A perspective on treatment for substance use disorders in the criminal justice system.
For many years, I was an advocate for drug courts and intensive supervision. I’ve come to a different view and my thinking continues to evolve. I hope that this post prompts discussion — I am eager for feedback, especially from those now working on the front lines.
My current perspective is this: Punishment rarely heals people — we should be striving to disentangle treatment for substance use disorders from criminal punishment, instead of combining treatment and punishment in drug courts and similar forms of intensive probation supervision. We absolutely need to offer high-quality treatment to people incarcerated for crimes, but we should only rarely use a continuing threat of incarceration to push people into involuntary treatment. The pervasiveness of coercion degrades the treatment system. Our primary concerns should be to improve the quality of treatment inside and outside carceral settings and to make available the forms of treatment that work best, including medically assisted treatment.
This post explores the issues by working through my personal evolution and the turning point experiences that I had as I moved from prosecuting to defending. To skip the lengthy back story, you can jump to the current outlook. I’ve also recorded a podcast narrative on this issue.
Early thoughts
As a young professional in New York City at the chaotic height of the crack epidemic in the late 80s, I didn’t understand what all the violence was about. Having escaped serious consequences from my own adolescent experimentation, I casually wondered if a legalized approach to cocaine could reduce the violence. When I returned to Boston as an Assistant Attorney General a few years later, I had that question in mind and eventually rotated to the AG’s Narcotics and Special Investigations Unit, hoping to see narcotics enforcement from inside.
As a prosecutor with progressive things to say about drug policy, I was fortunate to be invited to participate as a fellow in the Drugs and Addictions working group of Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. Over ten years, I spent many hours in conversations with leading experts on drug policy from across the country.
The first basic insight that I absorbed from those conversations (and the research that I did to prepare for those conversations) was that cocaine and heroin — and other drugs that act directly on the brain’s reward systems, like fentanyl and methamphetamine — are different from the psychedelics that I primarily experimented with as a teenager. I started to understand the idea of addiction — the possibility of enslavement to a substance, the possibility that one’s capacity for choice could be diminished or lost entirely.
I came to better appreciate the terrible policy dilemma that societies face — whether to elevate incarceration and violence by prohibiting the most addictive substances, or alternatively to make those substances legally available and let people take the risk of sliding into addictive use that destroys their lives. I spent time trying to imagine regulatory regimes under which one could simultaneously avoid both the harms of outright prohibition and the harms of liberal access. I eventually came to accept that prohibition of the most addictive drugs was quite possibly wise, and in any event, that the consensus support for it was robust. I abandoned my intellectual exploration of alternatives to prohibition for the most dangerous substances.
The working group moved past the broad prohibition conversation to a focus on drug use among people involved in the criminal justice system. Earlier, in the 70s and 80s, surveys were the only instrument that policy-makers had for understanding the prevalence of drug addiction. It is intuitively obvious that in survey interviews with strangers, people would underreport their unlawful use of prohibited substances, but surveys were the only instruments available. In the late 80s, a new instrument emerged — drug testing inexpensive enough to be administered to all people arrested in some cities. Suddenly, it became clear that most people arrested in the late 80s had used cocaine recently. Doing the wildly approximate math, it followed that frequent cocaine use in America was perhaps ten-fold more prevalent than the surveys suggested and further that the vast majority of current cocaine users were under some form of criminal justice supervision — on pre-trial release, on probation, in prison, or on parole.
The working group therefore spent most of its time considering the question of how the power of criminal justice supervision could be used to encourage or coerce recovery from addiction. We eventually published a book of papers spanning our views on the question. Some of us emphasized coerced participation in drug treatment, embracing a cognitive approach to recovery: people could change their thinking and their relationship with substances if forced to expose themselves to the conversations that happen in treatment settings. Others embraced a more behaviorist approach, supposing that the threat of modest punishments for drug use — frequent drug testing with immediate sanctions like a weekend in jail — would be enough to train people to abandon use. People would develop an aversion to drugs in the same way that a child learns not to touch the stove. A third, psychoanalytic strand of the conversation perceived criminal justice supervisory figures — judges and probation and parole officers — as benevolent parental figures whose moral and emotional influence, amplified by their awesome power could steer people out of addiction.
