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[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.

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So in the introduction to your book, The Feminist War on Crime, you describe yourself as a number of things.

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You say you were a feminist, a former defence attorney, a survivor and racial minority.

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And then you also describe the fact that much of your defending work was defending people who had been charged with,

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you know, gender violence or gender based crime.

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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,

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whether there were ever tensions between, you know, coming out between these different elements of your identity when doing that sort of work?

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Yeah, it's so interesting because I think this tension, what I call in the book and elsewhere,

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the feminist defence attorney dilemma, really, from my experience, went back to being very young.

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So I knew from a very young age that mass detention programs,

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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,

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where the in the American government put US citizens of Japanese descent, basically in detention camps.

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And so I grew up with this, um, deep scepticism of government detention authority, especially that which was racialized.

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But at the same time, you know, I grew up in the 1980s and, you know,

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things were things are pretty sexist now, but things were also pretty sexist then, right?

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And so I had this sort of, you know, idea that I was a feminist, um, throughout college that it was really important.

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You know, anti subordination, women's rights. Um, and I didn't study feminism.

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I actually studied metaphysical philosophy in college. Um, so I had interpreted a brand of feminism basically through the aether.

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And so I believed, you know,

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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.

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And that is that male individual violence, right?

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Individual intentional violence is the source of women's oppression and sort of the full source.

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And we can incarcerate our way to gender justice one man at a time.

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So this was a deep and painful dilemma for me.

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I knew I wanted to be a public defender and represent poor people against the awesome penal power of the state,

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and at the same time, I dreaded the thought of standing up for abusers and rapists.

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And, you know, so strong did I feel this dilemma when I was about to become a public defender.

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So finished law school, bound to become a public defender, a defence attorney paid for by the government.

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And I was so worried about this,

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this feminist part that I was more concerned with getting a case of misdemeanour domestic violence

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or misdemeanour sexual misconduct than I was about defending somebody charged with murder.

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Like I would rather defend the murderer. Exactly. I was more comfortable with that.

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Um, you know, everybody deserves a right, you know, to a defence.

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You know, maybe there's reasons for it. You know, the government gets it wrong.

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Police can get it right. All right. All the charges murder.

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You feel more comfortable, you know, listing off these reasons than all the reasons you had is as.

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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.

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Um, I had in the murder context. But when it came to like, even a misdemeanour, like domestic violence, all these images flooded in.

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And, you know, that made me a participant in patriarchy.

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And I, you know, and I was thrown in this. So that's how you kind of felt starting out. Yeah.

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Did did something change during the course of, you know, doing that work?

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You know, as you became experienced with it? Right. So this is why I think it's so important that theory meet practice.

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Because then I practised in a specialised domestic violence court, actually the second one in the United States.

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Um, you know, where judges are especially trained to take domestic violence seriously?

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Um, prosecutors are told not to drop cases, and there's mandatory arrests.

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And what I saw in this grand, sort of feminist, enlightened experiment was what you might expect.

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I would see in Washington, D.C., in criminal court. Poor people of colour in a revolving door of misdemeanour prosecution, incarceration,

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more economic marginalisation, which set up their social stressors for even more violence.

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Um, you know, I saw prosecutors proceed with cases against women's wishes, separating families.

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Um, even when the women were coming in and saying like, no, like I kind of need him not in jail.

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They would say, well, you know, you're obviously coerced. You don't know what you're talking about.

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And you were unsure that there was a kind of a victim, a genuine or a justified victim protective kind of rationale for this.

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You were sceptical of that. I think there was a victim protective rationale.

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Right. But the victim protective rationale wasn't tempered with other considerations, like for example,

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the narrative for the victims rights advocates as they were taught in their law schools, and a lot of them were law.

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Student in clinic was, hey, if we don't get these guys in jail, women will die.

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Right. That is a very popular narrative.

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Social science has shown that there might actually be a higher correlation between putting the person in jail,

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sort of, for that period of time and women dying. One of the theories being it deters violence,

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interruption because of the woman knows that this is going to trigger this whole penal machine that she has no control over.

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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.

