President Trump to Meet Chairman Kim Jong-un

Donald Trump likely thinks of himself as a cut-throat negotiator, but Kim Jong-un has killed family members.

We often do not grasp immediately the consequences of capitalism, and peaceful coexistence is one of them. The age of reason and capitalism were causally connected. People do not kill or die for what they can sell or buy.




I am reminded of a line from The Right Stuff. I think that it was Trudy Cooper who was talking about a college reunion and how the other girls were going on about their husbands' careers "... on Wall Street and places like that. 'Dog-eat-dog competition' [she scoffs]. I wonder how they would feel knowing that there was a 25% chance their husbands would not come out of that board room." 




In Die Hard, Hans Gruber has no interest in corporate "green mail."
Million dollar negotiator Harry Ellis has no idea who he is dealing with.

We were watching The Edge starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. Hopkins plays Charles Morse a multi-millionaire in the fashion industry. (Seeking to run off with Morse's wife, Bob Green [Baldwin] tries several times to kill him.) They are on a photo shoot in the Canadian Northwest when their plane goes down, killing the pilot, leaving them stranded. (Great shot of Morse with his cell phone looking at an empty horizon.) Everyone flounders. Most of them die. But Morse is up for this. He is a voracious reader. When he spoke the line, "All my life I wanted to do one unequivocal thing." I said to myself in my head, "You ought to try landing a Cessna 185."

I learned to fly in the 1990s. Since 2014, I have been in a military unit working closely with the National Guard and Air National Guard. Many of them are combat veterans. Even the guy, who when you ask him, "What are you doing?" says, "Sharpening my bayonet and praying for war." is really a teddy bear: he cares about other people. He's a good soldier, a good leader. I would follow him into hell because he has already been there--three times. But that's the point: the horror of war made him a deeper person than he expected to become. That is true of all of them. No combat veteran I have met ever treated a subordinate with the callous disrespect that President Trump displays.

Donald Trump has never done anything of mortal consequence. His whole life has been one of very vocally making everything negotiable. That is why President Trump has no emotional understanding of Marshal Kim.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Virtues of Aviation Culture 

Engineers and Jihadi 

Fools, Cowards, and Thucydides 

American Surrenders to North Korea 

Modes of Survival 

Alternatives to Prison (Part 1 of 3)

Introduction:  For almost 200 years, the treatment and punishment of convicted criminals was defined by blending the Pennsylvania System and the New York System.  And, of course, it did nothing to remediate either the offender or the harms.  People came out of prison worse than when then went in.  They re-offended.  And their victims often were the same people they hurt before.  It is a cliché in corrections that prisoners are returned to within 100 yards of where they were arrested.  However, we have made progress.  Community corrections, moral reconation therapy, and reintegrative shaming are among the new modes that provide successful outcomes.

Failure Modes

Historically, transgressors were exiled.  The modern prison solves that problem with topology: we lock them in, not out.  However, the modern prison system does not have deep roots in history.  Until America in the 18^th century, prisons were only for holding people until they were brought forward for punishment.  Some people might never leave prison, but incarceration was not the intended punishment for the crime. 

The modern prison began in 1788 with the Penitentiary House of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia.  The purpose was specifically to reform the penitent.  The intention to remake and rehabilitate the offender led to the construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829.  Separating convicts into solitary cells was a radical idea, consistent with the social theories of the Enlightenment.  Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764) launched the modern study of penology within criminology.  Beccaria argued against capital punishment and torture. His ideas were incidentally consistent with Quaker theory on salvation.  For them, solitary confinement was supposed to allow the penitent to come to terms with God.

However, an alternate model also informed penology:  convicted offenders should live and work communally under close supervision coupled with physical punishment for non-compliance.  That was the Auburn System created in New York following the appointment of Elam Lynds as warden of the prison in 1821. When flogging finally was prohibited in 1847, different punishments were invented. The striped uniform was another innovation in the Auburn System.

From chain gangs and work farms to separate facilities for low, medium, and high-risk offenders, prisons in America achieved little except to keep some people out of the sight of others.  Generally, prisoners themselves controlled their daily routines, usually with the most violent preying on anyone less aggressive.  Illegal drugs passed into prisons through corrupt guards.

Radicals and Reformers

Following the intellectual ferment of the 1960s, new methods for remediating harms slowly advanced within criminology; and they have found some success.  The basic assumptions of their sociology often are informed by some school of socialism, whether Marxist, neo-Marxist, or postmodern.  For them, crime is a response to oppression. For the classic Marxist, economic exploitation reduces the proletariat to criminal activity.  In point of fact, we have found that when the economy improves, crime goes up.  The current long recession (from 2001 to the present) has seen crime go down. 

