Look What You Made Me Do

Abstract

Who’s to blame for crime?  Individuals who commit crime or a society that has failed to keep those individuals safe and let them suffer severe economic deprivation?  Both.  But American criminal legal processes stifle that complex answer.  Instead they coerce defendants into expressing a profoundly simple narrative: crime is solely individual choice to do wrong.  This forced narrative finds defendants during a plea colloquy standing up in court saying that they are pleading guilty because they are guilty and for no other reason.  A defendant who goes off-script to tell a story about childhood trauma or being a victim of repeated violence runs the risk that the judge will refuse to accept the guilty plea and punish them after trial in sentencing for refusing to say that they alone are to blame.  That same narrative of individual choice to do wrong plays out throughout the criminal process.

Coercing defendants to tell a story that is not their own further disenfranchises defendants and creates a damaged public understanding of crime.  It hides our own societal failings and pretends that threating ever-harsher punishment will keep us safe—prioritizing a cheap illusion of safety over actual safety.  If crime is driven at least in significant part by unaddressed trauma and poverty, better mental health care and an expanded social safety net could better promote public safety than increased threats of cages—a core abolitionist claim.  And while prisons keep some of us temporarily safe by incapacitating those convicted of crimes, they are sites of great violence and little safety—a dynamic that then undermines safety outside the prison walls.  Instead of figuring out how to be safer we simply pretend that we’re doing our level best by mass incarcerating our citizenry and pressuring defendants to embrace our narrative while we stifle counternarratives.

Keywords: crime, criminology, criminal procedure, narrative, epistemic injustice