Recently, major news outlets reported that Anita Alvarez, the district attorney for Cook County, Illinois, had subpoenaed the grades, grading standards and electronic communications between students and professors in the Medill Innocence Project. Northwestern University runs the Medill project, which, during its 10-year history, has helped to secure the release of 11 innocent inmates.
Medill journalism students in the project research claims of innocence by incarcerated individuals. If the students believe the claims have merit, they give the information to lawyers who then decide whether to pursue legal relief. Medill students have gathered evidence that seems to exonerate Anthony McKinney, who is serving a life sentence for the 1978 murder of a security guard. Another individual, Tony Drakes, confessed to the murder during a videotaped interview with students.
The prosecutors' subpoena has sparked almost universal condemnation. Many commentators view it as a blatant attempt to harass the students and their professors and to chill advocacy on behalf of wrongly convicted individuals.
The prosecutors, however, will likely get the documents they seek -- unless a judge determines that the students are "journalists" under Illinois law. If the judge treats the students as journalists, then Illinois law would shield their communications from disclosure.
Full smear campaign
The merits of the subpoena depend solely upon the status of the students under the Illinois journalistic shield statute. Nevertheless, Alvarez has apparently decided to launch a full smear campaign against the Medill project.
First, Alvarez defended the subpoena by claiming that she wanted to know whether students received higher grades if they concluded that inmates were innocent. Now, Alvarez has made the salacious claim that Medill students paid two witnesses for their testimony.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Cook County prosecutors argued in court yesterday that Drakes received $40 from a cab driver hired by the Medill project and that he used the money to purchase "crack cocaine." Prosecutors also argued that students paid Michael Lane, a friend of Drakes and possible accessory to the murder, between $50 and $100 and "took him out for cocktails and dinner and flirted with him." Prosecutors, however, provided no other details regarding the payment to Lane. These assertions reflect absolute hypocrisy and desperation by the prosecutors.
Prosecutors "pay" witnesses all the time. In exchange for testimony from witnesses, prosecutors pursue lesser charges, or they give them full or partial immunity. They also drop pending charges in other cases. Prosecutors also threaten harsher penalties if witnesses refuse to cooperate. Indeed, it is probably likely that prosecutors threatened Drakes, who confessed to a murder, with severe penalties before he "recanted." In order to question the students' credibility, Alvarez must also question the credibility of prosecutors across the nation.
Furthermore, the prosecution's assertions seem highly unlikely. Indeed, the Medill project has a simple explanation for the payment to Drakes, which suggests that prosecutors made the allegation purely for shock value, rather than substance. David Protess, the professor who runs the Medill project, says students paid a cab driver to transport Drakes and that he retains the receipt.
Protess also questions the sincerity of Cook County prosecutors who seem to believe that Drakes would confess to murder for $40. But these prosecutors are so desperate to conceal the truth that they apparently do not care about their own reputations or the reputations of the Medill students who pursue justice for wrongfully convicted individuals.
Jason Bruce, a Marine reservist in Tampa, Fla., attacked an innocent Greek Orthodox priest with a tire iron. Bruce has initiated a shameful legal defense: the priest grabbed his crotch.
The actual story is quite different. Apparently, Father Alexios Marakis, who speaks little English, became lost after his car's GPS system led him astray. Marakis followed several cars into the parking garage of a condominium in order to seek instructions. He approached Bruce, who was retrieving items from the trunk of his car. Bruce responded by chasing Marakis and hitting him several times with a tire iron. Video footage shows a tire iron-wielding Bruce chasing Marakis. Marakis's GPS records confirm his assertion that he came to the area while trying to reach another destination.
Police arrested Bruce after he gave several inconsistent explanations. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Bruce said that:
Bruce's allegation that Marakis grabbed his crotch is an example of the controversial "gay panic defense." The gay panic defense allows defendants to claim provocation as justification for violent acts they committed. The defense is not uniformly recognized, and it is widely criticized by legal scholars.
The gay panic defense is homophobic because it rests on the assumption that a gay sexual advance is so provocative and threatening that, with or without physical contact, it warrants a violent response. This is not the law regarding heterosexual sexual advances.
Furthermore, Bruce's conflicting explanations suggest that the defense is a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, his lawyer, Jeff Brown, is running with it. According to Brown the following series of events took place:
The bearded man wearing a robe and sandals was clearly trespassing in the garage. In a sudden move, the stranger made a verbal sexual advance and grabbed Bruce's genitals. The Marine defended himself. And immediately, he called 911 as he chased him.
Brown is actually trying to peddle a gay Islamic Arab rapist terrorist defense. Brown's argument is a gross example of shameful lawyering.
Finally, this was not Bruce's first brush with the law. Although this information will probably get excluded from evidence if Bruce is prosecuted, in 2007, Bruce "was charged with misdemeanor battery ... for hopping over the bed of a tow truck and shoving its driver. He pleaded no contest." Today, Bruce remains violent.