The approach that I most fully embraced was coerced participation in treatment: If you lead a horse to water and make them stay there, eventually they will drink (meaning that if a person is forced to remain in treatment and hear the conversations about recovery that happen in treatment settings, they will eventually start to change their addictive thinking). Starting in the 70s, federal funds had built an edifice of research supporting the propositions that “treatment works and coerced treatment works too.” I accepted the consensus view. After I left the Attorney General’s office in 1998, I spent several years doing teaching, consulting, and research around drug policy issues and much of what I did was push the idea of coerced treatment, especially in drug courts. Those years included travel to work with community anti-drug organizations around the country through Boston University’s Join Together project.
Lessons of hands-on practice
Somehow, at a certain point, I came to suspect that my understanding of drug policy was still theoretical, not fully grounded in reality. Was it wandering around the lively streets of Newark at midnight and talking to a battered addict searching for a fix? Was it the earnest young drug dealer in Houston saying “I don’t think that selling drugs is wrong, it’s using drugs that’s wrong” as he furrowed his brow and looked down in thought? I began to feel the need to start working with people in trouble instead of talking about them. I started doing defense work in drug courts. I stood next to people as they stood before a judge who might lock them up for testing positive or leaving treatment or even, in some instances, complaining about treatment. And I found that advocating for them and winning their trust was so meaningful to me that I refocused my career on general criminal defense work as a bar advocate — a role that I didn’t know enough to consider as a law student.
It took only a few months in that role for my perspective to shift completely. I came to understand that the criminal justice system is a terribly blunt instrument. Trying to cure people’s addiction through systemic coercion is doing brain surgery with a sledgehammer. Relapse is part of recovery and need not lead to a full descent back into addiction. But if a slip leads to a week in jail while the drug court staff searches for an appropriate inpatient treatment bed, then the defendant loses their job, can’t pay their rent, and loses their apartment. Losing the apartment destabilizes their relationship with their partner and soon enough all is lost and they are back on the street.
Apart from drug testing and treatment, drug court defendants participate in weekly group sessions in court. Drug court judges meet off-line with treatment professionals and probation officers to discuss the treatment progress of the drug court participants. They then hold sessions with all the participants in open court and bring them up one by one for supervisory colloquies — praising or warning them based on what they’ve heard about their treatment progress, perhaps putting gold stars on their record. This banal patter, when elevated by the majesty of the court room, seems meaningful and some see it as having intrinsic therapeutic value, consistent with the psychoanalytic strand of the working group conversations mentioned above.
As a visitor to early drug courts, I was persuaded of their therapeutic value. But my sense of the drug court process changed when I became a defense attorney. I sat in the back of the court room with my clients and watched them go forward and say all the right things to the judge and then return to their seats rolling their eyes. The drug court process per se lost therapeutic credibility for me.
And I began to perceive that the widespread use of coerced treatment has done terrible harm to the treatment system. There is always a fine line between candor and charade in the drug treatment process. People with addictions are vulnerable to moments in which their only thought is to return to drug use and they may do self-destructive and deceptive things that feel like a betrayal to the people who are trying to help them.
Good treatment professionals understand that their responsibility is to heal the main spring of the addicted soul — to help the person with addiction stabilize their motivation towards recovery. They expect the person with addiction to betray them again and again. But flooding the treatment system with people who have not formed any desire to be in addiction treatment, who are only there to avoid the alternative of incarceration, increases the intrinsic challenge of building candor in the patient-provider relationship.
Additionally, and even more harmful, the prevalence of coerced treatment eliminates any accountability for treatment quality, masking the inadequacy of outdated forms of treatment in badly run facilities. In my policy consulting days, I staffed a panel on treatment quality (see also ASAM news, page 8 about this panel). The key message of that panel was that we need to reward results in treatment. When you and I feel that our physician or therapist is not giving us good advice, or when a residential health-care facility seems unclean or badly run, we can voice our frustration by filing a complaint or perhaps by going elsewhere. But the person who has been sent against their will to a treatment facility with unkind or incompetent leadership has no such option. If they voice their concerns, they will be accused of “building up to relapse.” If they leave, they will be sent to prison. The result of low accountability is a broadly-recognized quality problem in treatment for substance use disorders.
