The Bear-Trap Model of Punishment

Addict oppression operates in virtue of traps set up to simultaneously harm addicts and justify those harms.

Before Charley even realized that he had stepped carelessly into a hidden bear trap, he saw the huge man standing over him, holding his own service revolver. The trap had sharp steel teeth that bit into his boots. He was utterly helpless.

“If you had just believed me, none of this would be happening to you,” Sweet Tooth said. “I told you my camp was here. I don’t know why people just can’t believe things.”

Charley yowled but he realized there was no one to hear his cries. He twisted his head, seemingly in pain, but really to look for a weapon. There was a fist-sized rock within reach but the hermit would shoot him before he had a chance to close his hand around it. “You don’t have to do this.”

“None of us has any choice in life.” The hermit seemed genuinely sad as he said this.

I picked this excerpt from the Paul Doiron short story “The Bear Trap” to open this article, for contingent reasons. I had already decided that I was going to call the phenomenon I describe here the “bear-trap model,” and I wanted to find a suitable anecdote of someone falling into a bear trap and then getting blamed for it. When I searched “bear trap story,” this short story came up first, and conveniently, that’s what happens in it. A short synopsis: decades later, a game warden recounts the story of his attempt to apprehend a vagabond who’d been stealing from local stores and camps in upstate Maine. The warden spends a bizarre, ill-fated, and poorly-reasoned evening hiding in a freezer hoping to catch the hermit in the act. He succeeds, but when facing the hermit, finds himself overwhelmed with curiosity about this idiosyncratic character. The hermit offers to show the warden his camp; the warden in his glee fails to realize that by following the hermit he yields the upper hand. The hermit leads him right into a bear trap. By luck, the warden’s revolver is unloaded—it’s unclear whether he himself was aware of that—and he recovers and overpowers his opponent.

The hermit’s response when the warden falls into the trap is interesting: he straightaway blames the warden. “If you had just believed me,” he says, the warden wouldn’t have gotten trapped. The hermit even points out how he provided the nominal condition for the warden’s avoidance of this situation: told him where the camp was. This is doubly curious because it’s in some sense self-effacing. What the hermit has done is clever—ingenious, even. He escaped sure imprisonment by manipulating the warden into following him. He told a just-so story about a complicated outhouse he’d built to facilitate the warden’s falling into the trap. Yet now, as he prepares to deal the death blow, he claims it’s the warden’s alternating disbelief and gullibility, rather than his own strategy and intelligence, that precipitated this outcome?

We’ll come back to that last point later. For now, subtract that happy ending and let me walk you through another version of this story. You and a group of friends are being led through a dark wood. Everyone except for you has been through these woods before—in fact, most of them grew up in this area and know the woods extremely well. The leader says, “Come over here,” jolting you out of distraction. You start to follow, but suddenly your world is upended: a violent pain screams in your leg as steel teeth close around it, or a net encircles you and hoists you into the air. Nobody else has been felled by the bear trap. Most remembered it was there, and a few were just paying closer attention than you. It’s only you singled out. Everyone looks down (or up) at you, baffled and seemingly annoyed. The leader: “Jesus Christ, [your name]. Today of all days?”

There are a lot of things you might want to say at this juncture, which I do not recommend saying if you actually find yourself in the situation for which this anecdote is meant as metaphorical analogue. These include: “How is this my fault?” “Why are you angry?” “It was an accident.” “I’m in pain.” Most importantly: “Why the hell is this bear trap here?”

Bear-Trap Oppression

There is a particular punitive structure common in modern society which I call the bear-trap model of punishment, or more briefly, bear-trap oppression. It works as follows. Some background system, a “trap,” is set up to “catch” people—ostensibly to penalize a specific kind of behavior not conducive to social functioning. As a sorting mechanism, it’s accurate in the sense that it doesn’t render false positives. Among the people it traps, most are performing the behavior (at the specified time); contrapositively, those who aren’t performing the behavior are left alone. The trap does miss some people who are performing the behavior: a bear trap isn’t going to catch all the bears walking around the campsite. Moreover, the existence of the trap is justified by appeal to an intuitively sympathetic reason. Think, like, security checks at the airport or speed traps on the highway. Or, in keeping with the metaphor, to avoid bears taking your food.

Now come the two most important elements. First, most people who fall into the trap have something in common that makes them vulnerable over and above making a wrong step. In other words, an explanation of why someone was captured by the trap is not complete after you say they were performing the behavior the trap was testing for. There is also a dispositional or relational feature in light of which we can demarcate between the group of people who get trapped and the (usually much larger) group of people exhibiting the same behavior who don’t. In the story above, you were both distracted enough to stumble into the trap and unfamiliar with the woods. Those unfamiliar must be especially on-guard; they are uniquely vulnerable in a way those who have learned to unconsciously step around the bear trap are not. The auxiliary feature can sometimes explain the causal mechanism by which someone fell into the trap, but need not. What it is more likely to explain is why they came in contact with the trap in the first place: why there arose a moment at which their foot was at the edge of the trap’s radius. So, basically, there is a hidden variable at play that tells us why someone falls among the entrapped people rather than among those who performed the behavior for which the trap ostensibly assesses but were not assessed by it.

