Brian Banks, who was considered a top football prospect and was being recruited by some big schools, pleaded no contest to one count of forcible rape. He spent 5 years in prison. So, here’s a kid with one felony that was sent to prison for 5 years vs. one kid who has three convictions that is going to spend 3 months in jail. Both are young, gifted athletes. Both have (or had) bright futures. What’s the difference? Oh yeah, Banks is black. What’s the other difference? Oh yeah, Banks’ accuser later made a taped confession that he didn’t rape her.

Brian Banks, who was considered a top football prospect and was being recruited by some big schools, pleaded no contest to one count of forcible rape. He spent 5 years in prison. So, here’s a kid with one felony that was sent to prison for 5 years vs. one kid who has three convictions that is going to spend 3 months in jail. Both are young, gifted athletes. Both have (or had) bright futures. What’s the difference? Oh yeah, Banks is black. What’s the other difference? Oh yeah, Banks’ accuser later made a taped confession that he didn’t rape her.

Should we not put murderers in jail? I mean, afterall, punishing a murderer won’t bring the dead person back.
And, sure, we don’t have a rape culture. It’s not like we have an elected official using phrases like “legitimate rape” or anything. Oh, wait. Strike that last point, apparently we do.

Weed: Maybe it is time to stop kegging and start toking
I enjoy eating pot cookies. I do not enjoy binge drinking and I do not do it (throwing up once in college behind overdrinking taught me a lesson that I did indeed remember) So I am bias. With that said, in my experience, people high as fuck on marijuana (say, at George Clinton and the P-Funk AllStars concerts I have attended) are less likely to behave in ways I find belligerent, violent, aggressive or obnoxious (in the sense of stumbling into people or throwing up in front of people or peeing in front of people) than are people who are drunk as fuck on alcohol. When I myself have been high as fuck (like when I am experimenting with a new cookie recipe), I have never slurred my speech, forgotten where I was or how to get home from where I was , come out of the high not remembering what happened to me or how I behaved, passed out, or said or did things to other people for which I later owed them an apology. But these are all behaviors that various friends have all admitted to me happen to them at least once during the course of their partying career with alcohol.

When I hear about sexual assault on campus and its extremely close proximity to binge drinking I do not think “Oh, those girls who got assaulted should not have gotten drunk, shame on them.” Instead I think, “Oh, someone needs to teach these college age girls to stop imbibing alcohol altogether and to use pot cookies as their intoxicant. Eat one at 7:00pm. Be high and have a good time being disinhibited from 8:00am to 2:00am without ever passing out, then walk home completely sober and able to actually remember the good time you had.”

But who REALLY, REALLY needs to stop drinking and switch to weed is guys. I’m going to write you a funny story that you already know by heart. Guy A gets drunk. Guy thinks he is still able to drive a vehicle. Guy gets behind the wheel. Guy dies or kills someone else or wrecks the car or gets gets arrested. Guy B gets high. Guy B knows he can’t drive a car but has no other way to get home so he gets behind the wheel anyway. Guy B gets pulled over because he is on the road driving below the speed limit. No one dies. No one’s car gets wrecked.

That entire “Will people know I am high?” paranoia/self-consciousness is a good thing in my opinion. I think that there are non predatory young men out there, a lot of them, who typically would not attempt to stick their penis in the orifice of a nonresponsive, passed out woman who smelled of piss and vomit (Stubenville anyone?). But when they are drunk as fuck, they actually would attempt it. Not only that but because they are sexually inexperienced, when they are drunk as fuck they misinterpret or truly do not understand non-verbal clues that indicate non-consent. Or because they are drunk they just do not care. Predatory guys will be predatory sober, drunk or high. But I think non-predatory guys, of which I think most men are in the majority, are more likely to become predatory on alcohol rather than on marijuana.

I think that the entire “I’m so high right now I hope I don’t do anything stupid” thinking that often goes on when one is high in public (in private, with just friends in the garage being stupid may actually be part of the fun), may be the very thinking that causes guys to pay more attention to how the females they are with are responding to their sexual advances. This, in my opinion, might promote the type of observations that can prevent non-consensual sex acts. Also, people who are really high are a lot easier to understand when they speak because their speech is not slurred. So when a guy asks “Does this feel good?”, and a drunk girl answers “No, it kinda hurts.”, who knows what the heck the guy actually heard because the girl’s speech may have been slurred. She may have thought she said “No, it kinda hurts” when it fact what came out was mumbles that could be interpreted as pleasurable. If a high guy asks “Hey, do you like this?” and the girl answers “No, it kinda hurts”, I am way more confident that her words will come out in a way that is intelligible.

Young people are not going to stop getting intoxicated – on something. That is just part of the going-to-college, being-out-on-your-own process. I wish the U.S. was more like France. There, starting around age 13 at the dinner table with your parents you are allowed to have table wine and get accustomed to the affects of alcohol on your body so that by the time you were college age you would have a much better idea of what amount of alcohol you could consume to get a buzz without getting sloppy drunk or passed out drunk. But that is not the country in which I live.

Regardless of what though, according to the books I am reading (Girls and Sex by Peggy Orenstein for example), young people are getting drunk ON PURPOSE, not because they do not know how to drink. So I think alcohol needs to be removed from the scene altogether as an intoxicant for the college age crowd. I’d like to see it replaced with marijuana. Because I think the affects and implications and consequences of being high on marijuana are going to be a lot less disastrous.

Http://bit.ly/28v1x4n

A misdemeanor sentence for multiple felony charges is certainly unusual, especially for this kind of crime where men are usually punished much more harshly, especially by campus courts on the grounds of being accused. If there are any conflicts of interest between the judge and the perpetrator, I would wager them being more class-based than race or gender based; I doubt that Turner would have been let off nearly as easily had he been an old smelly hobo that lived in the same back alley where he did the dirty deed, as opposed to the reality of him being a young well-to-do college athlete with a would-be bright future.

I don’t believe that our culture does or should ever blame victims for what happens to them, but we can also take responsible safety measures to avoid becoming victims ourselves: Lock your doors, don’t make yourself look vulnerable when travelling alone, and have a buddy you can trust to look after you at a wild party. Until our justice system can stop criminals from being criminals, we’ll just have to take steps in safety to minimize our chances of becoming victims of future Brock Turners.

Don’t you think that part of the healing process is seeing justice done for the wrong that was committed? That’s kind of a fundamental building block of humanity. If you have any concern for the women then you should recognize that her knowing justice was served would be a great first step to, as you put it, putting her life back together. Saying that the girl just needs a therapist is missing the point that when justice is denied it actually contributes to mental anguish brought on by the situation. Besides, would you say the same about other crimes? Punishing a murderer won’t un-murder the victim, punishing an animal torturer won’t un-torture the animal?

I agree that we have a deeply flawed prison system so I think what makes a just sentence can be open for discussion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an extremely long stay in prison, it could be a mixture that includes community service, counseling/rehabilitation and maybe some other stuff. What I know for sure is that 6 months jail (3 with good behavior) for 3 felony convictions is not justice and it does a disservice to all involved as well as society as a whole when there is a miscarriage of justice.

There’s been a persistent narrative that Western civilization lives in a “rape culture” that trivializes and normalizes rape, which I find hard to believe when the subject has been so stigmatized, not normalized. Rape has been punishable by death throughout human history, and was one of the last non-murder crimes to have the death penalty removed from it in modern civilization. Many men have had their careers, reputations, and livelihoods destroyed from false rape allegations, allegations that would not have been taken seriously in a real rape culture.

What Brock Turner did was horrible, and it’s easy for a story like this to whip people into a vengeance-thirsty mob frenzy, but no amount of sentencing on him is going to un-rape his victim. I’m more worried about how both of these people are going to pick up the pieces of their lives after this. Will Turner be able to reform himself into an upstanding citizen, or will our flawed prison systems turn him into an even worse criminal with no hope for a better future? As for the victim, the most we can do for her is to find a good therapist to help her deal with the trauma and put her life back together. I would really hate to see two people’s lives be destroyed over one regretful act.