February 2018 Bar Bulletin
By Marc Lampson
Public Services Attorney
State violence — the violence inflicted by different agencies of a government — is an abstract concept. It is traditionally divided further into two: external (or foreign) and internal (or domestic). The external involves the military and war beyond the state’s borders. The internal involves the police, prisons, courts, the legal system generally and a war of another sort inside the state’s borders. I suspect most of us involved in the legal system rarely think of that system as resting on violence. For its victims, however, state violence is not...