By now, most readers of Seven Days must know that the barn at Pete’s Greens in Craftsbury burned to the ground on the frigid night of January 12, taking with it all the farm’s packing and storage equipment, and a quarter-million dollars’ worth of produce and meat. The barn itself was insured for only three-quarters of its value, the food not at all. At least for the moment, Pete Johnson has lost the farm.

Read more at Seven Days.

“None of us in this building live under the illusion that anything we do will put an end to sexual violence against children in Vermont,” announced Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin a couple of weeks ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled 34 recommendations for stiffening the state’s already stiff sex offender laws. The report comes after a summer of hearings held in response to the public lust for revenge following the murder of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her uncle, Michael Jacques, a repeat sex offender.

The committee report concedes that “it is impossible to know” whether its current proposals would have made any difference for Brooke. Research over the past several decades, moreover, should reinforce this agnosticism. Few data support the claim that longer sentences, broader sex offender registries or more surveillance of former offenders actually protect children. As I’ve argued before, sometimes these measures put kids at more risk.

Nevertheless, Shumlin told the press he is “confident” that the 34-point plan “will make Vermont safer [and] ensure our children won’t succumb to the kind of pain and tragedy that we all remember.”

Tougher laws, if implemented, will enhance not only child safety but also criminal justice, the committee suggests: Its investigation of the system’s handling of Jacques, says the report, “illustrates . . . why so many sex offenders unjustly avoid punishment.”

There is no evidence that sex offenders in Vermont are unjustly avoiding punishment — though I suppose that depends on your definition of unjust.

Shumlin promised to pass legislation implementing the recommendations in the first two weeks of the 2009 session.

But aside from the further vilification and chastisement of a wider universe of offenders, the laws will accomplish only one sure thing: They will shield the Democratic legislature from charges that it is soft on pervs, at least until the next gruesome crime. And after that, when a new committee is impaneled to recommend more stringent laws, it will concede that the existing laws failed to prevent that crime.

Strictly speaking, Shumlin is right to say that policy makers will not end the sexual abuse of children.

But that is not to say there is nothing they can do to significantly reduce child abuse and neglect.

No, not more treatment. Vermont already has about the best in the nation. Not more don’t-touch-me classes in schools or public awareness campaigns, as the 34 points recommend. Contrary to the claims of the ever-growing sex abuse industry — and the report — child abuse is not a “taboo subject.” It is, as Jim Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, often says, the “unspeakable” crime about which we can’t stop speaking.

Special investigative units, which in many places have led to overzealous enforcement and a paranoid child-protective culture, may not stop abuse, either. These will almost inevitably increase the number of child abuse convictions. But couple that increased prosecutorial firepower with the evisceration of the public defender’s office and new limits on interviews with child witnesses, and the resulting convictions won’t necessarily be of the guilty.

Vermont can reduce violence to children. But the way to do so won’t win any sexy headlines. The state can make kids safer from abuse by making them less poor.

Poverty is the single greatest risk factor for child abuse and neglect. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a child from a family whose annual income is less than $15,000 is 22 times more likely to suffer abuse and neglect than a child whose parents earn more than $30,000. I repeat: 22 times.

This is not because poor people are evil. It is not because they have a sickness called pedophilia. It is because poor parents are less educated and younger. They have more unplanned children. They suffer more frequently from alcohol and drug addiction and tend to be in poorer health. They live in unstable and overcrowded housing, with more people moving in and out. They are under daily stress, every day, every week and every year.

Each one of these factors, alone and in concert, increases the likelihood that a parent or guardian will batter, insult, underfeed, under-supervise, under-love or sexually molest a child.

Poverty is rising in Vermont. The percentage of the state’s children living in poverty grew sharply, from 8.9 percent to 12.4 percent, from 2002 to 2006. It dropped off a bit in 2007, to 11.7 percent, but the recession will probably wipe out that slight gain. Among these kids are a growing number whose families earn less than 50 percent of the federal poverty level. That level is $21,200 a year for a family of four. Half is $10,000 a year — about $200 a week. Try feeding a family on that — much less housing or clothing it.

Clinton’s “welfare reform” of 2001, which placed a five-year lifetime cap on public assistance, buttressed by Bush-administration work requirements that pushed even more people off the rolls, has created a new category of people who subsist utterly without public help. Some are emotionally unable to work; others have reached their five years and have drifted away. Social service professionals and advocates have given them a name: “disconnected women.” They are a growing group in Vermont. And they have kids.

And yet, the programs that would help give Vermont’s poor families the wherewithal to treat their kids better — the programs through which the state treats poor kids better — are among those that both Democrats and Republicans have placed on the chopping block to alleviate the state’s projected budget shortfalls, mounting far above $100 million.

According to documents released in September by the Joint Fiscal Office, among the programs being considered for cuts is SCHIP — the State Child Health Insurance Program — which will need to increase its premiums. As well, the already underfunded childcare-subsidy program could be required to limit its rolls and create a waiting list. Washington’s Center on Children and Poverty calls this subsidy the single most important method of getting low-income working families out of poverty.

The children’s mental-health program faces potential cuts of $600,000, although the economic crisis is likely to put more stresses on families and increase the need for this service. The Runaway Coalition, which helps youths on the street — sitting ducks for sexual exploitation — stands to lose $615,000.

Teen centers, homeless centers and post-adoption centers, all of which heat their offices with the friction from rubbing two dimes together, are looking at losing half their tiny allocations.

The state is also now proposing to comply with niggardly federal restrictions that it has long proudly resisted. Vermont has not subtracted people’s SSI grants from their TANF — Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Now it is considering doing so. Part of the federal work requirement for assistance was that if a parent did not comply with the rules, sanctions would be taken against the whole family (except for the children’s Medicaid). Vermont refused to let children be deprived because of their parents’ mistakes, so it has long deducted only a portion of the check and left some for the kids’ needs. Now, for the first time, the state is thinking of imposing “full-family” sanctions. Says Sheila Reed, Legislative and Community Advocacy Coordinator for Voices for Vermont’s Children, “They are nickel and diming the poorest of the poor.”

And, while all this is happening, the Vermont Child Poverty Council, established by the legislature in 2007 “to develop a 10-year plan to reduce the number of children living in poverty in the state by at least 50 percent,” receives no independent appropriation. A preliminary report will be released in January, but without money it is hard to know what more the council can do to make its wishes reality.

If the sex-crime laws are adopted, the state’s already shrinking budget will have to absorb untold new costs. Expanding sex offender registries will draw down the treasury by $3 million; special sex crimes investigative units and, of course, longer imprisonments will cost far more. Other stealth expenses will reveal themselves in time — the price tag for health care of geriatric prisoners; the police and probation officers’ time wasted chasing after beeping GPS devices and enforcing a growing list of impossible-to-comply-with restrictions; the loss of child support payments, not to mention taxes, from long-incarcerated fathers.

