Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
I just came across this article about vigilante justice on American Indian reservations in Mother Jones. Yes, you read that right: Mother Jones. Before jumping to any conclusions, read the article, which strikes me as solid reporting, though I'm not in a position really to say; I don't know enough about the subject.
In particular, I don't fully understand the legal issues here. Perhaps someone on Ricochet can help me understand what, exactly, is going on:
The rate of violent crime among Native Americans is twice the national average; on some reservations, it's 20 times higher. At least one in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes. Yet just 3,000 tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officers—the only kinds of cops with jurisdiction on Indian land—patrol 56 million acres. In 2008, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas had nine officers for 9,000 people in an area twice the size of Delaware. (A typical town with the same population has three times that number.) Tribal courts can only prosecute misdemeanors such as petty theft and public intoxication. They can't issue sentences longer than one year without meeting special criteria, and even then, three years is the maximum. More serious crimes must be handled by federal prosecutors, who turn down 65 percent of the reservation cases referred to them.
If the Feds are the only ones who can put the rapists behind bars, why exactly aren't they? Are the BIA cops unable to gather evidence sufficient to bring a criminal to trial, either because there aren't enough of them or because they don't take these crimes seriously?
Or do the Feds feel they've got better things to do with their time than get involved with this mess? I'd say, on the face of it, that indifference to this would be inexcusable, but perhaps there's something about this situation that I'm not understanding.
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Jul '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Claire Berlinski, Ed.: If the Feds are the only ones who can put the rapists behind bars, why exactly aren't they? Are the BIA cops unable to gather evidence sufficient to bring a criminal to trial, either because there aren't enough of them or because they don't take these crimes seriously?
Or do the Feds feel they've got better things to do with their time than get involved with this mess? I'd say, on the face of it, that indifference to this would be inexcusable, but perhaps there's something about this situation that I'm not understanding. ·
From the article it seems like the tribal cops aren't well organized or trained, and many tribes seem to lack a judicial system entirely. One can just imagine the due process nightmare that would await any Federal prosecutor who attempted to tackle the issue.
Mother Jones, of course, seeks to lay this all at the feet of White People Are Evil™, but it seems more like a lack of criminal-justice infrastructure.
May '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Time to end the duality of the "we-got-here-first" crowd. Close down the Bureau of Indian Affairs and start treating them like every other American.
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Wylee Coyote
Mother Jones, of course, seeks to lay this all at the feet of White People Are Evil™, but it seems more like a lack of criminal-justice infrastructure. · Nov 28 at 1:46am
I didn't read the article that way. One might expect that, and it seems to be the view of some of the readers who commented on the article, but the reporter doesn't say it--and seems to suggest just what you're saying.
Jun '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
In Canada the Department if Indian and Northern affairs spends more than seventy thousand dollars annually per aboriginal family. What we get for our money is mostly a series of hell-hole reserves. To be sure there are a few wealthy reserves that got that way by being located on land rich in resources, but these are the exception and not the rule. Justice is administered by the Crown and laws are enforced by the RCMP (Mounties).
The principal demographic statistic distinguishing reserves from the general population is a sky-high suicide rate. Everyday life on the reserve is generally a downward spiral of substance abuse: Booze and near substitutes such as Lysol, drugs that run the gamut from heroine to grass, and gasoline and glue for the kiddies. By their mid- to late-teens the kiddies brains are so well fried they cannot be taught any marketable skills. That combined with their unregimented life style learned on the reserve renders them unemployable.
A Crown Prosecutor friend of mine once said to me that he had never prosecuted an aboriginal whose crime did not start with intoxication, and then it was almost always serious, i.e. murder.
Edited on Nov 28, 2010 at 2:58amJun '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Having visited some reserves, I can attest that they are in general a mess. Housing is in most cases substandard and in need of repair if not outright replacement. Schools, such as they are, are staffed by teachers, who if they’re lucky might teach one kid every two or three years that actually learns enough to continue on in school. Forget parent teacher meetings, the parents are usually in no shape to ask after their children.
As for the vaunted aboriginal lifestyle that reserves were supposed to protect and foster, well the parents that were to pass on these skills long ago forgot them, or never learned them, or are in no shape to teach them. What we have is a clash of cultures that by their patterns of land use are mutually incompatible. Hunter gatherers need lots of open space while farmers need lots of confined space. Economically farmers are the vastly more efficient land users in that they can out-produce hunter gatherers in terms of regularity, predictability, and on a calories per acre basis, which is a nice way of saying the hunter-gatherer life style is dead because it cannot compete.
Jun '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
It may be sad or unromantic for some to read what follows, but it’s long past time to shutter the reserves and assimilate our native populations. By trying to protect these tribal lifestyles we are doing more harm than good, and sadly it is costing taxpayers, both in Canada and the U.S., too much in both money and lost human potential to continue doing what we have been doing.
May '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Closing the reservations won't work and here is why:
http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
When I enter a reservation, I can't help noticing signs that tell me that I'm stepping off US land and into the territory of another sovereign nation. At least, that's what the signs say.
And if the signs were telling the whole truth, the question, "Why can't we lock them up?" maybe wouldn't make so much sense: if they're sovereign nations, aren't we the wrong "we"?
But if these nations are unable to prosecute more than petty misdemeanors themselves, then they aren't really that sovereign, are they?
Still, as nations, they circumvent state and local jurisdiction altogether, interacting directly with our federal government.
