Justice?

So, admittedly, I've been getting consumed a bit by the global debate about Roman Polanski's recent arrest in Switzerland. As someone who is against prisons, and someone who is a sex abuse survivor/feminist/person with a conscience/human/activist, this is really a quagmire. I hate the idea that he committed this horrible crime, and that he has evaded punishment for so long. I hate the idea that almost every article on this subject refers to his crime as "sex with an underage person" (the reader perceives: consensual) when non-consensual sexual assault against someone of any age is rape, and always rape if their consent is not legally recognized if it is there. I hate that almost none of the articles mention that he was a full-grown man of 44 when he did this. I hate the idea that his actions are perceived as "not rape-rape" because he is a Holocaust survivor and his wife was killed by the Manson cult and he has made some important films. I hate the idea that he should be freed because his victim no longer wishes to pursue the charges against them; as a survivor I hate that our wish to not suffer further is interpreted culturally as retroactive consent and as a citizen of a purportedly democratic nation I hate that we accept the idea that just because a victim forgives hir abuser that an instance does not need to go to court. This is not the United Arab Emirates, blood money (though it always seemingly finds ways to exist), is not supposed to in this country. Simultaneously, I hate, very intensely, HATE, the idea that so many of the people who support this man's imprisonment support it because they are dreaming of the horrible things that would most likely happen to him if he was indeed imprisoned. Yet I am totally disgusted with the Hollywood supporters petitioning for his return to being a free citizen.

Dorothy Allison, also a survivor, has written that "there is no justice." I have been coming to that conclusion with regard to this current news topic. Is a wrong righted if an old man spends a few years in prison? I mean, this is America, so you have to be aware at this point that most rapists get less time than drug dealers and even some people who have been detained without any trial? And he's rich, so is it really feasible that he would much, if any, time in prison? My partner asked me what I think would be a good solution to this problem, because I keep bringing it up and he can see how intensely conflicted my feelings are about this, and the only thing I could come up with was that he should have to visit sex offenders in prison. Frequently. Be an ally for them, help them work through their shit by discussing his crime and how it has affected him, and also never be allowed to shake off his wrong doing. That doesn't seem equitable, though. Like, I'm sure Roman Polanski would definitely choose my punishment over the equivalent of what he did to his victim happening to him. There is nothing that would cancel out rape. There is nothing that would balance the scales here. Any attempt, as much of the media has done, to put the suffering of the victim and the abuser in some kind of hierarchy is futile, callous, and insulting.

So, as per usual, when I don't know what to make of the world, I turn to Adrienne Rich, who always seems to have commanding responses, if not answers, to the truly difficult questions.
Below is one of my favorite poems in the world, which I thought of while reading an article today on Switzerland not offering Polanski any bail, the parts I find most related to this are bolded.

HUNGER

--for Audre Lorde

1.

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,
intimacy rigged with terrors,
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter's ink-stick planned,
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed,
leaning together in a stick like boat
in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,
I don't know. I'm wondering
whether we even have what we think we have--
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. I know I'm partly somewhere else--
huts strung across a drought-stretched land
not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger.
I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can't control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.

2.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,
if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others,
self-hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive
is raging under the name of an "act of god"
in Chad, in Niger, in teh Upper Volta--
yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutritiou,
yet sharpened by the passion for survival,
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water.

3.

We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions--
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we're scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses--
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

4.

The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I'm alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz's women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the "mothers" drained of milk, the "survivors" driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I'm alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.