Aggression


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One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. -Nietzsche

April 7, 2012

Aggression

The Supreme Court decided that strip searches can be used for any purpose, including:

violating a leash law
driving without a license
failing to pay child support

Citing examples from briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, Justice Breyer wrote that people have been subjected to the humiliation of a visual strip search after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.
A nun was strip-searched, he wrote, after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration.
[NYT]

Strip searches are needed by the system as a powerful threat. If an arrest was merely bureaucratic processing without the shock of physical violation, it would not cause citizens to fear the system they pay for. Prison rape is sustained for the same reason. Rather than treating molestation and rape as crimes or taking easy measures to prevent them, they are tolerated and used as punishment.

Currently in the United States, 1 in every 31 adult persons is either in jail or prison or on parole or probation. That amounts to 7.3 million Americans and a cost that exceeds $68 billion annually. This figure does not include juveniles accountable to the U.S. correction system.
[Yahoo!]

Public policy outcomes are very deliberate. When brutal consequences persist for decades and are an anomaly compared to the civilized parts of the world, leaders are making choices for reasons they think are good and at a cost they are willing to foist upon the public.

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