And as the life rafts that keep people above water start to deflate, those who make it to shore will need more attention. The costs won’t drop; they will rise.

Compared with other states, Vermont treats its poor people relatively well. That’s not saying much, however, says Voices Executive Director Carlen Finn: “The bar is extremely low in this country.” Until now, the state’s low-income advocates have been able to rescue most poor children’s programs from the axe. For their part, representatives in Montpelier have upheld a commitment to keeping people out of the deepest poverty.

For the first time in decades, that commitment is being tested, as policy makers consider abandoning the state’s most vulnerable.

And a big reason why they’re doing so is that they do not wish to discomfit its most comfortable by raising their taxes a few points.

Pain and tragedy, Senator Shumlin? Few if any of the 34 points will prevent these from befalling Vermont’s children. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that each shiny, sharp nail the state installs in a sex offender’s bed will be felt on the skin of a child.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Hysteria is often catalyzed by a grisly event — this time the kidnapping of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her 42-year-old uncle Michael Jacques. (So far he has not been charged with the girl’s apparent murder.) The event is then sensationalized by the press — this time, rumors of an Internet “child-sex ring” that turned out to be Jacques’ ruse to hoodwink the police. The hint of sex fans the hysteria, which needs no further proof that its object is real (we don’t know yet if Jacques raped Brooke, either). Emotion fuels emotion. Reason and rights are thrown on the bonfire, surrogates of the offenders themselves.

Often the catalyzing crime is not preventable or predictable. But mistakes are nevertheless investigated, fingers pointed. Blame is turned to political advantage. In Vermont, Governor Jim Douglas stumps as the tough-on-crime candidate. With his Fox confederate Bill O’Reilly slavering from afar, he flogs Jessica’s Law, a vastly expanded sex offender registry, civil commitment, chemical castration and the death penalty.

Barre passes the first sex-offender residency restriction, barring former offenders from living within 1000 feet of a school or park — three-quarters of the city. A week later, Rutland Mayor Christopher Louras allows that he hasn’t conducted any research into the efficacy of such laws, but calls for the same ordinance in his city.

In Rutland as in Barre, the aldermen pass the ordinance unanimously. The police, the administration and the people cheer. One Barre resident proposes to the TV camera that the scum be exiled to their own childless “mini-state.”

Not to let an opportunity pass, Attorney General William Sorrell and the state’s attorneys pull out their wish list of measures stacking the criminal justice system in the prosecution’s favor. The five-point package contains a rule allowing the defendant’s prior convictions into court as evidence. Another prohibits defense attorneys from deposing the accuser before the trial. Bennington County State’s Attorney Erica Marthage explains the latter: The process is so unpleasant that the “victim” sometimes backs out, and the case must be dropped. The prosecutors also want police to collect DNA samples from every arrestee and keep the samples for good, even if the person is let go without charges.

The Senate Judiciary Committee launches a series of six public hearings on sex-crime fighting. Chairman Dick Sears, a Democrat, hints that he is amenable to the prosecutors’ proposals. Committee members voice no concerns that the rules changes eviscerate the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantees of a fair trial “by an impartial jury” and the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.” Presented with past bad acts, juries tend to conclude that the guy committed this one, too. And without a pre-trial deposition, the defense attorney can’t gather the information to prepare a case, uncover inconsistencies in the accuser’s story — or, hearing credible claims, counsel a client to plead to a lesser charge.

The committee is mum on the specter of local police deciding to draw blood from the arms of anybody they pick up. Only the ACLU expresses alarm at the state holding an archive of the bodily codes of its citizens, guilty or innocent.

As the flames of hysteria leap higher, opponents schlep facts to the conflagration. Victims’ rights advocates warn that residency bans send offenders underground, away from crime-preventive social life and surveillance. They point out that keeping offenders away from playgrounds does nothing to stop the vast majority of child abuse, which is perpetrated by the family and friends of the victims. Twenty-five-year minimum sentences like those in Jessica’s Law, they note, may prevent victims from coming forward, for no matter what Daddy did, it is the rare child who wants to be responsible for sending him up the river forever. Some prosecutors warn that mandatory minima deprive the state of the plea bargain, crucial to getting convictions in cases that are rife with reasonable doubt.

Vermont ACLU Executive Director Allen Gilbert sums up the opposition’s argument to the latest wave of sex crimes bills: “The problem . . . is that there’s absolutely no evidence they work.”

But Gilbert is looking for evidence in the wrong places. We aren’t talking about practical public-policy solutions to realistically assessed problems. Vermont is not in the grip of a sex crime wave. The Department of Corrections keeps close tabs on released prisoners. Recidivism of sex offenders is low. Crimes like Jacques’, thankfully, are ghastly aberrations, so rare as to be statistically almost nonexistent.

Instead, we are talking about perceived perils and heightened emotion. Laws born in hysteria are symbolic instruments fashioned in response to confusion, anxiety, terror and rage. They are crafted because the inexplicable demands explanation. It demands that something be done.

The label “predator” — even the more neutral “sex offender” — provides both explanation and a signpost to action. It tells us why Brooke died: because Jacques is that kind of creature. It informs us of what to do: hunt the creature down, cage it, mutilate it, kill it.

At best, such laws calm a restive public. At worst, they make the public crazier. But a grateful public or a vengeful public — both are politically useful.

The laws, in other words, work brilliantly.

Friends tell me not to worry. Vermont is a rational place, a smart place, a place that eventually finds a moderate solution. As Speaker of the House, Gaye Symington held off civil commitment. House Judiciary Committee Chair Bill Lippert has stood staunchly in the face of Bill O’Reilly’s vilification. Vermont still doesn’t have capital punishment.

But relentless calls for extreme penalties for sex offenders wear down resistance.

In response to the governor’s goading, now Democratic gubernatorial candidate Symington has vowed that if elected she will launch a “thoughtful review” of state sex crimes laws. What is left to review? On her watch, the Democratic majority substantially increased prison sentences for all levels of sex crimes (including life for second and third convictions for “lewd and lascivious” conduct, which includes brief touching and hands-off crimes such as flashing). It created an Internet sex offender registry and steadily boosted reporting requirements for more ex-offenders, as well as police surveillance and penalties for violation of probation. A “high-risk” registered sex offender who fails immediately to report a change of address or the purchase of a car faces getting locked up again — potentially for life. The legislature has created special sex crimes investigatory units, which will presumably yield more convictions. At the same time, it has allowed crippling cutbacks to the public defenders’ office. The crimes haven’t gotten worse. Only the political pressure has.

Hysteria gets what it wants. Draconian punishments start to make the merely cruel and unusual seem moderate.

Referring to the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which requires all states to vastly expand their sex-offender registries, Dick Sears told a reporter: “The idea [of the Act] seems to be that most sex offenders have to be on the Internet [registry]. I don’t think a lot of [legislators] have a problem with that.”