Second, the general attitudes expressed toward the trapped people are confusion, exasperation, anger, and dismissal of the relevance of their vulnerability. Confusion: The people who know the woods well cannot project themselves into your standpoint. They don’t understand how you could be distracted or uncritical enough to make a mistake they have known from childhood not to make. Exasperation: Your fellow-travelers regard you as a misbehaving child. You should know better! Anger: They need to get somewhere, and here you are making a spectacle of yourself when you could have so easily avoided the trap by just stepping around it. Dismissal: Sure, you don’t know the woods well, but come on! How hard is it to meet the minimal threshold of paying attention to your surroundings by not falling into a literal bear trap? Yes, you’re more likely to fall into the trap than someone who grew up in these woods, but that just isn’t relevant. It is reasonable to expect people—residents and visitors alike—to exert the amount of attention and awareness necessary to avoid falling into a bear trap.

These last two paragraphs are crucial. Without them, bear-trap oppression isn’t problematic in the way I’m trying to characterize. Speed traps are a paradigm case of the first few conditions I laid out, but we don’t regard drivers ticketed for speed with the emotions I describe in the previous paragraph. That’s closely related to the companion point about hidden variables. In cases where a punitive structure operates like a booby trap but applies equally to everyone, we do not regard the people who fall victim with bafflement or annoyance. The prevailing sensibility about being ticketed for speed is that it could happen to anyone. The only unifying feature of speedsters is needing to get somewhere. The moral charge of speeding can be eliminated—say, if you’re driving someone injured to the ER—but in very few cases can it be worsened by some further detail about the speedster’s story.

Terry stops

This is a blog about addict oppression, and I’ll talk about bear-trap oppression in relation to addicts shortly. But first I want to present a paradigmatic example of what I call bear-trap oppression with which readers are probably already familiar: racialized stop-and-frisk policies or “Terry stops.” (This isn’t to say that Terry stops don’t target addicts—they certainly do. But their racialization is more salient and has been significantly better-studied.)

I’m from Cleveland. John Terry was profiled and searched pretty close to where I grew up. On Euclid Avenue, police officer Martin McFadden detained Terry and two other men whom he thought were behaving oddly. (One of the reasons he thought they were behaving oddly was that the three were interacting even though two were Black and one was white.) McFadden presumed the men were “casing” a store for robbery. He subjected two of them to a search and found them to be in possession of unlicensed revolvers. Terry’s lawyer argued that the discovery of the revolver was inadmissible in court because it was illegally obtained: McFadden was not justified in searching Terry. The case escalated to the United States Supreme Court, who found against Terry 8-1 and hence sanctioned the “reasonable suspicion” standard for police stop-and-frisks.

I won’t dwell on this point at length here—I don’t think I need to—but it’s pretty well-established that stop-and-frisk is not carried out on a racially neutral basis (to put it lightly). An article by Pettit and Gutierrez in American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes a great deal of empirical evidence that “despite similarities in rates of offending…black men [are] disproportionately surveilled and stopped by the police.”¹ Similar studies abound. Sure, people who aren’t Black men sometimes get stop-and-frisked (and it is bad and oppressive when that happens), but the policy of Terry stops targets Black men, and poor Black men in particular, by design.

Stop-and-frisk follows the bear-trap model. It apparently exists in order to castigate the people who are carrying weapons or other illegal things; it’s intuitively justifiable (certainly we prefer that the people carrying guns in order to use them for some violent activity be prevented from performing it); and it has a low false-positive rate (though there’s always the possibility of contamination or deliberate police misconduct). But also, those caught in the trap disproportionately belong to an auxiliary category—and that carries some of the explanatory weight in the story, elucidating why they got Terry-stopped in the first place. Moreover, the public response satisfies my final condition: the exhortation is “You shouldn’t have anything illegal on your person” rather than “Why did the police officers stop you? It doesn’t sound like they had good reason!”

Why is it that stop-and-frisks are carried out disproportionately among Black men? That police initiate interactions more often with poor people? With parolees? There are two related reasons: the received views that those are the people more likely to be performing the relevant behavior, and that they are the people whose performance of the behavior is especially blameworthy or dangerous. Bear-trap oppression is deliberately uneven: it claims to check membership in one category, but actually, in mere terms of its arising, checks membership in two categories between which (it is pretheoretically supposed) there exist relevant relationships. The structure itself, despite its pretentions to uniformity, is concerned with eliminating the socially undesirable behavior only within a particular demographic—one already marked out by an auxiliary feature separate from the behavior.

Addicts and bear-trap oppression

My thesis is that the bear-trap model is used to facilitate and justify addict oppression. Here’s some examples.

Mandatory drug tests. Across the U.S., drug screenings—usually rapid-panel urine tests—operate as bear-traps in a variety of contexts. Carceral: Random testing is often a parole condition; parole officers can subject a parolee to a drug test without notice. Educational: In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education awarded grants to several districts for the implementation of random drug testing programs among students. Testing negative was a required condition for students’ continued participation in various extracurricular activities. Capital: Tellingly, although the ADA in some contexts qualifies addiction as a disability, it does not prohibit pre-employment drug screens for job candidates.