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These are the most vulnerable women among us.

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You know, they're really oppressed by abuse. Abusers.

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This is their main source of pain in their life is this man.

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And it's best to get them out of their lives.

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Even, you know, on on his pain of arrest, and I'm just really angry at him for being privileged and violent.

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Yeah, those are, you know, those are totally good to understandable thoughts.

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But the reality on the ground is completely different.

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And so yes, some of the women feel coercive, controlled, not to go forward but more often.

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And the social science bears this out.

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They were negotiating many different factors in their lives, including what, in their knowledge, made them safe.

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Right. And so this idea of just completely discounting not only the, the the woman's wishes,

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but also the man's story because of a lot of the abuse and violence,

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was also at the intersection of marginality, poverty and race and and could be dealt with in other ways.

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You have this sort of top down imposition. Um.

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In the name of good. But it seemed like.

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I'll just tell you. My dilemma evaporated when I saw the actual operation of a criminal legal process that feminism built.

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Because you came to the conclusion that, you know, these policies, such as mandatory arrest,

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simply kind of wasn't doing anybody any good in so many of these cases,

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you know, not not just the perpetrator, but also the victims a lot of the times.

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Yeah. And I and, you know, this is when I was practising,

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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,

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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.

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Right. And it might be mutual. More often it is not equal.

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right? It is gendered. It is male on female. Um, but there's violence in their lives.

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There may be violence against children at at different levels.

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Right. Um, and so what we do in these scenarios, if the woman is, is lucky enough to escape,

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not going to jail herself if there's other kinds of violence or drugs or prostitution going on.

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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.

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Yeah, right. Unsolved. Right. And, you know,

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it's kind of like any it's kind of like all the reasons why I think a young law

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student or a incarceration sceptic like me would become a public defender.

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You have serious reservations, both about the model of the criminal legal system and its actual practice.

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When you see just that, it really disproportionately impacts marginalised people.

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Sure. And especially in the United States, black people.

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Right, who have this history of a relationship with penal law that's, you know, based in control and enslavement.

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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.

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So this is kind of this speaks to the core tension that you explore in your book.

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It's kind of at the heart of the book is that you explain how, you know,

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most people who consider themselves kind of feminist progressives or let's say,

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kind of many people are generally have this anti carceral bent, you know, this anti carceral ideology.

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They think that mass incarceration just isn't the answer to so many problems, including problems that are problems of crime.

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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.

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As soon as it comes to sexual offences. Sexual assault, rape, domestic violence, they seem to go in entirely the opposite direction.

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And then the answer is just, you know, penal answers more and more and more, you know,

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more expansive offences, um, you know, greater penalties and this sort of thing.

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And, and you're kind of trying to grapple with, well, how does somebody hold those, those two thoughts in their head?

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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?

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Or is it something that, you know, is is just unfathomable? No, it's not unfathomable because I was there.

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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,

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which isn't unrelated to sexual violence. Right?

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I mean, in fact, a lot of the sexual violence happens within relationships of violence, But in both movements,

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if you look at least at American feminism and you're looking at the feminism of sort of the late 60s and 70s,

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I mean, this was a very anti-state, anti-government, uh, brand of feminism.

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I mean, it was born of like sort of this Vietnam War era scepticism.

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And when you look at the initial feminist proposals on what to do about domestic violence, they ranged right from, you know,

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batterer intervention and psychological help to resources, money, housewife wages, you know, um, shelter, opportunities, anti-poverty.

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It wasn't criminal law that was the default. In fact, when you looked at the social, the social scientists, the feminist, you know,

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um, and even, you know, less so the lawyers, but even some in the law arena.

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Um, hardly anybody endorsed criminal law. Mhm.

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Um, in fact, even the shelter programs that had to be funded by the government and required them to meet these bureaucratic regulations.

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One feminist called it the Nightmare in New York when they had to apply and certify women as battered and things like that.

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Like even that level of government intervention. Like really bothered feminists.

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Really? I mean, that seems so far away from I mean, I guess, you know, what I think of as mainstream feminism now.