When news broke in September of the apparent violent death of a Kentucky census worker, it raised some red flags. In addition to being horrifying and gruesome on its own merits, the case seemed to point toward the dangerous side of extreme anti-government sentiment. The census, after all, has been singled out on the right as a threat to liberty, and the worker who was found hanged in a forest reportedly had the word “fed” written on his chest. Nobody wanted to jump to conclusions, but frankly, it seemed open-and-shut.
Well, now the AP has a report that’s a reminder against making those kinds of assumptions. Apparently, investigators are doubtful that Bill Sparkman was killed because of his job, and instead have begun to suspect that it was a suicide.
Apparently, Sparkman’s body showed no signs of struggle, and his hands were bound in a way that would have left him able to manipulate a rope. Still, his son, his colleague and the man who found his body all believe that he was killed, based on what they saw of him before and after his death.
It’s all quite disturbing, and obviously does have some potential political implications. Many on the left have spent the year sizing up the resurgent far-right to determine just how worried they ought to be. The death of Sparkman seemed like another entry, and a tragic one, in the “be afraid” category.
Today’s AP story doesn’t necessarily refute the broad trend (or even the specific theory about Sparkman), but it’s still a good corrective. Sometimes we really don’t know the details, and should have the humility about these things. It's a particularly useful lesson in light of how many have responded to yesterday's shootings at Fort Hood.
In the last several weeks, two major events have reignited the controversy that engulfs capital adjudication in this country. First, the U.S. Supreme Court took a potentially significant step in expanding the role that federal courts play in superintending how states mete out the death penalty. Second, the New Yorker published a devastating article by David Grann about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man convicted and capitally sentenced for his children's murder on the basis of junk science and a mentally troubled jailhouse informant. Each of these events called attention to what the public perceives as our capital punishment system's signal failure -- its inability to ensure that those who are executed are actually guilty.
As the attention paid to systemic failure grows, so too does the apparent need to posthumously exonerate a capital convict. It is now fair to say that a posthumous exoneration is the pièce de résistance of death penalty opposition. But ardent defenders of capital punishment appear comfortable to defend on this territory. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2005 Supreme Court opinion that there is not "a single case -- not one -- in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit." For at least two reasons I discuss below, we must be careful not to overstate the importance of posthumous exoneration.
First, our system of capital adjudication is terrifically screwed up for reasons that have nothing to do with whether a state has accurately identified a murderer in a specific case. For starters, the death penalty is not colorblind. All other things being equal, nonwhite offenders are more likely than white offenders to be executed, and offenses against white victims are more likely to be punished capitally than are offenses against nonwhite victims. Racially motivated jury selection amplifies each of these problems. That similarly situated offenders are not being sentenced the same way is troubling enough; that race frequently accounts for that difference is morally revolting.
Moreover, some jurisdictions are derelict in enforcing Eighth Amendment restrictions on capital punishment that do not involve questions of guilt. For example, although the Constitution forbids the execution of offenders who are either incompetent or mentally retarded, a number of states have systematically undermined these prohibitions by adopting overly restrictive or nonscientific tests for these clinical phenomena. Another example involves mentally ill offenders, who may be executed only if a court's charge to the jury allows it to consider whether the defendant's illness mitigates culpability. For almost two decades, Texas fought tooth and nail to carry out executions imposed under jury instructions that unconstitutionally failed to permit sufficient consideration of mitigating evidence.
The role of race, and the way states undermine capital eligibility restrictions, are two problems that have nothing to with how accurately the criminal justice system identifies murderers. The unrelenting emphasis on identifying a person who has been executed for a crime he or she did not commit runs the risk of sidelining these otherwise powerful critiques of the death penalty.
Second, attempts at posthumous exoneration in individual cases can be counterproductive because they can create what I call the "Coleman effect." In 1992, Virginia executed Roger Coleman for murdering his sister-in-law. Coleman had insisted on his innocence until his dying breath, and his sentence drew considerable attention when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In 2006, then-Gov. Mark Warner ordered that the DNA evidence in the case be retested using more advanced methods. Death penalty opponents hoped that, by conclusively establishing Coleman's innocence, the posthumous tests would erode the legitimacy of capital punishment in the United States. The testing had precisely the opposite effect. It conclusively established Coleman's guilt, and reinforced a competing narrative -- that government institutions effectively prevent executions of the wrongfully accused.
Ad hoc posthumous inquiry into the accuracy of capital dispositions is a high-risk endeavor. If the test comes back the wrong way, then the result only further legitimizes the death penalty. To eliminate the Coleman effect, a posthumous exoneration program would require enough money to finance testing on a large sample population, so that we can be statistically confident that some tests will establish innocence. The reason we don't have such comprehensive posthumous testing has to do with how groups that seek exonerations allocate scarce resources; these groups sensibly commit limited resources to exonerating prisoners who are still alive. There are one-off posthumous inquiries into the accuracy of specific executions, but the Coleman effect often limits the outlays that groups are willing to make for these types of investigations.
