The Locus Effect
By Gary A. Haugen & Victor Boutros
Why the end of poverty requires the end of violence.
-------------------------------- A DREAM DEVASTATED ------------------------------------
The epic failure to provide billions of the world's poorest people with basic law enforcement systems so that they can be safe from the terror of lawless violence has had a devastating impact on the dream of ending severe poverty.
Marthin Luther King Jr., in his iconic "I Have a Dream Speech":
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of colr are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
-----------------------------
How common poor people are relentlessly ambushed by violence in developing world, have an eye for the brutal real-life implication of these terrifying events for the individuals who endure them -- the productive capabilities lost, the earning potential stolen, the confidence and well-being devastated by trauma, the resources ripped away from those on the edge of survival and poured instead into the pockets of predators. The multiplies of these devastating individual tragedies make you sensing the scandalous implications of this failure to address the massive sinkhole of violence that is swallowing up the hope of the poor.
The poor in the developing world endure such extraordinary levels of violence because they live in a state of de facto lawlessness. The law enforcement systems are so broken so that most poor people living outside the protection of the law. The justice system in developing world make the poor poorer and less secure.
The locus effect is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor. It also reveals stories about why basic justice systems in the developing world came to be so dysfunctional. It turns out that when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed by the law enforcement systems did not -- systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered.
Secondly, given the brokenness of the public justice system, forces of wealth and power in the developing world have carried out one of the most fundamental and unremarked social revolutions of the modern era in building a completely parallel system of private justice, with private security forces and alternative dispute resolution systems that lave the poor stuck with useless public systems that are only getting worse.
Finally, for historical reasons (and to tragic effect), the great agencies of poverty alleviation, economic development, and human rights have purposely avoided participating in the strengthening of law enforcement systems in the developing world.
Access to law enforcement protects the poor from common criminal violence is critical to their advancement and well-being. Criminal violence is a highly complex social phenomenon with many contributing factors that have to addressed. If one tries to stop criminal violence by addressing these other contributing factors in the absence of a credible law enforcement deterrent, such an approach will fail. Secondly, regardless the success of Western form of law enforcement, still there's the failings of the criminal justice systems (e.g. systematic law enforcement abuses in U.S.). The Western systems of criminal justice does not offer cookie-cutter solutions for other countries. The best solution will come from a combination of home-grown, highly-contextualized remedies witht he best of what might fit from external sources.
-------
-------
In the Eastern Congo in 2011, armed conflict reportedly gave rise to an epidemic of sexual assaults against women at the rate of 48 rapes per hour. In Peru, Huanuco city, 50 rape victims in just 5 days. One brutalized death body of 8-year old girl found in the trash in Peruvian's La Union. In Bangalore, female labors working like slaves in brick factory under hostage situation, tortured and raped at night. In Nairobi, Kenya, 10 years old girl sexually assaulted at her own home and raped by a neighbors.
For the world's poorest girls live, the home is not safe, the bathroom is not safe, and even schools are not save. In the absence of effective law enforcement, schools will not protect girls from violence. To successfully prosecute the assailants in almost all the rape cases, the victims will need to be examined by a doctor to gather physical and forensic evidence. However, only one policy doctor available in the whole city. They have to get in line with approximately 600 other victims, in addition to other non-sexual assaults victims.
For a person living in poverty in the developing world, however, while the protections of the family and community may be quite strong, the third and fourth lines of defense (private security and the government) are almost non-existent. The common poor person in the developing world cannot afford to hire private security the way wealthier people in the developing world can -- and, as we have seen and shall see further, poor people do not get the protections of law enforcement.
The poor in Mexico and India in the 1950s, seemed to be hungry because they couldn't grow enough wheat and rice. But then it turns out that perhaps they were just growing the wrong kin dof wheat and rice. Agronomists like Norman Borlaug introduced high-yield variations of these crops in the developing world, launched a Green Revolution, made Mexico and India net exporters of these grains and saved a billion poor people from starvation. But it couldn't save 3 million people from dying of stravation in Bangladesh when it had a plentiful supply of food, because the economist Amartya Sen teaches that the problem is not the supply of the food, but the inequities in the distribution system that rob the poor of the capacity to access the food.