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So, I mean, what happened between them between then and now and so, so between then and basically the mid 80s,

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in the mid 80s, feminists came to the conclusion that the law enforcement model was the only model.

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So how did that happen? How did that happen? Well, I think lawyers had a lot to do with it.

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Um, there were some lawsuits on behalf of women who suffered from abuse.

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And these were real women facing horror stories like horrible abuse.

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And they were begging and pleading for the police to intervene.

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And the police didn't intervene.

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And, um, you know, lawyers brought these lawsuits on behalf of the class of women, understandably, to get police to intervene.

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Right. And, you know, the narrative is, well, police aren't intervening because they love batteries,

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because they're probably better as themselves than they love batteries. Right. Um, and so these lawsuits were were successful and they changed policy.

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And at the same time, we had a burgeoning tough on crime movement.

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Okay. Um, and awareness of incest and Abuse.

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Right? As a problem of the breakdown of the family. Right.

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So there was a family values. So there's this confluence of factors that are leading everybody.

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Right. And sort of criminal law. Strange bedfellows as well.

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In one sense, you know, kind of the tough on crime and family values, people combining with the feminist movement,

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who traditionally you would think, you know, would not be fighting for the same cause.

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But we see that over and over again, at least in the United States, around sex,

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with the latest being, for example, online advertising of prostitution.

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Right. So, so that received overwhelming bipartisan support in the United States, which is right.

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And as did the deep fake news. And look, I'm not saying they're they're bad policies or whatever.

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They they need to be discussed on their own. But the point is anti-sex, right?

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Sort of moral family values and feminist anti-trafficking anti-trafficking narratives, those often are very close together.

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So basically in this day, though, I think that the idea really was there.

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There were some sexist cops out there who were like communing with abusers. Sure.

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But they actually did a study in 1980 of the reasons why there weren't arrests.

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And it was a lot more complicated than that.

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Um, you know, police didn't like to go on these calls because they'd be called in a highly dangerous situation.

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And then at the end, whether they arrested somebody or not, everybody was mad at them.

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Nobody was like, yay! You know, you you did it. You saw the problem.

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And they were like, if they caught the guy shoplifting at the store, people were like, yeah, you know.

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Yeah, right. Um, and the number one reason they said for not arresting is that the victim didn't want an arrest.

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Right. So, you know, it was always a more complicated story than sort of.

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We're begging. Every victim is begging police to arrest, and they're refusing.

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Yeah. Right. And I think it was the failure to sort of see that bigger picture.

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And I don't blame the lawyers because they're getting the women who come to them to court.

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Right. But it really did paint a very narrow picture of horrible abuse.

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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.

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Right. When? When in reality, yes, there would have been cases like that,

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but many of the cases in which arrests aren't being made are just far more complicated, right?

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Far more complicated. And even in cases like that, it's a very delicate dance of preserving safety.

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Right. And I know that we want to get what we imagine to be these horrible, privileged bad guys.

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As a public defender, a lot of these horrible, privileged bad guys were maybe horrible and privileged vis a vis their partners,

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but they kind of were like not privileged in life either.

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And so there's just a lot going on in these cases that I think the flattened narrative of,

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you know, sort of bad, evil, individual man, um, completely helpless woman who we need to save.

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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.

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So another area that you hone in on in the book is the feminist rape reform agenda, you know, decades in which, you know,

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feminists have campaigned and successfully in many cases campaigned for change in definitions of sexual assault, kind of more expansive definitions,

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a better understanding of what rape really looks like, taking rape more seriously, counteracting rape myths and all this kind of thing,

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many of which, you know, many such things are very good, obviously, you know, and have have yielded good results.

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Um, but then you also point to certain policies, you know,

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procedural policies or changes in substantive definitions of laws that have had this effect of simply kind of,

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you know, producing more mass incarceration of the kind that doesn't do any good.

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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?

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Yeah. So I think just in the larger scheme of feminism,

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one of the things I've been concerned about looking into is the way in which the focus on sexual justice and injustice,

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however you construe that, um, has sort of eclipsed the focus on other things.

