12.28.2019 📘 The Locust Effect by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros

"We have come to call the unique pestilence of violence and the punishing impact it has on efforts to lift the global four out of poverty the locust effect" (Xi). The problem is that the world knows that the poor suffer from hunger and disease, and people are working to fix it. People don’t know that "endemic to being poor is a vulnerability to violence" and because of that, efforts to change this reality are lacking.

“For reasons that are fairly obvious, if you are reading this book, I’m pretty sure you were not among the very poorest in our world – the billions of people who are trying to live off a few dollars a day. As a result, I also know that you are probably not chronically hungry, you are not likely to die of a perfectly treatable disease, you have reasonable access to fresh water, you are a literate, and you have a reasonable shelter over your head. But there is something else I know about you. I bet you pass your days in reasonable safety from violence. You will probably not regularly being threatened with being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed. But if you were among the world’s poorest billions, you would be. That is what the world is not understand about the global poor— and that is what this book is about” (xi).

“It turns out that you can provide all manner of goods and services to the poor, as good people have been doing for decades, but if you were not restrain the boys in the community from violence into that as we have been feeling to do it for decades – then we are going to find the outcomes of our efforts quite disappointing.... no one will find in this volume any argument for reducing our traditional efforts to fight poverty. On the contrary, the billions still mired in years probably cry out for us to be double our best efforts. But one will find in these pages and urgent call to make sure that we are safe guarding citizens from being laid waste by the locusts of predatory violence” (xiii).

"Once I asked a bonded slave who was held illegally in a rock quarry why he didn't go to the local police and get help. His answer clarified things for me. 'We don't have to go to the police,' he said, 'the owner pays the police to come to us--to beat us'" (74).

"Facts are hard things--and either we deal with the facts, or the facts will deal with us" (82).

"...efforts to spur economic development and to alleviate poverty amount the poor in the developing world without addressing the forces of violence that destroy and rob them can 'seem like a mocking.' To provide Laura and Yuri with the promise of schools without addressing the forces of sexual violence that make it too dangerous to walk to or attend school seems like a mocking. To give Caleb job training or Bruno a micro-loan for his belt business without protecting them from being arbitrarily thrown into prison where Caleb loses his job and Bruno loses his business seem like a mocking. To provide Susan with tools, seeds, and training to multiply crop yields on her land without protecting her from being violently thrown off that land seems like a mocking. To provide Laura and Mariamma with AIDS education and training on making safe sexual choices without addressing the violence in the slums and brick factories where women don't get to make choices seems like a mocking. To establish a rural medical clinic in the area where Gopinath is held as a slave without addressing the violent forces that refuse to allow him to leave the quarry and take his dying kid to a doctor seems like a mocking" (98).

"In the end, outsiders can seek to provide all kinds of assistance to the poor in the developing world--to the tune of more than $3 trillion over the last half century--but if there is not restraint of the bullies who are prepared to steal every sprig of prosperity away from those who are weak, then the outcome of our assistance is going to be disappointing (as in many ways it has already proven to be)" (100).


...why do the poor suffer such evastating and disproportionately high levels of violence in the developing world--violence htat so relentlessly steals away their chance for a better life? Why does the locust effect destroy their hopes and futures with such brutal routineness?
"The most obvious--and most neglected--answer is that the poor do not get the most basic protections of law enforcement that the rest of us depend upon and unconsciously presume are there every minute of every day. The basic capacities of the law enforcement systems in the developing world are so broken that, as the UN's global study concluded, most poor people live outside the protection of law" (116).

"To be clear, a law enforcement response to violence will never be sufficient on its own. Law enforcement is necessary,  but insufficient to adequately address violence. But it is necessary. To be effective, law enforcement must work in tandem with other interventions that address other complex social causes of violence--cultural norms, gender bias, economic desperation and inequality, lack of education, marginalization of vulnerable groups, etc. But these interventions will never be successful in the absence of a reasonably functioning public justice system that restrains, brings to justice, and deters violent predators" (122).

"Broken public justice systems auction impunity to the highest bidder, and when victims are too poor to purchase protection from private substitutes, impunity comes cheap" (195).

"...most law enforcement systems in the developing world are colonial relics that were never set up to protect the poor from violence (but to protect the regime from the poor), and that, tragically, these systems have never been fundamentally re-engineered to serve the common people" (197). "Across much of the developing world, the instruments of law enforcement failed to evolve because the authoritarian regimes and political elites that came to power in the developing world found that the colonial forms of policing very conveniently served their interests. Indigenous political and economic elites found that modern law enforcement models (with their emphasis on accounability to the community and general public) would be threatening" (179). Furthermore, "elites with wealth and power in the developing world have abandoned these dysfunctional public justice systems and have set up systems of private security that protect them from violence. They have financed the growth of massive private security forces that replace the need to rely on public policing, and they have abandoned the clogged and corrupt court systems to dysfunction and decay because they have found private means fro resolving disputes in their favor" (197). Finally, "the massive global movement to address poverty in the developing world over the last half century has not made a meaningful effort to address the problem" (198). "Only about 1 percent of aid from institutions like USAID or the World Bank can even be plausibly described as targeting improvements in justice systems in the developing world so that they better protect the poor from violence" (203). This is somewhat discouraging, but also hopeful in a way, because it indicates that if we try, things could change.

3 agendas that seem worth the risk: security vacuums, international crime ("when [wealthy countries find] the criminal violence threatens to spill over and affect their own societies" 208), and attracting business and commercial investment.

"In every society there are people, interests, and institutions that are intentionally trying to make a justice system fail and to make poor people and marginalized groups weaker and more vulnerable to violence. They are seeking to advance the personal, economic, political, and exploitative interests through violence and fear—and they are threatened by a functioning criminal justice system that would restrain their coercive power. And so they vigorously oppose reform" (230).

We look back at now-reasonably-funcitoning criminal justice systems and see that they all were once corrupt, racist, and ineffective, and this gives hope. We see examples of collaborations and work being done to reform areas of criminal justice in areas of the world. It is possible.