[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] I agree with. Thanks very much for having this conversation with me. Well, I'm so glad to be here.
So in the introduction to your book, The Feminist War on Crime, you describe yourself as a number of things.
You say you were a feminist, a former defence attorney, a survivor and racial minority.
And then you also describe the fact that much of your defending work was defending people who had been charged with,
you know, gender violence or gender based crime.
So to start with, you know, I wanted to kind of hear a bit about your experience of doing that kind of defending work and especially, you know,
whether there were ever tensions between, you know, coming out between these different elements of your identity when doing that sort of work?
Yeah, it's so interesting because I think this tension, what I call in the book and elsewhere,
the feminist defence attorney dilemma, really, from my experience, went back to being very young.
So I knew from a very young age that mass detention programs,
mass incarceration was a problem because I had grown up hearing stories from my mother about being in the internment camps during World War II,
where the in the American government put US citizens of Japanese descent, basically in detention camps.
And so I grew up with this, um, deep scepticism of government detention authority, especially that which was racialized.
But at the same time, you know, I grew up in the 1980s and, you know,
things were things are pretty sexist now, but things were also pretty sexist then, right?
And so I had this sort of, you know, idea that I was a feminist, um, throughout college that it was really important.
You know, anti subordination, women's rights. Um, and I didn't study feminism.
I actually studied metaphysical philosophy in college. Um, so I had interpreted a brand of feminism basically through the aether.
And so I believed, you know,
at the time and all the way through law school that feminism was coextensive with what I now know as one brand of feminism called dominance feminism.
And that is that male individual violence, right?
Individual intentional violence is the source of women's oppression and sort of the full source.
And we can incarcerate our way to gender justice one man at a time.
So this was a deep and painful dilemma for me.
I knew I wanted to be a public defender and represent poor people against the awesome penal power of the state,
and at the same time, I dreaded the thought of standing up for abusers and rapists.
And, you know, so strong did I feel this dilemma when I was about to become a public defender.
So finished law school, bound to become a public defender, a defence attorney paid for by the government.
And I was so worried about this,
this feminist part that I was more concerned with getting a case of misdemeanour domestic violence
or misdemeanour sexual misconduct than I was about defending somebody charged with murder.
Like I would rather defend the murderer. Exactly. I was more comfortable with that.
Um, you know, everybody deserves a right, you know, to a defence.
You know, maybe there's reasons for it. You know, the government gets it wrong.
Police can get it right. All right. All the charges murder.
You feel more comfortable, you know, listing off these reasons than all the reasons you had is as.
As a defence attorney. Right. And as somebody who's, like, sort of a critic of, you know, um, too strong of a carceral state.
Um, I had in the murder context. But when it came to like, even a misdemeanour, like domestic violence, all these images flooded in.
And, you know, that made me a participant in patriarchy.
And I, you know, and I was thrown in this. So that's how you kind of felt starting out. Yeah.
Did did something change during the course of, you know, doing that work?
You know, as you became experienced with it? Right. So this is why I think it's so important that theory meet practice.
Because then I practised in a specialised domestic violence court, actually the second one in the United States.
Um, you know, where judges are especially trained to take domestic violence seriously?
Um, prosecutors are told not to drop cases, and there's mandatory arrests.
And what I saw in this grand, sort of feminist, enlightened experiment was what you might expect.
I would see in Washington, D.C., in criminal court. Poor people of colour in a revolving door of misdemeanour prosecution, incarceration,
more economic marginalisation, which set up their social stressors for even more violence.
Um, you know, I saw prosecutors proceed with cases against women's wishes, separating families.
Um, even when the women were coming in and saying like, no, like I kind of need him not in jail.
They would say, well, you know, you're obviously coerced. You don't know what you're talking about.
And you were unsure that there was a kind of a victim, a genuine or a justified victim protective kind of rationale for this.
You were sceptical of that. I think there was a victim protective rationale.
Right. But the victim protective rationale wasn't tempered with other considerations, like for example,
the narrative for the victims rights advocates as they were taught in their law schools, and a lot of them were law.
Student in clinic was, hey, if we don't get these guys in jail, women will die.