“Most sex offenders,” under the Act, include people as young as 14. The Act also creates pages and pages of new federal crimes and doubles or triples mandatory minima and statutory damages.

But compared with death by lethal injection, what’s so bad about life in prison? Compared with life in prison, what’s so awful about having your face posted on a globally accessible Internet list of sex monsters, and, with it, the permanent impossibility of finding housing, decent work, friendship, or hope — even if you were 14 when you committed the act?

Pretty soon, no penalty of a sex offender is considered cruel and unusual enough. When the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment for the rape of a child is unconstitutional, both presidential candidates expressed disappointment in the decision.

“Everything should be on the table,” Sorrell told Vermont Public Radio when asked what sex-crimes laws the state should consider.

And while radical penalties become mainstream, formerly mainstream arguments against those penalties become radical. For instance: A defendant is not always an offender; an accuser is not always a victim. People lie about sexual assault, and they coach children to lie. Sometimes it is the contemplation of sending an innocent man or woman to prison — not traumatic memories of a real crime — that causes an accuser to scotch a complaint.

Some arguments can no longer be uttered. Here’s one: Being subject to a “lewd and lascivious” act won’t destroy your life, yet the offense can carry a life sentence. Where sex offenses against children are concerned, rarely does the punishment fit the crime.

Facts don’t cool emotions. Maybe only other emotions can. I can’t at the moment think what these would be. Compassion? The idea that everyone, even a rapist-murderer, deserves to be treated as a human being?

Spare the poison darts, readers. I already know that sentiment makes me a bleeding heart, a pedophile lover, and an accomplice child killer.

I also know that as long as terror and hatred persist — and as long as these emotions are fanned — the laws will keep coming, and their severity will keep mounting. Once they are on the books, the statutes are likely to stay. Even decades after this hysteria is tamped, politicians will be wary of broaching repeal. Wisely, they will fear the flammable fumes that might be released if the old feelings are stirred, like toxic gases lying inert in a mineshaft.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

These events made me think about why Americans continue to champion a policy that most of the world finds repugnant and most countries have abolished. In spite of a recent waning, America’s attachment to the death penalty remains fierce. How can our nation be turned around? Will emotional arguments change minds? Will rational arguments soften hearts?

It is hard to forget Donald Fell’s crime. On a late-November night in 2000, after killing his mother and her companion, Fell and accomplice Robert Lee jacked a car from a Rutland parking lot with its owner, supermarket worker Terry King, in it. Their hellish ride ended in a field in New York State, where the two men bashed King, 53, to death with a stone. When she died, she was on her knees, praying.

The death penalty is illegal in Vermont. But because the men drove their victim across state lines before murdering her, they were subject to the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act. In a campaign to bring anti-death penalty, or abolitionist, states to heel, in 2002 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft overruled a state plea agreement that would have sentenced Fell to life without parole. Lee killed himself in jail in 2001. Fell is on death row in Indiana.

The case rekindled Vermont’s abolitionism. In 2005, anticipating the sentence, Lawler, who was working with Amnesty International, joined representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, the ACLU and others to found Vermonters Against the Death Penalty.

The crime also brought cries to reinstate the death penalty in Vermont.

Each side vied for citizens’ sympathy. “The defendant had a childhood that most of us cannot even begin to imagine living through,” Lawler blogged. “He suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse from practically everyone in his life, witnessed his parents stab each other during a drunken argument; he was abandoned by both of them by the time he was 13. Everyone in his life gave up on him. And then society did by condemning him to die.”

Meanwhile, on The Burlington Free Press comment board, opinions echoed this anonymous writer’s: “If there was ever a case for the death penalty, this is it. [Fell] murdered a woman whose only mistake that day was going to work . . . He will never be a useful member of society. He cannot be rehabilitated. All he will ever be is a bloodsucker latched on to civilized society. The sooner he is put to death the better off this planet will be.”

Such a position would seem intractable — but not to Lawler. “I have always believed,” she wrote, “that one of the reasons why some people support the death penalty is because they simply don’t know the truth about it.” For instance, ending up on death row has little to do with the heinousness of the crime; 95 percent of death row inmates are indigent. If people knew the facts, “perhaps they’d feel differently about it,” she suggested.

Wishful thinking? George Lakoff, pundit of “framing,” or Elliot Aronson, the psychologist who coined the term “cognitive dissonance,” or Drew Westen, whose recent book The Political Brain exhorts Democrats to vie for voters’ hearts rather than their heads, would say yes. So, sadly, would I. The facts rarely change people’s minds. When the facts don’t jibe with feelings or worldview, most people figure out a way to dismiss the facts and justify their own impressions of reality. It’s not that minds can’t be changed, just that hearts must be won first. The anti-abortion movement understands this when it deploys feelings — notably, shame about sex — to open people to the misinformation that supports its agenda. Along with negative emotions, anti-choicers win allies by drawing sympathy to the unborn innocent.

The task of death-penalty abolitionists is way tougher: to win sympathy for the guilty.

So abolitionists also evince compassion for the victim’s survivors. Any capital conviction legally mandates appeal. The process can take decades, and at each round survivors must freshly relive the tragedy. “Closure,” say death-penalty opponents, is forestalled over and over. And even when death comes, it cannot bring the victim back.

Some of the most moving witnesses against execution are victims’ families who have finally renounced it. Some forgive the murderer, others don’t. Some feel their lives were being consumed by hatred; they want to honor their loved ones with life, not death. Some come to feel that cooperation with the system washes their own hands in blood.

Terry King’s family is having none of it. They want Donald Fell dead, no matter how long it takes. Only his death, they feel, will ease their pain.

Who can second-guess them? Vengeance is a primal emotion, retribution an ancient act. Who are abolitionists to say that vengeance — even decades later, accomplished behind a glass wall with a sterile syringe — cannot satisfy, even heal? Though intended with love, their arguments may come across as arrogant.

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In the U.S., the most effective persuader against the death penalty has not been emotional or even, precisely, rational. It has been pragmatic. As hundreds of death-row inmates are exonerated by DNA evidence or belated confessions by the real killers, people are realizing that human-made systems risk human error. Even some confirmed death penalty proponents now consider the risk of executing an innocent person intolerable. Some activists see these developments, as well as the patent class and racial inequities in the system, as grounds for reform and restriction, if not outright abolition.

I wonder, though, whether Americans, who think they can develop error-proof nuclear power or human genetic engineering, also believe mistakes in the death chamber can be eliminated. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has an elaborate proposal, including mandatory DNA evidence, which he says will do just that. He’s eager to set it up — since killing as many criminals as efficiently as possible is an unwritten plank of his party’s platform. I can even imagine the pro-execution people co-opting opponents’ plaints about the toll on survivors traveling alongside the defendant on the winding road to the gallows. Wanna solve that problem? Lose the mandatory appeals! The Roberts Supreme Court, also on a mission to streamline executions, might not object. There’s no danger they will overrule the death penalty itself, which has been repeatedly upheld as a punishment not sufficiently cruel and unusual to violate the Eighth Amendment.