A poor also is vulnerable to disease, from the epidemics like polio, dysentery, malaria, or HIV. The poor need an access to medical care, vaccinations, hygiene, and sanitation programs to solve this problem. But people in low-income countries may not be able to access these services if their national governments are saddled with excessive debt payments that crowd out budgets for basic public health services, or if corrupt authorities steal funds intended to provide those services.
An impoverished mom in low income country might be able to pay for mosquito nets and improved sanitation for her family on her own if she could have a micro-loan to buy that sewing machine for the tailoring business she runs out of her home.
One can see the way each aspect of poverty is clearly connected to other problems.
The aspect of poverty is violence -- common, everyday, predatory violence. Violence from war or conflict, which affects many of the world's poorest and has been identified by Paul collier in The Bottom Billion, as a major source of poverty or development trap, may occasionally enter our global conversation about the plight of the global poor. But, rather, here we are directing attention to the billions of additional poor people who are impacted by "common", every day violence in their otherwise relatively stable country.
For these billions in poverty, the forward progress will depend on whether the world is ready to address the epidemic of ordinary terror that swallows up many of our attempts to assist them in sustainably improving their lives.
Economists measure the costs of violence by counting the aggregate years of productive life that violence takes away through disability: DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years). The fact that 9 million years of disability adjusted life years are lost each year worldwide as a result of rape and domestic violence against woman, and think about food production in Africa and the fact that women do almost all the work (80%). Imagine the impact on food production are lost every year because of violence. Likewise, in India, a survey found that 13% of women had missed paid work because being beaten and abused at home -- that, on average, they had to miss a week and a half of work per incident. IN Nicaragua, researchers found that women who were abused earned about half of what other women earned in wages.
Experts have found that violence is a major source of un-freedom in developing societies that directly inhibits the efforts of individuals to better themselves. The "net accumulation of human capital" over a 15-year period in Latin America and the Caribbean was cut in half because of violence and crime. In Africa, violence and crime was eroding human capital and impeding employment, discouraging the accumulation of assets and hindering entrepreneurial activity.
Violence also devastates the development of human capital in poor communities -- which is the process by which people actually grow the level of skill and knowledge they are able to bring their struggle out of poverty. It has massive social costs, refer to as the destruction of social capital -- the social norms and networks that enable people to work and interact together. Violence destroys the social fabric of communities and has a disruptive impact on community and intra-familial relationships; it erodes social relationships through the trauma of loss but also in restricting physical mobility and increasing levels of tension.
In addition to the massive direct and indirect financial costs of violence, there are also non-monetary costs of violence -- the way violence can change a person's life forever. Violence significantly raises levels of depression, suicides, panic disorders, alcohol and substance abuse/dependence, and post-traumatic stress disorders -- to a point that the poor endure levels of psychological damage comparable to living in a war zone. The locusts of violence do not simply destroy your financial prospects -- they destroy your life. For the victims, they do not simply heal with time. Victims frequently continue to experience intrusive memories of the past keeping them disengaged from the present and unable to take initiative.
------ ----------- THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE PIPELINES ----------------
The first segment: The Police, ignorance and incompetence; corruption and perversity.
In Southeast Asian, there are cases of teenage girls who have been trafficked in to a bar that doubles as a brother, face being serially raped to pay off their "debts". Then you get to watch lawyers be stone-walled at the police station for hours.
Police are generally the first segment, nothing can get into the pipeline without passing through them. They are also the only segment with muscle (violent coercive power), which can be either used to stop violence or abused to hurt people Tragically, this first and most important segment of the most important system tends to also be its most dysfunctional element. The police, as experienced by poor people in the developing country, have almost no specialized crime-fighting training and can make more money hurting people than helping them; generally lack the most rudimentary equipment; and, year to year, their presence in the community makes poor people more insecure.
The police in the developing world are totally corrupt and abusive. Corruption is a crime, a theft, either by extortion (give me money or I will hurt, detain, fine, or inconvenience you) or by selling the non-performance of a service that one has been paid to perform and which the public is entitled to receive.
When the corruption becomes endemic to a police force, it has become a criminal force. It is working against enforcement of the Law. It is just like the doctors who are not doctors anymore when they start make money off of making people more sick.
Charles Kenny writes that, in developing nations, extortion and bribery are the expected norm for interactions with the police. Then, the poor really don't have law enforcement. Corruption places the poor in a bidding war against perpetrators who are making counter offers to the police to not enforce the law. Corruptions allows violent predators to purchase hunting licenses from the authorities to hunt down the poor.