As I came to appreciate the harm done by efforts to coerce abstinence and/or treatment participation in the criminal justice system, I began to focus on the concept of “Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment.” People with addiction often face a crisis related to their substance use — a bad fall leading to an emergency room visit, or perhaps an arrest. The crisis may create a teachable moment, a moment in which a frank conversation with a relatable peer might lead them to insight into the harms flowing from their substance use, and perhaps create a willingness to voluntarily seek treatment. In the emergency room context, brief intervention at teachable moments had shown good results. I wondered whether it might work in a court setting. Perhaps a judge could encourage defendants to go chat with a well-trained, sympathetic peer counselor located in the courthouse. They might then choose voluntarily to enter treatment.
The people who had done the work in emergency rooms warned me that the essential element of brief intervention was candor and trust between the patient and the counselor and that it would never work in a courthouse where people facing threat of incarceration are frightened. But I persisted and we did an experiment in Dorchester Court. For a couple of months, judges in the arraignment session of the court made a soft suggestion to defendants that they talk to our intervention counselor. After 150 screening interviews, our counselor found exactly 1 person who admitted substance use. It is generally accepted that well over half of criminal defendants have substance use issues, so it seemed clear that just being in a courthouse was enough to defeat the possibility of candor in the screening interviews. We ended the experiment.
After roughly 10 years of thinking about how courts could play a role in substance use recovery, I reached the conclusion that a partnership between the treatment system and the criminal justice system was a deeply problematic idea, as appealing as it seemed initially. I formed the view that, although there is a close relationship between addiction and crime, treatment of addictions should generally be a matter left to voluntary participation in the health care system.
Treatment and punishment in the legislature
Early in my legislative tenure, based on my evolved perceptions, I made efforts to curtail the expansion of drug courts, but the drug court judges who believed in their mission prevailed on my colleagues to continue to support them with funding. A positive narrative about drug courts dominated — there were enough defendants who were willing to say that drug court was good for them. In my view, most of these defendants were under huge implicit pressure to say so, but I knew that was not a perception I could credibly quantify. Nor was it practical to try to create a counter-narrative by bringing in defendants as poster-children for the harmful bad faith in drug courts.
Additionally, there was drug court industry research suggesting that in certain cases the drug court model was effective: For people with serious addictions who had chosen serious crime as a method for funding those addictions, drug court supervision was the only alternative to incarceration. Frequent drug testing with a threat of incarceration or coercion into residential treatment may be a responsible approach for these defendants. If they have relapsed to addiction, it is a high probability that they are also relapsing to the serious income producing crimes — robbery or larceny — that got them in trouble in the first place. The drug court experience appeared to yield public safety benefits with these defendants, and might be more therapeutic than incarceration. Of course, that depends a lot on what happens during incarceration.
Acknowledging uncertainty, my view was that the class of defendants who were best managed in drug courts was much smaller than many drug court judges wanted to believe — some of the judges had a motive to build their drug court client base to justify their drug court funding and all of them were getting self-serving feedback from defendants. I also believed that the harms to the inpatient treatment system from using it to warehouse unwilling defendants might outweigh those benefits overall. But I knew these perceptions could not be rigorously quantified and I moved on to broader reform priorities.
Treatment was just one of many conditions of probation that collectively set people up to fail. In the 90s, the tough-on-crime zeitgeist was still ascendant. That zeitgeist had driven up incarceration rates across the country and the costs of incarceration were starting to bother even the most conservative policy makers. In the tough-on-crime context, intensive supervision on probation seemed like an alternative that might lower costs while preserving public safety. Massachusetts created the Office of Community Corrections to provide very high intensity supervision. Defendants were kept on a short leash with regular drug testing and frequent home visits, ordered to stay in at night and to avoid their old friends who might be involved in criminality, and ordered to participate heavily in treatment or other day programming (anything from job training to parenting skills to anger management). On top of it all, they were forced to pay punitive fees for the experience. There were many ways for them to fail and that is what all too many of them did — ending up in prison after short probationary experiences.