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I often think that if someone killed my best friend, I’d want to strangle the bastard. But I know that taking justice into my own hands courts anarchy. Retribution is the community’s job; the justice system, flawed as it is, must carry it out. The state, therefore, has the solemn responsibility not to behave as an individual would, in rage. The death penalty, no matter how distanced the punishment from the crime, is a policy of rage. It is a response to rage, is fueled by politicized rage, and perpetuates rage.

Much as I have argued that social movements are emotional movements, it seems to me that in this case, only a higher principle — an ethic beyond emotion — can win the day. This principle is human rights.

To people around the world, human rights are not an abstraction. You might hear a Canadian teenager casually refer to health care as a human right, or a Bolivian peasant proclaim that his human rights are violated when a corporation buys his village’s local spring and sells the water back to him. These people, from extremely disparate circumstances, understand that everybody gets human rights simply by being born in a human body. You don’t have to deserve them, and, no matter how bad you are, you cannot lose them. They’re inalienable. No exceptions. State-sanctioned killing, they know, is the most fundamental violation of the human right to life.

“Unfortunately, the argument based solely on human rights usually does not fly with typical Americans,” Lawler wrote me. And the absence of a human rights tradition or culture makes abolition that much harder because it enables Americans to wipe large swaths of two-legged hairless mammals — “aliens,” “terrorists,” “predators” — from the category of humanity. Then we can kill them. “He’s not a normal person like the rest of us,” said Terry King’s sister Barbara Tuttle at Fell’s sentencing. “He’s subhuman. Now he’s going to his punishment.”

Rachel Lawler and her comrades in the abolitionist movement have not given up on Barbara Tuttle, and for that I thank them. They also continue to talk about human rights, even though they know the argument may not fly. Vermont should take their example, and in its best moments it has. Some citizens opposed Act 60 and civil unions, but both laws make real the principle that every person counts equally. With experience, maybe the feelings will follow.

And maybe there is an incipient emotion of human rights out there in America. For an example, I refer you to the homepage of Pro-Death Penalty (prodeath penalty.com), graced by the photograph of a smiling 8-year-old Tennessean named Cary Ann Medlin. “Jesus loves you,” we learn Cary kept telling her rapist Robert Coe, before he slit her throat. I could be wrong, but I take Cary’s statement to be an affirmation of the man’s humanity.

Robert Coe’s execution was stayed in 1999.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

This lawsuit struck me as an example of monumental — and typically American — chutzpah. After all, if ever there was an act of God, a lightning strike was it. And yet the parents believed that their child could have been protected, and since she was not, someone had to be held accountable — preferably via a large sum of money. Although I can’t track the story down now, I recall the father saying he hoped the penalty would move the ball club to implement more prudent guidelines for declaring games rained out. Other families, said he civic-mindedly, could be saved the pain his own had suffered.

September 11 should have put to rest the American delusion that bad things don’t happen to good people (“us”). What happens, instead, is history, whose ways are far more complicated than the Manichean fantasies of a geographically isolated semi-theocracy. Yet the practical response to that delusion — bureaucratic and technological measures to prevent bad things from happening —has only intensified. Endless investigations of the vulnerabilities in skyscraper construction and airport security have resulted in new protocols and procedures: rewritten building codes, fingerprinting of foreign tourists, plastic-bagging of carry-on toiletries. Among deluded attempts at prevention you could even count Bush’s pre-emptive war on Iraq — a strategy predicated on the idea that history and politics can be avoided if only your bombs are smart enough.

The prevention principle has been on display big-time these last months.

In response to the Virginia Tech shootings, voices rose to permit more involuntary commitment of mental patients.

Homeland Security is building a $49-billion, 700-mile fence along the Mexican border.

The feds are readying implementation of the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act, which will establish, among other things, a national searchable Internet sex-offender registry including parolees as young as 14.

And two weeks ago, four men were arrested on charges of plotting to blow up New York’s JFK Airport.

How effective are these measures?

Not very. Short of locking people up forever, there’s no way to police psychological treatment. A sociopath whose demons are bent on destruction is likely to succeed, sooner or later.

Sublegal-wage immigrant labor is a supporting truss of the U.S. economy. Barbed wire will only make crossing the border more expensive and dangerous for foreign workers.

Sex-offender registries, no matter how high-tech, do nothing to protect children from those most likely to abuse them: their own families. And what about the stepped-up surveillance and arrest of “terrorists” who’ve done little more than talk? The feds declared that in apprehending the JFK plotters they had forestalled “unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction.” Yet the following day, The New York Times reported that the prosecution’s criminal filings suggested a “terror plan . . . longer on evil intent than on operational capability.” The defendants’ “satellite photos” of the airport were Google Earth downloads, their “escape routes” local roads and highways. The conspirators seemed unaware that fuel pipelines, the incendiary device at the center of their plan, don’t explode or carry ribbons of fire from end to end. Even their lawyer implied that his clients resembled “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”

So what do these measures accomplish? They create an illusion of safety — and of the measures’ own necessity for fending off danger. Few Americans oppose these practices because they fit fortuitously with those twin national illusions: our insulation from harm, and our ability to fix things. Nothing bad happens to us, because we are good. So if something bad happens, the cause must be a temporary malfunction in the machinery, or an incompetent operator.

When the Democrats condemned the Bush administration for failing to prevent 9/11, the assumption was that a less-klutzy executive could have prevented it. In the end, this argument only strengthens the hand of the security state. Remember, only one Senator (not Vermont’s) and 66 Representatives (including Vermont’s) voted against the Patriot Act of 2001. We look back on those yea votes as capitulation to extreme political pressure. I think Congress believed the Patriot Act would work.

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I admit, I go for prevention too: gun laws, traffic lights, low-fat diets. I am a child of the 20th century, whose grand ideas, from communism to modernist architecture to psychotherapy, were built on the notion that we can redefine history — and redesign ourselves. I’ve only grudgingly accepted the entropic worldview of postmodernism, and I reject the now-dominant explanation of most human feeling and behavior as written in our genes. To me, that sounds suspiciously like our fates are written by God. To both of these, I prefer modernism’s fantasy, which is also America’s: We are in control.

But sometimes, as the bumper sticker says, shit happens. If you’re a true American, you sue. If you’re me, all isms fly out the window and you are thrown back to the cave, watching the sky for portents. Last month, I skipped writing my column because I was rendered temporarily insane by the belief — fanned by a “highly suspicious” mammogram, an alarming doctor’s visit and two weeks of Internet research — that I had breast cancer. One in nine American women gets the disease; I personally know plenty, including three who died. All of them, like me, ate broccoli and practiced yoga and refrained from smoking. Why should I be spared?

