the enforcement paradox

In Chapter 8 of Dark Ghettos, Shelby makes a distinction between legitimate authority and legitimate enforcement rights. While a place like the United States (due to its complicity and inadequacy in addressing the unjust inequalities still prevalent especially in areas such as ghettos) does not have legitimate authority and can not condemn on the grounds of civic reciprocity, it does have enforcement legitimacy and thus the right to punish some crimes in order to deter and contain it. Shelby explains the justification for enforcement legitimacy is to protect the vulnerable from unjustified harm (248). He then describes an example of a poor black person refusing to submit to the state’s efforts to hold him accountable for alleged lawbreaking (247). 

In this case, the state retains its right of enforcement but the accused also has a right to resist being held accountable. The accused has no duty to submit to the state’s mechanisms and can not be blamed for attempting to evade capture or refusing to cooperate. Conversely, the state also can not be blamed for pursuing the man and bringing him to trial. Shelby explains this paradox through the idea of liberty rights and claim rights, explaining the state only has the former and can “hold people accountable for crimes they are justly accused of, in the sense that it has no duty not to enforce the criminal law” (247). 

While Shelby viewed this as a solution to the paradox, I did not necessarily understand how it was one. What is the point in the state having the liberty to hold people accountable if there is no reason for the accused to cooperate in those efforts but rather the expectation they will take up their right to evade capture? Although the book explains that the reason enforcement is legitimate is that if the state does not punish those who perpetrate the acts it would fail to protect some of the most vulnerable in society against violent wrongdoing, the goals seem to still be at odds with one another. On one hand, we are trying to give the poor black man an opportunity to escape the system he was unjustly put into where he happened to be forced into breaking the law due to circumstance and systemic injustice, and on the other, we are trying to bring justice for the innocent person harmed by having the state continue to pursue the man and bring him to trial (even though we acknowledge the crime was not necessarily his fault but rather the system’s which we have failed to fix.) Though both sides are justified in their actions, the actions still end up conflicting. Are we favoring allowing the man to escape more or pursuing and bringing him to trial? The double negative phrasing of the quote also seems to imply the state is at its own discretion in deciding who it chooses to pursue/hold accountable and how much effort it puts into doing so because ultimately it is the state that is still at fault. By separating condemnation from penalties, are we giving half-hearted penalties to people we don’t think actually deserve them (to make a statement for those who were harmed)? 

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