ANDREW CUOMO SAYS on March 9 that Corcraft, a New York State–run company, will begin producing hand sanitizer. “It has a very nice floral bouquet,” he says. “I detect lilac. Hydrangea. Tulips.” Corcraft is operated by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs New York’s state prisons. I do not hear Andrew Cuomo say this. I do not hear him say that around 2,100 people incarcerated by the state work for Corcraft. Or that they make, on average, 65 cents an hour, can earn as little as 16 cents an hour. Or that they themselves are unable to use hand sanitizer because in prison it is considered contraband. “We are problem solvers,” Cuomo says. We, as in, the “state of New York, Empire State, progressive capital of the nation.”

Some send letters to my home, through the postal service. Others write through JPay’s email service. Approximately 4,800 characters requires one “stamp”; longer emails require more stamps. Each attachment requires one stamp. Each thirty-second “video gram” requires four stamps. Ten stamps cost $3. One hundred stamps cost $23.

Because visitations have been suspended, DOCCS promises that everyone will receive at least one free phone call, two free emails, and five free postage stamps per week, though I hear this has yet to be implemented. In a few weeks, DOCCS will increase the number of calls to two.

Henry Kissinger wrote in the first of his three memoirs (on page 1,261) that the shah “was for us that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally.” He readily agreed to Western demands for fifty-fifty profit sharing in Iranian oil operations and cracked down hard on internal opposition, arresting more than three thousand members of the communist Tudeh Party in the year or so following the coup and imprisoning a handful of officials for decades (he also granted American military advisers immunity from Iranian law). The shah worked with the CIA to set up a secret police force, SAVAK, that carried out the day-to-day work of political repression. He also became an avid purchaser, even a connoisseur, of American arms. By 1977, 35 percent of Iran’s annual budget was going to the military; a joke circulated among arms dealers that the shah read defense equipment manuals the way other men read Playboy. He placed orders for F-16 fighter jets, naval destroyers, nuclear-powered submarines, and more than a thousand tanks. The US even agreed to throw in nuclear reactors, with the shah reassuring American officials that he had no interest in pursuing nuclear weapons. Congress appreciatively estimated that Iran’s arms purchases from the US were “the largest in the world.”

Tensions between the near infallibility of religious rule and popular demands for democracy had been present throughout the revolution, and the drafting of the constitution brought them to a high pitch. Sticking with the insensitivity to Iranian domestic politics that had characterized America’s relationship to the country in the years leading up to the revolution, President Carter picked this fraught moment to allow the shah to enter the US for cancer treatment, thanks in part to an intense lobbying campaign organized by executives at Chase Manhattan Bank, of which the shah was a highly valued client. (Not satisfied with securing his entry, the Chase team, led by bank chairman David Rockefeller, also acquired visas for the shah’s associates and found a mansion for him to live in.) American officials justified the decision on humanitarian grounds, but they treat cancer in other countries, too. Politically, it was idiotic, providing a boost to the militant wing of the Iranian government at a moment when the shape that government would take was still unclear. Hard-liners seized on the gesture as evidence of a plot: America was biding its time and preparing to reinstall the shah, with the CIA running operations out of the American embassy in Tehran. On November 4, 1979, some four hundred university students overran the embassy and took the Americans hostage.

This may sound like the mindset of a comic-book villain, but America’s investment in surplus imperialism has a concrete, material basis. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been not only the world’s most powerful capitalist nation but the global custodian of capitalism itself. (That task had previously fallen to the system of European colonialism, which at its height occupied some 80 percent of the world.) In exchange for the privilege of enjoying the highest rates of consumption on earth, the United States also invests more than any other country in the direction, supervision, and maintenance of global capital flows. These investments take many forms, including the spearheading of free-trade agreements, the establishment of financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), support for governments that adhere to the capitalist consensus and the undermining of those that don’t, and the use of military force to pry open markets in cases where diplomacy and economic pressure aren’t enough. The “surplus” aspect of America’s imperialism is crucial, because capitalism requires stability and predictability through time in order to function smoothly. Investments need months, years, or decades to produce their returns, and people are only willing to invest their capital if they feel confident that the future is going to unfold in the way they expect. You don’t start producing almonds until you’re confident that almond milk isn’t just a passing fad, and you don’t move one of your factories to a new country if there’s a chance a leftist government will come to power and expropriate the factory. Financial markets move every day in response to changes in these ephemeral moods, and the financial press has names for them: uncertainty, consumer confidence, business expectations.