Being American, my first instinct was to blame a breakdown in the machinery — in my case, the incompetent-operator theory. I hadn’t had a mammogram in more years than I want to advertise. Ergo, the probability of illness increased. On the other hand, my friends conscientiously went for mammograms, and got sick anyway.

I was forced to realize that there’s prevention . . . and there’s luck. And mine was looking bad. When I found out my breast was healthy, I could thank only kismet.

Luck —the atheist’s version of God — plays a role in history, too. History (America’s Israel policy, the rise of fundamentalism, etc.) moved the Islamic jihadists to attack the World Trade Center. But the attackers enjoyed colossally good (and their victims colossally bad) luck when the buildings collapsed to dust. History took its cue: The extremeness of the U.S.’ response, both international and domestic, was proportionate to the shock of that image.

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This nation cannot prevent history. And we are not always lucky. History may rank second only to bolts from heaven as a force beyond our control. And, pace the Little Leaguer’s parents and the 9/11 Compensation Fund, no sum of money can cure history or rewrite bad luck as good.

So should we default to apathy, or play the lottery? Neither. We have no choice but to try to influence history. When shit happens, though, Americans might learn humility. That may be the best preventive of all.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

So reads the official Hardwick-Greensboro Police Department Chaplain Training Manual, to be used by the town’s new police-sponsored cadre of clergy, the volunteer component of Hardwick’s new Police Education and Community Enrichment program. PEACE, for short.

Recruited from among Hardwick’s eight houses of worship — four traditional and four modern evangelical Christian churches — the God Squad will offer counsel to stressed-out officers who request it. They will also ride along, at the officer’s behest, on calls promising conflict or crisis, from fights to car crashes — “situations,” says Police Chief Jim Dziobek, “where people’s faith might not be the strongest.”

Among the qualifications for service are “God-like compassion” and a valid driver’s license. The uniform includes black shoes you can run in and, on the chaplain’s person, a small Bible and latex rubber gloves.

The training manual is an amalgam of statistics and anecdotes, psychobabble and conventional counseling techniques for dealing with SIDS or suicide, prayers and constitutional interpretation, and a species of paranoia commonly circulated among politicized evangelicals: “Diversity is being taught in schools the problem is that diversity is for everyone except Judo-Christian” (sic).

The bulk of the document is the oeuvre of Reverend Bill Hinckley, of the Shield of Faith Ministries in Plainfield, Connecticut, to whom Dziobek was introduced two years ago by pastor James Tousant of Hardwick’s Promised Land Ministries. Since Hinckley conducted training in Morrisville, Tousant has served as Hardwick’s “unofficial” chaplain, accompanying officers on death-notification visits. After the bad news is delivered, the minister says, he sticks around to talk, to call family or funeral home — and, if asked, to pray.

Dziobek is optimistic that an agent of a Higher Authority will help the worldly authorities manage Hardwick’s rowdier citizens when the program expands to include the drunk, disorderly and domestically violent. “People behave differently in church than they do at home,” the chief explains. “You bring that church point of view to the home, and people act different . . .

“But we’re not trying to press religion on anyone,” he stresses, “or any particular religion.”

*******

I am not reassured. In fact, when this atheist Jew envisions a fundamentalist Christian padre at the elbow of a cop telling me my boyfriend has just been crushed on Route 14, I also imagine the Hardwick PD with a padrecide on its hands.

Dziobek several times mentioned a similar program of the Vermont State Police. But Wayne Whitelock, a minister on the VSP’s Peer Support Team, emailed me to “make sure you did NOT refer to me as the ‘Vermont State Police Chaplain.’ The Vermont State Police does not have a Chaplaincy program and provides no religious services to their troops. There is a careful separation between church and state.” The team also does not work with the public.

*******

So are the well-meaning Jims, Dziobek and Tousant, unwittingly establishing a state religion in Hardwick? Since constitutional law relies on the perceptions of a “reasonable person,” I seek one: Mitch Pearl, at Langrock, Sperry and Wool, cooperating attorneys for the Vermont ACLU (on whose board I serve).

The answer, says Pearl: It depends. To pass First Amendment muster, a state-sponsored function must be predominantly secular. The Salvation Army may receive state money to ladle soup to homeless people, so long as it doesn’t serve up Jesus with the meal. Presumably, the Promised Land pastor may hold a widow’s hand.

But the program can’t have either the purpose or the effect of inhibiting or advancing religion, or one religion. “What if a Wiccan volunteered?” Pearl muses. “If they said, sure, join us, that would be less of a problem.”

Still, references to Jesus in the manual take him aback. “It’s hard to imagine a public body adopting as an official policy that God is the answer to man’s dilemma,” he says. “But it seems to me that this is a statement that the Hardwick Police Department not only endorses religion but endorses a particular religion. It sounds highly problematic.”

Might the program be intrinsically religious and coercive? A chaplain is a chaplain, after all — religion is his business. And the cops aren’t offering a psychotherapist or a pie to comfort the bereaved. The police, moreover, are the police — coercion is their business. Even if the officer doesn’t order anyone to kneel and pray, the minister arrives under his aegis. Notes Pearl: “The police are authority figures. Most people believe they should cooperate with them.”

Add to this the pressure to get along in a small town and, legality aside, some may feel disinclined to refuse the minister’s kind offer. “This is another of these things about being in a minority in a small town,” says one Hardwick Jew. “Usually, you don’t make too much noise.”

*******

Following “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy being,” the training manual’s second of Ten Commandments for Law Enforcement Chaplains is “Thou shalt love thy Police Department and all its personnel.” That may be balm to Hardwick’s police, who don’t get a whole lotta lovin’. The town of 3100 spends a quarter of its budget — $445,000 in FY2007 — on the force, and folks generally don’t feel they get what they pay for. (The department failed to arrest anyone for a series of break-ins last year, even though one victim watched the perpetrator take his wallet. Meanwhile, it issued 527 traffic warnings and 705 tickets.)

So it’s reasonable for Chief Dziobek to try to make PEACE with the public. As America slouches toward theocracy, it’s not surprising he’s chosen God as his squad-car partner — or that I may be accused of churlishness for objecting. So be it. The U.S. is a secular democracy. Its Constitution protects my right to exercise religion — or not to.

For now, my lawyer is drawing up a DNR order: Do Not Redeem. And if the good pastor decides to pray in my dooryard anyway, he’d better be wearing those black running shoes.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Connelly headlined the column “In Memoriam.” Trying to squeeze in as many as possible, he listed only the soldiers’ names and ranks. He set the column in agate type, a small point size generally used for classified ads. Within several weeks, he was able to print the names of all the Americans killed in Iraq through Memorial Day.

