A New Business Pops Up in Nicaragua 

On the trip from the airport in Managua to our house at Rancho Santana, Nestor updated K and me on the local news. The election went off without a hitch, he told us, smiling. Government employees were told to photograph themselves voting for the president. Not that it would have made any difference. The candidates that were going to run against him were put in jail or under house arrest. It is a one-party government now. But there are no demonstrations. The universities are open for business. The streets are open. Business is recovering, although it’s still a fraction of what it was several years ago before the crackdown.

But there is one area of business that is doing very well, he told us. That’s the business of transporting people from countries all over Latin America, the Caribbean, and even the Middle East from the airport to the Mexican-Honduran border, where they sign up with the cartels to be smuggled into the US. “They are coming in by the busloads,” he said. “Every day. They pay $200 to get to the border and then pay the cartels thousands to take them up to the Rio Grande.”

“Why are so many flying into Nicaragua now?” K asked.

“Word has gotten out,” Nestor said. “It’s an easy trip into Nicaragua and from there up through Honduras and to the border.”

“So, how many are coming?” I asked. “And from where?”

“It’s crazy,” he said. “It used to be mostly Central Americans. Now it’s every country from South America. Plus Haiti and Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. There are even people flying in from Europe and the Middle East.”

It’s estimated that about 2.5 million people crossed into the US illegally last year. About two million of them, after reaching US territory, turned themselves in, claiming political asylum. They were booked in by the US immigration service, and then given a court date to adjudicate their claim. Soon after that, they are sent in planes and buses to various undisclosed US locations. (Just in case you are wondering: About 99% of that transportation is done and paid for by the federal government by order of the Biden administration. The totality of all the immigrants that were sent to Martha’s Vineyard and NYC and DC account for less than 1% of the total.)

An Introduction to “Realitivity” 

I’m working on an idea for a book that I will probably never finish. It will exist in the library of two dozen could-be bestsellers that I’ve been working on for years. Like the rest of them, I was excited about this one when it first occurred to me. And after a few months of chewing it over, I’m still liking it.

I’m calling it realitivity. (That’s realitivity, not relativity.) As in keeping it real. It’s based on the law of entropy, which, as you know, says that everything in the universe is programmed to degrade. And that any theory or system not designed with that law in mind is due to fail. One of the fundamental insights of realitivity explains what happens when we apply the law of entropy to human behavior.

Take, for example, the behavior of Frank Abrokwa, the guy that achieved his 15 minutes of fame by assaulting a woman with his feces in the NYC subway. (I mentioned him in my Nov. 2 blog post.)

He is the dictionary definition of repeat offender. (His most recent arrest was his 45th.) And his freedom to continue to serially assault New Yorkers has been due to the city’s catch-and-release policy that has recently been fortified with “cashless bail.”

I was speaking about him with a friend. “Abrokwa is mentally unbalanced,” he said, offering that as a justification for allowing him to be on the streets all these years.

I understand the sentiment. There is a difference between crimes committed purposely and intentionally by people that know they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing, and the same crimes committed by people that are insane. The first are obviously immoral. While the latter, lacking the element of willfulness, are clearly not.

That’s the rub.

I’ve been thinking about this. And here’s some of what I’ve come up with…

Criminal law is not a moral code. It is not established to support some view of morality. (As opposed to, for example, Sharia law.) The primary purpose of criminal law is to protect the public from crime and, in cases where the crime is especially egregious, to give those people affected by the crime (i.e., the victims’ families and, in extreme cases, the public at large, a sense of retribution).

Furthermore, the concept of “not guilty by reason of insanity” is illogical. The determination of guilt should be restricted to one question: “Did the accused commit the crime?” If the accused is judged guilty, he should be subject to incarceration. Tout de suite. And the length of his incarceration should be determined not just by the severity of the crime, but also by the likelihood that he will do it again.

In the case of Mr. Abrokwa, the question of culpability is easily answered. His crime was videotaped. By my logic, he should be incarcerated. No questions asked. Catch-and-release for a repeat offender like him doesn’t work. How long he should be put away should depend upon (1) the severity of the crime, which, as a non-lethal assault, is in the moderate range, and (2) the likelihood of his repeating it, which is very high.

That satisfies the criminal justice issue. But it leaves open the question of human justice. Is it fair to treat two criminals the same way when one committed the crime consciously and purposely and the other one was obviously out of his mind?

The answer is no. It’s not fair.

So, in terms of “punishment,” how do we distinguish between them?

When, as in the case of Mr. Abrokwa, it’s clear that the criminal is crazy, the state should do what it can afford to do to give him some sort of medical or psychological treatment to stabilize his mind. But if and when his mind is deemed stable, he should not be given a “go out and do it again” pass. The length of his sentence should not be shortened. He did the crime, so he should do the time. The human justice obligation is met by treating him during the full term of his sentence.

Those are my thoughts at the moment. What do you think?