There is something unsettling about the very idea that posthumous exoneration is a burden that death-penalty opposition must assume. We don't need posthumous exonerations to tell us something that we already know from available evidence -- that considerable error inheres in the way we administer capital punishment. We know that many noncapital defendants are wrongfully convicted, and there is no reason to believe that capital adjudication is any more accurate. We know that the Innocence Project has used DNA testing to exonerate at least 17 death-row inmates, and it is inconceivable that there are not other cases that have slipped through the cracks. And we know that incompetent attorneys, junk science, false confessions, self-interested informants, prosecutorial abuse and unreliable eyewitnesses render wrongful executions a statistical certainty. In other words, we already know that we execute innocent people.
Case-by-case posthumous inquiry tells us only one thing that we don't already know: the identity of the wrongfully executed convict. But when we evaluate the institutional implications of wrongful executions, why is identity so important? Shouldn't it be enough that we know that such executions happen, and shouldn't posthumous testing be conducted comprehensively to discern trends and determine things like frequency? Justice Scalia might have been correct in pointing out that we cannot conclusively specify the identity of a wrongfully executed person, but he's certainly wrong to infer on such a basis that wrongful executions do not happen.
The hunt for the identity of a wrongfully executed person reflects the need to put a face on one particular critique of capital punishment. That hunt is admirable and, if structured the right way, well worth the cost. But the "innocence" critique need not have a face to be right, and the myriad other critiques of our perverse capital punishment system should not all stand or fall on our ability to specifically identify a wrongful execution.
In the midst of his amphetamine addiction, Stephen Elliott thought he was writing a true crime book about the murder of Nina Reiser by her husband, Hans. But that was only part of the story.
"The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder" is about that gruesome crime, but it is also a grim, soul-searching account of addiction and writer's block, all within a memoir about a life of sadomasochism, group homes and general hard knocks, subjects that have anchored Elliott's six previous works, including his acclaimed fourth novel, 2004's "Happy Baby." That fictionalized version of his own turbulent adolescence, sexual proclivities and drug use made Elliott a cult favorite, known for transforming brutal experience into piercingly honest prose.
Unlike most addiction memoirs, written from the safety of sobriety, "The Adderall Diaries" comes from the frantic depths of dependency (a doctor prescribed Adderall for depression, though Elliott notes that it is, essentially, speed). At the same time, Elliott developed a morbid interest in the murder trial of accomplished computer programmer Hans Reiser, whom he interviewed from jail for Salon last summer. Hans' brilliance, the beauty of his mail-order Russian bride and the sordid details of her death (and love life) made for a trial obsessed over in high-tech circles and TV tabloids alike. In 2004, Nina had divorced Hans and began dating his best friend, Sean Sturgeon, who would go on to play a starring role in her murder trial. As it turned out, Elliott and Sturgeon ran in the same BDSM San Francisco circles and had shared ex-girlfriends, and Elliott had even participated in a bondage photo shoot in Sturgeon's apartment (though he didn't know Sturgeon at the time). Drawn in by his personal connection to the case, Elliott sat in the trial for nearly six months, inspired by other novelists-cum-true crime writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.
The murder trial contained more twists than usual: At one point during the investigation Sturgeon cryptically confessed to "eight murders, maybe nine" of his own -- revenge, he said, for the physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child in an East Bay commune. Add to this Elliott's own ruminations about his estranged, abusive father -- who also confessed to a murder in an unpublished memoir, though Elliott could never verify it -- and you have a frenzied exploration into the arbitrary nature of truth and innocence, with mystery and speculation at its core. As Elliott writes at the beginning of the book, "This is a work of nonfiction ... Much is based on my own memories and is faithful to my recollections, but only a fool mistakes memory for fact."
Since finishing "The Adderall Diaries," Elliott founded an online culture magazine, the Rumpus, and has both written and lectured about using the intimate details of his life as writing fodder. When I met him in a Manhattan coffee shop, he proudly held the first bound hardcover copy of "The Adderall Diaries" -- which he called the best thing he's ever written -- and spoke candidly about why most addiction memoirs are bullshit, a newfound love for his father and the connection between writers and suicide.
At the beginning of the book, you write about not always trusting your own memories and what others say. In "The Adderall Diaries," does it matter if the stories are true or not?
In the end it's weird. My father's confessions, Sean Sturgeon's confession to eight murders and even Hans Reiser's confession to murdering Nina -- which he did, but not in the way he confessed -- all three of these confessions were false. In the end it's really a book about not knowing. And about how the lie mixes with the truth and becomes inseparable. We either accept that memories are true, or we accept that there is no truth. Our memories of events are so divergent that they're completely incompatible, and it's impossible to know.
It is a fact that Hans Reiser murdered Nina Reiser -- that's a very important fact, but I don't think we'll ever know why. Hans thinks the reason he did it was for his children -- but in that case he's lying because he's lying to himself. It's complicated.
The book turned out to be much more about your father than you anticipated, and you have a tangled history with him. He's been known to even post online reviews of your books disputing your retelling of the past. Can you talk about that relationship, and why you included him in this book?
He's already left reviews for this book, and I don't even think he can get a copy yet. I love him very much because he is my father. But it took writing the book to realize that my relationship with my father is the most important relationship in my life. Our history has been very turbulent.
