Cages

Human beings make a great many tools. Mother Earth tells me that cages are among the worst of them. This is because her creation is interactive, and neither her whole creation nor any of its almost limitless elements can be healthy, or fulfill their role within the whole, while they are caged. Although the suffering which caged animals experience has become more widely condemned in recent decades, caging continues to be accepted for pets which are likely to flee if not caged, as well as for experimental uses, including chimpanzees. We cage domestic farm animals for much the same reason, that their domesticity does not usually extend to a preference for enclosed rather than open spaces. Our willingness to legalize the caging of chimpanzees in particular is revealing, since they are perhaps the animals closest to the human animal in their physical characteristics and personality. Our attitude to chimps simply mirrors our attitude to ourselves. Humans cage humans, as we well know, at least in the culture which dominates Los Angeles and much of the rest of humankind. According to the California Criminal Justice Statistics Center, on average about 30,000 people are kept caged - that is, are in jail - every day in the Los Angeles region. They are being caged for periods ranging from minutes or hours to the rest of their lives, by the criminal justice system. This collection of people and processes are empowered by our communities to use caging as an appropriate treatment of fellow humans whom they suspect, or believe they know, have harmed or may be expected to harm these communities. Included in this system are the police, attorneys, judges and the courts over which they preside, jurors, jailers and prison guards. To Mother Earth, this caging is cruel and unreasonable. Our planet creator sees caging not only as an assault upon her creatures, but also a brutal barrier to these creatures performing as she intends, whether they be humans, chimps, or the others we confine. When we use cages, we stand against her. And caging a human animal because we believe it is harming other humans is no more acceptable than caging others for amusement, companionship, experimentation, or food.

Planetary Crime If we rule out caging, as once most humans did and Mother Earth will again have us do, then we must take seriously the challenge of removing crime. One of the simplest steps, which was adopted by the cultures of many North American peoples before the invasion and occupation by Europeans, is to accept that nothing is a crime which is done among consenting adults, the immediate effect of which is only among them. This incorporates a recognition that the morality of any religion cannot be used to define crime for the whole community. Many activities taken to be criminal now, leading to caging, become decriminalized when the above principles are embraced. These include drug production and trafficking, prostitution, gambling, and polygamy. Tools allow us to become greedy, a meaningless ambition to the rest of Mother Earth, and she is not sympathetic to it. Greed, and the accumulation by individuals, families and corporations of great hoards of tools, including money, houses, cars, boats, and other consumer goods, as well as control over large tracts of land and productive tools such as machinery and equipment, is not only destructive of other species and the whole planet. It also is the root of many crimes, such as theft and murder. A return to the gift-giving and poverty-averting practices of healthier cultures would diminish wonderfully the frequency with which these crimes occur. In the dominant culture, rich may seem better than poor, but far better are communities which share, guided by the rule that no one can have more if anyone is poor. When we reject this principle, in praise of innovation, tool-centered progress, and the concentration and growth of economic and military power, we do not impress the planet nor do we increase our own satisfaction or wisdom. Great power over others is ultimately a dangerous illness which corrupts both the powerful and those whom they oppress. Rampant theft, violent assaults and murder are fruit of this corruption. Mother Earth has made us social creatures, and our existence as individuals and groups depends not only upon the strength of our mutual bonds but also upon our active and regular cooperation with one another, in pursuit of material survival and prosperity. Failure to bond and to cooperate is for humans our most fundamental and natural crime. This does not mean that she abhors competition among humans, provided that its goal is to increase the excellence of the whole community, as for instance in the selection of exceptional leaders, teachers, and counselors, and in the praise and support of extraordinary performance in every sphere of legitimate human activity. However, when competition becomes a duality of success and failure, so that the two are aspects of the same reality, it becomes dangerous to the whole. Natural selection as it is commonly understood, a process mistakenly associated with the work of Charles Darwin, in which individuals, or groups, within the community struggle against one another for survival, is not a virtue for humans. It is instead the most serious of planetary felonies. Discouraging this kind of competition would move us towards eliminating crime entirely. Specifically, it would stand against the vigorous single-minded pursuit of powerful tools which motivates our most notable natural criminals, many of our wealthiest citizens and political leaders among them.