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And in the United States, it was it was really interesting to me that this, this moment, you know,

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that really extended from 2012 all the way through the MeToo moment where campus feminism was really

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captured by this idea that there were not enough government and institutional regulations into sex,

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right? Like that. Too much sex was harmful. And we needed we needed more, more sort of governance in this space.

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And I do think that is important. Um, absolutely.

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Although, you know, the the pushes for for the expansive definitions, like we can argue about whether they were good or not,

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but, but it was almost a culture and knowledge producing enterprise.

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You could think of more and more things as more and more devastating. You can educate people what is sexual assault.

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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,

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the rights against government interference in the sexual and reproductive realm, were about to go away.

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And it received just Far less press coverage, far less.

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This would be the site for me of feminist campus activism, and and there just wasn't a lot on it.

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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.

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And I think that has happened many times throughout history.

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Yeah. And so what I would say with the, with the today's sexual, um, sexual consent type laws, affirmative consent,

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I mean, I really would challenge us to think about who are the winners and losers of this regime.

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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.

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Hey. Everybody should just be more open about sex. Talk more about it.

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There'll be less. And maybe strive towards, you know, desire and enthusiasm as a kind of an ideal.

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Um, if that's what you're into. I mean, actually, I don't know, because, you know,

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there are some studies that show that male college students actually have sex

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against desire more than female because they're doing it for sexual pressure.

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Yes. And social pressure. So, I mean, you know,

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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

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or in another person to like within the realm of what they agree to and whatever they want and however they want to.

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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,

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so it's sexist, but people have sex all the time to satisfy their partner and they don't consider it devastating.

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And, you know, a lot of them aren't. Again, they're these abusive, unequal relationships.

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But but some in more stable relationships are able to to negotiate that in different ways.

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But but so anyway, so so negotiation and even desire might be worthwhile goals.

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But the yes means yes standard was pretty clear and it was pretty gendered.

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Mandy, to double and triple check with women to make sure they really want to have sex at the risk of devastation.

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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.

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And okay, I understand that. Um, but I am pretty sure that's what a lot of people mean when they say affirmative consent.

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And if you're asking me as a feminist, whether that standard is liberatory and maybe not so much like the.

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We'll both negotiate. We both have interests. We both have desire. We want to treat each other well.

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Right. Like. Yes, that's a feminist standard. Um, but the one, the ones that are emergent are not necessarily.

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Somebody might say that on college campuses, you know, it's a particularly contained environment.

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You know, it's a very, you know, sensitive time of life. It's young people and it's not the criminal law.

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You know, we're not talking about incarceration.

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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,

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you must obtain a very clear, explicit, yes, in one way or another, because the consequences are not, you know, are not crime consequences.

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And, you know, another part of the argument is, well, it's always a it's always possible to,

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to double check, you know, to make sure that you do have that. Yes. Right.

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And absolutely, you know, I don't think we're talking about the same thing when we're talking about college disciplinary procedures.

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And, you know, what's at stake in a criminal case?

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I mean, those are just different. And I don't think anybody who's sceptical of some of these policies are.

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You know, arguing it's the same thing. I think that's, you know, kind of a straw man.

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But. But here's what's really interesting to me, um, when this movement started.

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One of the reasons that students were calling on, um, their administrators to take care of predators.

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They were saying, these are sexual predators. They're repeat offenders. These aren't my fellow student.

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And maybe, you know, also had things going on, but these are monstrous offenders.

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Um, was that the criminal law was inadequate? Uh, the police don't take us seriously.

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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.

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It was like, these are real horrible rapes that because of a broken and lenient right?

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Criminal legal system, we're not getting it. So we will deal with them this way.

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So so this is a makeup, right? This is a make up for what we really think they ought to have.

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So it's not that it was embedded in some alternate logic.

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Right. Like alternate like. Oh. Criminal law has got a lot of problems.

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And now we're going to do this. It was that the problem of criminal law is that it's not tough enough.

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Right. And so unfortunately for us, we have to go to the second best thing, which is getting him kicked out,

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possibly getting a red mark on his head and hopefully having the rest of his life ruined.

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Yeah. Right. Like, kind of hopefully the intention. Right? Yeah. Um, but you know, we know that's not even going to happen.

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So we're going to have to settle, right? We're going to have to settle for that. So that.

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I mean, that was the narrative. I mean, and a lot of people agreed with it.

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They're like, yeah, I do want, you know, the person said that they are bad.

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They are predators. That's fine with me. Own it. Right. Like own the narrative.

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And that's, you know, a prosecutorial position that has a lot of validity behind it.

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Right. But what happened was very interesting. So all these policies go into effect.

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They're highly disciplinary. They water down due process like process almost doesn't even matter anymore.

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It's just, you know, whether the investigator how the investigator felt.

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Right.

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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.

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Yeah, as a college policy, because remember, the police who are trying to, like, navigate their own liability for all this, right?

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And yes, there were some campus activists where like, we don't believe in mandatory reporting for but not many.

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Right. Because it made every teacher a mandatory reporter.

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And, you know, there are a lot of anti-rape groups that are against mandatory reporting.

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But but again, you didn't hear the outcry out of sort of this police campus, you know, connection.

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Um, and then George Floyd happen in 2020 and the sort of quote unquote, critique of carceral feminism, you know, became more popular.

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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.

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And to caution about that, that became more popular.

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And a lot of the title nine activists, because they were on the left, became prison abolitionists.

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Right. And so there was this sort of, um, like revisionist narrative of title nine as, oh,

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we always intended it from the outset to divert cases away from from the criminal law.

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Right. Like, so we really meant this to be, like, totally antiquated kind of our informal way of resolving the issue.

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This is how we resolve the issue, that we did this maybe without thinking through the criminal law part as much.

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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.

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Huh. Um which. Okay. That could have been true.

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Right? If it were true. My sense that it is, it wasn't true.

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And it in fact hasn't been true because affirmative consent has exploded off, uh, college campuses into the criminal law context.

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And so you're saying you think there's kind of a creep from college campus definitions,

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which maybe, you know, on from one view were intended to be just a suggestion.

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You know, you're right, because here might be a good thing to do just to be just extra cautious.

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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.

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They ask students to say the definition of consent. And they said consent means freely given affirmative consent and only yes means yes.

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And then they had the students describe their last consensual sexual experience and nobody said yes.

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Right? I mean, and people might say, well, there were other things that were obvious, but okay.

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But that was the problem. That yes means yes was getting at. No interpretation has to go on here anymore.

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And like people weren't doing it. And yet, you know, that has made it into the criminal law in many ways.

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And I wrote my book in 2020, and by 2025, I would say even where it's not the formal standards,

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prosecutors argue in every case that only yes means yes.

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Really, that has resonance. Can we briefly just move into something slightly different, discuss the the case of Brock Turner.

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Yeah, because you discussed this in your book and your analysis is super interesting.

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And this is the the Stanford athlete who was really caught in the act, you know,

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committing quite a serious sexual assault on an unconscious, um, woman who was also at Stanford, I think.

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And the case.

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He was convicted, but the case attracted a huge amount of attention because the sentencing judge sentenced him to only six months in prison.

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And there was this huge outcry which which I remember at the time, I think was people interested in this stuff, remember it.

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Outcry against the judge and suggestions that, you know, you know, the judge kind of found some kind of affinity,

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you know, between himself, because the judge had been an athlete at Stanford and the judge was white.

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Yeah. And I kind of I kind of bring it up because, you know, the idea that, you know,

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college campus, you know, disciplinary policies are there to rectify something could be,

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you know, somebody could think, well, it's brought out in this case because, look, it went to it went into the criminal law.

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And look what happened. You know, a serious sexual assault was met with, you know, barely anything.

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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.

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Yes. Um, so you give from your point of view as a, as a former defence attorney,

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Quite an interesting and useful kind of legal analysis of what was happening there in the sentencing.

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So what is your take on what was going on in that sentencing and why the judge gave him that sentence?

301
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Yeah. So the the sentencing was very typical.

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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,

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and that probation officer will interview the victim,

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interview the convicted person, um, and consider record background and a number of factors and make a recommendation to the judge and judge.