Each week, Connelly — who has owned the paper with his wife, Susan Jarzyna, since 1986 — would go to the Web to download “another chunk” of the Department of Defense casualty reports. Reading the details of the reports, which include not just the soldiers’ names and ranks, but also their hometowns, armed-forces divisions and circumstances of death, had an effect on Connelly: “They became real people, not just names.” These people came from a place, maybe like Hardwick, where each had a family, a pet, a best friend, a hobby. And each suffered his own, unique death.

“As I was doing it,” Connelly told me, “I had this real emotional sense of loss. I felt sad. I wanted to share that with readers.”

So the Gazette started printing all the information Connelly downloaded. He abandoned the agate for a larger type. It was a newspaperman’s humble homage.

Then, on September 22, 2005, the realness got realer. Specialist Scott P. McLaughlin, 29, of Hardwick — 1st Battalion, 172nd Armor Regiment, 42nd Armor Division of the Vermont Army National Guard — was fighting outside Ramadi when a sniper’s bullet pierced the seams of his body armor.

Scott and Nicole McLaughlin had only recently moved to Hardwick. They had a baby daughter, Molly, and a 6-year-old son, Tyler. McLaughlin had enlisted in the Marines after high school, then returned to Vermont and joined the National Guard. Before shipping out, he worked as a laser-cutting technician in Middlesex. He was an active member of Living Hope Fellowship church. He loved strawberry shortcake and fishing — he went fishing on his wedding day, in his tux.

That week, Connelly dedicated the column to Scott McLaughlin. He set the announcement inside a black border. Then he resumed the ordinary lists.

Until last week.

Just six months after Scott McLaughlin’s death, the Gazette ran a second black box, for another Hardwick family burying one of its own. This time, it was National Guard Specialist Christopher Merchant, a volunteer with Company C, 1/172nd Armor, who later transferred to Task Force Saber. Merchant was killed on March 1, in an attack on Iraqi police headquarters a few miles outside Ramadi. He died instantly after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the National Guard. The press release added, “He was wearing his full complement of Individual Body Armor and Kevlar helmet.”

Merchant, born in Burlington, was the father of three daughters and a stepson, ages 9 to 14. He was a fan of the New York Yankees and Star Wars, and an excellent bowler and baker; he attended St. Norberts Church. Only two months before leaving for Iraq, he had been hired as a custodian at his alma mater, Peoples Academy in Morrisville. His mother Janet worked in the cafeteria.

“He volunteered to go to Iraq with the hope that he could make a difference, so his son would not one day have to go to war,” wrote his wife, Monica, in a public statement. His friend Colin Mlcuch expressed a similar sympathy. “I think [Chris] joined up when he saw what was happening to the soldiers there. He saw a lot of young kids dying too young.” Merchant was 32.

Recently, some members of a student club that opposes military recruitment at Hazen Union School placed an ad in the school paper, the T-Bone. It was a photograph of a graveyard; its text began, You can’t be all you can be if you’re dead. The ad pointed out, “There are other ways to get money for college,” and urged students to “think about it” before signing up. Recruiters regularly set up tables in the cafeteria, distributing pens and other souvenirs to students who show interest. To reach its enlistment quotas, the Army has admittedly targeted working-class communities like Hardwick, where jobs are few and many families cannot afford college tuition. After the ad ran, a raft of letters hit the Gazette. A few writers supported the students, but most were angry.

By contrast, the Gazette has not received one letter about Connelly’s “In Memoriam” columns. Only a handful of folks have even mentioned them to Connelly. One person was appreciative. Another, who served in Afghanistan, asked if Connelly meant to make a political statement. Before the editor could answer, his interlocutor answered his own question: “I guess it’s whatever politics you want to put on it. It’s up to the reader.”

U.S. deaths in Iraq have reached 2300, including 23 servicepeople with ties to Vermont — two from Hardwick, a town of 3200. An estimated 15,000 to 32,000 Iraqi civilians have also been killed. We don’t know their names.

Since Memorial Day, the editor’s space in the Hardwick Gazette has become a serial memorial. Connelly has not missed a week of listing, except the first of the year, when the paper customarily shuts down publishing. But the Gazette can’t keep up with the war in Iraq. “In Memoriam” is three months behind.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

A third of Greensboro (pop. 770, tripled in summer) was meeting representatives of Northeast Kingdom Human Services, which wants to convert the former Lakeview Inn to a residential treatment facility for eight mentally ill patients moving from the hospital to the world.

After rejecting 50 properties, NKHS was smitten by the inn – its capacious grace, broad vistas and meticulous, code-compliant historic restoration. And who wouldn’t adore Greensboro, a perfect cluster of white clapboard on the shores of Lake Caspian, anchored by the grand general store Willey’s?

On January 19, NKHS and the landowner agreed to terms. The next day, Executive Director Eric Grims informed the selectboard. On January 24, he talked to the Caledonian Record, whence the rest of Greensboro found out. “There seems to be a good positive energy surrounding the project,” the reporter paraphrased Grims.

He could not have been more wrong.

Letters flew to the agency’s office. Lakeview neighbor Lucas Lonegren posted a blog, where information-sharing turned to fulminating, then to organizing. Lonegren deleted flames, but contributors who voiced support for NKHS were promptly denounced – or ignored.

By February 3, rage was hot. The audience fidgeted as Grims discoursed on square footage, and Division Director Cathy Rousse on “inspiring creativity in people whose creativity has been thwarted.”

Then it spoke.

Argument was both eminently rational and surfeited with emotion. Everyone endorsed the “concept” of community-based recovery – just someplace else in town (though no place is available) and not at Greensboro’s “gateway.” The next-door neighbor, a planner, pronounced the site “inappropriate,” the word of the evening.

People felt blindsided, though it’s hard to say they could have been told earlier.

They were outraged as taxpayers, though Grims explained that at $1.4 million, the inn is cheaper than new construction.

Some fear was bald. Warren Hill read a headline: Man Pleads Innocent to Vermont Shooting Spree. “Can you guarantee me that a person like this will not end up here?” he demanded.

Anger turned defiant. “You could not have chosen a worse place to try to buy,” threatened Andy Dales, representing the 500-member second-home-owners’ Greensboro Association.

Empathy swelled momentarily when Elizabeth Leopold, former attorney and daughter of Greensboro, confessed, “I’m a client of the system,” with three suicide attempts and two involuntary commitments. She saw “nothing wrong” with a group home at Greensboro’s gateway. Neither might others, if NKHS could deliver only patients like the patrician Liz, and not like the grizzled male stranger growling over the cookies.

Arguments contradicted each other.

The town was too rural to serve this population. But the facility should be further outside the village – more rural.

The agency could not guarantee the town’s safety. But learning that no dangerous patients would be accepted and all would be monitored 24/7, two staff per resident, people grew suspicious: If they’re not dangerous, why so much supervision?