Scarcity: the expensive law enforcement: Not only about lack of law enforcement officers.
Within developing world countries, governments tend to deploy their scarce law enforcement resources to protect the things they value most -- which generally are not common poor people. In Indonesia, Bali gets about one police officer for every 300 people (a ratio on par with U.S.), but Kalimantan has one police for every 2,500 citizens.
A typical police station gets about $100 to cover all non-salary expenses for a whole year, which is what a good Starbucks customer in U.S. spends every month. The police do not have the most basic tools to do their jobs, including transportation to to the remote area, they lack of basic office supplies and technology like forms for filing a criminal complaint, paper to make copies of evidentiary documents, or folders for maintaining files, phones for conducting interviews, contacting government offices, or contacting victims or witness, computers for keeping records, tracking performance data, or writing reports, or undercover cameras, undercover audio recording, or basic digital photography equipment.
---------
The next segment in broken justice pipeline: PROSECUTORS
(Law & Order, TV series)
"In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet, equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
The brokenness of prosecution services in the developing world not only leaves innocent people who've had the misfortune of being wrongfully charged with a crime to languish in jail, but it also allows the violent abusers of the poor to run free.
The shortage of prosecutors is compounded in poorer countries by the disproportionately large volume of criminal violence and a massive pre-existing backlog. A criminal justice system is a relentless conveyor belt of criminal cases. They just keep coming. The lacking of prosecutors make them increasingly unable to give any one case the attention it deserves.
The Philippines prosecution service is in much better shape than most developing countries. Even so, common Filipinos know that the system is so overwhelmed that the only way a victim of a crime can get his or her case properly prosecuted is if he or she hires a private prosecutor to do all the investigative work, the logistical legwork, the legal analysis and the argumentation for the public prosecutor. If, however, you are too poor to hire your own private prosecutor, there simply is no prosecution service for you.
-------
The final segment: THE COURTS
A credible court system must be swift and true; that is, it must discern the guilt or innocence of an accused person with reasonable reliability --- and do so in a reasonable amount of time. The criminal courts in developing world are nearly paralyzed with dysfunction, reach the wrong results, and treat people badly. The judge in the criminal court enters the trial process with access to only one side of the story -- the side that can afford a lawyer. Lawyers tend to be such a tiny guild of professionals that billions of poor in the developing world will never meet a lawyer in their lifetime. But the problem is deeper than a lack of access to lawyers for victims and defendants in the courtroom. Lawyers can be so rare in the developing world that many judges, especially in Africa, have never been to law school and have no formal legal training. When poor (especially women) appear in court, they frequently are forced to tolerate not only the absence of legal expertise but also brutal buffoonery from ignorant, bigoted, and bizarre judges.
Courts in the poorest countries lack even more basic equipment -- like paper. In Malawi, courts tend to run out of paper half way through the month and have to stop hearing cases until more paper arrives. Victims will have to have case records prepared because the court does not have enough funds to pay for the paper or ink to document its own proceedings or order.
The lack of resources for the public justice system means that the poor must pay a variety of fees and costs (beyond bribes).
Another devastating detail: trials are not conducted from start to finish in a few days, but one bit at a time over months and years.
--------------------
------------------------ THE UNTHINKABLE BECAME MAINSTREAM --------------------
Shortly after WWII, the early pioneers of the modern human rights movement achieved victory -- passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such a think would have been unthinkable even a few years before, if we go back to the mid-1940s -- an era when it was inconceivable that a sovereign nation would have to answer to a higher authority for the way it treated those within its own borders.
The very idea of human rights represented what is called " a radical departure from traditional thinking and practice". Getting states to acknowledge universal human right claims would require a stunning reversal of centuries of geopolitical inertia: We are in effect asking states to submit to international supervision of their relationship with their own citizens, something has been traditionally regarded as an absolute prerogative of national sovereignty." The foundations of that sovereignty principle bgan to crack as the mass atrocities committed by Nazis -- many of which were consistent with their domestic law -- came to light.
The Nuremberg principles of international law governed the trials of German and Japanese war criminals. It delivered the first blow to the sovereignty principle by affirming that there were some rights that no country could violate, even within their own borders, towards their own people, and consistent with their own laws.