However, their point is well-made because the outcomes of criminal action are different for different classes. And class correlates with race, though correlation is not cause.  See Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class by Lawrence O. Graham (HarperCollins, 1999).  When suburban kids are caught shoplifting, or shooting out streetlights with a pellet gun, or using drugs, their outcomes are different from that of their inner city cohorts. Suburban offenders receive many of the treatments and remediations outlined here.  The poor get prison. 

Moreover, we all offend.  Newt Gingrich once said that for most Americans, the posted speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity.  The only relevant questions are: Whom did you hurt? And what are you going to do about it?

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Firefighters

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights

Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project

Wolf DeVoon

Alternatives to Prison (Part 2 of 3)

Reintegrative Shaming was developed by John Braithwaite based on his experience as an administrative regulator of pharmaceutical firms in Australia.  It was quite simple.  If you go in with a warrant, you only meet the lawyers.  If you sit down for tea with the plant manager, you gain voluntary compliance.  “Sitting down for tea” meant getting the manager to acknowledge out loud that he knew about the violation, and knew that it was wrong. Then, he would promise to fix it, and usually did. 

Braithwaite followed those encounters with research into the anthropology of offense.  He found many examples from history and modern first peoples where the offender was brought back into the community after admitting the transgression and apologizing to the victim, making restoration where possible. 

Sometimes, it is not possible.  An Eskimo man killed his wife; and when her brother complained about that, he killed her brother.  So, his friends invited him to go hunting.  Four went out; three came back.  (Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1967. The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.).  Usually, the outcomes are better for everyone because most harms are smaller than murder. 

Even though less than homicide, assault is a violent crime.  Victims suffer multiple traumas, deeper than the physical wounds and scars.  Howard Zehr is a photographer.  He created Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims (Good Books, 2001).   Zehr presented the portraits and the stories of 39 courageous victims of violent crime.  Not all of the encounters brought closure.  In two, the attackers continued to mock their victims.  In one, the subject was a man whose son was killed in prison.  For three dozen other cases, both the victim and the offender found that they could overcome their suffering.

Community Corrections

The Midtown Manhattan Community Court opened in 1993. The Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn opened in the summer of 1998.  Red Hook’s success has served as a model for many other efforts.  Greg Berman invested two years of daily work, laying the social foundation for the center before it opened.  He met with groups.  He met with individuals. His salary came from a grant by the New York City Housing Authority to the Center for Court Innovation and the King County District Attorney’s Office.

The Red Hook court brings offenders and victims together.  The usual harms are domestic violence and shoplifting.  They also get public indecency cases when men are caught urinating in an alleyway.  Their theory on that is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime.   Every transgression harms the community.

In cases of personal crime, perpetrators confront their victims, apologize, and make whatever restitution is possible.  For offenses against the public order, the guilty apologize to an appropriate authority, acknowledge the harm they caused, and perform community service work. 

In many community corrections programs house arrest with electronic tethering is a common judicial sentence, especially for otherwise non-violent offenders such as the habitual drunk driver.  Community programs find work for them.  Their whereabouts are monitored.  It costs less for us, and keeps them integrated to the community.

Self-Awareness

That assailants are also victims is a fact of crime.  In the first place, a police investigation often reveals that the victim was only the last person to get hurt the most.  Whether a fight in a bar or a feud between neighbors, they had a personal interaction that played out over time.  Either one could have withdrawn completely, but neither did. 

Domestic assault is different than that.  There, a lifelong violent offender finds a lifelong victim of violence.  Typically, both grew up in abusive homes, as did their parents.  That is how they learned their roles.  To them, it seems perfectly normal. 

Moral Reconation Therapy is one of the most successful treatment programs for domestic and drug abuse cases.  Not surprisingly, they go together, especially with the drug of choice is alcohol; and MRT is also employed for treating drunk drivers.  MRT is the work of Gregory L. Little and Kenneth D. Robinson.  Launched in 1988, it was based on five years of research in the Tennessee prison system.  Research continues across problem areas and the many multi-year follow-up studies on recidivism place it high on the list of evidence-based therapies. 

The process is simple.  Following a tested and proven workbook, counselors direct clients in small groups to explore their own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.  For them self-awareness is a new experience.  Ayn Rand most cogently pointed out that the root of all evil is the failure to choose to think.  Thinking is not automatic.  It is volitional.  People blank-out, evade, and repress unpleasant thoughts, especially about themselves.  For a child, it does not take many years for them to become fogged into a reactive life of the immediate present.  Non-violent people become dysfunctional neurotics.  The violent ones become aggressive criminals.  Self-awareness cures that in about half the cases.

For over thirty years, MRT and other evidence-based practices typically have had success rates in the mid-fifties percent.  The National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov) is part of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (http://www.samhsa.gov).

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Employee Theft

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

The Fallibility of Fingerprinting

20% of Scientists are Crooks

Alternatives to Prison (Part 3 of 3)

Laissez-faire Criminology is my assertion (on this blog) that you do not need to react to every wrong or harm, either against yourself or someone else.  Defining “human” as “rational animal” and given that violent offenders lack self-awareness, they cannot be considered human.  Self-righteous punishment of a criminal is no more meaningful than scolding a coyote or attempting to corral a tornado.  (Indeed, prisons are nothing if not corrals full of tornados.)  Sometimes the best thing you can do is to cut your losses and mind your own business.

Private treaties are one way that corporations deal with white collar crime.  Of all the harms that individuals visit on each other, white collar crime perfectly matches the theory of the rational actor.  White collar criminals are planfully competent.  They are privileged, educated, economically comfortable.  Therefore, the remediations are individualized and based on profit.

 “In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...
“While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact...  In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions.  In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types.”
(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988. The Hallcrest Report I and II, by William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, et al., Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 1985 and 1990.)
 

When Nothing Works

Robert Martinson is famous for “What works? Questions and answers about prison reform” (The Public Interest 35.2; 1974: 22-54).  His research was immediately recast as “nothing works.”  Martinson found that every attempt at rehabilitation in prison had failures, often in greater proportion to their successes.  Successful treatments tended to work only for various minorities, often poorly identified or defined. 

Eventually, the claim that “nothing works” generated another response.  Among very many articles, consider:

·       “Beyond ‘What Works?’ A 25-year Jubilee Retrospective of Robert Martinsons Famous Article,” by Rick Sarre, in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 34: 38-46.

·       “Does Correctional Treatment Work? A Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed Meta-Analysis” by D.A. Andrews, Ivan Zinger, et al., Criminology, Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages 369–404, August 1990. 

Reduce your problem population as much as you want, eventually you will find individuals for whom nothing we know of will solve their problems.  What do you do with the unregenerate?

Perhaps we should just kill them.  We would save ourselves the trouble and expense.  Consider that we know that a child who is cruel to animals grows up to be a violent offender.  Would it be right to kill a child for abusing a family pet?  Ideally, the offender would be remediated and re-integrated with one of the other responses.

The therapies and remedies discussed above may not work in all cases.  Ultimately, we are left with an intractable problem. We build very many small spaces for internal exile.  In Russia, they have all of Siberia for internal exile.  That may remain the best solution for the worst cases.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part I

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part II

A Forensics Bibliography

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief

Dr. William Herbert Sheldon, Jr., (1898 – 1977) created the 70-point grading scale that is the standard in modern American numismatics.  He also pioneered the study of Early American Copper, the Large Cents and Half Cents struck until 1857. He also stole coins from the American Numismatic Society; and he defrauded other collectors.

Dr. William Sheldon
(Wikipedia)

Sheldon came from a privileged family. The philosopher William James was his godfather. He earned his bachelor’s at Brown University and went on to complete a master’s at the University of Colorado. Returning to the east, he was granted a Ph.D. by the University of Chicago in 1925, which he followed in 1933 with an M.D. degree. Studying in Europe, he met with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. He developed a theory of personality “somatotypes” that were similar to the theories of Ernst Kretschmer under whom he also studied.  During World War II, Sheldon served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps. He taught psychology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago before joining the faculty of the University of Oregon Medical School as a professor of medicine. He returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded his own research organization.

According to Sheldon, people could be classified as ectomorphs, mesomorphs, or endomorphs: skinny, medium, fat.  Ectomorphs are stingy and mean while endomorphs are jolly.  Mesomorphs are a little of both. 

Sheldon developed his measurements deeper than those crude labels. Writing for the E-Sylum mail list of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, Denis Loring said: “I was somatotyped by Dr. Sheldon himself. I used to visit him and Dorothy Paschal (“Dr. Dorothy” as he called her) at their home in Cambridge, Mass. On one occasion the conversation turned to somatotyping, and the fact that I went to Harvard but had not participated in Sheldon's photographic somatotyping project. He promptly got up, told me to stand straight and face 90 degrees away from him. He inspected me carefully and pronounced me a 4-6-1, (4 endomorphic, 6 mesomorphic, 1 ectomorphic), a solid rarity 6 in the somatotype world.”

The “Harvard Study” that Denis Loring referred to was one of a series in which Sheldon photographed Ivy League and Seven Sister School students, typically in their underwear, against a grid. It was alleged that many were nude, but this may be an urban legend; or it may be that the nudes in his files were from different studies; or that photographs in his collection which were labeled “nudes” were not. It remains true that among those whose somatotypes were recorded were Hillary Rodham, Diane Sawyer, Warren Beatty, Nora Ephron, and Meryl Streep.

