Letter from Los Angeles — Part Four
[Sam Pillsbury is a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, in Los Angeles. He teaches criminal law, criminal practice, and American legal history. This is the fourth and final of a series of excerpts from his stunningly human and moving new book, “Imagining a Greater Justice: Criminal Violence, Punishment and Relational Justice” (Routledge 2019), which he has generously contributed to this blog. The full text is available at the publisher’s link, here.]
From the Conclusion: The American Dream for Justice
For the last 30 years I have walked around the Pico-Union neighborhood where my school is located, morning and afternoon. I have seen and felt how the city of LA has changed over that time. Violent crime was high through the mid-1990s, but steady declines since then have changed the look and feel of the city. Gangs which before ravaged the locale at night have retreated and there is less graffiti on buildings and signs. Residential and commercial developments have come back. There are more people out walking. Also more homeless. Tents and mattresses and trash proliferate under the underpasses and along the freeway on- and off-ramps.
The highlight of my walks in recent years has been the neighborhood children going to and from school: the pre-K and kindergartners who attend the Olympic Primary Center, the elementary and middle schoolers of the Immaculate Conception Parish School and the students of Tenth Street Elementary School. Except for the middle schoolers, the children usually travel in family clusters. Often a mom pushes a stroller containing the family’s youngest, and older siblings hold her hand or grasp the stroller bar so that they walk along physically connected.
Many of the mothers and fathers of these children fled civil wars and criminal violence in Honduras and Nicaragua and El Salvador to come to California. For them America was not just a place of economic opportunity but a place of peace. In their flight from violence, these immigrants from foreign lands repeated the pattern of the Great Migration of African-Americans, who in the 20th century left the South for the North and West to escape racial violence and oppression.
The American dream has always been about justice as well as individual freedom. Today the rule of law is as great a draw for many immigrants as economic opportunity. The idea that wrongdoers might be held accountable by law, in contrast to the impunity that they enjoy in many nations from which immigrants hail, is a wonderful gift for the next generation.
In the last 20 years, the majority in Southern California has changed its attitude towards those who have immigrated from nations south of our border. In the early 1990s, Gov. Pete Wilson urged the passage of Proposition 187, a harsh anti-immigration measure that won wide public approval, with television ads depicting hordes of people running across the border, under the heading of “they keep coming.” The punitive sentencing laws detailed in Chapter 5 were inspired in part by fears of violence by illegal immigrants. Today, however, city and state leaders champion sanctuary for undocumented residents against newly aggressive deportation efforts undertaken by the Trump administration.
What changed? Perhaps most important, violent crime significantly declined. Gangs became weaker. The economy has improved. Policing has improved. The pace of illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico, has greatly diminished. In the passage of time there have been many important demographic changes in the state’s population, making it younger and more diverse. But the key change is this. In the eyes of the majority, Hispanic immigrants, including the undocumented and their families, have become part of our community. They have become us.
The children setting off to school wearing their big, brightly colored backpacks and coming home in the afternoon, munching a just-purchased treat, seem wonderfully, indeed almost unimaginably, removed from the violence that their parents fled. In this image of LA today, I see the nation that we can have, if we wish. But we will have to fight for it.
Looming over this vision is a figure and a movement that I have avoided considering so far, not wanting my argument to be tied to a particular, and particularly divisive, time in our nation’s political life. As I write this, in the summer of 2018, the elected leader of the United States, the President, is someone passionately committed to good guys versus bad guys thinking in criminal justice. And somehow the good guys always seem to be white and the bad guys people of color. He has been recorded admitting to, and laughing about, acts of sexual violence. He uses and celebrates personalized morality in all manner of public policy decisions. He frequently urges violence, both emotional and physical, as a way to resolve conflicts. His administration used child separation to deter asylum seekers, doing violence to immigrant families, until widespread outrage forced a change in policy. His administration has rejected asylum claims based on domestic violence and gang violence.
Many Americans support the President today. This means that many reject the vision of justice I have drawn, not just in this chapter but throughout.
Although everyone says they are for it, justice is and will always be a contested ideal. We will always argue about its meaning. Sometimes this will lead to serious fights. Part of our discussions and part of our fights will be over what we imagine justice to be.