The defendants protested that they could not be held accountable for these atrocities to the Jews. Hermann Goering (Hitler's deputy and the original head of Gestapo), went so far as to complain that it was the Nazi defendants whose rights were being violated. At one point, rather than dispute the evidence presented by the prosecution of Nazi's atrocities, Goering defended the atrocities themselves: "But that was our right? We were a sovereign state and that was strictly our business."
----------COLONIAL LEGACIES AND FAILURE THAT MAKE SENSE-------------
In response to the question "why do criminal justice systems in the developing world fail so miserably to protect the poor from violence?" because those systems were never intended to protect common people form violence -- they were intended to protect the colonial rulers from the common people.
The western countries exported a very different form of policing around the world (different from their homes) to the vast empires under their tenuous imperial control Not surprisingly, the purpose and priority of this colonial model of policing would not to protect common citizenry from violence and crime -- but to protect the colonial state and its narrow interests and beneficiaries from the common citizenry.
-------------------- A DOWNWARD SPIRAL ---------------
As individuals with high incomes pursue private substitutes to public goods and services, the influential elites undermine support for funding of public services, and predictably, such systems get worse and worse. As the wealthy lose interest in public services, so do the policy-makers responsible for providing high-quality public services. Those support increased investment in public services, primarily lower-income individuals, have the least political influence, and the result is a gradual deterioration of public services. Other scholars have found that this dynamic is especially pronounced in developing countries where the poor make up the majority of the population but are politically marginalized.
THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE TO CHANGE: THE BENEFICIARIES OF LAWLESSNESS
Elites do not need an effective public justice system to protect them from being victimized by others, but they may need a broken public justice system to protect them from being held accountable for victimizing others. Broken public justice systems auction impunity to the highest bidder.
First, we've seen that most law enforcement systems in the developing world are colinal relics that were never set up to protect the poor from violence (but to protect the regime from the poor), and these systems have never been fundamentally re-engineered to serve the common people.
Secondly, elites with wealth and power in the developing world have abandoned these dysfunctional public justice systems and have set up systems of private security that protect them from violence.
Thirdly, the massive global movement fail to address those problems above.
-----------------------------------------------
Why the end of poverty requires the end of violence.
-------------------------------- A DREAM DEVASTATED ------------------------------------
The epic failure to provide billions of the world's poorest people with basic law enforcement systems so that they can be safe from the terror of lawless violence has had a devastating impact on the dream of ending severe poverty.
Marthin Luther King Jr., in his iconic "I Have a Dream Speech":
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of colr are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
-----------------------------
How common poor people are relentlessly ambushed by violence in developing world, have an eye for the brutal real-life implication of these terrifying events for the individuals who endure them -- the productive capabilities lost, the earning potential stolen, the confidence and well-being devastated by trauma, the resources ripped away from those on the edge of survival and poured instead into the pockets of predators. The multiplies of these devastating individual tragedies make you sensing the scandalous implications of this failure to address the massive sinkhole of violence that is swallowing up the hope of the poor.
The poor in the developing world endure such extraordinary levels of violence because they live in a state of de facto lawlessness. The law enforcement systems are so broken so that most poor people living outside the protection of the law. The justice system in developing world make the poor poorer and less secure.
The locus effect is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor. It also reveals stories about why basic justice systems in the developing world came to be so dysfunctional. It turns out that when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed by the law enforcement systems did not -- systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered.
Secondly, given the brokenness of the public justice system, forces of wealth and power in the developing world have carried out one of the most fundamental and unremarked social revolutions of the modern era in building a completely parallel system of private justice, with private security forces and alternative dispute resolution systems that lave the poor stuck with useless public systems that are only getting worse.
Finally, for historical reasons (and to tragic effect), the great agencies of poverty alleviation, economic development, and human rights have purposely avoided participating in the strengthening of law enforcement systems in the developing world.
Access to law enforcement protects the poor from common criminal violence is critical to their advancement and well-being. Criminal violence is a highly complex social phenomenon with many contributing factors that have to addressed. If one tries to stop criminal violence by addressing these other contributing factors in the absence of a credible law enforcement deterrent, such an approach will fail. Secondly, regardless the success of Western form of law enforcement, still there's the failings of the criminal justice systems (e.g. systematic law enforcement abuses in U.S.). The Western systems of criminal justice does not offer cookie-cutter solutions for other countries. The best solution will come from a combination of home-grown, highly-contextualized remedies witht he best of what might fit from external sources.
