On the Sowell Matter

This is no sermon. There is no point in waxing poetic on the horror of it all: a mass murder amid the poverty class in the Poverty Capital of America, the loss and suffering of the living and the dead.

This is, instead, a public policy position statement shrouded in the loose observations of an author who is lamentably familiar with the poverty class. Consider this: the current and justifiable hue and cry can be Venn diagrammed by two overlapping circles.

First is the circle of Anthony Sowell, who ghoulishly lived among the victims for God knows how long undetected, despite his violent record, the recurrence of red-flag brushes with the law, and his loosely monitored status as a sex offender registrant.

Second is the circle of the dead: disposable, untraceable women in a community disinterested in their fates in life. Many had loose ties to their families, or none at all. Some had drug/alcohol problems or criminal records/arrest warrants, themselves, which left them outside of the social realm designed to look out for them, whether living, missing or dead.

These circles overlap, not in the Sowell residence, itself, but in the criminal justice system. Let me explain: justice is the intersection of many things, but the best (and I argue the only) way to evaluate it is to look at how our institutions treat the least among us in society. If the least among us are treated with dignity and fairness and reasonableness, in compliance with Constitutional standards, then our society is a healthy one. If our society ignores its obligations to look out for the least among us, then our society is a failure; it is unjust. This is the milieu of the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is a vast Venn diagram of its own. It purports to be the hand of society that serves justice, and it employs many constituent parts. Police, prosecutors, judges, jailers, defense lawyers are some of the parties paid to supply justice. It's subjective consumers are defendants and victims, its objective consumers are jurors and, theoretically, the public at large, the community served by the system.

It is the last of these categories that, now, sees the folly of a current system that "let Sowell happen," so to speak. But as the finger-pointing heats up (an aside: prosecutors blaming police, police blaming prosecutors? What a refreshing change from everyone blaming defense attorneys...), I suggest that the public at large "let Sowell happen." I don't mean his neighbors. I mean a society whose only engagements with the criminal justice system are the shamefully two-dimensional caricatures paraded past us by the media, with content spoon fed to it by people with much to gain by the maintenance of a corrupt status quo. I mean a society that knows nothing about the mechanism of the law, and cares nothing about the circumstances that lead subjective consumers of criminal justice to it's courthouses and cages.

It is just as likely that I would be assigned to represent Sowell in court for his crimes as it is that I was assigned to represented any number of his victims during their own legal headaches. That's because I look out for the least among us, the poor, the forgotten, the mentally ill, the addicted, even the despicable. I give them their Constitutional due. I give them some judgement-free dignity. You watch it and you smell it from the inside as I do, and perhaps you'll make sense of what I've said about the system and what I do for a living.

Welcome to the Bloomsday Device.