I left home at 13, and the state took custody of me. We made up later and there was always a lot of resentment around that. By 2004 my father was regularly contacting journalists I was talking to; even if I didn't mention him, he would tell them that I was lying. I ended up basically not talking to him for five years. In the process of writing this book, I thought I'd made some real discoveries about us and I realized that I loved my father, which I don't think I knew. So I thought it was important that I meet with him and tell him about the book.
Originally, I was going to confront him about the murder he confessed to. And then I decided that it really didn't matter whether or not he killed this guy. That was 36 years ago, and I just wanted to take some of the poison out of our relationship. Then we met and I wasn't that successful, I guess, so after a couple hours, I asked him about the murder. And he acted like he did it. His initial reaction was shock and then he made a joke about it! I think he was surprised but I don't actually know. I don't even think I'm the right person to judge my father's reactions. I'm always wrong about my father. When I started writing the book, I was sure that he didn't do it. By the time I was done writing the book, I was no longer sure. I knew less at the end of the book than I did at the beginning.
It turns out that Sean Sturgeon's confession to eight murders was completely fabricated and a cry for attention. Yet at one point after the trial, "60 Minutes" wanted you to come on and talk about Sean's sexual history and role in the case, but you refused. Why?
A lot of what drew me into the story was Sean. We knew a lot of people in common. When I first met him, I was skeptical, but I liked him -- he really went out of his way to help people and to be nice. But I felt like "60 Minutes" was exploiting Sean. They wanted me to talk about him in a very salacious way and I said no. I sat in this courtroom for six months and one thing you learned from this trial was that Sean had nothing to do with Nina's murder. So after the trial when they wanted me to talk about his sex life, I didn't know why they didn't ask me about Hans Reiser, who I was an expert on by that time. I knew everything you needed to know about this case. So why would you want me to talk about someone's sex life? So I said no, and they tried to bribe me with the rest of the money they owed me. And so I threatened to take them to court, and they paid me. I was personally offended because they were sensationalizing S/M. They were trying to make a link between sadomasochism, bondage, kinky sex and Nina Reiser's murder. But kinky sex had nothing to do with Nina Reiser's murder, not even remotely. I thought it was exploitative and kind of disgusting, but that's what television is.
You wrote a piece for Salon in which you interviewed Hans Reiser after the guilty verdict came in. What was that like? How did you get access to him?
It was easy to get access to Hans Reiser in jail. Anybody can visit in a jail. It's not a prison -- you don't have to be on the list. Still, I knew other journalists had tried unsuccessfully, and so I went in with a plan. When I got there, Hans saw me and he knew I had been at the trial because I had been in court every single day. He picked up the phone and said he wasn't talking to journalists. I told him I wasn't a journalist, but that I wrote a book about him. He said I could write him a letter and he would answer my questions. I told him I didn't have any questions but if he had anything he needed to tell me, now was the time. And then he just started talking and it was just a flood that I couldn't control. I knew once I cut in he was going to stop, so I just let him go for like 40 minutes. And it was all about his victimhood, how he hadn't been given a fair trial and how everybody was out to get him. It was an endless stream and there was no remorse whatsoever. A few days later, he led the police to Nina's body and he's saying, I'm sorry. He definitely has no remorse. He feels completely dead inside.
The book is called "The Adderall Diaries" even though Adderall is only mentioned a few times explicitly. But the tone of the book is very reminiscent of the feeling of being on Adderall -- it is extremely humorless and matter-of-fact.
That's a very astute observation. The Adderall is always there in the book, and in so many ways it's about taking it and getting back on after getting off of it. I think Adderall is really bad for you. I think you get dependent on it and you don't solve problems you would have otherwise solved. You don't confront things because you think it's just the Adderall. It hurts your sleep patterns, it makes you inconsistent in your moods and actions. Adderall is chemically indistinguishable from the original amphetamines, so however you feel about amphetamines, that's how you feel about Adderall. It's the same stuff Ginsburg was writing about and Jack Kerouac was taking, and the Nazis when they were parachuting behind enemy lines on murderous rampages.
I'm still taking Adderall, but I'm against it. I don't think anyone should get on it. The logical conclusion of the book would be for me to stop taking it, but that's the problem with all these bullshit memoirs, these Elizabeth Wurtzel books, they come to false conclusions. The writer wants to give the reader what they want. I hate that because it's phony, it's a lie. That's not what life is. Now I take 10 mg of Adderall a day. I don't know if in the future I'll take less or more or stop. I don't want to make predictions or promises but I do think that Adderall is overprescribed. People get on it and it totally fucks them up. It's insane to put children on Adderall. Medicating your child should be a last resort. The child has to learn and get through these things, and make changes and adjustments on their own. What do you do when you have a behavior disorder and you're taking pills, so you don't learn the things that you need to do to combat the depression and then the pills stop working? It's the same thing with all these drugs.
Can you talk about your own experience with drugs, and how it affects your view of Adderall and other drugs now?
