There's an experiment we'll never get to do nationally and especially not in Arizona, and that's find out what all the money and effort spent on Border Patrol and ICE raids, the drones, the border fence, and SB 1070 would do if it were spent improving infrastructure, farms and industry in Mexico. We can't do that experiment because we have to protect our border so that what happens over there doesn't affect what happens over here. And look how well that's working for us... I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said,

"SB1070 It's a dry hate"

Out in these here parts, stranger, we're still good Puritans and Calvinists. We don't' make laws that further our own best interests, we get our rocks off on punishment. It's a theme writ large and unchecked by the law and the profits from the death chamber to the dog pound, from cops who beat false confessions out of prisoners to prosecutors like Ken Peasley who collude with detectives to suborn perjury in order to get a conviction, to victim families who demand vengeance in the name of the Lord, to Joe Arpaio, Arizona's poster child for retributive justice. Pima County, for one other tiny little instance, has one of the most Draconian and punitive building codes in the country, possibly the world.

An engineer for Key Dome in Florida, looked at me in astonishment when I told him the building department put my house plans in commercial and said I had to have calcs.

"We've built these all over the world and this is the only place that has ever asked us for calcs. And it's ridiculous, you can't prove the strength of an eggshell, but I'll put some numbers down on paper and put my stamp on it, then it's my liability, that's all they want, just to cover their asses."

And Mike Reynolds, went through hell and bankruptcy getting permission from the New Mexico legislature to begin building his Earthships, and he said Pima County is one of the WORST places in the country to try to build an alternative house.

Years later the board of appeals tried to evict me because I fell behind in my building schedule, and tried to get the head of the building department fired for helping me get back on track. Other people weren't so lucky. ( If you're an artist in a warehouse or you're an individual not connected to the infrastructure, we're not interested in helping you, we're interested in either making you totally dependent on the state or throwing you out on the street, so you'll be SAFE.) An inspector who dropped by recently to say hello, said it best,

"Some of these inspectors don't seem to know the difference between inspection and harassment."

Years still later I went before a similar Pima County board for my friends Jim and Mindy Phypers who started Solar Haven out at Three Points. I said we should be thanking these people, and giving them recognition, for showing us how to live off grid in a super insulated trailer house and instead we're punishing them for not having enough money to build a house. They laughed at me.

Jim and Mindy managed to build a small straw bale house and almost got a solar village going and then things, economic, political, you name it, just got too adversarial. They moved to a South American country. We don't like alternative lifestyles in Southern Arizona, because if they're some kind of solution then we might have to admit there's a problem. We might have to think about what kind of code we need for a house that's at ground zero for global warming.

Another building inspector lectured me once,

"For every rule in this book, somebody died."

And I'm thinking if you make enough rules to remove all risk from life it's a living death. And if you tried positive solutions instead, (ones that entertain the proposition that all life is a crapshoot)....you'd be laughed out of court. I came in to Developmental Services early one morning, looking for an inspector I could talk to, and wandered into an empty office with one sentence on the chalk board:

"Remember, try to be as constipated as possible at all times."

Even if it was a joke, you know, like Dostoyevski so sweetly suggested in "Notes From The Underground", the thought that you could get pleasure by keeping people from getting where they are trying to go must have at least once crossed their constipated little minds.

I got a ticket a few weeks ago for expired registration. I was two months overdue, partly because of mechanical problems, partly because my customers refuse to schedule their emergencies for my convenience. The fine is over six hundred dollars but you can bring it down to a hundred and fifty if you re-register before the court date. And that's how much social damage I did by being so busy for a month that I didn't notice my plates had expired? I wonder who figured that one out. I'd worked for two days on a freezer for a restaurant, spending hours on research for which I can't charge, came home late and tired and got nailed. It was like the city saying, no matter how hard you work, no matter what benefits you create, we will take it all...because we can. There's now a mandatory $500 fine for driving without insurance. It's punishment for driving while poor. And it works. I have friends who just went down and down starting with one traffic ticket.

And I see the bowed heads of other people in traffic court and notice how they all made similar mistakes because of their circumstances, and how their punishment makes them less instead of more competent and self sufficient and consequently less able to contribute to society. But it's a good source of revenue. That's why we're Numero Uno in education, feeding the poor, and housing the homeless, right?

