On today’s show we speak with Rebecca Merton of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) and Lourdes Barraza, whose husband is currently detained at West County Detention Facility in Richmond, California about dismal conditions reported by people under ICE detention. We end with an hour-long conversation with Alex Vitale, professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, about alternatives to policing.
BRIAN: Don’t Drink the NAMBLA Kool-Aid!
What you’re doing is victimizing the perpetrator when you excuse pedophilia on the basis of “the poor things are just sick.” Doing so, you are almost in lockstep with NAMBLA, who are working hard at getting pedophilia recognized as being viewed as a sickness the way homosexuality used to be wrongfully viewed as a sickness, so their NEXT STEP will be, “Oh, what we do is no different than homosexuality, bisexuality, or any other type of sexuality, why should we be persecuted so?”
The huge difference being – should you need reminding – is pedophiles are akin to serial rapists & serial killers in that what they do is quite literally predation. What they do is pre-meditated, calculating, intentional NON CONSENSUAL predatory behavior to CHILDREN. If the non-death penalty crowd wants more converts, they will have to make reasonable exceptions for these sorts of individuals who truly are a danger to the rest of the population.
I am non-death penalty – but for most likely what you would call unenlightened reasons – because the rapists & pedophiles are not the ones that get killed. It’s because I recognize the prison legal system is inherently flawed, especially when a child can get 7 years for stealing a backpack while a pedophile who ritually preyed on children gets to waltz out of jail on 6 months “good behavior” – which is easily obtained when put into solitary confinement as protection from the rest of the prison population. The sentence Larry Nassar received is a rare example of true justice when it comes to sex crimes of this nature compared to how pedophiles are usually milled through the prison system. The usual punishments for sex crimes in this country are too lax as a rule.