Scarlet Barcode

by digby

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the busybody culture seems to be on the uptick. It’s not just the Schiavo stuff, which is the worst of it in that it featured the president himself flying back to Washington in the dead of night to sign special legislation. It’s more than that and it has to do with the religious right,corporations and government all working together (and sometimes using modern technology) to regulate personal behavior. I no like.

You have moral scolds and personal responsibility hypocrites and authoritarians and rapacious business interests that are determined, for a variety of reasons, to erase the idea of personal privacy on the one hand and the idea of redemption and reinvention on the other. Combined with a breathlessly intrusive tabloid media (dripping with hypocrisy and phony sanctimony) and you have a recipe for some very unpleasant social changes.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

The collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions are already severe. One misdemeanor can significantly diminish or outright ruin your chances for various types of employment, housing, financial aid, higher education, and licensing (not to mention its potential immigration consequences). These collateral effects of criminal convictions — most severe for people being released from prison — disproportionately harm the poor, creating a miserable cycle that makes it even more difficult for people in economically and educationally depressed communities to better their circumstances.

To make matters even worse, the FBI now wants to go beyond tracking “severe and/or significant offenses” (felonies and significant misdemeanors) and include on criminal history reports (accessed by employers and licensing agencies) “non-serious offenses” – from drinking in public to teenage vagrancy, traffic violations to urinating in public, loitering to disorderly conduct. As Michelle Chen observes in the New Standard, this “would foreclose employment opportunities for an untold number of people, disproportionately impact people of color, and invite the abuse of sensitive information.”

The majority of employers will not hire someone with an arrest or “infraction” history, and even the most meaningless of follies will cause heightened scrutiny of the applicant. Any negative information, no matter how minor or long ago, will inevitably be prejudicial towards the applicant. Compound the stigma of even a non-criminal record with the fact that numerous state and federal laws have made it increasingly easy for employers to perform invasive background checks, and soon people’s lives could be negatively impacted by the revelation of even the most minor indiscretions.

Additionally alarming is the fact that these vast criminal records databases are riddled with mistakes or incomplete — half the arrest records do not contain the outcome of the cases (i.e., dismissal, acquittal, the District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, etc.). Not only does the FBI want to allow even greater invasions of our private lives, but such incursions would sometimes uncover false and misleading information — but damaging nonetheless.

Like the bankruptcy bill or these “shaming sentences” this is part of the zero tolerance culture that we see emerging in the courts and elsewhere, where we have ritual public humiliations designed to “send a message” and where people can never escape the mistakes of their youths. This allows the powerful and the sanctimonious to indulge in the fiction that they are morally superior by forcing others to pay both publicly and forever. A zero tolerance society turns into a paranoid society very quickly.

Here’s the thing. I’m not big on American exceptionalism as a rule. But if there’s anything about American culture that makes it unique it is the idea of second chances. After all, the colony and then the nation was settled by refugees and opportunists, petty criminals, fortune hunters and losers who were looking for a chance to start over again. It’s who we are.

I’ll evoke the usual suspect here, even though it’s an unbearable cliche, because it happens to be true:

“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”

There’s a lot about that to quarrel with, but I believe it is intrinsic to our success as a nation, whether its the willingness to take risks and create a dynamic, vibrant economy or our ability to come back after having made mistakes and create art and music and technology — or just a decent life for ourselves and our families. When you strip it down to fundamentals, it’s what makes progress possible.

But this new propensity among our institutions to track your every movement and keep secret lists with your data and share it amongst themselves is likely to stifle all that creativity and energy and turn us into a paranoid, withdrawn, insecure culture where one mistake can mean the end of everything. There can be no vibrant capitalism where you cannot afford to take risks. There can be no growth or knowledge or invention if you must watch your every step and know that no matter how trivial your misstep or whether you pay your debt to society, you will always be subject to social, economic and governmental disapprobation.

Every day I hear conservatives talk about freedom and liberty. And every day I see their institutions conspiring (sometimes with the help of well meaning, but misguided liberals) to erode the foundation upon which liberty is built. Of course people must behave responsibly and lawfully. A civil society depends upon us all agreeing to follow its rules. But humans are only human and they make mistakes. If we begin to use this powerful technology to ensure that there is no statute of limitations on life lessons and errors, everyone who doesn’t have the means to game the system will be wearing a scarlet barcode on their foreheads. Because, (I know you’vve heard this before somewhere) nobody’s perfect.

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