I've known several people that have died from overdoses. I came very close to dying from a massive heroin overdose. From ages 10 to 16, I would take anything that passed in front of me. I just wanted to numb out. I remember taking acid for the first time when I was 11 or 12 and remember specifically thinking, this is what it feels like to be happy. I didn't know what happiness was and now I know. I stopped taking drugs when I was 16. I started again at 21 or 22, overdosed and then I stopped again. I don't drink or do any drugs. I take Adderall, I drink coffee. I have many happy moments. Most people would say I'm funny. I don't think people think of me as depressed. The problem with depression is not being happy or sad, but when you're sad, how far do you go? Even if you're only sad once in a while, if you get really sad that one time, then it's a problem. As far as how you deal with that, I don't know the answer.
At the beginning of the book you write, "I feel ready to kill myself," and near the end, there's a section where you explore suicidal urges and depression. Why do you think these feelings are common among writers?
The book comes from a suicidal urge. When you feel suicidal you can write whatever you want. It really opens you up, and you have total creative freedom, but of course it's dangerous. You could say it has to do with the dilemma of the modern man and woman -- the existential dilemma -- but in the end it's probably just chemicals. I've noticed that it helps a writer to feel kind of manic and to think that what you have to say is so valuable that someone else would want to hear it. But those moments of mania can be followed by periods of pretty deep depression. And that's always been a part of my personality.
The year I spent on the street from when I was 13 to when I was 14 I tried to kill myself seven times. I still have the scars on my wrist. And I'm kind of glad I did try to kill myself and I have these scars to remind me that this is not some new thing and I'm not going crazy, it's just something that has always been there.
You devised something called the "lending library," where you loaned advanced copies of the book to anyone who signed up as long as they would read it within a week and then mail it on to the next person on the list. What gave you this idea?
They had given me 300 galleys and I was supposed to send the book out to media outlets. I did that, but I used 75 of the books to make this lending library. So about 400 signed up to read the book in advance and it was amazing because I got all these letters from people who had read my book. I had never gotten that much feedback from people. One guy that read the book started a Facebook group called "I read an advance copy of The Adderall Diaries" and I didn't start that group! It was great.
But the idea wasn't so much to market the book as it was a reaction to someone else's idea to market it. Somebody wanted to join this program with Amazon where you pay them to send the book to their top reviewers and their reviewers do advanced reviews. I thought that was crazy. Are those my readers? I just thought it was a total waste. We only had a limited number of advanced copies and normally, you'd send five copies out and have one person read it, but this way we could send one copy out and have five people read it. I don't care about selling books. I've never made any money publishing books, so why would that change? I just want people to read it.
Dear Cary,
I stole a large sum of money over a period of time from my job and was appropriately fired. I agreed to work out a repayment plan for all the money that I owe.
Although I am extremely lucky with the outcome, I feel remorseful and ashamed of what I did. I even attempted to commit suicide for the pain and guilt I felt (because of this situation, coupled with other things going on in my life). My career is probably shot to hell, I probably lost the trust of many co-workers/friends and I can't seem to move forward with my life.
I knew that what I did was wrong and I am deeply sorry for what I have done, but I can't seem to get past this. How do I forgive myself for what has happened and move forward? < p>
Ashamed and Lost in Chicago
Dear Ashamed and Lost,
Self-forgiveness comes from a recognition that though we have done wrong things, we retain a core self that is worthy of love.
There is a paradox, or difficulty, at the heart of this, whether you believe in an external power of forgiveness or not. We face what we have done, no matter how awful, but we come to this action filled with self-love. How can this be? How can we not hate ourselves for what we have done? How can we not grind our teeth at night for how we have screwed up our lives and the lives of others? And if we still love ourselves, does that mean that we believe we are innocent?
No. We are not saying we are innocent of the crime we have committed. We are saying that no matter how great our crime, we retain some kernel of innocent humanity, and that we remain deserving of love.
We balance these seemingly contradictory truths and live with them: Yes, even after committing a crime, we retain an innocent core self; it may only exist as a ghost self, or a fragile impression, a faint tracing of past innocence; but it is there. We were born into innocence, and that fact remains. It is to that self that we direct our nurturance and love.
This is a matter of the heart. But that is not all there is to it. There is a worldly component. When we transgress, we are cast out. A firing is a casting out. Yet unlike a society or village that might cast you out and then welcome you back from the forest, or a penal system that might imprison you and then release you, a company may fire you and forget you. There is little hope of being welcomed back to this particular company. Yet you need, for your own resurrection, to enact some kind of return. So perhaps you will feel it necessary to return to this same field with a different company. Or you will embark on a similar field, in a way that is informed by what you have learned through your transgression. In this way, having been cast out, you reinvent yourself in order to make a kind of return.
The ritual of exile and return makes vivid our passage. It gives us the feeling of "moving on." Lacking that ritual, you would naturally feel stuck. Look for ways to live in the world openly as a person who has committed a transgression and is making restitution. Perhaps you can be of help to others who are also struggling with feeling stuck and full of self-hatred. That will take your mind off your own problems and give you a way to be useful. Being useful in the world heals us and gives us back our place. It is one way of "returning." Speaking openly of what we have done and how we are working to correct it empowers us, and it empowers others; it takes the sting of shame away.
