In case you didn't see, Aaron Schwartz just had an absurd level of felony charges brought against him for allegedly trying to mass download JSTOR by prosecutors. You can support him here. Meanwhile Twitter turned over the account records of Malcolm Harris to the New York criminal justice system.
How can we theorize innovations in criminal justice policy over the past decades as a reaction to liberalism? Not liberalism like the New Deal or the Great Society, but liberalism as in the philosophical theory of the modern era. Let's start with the policy innovation driven by neoconservatives, and then examine how the progressive assault on classical liberalism also functions in the war on crime.
The Conservative Assault
One part of liberalism is about formal equality--liberty to participate as well as equal freedom from government interference. The War on Drugs and aggressive quality of life initiatives, beyond filling our jail cells, are about getting a lot of low-level charges and convictions on as many people as possible. From 1994-2000, arrests for smoking marijuana in public view (MPV) were up 2,670%. Why does this matter? They interact with three-strike laws to build to large sentences out of minor charges. This also allows for the creation of hierachy through a law ostensibly dedicated to equality and liberty. Once people have been prisoners, they face serious legal impediments, such as limits on access to voting, public housing, public employment, and public assistance. Tens of thousands of legal restrictions regulate the ability of ex-convicts to function and exist in society. There are also certain presumptions against individuals, especially felons, that deny any type of formal equality before the law. When Michelle Alexander talks about a New Jim Crow system of segregation through the legal code and policing, this is the dynamic she is discussing.
Another part of liberal philosophy is that if the state wants to use its power to act against an individual, say for violating a crime, they need to make their case through an institution that is skeptical of that power. In the United States, that means trial by jury, under the supervision of a judge. The judge and a jury of one's peers are supposed to be the key agents in a court.
Another key policy innovation of neoconservatives is attacking the relative independence and power of judges. There have been a host of conservative policies designed to reduce the power of judges, of which mandatory minimums are one of the most important. As judges lose power, prosecutors gain it. Prosecutors are now the major presence in the courtroom, overseeing the overwhelming majority of cases that are run through plea-bargains.
When the evangelical Harvard law professor William J. Stuntz writes that the American criminal justice system has collapsed, this focus on the prosecutor as the arbiter of justice in the courtroom, rather than the judge and the jury, is what he means. Stuntz: "Prosecutors now decide whom to punish and how severely...To a degree that had not been true in America's past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries' judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes....criminal law does not function as law. Rather, the law defines a menu of options for police officers and prosecutors to use as they see fit."
Notice how the prosecutor overseeing Aaron Schwartz's case just decided to charge him with 13 felonies, mostly for violating the Terms and Services "terms of service" of a website. At 13 charges, it looks like the prosecutor is trying to stack the deck on overreaching and arbitrary charges so they can have as much leverage as they can get when it comes time to go to court. That isn't a rule of law, it's a rule of prosecutorial discretion as justice. This is what a collapsed criminal justice system looks like.
The Progressive Assault
Part of the progressive assault on the laissez-faire of classical liberalism was creating the idea that there is no pre-political distribution in the economy. Property is a creation of government, and therefore the distribution of that property is also created by the government. Governments must balance conflicting boundaries of property, and must do so democratically, because appeals to "natural rights" or "economic liberty" will ultimately be empty. Matt Bruenig has several recent posts - one, two, three - spelling out this "myth of ownership" argument over distribution and property rights that are worth checking out.
This progressive approach to property and the state is absent in contemporary talk on economic policy, but it is being theorized and applied in the most avant-garde ways when it comes to criminal justice policy. Let's talk about dogs that do drug searches. If the police wanted to search your suitcase, or look through it with hypothetical x-ray goggles, they'd need a warrant. That would be an illegal search of your property, which is protected by the Constitution. However if a drug dog sniffs your suitcase and smells drugs, that doesn't count as a search.
Why? As Justice Stevens argued in United States v. Jacobsen (1984), "Congress has decided -- and there is no question about its power to do so -- to treat the interest in 'privately' possessing cocaine as illegitimate; thus governmental conduct that can reveal whether a substance is cocaine, and no other arguably 'private' fact, compromises no legitimate privacy interest." Since the dog can only "see" contraband such as cocaine when it sniffs, that sniff doesn't count as a search of your property, because you have no right to contraband.
You have a legitimate privacy interest in your property, except when you don't, because the government doesn't recognize your property as "property." Even though drugs are excludable, rivalrous, and have their price determined in large part by supply and demand, they aren't property the government recognizes, so the bundle of rights that go with property don't apply. The distribution of property outcomes is overwhelming determined by the government here.
People have talked about property this way in the past, but less so now. We talk about inheritance as almost a right now, but John Stuart Mill, for instance, argued in Principles of Political Economy that while "the right of bequest, or gift after death, forms part of the idea of private property, the right of inheritance, as distinguished from bequest, does not." Your right to receive inheritance doesn't exist outside of political framework, which can be held democratically accountable. (For those who think the war on drugs should be stopped and that you receiving an inheritance should be thought of as a type of quasi-contraband, the current policy framework is very backwards.)
There's not enough space here to really dive into it, but there's a mind-blowing legal realist seminar on the "Myth of Ownership" taking place in the realm of "asset forfeitures" criminal justice policy right now. The government sues property and money for being illegitimate under civil law; the government can seize the proceeds of the trade of contraband as well as property instrumental to that transaction. If you drive a car solely to sell contraband, and use the surplus of those sales to buy a home, what property claim can you have to own that car or that house? Here the government is actively creating and policing the boundaries and relationships of property through denying its existence as legitimate "property," all done under criminal law.
This brings us to Malcolm Harris' Twitter account. Who owns a tweet? Who has the ability to turn it over to a third party, and who has the ability to block it? The property claim of a tweet is now being determined through the ability of the government to take it for criminal justice purposes.
A New York criminal court had demanded Twitter hand over Malcolm Harris' tweets, and Twitter did so last week under extensive pressure. The court argued that "Here, the defendant [Malcolm Harris] has no proprietary interests in the @destructuremal account’s user information and Tweets between September 15, 2011 and December 31, 2011...While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical 'home' on the Internet." They are determining that Harris has no legitmate property claim on the tweet and no right to prevent a search of his account on Twitter's mainframe.
It is fascinating, though problematic, to see the idea, boundaries and relationships of online "property" being determined through the criminal justice system. Here the "property" of online records are carved out and created based on where it will be easiest for cops and prosecutors to access them. Hence all the more reason to have Congress re-establish baselines on what our privacy expectations are online, in the opposite way it has been dissolving privacy and property claims under the banner of the War on Drugs.
Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:
