ndrosen

Jacob Sullum has an article in Reason about the prosecution of Colin Gray, the father of a teenaged school shooter. There is also mention of the prosecution and conviction of James and Jennifer Crumbley for supposed negligence when their son committed murder. I think that the estimable Mr. Sullum’s column is worth reading for the points it makes, but I would also like to make a somewhat different point: Even if you think that someone deserves to be punished for what he did or failed to do, you should also think about the incentives that punishing him will create for other people.

Imagine that a couple of months from now, a high school principal summons James and Jennifer Smith to the school, informs them that their sixteen year old son Tom has threatened to perpetrate a school shooting, and demands that they rigorously prevent him from getting his hands on a gun or anything else dangerous. Tom indignantly denies that he made any such threat, and says that some teenage jackass has made a completely false accusation, or that a hysterical teacher has jumped to mistaken conclusions based on a scary story he wrote as a school assignment. (There would be precedents for such a thing.)

Mr. and Mrs. Smith think that he may well be telling the truth, but that they don’t want to risk being sent to prison for twenty years. They severely restrict his activities, and send him to a therapist, or perhaps send him to a mental ward as an inpatient. Tom becomes understandably angry, and is offended both by the behavior of the school authorities, and by his own parents, who, as he sees it, don’t trust him, and don’t have his back. His education is derailed, he is stigmatized as crazy-dangerous, his “therapy” proves iatrogenic, and he is left burning with resentment. This may be quite bad for him, and it may also result in him hurting others, one way or another.

We should think about the potential for this kind of harm before we enthusiastically prosecute parents for being less attentive or vigilant than it appears, in retrospect, that they should have been.

I trust that many readers know about civil forfeiture, the practice of seizing property based on its alleged connection to a crime, without convicting the property owner of any crime, and sometimes without any accusation that the owner had any connection to the crime, even if a crime was actually committed by someone. Reason magazine has an article about a lawsuit alleging that prosecutors filed bogus charges against a man for challenging the seizure of his car. We need law enforcement to make crime reasonably dangerous for the criminals, but we should not be indifferent to abuses committed by police and prosecutors.

Oklahoma’s Governor Stitt has commuted Julius Jones’s sentence to life without parole. If the case against Mr. Jones is as weak as some people claim that it is, this is less than justice, but while there’s life, there’s hope. Perhaps at some point, Julius Jones may be able to establish his innocence to a court’s satisfaction.