Disgust vs. Science on Sex Offenders

I wanna talk about an upcoming topic of “sex offenders” and their role in the struggle. A primary question is, I think, do they have a role in the struggle? It boils down to our moral outlook on sex offenders who were convicted by the imperialist justice system. How many wrongfully-convicted comrades are there in prison? I mean those who are not sex offenders. Are we wrong when we say that the U.$. imperialist justice system is broken and biased and oppressive and due to its historical implementation is invalid? No. I think most agree that this is the case.

And if that is the case, we cannot make exceptions to certain crimes and convictions. Or can we?

That leaves us to draw on what we ourselves as communists consider unlawful under socialism. Sex crimes, like all other physical assault, are unlawful. But how do we filter the sex offenders convicted by imperialists into the category with the rest of the convicted so-called “criminals” who fight within our ranks?

We know on the prison yards that we rely on what we call “paperwork” which is any police report or transcripts from the preliminary hearing or trial transcripts or even just mention or allegation that indicates someone’s involvement of the crime or “snitching” for a dude to be blacklisted as “no good” on the yard. But that goes back to relying on an imperialist’s rule of thumb when determining guilt.

Under our own law we would need to measure someone’s guilt by our own standards and come up with ways of determining how to do so.

But what about the sex offenders who actually are guilty of sex crimes? Are they banned for life? Is there no “get-back” for them ever? Becuz of their crime can they provide no contribution to revolution or to society under a socialist state?

I think they can make a contribution to revolution. And under a socialist state, after being appropriately punished (not oppressed) and taught the lesson to be learned against crimes of humanity rehabilitation can be achieved.

Note that I’m not an advocate for sex offenders, so if I must set aside emotion and personal disgust for correct political analysis and conclusion to further the movement on this question, then we all must.

MIM(Prisons) responds: We want to use this contributor’s perspective as an opportunity to go deeper into looking at the current balance of forces and our weakness relative to the imperialists. Our difficulties in measuring guilt, and helping rehabilitate people who want to recover from their patriarchal conditioning, are extremely cumbersome.(1)

The imperialists are currently the principal aspect in the contradiction between capitalism and communism. The imperialists have plenty of resources to set social standards (i.e. laws), conduct and fabricate “investigations,” hold trial to “determine guilt,” mete out punishment to those convicted, and even often find those who attempt to evade the process.

We hope by now our readers have accepted this contributor’s perspective that we can’t let the state tell us who has committed sex-crimes by our standards. The next step would be for us to figure out how to deal with people who are accused of anti-people sex-crimes in the interim, while we are working to gain state power. We can set our own social standards, attempt to conduct investigations to a degree, establish tribunals to determine guilt, and in our socialist morality, either mete punishment, or, even more importantly assist rehabilitation when we have power and resources to do so.

How much of this we can do in our present conditions is open for debate. How much someone can actually be rehabilitated by our limited resources while living under patriarchal capitalism is debatable. How relevant it is to put resources into this type of activity depends on how important it is to the people involved in the organization or movement.(1) How much resources we put into any one of these “investigations” depends on conducting a serious cost-benefit analysis.

For example, if someone contributes a lot to our work, and is accused of a behavior that is very offensive and irreconcilable to others who work with em, then that makes developing this process sooner than later a higher priority. At this stage in our struggle, low-level offenses should only be addressed by our movement to the degree that they build an internal culture that combats chauvinism and prevents other higher-level offenses from arising. Of course there is a ton of middle ground between these two examples. But what we might be able to address when we have state power (or even dual power) at this time may just need to be dealt with using expulsions and distance.