Right. That is a very popular narrative.
Social science has shown that there might actually be a higher correlation between putting the person in jail,
sort of, for that period of time and women dying. One of the theories being it deters violence,
interruption because of the woman knows that this is going to trigger this whole penal machine that she has no control over.
She won't make the call. There you go. Right. And so I do think it came from a real place of, like, women are going to die.
These are the most vulnerable women among us.
You know, they're really oppressed by abuse. Abusers.
This is their main source of pain in their life is this man.
And it's best to get them out of their lives.
Even, you know, on on his pain of arrest, and I'm just really angry at him for being privileged and violent.
Yeah, those are, you know, those are totally good to understandable thoughts.
But the reality on the ground is completely different.
And so yes, some of the women feel coercive, controlled, not to go forward but more often.
And the social science bears this out.
They were negotiating many different factors in their lives, including what, in their knowledge, made them safe.
Right. And so this idea of just completely discounting not only the, the the woman's wishes,
but also the man's story because of a lot of the abuse and violence,
was also at the intersection of marginality, poverty and race and and could be dealt with in other ways.
You have this sort of top down imposition. Um.
In the name of good. But it seemed like.
I'll just tell you. My dilemma evaporated when I saw the actual operation of a criminal legal process that feminism built.
Because you came to the conclusion that, you know, these policies, such as mandatory arrest,
simply kind of wasn't doing anybody any good in so many of these cases,
you know, not not just the perpetrator, but also the victims a lot of the times.
Yeah. And I and, you know, this is when I was practising,
I hadn't yet become a professor who's now read all the social science on it, which seems to back up what my impressions were,
because when you think of it, even just like as a layperson, you get a couple that are entrenched in so many problems, um, including violence.
Right. And it might be mutual. More often it is not equal.
right? It is gendered. It is male on female. Um, but there's violence in their lives.
There may be violence against children at at different levels.
Right. Um, and so what we do in these scenarios, if the woman is, is lucky enough to escape,
not going to jail herself if there's other kinds of violence or drugs or prostitution going on.
Um, you know, what we do is say, okay, we're going to have a system that basically puts this person in jail or prison for six months.
Yeah, right. Unsolved. Right. And, you know,
it's kind of like any it's kind of like all the reasons why I think a young law
student or a incarceration sceptic like me would become a public defender.
You have serious reservations, both about the model of the criminal legal system and its actual practice.
When you see just that, it really disproportionately impacts marginalised people.
Sure. And especially in the United States, black people.
Right, who have this history of a relationship with penal law that's, you know, based in control and enslavement.
So like when you see all that, you have these objections to the system, but you just have carved out, right, like these feminist scribes.
So this is kind of this speaks to the core tension that you explore in your book.
It's kind of at the heart of the book is that you explain how, you know,
most people who consider themselves kind of feminist progressives or let's say,
kind of many people are generally have this anti carceral bent, you know, this anti carceral ideology.
They think that mass incarceration just isn't the answer to so many problems, including problems that are problems of crime.
And then yet you use exactly this phrase in the book you said. But then they have this carve out for gender crime, these very same people.
As soon as it comes to sexual offences. Sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, they seem to go in entirely the opposite direction.
And then the answer is just, you know, penal answers more and more and more, you know,
more expansive offences, um, you know, greater penalties and this sort of thing.
And, and you're kind of trying to grapple with, well, how does somebody hold those, those two thoughts in their head?
So I mean, I'm wondering, is there anything in your view that could explain or justify that kind of exceptionalism around gender crime and sex crime?
Or is it something that, you know, is is just unfathomable? No, it's not unfathomable because I was there.
Right. Um, and and I think what happened was when I look back at the history and I could just keep on the domestic violence,
which isn't unrelated to sexual violence. Right?
I mean, in fact, a lot of the sexual violence happens within relationships of violence, But in both movements,
if you look at least at American feminism and you're looking at the feminism of sort of the late 60s and 70s,
I mean, this was a very anti-state, anti-government, uh, brand of feminism.
I mean, it was born of like sort of this Vietnam War era scepticism.
