THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM PROMOTES JUST OUTCOMES

THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM PROMOTES JUST OUTCOMES

1. THE US GOVERNMENT HAS ATTEMPTED TO ATONE FOR ITS PAST FLAWS

Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, .

So what about slavery? No one will deny that America practiced slavery, but America was hardly unique in this respect. Indeed, slavery is a universal institution that in some form has existed in all cultures. In his study Slavery and Social Death, the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, “Slavery has existed from the dawn of human history, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution.” The Sumerians and Babylonians practiced slavery, as did the ancient Egyptians. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs all had slaves. Slavery was widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, and American Indians had slaves long before Columbus came to the New World. What is distinctively Western is not slavery but the movement to end slavery. Abolition is a uniquely Western institution. The historian J. M. Roberts writes, “No civilization once dependent on slavery has ever been able to eradicate it, except the Western.” Of course, slaves in every society don’t want to be slaves. The history of slavery is full of incidents of runaways, slave revolts, and so on. But typically, slaves were captured in warfare, and if they got away, they were perfectly happy to take other people as slaves.
2. PRISONS ARE NOT RUN FOR PROFITS

Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, .

The contention that the quest for profits has driven America's fourfold increase in prison capacity since 1980 is equally specious. Private-prison operators, a chief bugbear of the Left, incarcerate a measly 5 percent of America's convicts. Prisons contract out more services than they did 15 years ago, but so do nearly all other government agencies. The overwhelming majority of prison services remain in the hands of money-losing government bureaucracies. Unlike their military-industrial counterparts, which produce some of America's leading exports and sell civilian goods ranging from jetliners to computer hardware, major prison-related producers sell little outside of America's borders and almost nothing to private citizens. While a few states, California and Tennessee most prominently, do count corrections-industry groups among their most powerful lobbies, they remain exceptions. No sizeable cities have prison-reliant economies, and few people outside of declining farm towns actually want to live near prisons. Indeed, the presence of a large jail proved a major stumbling block in the effort to revitalize Chicago's South Loop.

Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000.

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, .

The bulk of the evidence shows that longer sentences really do work. And an honest look at the international data presents a good case for building prisons: A 1998 study from the British Home Office, their equivalent of the Justice Department, cited the U.S. as one of only two major Western countries to see their crime rates drop between the late 1980s and late 1990s. Canada, France, England, and Switzerland all have more crime per capita than the United States. A study commissioned by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 1998, Englishmen were twice as likely as Americans to have their cars stolen, about a third more likely to get mugged by an armed assailant, and nearly ten times more likely to have their home broken into while it was occupied. The study's authors suggest an explanation: "An offender's risk of being caught, convicted and incarcerated has been rising in the United States but falling in England."

SIMONE DEBEAUVOIR

FRENCH EXISTENTIALIST AND FEMINIST (1908-1987)

Simone DeBeauvoir epitomizes the excellence of the French intellectuals of the 20th Century. Articulate, refined, somewhat humorous but gravely serious at times, DeBeauvoir was a better writer than her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre; some even say she was a better thinker as well. Her ideas were both an affirmation of Sartre’s existentialism and a refutation of it, for while she argued that we could not justify our values through appeals to higher authority, while she agreed with Sartre that the universe was largely a moral void, she insisted that values must be chosen as values, and she realized long before Sartre did that such values necessarily required deference to the needs arid situations of other people.

Simone DeBeauvoir made the leap from radical individualist to the continuity of women--a step few intellectuals take. With the publication of The Second Sex, DeBeauvoir would always be known as a feminist, and what an existentialist feminist had to say would be pretty interesting. DeBeauvoir did not invent, nor did she leave behind, a comprehensive set of ideas; she started no movements, gathered no followers. What she did was think and write, and did these things better than any writer of her time.

Life And Work

Simone DeBeauvoir was one of three daughters born in Paris to a middle-class family; Simone was born in 1908. The mother was a devout Catholic, while the father was a bitter, cynical atheist. The two had agreed to stay together despite their differences, and Simone would be influenced by their opposing views of the world, and the synthesis created by them. She learned about religious and moral guilt; about the longing for the afterlife and rewards for suffering, only to hear from her other parent that no such things existed. That longing for transcendence, DeBeauvoir would later argue, is much of the basis for ethics. The fact that it can never be satisfied, she would go on to say, is part of the impossibility of the ethical task.

From an early age, the young girl was determined to be a writer. She graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1929 (finishing just behind a short, wall-eyed but brilliant student named Jean-Paul Sartre), taught school until 1938, published her first novel, She Came To Stay in 1943, and had no “job” but writing until her death.
Three events shaped Simone DeBeauvoir’s life (her considerable autobiographical memoirs give abundant insight into such influences). First, her relationship with Sartre affected both the content and style of her philosophy and fiction. She and Sartre developed existentialism as an ethical system derived from the existential analytical work of Martin Heidegger as well as the ethical challenges of Friedrich Nietzsche. But Sartre was her emotional as well as intellectual companion, and her love for him, as well as their mutual desire that there should be no marriage or children in the relationship, raised important questions in her mind regarding divisions between men and women, as well as other types of social divisions.
Second, in 1939, the Germans occupied much of France. This changed Sartre’s and DeBeauvoir lives considerably; both were sympathetic to the French Resistance and DeBeauvoir lived through a dangerous and worrisome period when Sartre was a prisoner of war in Germany. These episodes made DeBeauvoir concerned with ethics, the kind of ethics an existentialist can willfully hold, and the need for self-sacrifice. Her novels of the period reflect such ambiguous ethical calls; The Blood of Others begins with the hero sitting at the deathbed of his mortally wounded lover, who has been injured in a mission against the Germans. The hero spends a great deal of time wondering about how his choices affect others; the Germans will kill innocent people in answer to Resistance activities. It is difficult, DeBeauvoir thought, but inevitable nonetheless, to make ethical decisions.
Finally, DeBeauvoir was affected by the 20th Century women’s movement. She knew that she was fortunate in economic and social circumstances to be allowed’ into life both as a woman and an intellectual. She realized these privileges did not exist for the majority of women in the world. She firmly believed, and passionately argued, that women needed financial independence and the ability to work and prosper as human beings in order to realize their freedom. But she never “rejected” the “masculine world,” and in fact did not believe masculine categories of the world were themselves subject to criticism. For her, the problem would be material, economic, social, and individual; it would never reflect the metaphysics of masculinity in the way other feminists made the problem out to be.
Sartre died in 1980; DeBeauvoir would write that she had loved him so much she wanted to “jump into” the death his body was experiencing, to die with him. By that time, her life was about over, too. But by the time of her death in 1987, she had published around twenty works of fiction and philosophy, including philosophical works such as The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity and novels like She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, The Mandarins and All Men are Mortal. Finally, her memoirs comprise several volumes, from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter an autobiography of her childhood, to her much more somber farewell to Saitre and to her own brilliant career.

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