A beloved building was being “taken from the economy.” Grims avowed that NKHS pays its taxes in every host town. Hill responded, “Sir, I do not believe it.”

The meeting was billed as “informational,” but few seemed eager to be informed, much less persuaded.

It would be easiest to chalk up Greensboro’s reaction to fear of the mentally ill, whom many wrongly associate with violence, compounded by the pique of a monied summer community accustomed to getting its way. No doubt, these are in the mix.

But working-class communities also resist group homes. Institutions change neighborhoods, and nobody likes change, especially when the status quo is as copacetic as in Greensboro.

What else is going on?

For one thing, democracy is frustrated. The Caledonian presented a done deal; the state, having screwed up in Waterbury, wants Greensboro to trust it. Greensboro would sooner trust its local government. But while Grims called the selectboard, he doesn’t need its consent or, with eight residents, even a zoning variance.

Property, which ordinarily affords the summer people formidable sway over Greensboro society, now is the problem. Lake-home owners once prohibited sales to Jews and other undesirables. Now faced with another perceived undesirable, they are at the mercy of one private landowner.

“A bigger social dilemma” is at play, too, comments Janice Irvine, a University of Massachusetts sociologist. “Since deinstitutionalization, people have either been dumped into the streets to become homeless or placed in community homes, which are difficult for every community. As a society, we have

not found a way either to integrate or to separate out the mentally ill.”

Greensboro is not letting its emotions overtake its reason. Emotions are increasingly legitimized as public argument. The president acts from his gut. Policy is mobilized by hatred – of sex offenders, terrorists, even opposing party members. Certain emotions, though, are more legitimate than others. Cynicism is called realism, while the hope and trust that Rousse invoked are dismissed as sucker-bait. “These are nice concepts,” one resident told her, “but they’re pie in the sky.”

NKHS doesn’t want to move where it’s not wanted. But the state is desperate to shutter the state hospital, and another proposed facility was gunned down in Vergennes.

If it does move in, the agency promises to work with the community to find its tolerance. Some local supporters, such as physician Mark Lichtenstein and Chelsea school principal Carl Stein, have volunteered to help.

If it does move in, what might happen is what happened with civil unions, another passionately opposed change: nothing.

Or, something good could happen. “I hope you will open your hearts to your unwanted brothers and sisters, your extended family,” state representative and “psychiatric survivor” Ann Donahue implored at the Friday meeting.

They might not get the chance. By Tuesday, claiming to represent a majority, the selectboard wrote the health commissioner and NKHS asking them to inform Greensboro, “in writing and as soon as possible,” that the plan has been abandoned.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Defending his decision, the judge explained that Hulett was assessed at low risk of re-offending and was not going to get treatment in jail. Cashman thought Hulett needed treatment more than lengthy incarceration, which would only make him more dangerous. Then the judge averred that he no longer believes in punishment. “Anger corrodes the soul,” he said.

Although none of the critics knows exactly what Hulett did or how often he did it, Cashman was besieged by condemnation. Calls poured into Montpelier. Gov. Jim Douglas issued a statement eviscerating Cashman and calling for sentencing reform. Republican legislators resolved to impeach the judge.

By Friday, the national conservative media and blogosphere had joined the mob. Bill O’Reilly dubbed Cashman “the worst judge in the USA.” A blog called Imago Dei pointed to Cashman, a devout Catholic, as “proof of the existence of evil.” A contributor to the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion site called him proof that Vermont is insane.

On Vermont Public Radio’s “Switchboard,” Democratic House Speaker Gaye Symington declared that “as a mother and a citizen,” she, too, was appalled by Cashman’s decision. She plugged the House’s forthcoming Safe Communities bill, which may contain longer sentences for sex offenders.

It’s hard to say how news of the Hulett case got out. But you can’t understand its resonance without considering the mega-decibel amplifier created by Douglas’s two-year campaign to get tough on sex offenders.

What the governor wants most is a law allowing “civil commitment” of “sexually violent predators” — the indefinite psychiatric incarceration of people who have completed their prison sentences but are deemed likely to commit another crime. Among his other wishes are longer sentences and tighter probationary restrictions; posting more ex-offenders on the Sex Offender Registry website and availing the public of their addresses.

None of this is a response to a real problem. Rather, it’s a strategy to embarrass “soft-on-crime” Democrats and win votes for Republicans. After all, Vermont ranks 48th among the states in crime, 44th in rapes. As for sex crimes against children, thanks to good treatment programs, we have some of the lowest re-offense rates in the country: In 1995, Vermont reported after-treatment arrests at 7 percent for pedophiles, 3 percent for incest perpetrators, and 3 percent for those who had committed “hands-off” crimes such as exhibitionism.

Nevertheless, last session the lawmakers passed a Sexually Violent Predator designation, ready for deployment should civil commitment become law. And the speaker promises more. Fear, both public and political, is winning the day.

But if fear is the greatest political motivator, it is also the worst basis for policy. A tougher sex-offender law will not make Vermont’s communities safer. Indeed, it could make them more dangerous. Here’s why:

1. Such laws put resources where the problem isn’t. All but about 7 percent of sex crimes against children are committed by Dad, Mom’s boyfriend or a close family friend. Sex offender registries do nothing for these victims, who already know where the released perpetrator is. Requirements that ex-offenders stay away from schools and playgrounds are likewise unnecessary. Where molestation is concerned, kids are safest in public.

2. Sex criminals reform, and treatment works. Even for people who have committed many crimes, the one they’re caught in is usually the last. Large studies in the U.S. and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested for similar crimes, compared with 74 percent of all other prisoners. “Being handcuffed and hauled away from decent society is a shattering experience for anyone,” an ex-offender told Eric Lotke, former research and policy director of the Justice Policy Institute. “But it is all the more electrifying and soul-stripping when the offense is as intimate and shameful a secret as is a sex crime.” That memory “stops most of us from ever doing it again.”

Treatment improves the odds greatly, as Vermont’s low recidivism proves.

3. In a free society, you don’t lock people up for crimes you think they might commit. Anyway, it’s almost impossible to know.

Not to worry, says the guv. Only the baddest of the bad — 19 ex-cons, tops — will end up in the bin. But most states have exceeded their estimates by hundreds, even thousands, using civil commitment as a backdoor to longer sentences.

Vermont’s new statute sounds reassuringly stringent. “The standard of proof . . . shall be clear and convincing evidence that the convicted sex offender suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder that makes the person likely to engage in predatory, sexually violent offenses.”

Such risk prediction, though, is anything but clear and convincing. Notwithstanding its definition in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “personality disorder” is a diagnosis about as precise as “a real fruitcake.” A “mental abnormality” is as common as anorexia. And depending on whom you talk to, “pedophilia” can refer to a 40-year-old who rapes a toddler or an 8-year-old playing doctor with his 5-year-old sister.