And when you look at the initial feminist proposals on what to do about domestic violence, they ranged right from, you know,
batterer intervention and psychological help to resources, money, housewife wages, you know, um, shelter, opportunities, anti-poverty.
It wasn't criminal law that was the default. In fact, when you looked at the social, the social scientists, the feminist, you know,
um, and even, you know, less so the lawyers, but even some in the law arena.
Um, hardly anybody endorsed criminal law. Mhm.
Um, in fact, even the shelter programs that had to be funded by the government and required them to meet these bureaucratic regulations.
One feminist called it the Nightmare in New York when they had to apply and certify women as battered and things like that.
Like even that level of government intervention. Like really bothered feminists.
Really? I mean, that seems so far away from I mean, I guess, you know, what I think of as mainstream feminism now.
So, I mean, what happened between them between then and now and so, so between then and basically the mid 80s,
in the mid 80s, feminists came to the conclusion that the law enforcement model was the only model.
So how did that happen? How did that happen? Well, I think lawyers had a lot to do with it.
Um, there were some lawsuits on behalf of women who suffered from abuse.
And these were real women facing horror stories like horrible abuse.
And they were begging and pleading for the police to intervene.
And the police didn't intervene.
And, um, you know, lawyers brought these lawsuits on behalf of the class of women, understandably, to get police to intervene.
Right. And, you know, the narrative is, well, police aren't intervening because they love batteries,
because they're probably better as themselves than they love batteries. Right. Um, and so these lawsuits were were successful and they changed policy.
And at the same time, we had a burgeoning tough on crime movement.
Okay. Um, and awareness of incest and Abuse.
Right? As a problem of the breakdown of the family. Right.
So there was a family values. So there's this confluence of factors that are leading everybody.
Right. And sort of criminal law. Strange bedfellows as well.
In one sense, you know, kind of the tough on crime and family values, people combining with the feminist movement,
who traditionally you would think, you know, would not be fighting for the same cause.
But we see that over and over again, at least in the United States, around sex,
with the latest being, for example, online advertising of prostitution.
Right. So, so that received overwhelming bipartisan support in the United States, which is right.
And as did the deep fake news. And look, I'm not saying they're they're bad policies or whatever.
They they need to be discussed on their own. But the point is anti-sex, right?
Sort of moral family values and feminist anti-trafficking anti-trafficking narratives, those often are very close together.
So basically in this day, though, I think that the idea really was there.
There were some sexist cops out there who were like communing with abusers. Sure.
But they actually did a study in 1980 of the reasons why there weren't arrests.
And it was a lot more complicated than that.
Um, you know, police didn't like to go on these calls because they'd be called in a highly dangerous situation.
And then at the end, whether they arrested somebody or not, everybody was mad at them.
Nobody was like, yay! You know, you you did it. You saw the problem.
And they were like, if they caught the guy shoplifting at the store, people were like, yeah, you know.
Yeah, right. Um, and the number one reason they said for not arresting is that the victim didn't want an arrest.
Right. So, you know, it was always a more complicated story than sort of.
We're begging. Every victim is begging police to arrest, and they're refusing.
Yeah. Right. And I think it was the failure to sort of see that bigger picture.
And I don't blame the lawyers because they're getting the women who come to them to court.
Right. But it really did paint a very narrow picture of horrible abuse.
That's solely the fault of a bad man who must be stopped and deserves it and must go to jail, or he will kill, kill, kill.
Right. When? When in reality, yes, there would have been cases like that,
but many of the cases in which arrests aren't being made are just far more complicated, right?
Far more complicated. And even in cases like that, it's a very delicate dance of preserving safety.
Right. And I know that we want to get what we imagine to be these horrible, privileged bad guys.
As a public defender, a lot of these horrible, privileged bad guys were maybe horrible and privileged vis a vis their partners,
but they kind of were like not privileged in life either.
And so there's just a lot going on in these cases that I think the flattened narrative of,
you know, sort of bad, evil, individual man, um, completely helpless woman who we need to save.
And I'm not saying that that's that's very reductive of it, but I do think that that narrative is as had a colouring effect, a very profound one.
So another area that you hone in on in the book is the feminist rape reform agenda, you know, decades in which, you know,
feminists have campaigned and successfully in many cases campaigned for change in definitions of sexual assault, kind of more expansive definitions,
a better understanding of what rape really looks like, taking rape more seriously, counteracting rape myths and all this kind of thing,
many of which, you know, many such things are very good, obviously, you know, and have have yielded good results.
Um, but then you also point to certain policies, you know,
procedural policies or changes in substantive definitions of laws that have had this effect of simply kind of,
you know, producing more mass incarceration of the kind that doesn't do any good.
So I wondered if you could kind of just maybe point to any particular policies or changes that you think have had these kind of detrimental effects?
Yeah. So I think just in the larger scheme of feminism,
one of the things I've been concerned about looking into is the way in which the focus on sexual justice and injustice,
however you construe that, um, has sort of eclipsed the focus on other things.
And in the United States, it was it was really interesting to me that this, this moment, you know,
that really extended from 2012 all the way through the MeToo moment where campus feminism was really
captured by this idea that there were not enough government and institutional regulations into sex,
right? Like that. Too much sex was harmful. And we needed we needed more, more sort of governance in this space.
And I do think that is important. Um, absolutely.
Although, you know, the the pushes for for the expansive definitions, like we can argue about whether they were good or not,
but, but it was almost a culture and knowledge producing enterprise.
You could think of more and more things as more and more devastating. You can educate people what is sexual assault.
And they were wrong for not thinking it was before. And and it strikes me that during that very time it was quite obvious that reproductive rights,
the rights against government interference in the sexual and reproductive realm, were about to go away.
And it received just Far less press coverage, far less.
This would be the site for me of feminist campus activism, and and there just wasn't a lot on it.
And the way that the call for more regulation of sex eclipse the danger of too much regulation in that realm was just very striking to me.
And I think that has happened many times throughout history.
Yeah. And so what I would say with the, with the today's sexual, um, sexual consent type laws, affirmative consent,
I mean, I really would challenge us to think about who are the winners and losers of this regime.
And so with the with the yes means yes. Even before we get to the, the criminal law, you know, there are ways in which you can look at it.
Hey. Everybody should just be more open about sex. Talk more about it.
There'll be less. And maybe strive towards, you know, desire and enthusiasm as a kind of an ideal.
Um, if that's what you're into. I mean, actually, I don't know, because, you know,
there are some studies that show that male college students actually have sex
against desire more than female because they're doing it for sexual pressure.
Yes. And social pressure. So, I mean, you know,
I it's not 100% in my expertise to say how people ought to negotiate their own sex lives and their own interests in desire
or in another person to like within the realm of what they agree to and whatever they want and however they want to.
Like people have sex all the time, and this can go cross-gender, but, you know, and maybe a feminist would say, but it's mostly women,
so it's sexist, but people have sex all the time to satisfy their partner and they don't consider it devastating.
And, you know, a lot of them aren't. Again, they're these abusive, unequal relationships.
But but some in more stable relationships are able to to negotiate that in different ways.
But but so anyway, so so negotiation and even desire might be worthwhile goals.
But the yes means yes standard was pretty clear and it was pretty gendered.
Mandy, to double and triple check with women to make sure they really want to have sex at the risk of devastation.
Yeah, right. And I know that, um, feminist philosophers and affirmative consent as a moral standard, people would say, well, that's not what we mean.
And okay, I understand that. Um, but I am pretty sure that's what a lot of people mean when they say affirmative consent.
And if you're asking me as a feminist, whether that standard is liberatory and maybe not so much like the.
We'll both negotiate. We both have interests. We both have desire. We want to treat each other well.
Right. Like. Yes, that's a feminist standard. Um, but the one, the ones that are emergent are not necessarily.
Somebody might say that on college campuses, you know, it's a particularly contained environment.
You know, it's a very, you know, sensitive time of life. It's young people and it's not the criminal law.
You know, we're not talking about incarceration.
So it's just an argument that I've heard is people saying, well, it's okay for colleges to insist on this higher standard of, you know,
you must obtain a very clear, explicit, yes, in one way or another, because the consequences are not, you know, are not crime consequences.