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Persky was known as a judge that generally followed the recommendation of probation,

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which, you know, um, you know, as a defence attorney, that can be a good or bad thing.

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In a lot of the cases, the the probation officers are fair and they and their reports are very informative to the judge.

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So the female probation officer in Brock Turner's case took into the account that Chanel Miller had said,

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well, she didn't want him to rot in jail was her term, that he seemed sincerely remorseful.

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He was really, like, upset about it, um, that he was young and had no record and had been intoxicated himself.

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So this was the probation officers. This is the preservation officer sort of looking at the mitigating factors, right against the aggravating factor,

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that this was a serious offence that made the victim feel a significant amount of harm and lasting harm,

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but tempered with that, the victim didn't necessarily translate that into needing long punishments.

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Um, and so the probation officer came up with a jail term, not a probationary term.

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Right. Yes, a jail term. And, you know, this jail term was six months.

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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.

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Right. You have no relation to it. It just seems like six months is such a short amount of time, right?

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Yeah. Of your life. Of your life? Yeah.

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You know that that that the the moments that Brock Turner did his crime were also a short amount of time in life.

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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.

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You know, we would say. No, no, these were significant minutes.

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Yeah. And so anybody who's imagining six months in a prison is not a significant six months doesn't know anything about prison.

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Okay. And. Okay. So, so so that's one thing I think that that that's one thing.

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And the second thing is there were life consequences.

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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.

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Um, and, you know, Brock Turner also got informal punishment of being the poster child for rape.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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but there was just plainly no evidence, right like, to back up this claim.

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Um, and then, you know, when you look at it, they would compare it to this one case of Corey Beatty,

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who was a college football player, black, who had sexually assaulted a white woman.

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And and there are ways in which this sexual assault was, was quite a bit worse.

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Um, I'll spare the details of, um, who got 15 years and they're like, oh, that's because he's black, right?

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But he got 15 years because the mandatory minimum for sexual assault in that state was 15 years.

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So there was no judicial discretion, no sentencing in that case.

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Right. And the judge also said, you know, this is a case in which I understand the student who then,

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you know, was in grad school at the time, you know, this was a horrible harm to her.

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But also, you know, this is 15 years in jail for for a kid who's 19.

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Um, it is, um, you know, lifetime.

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Or maybe it was 20 years, but I think it was actually lifetime sex offence registration.

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And, you know, and my hands are tied.

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And actually, when the Coalition Against Violence Against Women in Kiribati state came out with a statement on it,

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it wasn't like, oh, he's black, he got too much. Here are all the white guys.

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They said 15 years isn't enough. The judge could have given him 25.

346
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Right. And that would have recognised the victim suffering. So you can have all these arguments that I'm really concerned about racism.

347
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I'm really concerned about privilege. I'm really.

348
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But in the end of the day, the narrative was, again a crime control, victims rights prosecutorial narrative, which is fine, right?

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If you're the Coalition Against Violence Against Women and you have your arguments for this prosecutorial model?

350
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You know, like. Like that's fine. But most of the people calling for Brock Turner to be even castrated, right?

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Um, probably if you ask them about racialized mass incarceration would say like, no, I don't agree with it.

352
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Right. Yeah. And I'm not calling them hypocrites. And you don't think these things can can entirely be separated?

353
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Yeah. I think that you have to understand the relationships of sort of like spectacular,

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monstrous harm doer narratives and like these really draconian consequences that see no limits.

355
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But I guess the obvious question then is, okay, if not penal sanctions, then what?

356
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You know, what should we do? What? What should be the solutions?

357
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How should we address what seems to be an epidemic of sexual assault, sexual violence?

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Because presumably doing nothing is not right. So I hesitate to use the word epidemic.

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I mean, as we know, Epidemics, even medical epidemics, are politically constructed.

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Some epidemics count more than others. Aides to certain political groups count it a lot.

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Covid counted little, right? I mean, so.

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So with an epidemic of sexual assault, I think what we can say is too many people are suffering a range of harms.

