BOOK REVIEW by Thomas Gayton
Civil rights and criminal defense attorneys are well aware of the erosion of our civil liberties and the devolution of the criminal justice system into the prison-industrial complex. But after reading “A Parallel Universe” by Alex Landon and Elaine Halleck, anyone who still thinks that by electing an African-American president we have adequately redressed these burning civil rights issues will be thoroughly disabused of the idea.
Attorney Alex Landon teaches at the University of San Diego and has battled fearlessly for many years for justice in the criminal courts of San Diego, and journalist Elaine Halleck has reported insightfully on social dynamics in contemporary society and in Nazi Germany.
Together, in alternating nonfiction and fiction (based on facts) chapters, they treat the hot-potato issue of sex offenses and laws — the authors call them “designer laws” — that were named after the victims of gruesome sex crimes, such as laws passed after the summer of 2002, dubbed “The Summer of the Abducted White Girl.”
The alternating chapters by Landon and Halleck, although they closely parallel one another and partly explain the title, will be challenging for some readers because of the mix of genres. And the book maybe be generally challenging because so many people have been deceived by fear-mongering politicians to believe that designer laws (Megan’s Law, Jessica’s Law, Chelsea’s law, etc.) actually protect children. So, parents and children suffer a false sense of security, while convicted people live in a parallel universe where they are not protected by principles that others take for granted.
Landon describes in glaring detail how the forces of fear have mutated those who were once described as “Mentally Disordered Sex Offenders” to “Sexually Violent Predators,” “pervs, perps and peds.” We now have a system where the Hippocratic Oath has mutated into “police-affiliated therapists” who are not troubled by the lack of voluntary consent or doctor-patient confidentiality in their “sex therapy sessions” because they profit from the public financing of this charade. The abuses are so well described in Halleck’s chapters that you’ll surely be left saying, as does one convicted man, that he’d rather be in prison than in “therapy.”
Landon masterfully explains the larger constitutional issues involved in some U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as the 2002 decision, McKune v. Lile, that, as Landon writes, “put another bullet in the already badly maimed body of convicted people’s rights,” in this case the protection against self-incrimination for sex offenders, and the 2003 decision that gave the green light for Megan’s list to go on the Internet. (Landon’s factoids in Chapter 3 that one out of every 135 California men are on Megan’s list and, in Chapter 23, that, per Jessica’s law, the annual cost of GPS tracking for all sex offenders would cost $1.05 billion are also illuminating.)
Halleck’s fictional chapters present a lower middle class Mexican-American family in Orange County — from the POVs of a convicted man named Danny Fernandez, his mother, daughter and friend — who are suffering the effects of Danny’s blacklisting under Megan’s law, effects such as housing discrimination, hate incidents and vigilantism.
This may not be an easy read for many, and the “parallel universe” into which Danny and the “surfing fool” sex offender Michel are exiled is certainly not a pleasant place to visit, even from an armchair but Danny’s mother, daughter and Michel interject lighter notes that engender empathy and smiles.
In conclusion, the authors ask the reader, “If the ‘parallel universe’ where precious rights are scarce and where tax money disappears into a dark hole, has grown too large to take on.” And if “the money interests of politicians, media, prison guards, police and the ‘helping professionals’ will give up without a tooth and nail fight.”
Implicit in the question is the challenge to 21st century Americans to take action before the New Jim Crow and sex crime juggernaut wake us up to a financially ruined police state.
The authors urge us to keep in mind the words of the imprisoned German pastor Martin Niemoller who in 1946 made a speech about the failure of the Germans to resist Hitler. “They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”