Before committing a prisoner, courts usually ask, “Did he cooperate with treatment in prison? Does he show remorse?” According to Canadian Solicitor General Karl Hanson, who conducted the widest, most sophisticated analysis yet of recidivism risks, neither of these says a lot about an offender’s future behavior.

One thing that does predict re-offense, Hanson finds, is youth: a person under 25 is far more likely to assault someone than an older person, and the compulsion lessens with age. Thus, very long prison sentences, even as an alternative to civil commitment, are a bad idea relocated — a waste of money, and lives.

4. Expanded sex-offender registries and tougher restrictions contribute to re-offense.

“The treatment research shows that the best way to [change antisocial behavior] is to normalize life,” says Lotke. Offender websites and community notification of neighbors, landlords and employers, coupled with requirements that registrants report their every move to the police, do the opposite. The U.S. Justice Department names “lifestyle instability” as a big contributor to re-offending.

In other words, as Robert Longo, a therapist and former director of Vermont’s Safer Society Program, told me, “You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place. You make him a better sex offender.”

5. Community notification encourages violence.

“Stronger sex offender laws give tools to parents and concerned citizens so they can be more aware of the location of convicted sex offenders, especially sexually violent predators,” Douglas proclaims.

And what are we to do with these “tools?” Gather the good old boys to patrol the offender’s place with shotguns? That’s what’s happened nationwide: harassment, assault, arson. Margy Love, former Justice Department Pardon Attorney, calls the new nationwide sex-offender registry an “incitement to vigilante justice” masquerading as “a responsible public safety measure.”

Imprisonment does two things: It punishes, and it protects the community by keeping bad guys off the street. A third function, in Vermont at least, is rehabilitation, which protects the community by helping ex-convicts create lives beyond crime. Commenting on the Hulett case, Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann suggested that punishment and rehabilitation are mutually reinforcing. Time behind bars, he told the Free Press, pushes offenders “to contemplate the pain [they] have caused the victim.”

Judge Cashman, reputedly more for harshness than leniency, seems to be grappling with the fact that prisons are rarely conducive to salutary contemplation.

If Vermont wants to solve real problems, it will keep doing what it already does: Educate the public about sexual violence; tailor sentences to the severity of the crime and the dangerousness of the criminal; encourage treatment in prison; improve prisoners’ reentry into family and community, with housing, job training, counseling and supervision.

But offender websites and civil commitment are not about safety. They are about vengeance. And votes.

The experience of other states foretells Vermont’s. Prison sentences and registries grow longer. The cellblocks fill, along with the locked wards. The public perceives more crime; it demands more laws, criminalizing more acts. Broader laws bring more arrests, which look like more crime.

Conjuring monsters in the streets, communities are divided, while children are left defenseless at home. People feel falsely safer and, at the same time, more fearful.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Before the fire trucks had left Main Street, townspeople were raising money, donating everything from furniture to new underwear, and making up the beds in their spare rooms for the disabled and elderly tenants driven into the cold in their nightclothes. The Village Restaurant served free coffee and cocoa. Bond Auto opened its bathrooms to the firefighters. Grand Union sent boxes of food. A rescue crewman commented, “Sandwiches and coffee kept appearing all day.” An arts organizer and the owner of the old general store in East Hardwick offered the food co-op temporary space. Somebody saved a cat from the flames.

Beyond the impromptu rescue and relief, some usually unnoted features of smallness also came to light. Action was unhampered by bureaucracy. As soon as he learned of the fire, janitor Joe Martineau unlocked the elementary school doors to give shelter to the tenants. The relatively rich and the relatively poor — the real-estate agent who has benefited from the recent rise in property values and the low-income residents who are its victims — were displaced side by side. Hippie and hairdresser, antiques dealer and Chinese restaurateur, pagan and evangelical Christian saw their businesses drowned in sludge. And farmer, lawyer, carpenter, office worker, homemaker and blacksmith were there to help, side by side.

“The community rallied in a remarkable way,” commented Rob Levine of the American Red Cross.

Charlie Volk, an electrician who serves on the Hardwick Select Board, found light in the billowing black smoke. “It was endearing to watch,” he said of the town’s efforts. “I think it’s going to overcome the political divisions in town.”

I hope Charlie is right. But even if he’s not, he made me think about compassion and politics, their relationship and differences.

One of the pleasures of life in a small town is the opportunity to express your good will directly — to cook for the community dinner, mentor a sixth-grader, or drive the ambulance. You also get to feel gratitude directly, if you happen to be the recipient of your neighbor’s largesse. Of course, the opposite is also true. Enmities and feuds are up front and personal, and they tend to be passed down, like heritable diseases, from generation to generation.

It’s hard to sort feelings from politics in a place like Hardwick. For if all politics is local, all local politics is personal; the smaller the town, the more personal it is. Last summer, a cell tower proposed for construction in a pasture on Bridgman Hill tore the town in two. Each faction accused the other of selfishness; each claimed to be acting for the public good. The dispute turned especially nasty when a few tower supporters started running ads in the Gazette making unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on Zoning Board members. And it isn’t over. Both sides are appealing the board’s compromise decision.

But compassion and anger are not the same as politics, and it would be a mistake to say that good policy is simply righteous feeling codified. Policymaking may start with emotion, but it must step away from emotion toward principles and practicality — the vision of a good society, plus the logical consideration of a law’s consequences, intended or not.

For example: Just about everyone feels rage toward murderers and sympathy for their victims. But do those feelings justify the state execution of murderers? Opponents must overcome their revulsion to the crime itself and sometimes ignore the wishes of the victim’s loved ones. Proponents must ask if death sentences can be justly handed down. Both need to think about what policies best protect the public. Feelings — even ethics — of forgiveness or vengeance, no matter how justified or widespread, are not enough to make good law.

Another difference between personal acts and politics is the question of control. Many generous philanthropists feel obligated to help the less fortunate. Yet they oppose taxes that might alleviate the poverty of the very institutions or families to whom they give their money. Why? They’d rather write their own checks than be required by the government to do so or allow their money to be distributed by elected officials.

Paul Cillo, Hardwick’s former State Representative and my significant other, invokes the Vermont state motto, “Freedom and Unity,” to talk about these questions. Most people want to promote personal freedom and responsibility, he says; they also want the government to serve the public good, which may mean curtailing freedom and helping some people who aren’t particularly responsible. It’s not a choice between private charity and welfare, private freedom and public unity, though: “The political fight is always over where you draw the line between the two.”

Perhaps because loss is a universal experience, compassion is a near-universal virtue. I’d surmise it is distributed equally between conservatives and progressives, religionists and atheists. Compassion is not sufficient to pay the firefighters or house the homeless, however, and in politics, we rarely even agree on what acts comprise it. Still, as Charlie Volk suggests, an outpouring of simple good acts warms a public spirit badly in need of warming — like coffee for a suddenly homeless woman standing in her nightgown in a school gym.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.