Twenty years later, by the time we were discussing major criminal justice reform in the legislature (2012 to 2018), the many bad experiences with intensive supervision (combined with the general shift away from the tough-on-crime zeitgeist) had led to a shift in the prevailing philosophy of supervision. Leading judges and probation professionals were looking to simplify probation rules so that defendants had a possibility of success. This was a movement that was broadly consistent with my own evolution on drug courts. In our criminal justice reforms, we did not tackle treatment coercion as an issue and we did not endeavor to diminish the broad discretion of judges to set conditions of probation. But we did take aim at the punitive fees. Those had been legislatively imposed. We abolished or diminished as many as we could in 2018. We completely abolished probation fees in 2022.
Senator Cindy Friedman has now filed a bill that would go a step further and prohibit a judge from finding a defendant in violation of probation for a positive drug test if they are making efforts to participate in treatment. Essentially any reputable form of inpatient or outpatient treatment is acceptable under the bill, giving defendants to flexibly choose and change their treatment plan as opposed to locking them into a court-selected facility. By limiting the use of drug testing and allowing defendants to choose counseling instead of an inpatient facility, the bill would effectively end the practice of “holding the defendant for a bed” — the often life-disruptive brief incarceration. The bill is a big step in the direction of making treatment substantially voluntary and divorcing it from the criminal justice system and I would vote for it enthusiastically.
There is one arguable downside of the legislation that needs to be frankly acknowledged: In more serious cases, the legislation will lead judges to more often incarcerate the defendants instead of placing them on probation. Judges do routinely use a sentence of probation with drug testing and coerced inpatient treatment as an alternative to a sentence of incarceration. A positive drug test is a concerning indication that a defendant is not only returning to use but returning to crime. Judges have a duty to protect both the public and the defendant from risks of harm and if we remove the coercive probationary tools, more defendants will end up with carceral sentences. However, inpatient facilities that work heavily with court-ordered clients are quasi-carceral anyway and conversely most of our jails and houses of correction today do provide defendants with some access to treatment. We lack an evidence base establishing that treatment outside is better than treatment inside in Massachusetts.
Current outlook
Legislation limiting court power to mandate drug testing and treatment has so far not gotten much traction in the legislature. It has been filed since at least 2021.
Advocates focused on reducing incarceration are now focused on improving the availability of treatment. The perception is that too often defendants are “held for a bed” because treatment is not immediately available. The goal of a recent “summit” that I attended was to create momentum toward “treatment on demand” — to generally improve access to treatment as a strategy for reducing incarceration. The ambition of the summit organizers is to create a conversation that will lead to a broad overhaul of treatment for substance abuse treatment in Massachusetts.
However, statistics and perceptions shared by conference invitees suggested treatment enrollments have trended down and there is excess capacity in many parts of the treatment system — even excess in-patient capacity. Additionally, the treatment system also offers many voluntary entry points. Despite the already high availability of treatment on demand, it is still true that the majority of people in inpatient treatment are there subject to coercion.
My personal takeaway from the day of conversations was that the likely reason that judges often temporarily incarcerate a defendant for lack of a treatment bed is not that there is a general lack of “treatment on demand.” More likely, judges may quite accurately perceive defendants as not eager to enter and unlikely to remain in non-carceral treatment. Right or wrong, judges often see it as necessary to stabilize the defendant with some frank incarceration to keep them from killing themselves and to protect the public.
Additionally, while there may be enough of some forms of drug treatment, there may not be enough of the specialized care needed by dual-diagnosed patients — patients with co-occurring substance use disorders, mental health issues, behavioral disorders, and possibly physical health issues. Long waits for mental-health placements by patients in emergency rooms reflect a care shortage that may also be driving some judicial decisions to hold defendants.
Where does this leave us today? First, we need to improve the availability of evidence-based, trauma-informed, professional care for the most challenging patients. Most of these patients do encounter the criminal justice system repeatedly. So, some of this specialized care will have to happen in fully carceral settings, but when people are released, they need to be connected to continuing care in the community. All too often, release leads to relapse, with a high risk of overdose due to reduced tolerance. Community-based, medically-assisted treatment and save lives among returning citizens.