Finally, let me just say, as a layperson with no religious or political standing, as somebody you might sit next to on the bus: You are a flawed human being just like the rest of us, deserving of love and respect just like the rest of us. You needn't punish yourself any more. You're doing your time.
Makes a great gift. Can be personalized for the giftee of your choice. Signed first editions on sale now.
What? You want more advice?
In all catastrophes, there are always winners among the host of losers and victims. Bad times, like good ones, generate profits for someone. In the case of the present global economic meltdown, with our world at the brink and up to 50 million people potentially losing their jobs by the end of this year, one winner is likely to be criminal activity and crime syndicates. From Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.
Take Mexico, just now in the headlines. In late March, during her first trip there as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly asked about the burst of narcotics-related violence in that country, the thousands of deaths that have gone with it, the patent inability of the Mexican military to contain, no less repress, the drug trade, and the possibility that the country might be at risk of becoming a "failed state." Mexico itself may not be in danger of collapse, she replied diplomatically, but a very real danger threatens both countries from a rise in violent crime along the U.S.-Mexican border. "The criminals and kingpins spreading violence are trying to corrode the foundations of law, order, friendship, and trust between us," she declared at a press conference in Mexico City. To counter this danger, the secretary of state promised a militarized response that reflected the level of danger she imagined -- a significant increase in U.S. anti-narcotics assistance, including the expedited delivery of Black Hawk helicopters.
The Mexican drug trade itself is nothing new. The illicit export traffic to the United States and the ensuing bloody competition among drug traffickers for access to the U.S. market have long concerned U.S. and Mexican law enforcement authorities. In the last two years, however, the violence associated with this commerce has grown to unprecedented levels as the leading crime syndicates -- the Juárez Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, and Los Zetas -- have successfully resisted a fierce government crackdown, while fighting among themselves for control over key border access points. According to Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora, 5,376 Mexicans were killed in drug-related violence in the first 11 months of 2008 compared to 2,477 during the same period in 2007, an increase of 117 percent. And as times get ever tougher for ordinary Mexicans, recruiting for the trade grows ever easier while the killings only multiply. U.S. law enforcement officials now believe inter-gang warfare is spilling into the United States in a serious way, producing rising murder rates in border states like Arizona, California and Texas.
The ongoing slaughter in Mexico may be monopolizing overseas crime headlines, but other parts of the world have also seen sharp rises in criminal violence in 2008 and the early months of 2009 as the global economic crisis has deepened. With legal jobs disappearing, growing numbers of unemployed youth are unsurprisingly drawn to what's still available -- illicit professions or jobs in the military and police that, in many countries, are ill-paid but allow access to bribes. Just such a process appears to be under way in impoverished parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Drug Traffickers and Pirates
In fact, it's an irony that, as global trading and other aspects of economic globalization are breaking down, crime may be globalizing. Consider recent developments in Guinea-Bissau and Peru, when it comes to the growing reach and savagery of Latin America's drug traffickers.
On March 1, in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony on the west coast of Africa, unknown assailants killed Army Chief of Staff Gen. Batiste Tagme Na Waie and President João Bernardo Vieira within hours of each other. The two men had long been political rivals, and it is widely believed that President Vieira was behind Na Waie's assassination and was then killed in retaliation by members of the country's security forces.
Guinea-Bissau, however, has also become an important way station for the trans-shipment of illegal narcotics from Colombia to Europe. Many observers believe that the assassinations were tied to infighting among the drug cartels and their associates within Guinea-Bissau's political and military elites. While the killings may have been sparked in part by "personal hatreds [and] ethnic rivalries," said Joseph Sala, a former State Department official with knowledge of the country, a factor was also "the growing involvement of Latin American drug cartels."
In Peru, the pervasive lure of illicit drug profits is reflected in the reemergence of the Shining Path guerrilla movement -- this time as a cocaine smuggling operation. Originally a revolutionary Maoist organization, the Shining Path largely disappeared after its messianic leader, Abimael Guzmán, was captured by Peruvian anti-terrorist agents in 1992. Recently, however, a surviving faction of the group has reappeared in a remote, impoverished jungle redoubt, promoting the growing of coca and its refinement into cocaine. Although still professing loyalty to its Maoist roots, the guerrilla faction appears to devote most of its time to fending off efforts by the Peruvian military to suppress drug trafficking in the area. The result has been a spike in armed violence with at least 22 soldiers and police officers killed in the region in 2008, the highest death toll in almost a decade.
As times get tougher, increased criminal violence is also evident in two other striking ways: as rising levels of piracy on the high seas and as a spike in capital punishment in China.
The increase in piracy has gained particular notoriety since Somali pirates hijacked the Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker carrying more than $100 million worth of crude oil, in November 2008. In some sense, Somalia may be the poster child for what lies in store for far wider regions in a new era of criminalization. As a genuine failed state, after all, it has been experiencing the local equivalent of a Great Depression for years. While it has led the way on piracy, the phenomenon is on the rise elsewhere as well. The taking of the Sirius Star was only one of 293 incidents of piracy in 2008 – the highest number since the Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) of the International Maritime Bureau began compiling such records in 1992. According to the PRC's annual piracy report, 889 crew members were taken hostage in 2008, 11 were killed, and 21 are still missing and presumed dead; guns were fired in 139 of the incidents, up from 72 in 2007.
When it comes to China, whose booming economy was a global wonder until world trade took a tremendous hit last year, it's hard to gauge the level of violent crime, as officials there are said to systematically under-report it. However, there are indications that it is on the rise and that organized crime has secured a stronger presence in the country. In what is evidently an effort on Beijing's part to combat this trend, the government has vastly stepped up its executions of criminals found guilty of capital offenses. In 2007, according to Amnesty International, at least 470 convicted criminals were executed and another 1,860 (or more) sentenced to death. The just-released figures for 2008 show an enormous increase: 1,718-plus executions and another 7,003 people sentenced to death. Some of those killed may have been political prisoners falsely charged with criminal offenses, but most were, presumably, common criminals put to death to intimidate others who might engage in similar behavior.
The Rise of the Narco-state
These developments and others like them naturally beg the question: To what extent can any increases in violent crime in the coming period be attributed to the global economic meltdown?
Certainly the situation in Mexico suggests a close correlation. Like other countries dependent on exports to the United States, Mexico has been reeling from the current crisis. Total exports fell 32 percent in January, while automobile exports -- a major source of economic activity in Mexico's border states -- fell by 50 percent in the first two months of 2009. By one account, Mexico's export factories have lost 65,000 jobs since October, a number that experts believe understates the loss. Many economists now predict a painful 5 percent contraction in the Mexican economy in 2009.
One Mexican export business, however, is thriving in bad times: the drug trade. With so many people out of work or facing diminished incomes, the attraction of being employed by it has certainly risen. By some estimates, illegal trafficking, mainly to the United States, nets the Mexican drug cartels nearly $25 billion each year, making this one of the country's most lucrative industries, and despite an attempted government crackdown, there seems to be no downturn in sight. True, narco-traffickers risk being apprehended and doing jail time, but so many of Mexico's police and court officers are evidently on cartel payrolls that the likelihood of that happening remains modest for higher level operatives. With other job opportunities for poor young men dwindling, the appeal of easy money -- not to mention the faux glamour of an outlaw's life -- must seem irresistible to many.
The crackdown on drug trafficking being conducted by the Mexican government with strong U.S. backing has, paradoxically, made the narcotics trade more appealing as a profession. This is so because increased drug seizures have driven up the street price of drugs, thereby increasing profits for those who succeed in eluding the police and antidrug agents. Given the general economic environment, this is certain to prove a self-perpetuating system that will continue to lure ambitious or desperate young men into the drug trade.
As Professor Francisco E. González of Johns Hopkins University suggests in explaining this predicament in Current History magazine, "[I]t goes without saying that conditions of hopelessness and extreme life choices abound in developing countries such as Mexico. As long as these conditions persist, and as long as the system put in place to counter the narcotics trade leads to the generation of exceptional profits, there will continue to be individuals willing to play this lottery."
In fact, this observation applies no less well to many other countries suffering from severe economic distress. Take Guinea-Bissau and its neighbor Guinea, both essentially indigent countries that are widely described as "narco-states" (that is, states whose political and economic institutions have been thoroughly infiltrated by the Latin American drug cartels). Guinea-Bissau holds the ninth spot from the bottom on the overall U.N. human development index released in December, which measures living standards, health and quality of life globally. In terms of gross domestic product per capita, however, it's fifth from the bottom, just ahead of Liberia and Burundi. Hardly surprising, then, that a government almost incapable of otherwise generating income is thought to be heavily penetrated by the cartels.
According to U.N. officials, Guinea-Bissau reaps as much as $1 billion per year in illegal proceeds from the drug trade, a vast bounty in a country so poor. Drug trafficking "is indeed a factor in the current crisis," observes Carlos Cardoso, a researcher at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. "Drug trafficking seems to involve the military. Given the ubiquity of the military in political life, anything that affects it, affects the state."
Neighboring Guinea, once known as French Guinea, presents a very similar picture. Ruled until December 2008 by the military dictator Lansana Conté, it, too, had become a haven for South American narco-traffickers. "In the past few years, as Mr. Conté's health declined, Guinea drifted toward chaos," Lydia Polgreen wrote in the New York Times. "South American drug traffickers, who ship cocaine to Europe via West Africa, infiltrated the government at the highest levels. Mr. Conté's son Ousmane confessed on television [in February] to aiding the cocaine traffickers who had turned Guinea into a virtual narco-state." Lansana Conté died on Dec. 23 and power was usurped by a military junta headed by Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara; the junta's young officers have pledged to clean up the country and oust the traffickers, but many Guineans express skepticism about their capacity to accomplish this Herculean task.
