R Kelly Goes to Jail: The Moral of the Story.

let's start shallow and then get deep
for me this is a reasonably profound issue back when I lived in Cambodia Laos and Thailand what I discovered to my horror and it really was a long-term enduring horror was that underage prostitution child sex trafficking was the easiest thing in the world for the police to discover the reason what the laws were not being enforced was simply that people didn't want to know about it and the authorities to a very large extent in all three of those countries were involved in aiding and abetting it I was eventually employed in research directly linked to this field so not just the law enforcement but aids prevention and like the charities that try to provide education and a new chance of life for people who were who became prostitutes as children are very young teenagers and then they move on to other jobs later sooner or later they emerge from their captivity or whatever you want to call it I did formal research on that and one stage in my career in Cambodia and then informally when I was actually a nonfiction editor we had books and we had PhD level research coming in that was editing to be published in books related to all that kind of stuff and one of the simplest methods of finding the brothels where they have underage prostitutes simply to show up in any one of these cities at the airport bus station train station whenever they had flag a taxi and ask a taxi driver and what these researchers found this was dead serious social science research basically everywhere he went in the region all the taxi drivers knew and they'd know offhand look if you asked oh well at this brothel what type of women do they have at this Prout they would know what the ages were what was on offer and what wasn't because for the taxi drivers that was a huge part of their business and if if by chance one of the taxi drivers didn't know for some reason which there was not even a single example of that in these studies then of course they could tell you oh ask this other taxi driver who's older and who knows about that kind of stuff I don't remember a single anecdote in there of a taxi driver saying no I'm a pious Buddhist I don't do that kind of thing so there were a lot of advantages to living in a society built on a very permissive religion very permissive cultural foundation like tera vaada buddhism but there are disadvantages also I would rather live in Thailand than live in Saudi Arabia I assume the amount of prostitution in Saudi Arabia is a lot lower than Thailand but whatever prostitution is there is obviously very secret very tightly controlled it's it's out of sight but for sure I'm not claiming different modes of authority all right so that's the shallow end of the pool what our Kelly's case illustrates is that this stuff goes on it's created and sustained through the willing ignorance and even active participation of a relatively large number of people and a lot of the public outrage in recent weeks leading up to the announcement that he'd actually face charges that he's gone into custody million dollars bail leading up to that a lot of the outrage was actually directed towards the smaller figures people who were in an assistance role so to speak around the edges of this now for me the deeper point I want to reflect on which is more broadly applicable to a lot of questions in life is actually about the utility of short term prison sentences for the earlier and less serious charges in a person's life for really asking what kind of a positive lesson can we draw from our Kelly's life and trajectory the terrible truth is the fact that he got away with these crimes earlier on in life is exactly what embolden him to do it again and again and again as his life went on now let's say hypothetically the first time he came into this crime was with the singer alia I have no reason to think that perhaps he had other targets before or certainly another's after but let's say hypothetically that was his first experience so we know that there's paperwork where he tried to legally marry alia and where he apparently lied on the paperwork about her age allegedly what if he had just done six months in prison for that what if he'd done six months in prison for submitting false pay for company application okay what if he'd faced a relatively mild statutory rape charge at that phase a lot of the anger and anguish is focused at the end of the process where Tiger man is fifty years old and has like an unquantifiable number of victims and people are saying put him in jail you know for the rest of his life execute him calling for really extreme punishments I think the question we all were really need to reflect on is couldn't all of this harm have been reduced the tragedy for some of his victims the tragedy for him as a person if he act if if the Department of Corrections actually had a corrective effect on him earlier on through relatively small sentences for relatively minor infractions and an earlier phase Cambodia and South Africa are both examples of societies where tremendous atrocities were just swept under the rug in the name of peace order good governance and keeping business rolling and you can see footage I've seen this you can see footage of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa where you have a black woman sitting down with a black man who liked tortured and executed our own son and today that black man is still employed as a police officer or maybe even a post office workers in some kind of government employ and the point is before in the bad old days he was one of the people who worked for the white establishment in apartheid South Africa like all those regimes you know a large part of the dirty work was not done by white people was done by local local black people employed by and following orders from the white establishment and and you know that mother is just supposed to sit there and take it they're supposed to have some kind of pious Christian moment of acceptance and forgiveness that this guy is is not even gonna spend one day in jail that he has impunity and then the flipside you scale that up okay maybe this particular guy maybe he does go on to be a law-abiding citizen I doubt it like what's the educational effect or process of getting away with the crime because again it's not