We not only want to assure availability of specialized care, but to manage it within a framework that encourages high quality. To me that means a framework that imposes some accountability for results. In carceral settings, this requires clear standards and a strong oversight structure. Assuring such a framework is an issue within the scope of the Commission on Correctional Consolidation and Collaboration of which I am co-chair.
Ideally, more of that specialized care can occur outside of carceral settings, in voluntary settings where patient choice creates accountability for results. The best programs can then be identified as those which are most successful in persuading patients to voluntarily remain in treatment, the programs in which patients build a real connection with care givers. Only strong street outreach and recruitment can adequately populate those facilities. We do have good street workers in many communities, but recruiting people into treatment is often difficult.
Finally, I do hope that we can pass legislation to reduce the imposition of coerced drug testing and treatment in the courts. I recognize that this may result in some increased incarceration for more serious offenders, but it will also reduce the crushing overuse of supervision for less serious offenders. I also believe that it will help improve the treatment system: Treatment facilities will improve if they have to persuade their clients to stay in treatment instead of relying on court-coercion to guarantee their flow of revenue.
Closing
The aspirational recommendation above — that we expand high quality and medically-assisted treatment inside and outside of carceral settings — is hardly controversial today. The more controversial recommendation is for legislation that would effectively take away from judges the tool of inpatient treatment forced by threat of incarceration and also limit the use of drug testing as predicate for incarceration. The central perception in this post is that corrective legislation is needed because forced treatment is overused, in practice harmful to many individuals, and bad for the treatment system overall. I very much welcome contrary views on this.
Thanks for sharing. Sounds like your deliberative approach and experience will lead to better outcomes for many people. I support anything you can do to help prople help themselves and keep our communities safe.
Complicated issue, but I believe system is trapping people in yet another cycle of dependency with the legal drugs prescribed for opiate substitute. Not to mention all the psych meds they prescribe on top of that. Focus needs to be on restoring self worth, connecting with true community and restoring physical health as well.
The drug rehab business has become just another business. That needs to change. No more profiting off human misery.
Senator:
Not an easy topic. I don’t think there are any simple answers to drug addiction. My brother fell into this at an early age and the world lost a truly brilliant mind at a young age. He actually died in your town, Belmont, and spent many years at the Hospital there. I’d like to follow my libertarian nature and say legalize and let people fend for themselves. However, the damage that people can cause is too great and this also lets off the hook the merchants of death that are enriched by the suffering of the poor souls that try and fall victim to drugs. Therefore criminilization is required. However, for use of drugs only, the sentence should be relatively limited. For sale or enciting to use we should crack down hard.
In the justice system, somewhere along the line, we lost the ideal of blind justice. Rather than hold people accountable for the crimes they commit through restitution to victims and society we have tried to search for root causes and blame the cause versus the perpetrator. Just like all poor don’t steal, not all drug addicts commit crimes. Equating the addiction to the cause of the crime is not correct and we need to split the two and treat them independently. Acceptance of treatment shouldn’t excuse incarceration. I agree that this shouldn’t be an option for a judge.
Also, I would hope that the access to drugs would not exist in prison and that the detox period would support the prisoner in breaking his/her addiction.
I also am not enthused about formalized treatment programs. From my experience drug addicts are already pre-occupied with the topic of drugs to the determint of their lives. Formal treatment tends to make them focus even more on the topic. What is more effective is diversion of thought and effort onto some other higher focus or work in conjunction with isolation from the culture and accessibility of drugs. That fact is that addicts need to cure themselves and we only do so when there is a greater motivation to live drug free than drug addled. That search has to be self directed and can’t be enforced.
These are excellent points Mike, well stated from your experience, especially the tragic loss of your brother.
Very good, thoughtful comments from a person who lost his brother to drugs.
While I have only used marijuana 40 years ago for fun and to counter-act my use of methotrexate (a DMARD for arthritis and to distort the pain), my doctor told me that I should not even consider using it today because not enough research has occurred. That has been the case because marijuana is a drug on par with heroin!
I take lots of meds for arthritis, asthma, and more. A few of these drugs caused TIAs, minor strokes, Afib, and iNPH. I could have died. So, my thought is that more attention should go towards drug research. For me I don’t see Big Pharma’s peddling of dangerous drugs as that much different than the cartels’ peddling.
