Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Translating US Justice into Minutes & Seconds

This sounds like a sick joke (from BBC news):
Disgraced US financier Bernard Madoff's lawyer has said his client deserves 12 years in prison for his crimes.

In March, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges that he masterminded a $50bn (£35bn) investment fraud.
But with the legal system in the US, it will probably become true.

If so, then Madoff will get away with "paying" 1 minute in jail for every $10,000 he stole.

Why then does the corner store stick-up artist who manages to get $100 out of the till spend even 1 second in custody? But, sadly, I remember reading stories about people in jail for decades for stealing trivial amounts. One story sticks in my mind that I read in the 1960s of a man who stole an apple during the Great Depression finally getting out of jail three decades after that "crime".

Where is the basic fairness, justice, or honesty in the US legal system? Why pull the joke of putting "scales" in the hands of Justice? There is no even-handed justice. If you steal big like Madoff you can skip free, if you are famous and can buy expensive lawyers then you can kill like O. J. Simpson and walk free. The whole system is a sham.

The system in Canada is just as corrupt as it is in the US. My complaint is not about the US legal system. It is about the way of the world, of civilization. As little kids we are sold a picture of our society as good, generous, and fair. But the reality is that the community has great clefts and rifts. The biggest crack is between the haves and the have nots. You get "justice" if you are a have. You get screwed if you are a have not.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I guess the oldest dream of mankind is a society that is fair, well, the have nots have this dream and a few haves may have some form of this dream. I would think this is what leads many into one religion trap or another. I spent many years believing that Christ would return and set things right. I still have hope of a day when the world will be a place that gives all men an equal footing in at least some areas. I know there will always be rich and poor, but at least they could live decent lives within their realms?

RYviewpoint said...

Thomas, it isn't purely a "religious" dream. There is an experiment in psychology called the ultimatum game where two people have to cooperate to split a reward. Economists with their "rational man" model of behaviour sneer and think the split should minimize the sum that the passive player gets. But in experiments the passive player -- whose only power is to nix the reward so nobody gets anything -- can only accept or reject. The "rational" economists say that the passive player should be happy with $1 out of a pot of $100 because $1 is more than none. But experiments show that if you don't do something close to a 50-50 split, the passive player will nix the deal and nobody gets anything. Why? Because we have a very deep seated sense of "fair play" and "sharing" and "reciprocity". These are things that economists fail to consider. In the real world we collaborate. This isn't some religious mumbo-jumbo. It is deep in us as a social species. Much like the "irrational" investment that a mother (or parents) put into a child which as an economic "asset" makes no sense to spend time or money feeding. In short, economics is a really incomplete view of reality but for thirty years it has masqueraded as a complete theory of man and society.

Right now in Iran you see this phenomenon at play. Those people in the street are saying "if you don't count my vote I will pull the whole society down". It is the power that the dispossessed ultimately have. It is what drives revolutions. And it is what keeps the rich from monopolizing everything and forcing the poor to starve.

Unknown said...

In many cases throughout history the ones in power have oppressed the poor to the point of revolution. You would think that the humans would have a survival instinct that would keep them from starving those that they live off of entirely out of existence or to the point of revolt, but we see that they do not.

This is not to say that I don't agree with you... I am not debating what you have written. The revolutionist will bring down the whole system to make corrections or to even out the game. I find this interesting. I need more time with this ...

RYviewpoint said...

Don't misunderstand me. Societies have conflicts for lots of reasons. I would guess that most problems are conflicts among the power elite, e.g. WWII was global war driven by the elites in fascist countries seeking to exploit democracies which they believed to be too weak to defend themselves. The Cold War was a conflict between communist ideology and Western democracy. There are cases where revolts from below topple an elite (a real revolution). There are even more cases where an uprising from below is quashed (a rebellion). There are cases of societies collapsing because the elite goes insane (think of Jonestown with Rev. Jim Jones or Waco with David Koresh).

The reason why Churchill called democracy the "worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" is that democracy has a mechanism for the tensions of society to be worked out as various groups contend for power. Right now Iran is riven by a power struggle by the elites (Ahmedinejad vs the other presidential contenders) while there is revolt from below by mostly young middle class people wanting to break the grip of the theocracy. This violence is because there is no real democracy in Iran. (And even "real" democracy is no solid guarantee that factions won't go beserk, but it is a mechanism to give hope and redirect conflict from violence in the street to political contests for ballots.)

The sad fact is that after 10,000 of civilization, what you see is what you get. You get good times when economies flourish and communities build for the future and you get bad times when conflict from within or without bring societies crashing down. And the rest of the time you generally have turmoil which hysterics interpret as the "end of the world" but which are really just "normal". (I put the global warming crowd into the group as today's hysterics, just as the "AIDS will mean the end of civilization" crowd, the Club of Growth's moaning in the 1970s that resources were running out and the end was nigh, and the 1960s "population bomb" crowd that called for mass famines by the end of the 20th century because population would outstrip food sources.)