Though the city I live in is nothing like a reservation, I can only imagine that if it had to rely on the feds for prosecution of anything above a misdemeanor, we'd all be toast.
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
I don't believe there's any such thing as a society so benighted that locking up the rapists wouldn't improve it. Why exactly are the prosecutors turning down so many of the cases referred to them? Surely this can't be helping matters?
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
outstripp: Closing the reservations won't work and here is why:
http://the10000yearexplosion.com/ · Nov 28 at 5:16am
The book looks interesting, Outstripp, but I don't see an obvious connection between it and the efficacy of reservations -- at least it's not clear from the chapter summaries posted on the website. Can you explain?
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Is there something about most crimes that make them more effectively prosecuted at a local level of government?
Maybe it's just harder to get a coherent case together when you're an outsider answering to a centralized agency rather than an insider answering to the same community as the victims. (I don't know, being neither a law-enforcement officer nor a flagrant criminal, but it seems plausible.)
And maybe prosecuting is the jurisdictional nightmare that Wylee Coyote suggests.
Would reservations be better off treating with state and local governments over law-enforcement matters? (But how could they, since they are nations?)
Edited on Nov 28, 2010 at 5:49pmRe: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
The idea that these are sovereign nations is just incoherent if they don't have the right to put serious criminals away. That's "Nation 101." What's the benefit of being a sovereign nation here? Or the definition of it, for that matter?
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Yep.
I've got no flippin' clue. I just know what I've read on the signs.
Does this Wikipedia article on tribal sovereignty help? Or this one on reservations?
(Have you ever run into the term "domestic dependent nation" before?)
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Claire,
We're all hoping you found that story on Arts and Letters Daily and weren't actually slumming over at Michael Moore's old hangout on purpose.
Reservations are the result of treaty making with the US govt , the quid pro quo is conceptually devalued over time in order to justify whatever dollars we continue to throw at them. It's not us with FAS, or methmouth, or abuse of women (used to be called spousal abuse, but that would imply marriage). We have tried to limit the alcohol by banning it's sale on the res, but at the borders of most res are a bunch of liquor stores. We split hairs and refuse to stop the obvious when we know that Amerindians have a general inability to assimilate alcohol in their genes. We allow amateurish law enforcement to let things deteriorate. We see the children in rapid states of decline. The BIA is, and has always been, rife with corruption and mediocrity.
The rhapsodic mythology of their history has to be discredited and the misery of their sovereignty has to be recognized as some moral codependency resulting from the tyranny of guilt . h/t Pascal Bruckner
Aug '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
Maybe we need to frame the evolution of their society within the reservation. It sounds like things are similar to America c.1880. We would hang horsethieves on the spot, whorehouses were chockablock throughout the country, public drunkenness was epidemic....sounding familiar yet ?
Now if we can carefully tweak the evolution of their societal development, in a hundred years they will have their own systems of ineffective justice and scores of lawyers on the reservation, combined with thousands of social workers caring for their illegitimate children (haven't heard that in a long time !).
That's progress, and someone out there is thinking: "if we can just get them to ignore coal and go straight to solar......."
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
flownover: Claire,
We're all hoping you found that story on Arts and Letters Daily
A&L Daily? Are you suggesting I'm an effete bourgeoise? I'll have you know that I pride myself on keeping in touch with the commie pulse, flownover. I stay current with all their pinko trends.
Oct '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
The following is a shot in the dark guess with no facts to back it up:
Perhaps the Feds have great difficultly prosecuting rape cases and the like on reservations because they have a very difficult time getting any kind of cooperation from the communities there. They are outsiders, and in order to build a case you have to be able to get straight answers from people you interview. Isn't it true that in some neighborhoods in America that even if somebody is shot in public in broad daylight, everyone the police asks about it didn't see anything? Could this be how things are on the reservation?
Or perhaps the Feds have the attitude from Chinatown, "as little as possible." As in, "forget it Jake, it's the reservation." Maybe some combination of the two.
Jul '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
It's all about political correctness. In Canada, there is no shortage of money going to 'First Nations". And where there is lots of oil money, there is lots of suicide, as well as murder and rape. There is nothing to do on the reserves. A carpet cleaner in SE Alaska told me that the whole village would come around and watch him clean carpets. Fascinating. Somebody DOING something!!!
But having FirstNation lands means there is lots of jobs for social workers and planners and policemen and government departments, all devoted to taking care of the FirstNation "culture." Where I live, if a child has not been raped by his/her 12th birthday, there is something totally wrong with that child. But there's lots of money in them thar "FirstNations" for an entire professional cohort.
Sep '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
I think ElevenX is onto the real issue. Cooperation of the victim make rape cases are tough in the best of circumstances. On the reservations, there's intimidation and threats to keep people quiet.
Sadly, the formation of reservations has slowly destroyed the pride the Indian people used to have. Out of control alcoholism combined with a large welfare state has resulted in a cesspool of crime and mischief.
Jul '10
Re: Why Can't We Lock Up Rapists on Indian Reservations?
In the late 19th Century the US was persuaded by the usual academics (elites, if you prefer) to shift from policies promoting assimilation and Christian missions to the reservations to measures intended to preserve what remained of native Indian culture for future generations of academics to study. This raised huge barriers to assimilation for Indians, a process that was working well enough that these 19th C. academics warned of the reservations emptying out within a generation.
These elites saw the tragedy as a vanishing culture, now the tragedy is in a culture artificially retained in an adverse environment. But I am informed that casinos make it all better.