South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog

Read this. Matt Brown's description of a brief encounter with a probation agent conducting a pre-sentence interview captures an irony that is ever-present in our criminal justice system:

After the probation officer finished, she shuffled past me with a faint smile on her face. I caught a glimpse of the defendant in the visitation room. He was grizzled, with a glass eye and scars everywhere. He was rail thin and had a head of curly black hair. I looked back at the probation officer. She waited impatiently to get buzzed out of the jail hallway while fiddling with her ponytail.

The stupid questions and the stark contrast between the probation officer and the defendant made a strong impression. She shouldn’t be in a position to report on him. He’s experienced things that she can’t even fathom. I’d guarantee it.

I imagine the probation officer sitting in her office, surrounded by bric-a-brac as she types up a report about that man’s antisocial personality and escalating drug use. A judge will read what she writes and commit a fellow human being to state custody for a term of years. The judge may have struggled less in his or her life than the probation officer.

What kind of sick, twisted system do we have where the coddled get to judge those among us who’ve had real life experiences?

The probation officer could just as easily be the man's defense lawyer, the prosecutor, or any other person that comes into contact with him in the system and participates in determining his fate. I imagine that many readers of this blog and Matt's may relate more to the probation officer in the story, and that many of those readers just don't get it. Also, it's an academic observation - the coddled among us are most often the ones who are privileged to attend universities, obtain degrees, and take positions of authority over the rest of us - that's not going to change.