And, you know, another part of the argument is, well, it's always a it's always possible to,
to double check, you know, to make sure that you do have that. Yes. Right.
And absolutely, you know, I don't think we're talking about the same thing when we're talking about college disciplinary procedures.
And, you know, what's at stake in a criminal case?
I mean, those are just different. And I don't think anybody who's sceptical of some of these policies are.
You know, arguing it's the same thing. I think that's, you know, kind of a straw man.
But. But here's what's really interesting to me, um, when this movement started.
One of the reasons that students were calling on, um, their administrators to take care of predators.
They were saying, these are sexual predators. They're repeat offenders. These aren't my fellow student.
And maybe, you know, also had things going on, but these are monstrous offenders.
Um, was that the criminal law was inadequate? Uh, the police don't take us seriously.
So. So we so we defer to these. It wasn't like, oh, this is just because we have a super high standard in college.
It was like, these are real horrible rapes that because of a broken and lenient right?
Criminal legal system, we're not getting it. So we will deal with them this way.
So so this is a makeup, right? This is a make up for what we really think they ought to have.
So it's not that it was embedded in some alternate logic.
Right. Like alternate like. Oh. Criminal law has got a lot of problems.
And now we're going to do this. It was that the problem of criminal law is that it's not tough enough.
Right. And so unfortunately for us, we have to go to the second best thing, which is getting him kicked out,
possibly getting a red mark on his head and hopefully having the rest of his life ruined.
Yeah. Right. Like, kind of hopefully the intention. Right? Yeah. Um, but you know, we know that's not even going to happen.
So we're going to have to settle, right? We're going to have to settle for that. So that.
I mean, that was the narrative. I mean, and a lot of people agreed with it.
They're like, yeah, I do want, you know, the person said that they are bad.
They are predators. That's fine with me. Own it. Right. Like own the narrative.
And that's, you know, a prosecutorial position that has a lot of validity behind it.
Right. But what happened was very interesting. So all these policies go into effect.
They're highly disciplinary. They water down due process like process almost doesn't even matter anymore.
It's just, you know, whether the investigator how the investigator felt.
Right.
Um, and and one of the, the things that they required was reporting to the police when it rose to that sort of level, and, yes, as a college policy.
Yeah, as a college policy, because remember, the police who are trying to, like, navigate their own liability for all this, right?
And yes, there were some campus activists where like, we don't believe in mandatory reporting for but not many.
Right. Because it made every teacher a mandatory reporter.
And, you know, there are a lot of anti-rape groups that are against mandatory reporting.
But but again, you didn't hear the outcry out of sort of this police campus, you know, connection.
Um, and then George Floyd happen in 2020 and the sort of quote unquote, critique of carceral feminism, you know, became more popular.
That just means, you know, people sort of saying the ways in which feminism and mass incarceration in the United States have had a relationship.
And to caution about that, that became more popular.
And a lot of the title nine activists, because they were on the left, became prison abolitionists.
Right. And so there was this sort of, um, like revisionist narrative of title nine as, oh,
we always intended it from the outset to divert cases away from from the criminal law.
Right. Like, so we really meant this to be, like, totally antiquated kind of our informal way of resolving the issue.
This is how we resolve the issue, that we did this maybe without thinking through the criminal law part as much.
But now that we've thought through the criminal law part. We're going to think of this as always anti carceral from the get go.
Huh. Um which. Okay. That could have been true.
Right? If it were true. My sense that it is, it wasn't true.
And it in fact hasn't been true because affirmative consent has exploded off, uh, college campuses into the criminal law context.
And so you're saying you think there's kind of a creep from college campus definitions,
which maybe, you know, on from one view were intended to be just a suggestion.
You know, you're right, because here might be a good thing to do just to be just extra cautious.
We're going to train our students on it. And by the way, there's a 2019 study that they have trained the students on it.
They ask students to say the definition of consent. And they said consent means freely given affirmative consent and only yes means yes.
And then they had the students describe their last consensual sexual experience and nobody said yes.
Right? I mean, and people might say, well, there were other things that were obvious, but okay.