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And and women are bearing the brunt of that.

364
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Right. For for reasons that, you know, maybe some legacies of chastity norms, like feeling ruined by sex, investing too much.

365
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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

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norms that are allowing too many types of sexual encounters to be acceptable.

367
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And and I think that that that is true. Right.

368
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Um, am I going to use the word epidemic for for anything involving crime?

369
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No, because I think I get it. Epidemic combined with sex makes people just not do reasoning anymore.

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It just makes them like, you know, punishment. Um, but I'll tell you this one thing.

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I think thinking slightly differently about Brock Turner, slightly less in epidemic sort of terms,

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would have been that they would not have brought in new mandatory minimums to California law.

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That was a direct result of the Brock Turner case.

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You know, the governor then was a very liberal governor, and he said, I am not going to sign any new mandatory minimums.

375
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I mean, California is notorious for the three strikes law.

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That really I mean, California mass incarceration is just out of control.

377
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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.

378
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And even the Supreme Court, right. Who are no liberals were like, oh my God, no, you have to do something about this.

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This prison overcrowding and keeping people in prison till they're 99 years old.

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You know, like you have to do something about it.

381
00:40:27,750 --> 00:40:33,390
And what they ended up doing, this little aside, was moving the population from the prison to local jails, which was even worse.

382
00:40:34,190 --> 00:40:39,350
Um, but but so, like, you know, I'm not going to add any new mandatory minimums.

383
00:40:39,750 --> 00:40:44,750
And then Brock Turner happened and he said, well, this is merely closing a loophole, right?

384
00:40:44,950 --> 00:40:49,110
I don't know what loophole it was. It was a loophole of not having enough punishment in that space.

385
00:40:49,390 --> 00:40:57,630
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.

386
00:40:58,030 --> 00:41:00,310
One of the arguments of, of neo abolitionists,

387
00:41:00,950 --> 00:41:07,630
that is feminists who believe that prostitution must be abolished is that if we don't continue to arrest,

388
00:41:08,710 --> 00:41:12,190
you know, they're now like, we don't hate women prostitutes.

389
00:41:12,750 --> 00:41:16,750
We don't think they're bringers of disease and vice like the temperance feminists did.

390
00:41:17,070 --> 00:41:19,670
They're like, no, they're just very sad. Coerced.

391
00:41:20,830 --> 00:41:27,670
I've heard them called ex children, you know, who've been subject to abuse and are held under the most horrible conditions.

392
00:41:28,910 --> 00:41:39,670
But the only way to track them and eventually, maybe get them to testify against traffickers is if we arrest them.

393
00:41:40,510 --> 00:41:51,230
Right. And so, you know, this idea that, okay, you know, you know, we're concerned with violent violence against women,

394
00:41:51,550 --> 00:41:57,710
so we're willing to arrest women for our bigger, our bigger picture of what we imagine it's going to do.

395
00:41:58,270 --> 00:42:00,190
You know, I think it's that same move as, oh,

396
00:42:00,390 --> 00:42:07,510
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.

397
00:42:07,990 --> 00:42:11,280
And I think this, you know, happens over and over again.

398
00:42:11,680 --> 00:42:17,400
So when they say that some of these mass incarceration consequences and the fact that, you know,

399
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:27,000
one of in fact, it might be at this point, the highest percentage of our prison population is sex offenders.

400
00:42:28,360 --> 00:42:30,880
Um, you know, when they say, well, okay, what you know,

401
00:42:31,200 --> 00:42:38,680
these were all unintended consequences when consequences are repeating themselves over a hundred years.

402
00:42:40,440 --> 00:42:44,600
Yeah. You have to ask if they are unintended, right? Well, at least they're disregarded.

403
00:42:45,840 --> 00:42:52,040
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.

404
00:42:52,680 --> 00:42:58,120
But I wonder whether the, the burden for anti-capitalist is, I guess, to kind of, you know,

405
00:42:58,400 --> 00:43:03,000
create more options, you know, explain, you know, and suggest to so what shall we do?

406
00:43:03,240 --> 00:43:08,440
You know, when people are, you know, are clearly guilty, you know, of quite serious sex offences.