-------
-------
In the Eastern Congo in 2011, armed conflict reportedly gave rise to an epidemic of sexual assaults against women at the rate of 48 rapes per hour. In Peru, Huanuco city, 50 rape victims in just 5 days. One brutalized death body of 8-year old girl found in the trash in Peruvian's La Union. In Bangalore, female labors working like slaves in brick factory under hostage situation, tortured and raped at night. In Nairobi, Kenya, 10 years old girl sexually assaulted at her own home and raped by a neighbors.
For the world's poorest girls live, the home is not safe, the bathroom is not safe, and even schools are not save. In the absence of effective law enforcement, schools will not protect girls from violence. To successfully prosecute the assailants in almost all the rape cases, the victims will need to be examined by a doctor to gather physical and forensic evidence. However, only one policy doctor available in the whole city. They have to get in line with approximately 600 other victims, in addition to other non-sexual assaults victims.
For a person living in poverty in the developing world, however, while the protections of the family and community may be quite strong, the third and fourth lines of defense (private security and the government) are almost non-existent. The common poor person in the developing world cannot afford to hire private security the way wealthier people in the developing world can -- and, as we have seen and shall see further, poor people do not get the protections of law enforcement.
The poor in Mexico and India in the 1950s, seemed to be hungry because they couldn't grow enough wheat and rice. But then it turns out that perhaps they were just growing the wrong kin dof wheat and rice. Agronomists like Norman Borlaug introduced high-yield variations of these crops in the developing world, launched a Green Revolution, made Mexico and India net exporters of these grains and saved a billion poor people from starvation. But it couldn't save 3 million people from dying of stravation in Bangladesh when it had a plentiful supply of food, because the economist Amartya Sen teaches that the problem is not the supply of the food, but the inequities in the distribution system that rob the poor of the capacity to access the food.
A poor also is vulnerable to disease, from the epidemics like polio, dysentery, malaria, or HIV. The poor need an access to medical care, vaccinations, hygiene, and sanitation programs to solve this problem. But people in low-income countries may not be able to access these services if their national governments are saddled with excessive debt payments that crowd out budgets for basic public health services, or if corrupt authorities steal funds intended to provide those services.
An impoverished mom in low income country might be able to pay for mosquito nets and improved sanitation for her family on her own if she could have a micro-loan to buy that sewing machine for the tailoring business she runs out of her home.
One can see the way each aspect of poverty is clearly connected to other problems.
The aspect of poverty is violence -- common, everyday, predatory violence. Violence from war or conflict, which affects many of the world's poorest and has been identified by Paul collier in The Bottom Billion, as a major source of poverty or development trap, may occasionally enter our global conversation about the plight of the global poor. But, rather, here we are directing attention to the billions of additional poor people who are impacted by "common", every day violence in their otherwise relatively stable country.
For these billions in poverty, the forward progress will depend on whether the world is ready to address the epidemic of ordinary terror that swallows up many of our attempts to assist them in sustainably improving their lives.
Economists measure the costs of violence by counting the aggregate years of productive life that violence takes away through disability: DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years). The fact that 9 million years of disability adjusted life years are lost each year worldwide as a result of rape and domestic violence against woman, and think about food production in Africa and the fact that women do almost all the work (80%). Imagine the impact on food production are lost every year because of violence. Likewise, in India, a survey found that 13% of women had missed paid work because being beaten and abused at home -- that, on average, they had to miss a week and a half of work per incident. IN Nicaragua, researchers found that women who were abused earned about half of what other women earned in wages.
Experts have found that violence is a major source of un-freedom in developing societies that directly inhibits the efforts of individuals to better themselves. The "net accumulation of human capital" over a 15-year period in Latin America and the Caribbean was cut in half because of violence and crime. In Africa, violence and crime was eroding human capital and impeding employment, discouraging the accumulation of assets and hindering entrepreneurial activity.
Violence also devastates the development of human capital in poor communities -- which is the process by which people actually grow the level of skill and knowledge they are able to bring their struggle out of poverty. It has massive social costs, refer to as the destruction of social capital -- the social norms and networks that enable people to work and interact together. Violence destroys the social fabric of communities and has a disruptive impact on community and intra-familial relationships; it erodes social relationships through the trauma of loss but also in restricting physical mobility and increasing levels of tension.
