version agrilogistics, fascism is an attempt to harness energy against this system, yet at the same time

intensifies this severance from the symbiotic whole, willing to maintain the hierarchical oppression and include a number of others in the category of “non-human.” Violence in general is an expression of this severance, so to reestablish connection to the symbiotic whole requires a direct relationship to the land – a theme that is increasing in extremist discourse and offers important opportunities for countering violent extremism.

Analysis of Atomwaffen Communiques This article uses linguistic analysis to explain what it means to be “siege-pilled,” as well as the visual communiques to, through mixed methodologies, detail the worldview of Atomwaffen Division, link it through common themes to the wider whitepower network, articulate the fundamental fallacy at the heart of the analysis, and consider ways to disrupt the narrative accordingly.

Counterinsurgency as scapegoating This article looks at the work of Rene Girard to help understand the role of the extremist in counter-extremist narratives. Focusing on the degradation and destruction of extremist groups may be helpful to the internal cohesion of the society who has made these groups an enemy, yet invisibilizes the social injustices that generate and attract extremism in the first place. The result is the enrichment of those who profit from counter-enrichment, or who otherwise benefit from financial support due to their framing of the problem and solution without focusing on effective solutions. Girard’s contribution highlights this problem that has shaped the global war on terrorism and offers a way to approach terrorism and extremism by disrupting cyclical violence through nonviolent dialogue and understanding.

Ecoterrorists as Heretics of Neoliberal Free Market Capitalism This article highlights how the worldview of ecoterrorism is diametrically opposed to a government set up for the express purposes of colonial and extractive settlerism. This is important in understanding how and why environmentalists are often labeled “radical extremists” and “eco-terrorists,” which is problematic in that detracts from analyses of terrorism while prompting increasing radicalism.

Critiques of Pinker’s Violence Claims This article critiques the methodology behind Stephen Pinker’s book “Our Better Angels,” suggesting the claim that civilization is becoming less violent over time is dubious at best and more likely intellectually dishonest. By using a deeper lens of history, I show how civilization depends on state violence, in turn prompting violent resistance, and how the modern industrial age depends on the mass mobilization of its populace towards maintaining structural and systemic violence. Such a lens can help us understand the level of violence has increased, we are just less able to see it since it has been mostly invisibilized, thus the shock of violent extremism as an “anomalie” when it occurs.

Patriotism as Extremism A critical look at nationalism, patriotism, and identity boundaries as intrinsically providing the theoretical underpinnings of an us vs. them mindset that is susceptible to radicalization, extremism, and political violence.

Law Enforcement Officers as Extremists

Personal experience in the field of criminology and intelligence analysis programs as well as applying to law enforcement, highlighting the extremist language of LEOs (i.e. “bad guys”) that cultivates a culture of extremism, as demonstrated in various news events.

Deterrence Doesn’t Work for the Same Reason Violence Doesn’t Work An article critiquing deterrence and the need for alternatives to deterrence as a strategy to prevent or counter violent extremism. In the same way the coercive violence or the threat of violence utilized by extremists is counterproductive, the violent coercion used by law enforcement or security forces is similarly counterproductive, leading to a kind of “mimetic escalation.”

Cosmic Evolution of Rage Cosmic evolution is driven by both entropy and increasing complexity, meaning that in certain pockets of the universe, despite the general tendency for a gradual decline into disorder, energy flows can be harnessed by dissipative structures to drive increasing complexity. Regarding civilization, if violent extremism and terrorism are indicators for socioecological collapse (as argued elsewhere), then as a dissipative structure, civilization can engage in three strategies to stave off that collapse and retain its legitimacy for constituent members: increase energy flow, decrease mass, and/or shorten the time it takes for energy to flow through a system. This is to say, the solution to violent extremism and terrorism is a thermoeconomic flow structure through which energy moves as efficiently as possible. Indeed this is why fractal branching patterns are self-similar across scale (rivers, tree branches, blood veins, neural networks, galactic superclusters, language…). Examples of civic education and citizen science projects aimed at rehabilitating individuals and communities towards these ends are offered, to foster grass-roots resilience and reduce recidivism by addressing the root cause of extremism.