But that was the problem. That yes means yes was getting at. No interpretation has to go on here anymore.
And like people weren't doing it. And yet, you know, that has made it into the criminal law in many ways.
And I wrote my book in 2020, and by 2025, I would say even where it's not the formal standards,
prosecutors argue in every case that only yes means yes.
Really, that has resonance. Can we briefly just move into something slightly different, discuss the the case of Brock Turner.
Yeah, because you discussed this in your book and your analysis is super interesting.
And this is the the Stanford athlete who was really caught in the act, you know,
committing quite a serious sexual assault on an unconscious, um, woman who was also at Stanford, I think.
And the case.
He was convicted, but the case attracted a huge amount of attention because the sentencing judge sentenced him to only six months in prison.
And there was this huge outcry which which I remember at the time, I think was people interested in this stuff, remember it.
Outcry against the judge and suggestions that, you know, you know, the judge kind of found some kind of affinity,
you know, between himself, because the judge had been an athlete at Stanford and the judge was white.
Yeah. And I kind of I kind of bring it up because, you know, the idea that, you know,
college campus, you know, disciplinary policies are there to rectify something could be,
you know, somebody could think, well, it's brought out in this case because, look, it went to it went into the criminal law.
And look what happened. You know, a serious sexual assault was met with, you know, barely anything.
I mean, that was the outcry. And then as you described, there was even a campaign to recall the judge, which I think was ultimately successful.
Yes. Um, so you give from your point of view as a, as a former defence attorney,
Quite an interesting and useful kind of legal analysis of what was happening there in the sentencing.
So what is your take on what was going on in that sentencing and why the judge gave him that sentence?
Yeah. So the the sentencing was very typical.
Okay. And so what happens in a case like this is that the case will go to the probation department for a pre-sentence report,
and that probation officer will interview the victim,
interview the convicted person, um, and consider record background and a number of factors and make a recommendation to the judge and judge.
Persky was known as a judge that generally followed the recommendation of probation,
which, you know, um, you know, as a defence attorney, that can be a good or bad thing.
In a lot of the cases, the the probation officers are fair and they and their reports are very informative to the judge.
So the female probation officer in Brock Turner's case took into the account that Chanel Miller had said,
well, she didn't want him to rot in jail was her term, that he seemed sincerely remorseful.
He was really, like, upset about it, um, that he was young and had no record and had been intoxicated himself.
So this was the probation officers. This is the preservation officer sort of looking at the mitigating factors, right against the aggravating factor,
that this was a serious offence that made the victim feel a significant amount of harm and lasting harm,
but tempered with that, the victim didn't necessarily translate that into needing long punishments.
Um, and so the probation officer came up with a jail term, not a probationary term.
Right. Yes, a jail term. And, you know, this jail term was six months.
And I think if you've never seen the inside of a jail or a prison, you can imagine that's a slap on the wrist.
Right. You have no relation to it. It just seems like six months is such a short amount of time, right?
Yeah. Of your life. Of your life? Yeah.
You know that that that the the moments that Brock Turner did his crime were also a short amount of time in life.
It didn't make them insignificant. Yeah. Um, and I think anybody who would say, oh, well, yeah, this is a few minutes, you know, victim.
You know, we would say. No, no, these were significant minutes.
Yeah. And so anybody who's imagining six months in a prison is not a significant six months doesn't know anything about prison.
Okay. And. Okay. So, so so that's one thing I think that that that's one thing.
And the second thing is there were life consequences.
Again, if you don't know anything about having to register as a sex offender, you might imagine that that's a slap on the wrist.
Um, and, you know, Brock Turner also got informal punishment of being the poster child for rape.
But what a lot of people were saying at the time is he should face life in prison because Schnell Miller has lifelong, devastating consequences.
Um, and I don't I mean, I can't speak for her, but I don't think that was her position and that was not everyone's position.
But that was a very, very popular position. And they said that the only reason that he didn't get it was that he was white,
but there was just plainly no evidence, right like, to back up this claim.
Um, and then, you know, when you look at it, they would compare it to this one case of Corey Beatty,
who was a college football player, black, who had sexually assaulted a white woman.