In addition to the massive direct and indirect financial costs of violence, there are also non-monetary costs of violence -- the way violence can change a person's life forever. Violence significantly raises levels of depression, suicides, panic disorders, alcohol and substance abuse/dependence, and post-traumatic stress disorders -- to a point that the poor endure levels of psychological damage comparable to living in a war zone. The locusts of violence do not simply destroy your financial prospects -- they destroy your life. For the victims, they do not simply heal with time. Victims frequently continue to experience intrusive memories of the past keeping them disengaged from the present and unable to take initiative.
------ ----------- THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE PIPELINES ----------------
The first segment: The Police, ignorance and incompetence; corruption and perversity.
In Southeast Asian, there are cases of teenage girls who have been trafficked in to a bar that doubles as a brother, face being serially raped to pay off their "debts". Then you get to watch lawyers be stone-walled at the police station for hours.
Police are generally the first segment, nothing can get into the pipeline without passing through them. They are also the only segment with muscle (violent coercive power), which can be either used to stop violence or abused to hurt people Tragically, this first and most important segment of the most important system tends to also be its most dysfunctional element. The police, as experienced by poor people in the developing country, have almost no specialized crime-fighting training and can make more money hurting people than helping them; generally lack the most rudimentary equipment; and, year to year, their presence in the community makes poor people more insecure.
The police in the developing world are totally corrupt and abusive. Corruption is a crime, a theft, either by extortion (give me money or I will hurt, detain, fine, or inconvenience you) or by selling the non-performance of a service that one has been paid to perform and which the public is entitled to receive.
When the corruption becomes endemic to a police force, it has become a criminal force. It is working against enforcement of the Law. It is just like the doctors who are not doctors anymore when they start make money off of making people more sick.
Charles Kenny writes that, in developing nations, extortion and bribery are the expected norm for interactions with the police. Then, the poor really don't have law enforcement. Corruption places the poor in a bidding war against perpetrators who are making counter offers to the police to not enforce the law. Corruptions allows violent predators to purchase hunting licenses from the authorities to hunt down the poor.
Scarcity: the expensive law enforcement: Not only about lack of law enforcement officers.
Within developing world countries, governments tend to deploy their scarce law enforcement resources to protect the things they value most -- which generally are not common poor people. In Indonesia, Bali gets about one police officer for every 300 people (a ratio on par with U.S.), but Kalimantan has one police for every 2,500 citizens.
A typical police station gets about $100 to cover all non-salary expenses for a whole year, which is what a good Starbucks customer in U.S. spends every month. The police do not have the most basic tools to do their jobs, including transportation to to the remote area, they lack of basic office supplies and technology like forms for filing a criminal complaint, paper to make copies of evidentiary documents, or folders for maintaining files, phones for conducting interviews, contacting government offices, or contacting victims or witness, computers for keeping records, tracking performance data, or writing reports, or undercover cameras, undercover audio recording, or basic digital photography equipment.
---------
The next segment in broken justice pipeline: PROSECUTORS
(Law & Order, TV series)
"In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet, equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
The brokenness of prosecution services in the developing world not only leaves innocent people who've had the misfortune of being wrongfully charged with a crime to languish in jail, but it also allows the violent abusers of the poor to run free.
The shortage of prosecutors is compounded in poorer countries by the disproportionately large volume of criminal violence and a massive pre-existing backlog. A criminal justice system is a relentless conveyor belt of criminal cases. They just keep coming. The lacking of prosecutors make them increasingly unable to give any one case the attention it deserves.
The Philippines prosecution service is in much better shape than most developing countries. Even so, common Filipinos know that the system is so overwhelmed that the only way a victim of a crime can get his or her case properly prosecuted is if he or she hires a private prosecutor to do all the investigative work, the logistical legwork, the legal analysis and the argumentation for the public prosecutor. If, however, you are too poor to hire your own private prosecutor, there simply is no prosecution service for you.
