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Legal authorities in the US take an upbeat view of AA. The Program is taken into account in court sentencing practice in many states. Convicted drunken drivers are routinely obliged, in addition to such other humiliations as being handcuffed and made to spend a night in the drunk tank, to attend a course run by AA or NA (Narcotics Anonymous). Typically, this means attending a dozen meetings. In large conurbations such people can make up a sizeable part of the congregation. They tend to be a surly crew, not least because they have had to come to the meeting by public transport. Baffled by the proceedings and frequently both pissed and pissed off, they can’t wait to get their court cards signed and reclaim their driving privileges.

Whether this compulsory attendance is seen by American judges as condign punishment (like Volpone being confined with the incurabili), rehabilitation or moral tagging is unclear. It’s likely that courts impose it as a sop to the powerful pressure group, Mothers against Drunk Drivers (MADD, who would really prefer drunk drivers to be strung up on piano wire). Drunks forced by the courts to attend meetings benefit little from AA, but they give the organisation a valued seal of official approval.

With society (voters and legislators) unwilling to commit substantial resources to address alcohol and drug abuse as a health care problem (instead of a criminal problem that requires incarceration), it comes as no surprise that health insurance companies offer little support. Again, as in the courts, AA must fill the void:

AA has come to serve similarly as an out-patient facility for the American health industry. Insurance policies are specific about what treatment they will or won’t pay for. Coverage for addiction tends, in most plans, to be limited to a month a year per family member. Residential care for alcoholics – in what used to be called sanatoriums – is costly: the cheapest institutions charge around $5000 a week, while the most fashionable (such as the Betty Ford Clinic, at the delightfully named Rancho Mirage) charge much more. The Health Management Organisations which were set up in the 1980s to keep costs under control take a dim view of alcohol rehabilitation. If you are hospitalised for a drinking problem what you routinely get is a crash course of ‘detox and counselling’, after which (within a few weeks or even days) the still trembling patient is released into AA on a fire-and-forget basis. The prospect for these unfortunates is poor.

The internal contradictions of AA are vast. AA says that alcoholism is a disease:

Medically, AA cleaves to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, seeing those ‘alcoholics who still suffer’ as being in the grip of an illness which is ‘cunning, baffling and powerful’. The recovering alcoholic is never cured – but must imagine himself in a protracted state of remission; as with the diabetic, relapse is always imminent (particularly if you stop going to meetings – the insulin analogy is often made). AA holds to the superstition that alcoholism progresses inexorably, even when you are not drinking. Should you fall off the wagon, after twenty years’ sobriety, your disease will be two decades more terminal. ‘Rust,’ as Neil Young (the alcoholic’s favourite balladeer) puts it, ‘never sleeps.’

Despite being a “disease,” there is little appreciation of the medical establishment’s ability to treat addiction and there is much focus on reckoning for their many mistakes as the path to sobriety and redemption:

The trickiest aspect of the programme is all the moral prescription. While accepting that the alcoholic is sick, AA nonetheless enjoins him to ‘make direct amends’ for past misdeeds committed under the influence. This ‘ninth step’ requires the penitent husband, for example, to go back to his injured family, to square things with his cheated partner, and settle up with his creditors as best he can. ‘Cleaning house’ is the homely metaphor applied to this phase of recovery. Originating as it did in small-town America, AA is vigorously opposed to what it scornfully calls ‘geographical’ cures: that is, making a new start in a new place. You get sober where you got drunk.

The amends business is, however, deeply contradictory. The alcoholic is reassured he is no more responsible for his misdeeds than a tubercular is for coughing. Yet, at the same time, he is to regard himself as a repentant sinner who must fully atone for what he has done. Recovery, as AA defines it, requires this strenous doublethink to be brought to a successful conclusion.

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“A criminal prosecution is the single most awesome use of government power short of warfare,” Norman Reimer said this week. It’s not unusual for Reimer, the head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to warn about the dangers of Justice Department overreach. Prosecution, he said, “is not a game, it is not a hunt, it is not sport.”

What made Reimer’s remarks extraordinary was where he made them: in the U.S. Capitol, flanked by senators from both political parties and a wide array of interest groups.

Ethical prosecutors have long taken the position that they have nothing to hide in a criminal prosecution:

That’s why some lawyers believe the best way to move on from the Stevens debacle is to force prosecutors to open all their files to defendants before a criminal trial begins.

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It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels.

Finally, evidence that all of that time reading fiction wasn’t wasted:

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

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The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.

Demanding a speedy trial has often been the rally cry of public defenders. A public defender office could marshal the power of all of its clients, as a group, to put pressure on the government to offer better deals or dismiss  cases. Unfortunately, the plan always falls apart because the Public Defender cannot sacrifice one for the many; every client must be treated individually. Although most would benefit, some would be worse off.

But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

It is hard to imagine that such a disparate group of people, defendants in the criminal courts, could organize themselves to pull this off.

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