Forget affluenza. The rich's real "disease" is failing to get that their privileges come at a price: our contempt.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Felix Mizioznikov
February 8, 2014
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More than half a century ago, “West Side Story” satirized the idea
that what was then known as juvenile delinquency was a product of
poverty and the psychological maladjustments it produced, and that
therefore “this boy don’t need a judge, he needs an analyst’s care.”
Since
then, America has been busy transforming itself into an unabashed
plutocracy: while median household income has barely budged since the
mid-1960s, the annual income of the top 1 percent has increased by an
average of approximately 200 percent in real terms.
So perhaps
it’s not surprising that the belief that economic deprivation leads to
psychological hardship, which in turn inspires youthful crimes, has not
merely been discarded but, in some cases, actually inverted.
Consider the case of a Texas teenager who
killed four people and severely injured two others while
drunk-driving in his father’s pickup truck. Prosecutors wanted to send
him to prison for 20 years, but a judge decided to give him no jail time
at all after an expert witness for the defense testified that the
defendant was suffering from “affluenza.”
This affliction, the
psychologist testified, was a product of the defendant having spent his
life in the lap of luxury. Having his parents’ cash between himself and
reality had left the killer of four of his neighbors unable to make the
connection between his decisions – such as his decision to drive a
two-ton truck down a residential street at 70 miles per hour while drunk
out of his mind – and the potential consequences of those decisions.
In short, the defense team argued, their client was depraved because he wasn’t deprived.
This
argument seems to have worked on the judge, who sentenced the defendant
to 10 years of probation after his wealthy family offered to pay for
their son’s confinement in a $450,000-per-year in-patient facility,
where apparently young scions are therapeutically guided toward the
insight that randomly slaughtering your fellow citizens as a predictable
consequence of your own selfishness and stupidity is a bad thing to do.
Understandably,
the judge’s decision has outraged many people, including the families
of the victims. Eric Broyles, whose wife and daughter were killed by the
defendant, argued that “had he not had money to have the defense there,
to also have the experts testify and also offer to pay for the
treatment, I think the results would have been different.”
That’s
probably true. The rich can to a significant extent buy their way out
of suffering the full consequences of their crimes and those of their
children – not primarily through crude (and, and in the American justice
system, fairly rare) mechanisms such as bribing judges and prosecutors,
but because to be rich means that you will have almost limitless
opportunities to manipulate the system toward working in your favor.
All this brings to mind the recent controversy over
Tom Perkins’ remarks, comparing
animosity toward the rich to the kind of hatred that eventually
culminated in the genocidal persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
Perkins’ absurd exaggeration elicited a storm of condemnation, and
rightly so.
Perkins’ remarks (which have been
echoed by
various other 1 percenters) point to the real affluenza, rather than
the fake syndrome conjured up by an expert witness to help get a rich
kid off the hook for four homicides. The real affluenza is the failure
of the rich to appreciate that their special privileges – such as the
privilege of operating under what is, from a practical perspective, a
substantially different justice system than everyone else – must come at
a price.
That price is paid in the form of the growing contempt
of their fellow citizens, a contempt that grows in proportion to the
ever-increasing gap in America between the children of privilege and
everyone else.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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