Posted on 02/14/2003 11:26:23 AM PST by IMHO
Arbitrary Arrest
by Bob Murphy
If there?s one thing you can count on in this world, it?s that LewRockwell.com will show you how the most popular and apparently innocuous government actions are in fact sinister. So that?s why I?m going to devote this article to defending sex offenders from a particularly ominous encroachment of State power.
My point of departure is a January 25 article in the Long Island Newsday entitled, "After Time Served, More Time," from which I quote extensively:
Saying that women and children need protection from sexual predators inclined to strike again once they?re released from prison, a state assemblyman is calling for passage of a civil confinement law that would keep high-risk offenders locked up even after serving their sentences.
"This is simply the right thing to do," said Assemb. Steven Labriola, a Massapequa Park Republican who lobbied for the legislation?The bill would keep sex offenders who are most likely to re-offend and who have great difficulty controlling their behavior confined in mental institutions until they are deemed rehabilitated.
So far 16 states have civil confinement laws?Civil confinement laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently in 2002 in a Kansas case.
If passed, the bill would tack onto the end of an offender?s prison term an elaborate process of evaluation and, if the offender is still considered a risk, a trial that could result in a confinement in a mental institution indefinitely. One key provision of the bill is that the offender must have a mental defect that predisposes the offender to re-offend.
Now, for anyone familiar with the growth of government power, this article should be absolutely horrifying. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a scarier proposal than to allow a bunch of State "experts" to determine which people are mentally deranged and therefore must be incarcerated indefinitely until these experts deem them to be of sound mind.
Before I go any further, let?s get one thing clear: Assemblyman Labriola and every other tough guy who votes for this bill doesn?t give a damn about women or children. If they wanted to protect kids from recidivist sexual offenders, they could simply bump up the prison terms for the crimes in question. For someone convicted twice of such a crime, they could mandate life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole. (After all, the current jail terms for dealing cocaine are probably much worse than for molesting a child.) No politician in his right mind would vote against a bill mandating tougher sentencing of child molesters or rapists, so this option is obviously politically feasible.
But no, this isn?t enough for Labriola. He wants to discard the quaint notion of an objective legal code with fixed penalties for specific crimes, and the old-fashioned idea that when you served your sentence after committing a crime, you were a free man. No, Labriola wants to give the government the power to determine whose minds are unfit for freedom, and the power to subject such freaks to benevolent mental readjustment courtesy of the State.
The most obvious danger of these "civil confinement" (though these confinements are about as "civil" as a civil war) laws is the precedent they set. After all, why wait for someone to rape a woman before "rehabilitating" him? If he?s got a "mental defect that predisposes" him to rape women, shouldn?t that medical condition be treated the moment it?s discovered (or suspected)? The civil confinement technique is nothing but the Bush doctrine applied domestically: State psychiatrists are launching pre-emptive arrests against men they feel might attack in the future.
The deeper problem with civil confinement laws is the pseudo-science on which they?re based. Thomas Szasz has fought a virtually one-man battle against the idea that people have "mental illness" the way they have body illness; in books such as The Myth of Mental Illness and Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, Szasz makes a compelling case that the entire mental health industry is built upon foundations as tepid as the Keynesian pump-priming industry in economics.* Yes, there are certainly people whose behavior is abnormal (just as there are recessions in the economy), but virtually the entire body of mental health classifications and treatments is based upon flimsy assumptions that only survive because precious few dare to challenge them.
Some readers may feel that I?m getting worked up over something minor. After all, the government isn?t proposing to lock up law-abiding people in the fear that they?ll commit a future crime; Labriola?s bill only applies to convicted sex offenders. Well, I hate to break it to you folks, but the government has a long history of locking up nonviolent people "for their own good" in order to fix their minds.
And this isn?t 19th century barbarism I?m talking about, either. Those who saw the film A Beautiful Mind know that John Nash was involuntarily committed to a mental institution, and they saw what appeared to be shock therapy administered to Nash.
But the real story is much more gruesome. Nash was committed (against his will, of course) to the Trenton State Hospital for the unspeakable crime of believing odd things (such as that he was the emperor of Antarctica, or that aliens were communicating with him through newspaper headlines). Despite the fact that he was an acknowledged mathematical genius, it was determined that Nash?s mind was not so "beautiful" as to be exempt from the cutting edge treatment for schizophrenia: insulin coma therapy. (You read that correctly: They would induce comas in patients.) In her best-selling book that inspired the movie, Sylvia Nasar describes Nash?s experience:
For the next six weeks, five days a week, Nash endured the insulin treatments. Very early in the morning, a nurse would wake him and give him an insulin injection. By the time [Dr.] Baumecker got to the ward at eight-thirty, Nash?s blood sugar would already have dropped precipitously. He would have been drowsy, hardly aware of his surroundings, perhaps half-delirious and talking to himself?By nine-thirty or ten, Nash would be comatose, sinking deeper and deeper into unconsciousness until, at one stage, his body would become as rigid as if it were frozen solid and his fingers would be curled. At that point, a nurse would put a rubber hose through his nose and esophagus and a glucose solution would be administered?Then he would wake up, slowly and agonizingly, with nurses hovering over him?
Very often, during the comatose stage, patients whose blood-sugar levels dropped too far would have spontaneous seizures - thrashing around, biting their tongues. Broken bones were not uncommon. Sometimes patients remained in the coma. "We lost one young man," recalled Baumecker. "We?d all become very alarmed. We?d call in experts and do all kinds of things. Sometimes patients would get very hot and we?d pack them in ice." (Nasar p. 292)
Before I close, let me address one final point: I?m sure many people understand in an academic sense what I?m saying, but just can?t bring themselves to get too worked up over sex offenders, for crying out loud.
If so, then you?ve fallen for the government?s cheapest ploy. Of course they have to start with unpopular minorities. Nobody cares about rapists or child molesters, so the government can quite easily establish the precedent that the State has the authority to lock up and "treat" anyone from these groups whom it considers mentally abnormal and/or dangerous.
Is that a precedent that we ought to allow? Does anyone really believe the government will stop there?
*The analogy is mine, not Szasz,? though as a libertarian I believe he would endorse it.
...or, we can tell pederasts that, if they offend again, they will be shot on sight.
Libertarians on this website have defended child porn, so why is an article like this, from the lowest of lowlifes, lewrockwell.com, a surprise?
Or, we can move all child-abusers in to a safe house next to yours.
Feel better?
And ,if ever there was a place where the general population abhores freedom it's long island. Carolyn McCarthy as their elected representative does everything she can to turn the whole country into a concentration camp, and they don't seem to mind. So what a great place to get the Soviet system of indefinite internment in a mental institution started.
Republicans on this site have defended racism. Feel better?
If that is the appropriate punishment for the action then by all means, but the author here is worried about indefinite detainment where your freedom is dependent on some government bureaucrat rather than a court of law. It is either extremely naive of you or extremely disingenuous to pretend that the article is about child abue when it's really about government's potential for abuse of all citizens.
Then why pick a pederast as an example? The bottom line is, a loserdopian is whining that child abusers are persecuted.
It's constitutional, so I have no problem with keeping an eye on certain abusers a little longer.
To show how the government moves its agenda of total control ahead. Start with a group that everyone despises and then once the precedent is set expand from there. I would be had pressed to find a group more universally disliked than pedophiles. Just like seat belt laws. Start out as a secondary law. Can't stop someone for it. Then make it a primary law just like speeding, then raise the fine from $50 to $200. Constant expansion of government into your everyday life.
Why are you so opposed to just giving them an appropriate sentence in the first place? Surely you know that some percentage of them will be intelligent enough to game the system.
I just don't get it: Why are you people so hell-bent on setting (some) child molesters loose on society?
It's called respect for and adherence to due process. If you suspend it for one group, then there isn't anything to prevent its suspension for any group.
I am on your side. I think the sentences should be much, much longer and/or more appropriate.
But I don't agree with giving the authorities carte blanche to go pick up someone. (Actually, if it was just child molesters, I wouldn't care. But I know that once the precedent is set, it will extend to anyone.)
I think that this is the way to go. Put them in for 50 years. Grind them up for fertilizer. Let it be known up front, but don't suspend the system so that some government bureaucrats can determine some person's fate without a trial.
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