Planetary Consequences Even when crime has been reduced to a rarity, no culture exists without internal error; and such misbehavior may be a crime. I hear from Mother Earth that she understands ineluctable crime among humans thusly - as willful unwarranted harm. If there has been no intent to harm, but harm nevertheless occurs, it is an accident. The accident-prone may need to make adjustments in their manner of living, and help to do so, but this is not about crime. What harm is and isn't warranted must vary from culture to culture, with differences in physical environment, history, and discovery. However, Mother Earth generally rejects lethal harm that is not directly necessary in securing the food, shelter and clothing appropriate to maintaining good health. Because our success almost always depends upon doing this together, it means rejecting humans killing humans, except between communities when at least one community sees its immediate survival thwarted by another, and inter-community compromise proves impossible. But this is also not crime. It is war, aimed at warding off imminent annihilation, the only warring which Mother Earth accepts. In the cultures she accepts, its harm is limited by goals, that is survival, not accumulation; and, in these communities, it is limited by the extremely modest tools of war available - see Tools. Wars initiated by tool-developing avaricious cultures are not tolerable to her, especially with the destructive power of the weapons available today. This is one reason why she has decided that our present dominant social structures are terminal. Whatever crime remains, those who commit it must be confronted. But how are they to be identified? The short answer is, by their community. Mother Earth tells me nothing more than this, but it seems to me that the practical task can be best performed by a competent judge and a jury of the accused's peers. It should be the judge's responsibility to manage any investigation of the facts which may be necessary to arrive at a single individual, or a short list, suspected of causing the crime. The decision of guilt or innocence would then be made by the jury, drawn from the community, after hearing testimony, both that organized by the judge and from any others who may come forward. Separate contenders, engaging in a competition to persuade the jury of guilt or innocence (roles now played by attorneys), are not desirable since their contest, like that of any debate, as often misleads and misrepresents the truth, as it reveals what actually happened. Once the jury determines who is guilty, this person or persons must face consequences. From the community's point of view, the object is to prevent a repetition of the crime. Caging, or assaulting the criminal either by maiming or killing, violates Mother Earth and alienates the criminal and those in sympathy with him/her. So-called rehabilitation is typically a sham under these conditions. Two challenges face the criminal and the community. First, to change the conditions which precipitated the crime; and second, to protect the community and the criminal while those changes are being made. Restitution, as much as possible by the criminal to his/her victims and to the community, is one part of meeting both challenges, but restitution alone - a task which is literally impossible in the case of murder - is clearly not enough. Sentencing requires understanding the causes; the jury and judge should take counsel together to determine these causes. It then becomes the charge of the whole community to make the needed changes. If this includes restoring the mental health of the criminal, those most likely to help heal him/her should be named and the appropriate treatment begun. In the meantime, how can the community be protected? If the solutions are simple, and quickly done, no protection may be needed. For instance, if a misunderstanding is the cause, the immediate concerns of both victim and criminal may be met. However, when the appropriate changes are difficult and time-consuming - healing the criminal is a likely example - the person convicted may need careful watching to prevent further crime. Leaving the perpetrator alone may not be an option. If an exceptionally injurious criminal is identified who clearly cannot be turned away from similar crimes in future, the only remaining choice may be banishment from the community. However, such a solution is a last resort, representing a communal failure and tragedy. If the cause is a deeply-rooted flaw in the culture of the community, such as the presence of substantial poverty for many and wealth for a few and the crime is theft, by one or more who are poor, then the criminals are essentially blameless and the crime unavoidable until the social flaw is removed. The crime is not theft but selective poverty. The thieves should be encouraged by the judge and jury to go further, not merely seeking an end to their own poverty but an end to all poverty in the community, and a means provided by which the convicted can join with others to accomplish this goal.

From This to That Now

All of the above may seem utopian, beyond any possible reality, given the prevailing, firmly embedded, judicial system in Los Angeles and elsewhere. It may seem to express a fundamental blindness to the killer in all of us, at least all human males, which many now believe is one of our most distinctive natural traits. She tells me that this belief is ill-founded. She wishes us to recognize instead that for most of the history of human beings, and human cultures, the actual treatment of crime and its consequences has been similar to this apparent utopia. Further, if we survive at all, such sensible treatment will return. In this, as with other aspects of our current crisis, our choices are not between the cages and some other, more truly natural and humane response to human injustices. The cages are going to pass away, and soon. What we can do is to turn our back to the terminal now in which we are living, and begin seriously as Los Angeles communities to discuss and implement what the planet needs from us. The contemporary political movement in the U.S. to oppose the prison-industrial complex can be part of this work, provided that it is not too timid or deaf to consider options consistent with who we actually are, and who is our planetary mother. For Los Angeles in particular, which participates in California's pace-setting record as cager of its people, a simple recognition by jurors that they have today the power and duty to find innocent anyone charged under an unjust law (see the website The Jurors' Handbook) would promise not only an effective but also urgent step towards a more sane judicial practice. It would be even more hopeful were jurors to acknowledge that any law is unjust if its violation prescribes a sentence of caging. Debtors prisons no longer exist. As jurors, citizens in Los Angeles and in many other places have the legal authority to end prisons altogether. What we yet lack collectively is the understanding and courage to do it. If Mother Earth were better heard, including her decision to destroy the prisons if we do not, we might discover the will to act. This message is written to that end, and to the hope not only of freedom for humans but for chimpanzees and all other creatures whom we continue to confine.

Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth