Month: October 2015

Modern Slavery – Yes, it happens in Tallahassee

Few things are more precious to us Americans than freedom. However, it may surprise you to know that not everyone in our nation is free and that slavery is a growing problem in our country. At this past week’s meeting of my Rotary club, Terry Coonan, director of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, gave an especially compelling presentation on Human Trafficking. I was looking forward to his talk because I gave a sermon at my synagogue a few years ago on the Tomato on the Seder Plate initiative of Rabbis For Human Rights of North America which focused on the problem of slavery in Florida’s agricultural industry.

Modern slavery, which includes both worker and sex trafficking, is a worldwide problem. According to a 2013 White House report, it is estimated that there are 21 million people who are being held in bondage in the modern world. This is the largest number of people living as slaves in human history. One might think that modern slavery is relegated to the third world countries and remote areas of the world, but modern day slavery is happening throughout the world, including the United States, in both our urban and rural communities. It is especially pervasive in the sex, agricultural, and the hospitality industries. In modern slavery people are not kept captive with chains. Instead, traffickers use force, fraud, and coercion to keep people enslaved.  A huge industry, modern slavery generates between $9-12 billion annually in the United States alone. It is said to currently be the second largest criminal industry behind the drug trade.

Even relatively tranquil communities such as Tallahassee are not immune from this problem. One of the major sex trafficking prosecutions in the past 10 years, the Melchor case, began when two women being held captive in a private home in the Killearn neighborhood of Tallahassee escaped and ran door to door seeking help. The women, who had come to the United States based upon the promise of jobs, were forced into prostitution utilizing a mobile brothel model where they were driven to apartments and mobile homes on the outskirts of Tallahassee and forced to perform 25-35 sex acts per night.  An ensuing two-year investigation revealed an international conspiracy that trafficked women from South America into multiple Florida cities for the purpose of forcing them into prostitution.

Melchor is not the only case to arise in the Florida panhandle. The Destin King labor trafficking case involved workers at the Sandestin Hilton and other hotels along the Gulf Coast. The workers were young women aged 19 -23 from eastern Europe who came to the United States upon the promise of employment at Disney. When they arrived in the United States they were told that the promised Disney jobs weren’t available, but that they could work at hotels in the Florida panhandle. They found themselves living 15-20 people in a single condo, while working for less than minimum wage.  As if paying less than a living wage wasn’t enough, their employers charged them for things such as rent, job placement fees, transportation fees, and $1500 – $2000 for visa processing fees. The young women were not employed directly by the hotels, but they worked for subcontractor corporations that negotiated contracts to supply the workers to the hotels. The subcontractor corporations were able to submit low bids for the contracts due to their failure to pay even a minimum wage to the workers. The hotels were able to claim ignorance of the situation because the women weren’t employed directly by the hotel, although one has to question whether or not the hotels were simply turning a blind eye to the exploitation when they unquestioningly accepted such extremely low bids from the contractors.

You can do something to help!
You can do something to help!

As individuals there are some things we can do to help combat modern slavery. There are a number of websites that list possible signs of Human Trafficking such as the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. I’m not going to reproduce the list here, but I do encourage you to make yourself familiar with the possible signs. One thing that I will say is that it is absolutely necessary that we slow down, recognize, and engage with people who are often invisible in our society. We have to take time to notice the hotel maid, the streetwalker, the runaway youth, the homeless, and the agricultural worker and report instances where we suspect involuntary servitude may be happening to the toll free human trafficking number 1-888-373-7888. We need to support businesses that are willing to join Fair Food and Fair Trade programs and to encourage other businesses to join through our purchasing decisions. I also would suggest that supporting businesses that allow their employees to join unions and engage in collective bargaining is yet another way of combating human trafficking.

I hope that this post will inspire you to want to learn more about this huge injustice. I believe that the more attention that can be brought to this subject, the better. As I think about this topic, I can’t help but recall that the Hebrew Bible, at least 36 times, more than any other commandment, repeatedly reminds us that we must treat the stranger kindly because of the Jewish people’s own experience with slavery in Egypt. This is not an issue we can afford to ignore.

 

The Lawyer as Artist

In 1989 Salman Rushdie was quoted in the London Independent as saying:

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

To me this sounds a lot like the work of a lawyer. Is there a connection between artistic creation such as one finds in poetry and the practice law? Can a lawyer be an artist, or are we merely logical thinkers who rarely color outside the lines society draws for us?

When I was a law student attending City University of New York School of Law I lived in Brooklyn. When the long hours of studying law exhausted my energies I would sometimes take the subway into Manhattan, or “the city” as genuine city dwellers call it. Once in there, I would go to the Pastel Society of America where they offered inexpensive classes in pastel painting led by the top pastel painting artists in the United States. I loved these classes and found the process by which these incredible artists created their paintings to be fascinating. Through these classes I began to see that a tree is more than just green and brown, but is really a collection of an endless variety of different colors spanning the entire rainbow. Indeed, the only limit on the colors found in a tree is that created by the artist’s own mind. When I would return from my expedition into the world of art and creativity to the “logical” world of law I noticed that my understanding of the cases and legal principles I was studying seemed to be enhanced. I wasn’t just rejuvenated – I was inspired. It occurred to me that, after the classes, I was seeing law differently, and this led to a continuing curiosity into the intersection between law and art.

I don’t often hear people describing lawyers as artists, but in my mind great lawyers think artistically as well as logically. I love going to art museums, plays, concerts, and reading great writing because, when executed well, they provide me with opportunities to see some aspect of the world from a different perspective. For me, art is fundamental. In my spare time I play and study music. I explore Tallahassee on my bicycle and take photographs. I’ve written and performed a play about economic justice. Even this blog is a creative outlet that allows me to play with ideas. I find that art is at its very best when it takes something that is familiar to me and lets me see it in a totally different way than I’ve ever seen it before.

So it is with law. I believe that a great lawyer or judge doesn’t just see law and justice as words on a page to be blindly followed and applied. Such an approach to the law would leave it forever stagnant and allow injustices to go undiscovered. Great lawyers recognize injustices and create for themselves and others, a constantly refining vision of justice. Consider that for nearly 100 years the law and the courts in the United States steadfastly held onto the rarely challenged notion that racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal” was justice. However, it took visionary lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall to show them a different perspective, that “separate but equal” would never be equal. Such work is as much art as it is logic. The question is how to tell the story such that the injustice of the status quo becomes undeniable.

The primary art form of the lawyer is that of storyteller. Our client’s cases are non-fiction stories that we advocate be viewed from a certain perspective. Our choice of words, the way in which we present evidence, the focus we give to certain facts, and the way in which interpret the law all become part of our storytelling vision. I know that many will read this and think that this idea of “storytelling” is justification for deception and dishonesty, but it’s not that at all. Effective storytelling is truthful. When a story becomes dishonest it loses the ability to fully engage us. Good stories are often messy and even the best cases usually present a challenging fact or two for a lawyer to deal with. It is the lawyer’s ability to weave the messy or difficult parts of the story into a collective whole with a positive truth for the client that I believe distinguishes great creative lawyers from the ordinary.

Many lawyers such as John Grisham, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Scott Turow have made successful transitions from lawyer to author. In fact, so many lawyers are interested in making the transition from lawyer to author that there actually was a panel called “The Law as a Platform for Writing” at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Bar Association. While I hear many stories of unhappy lawyers, I don’t see the interest in writing as a product of that unhappiness. Instead, I see it as evidence that many lawyers see the art in our profession, and once this is recognized, are compelled to give expression to that art in as many ways possible both in and out of the courtroom.

 

 

Mass Murder in America – Looking Beyond Legal Solutions

Until a couple of days ago, I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week. However, the tragic gun deaths of nine students, and wounding of nine others, at an Oregon college is a topic that deserves attention. Predictably, this event has reignited political debates regarding issues such as gun control and allowing students to carry firearms on campus. While I think these are important discussions, and I support gun control legislation, I’m not convinced that either gun control or further proliferation of firearms will resolve the problem of mass shootings.   I say this because on many levels these events are more than simply legal problems and failure of legislation.

I recognize that law has its limits. We cannot seek to resolve our social problems solely through criminalization and regulation. I believe we need to take a closer look at what social forces are driving these events and consider how we can create change that stops the creation of people who are driven to commit mass murder.

When one looks back that the majority of mass shootings in our nation we see a recurring profile of the individuals who commit these violent acts. The group is exclusively male, most often white, alienated, unemployed or underemployed, and exhibiting symptoms of untreated mental illness. These are not professional criminals, gang members, or individuals with histories of long-term involvement in radical organizations, although they may take up a cause to justify their actions.

I would like to focus upon the issues of alienation and untreated mental illness because I feel that these two areas are ignored in most discussions. Human beings have a strong drive for connection. We are not solitary creatures. In fact, social isolation has been compared to smoking and obesity in terms of the magnitude of its impact upon our health. Yet we live in a society where the social fabric is decaying, and with it, opportunities to find social connection. More and more of our professional and personal lives have moved into the digital realm. I was recently talking with some young people about job hunting and I was encouraging them to go to the employer and talk with someone in person whenever possible as part of their job hunting strategy. I was surprised when they told me that this was no longer possible with most employers and that for grocery stores and other retail entities all job seekers are directed to the Internet. As I wrote in an earlier posting, social institutions of all sorts are declining in membership. I would argue that even where membership is steady, the social life of many institutions has declined tremendously in the past two decades. I remember years ago when the holidays of Chanukkah and Sukkot in my local Jewish community meant multiple invitations to parties and dinners. In recent years such invitations have become increasingly rare to the degree that I am surprised when one is extended.

Alienation creates worse health outcomes, not just physically, but also for mental health. We are not prepared to respond to  the increased mental health needs arising from increased alienation. The United States’ mental health infrastructure is completely inadequate and  is getting worse by the day. We do not have the providers and we  haven’t funded the research needed to deliver effective evidence based treatments. Even for those who have the financial resources to pay for care, it’s often simply not available or the quality of care is poor due to inadequate training of the provider.

Untreated mental illness often brings people into the criminal justice system. I remember when I was doing contract nursing and I was sent to work in a local prison. I was stunned at how a majority of the inmates’ medical records showed the same profile of untreated mental illness; a history of childhood abuse or neglect; low IQ; and untreated addiction. Is it any wonder that the largest provider of mental health services in the State of Florida is the Department of Corrections? However, this also says that, as a society, we’re not committed to the prevention of crime and destroyed lives, only to reacting to the damage they cause.

One last story and I’ll close. When I was a law student I worked on a clemency petition for a young woman who, at age 13, was sent to adult prison in Florida for 9 years following the home invasion robbery of her Grandparents’ house. This child, and she was a child until the state of Florida stripped her of that status, had been evaluated by two mental health experts a few weeks earlier following a violent outburst. The mental health experts both recommended immediate inpatient treatment for her. Nothing was done, her behavior continued to escalate, and the State of Florida decided that rather than mental health treatment she was a criminal and made her the youngest person in the Florida adult prison system. It should be noted that her escalating violence was associated with her mother’s abandonment of her. During her 9-year prison sentence, neither her mother nor her grandparents ever visited her once. The recommended mental health treatment was never provided to her. I argued her clemency petition to then Governor Jeb Bush, who denied it. I guess he just figured that stuff like this happens.

In closing, I don’t believe that we’re helpless in the face of this problem.  As individuals, we can work to decrease alienation in our communities by simply going out into the world.  I know some will disagree with me, but a digital connection is not the same as being in the presence of a live person.  We can lobby for mental health research and treatment funding, not simply because of this issue, but because it creates justice in the world.   If we can do these things, our lives will all improve.