What is it, even, that I do here?

I write. If you like my writing, and you want more of it, then please subscribe. I promise not to overload you — if anything, I will underload you. My plan is that all of my posts are freely available, but if you would like to have a paid subscription to support me, I have rarely said no to money, and I will have your back in a bar fight.

I write a lot about punishment, sexual violence, law, policy, culture, sex offense registries, “civil” commitment, and really, whatever else is on my mind. Sometimes it’s autobiographical. Sometimes, it is even well-written.

The tagline for this blog is “On witch burning, and other pastimes” because I’m not certain that we have ever stopped burning witches. We change what we call them, we change how we burn them, but the impulse is still deeply ingrained in the American (and perhaps, human) imagination. They were witches once, savages, then hippies, druggies, commies, sex offenders, terrorists, so on, and so forth. We put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps because we were afraid of them. There are still people in trapped in Guantanamo Bay, and who will probably die there, slow-motion casualties of war. We have a couple dozen or so shadow prisons stateside for a different kind of terrorist, six thousand of them or so, not for “punishment,” but for “treatment,” some held for decades on nothing more than probable cause. Our courts make constitutional exceptions, suspending the normal sort of order that we have otherwise agreed upon in polite society, though how polite can it be, really?

I don’t have all—maybe not even any of—the answers. These are difficult topics. Fear, trauma, rage, disgust, politics, and American-style puritanism & punitivity all make these kinds of topics a minefield. So we tread carefully.

But I love minefields.