The Banality of Oppression

Honesty, strangely enough, is not something that is very welcome in the justice system – at least not the deep variety, those revelations that lead to more questions, reflections, connections. Lawyers don’t like it; successes slip away, sophisticated lines of defence are severed, and we start to uncomfortably understand (and worse, contemplate responding to) how tangled the roots of wrongdoing really are. Police and prosecutors prey upon it; hearing, instead of the complex subtext of shame and hopefulness that may justifiably lead someone to admit a wrong action, simply the “aha, gotcha!” moment that secures a conviction. Judges, well, judges tend to be so chronically undernourished on their diets of partial truths and platitudes that real honesties likely taste strange, insubstantial. Besides, what court has time to sink its teeth into the messy realities of lives, especially when dryly recited by parroting counsel who have fifty other files and their own interests to think about?

Opportunities for honest engagement, like many other of the most important insignia of healthy relations, are rarely found in our criminal courtrooms. And so, even as the system digs its claws and keeps its tabs upon the humans it commands, most are paradoxically hard-pressed to be seen as full humans, to assert and nurture, as one frustrated client put it, their “dignity and integrity”. It might seem an odd attribute to recognise in those accused, perhaps, of violating the dignity and integrity of others (or their property), but it’s a fundamental attribute of liberal humanism. Anything less leads to oppression.

So that’s what I’m going to call it, even though ours is the sort that leaves no whip scars or wire burns, that doesn’t disappear people in the night or actively shackle basic entitlements, as in certain other power-addled states. Rather, our oppressions are cloaked in the strict, confounding logic that imprisons addicts for the effects of their addictions, that denies the homeless bail because they don’t have stable homes. They are deepened by the measured condescension of professionals, when respect means little more than checking off the right boxes. And they are underlined by the centrality of poverty among the reasons why some folks are pegged as “rounders”, returned with sad regularity to the system’s small square holes. Oppression flourishes when those who wield power cease caring about how it diminishes the dignity and integrity of those without.

People with the least power in our society – those enduring mangled families, self-medicating wounds, wandering between temporary refuges – are disproportionately represented in our pre-trial prisons. Many are legally guilty of at least some of what they’ve been charged with; some are not. This is not surprising: private sufferings have public consequences. Oppressed people, perhaps in more achingly evident ways than the rest of us, commit crimes: they lie, they lash out, they try to get ahead by doing underhanded things, and thus, they come into contact with our official structures of rules, punishments, and accountability. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this state of affairs – societies have long reserved the right to draw and enforce moral boundaries around the lives of their members – but it seems reasonable to assume that any institution that dignifies itself with the word ‘justice’ ought to remember that any exercise of its substantial influence should be accompanied by significant responsibilities, including a sensitive awareness of the brokenness that characterises many of its subjects’ existences. By and large, those invested with the tasks of policing, prosecuting, defending and judging persons accused of crimes do not share much in common with them. Most don’t have any idea what it’s like to live with a mental illness or the memory of abuse, most, if they’re addicted to anything, don’t have to huddle in alleys or hustle their own bodies to get a fix, and most are more likely to own their homes rather than face the hassles of bad landlords or the revolving-door welcome of charity shelters. Again, not surprising, and not a feature of our slanted society that’s about to change. But once we accept the burden of adjudicating conflicts, can we justly refuse to recognise our role in making matters better or worse?

While ‘better’ is maybe too much to expect of a system primarily designed to determine who should be marked with the stigma of “criminal”, it’s more culpably complicit in making people’s lives worse. The blinkered roll-out of equal treatment is one of the worse culprits in this regard. Although its façade is fraying somewhat thin these days, the presumption of innocence remains a cornerstone of our legal process. Unless pre-trial detention is necessary in the interests of public safety or to make sure someone returns to court, that presumption demands that they should be allowed every freedom in the interim, to either address the underlying difficulties that led to the charge or, if they prefer, go about as if nothing had happened. Instead, most people accused of committing a crime are made to agree to a string of conditions before they’ll be released. These may include demands that they keep a curfew, or stay at a certain residence, or steer clear of drugs, alcohol, or anyone with a criminal record. Most insidiously, bail is rarely granted to those who can’t produce a whack of assets, a whistle-clean relative, or, more commonly, both. Some programs, like that offered by the John Howard Society, attempt to level the field a bit by supervising the release of those who are otherwise bereft of alternatives, but the ostensibly equal, manifestly discriminatory rule remains the same: if you take one step out of line, any faltering that may be entirely understandable in your difficult circumstances, your next residence will be that big house on Barton Street. Told you so. This is the banality of oppression in our time, our community: processes whose impervious, impersonal demands box in complete people with complex stories, who make it ever harder for those without power to reclaim the dignity and integrity that should never be lost.