And and there are ways in which this sexual assault was, was quite a bit worse.
Um, I'll spare the details of, um, who got 15 years and they're like, oh, that's because he's black, right?
But he got 15 years because the mandatory minimum for sexual assault in that state was 15 years.
So there was no judicial discretion, no sentencing in that case.
Right. And the judge also said, you know, this is a case in which I understand the student who then,
you know, was in grad school at the time, you know, this was a horrible harm to her.
But also, you know, this is 15 years in jail for for a kid who's 19.
Um, it is, um, you know, lifetime.
Or maybe it was 20 years, but I think it was actually lifetime sex offence registration.
And, you know, and my hands are tied.
And actually, when the Coalition Against Violence Against Women in Kiribati state came out with a statement on it,
it wasn't like, oh, he's black, he got too much. Here are all the white guys.
They said 15 years isn't enough. The judge could have given him 25.
Right. And that would have recognised the victim suffering. So you can have all these arguments that I'm really concerned about racism.
I'm really concerned about privilege. I'm really.
But in the end of the day, the narrative was, again a crime control, victims rights prosecutorial narrative, which is fine, right?
If you're the Coalition Against Violence Against Women and you have your arguments for this prosecutorial model?
You know, like. Like that's fine. But most of the people calling for Brock Turner to be even castrated, right?
Um, probably if you ask them about racialized mass incarceration would say like, no, I don't agree with it.
Right. Yeah. And I'm not calling them hypocrites. And you don't think these things can can entirely be separated?
Yeah. I think that you have to understand the relationships of sort of like spectacular,
monstrous harm doer narratives and like these really draconian consequences that see no limits.
But I guess the obvious question then is, okay, if not penal sanctions, then what?
You know, what should we do? What? What should be the solutions?
How should we address what seems to be an epidemic of sexual assault, sexual violence?
Because presumably doing nothing is not right. So I hesitate to use the word epidemic.
I mean, as we know, Epidemics, even medical epidemics, are politically constructed.
Some epidemics count more than others. Aides to certain political groups count it a lot.
Covid counted little, right? I mean, so.
So with an epidemic of sexual assault, I think what we can say is too many people are suffering a range of harms.
And and women are bearing the brunt of that.
Right. For for reasons that, you know, maybe some legacies of chastity norms, like feeling ruined by sex, investing too much.
And maybe over time we can change change that. But but we're we're with it now where women are bearing the brunt of sexual
norms that are allowing too many types of sexual encounters to be acceptable.
And and I think that that that is true. Right.
Um, am I going to use the word epidemic for for anything involving crime?
No, because I think I get it. Epidemic combined with sex makes people just not do reasoning anymore.
It just makes them like, you know, punishment. Um, but I'll tell you this one thing.
I think thinking slightly differently about Brock Turner, slightly less in epidemic sort of terms,
would have been that they would not have brought in new mandatory minimums to California law.
That was a direct result of the Brock Turner case.
You know, the governor then was a very liberal governor, and he said, I am not going to sign any new mandatory minimums.
I mean, California is notorious for the three strikes law.
That really I mean, California mass incarceration is just out of control.
I mean, it was the subject of of a of a, you know, widely known Supreme Court lawsuit that said this is cruel and unusual punishment.
And even the Supreme Court, right. Who are no liberals were like, oh my God, no, you have to do something about this.
This prison overcrowding and keeping people in prison till they're 99 years old.
You know, like you have to do something about it.
And what they ended up doing, this little aside, was moving the population from the prison to local jails, which was even worse.
Um, but but so, like, you know, I'm not going to add any new mandatory minimums.
And then Brock Turner happened and he said, well, this is merely closing a loophole, right?
I don't know what loophole it was. It was a loophole of not having enough punishment in that space.
But but so so that happened. Right. And so I think every time we get caught in that space will make a new criminal law like so.
One of the arguments of, of neo abolitionists,
that is feminists who believe that prostitution must be abolished is that if we don't continue to arrest,
you know, they're now like, we don't hate women prostitutes.
We don't think they're bringers of disease and vice like the temperance feminists did.