The 70-Point Grading Scale

Sheldon had a passion for Large Cents and related coins in the “early American coppers” series. He wrote Early American Cents 1793-1814: an Exercise in Descriptive Classification with Tables of Rarity and Value (Harper & Brothers, 1949). Working with Dorothy I. Paschal and Walter Breen, Sheldon then updated his research as Penny Whimsy: A Revision of Early American Cents 1793-1814 (Harper & Row, 1958). Penny Whimsy became the standard reference for these coins with several reprints issued over the years by Sanford Durst (1965 and 1990) and Lawrence Quarterman (1976). To establish the values of the coins, Sheldon created a 70-point scale, based on a convenient fiction that if a Large Cent were graded Fair (1) and were sold for one dollar, then the same date, type, and variety, in Uncirculated (60) should sell for $60. A perfect example would be priced at $70.

Inflation long ago erased the baseline for such calculations. Also, the arithmetic was never intended for any other series. Still, over the years, numismatists accepted the numerical ranges for grading all American coins. Today, it is used in every American catalog or reference. The scale even shows up in American catalogs for ancient Roman coins. However, hardly any European dealers or collectors recognize the scale, and prefer nicely descriptive adjectives that translate well.

Sheldon’s drive to acquire the coins he loved to study crossed all lines of common decency among numismatists. All collectors (coins, stamps, furniture, automobiles, rock ‘n’ roll records, …) know the foibles of passion, in others, if not themselves.  William Sheldon did not optimistically over-grade his coins. He did not carefully clean and nicely retone them, and then fail to mention the fact. Beginning no later than 1949, Sheldon visited the American Numismatic Society collection often and swapped his lower grade examples for their better ones. He also exchanged his lower grade coins with better examples bought from other individuals, placing his in their holders without annotation, and then selling those to other collectors.

Like the infamous “Western Assay Bars” of John Ford, Sheldon’s thievery was revealed when later collectors bought the inventories of famous numismatists at highly visible auctions by important firms. Then, the coins, their photographic history, and their auction pedigrees could be examined as a body. Also, like those pioneer gold fakes, the highest echelons of the numismatic community long suspected the problem; but talking in private for decades achieved nothing and only a suit at law in federal court forced the correlation and recognition of all the facts. Ten years later, the ANS was still pursuing its lost property.

Dr. William Sheldon is not alive to defend himself. No one else rises to his cause. The evidence is damning. Much of it is physical, and of a quality that would be the envy of any prosecutor. The coins in question were pedigreed, catalogued, photographed, displayed, admired, and bought and sold among the highest echelons of American numismatics. While Dr. Sheldon did write the standard reference, he was not alone at his level of expertise. His crimes were exposed by other authorities.

Sheldon also was not alone in profiting from his crimes, which is why the American Numismatic Society had to go to court.

Delmar Bland is widely regarded as the “Expert’s Expert” for Large Cents. The ANS hired him to investigate the problem of William Sheldon in 1991. That also raised some questions from another aficianado of Early American Copper, John Adams who claimed that the ANS may not be the helpless victim of a predator. The ANS waited 20 years (1973 to 1991) between the time that it first investigated the problem until it sought to recover its property. “… torpid if not supine…” Adams said. Adams suggested that some of Sheldon’s ill-gotten gains may have come from undocumented sales by unidentified ANS curators. We may never know. We do know that an overwhelming inventory of coins not matching their supposed provenances were in the collection of Dr. William Sheldon.

Notes (This was edited from a two-part article in the Winter 2013 and Spring 2013 issues of the Mich-Matist magazine of the Michigan State Numismatic Society.)

• Jess Patrick of the Patrick Mint brought to my attention the apparent error in the obituary published by Nature and reprinted in The Psychiatrist. Sheldon probably did not study under Jung and Freud.
• Denis Loring’s reminiscence appeared in the E-Sylum mail list of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society (Volume 11, Number 50, December 14, 2008, Article 16).

About the suits in federal court: 

• “ANS search for 129 missing cents becomes legal battle: Society attorney names late William Sheldon as suspect,” by Bill Gibbs, Coin World Aug. 23, 1993. 
• ANS Magazine, vol. 3. no. 2, Summer 2004, by curator Robert W. Hoge. 
• “More on Collector Ted Naftzger and the Switched Large Cents,” by John Kleeberg, The E-sylum, Vol. 11, No. 24, June 15, 2008, Article 17.) 
• Maine Antiquarian Digest (February 1998) by David Hewett.
• Adams wrote to the Maine Antiquarian Digest (March 1998) as he has also published later in the E-Sylum, (Volume 11, Number 24, June 15, 2008, Article 17).  
• Maine Antiquarian Digest. April 1998 by Lawrence, Susan, and Harvey Stack.

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Junk Criminology in the Courtoom
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