Punishment and Crime

January 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

When a criminal case is front-page news, the sentence matters not for its effect on the criminal but for its effect on the rest of us. As I said (here) about the Stanford swimming team rapist, punishment is not about crime.

The headlines in the local papers this morning confirm this idea.

What’s important about the sentence and the judge’s statement is that they express a collective outrage at Nassar. Nobody seriously expects the sentence to have any deterrent effect on other potential criminals. Nor was the sentence necessary to keep Nassar from further crimes. Federal courts had already sentenced him to sixty years for kiddie porn. The purpose of the sentence is to allow the rest of us to feel good. That function of sentencing marches under the banner of “retribution” or sometimes “justice.” But it might just as well be called “vengeance.”

The headlines also make it clear that this same motivation is the basis for sentiments favoring the death penalty. Proponents may talk about deterrence and saving lives, but their real argument is the moral one – that the criminal is so evil that he (almost always he, rarely she) does not deserve to live. But it’s not the criminal’s death per se that they want. The criminal who commits suicide or dies of illness has “cheated” us of our chance for vengeance. (See this 2006 post, “Cheating the Executioner.”)

We want the strongest expression of our moral outrage – and that is a sentence of death. Anything less will not do. So even though Nassar’s crimes were not capital offenses, the judge pretended that she was handing down a death sentence. Predictably, “death warrant” was the part of her statement that the newspapers ran in the headlines. Even the sedate New York Times had the money quote in a subhead, after “Gymnasts’ Abuse Draws Sentence Likely to Be Life.”

In these celebrated cases, what’s important then is the judge’s pronouncing the sentence. Whether the sentence is actually carried out usually escapes notice. Most people sentenced to death are not executed, and for the few who are, the execution comes so many years later that the crime has been all but forgotten. Go back to a case of a few years ago, a case where prosecutors and the much of the general public claimed that the only way to achieve justice was to execute the convicted person. Ask people if that criminal is still alive. Most will not know, and most will not care enough to bother to find out. The moment of truth was the handing down of the sentence. What happens later doesn’t count much on ledger of moral sentiments. There are exceptions – Charles Manson was never going to be paroled – but they are just that, exceptions

Harley Barber Was Right

January 20, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Harley Barber’s Finsta video – the one where she repeats the word nigger a dozen times in a minute – went viral. But in all the criticism, nobody (as far as I know) bothered to note that she is essentially correct: Language norms vary from region to region and from group to group. Or in Barber’s formulation of this idea:

I’m in the South now, bitch so everyone can fuck off.  I’m from New Jersey. So I can say nigger as much as I want.

Here’s the entire video.

She could have been more specific. She’s not just in the South. She’s in Alabama, and even more specifically, she’s in a car surrounded by her University of Alabama Alpha Phi sorority sisters. Her point is that if she had been in New Jersey, the people around her might have said, “You know Harley, we don’t think that way or use that word these days. And even if you do have those sentiments, it’s not a good idea to make a video of yourself expressing them, especially with that word. And if you do make a video, it’s a really bad idea to post it on Instagram.”

But her sorority sisters seem to be in complete agreement with her. That’s to be expected. Alpha Phi has a reputation for its retrograde mentality regarding race and gender. Their 2015 recruiting video looked like a casting call for The Bachelor except that all the girls are White.

As a writer at AL.com (the newspaper/media consortium) put it, Alpha Phi in this video presents itself as “all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition.” (The sorority soon took down the video, though you can see it here in a TV news story.)

The message was not lost on Harley Barber. Her video begins,

I’ve wanted to be in Alpha Phi since fucking high school and nobody fucking understands how much I love Alpha Phi

A couple of other observations about the incident:

1. Language norms change. Barber says fuck or fucking more times than she says nigger. As far as I know, nobody has voiced any objections.

2. Money makes it OK. In Barber’s reasoning, wealth and conspicuous consumption justify morally questionable attitudes.

And if anyone else wants to snake me for saying nigger on my finsta, I’m a in a fur vest. I want you to buy my fur vest. Cause fuck you. Go to Neiman Marcus and buy my fur vest

Neiman-Marcus fur vests go for as little as $600, but most are $2500 and up. Barber is not alone in resolving moral questions by looking at financial success. (See this earlier post about similar defenses of chicanery by JP Morgan during the financial crisis)

3.  Ideas and essence.  A day or two later in her fifteen minutes of fame, Barber issued an apology: “I’m an idiot. There’s no excuse. I did something really bad.” I would guess that if you asked Barber, “Are you a racist?” she would say No, and she would be sincere. Many other people are calling her a racist, and they are just as adamant. The trouble is that the question “Is she a racist?” is the wrong question. First, it assumes that ideas and attitudes are permanent and essential. Second, it also assumes what we might call the racism-binary – that each person either is or is not a racist. Both those assumptions are questionable if not flat out wrong. Much of the reporting about the incident got it right. Headlines referred to a “racist video” or “racist rant,” not a “racist co-ed.”

What Becomes of the Broken Norm?

January 16, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Norms are fragile things, especially when they apply only in select situations.

In the 1970s, Bill Weeden and Dave Finkle worked as a comedy duo in clubs like the Improv in New York City. They billed themselves as “A Couple of Guys With Class,” which was also the title of their opening song. As best I can remember, it started like this:

We’re a couple of guys with class, Up to our ears in class. If you looking for vulgar, Boy we’re not it, We never say “fuck” And we never say “shit.”

The joke of that last line – it always got a laugh – was in the apophasis (saying something while saying that you’re not saying it). But it also put the audience on the side of the performers in recognizing that the norms about proper language were arbitrary and situational. The message was,“We all know we’re not supposed to say these words, but we also know that we all actually do say them.” We were laughing at our own hypocrisy or at least our inconsistency from one situation to another.

If you lean on that situational norm, pretty soon it gives way. Twenty years earlier, Weeden and Finkle could have been arrested for violating New York’s obscenity laws (as Lenny Bruce fans and viewers of Mrs. Maisel know). Many “fucks” and “shits” and a few court cases later, that had all changed. Today, it’s rare to hear a comic who, like Seinfeld, does not say “fuck” and “shit.”

A few weeks ago, news outlets with class – the New York Times and NPR, for example – would not use the word “shit” even as part of a compound word – a word like, say, “shithole” – even though the word  “shit” was in wide use elsewhere. Season two of NPR’s podcast “Serial” was about an Alabama man who referred to his local community as “Shittown.” NPR called the podcast “S-town.” That was a year ago.

Now Donald Trump’s characterizing some nations as “shithole countries” was just too important to ignore. Some publications continued to censor or Bowdlerize the word. You would see “S**t” in print or hear Wolf Blitzer talk about “s-hole countries or bleep-hole countries.” Much of the mainstream media put the phrase in quotation marks, as if to say, “Trump’s word, not ours.” But in today’s Times, Paul Krugman, writing about anti-immigration in the 19th century, says, “Ireland and Germany, the main sources of that era’s immigration wave, were the shithole countries of the day.” The quotation marks around shithole are implied but not visible.

I expect that from now on, the censoring of other quotes that include “shit” will decrease. Then before long, op-ed writers will be able to use the word even when it carries no reference to what someone else said.

The norm once breached is now broken. Like Humpty-Dumpty, it has been pushed off the wall and lies shattered on the sidewalk. Of course, Trump has violated far more serious norms (as noted in this Atlantic article  among many, many others). Will the social forces (i.e., people) upholding those norms be resilient enough to re-instate them?

One For the Books

January 15, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

The ending of the Vikings-Saints game was one for the books.

By “ending” I don’t mean the fluke 60-yard catch-and-run touchdown as the clock ran out.  I mean the actual ending – the final play, the extra point, which didn’t come until eight minutes (it seemed like 20) after the touchdown.

And by “books” I don’t mean the record books. I mean the bookmakers. That point, or non-point, made a big difference only to them and their customers.

It was also one for this blog. In the early days of this blog, I had several posts that considered the idea of “the wisdom of crowds.” James Surowiecki’s book with that title was much on my mind, mostly because I thought that it was wrong, at least when the topic was football gambling. (See this post, for example.) The basic idea is that for guessing what is now unknown (a lost ship, the outcome of next week’s game, the weight of an ox), don’t ask an expert. Ask a crowd of ordinary but interested people and take the average. Gamblers call that choice the “chalk” – the team (or horse) that’s getting most of the action.

But gamblers also talk about the “smart money.” In sports betting, bookmakers don’t care so much about the crowd. But there are a few people whose action the books do pay special attention to, and not just because the bets are usually large. Last Monday, most books opened the Vikings-Saints game with the Vikings as 3½-point favorites. The public liked the Saints. Two out of every three bets took New Orleans plus the points.

Since bookmakers have a guaranteed profit when the amount bet on each side is the same, bookmakers should then have tried to discourage more Saints money by reducing the points – say from 3½ to 3. Instead, they raised the line to 4 and then 4½, The public may have been backing the Saints, but the smart money, the “sharps,” were taking the Vikings. By the weekend, the line had gone to 5 and then 5½.

With the Saints leading 24-23 with ten seconds left and the Vikings 60 yards from the goal line, it looked like the crowd was right. Then came the touchdown pass to Stefon Diggs. The score was now Vikings 29, Saints 24; the clock showed all zeros. The smart money, the bettors who had gone with the Vikings early in the week, looked very smart indeed. Among Saints backers, those who had bet late and gotten the 5½ came out ahead.

Bookmakers still lost money since a lot of the Saints action had come in on Sunday at 5½. But the touchdown saved them from paying off all those early bets on the Saints.

Then came the bizarre extra point. After the touchdown, with no time left on the clock, everyone thought the game was over. TV crews and others went out onto the field. Players strode gleefully or walked dejectedly to the locker room. The refs had to call them back out for the extra point. NFL rules require it. But there was no way the outcome would be changed, so who cared? Bettors and bookies, that’s who. The score was 29-24. For anyone who had bet the game at 5½, the extra point was the difference between winning and losing.

The Saints weren’t too enthusiastic about things and took their time coming out of the locker room and back onto the field.

When both teams had finally shown up, the Vikings, rather than trying to score, politely took a knee. Game over, finally.
 
It would have been even better for the books –  and worse for the crowd –  if the teams had taken the extra-point seriously. Normally, even with only a few seconds left on the clock, the teams would have lined up for the extra point, the kick would have been good, and the Vikings would have won by 6 points rather than 5. Bookies would have kept all the money that had been bet on the Saints. Instead, they had to pay off the late bets that came in on the Saints plus 5½.

In the end, the smart money – the sharps who bet the Vikings giving 3½ or 4 points – won. As for the crowd, some won, some lost, some got a push.