An environment of poverty and chaos has long prevailed in Somalia, home to the most determined and aggressive of the high-seas pirates. Of the 293 piracy incidents noted by the PRC in 2008, 111, or 38 percent, occurred in the Gulf of Aden or off the coast of Somalia. Many of the most daring incidents -- including the seizure of the Sirius Star -- also occurred in those waters. By their own account, many of the Somali pirates are former fishermen driven out of business when the collapsed Somali state could no longer protect the country's rich fishing grounds against predation by the highly organized fleets of other countries. Now penniless, these one-time fishermen have taken up piracy to support their families. "Killing is not in our plans," the hijacker of a guns-laden cargo ship told a reporter in October 2008. "We only want money so we can protect ourselves from hunger."
A Syndrome of Crime, Violence and Repression
China, of course, is no Guinea-Bissau. Millions of Chinese citizens live in relative luxury, the beneficiaries of a quarter-century of unparalleled growth; but millions more still live in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on minuscule farms in the countryside or working as migrant laborers in the cities, mostly in factories making consumer goods for the export market. So long as China's economy was booming, migrant laborers were able to find work in the coastal export factories and send a bit of money back to their families in the countryside. Now, with Chinese trade figures in a major decline and many factories cutting back or closing due to the slump in exports, at least 20 million of these workers are locked out and Chinese officials fear a spike in social unrest and crime.
That 20 million figure was provided by Chen Xiwen, a senior official who heads the Chinese Communist Party's office on rural policy. "For those migrant workers who have lost their jobs, what are they going to do for income when they return to their villages? How are they going to manage? This is a new factor affecting social stability this year," he said at a news conference in February in Beijing.
That many of the migrants will be able to find remunerative work in their own villages is inconceivable -- plots of farmable land are far too tiny and, despite a Chinese governmental stimulus package, there are as yet few other sources of income. As a result, most of these unemployed former peasants will head back to the cities in search of any sort of work. The danger is that many will be cheated out of their pay by unscrupulous factory owners taking advantage of their desperation or will simply find no work at all, leading to angry protests (known as "mass incidents" in China). Count on one thing: As in Mexico and elsewhere, some of them will be drawn into organized crime activities or other illicit pursuits.
Acknowledging these risks, Chen Xiwen spoke ominously of the need for greater government preparedness to contain mass incidents and other forms of social disorder. "If a mass incident occurs, leading cadres must all go to the front line, and talk to the people directly, face-to-face, to explain things," he urged, rather than simply rely on police coercion and thereby provoke greater public anger.
This syndrome -- declining employment in the core economy, growing reliance on jobs in marginal enterprises or in an unofficial black-market economy, and rising rates of violent crime leading to increased state repression -- is likely to be repeated in a range of other countries suffering from the global economic crisis.
Russia is at particular risk from this syndrome. According to a World Bank report released in March, its economy is expected to contract by a staggering 4.5 percent in 2009 and unemployment is expected to reach 12 percent, doubling the 2008 figure. The consequences are sure to be severe: "[T]he number of poor people in Russia will likely increase by 2.75 million, wiping out part of the gains in reducing poverty in recent years." This, in turn, will force more people to make ends meet by any means necessary, including participation in the informal economy, petty thievery and organized crime -- thereby inviting increased repression by state authorities.
Russia has, of course, long been plagued by high levels of individual and organized crime. "The U.S. Embassy receives numerous criminal incident reports from private and official Americans on a routine basis. These incidents include, but are not limited to, racial violence, theft, vandalism, robbery, physical assaults, and murder," the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), a State Department agency, reported in February. The current economic crisis has, by all accounts, sharply increased the level of such lawlessness. Russian newspapers have reported increases in everything from shoplifting and aggravated assault to murder. "One of the most significant negative consequences of the crisis could be a change in crime trends," the chief prosecutor of Moscow, Yuri Syomin, observed in February. "If life becomes worse, then crime will rise."
One aspect of the growing violence in Russia likely to be replicated elsewhere is attacks on immigrants, who are often portrayed by racist and ultra-nationalist groups as taking jobs from native people at a time of employment scarcity. "There has been a steady increase in racially-motivated incidents and ethnically-motivated violence throughout Russia," the February OSAC report noted. "Attacks on ethnic minorities by young Russian ultra-nationalists who profess a sentiment of 'Russia is for Russians' have risen for the third straight year." These concerns were heightened last December when photos of the decapitated body of a Central Asian male, presumably an immigrant from one of the former Soviet republics, were sent to human rights organizations in the country by an ultra-nationalist group that claimed responsibility for his murder and mutilation.
Wherever one looks, then, the global economic crisis is destined to be accompanied by rising levels of crime, violence and -- increasingly -- state repression. Worried governments may attempt to forestall the risk of criminal disorder by spending more on law enforcement or, as in the case of China, stepping up the rate of executions. In a world on the brink, this is unlikely to deter those like the Somali pirates who "only want money so we can protect ourselves from hunger."
Without a global stimulus effort aimed at those at greatest risk of destitution, hunger and homelessness, expect an epidemic of global crime and boom times for criminal syndicates and cartels everywhere.
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