They're like, no, they're just very sad. Coerced.
I've heard them called ex children, you know, who've been subject to abuse and are held under the most horrible conditions.
But the only way to track them and eventually, maybe get them to testify against traffickers is if we arrest them.
Right. And so, you know, this idea that, okay, you know, you know, we're concerned with violent violence against women,
so we're willing to arrest women for our bigger, our bigger picture of what we imagine it's going to do.
You know, I think it's that same move as, oh,
we're going to force mandatory arrest on women for a bigger vision of of what they're going to do and who has helped.
And I think this, you know, happens over and over again.
So when they say that some of these mass incarceration consequences and the fact that, you know,
one of in fact, it might be at this point, the highest percentage of our prison population is sex offenders.
Um, you know, when they say, well, okay, what you know,
these were all unintended consequences when consequences are repeating themselves over a hundred years.
Yeah. You have to ask if they are unintended, right? Well, at least they're disregarded.
I'll just say I lean towards anti-capitalism myself, and I think increasingly so, you know, for all of the very good reasons that you've outlined.
But I wonder whether the, the burden for anti-capitalist is, I guess, to kind of, you know,
create more options, you know, explain, you know, and suggest to so what shall we do?
You know, when people are, you know, are clearly guilty, you know, of quite serious sex offences.
It seems like, well, doing nothing is not really an option.
And then at the same time, the ways of redressing these wrongs that are outside of the legal system.
I think for many people are concerned, there is kind of how ungoverned it is, you know,
maybe the absence of any kind of procedural constraints or procedural rights.
You know, you hear people using the terms mob justice and pitchfork justice.
So one thing, I guess, that the criminal law or, you know,
any kind of law affords us is at least, you know, some kind of order to, to the proceedings.
Whereas when we are addressing things just kind of informally and socially, it just seems like it's kind of chaos.
You know, it's just whatever people happen to want to do. Yeah.
So that's interesting because when you're breaking new ground on criminal law, because a practice is, in your mind, too widespread, right?
A negative practice, something sexual, deepfake nudes up, skirting whatever.
Um, you know, before there's the criminal law, it's not like you're seeing a lot of mob justice,
you know, uh, you know, pitchforks against the people.
It's just something that goes on that gets more or less condemnation that you don't think gets enough condemnation because it's going on too much.
Um, and so, like this idea that without the criminal law will have pitchfork justice is belied by the very fact that we don't have criminal law.
And to the extent that we have criminal law for a lot of things. I mean, it's really it's so limited, right?
It's enforced, so idiosyncratic against certain segments of society unevenly.
Like, we don't even know if it if it affects anyone's incentives at this point.
It's such a morass. So, I mean, I just don't think that there's evidence that the alternative to criminal law is pitchforks.
Okay. Um, and I think that, you know, whenever you say, like, hey, before you make a new criminal law or are thinking of strengthening the old one,
or maybe are considering proposals to dial it down a little.
You know, if I'm on the side of less criminal law, I have to give you a perfect utopian system for how no harms will ever be done.
I think it's kind of weird because we know that the harms are being done and, you know, maybe less so.
You know that that I leave to criminologists to see how much mass incarceration has correlated with reduced crime rates.
They say like maybe 10%. And then the rest is other things. But, you know, that's all a contested number.
But but the point is we have this system and we have the system with proven and studied pathologies.
Right? Right. And you're and you're about to use it without considering, for example, what the sex worker rights group Red umbrella has said about,
you know, dealing with trafficking and getting trafficked women resources.
You're dealing with it without what a lot of the community justice people are saying about how they deal with,
you know, domestic violence in and amongst their relevant community.
And if you look back at the history, like in domestic violence, there were a series of researchers that were looking at social stressors and they
like had a lot of good ideas of how to reduce the antecedents of male violence.
And they were just completely shunned from view because they were making excuses for men.
Right. So I think it's not that there aren't ideas out there.
I think it's that the the carceral narratives really are very invested in this idea that chaos, anarchy and lawlessness not right.
Right. And we don't have we don't have real proof of that.
Right. I agree, but thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me.