One manifestation of this generational imbalance of power is the immense difficulty of health-care reform, since major constituencies — not just profiteering corporations, but segments of the markets they’ve captured, and the people who compose those segments — are materially tied to the current system. This is the underlying social basis of the attempts to fend off Medicare for All through appeals to incumbent health insurance, in particular Medicare itself. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is not — contra liberal snobbery — simply ignorance and false consciousness. It is rather, as Esping-Andersen would put it, the slogan of asymmetric chronopolitics. It is important to understand that chronopolitics is nothing more than the political and cultural modality in which class conflict in recent decades has appeared: the conflict between generations is not fundamental but is rather the outcome of specific historical developments, which have turned age into the medium of conflicts flowing from the relations of property. But this does not make generational conflict superficial, any more than the mediation of class through race makes race superficial. There is a genuine divergence in life chances and social power along the lines of age.

The overlap of treatment and punishment in the sex offense legal regime is a part of a process critics refer to as medicalization: the reconception of differences or problems as medical or psychiatric disorders — frequently constructed as biologically caused — that need to be prevented, diagnosed, or treated. Marginalized sexual desires or acts considered immoral at a given time, like homosexuality, are often subject to medicalization, turning “badness to sickness,” as sociologists Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider write in their 1980 classic Deviance and Medicalization. But the slippage is not just between nature and culture; it is also between the moral and the legal. Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”

PEOPLE WHO COMMIT sexual harm have commonly experienced trauma as children or adults. Like most of us at some point in our lives, they could use therapy. But civil commitment is prison, and incarceration is psychologically destructive; indefinite detention borders on psychological torture — the opposite of therapy. Furthermore, the “treatment” arm of the sex offense legal regime asks us all to collaborate, recruiting the public, helping professions, schools, religious institutions, and even families to police the state’s boundaries between sexual normalcy and deviance. The radical approach to civil commitment is to stop thinking of sexual violence as a sociopathology from which the community must be safeguarded, and to turn instead to social and environmental approaches that engage the community in helping people who have done harm to live nonviolent lives.

What we need are paradigm shifts: from justice as retribution to justice as healing, from conviction to accountability, punishment to repair, and rehabilitation to transformation. Movements for transformative and restorative justice are not just for institutions, nonprofits, or, simply, someone else. All of us need to step away from the systems to which we have outsourced the responsibility to deal with harm and make us safer.

If we want to end violence, we have to divest from the industries of punishment and surveillance and invest in what allows people and communities to flourish. And to invest in economic, political, and social systems that put people — all people — before profit, we must never abandon children, or anyone else, to endure or defend themselves when they are subjected to sexual harm. But the United States abandons people in countless ways — leaving them without decent housing, health care, clean water, and so much else. The sex offense legal regime displaces real protection with a false sense of security at the same time as it incites terror to justify itself. Like the rest of the criminal legal system, it disproportionately targets people of color. It exiles a permanent class of sexual pariahs — now nearly a million — from the rights of residency, citizenship, and humanity itself. It is long past time to overthrow the regime.

The people at Lucero’s sessions are all sick. They carry hospital ID cards issued by Mount Sinai and Bellevue, where they are treated. Many of them have developed cancer. They have rhinitis, gastritis, arthritis, severe acid reflux, asthma, high blood pressure, and back pain. They have PTSD, anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Their psychological symptoms are triggered by the smell of barbecue, by darkness, by any news coverage of natural disasters. The group helps them in some ways, but Lucero is just one person and cannot do it alone. Meetings are irregular.

When I return to visit the group again in early 2017, all anyone can talk about is deportation. A woman named Lourdes with two long braids reminds the group to be careful. She tells them to carry their prescription bottles around with them as well as their hospital ID cards to present to ICE officers should they be approached. She says ICE once entered her home, but they left her alone when she was able to prove that she was receiving treatment through a local hospital’s World Trade Center worker program. But that was one nice ICE officer, she says. Any of them could be deported at any time.