407
00:43:09,080 --> 00:43:11,960
It seems like, well, doing nothing is not really an option.

408
00:43:12,400 --> 00:43:20,600
And then at the same time, the ways of redressing these wrongs that are outside of the legal system.

409
00:43:22,120 --> 00:43:26,360
I think for many people are concerned, there is kind of how ungoverned it is, you know,

410
00:43:26,480 --> 00:43:30,240
maybe the absence of any kind of procedural constraints or procedural rights.

411
00:43:30,600 --> 00:43:34,640
You know, you hear people using the terms mob justice and pitchfork justice.

412
00:43:35,120 --> 00:43:38,320
So one thing, I guess, that the criminal law or, you know,

413
00:43:38,520 --> 00:43:44,440
any kind of law affords us is at least, you know, some kind of order to, to the proceedings.

414
00:43:45,080 --> 00:43:52,000
Whereas when we are addressing things just kind of informally and socially, it just seems like it's kind of chaos.

415
00:43:52,800 --> 00:43:55,440
You know, it's just whatever people happen to want to do. Yeah.

416
00:43:56,200 --> 00:44:03,560
So that's interesting because when you're breaking new ground on criminal law, because a practice is, in your mind, too widespread, right?

417
00:44:03,840 --> 00:44:07,480
A negative practice, something sexual, deepfake nudes up, skirting whatever.

418
00:44:08,360 --> 00:44:12,600
Um, you know, before there's the criminal law, it's not like you're seeing a lot of mob justice,

419
00:44:13,320 --> 00:44:16,080
you know, uh, you know, pitchforks against the people.

420
00:44:16,400 --> 00:44:24,040
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.

421
00:44:24,920 --> 00:44:33,760
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.

422
00:44:34,040 --> 00:44:40,000
And to the extent that we have criminal law for a lot of things. I mean, it's really it's so limited, right?

423
00:44:40,320 --> 00:44:45,400
It's enforced, so idiosyncratic against certain segments of society unevenly.

424
00:44:46,280 --> 00:44:51,080
Like, we don't even know if it if it affects anyone's incentives at this point.

425
00:44:51,400 --> 00:44:58,600
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.

426
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:08,160
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,

427
00:45:08,480 --> 00:45:11,440
or maybe are considering proposals to dial it down a little.

428
00:45:12,080 --> 00:45:18,560
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.

429
00:45:19,040 --> 00:45:26,120
I think it's kind of weird because we know that the harms are being done and, you know, maybe less so.

430
00:45:26,720 --> 00:45:32,640
You know that that I leave to criminologists to see how much mass incarceration has correlated with reduced crime rates.

431
00:45:33,200 --> 00:45:38,680
They say like maybe 10%. And then the rest is other things. But, you know, that's all a contested number.

432
00:45:39,040 --> 00:45:44,080
But but the point is we have this system and we have the system with proven and studied pathologies.

433
00:45:45,280 --> 00:45:54,160
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,

434
00:45:55,440 --> 00:45:59,000
you know, dealing with trafficking and getting trafficked women resources.

435
00:46:00,240 --> 00:46:08,170
You're dealing with it without what a lot of the community justice people are saying about how they deal with,

436
00:46:09,010 --> 00:46:12,930
you know, domestic violence in and amongst their relevant community.

437
00:46:13,770 --> 00:46:21,290
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

438
00:46:23,250 --> 00:46:29,970
like had a lot of good ideas of how to reduce the antecedents of male violence.

439
00:46:30,850 --> 00:46:39,370
And they were just completely shunned from view because they were making excuses for men.

440
00:46:39,930 --> 00:46:42,930
Right. So I think it's not that there aren't ideas out there.

441
00:46:43,730 --> 00:46:52,850
I think it's that the the carceral narratives really are very invested in this idea that chaos, anarchy and lawlessness not right.

442
00:46:53,570 --> 00:46:56,690
Right. And we don't have we don't have real proof of that.

443
00:46:56,890 --> 00:47:00,810
Right. I agree, but thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me.