If you don't have a parking or a photo violation and you actually do get to go before a judge, he or she often has no discretion, and often there is no appeal, never an opportunity to argue constitutional rights versus the state's supreme right to regulate, and, outside of death and dying, no context that could ever justify forgiving your civil debt to society. Prosecutors put words in your mouth and words all over you so they can refute the argument they can handle instead of the one you are making, and prosecutors serve simultaneously as defense attorneys. In cases of women reporting domestic violence, (and I'm well aware of how the guilty often go free), but in a lot of other cases, the man is considered guilty until proven innocent, and just expressing the possibility that the woman could be lying is proof of guilt. A warrant can be issued, your license can be taken, solely at the discretion of a judge, and you can be fined within an inch of your life with no right to a jury trial. In a lot of cases this gives the cop the discretion we are so loathe to give judges and makes him or her the default judge, jury and executioner.

The cop who ticketed me was so pleased with herself. Cops like traffic because it's something they can handle and it's more rewarding (more doughnuts while on duty) and less dangerous than working on more serious crimes. But, they tell me, I'm missing the point, that's in another department. Yeah, like Mexico is another country and what happens over there doesn't affect what happens over here (unless you belong to one of those special interest groups called "ecologists").

I see people at animal control, desperate because their pets got out and it would cost them their life savings to get them back. For a lot of people this may be removing the most therapeutic and socializing influence in their lives and/or putting THEM on a diet of cat and dog food. Sad to say...but are we fixing that with fines?

Correct me if I'm wrong and I'm sure you will, but isn't the whole effect of these civil penalties the creation of an "us" and a "them" mentality? I didn't feel very generous or even civil after getting my citation. I felt downright anti-social, and I can see how a general reaction to perceived injustice could lead to a for-profit prison system filled 80 to 90 percent with minorities and the poor. And just in terms of revenue, if that's really what we're doing this for, how much is the city and the state really getting out of making people less capable of taking care of themselves? What's the alternative?

We could give the court more discretion, (otherwise why are we paying judges to be highly educated?), we could relate the fines to income level or at least make discounts available to below poverty level defendants. We could make repair service available to people who can't afford to fix their cars and/or have programs to make it easier for people to buy safer, cleaner, and more fuel efficient cars, we could offer people a chance to work for animal control to get their pets back, we could have a law, like New Mexico does, (thanks to Mike Reynolds) that allows people to build experimental houses. We could work with people who are underwater with their mortgages and try to keep them in their houses. We could build wind generators and solar panels in Mexico, hey, at least it's closer than CHINA.

OR... we could build a cement wall across the entire Mexican border like the Israelis did in Palestine, and split up families, and interrupt supply lines and riparian crossings. Israel is, straight out of The Old Testament, a good role model for punishment. Let's take this "land without a people just waiting for a people without a land" and if you Americans say shit about it we'll remind you how you stole Texas from Mexico and are now whining about these criminals crossing the border looking for work. And while we're at it let's build the wall around the whole country and call it The Great Wall Of America. If it's good enough for Germany it's good enough for us. That'll keep the barbarian hordes, Buffelgrass, Asian carp, Alaskan weather, Russian Thistle, Australian Prickly Pear, GMO seeds, rising oceans and hurricanes out. And then we can build an e-glass bubble over everything inside the wall to replace the ozone layer. And then let's get rid of all immigrants. And the last guy across the Bering Strait....please turn out the light in the Statue Of Liberty.

Or we could just add zeroes to all fines until we all owe more than we can ever pay and have to work for the state or city the rest of our lives...that would be a Republican form of SOCIALISM! (gasp), but it's punitive enough. Sales taxes also punish the poor but there's a drawback, they have more choice involved. There are some things you don't have to buy but once you've crossed the civil infraction line there are no more choices. And what is more precious to our democracy than the illusion of choice? We could remove the painful illusion of choice and justice and just eliminate court altogether, and adjudicate everything by computer. But then the voyeurs wouldn't get to watch. No, we live in a State of no good options, because the poorest people and the sorriest societies would rather get out the whip and black leather suit than fix the problem. So let's just leave things the way they are.

Because we've always done it this way. And the system, as it is, has kept the State, the County and the City SOO prosperous all these years, but maybe we should hearken (you can't have too much HEARKENING for a conservative), hearken back to debtor's prisons, lashes and stocks, the rack, maybe even a little water boarding, an honorable tradition dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, and there's a team of lawyers who used to work for a former President who'll say it's LEGAL!....for a fee of course. Because lawyering is hard work, because it takes more energy to lie, especially with legal fictions, (well at least they're LEGAL), than to tell the truth, and because guilty pleasures always come at a price we can't really afford.