Thanks, Bill, for your thoughtful work and for sharing this information so widely. Too bad I don’t see this same effort from the representatives of the alleged “peoples’ republic” of Newton. 🙂
Senator, as always a well-thought out and explained description of what you’re thinking and how you got there.
I don’t write as well, so please assume I would come across more compassionate in an in-depth conversation about this very complex and nuanced topic.
Any reform must still include punishment and restitution to those robbed, assaulted, or otherwise criminally convicted for their crimes. While your journey has taken you to more of a treatment-than-punishment stance to provide the best chance of recovery for the addict, the Commonwealth must not lose sight that justice for the victim includes the punishment of criminal. The judges must retain wide discretion to incarcerate people for the crimes they commit, even if the crime was fueled by addiction.
I would hope that any expansion of programs or new programs would be funded through cancellation of programs that don’t demonstrate success. Everyone in Massachusetts is required to have health insurance and every health insurance plan is required to cover addiction services. A probably overly-harsh quote I read recently said “What (x) means here is “I will continue to fight for more taxation of working, non-drug-addicted people, in order to fund treatment centers for people who use(d) drugs”. We all have some moral duty to care for the members of our community but the failure of government at every level to meaningfully address, for example, Mass and Cass in spite of enormous investments shows that more programs from the same players are probably going to produce the same results. We cannot keep indefinitely everybody’s pet project because it’s hard. If it doesn’t produce meaningful results – long term success in treatment, fewer crimes tied to addicted persons, whatever, then it’s not working and the money should go elsewhere.
Again, thank you again for your thoughtful explanation and for the considerable time you devoted to this issue throughout your career.
This is another corrupt prescription to feed the beast of the soul-destroying welfare, nanny state. The rot has so thoroughly corrupted the Democratic Party and they are so boxed in that a remedy exceeds their capacity to free themselves.
People have been saying this for decades and decades that narcotic use is not a victimless crime, because you’re not just buying drugs, you are paying your money to people south of the border to fund enslavement, the murder of everyday people, the murder of judges, lawyers, doctors, you are funding the crippling of governments to be servants to terrorists and Communist China and Russia.
Only a handful of times in our history has the United States been blessed with a President possessing the capacity to assume the role of Chief Executive and now is one such time. Kinetic action against the drug boats, camps, routes &c is not the outrage, the outrage is the is it hasn’t happened before, the outrage is no President before put the lives of Americans first. It hasn’t happened before because it’s simple economics, drugs and poverty and welfare is the sustaining constituency of the Democrats and they have no incentive to end it.
P.s., Stigma is healthy in combatting addiction. Stigma is essential to combatting addiction.
The Democrats were the party slavery and as the freed slaves were beginning to stand on their own two feet the Democrats were the party of the welfare state that interrupted this burgeoning independence and created economic incentives towards the dissolution of black families and further dependence on the Democratic machine. Democrats don’t offer solutions for the addiction catastrophe they are the proximal cause of the scale of it.
I find it interesting that on this day when we celebrate the vanquishing of the incrementalists, the ones who truly believed that all men were created equal, on this day we are celebrating the victory of the Democratic Machine and the Socialist fruit they’ve been biding their time to champion expressly.
Now, the Democratic machine has run its course, has run out of options and they embark on a socialist metamorphosis, not leading and teaching our children but taking the easy path of not opposing the poisoning their minds by the agitprop of China and Russia, or the near total leftist all of media monopoly providing mutualistic validation in their social media bubbles.
America is waking up and we will no longer stand for “a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.” (Apologies to MF)
P.p.s.,
The Democrats are tools of the (proto)oligarchy, to wit the Democrats’ pivot to Socialism only protects the oligarchs with regulations and further market distortions.
If the Democrats truly loved their children they would teach them well the work of Milton Friedman.
This is a complex and frustrating issue, I was happy to read about your background and experience here.
I don’t know much about this world – my LCSW daughter and I talk about it a bit, especially when she was interning at BMC in the emergency dept. I tend to agree with you – I don’t know what the answer is here and it does feel like an insurmountable issue, but I support this legislation. To me, this one of those “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” situations, and I believe that the benefits of reducing overuse of supervision and the improvement (hopefully) of facilities will outweigh the negatives of the more serious incarcerations.