Terrorism/Extremism as Desire for Structural Transformation This article draws from the work of Michael Loadenthal in suggesting insurrectionists can make an important contribution to terrorism studies and security studies. Deterrence in a sense doesn’t work to prevent violent extremism, terrorism, and insurrection, because these are political responses to what is perceived as an unjust social order. The goal cannot be to simply get extremists to stop perceiving these structures as problematic, but rather to understand extremism as a desire for structural and systemic transformation.

Scarcity and Violence Looking at the role of environmental scarcity in contributing to ethnic violence. Drawing from several models in political science and criminology, this article highlights how demographic trends degrade the environment in which governments are situated, contributing to social stresses that in turn exacerbate criminogenic mechanisms and violence. In this regard, a more effective approach to counter-extremism, counterterrorism, counter-insurgency, etc. would focus earlier in the process to address the core underlying conflicts shaping the radicalization process.

Trauma and Psychological Carrying Capacity as Mechanisms for Extremism This article demonstrates how religions, worldviews, and social structures are constrained and probabilistically determined by the infrastructure, technologies, and

economic mode. Religious narratives then can be better understood as survival mechanisms and adaptive strategies that are passed down to keep a culture resilient and staying within the carrying capacity of the landscape. The modern industrial era has disrupted many traditional religions by introducing more complex infrastructure, technologies, and economic modes that are psychologically alienating. By focusing on the idea of solastalgia, the stress induced by watching the degradation of one’s home, one can understand how environmental traumas can prompt extremist responses, while formulating ways to maintain psychological carrying capacity in order to better resist such responses.

Apocalyptic Violence as Activist Frame This article looks at the archetype of the apocalypse as an unconscious (or conscious) frame for violence by extremist groups, seeing it as an irreversible threshold event meant to create a fundamental break with the continuity of oppressive empire towards a necessarily vague notion of future idyllic social relationships.

Political religions need violence, open dialogue disrupts violent ideology This article suggests how ideology can only be sustained through violence, and hence extremist perspectives necessarily derail into “second realities” and thus constitute “political religions.” Drawing from philosopher Eric Voegelin’s work, an analysis of how such political religions suffer from the same “pneumapathology” or spiritual disease that characterizes the modern world.

Leftist, Right-wing, Jihadi, Moderate, and Law Enforcement Extremisms A general framework that demonstrates how typical extremists are articulated as such because they are identified and marginalized by those in power. However, this social construction is both normative and transitional, in the sense that these are personal values being operationalized, and in a pluralistic society, those values shift according to historical context. There is no reason then to suggest those currently empowered (those moderating their extremism or those enforcing it) are not themselves engaged in extremist rhetoric and using political violence, which similarly must be addressed, especially as it is these politically empowered actors who may be most responsible for creating the conditions in which oppositional extremisms abound.

5th Generation Warfare and the Hypothesis of Coalitional Accelerationism A review of 5gw theories, and what the shift from fourth generation warfare to fifth generation warfare looks like, utilizing social media and super-empowered stateless individuals to facilitate network-centric warfare through multiple domains. Articulates the endgame of fifth generation warfare as the threat of coalitional acceleration.

Militant Co-Research – a Framework for CVE A research program to engage extremists. Focusing on the goals of the movement, working with participants and activists to design effective methodologies that themselves disrupt extremist narratives. Employing methods that articulate more nuanced analysis, and in turn orienting movements toward more effective pathways toward system transformation.

Axial Religions and their Successors as Anti-Civilizational Movements.

This article unites multiple religious movements in their opposition and resistance to the excesses of civilization before and during the common era. While perhaps unconsciously

opposed to urbanization and empire, contemporary environmental movements have consciously articulated this objective. Thus, there is the possibility for various similarly oppositional extremist groups to dialogue around common points of unity.