just that our Kelly became a worse person because he didn't go to prison he became a worse and worse person because he you know he kept being confronted with the possibility of getting to prison and then feeling that he was better than the system the feeling he was better than his accusers being embolden and hardened and those in those actions ultimately I think you could say he developed a sense of entitlement he felt entitled to break the law that's something you know I see even and even in people I know directly my personal life you let them get away with this little crime and they go on to commit to many other crimes you create a little culture of impunity even if it's a culture on the small scale culture of just a few people like a culture of our Kelly and the 30 people around him who are his enablers his helpers his handlers his assistants so on and so forth in Cambodia on a massive scale the fact that there was no justice for anyone and you know again words like Truth and Reconciliation all these really phony insincere you know well this humanitarian jargon for the United Nations was used to glorify the fact that people who had committed atrocities torture and murder beating people to death confining people starving to death but you know literally the employees of the main torture chamber s21 right in the middle of the capital city that those people all just had impunity now I think I think there were a lot of crimes where we really have to look at the corrective power of the state say you know what maybe this person shouldn't be locked up forever maybe they shouldn't be locked up and throw away the key maybe there really should be the possibility of Correction with the exception of people who are so poor that they find prison conditions an improvement over the quality of life that exists still today there's a big issue during the Great Depression there were a lot of people were sent to prison and said well quality of food and shelter I have is better in prison then what's inside of prison that's not such ancient history and obviously in a third world country like Cambodia I've seen some Cambodian prisons that were really terrified anyway it's possible it's possible the prison conditions are better so you can get some inverse incentives that way any middle-class person United States of America any person who knows what it's like to be able to do your own laundry you know what I mean don't a washing machine or this kind of thing um you don't think six months in prison feels like a long time doing I'm not saying today our Kelly should have six Mis point sure death penalty whatever hundred years whatever I the question of hashing is would it have been possible for our Kelly to get in a much better trajectory in life by getting some kind of short corrective sentence earlier in life so guys in terms of my own politics I'm certainly left-of-centre if I were in America I'd be voting for Bernie Sanders not Donald Trump however I'm not left-wing I'm not far left and to me I think one of the sickest thing is that that left wing academia one of the one of the one of the sickest influences on mainstream culture coming out of left wing academia is this idea that the the controlling and coercive nature of the state of government is always a bad thing just those words control and coercion no it's not no it's not no it's not I don't want to guess what percentage of men like our Kelly really feel attracted to sort of fourteen fifteen sixteen year olds right that's a different category of pedophile from the guy - or chasing after eight-year-olds it is you know the chasing obstacles are right around the age of puberty it's it's a different market you know again I've seen the statistics you know when countries like Thailand Laos and Cambodia what where people have the freedom to do that and get away with it where there isn't the coercive power of the state preventing that behavior would you like to venture an estimate as to how many men would live like our Kelly if whatever that uh you know it's it's a shame that we can't more effectively educate people on how to cope with their own sexuality whether that's straight or gay whatever feelings you've got what's oh yeah yeah yeah this may be innate in you this preference I have no doubt I mean you know our Kelly is born different there's a lot of things different about this guy he remained illiterate quite late into his adult life he may he may have really serious learning disabilities he may in some sense be mentally [ __ ] wouldn't surprise me at all I don't think we're gonna get a diagnosis coming out of court maybe he will maybe won't say a lot wrong with our Kelly um and he's in a minority you know it's not the majority of men that are after what he's asked not by any stretch the imagination um recognizing human nature for what it is in all its diversity in all its contradictions you know its darkness and really providing people with an education that says loud and clear there are some things you want that you can never have there are some things you want you desire where it is your absolute moral obligation to deny yourself that's very alien to American culture right and ironically that's a big part of what Buddhism as a religion is about living in that kind of self-denial and self-discipline and why is that you know yeah ultimately it's for the greater good you know ultimately it's so that we can have a society where fifteen-year-old girls are safe going to McDonald's unattended by a father or an uncle it's so that those little girls can grow up and become full-grown women without carrying with them this bizarre memory it was just her testimony you know of losing their virginity with our Kelly and so on it's you know there are a lot of real knock-on consequences for how society as a whole operates it's not for any one simple reason that this is ultimately stigmatized shamed and punished with the long arm of the law but the alternative is it's the same with drug policy if you want to reduce the number of people that are encountering government persuasion at the punitive end of things Corrections prison then you've got to increase the number of people who are getting the message early on through education and that is something in the United States of America in the 21st century so far nobody is really comfortable with doing