Thanks for the detailed information.
Thank you for sharing. I encourage you (and everyone!) to follow Drug Policy Alliance, they do a fabulous job of explaining their evidence-based approach to their advocacy. They have a website (https://drugpolicy.org/), newsletter, and social media channels. Please check them out!
Every offering from the Democrats is a Trojan horse.
The Drug Policy Alliance is Soros-funded organization that also throws its money and agency towards denying the humanity of unborn babies. I’m not saying abortion is murder, though it’s not not the termination of a life.
Just as the Antisemitism Commission was just another socialist tool of DEI antisemitism racism, this nice and reasonable sounding position statement ignores half of the world’s wisdom and offers only the socialism solution, which enriches an undeserving elite.
Democrats have nothing to offer but bankrupt Socialism.
I realize it’s not directly related, though falls within the Socialist/Democrat’s M.O., can the Senator do a post about the DNC’s treachery of standing down at the border to suborn an invasion meant to game the census and subvert the electoral process surely with an eye on packing the court and disenfranchise the American people and basically undoing America’s virtues? A plurality of Americans see the obvious justice of I.C.E.’s actions and cheer on the men and women working at the difficult and painful task so this treason will not stand.
The mighty woman with silent lips said “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” not give the Democratic Party, the Party of the welfare state, fodder to defraud the census, your huddled masses yearning to become dependents of that corrupt system of welfare. If a treacherous and treasonous government stands down at the border then the entire country is the border.
This. This mentality from our leaders and “stakeholders” is how Democracy died.
This position statement is not an expression of compassion, it’s an entrenchment of their subversion.
Democrats are objectively operating as a criminal organization. The socialists doing business as Democrats and the hapless legacy Democrats remaining in their ranks are not defending Americans and the Constitution, but rather the prerogatives of their criminal enterprise. The Democrats are fomenting an insurrection to preserve their illicit “outfit,” and the antidemocratic, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, ungodly foreign ideologies of our enemies and adversaries who attack our most treasured asset: the values of liberty.
The work of DHH, Border Patrol and ICE is the lesser evil particularly because it is the work to undo the greater evils: the Democrats’ stand-down at the at the border and the treasonous subornation of an invasion intended to game the census, pack the court and disenfranchise the pro-American plurality of Americans. I will note that a “lesser evil,” turned against a greater evil cannot be either evil, nor unjust.
Let me tell you what, in effect, is being advocated for in Massachusetts with the Senator’s position statement. With this position for Massachusetts the Democrats are removing yet another control rod maintaining domestic tranquility. The Democrats are empowering anarchists and inflaming walk a day Democrats and useful tools who don’t realize the role they are playing and adding to their numbers an antidemocratic force.
Thank you Will. Clearly and deeply thought out. I wish there were an easy way to get all people to want to be alive, sober, contributing to the present, but nobody knows what that might be.
This is not a position statement on “Punishment vs. Treatment,” it is a call for anarchy and a recruiting tool for anarchists. This is one of a host of proposals which seem designed, and certainly have the effect of disturbing and upsetting domestic tranquility as it will further Portlandify Boston and Minnesotaize Massachusetts.
The United States is a constitutional republic. We have elections, an electoral college to preserve us from mob rule, There is a high bar for the alteration of the Constitution through the amendment process.
The Republicans are defending an anti-democratic end-run on this process by not standing for the Democrats’ open border scheme, among other nihilistic efforts, to subvert the Constitution and overthrow republican government.
The stand down at the border suborning a massive invasion was an act of treachery, an act of treason, and what history may prove, an act of war against the republic.
Neither Obama voters, nor Biden voters voted for an eleven million strong invasion. Indeed a plurality of Americans voted to repel this invasion. In spite of a de facto leftwing mainstream media monopoly you lost the election and certainly could not hold a Constitutional Convention to end the Republican nature of the country, of the government. Why do you think it would stand that the Democratic Party’s Presidential administration could do by the treachery of suborning an invasion as an end run?