-------
The final segment: THE COURTS
A credible court system must be swift and true; that is, it must discern the guilt or innocence of an accused person with reasonable reliability --- and do so in a reasonable amount of time. The criminal courts in developing world are nearly paralyzed with dysfunction, reach the wrong results, and treat people badly. The judge in the criminal court enters the trial process with access to only one side of the story -- the side that can afford a lawyer. Lawyers tend to be such a tiny guild of professionals that billions of poor in the developing world will never meet a lawyer in their lifetime. But the problem is deeper than a lack of access to lawyers for victims and defendants in the courtroom. Lawyers can be so rare in the developing world that many judges, especially in Africa, have never been to law school and have no formal legal training. When poor (especially women) appear in court, they frequently are forced to tolerate not only the absence of legal expertise but also brutal buffoonery from ignorant, bigoted, and bizarre judges.
Courts in the poorest countries lack even more basic equipment -- like paper. In Malawi, courts tend to run out of paper half way through the month and have to stop hearing cases until more paper arrives. Victims will have to have case records prepared because the court does not have enough funds to pay for the paper or ink to document its own proceedings or order.
The lack of resources for the public justice system means that the poor must pay a variety of fees and costs (beyond bribes).
Another devastating detail: trials are not conducted from start to finish in a few days, but one bit at a time over months and years.
--------------------
------------------------ THE UNTHINKABLE BECAME MAINSTREAM --------------------
Shortly after WWII, the early pioneers of the modern human rights movement achieved victory -- passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such a think would have been unthinkable even a few years before, if we go back to the mid-1940s -- an era when it was inconceivable that a sovereign nation would have to answer to a higher authority for the way it treated those within its own borders.
The very idea of human rights represented what is called " a radical departure from traditional thinking and practice". Getting states to acknowledge universal human right claims would require a stunning reversal of centuries of geopolitical inertia: We are in effect asking states to submit to international supervision of their relationship with their own citizens, something has been traditionally regarded as an absolute prerogative of national sovereignty." The foundations of that sovereignty principle bgan to crack as the mass atrocities committed by Nazis -- many of which were consistent with their domestic law -- came to light.
The Nuremberg principles of international law governed the trials of German and Japanese war criminals. It delivered the first blow to the sovereignty principle by affirming that there were some rights that no country could violate, even within their own borders, towards their own people, and consistent with their own laws.
The defendants protested that they could not be held accountable for these atrocities to the Jews. Hermann Goering (Hitler's deputy and the original head of Gestapo), went so far as to complain that it was the Nazi defendants whose rights were being violated. At one point, rather than dispute the evidence presented by the prosecution of Nazi's atrocities, Goering defended the atrocities themselves: "But that was our right? We were a sovereign state and that was strictly our business."
----------COLONIAL LEGACIES AND FAILURE THAT MAKE SENSE-------------
In response to the question "why do criminal justice systems in the developing world fail so miserably to protect the poor from violence?" because those systems were never intended to protect common people form violence -- they were intended to protect the colonial rulers from the common people.
The western countries exported a very different form of policing around the world (different from their homes) to the vast empires under their tenuous imperial control Not surprisingly, the purpose and priority of this colonial model of policing would not to protect common citizenry from violence and crime -- but to protect the colonial state and its narrow interests and beneficiaries from the common citizenry.
-------------------- A DOWNWARD SPIRAL ---------------
As individuals with high incomes pursue private substitutes to public goods and services, the influential elites undermine support for funding of public services, and predictably, such systems get worse and worse. As the wealthy lose interest in public services, so do the policy-makers responsible for providing high-quality public services. Those support increased investment in public services, primarily lower-income individuals, have the least political influence, and the result is a gradual deterioration of public services. Other scholars have found that this dynamic is especially pronounced in developing countries where the poor make up the majority of the population but are politically marginalized.
THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE TO CHANGE: THE BENEFICIARIES OF LAWLESSNESS
Elites do not need an effective public justice system to protect them from being victimized by others, but they may need a broken public justice system to protect them from being held accountable for victimizing others. Broken public justice systems auction impunity to the highest bidder.
First, we've seen that most law enforcement systems in the developing world are colinal relics that were never set up to protect the poor from violence (but to protect the regime from the poor), and these systems have never been fundamentally re-engineered to serve the common people.
Secondly, elites with wealth and power in the developing world have abandoned these dysfunctional public justice systems and have set up systems of private security that protect them from violence.
Thirdly, the massive global movement fail to address those problems above.
-----------------------------------------------
Comments
Post a Comment