This is not the only manifestation of antidemocratic instincts of Democrats and Socialists. It is one of many efforts to undermine a charter born in liberty that affirms the sovereignty law by the of the consent of the governed, and the dignity of man. Our founders rejected socialism and established a charted founded in liberty. Liberty is antithetical to socialism. Progressives a.k.a., socialists and the legacy Democrats who have surrendered the corrupt racket to them, and the technocratic oligarchs who will swoop in take their keys, necessarily demand to be arbiters of right and wrong. Consider the profound wisdom of “In god we trust.” You needn’t be a deist to know the wisdom received by the god of the Hebrews and Christians. Secular humanists have described well the life and liberty affirming.
To the Democrats who do not realize they are enrolled and registered in a socialist Party and those who do know it I tell you the Progressives (socialists) will not stop at a superfluous and performative equal rights amendment, they will not stop at an amendment that affirms that sex and gender is subjective and notional, they will not stop at the warmth of communal property, they will not stop at outlawing parental rights, they will not stop at amending the First Amendment to exclude protection of speech critical to the state ideology. Long before we’ve seen the worst we will see the Socialist, Progressive flag flying in every classroom and building.
…described well the life and liberty affirming nature of the Judeo-Christian bible and the genius of the founding fathers and mothers in founding a republic that trusts in god not a king, or a czar.
“Distance yourselves from words of falsehood.” – Exodus 23:7
Even the exceedingly decent and good people at my reform temple bought in to the insurrectionist and treasonous agitprop and wrote that Pretti and Goode were shot at a “protest.” Were they at a protest? Sure. Maybe. Surely some of the “helpers,” as they call them, were there to protest, to exercise their natural right to free speech and assembly as enumerated in the First Amendment, and had no notion an insurgency is afoot, one of the concerted operation to obstruct, interfere with and delay the duties of our federal officers. But, were Goode and Pretti there to protest? Or, were they being the latter form of “helper?” Maybe a little of both?
Or, Maybe they’re there because Dobbs is the law of the land? Maybe they were there because the corrupting welfare state and racist DEI policies antithetical to a constitutional republic built on natural law and dependent on a Bill of Rights are being dismantled? The evidence seems to indicate they were engaged in highly coordinated conspiracy against the US Government to interfere, obstruct and delay federal officers from carrying out their duties and the President’s mandate.
They write in their “Response to Current Events”: “Yet it is also devastating to recognize that sometimes the helpers themselves are harmed just for showing up…” Again, I say, “Distance yourselves from words of falsehood.”
They go on to say, as if a threat to leverage the media’s portrayal of a victory, or change in momentum, “Should nothing change, it seems likely that our sense of the urgency of these issues will surely escalate.” Indeed! No doubt. That cuts both ways. One way for those preserving the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, election integrity vis-a-vis tue border and equal time, the Electoral College all serving to ultimately keep our constitutional republic, and it cuts another way for the socialists, for the Democrats (whatever that means, or whatever they are) who are threatened by free speech and the ideals of our founders, ideals that far exceed in wisdom and justice the poison of AOCs and Mandamis, the DNC and our adversaries and enemies who amplify their nihilistic message.
“Teach your children well.” -Graham Nash
What were the Rabbi and Temple President trying to teach the children?
It doesn’t take any time philosophizing, or essaying to reach the conclusion that apprehending people to send them to a place they used to call home just feels wrong. How could it be right? One feels even more deeply in the certitude of their belief when (in spite of the more or less evenly divided electorate) 90% of legacy and cable media and 100% of their chosen social media, is telling them emphatically they are on the right side and certainly not on the side of “murder,” “extrajudicial executions,” “kidnapping,” “disappearing;” and they are definitely are not on the side of the “regime.” After all, somebody, somewhere compared ICE to the Nazis, so there’s no room for
We don’t need this divisive, socialist ideological drug policy now that we are not the country of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” anymore. The American life expectancy is going back up because finally we’re back to having a President who is demonstrating a model for acting like a Chief Executive instead of a servile functionary.
Our founders and founding documents gave is everything we need for just and lasting diversity, equity and inclusion- in the American way. We don’t need public institutions at any level (local/state/federal) such as education, public health, &c., be co-opted by a political party and bent to serve their ideological social program, which in turn serves to profit them politically. This is not “progressivism” this is machine politics.