Mandatory drug tests are in many respects like the bear-trap in my imagined woods. They are regarded by many nonaddicts as banal, especially when advance notice is given. That is because the way in which the trap operates makes it easy for nonaddicts to avoid getting caught in it. One can almost hear the response, “You failed a scheduled drug test? How could you be so stupid? Just don’t use for a week!”

Of course nonaddicts are confused. Mandatory drug tests don’t actually test for the behavior they claim: drug use. If they did, nonaddicts too would fail them. Rather, drug tests evaluate for the demonstrated ability to abstain from the tested substances for some period of time. Nonaddict casual users can sidestep the trap because it was never meant to capture them. Some moralistic structures aside, most have no problem with hiring or educating a nonaddict who occasionally, “responsibly” uses controlled substances. They don’t want to hire, release, or educate addicts.

Mandatory minimum sentences. In the wake of the crack panic, the Anti Drug Abuse Act passed Congress in 1986. One of its crucial features was the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for particular quantities of cocaine possessed: 5 years for 5 grams of crack or 500 grams of powder. (Ignore this breathtaking incongruity for now.) It also facilitated many states’ mandatory life sentences for people found in possession of dramatically larger quantities, i.e. “650-lifer” laws.

Like other instantiations of the bear-trap model, mandatory minimum possession sentences seem to have good reason to exist. They deter drug distribution, apparently targeting dealers rather than addicts. Great! Addict liberation! Right? No. The fact that the minimum sentences are automatic—mandatory—rather than dependent on whether intent to distribute can be proven demonstrates that distribution was never the concern. As with the other cases, the bear-trap does not check for the condition it claims. It does not evaluate whether its subject plans to distribute drugs. It targets the people who are in possession of a large quantity of drugs. And one of the paradigm behaviors of addicts is stockpiling, especially when obtaining one’s drug of choice is sensitive to contextual features outside one’s control (like the criminalization of distribution). Another paradigm addict behavior is getting stuck, through cyclical oppressive means, in patterns of petty drug distribution. If you’re an addict who is in favor of the war on drugs, it is wise to remember that drug distribution deterrence mechanisms as they currently exist don’t target so-called kingpins. They don’t target the Sacklers. They target us.

Open-container laws. Most U.S. states prohibit carrying around open containers of alcohol in public places: sidewalks, parks, city blocks. I’ve always found these so bizarre. You open a bottle in somebody’s apartment and then it has to live there forever. Continuing the pattern, falling victim to the open-container law is not really about whether you’re carrying alcohol, but rather—as with public intoxication laws—whether you’re drinking in a normatively atypical fashion.

Substance culture is a bear trap

The examples I’ve described so far are meant to be sort of metonymic. All these bear-traps are around, ready to engulf the unfortunate addict like Charybdis. It’s easy to distill the concept of the bear-trap model by appeal to specific cases. But society at large is one ongoing bear-trap, to which we are constantly being subjected, of “overuse” or “misuse”: not using substances in the appropriate manner.

You have probably noticed, even if you aren’t an alcoholic, that alcohol is both everywhere and nowhere. Depending on social context and community values, it is either omnipresent or strictly disallowed, with almost no in-between. What might not be obvious is that more strictly controlled substances are everywhere-and-nowhere too. (So is gambling, for the record.) Everywhere: Pharmacies. Hospitals. Media depictions. And, especially for weed, powder cocaine, and club drugs, nonaddict social communities. Nowhere: We don’t talk about these things. We just sort of collectively pretend it isn’t the case.

Merely using was never the issue. Everyone else is doing that too. Rather, there is a paradigmatic social bear-trap around using substances irresponsibly. Say you’re a newly-remitted alcoholic invited to a dinner where there will be drinking, or a cocaine addict invited dancing by friends. You are expected to be around your substance of choice—to interact with the space as if it doesn’t pique your attention. Perhaps you’re even expected to use it. At best, you’ll be distracted, miserable, and irritated. (You don’t know the woods, but you are keeping your wits about you and avoid the trap.) But you might also end up drinking to blackout, then performing socially atypical behaviors for which you’ll be blamed, ridiculed, and castigated. Addicts’ ultimate relationship to nonaddict communities follows the bear-trap model: when you get scooped up by the net, people ask how you could be so irresponsible rather than why the net was there. It's no better if the nonaddict community of which you are a member is one that does not sanction drug use. The conditions for falling in the trap in such a case are slightly different, but the existence of the trap isn’t.

Closing notes

At the beginning of this piece I pointed out how odd the hermit’s commentary seemed. But really it’s not odd at all. People don’t want to believe they are subjecting you to an oppressive entrapment for which you are not responsible. Of course they don’t! It would be awful to conceive of oneself as facilitating entrapment that functions in service of a purpose entirely removed from, and much more sinister than, its stated purpose. The more ingenious—the more strategic and predatory—the setup of the trap, the more self-effacing the ways in which its architects will view themselves.

It is precisely because he is about to deal the death blow that the hermit in Doiron’s story murmurs, “None of us has any choice in life.” To have choice is to be required to grapple with putting somebody in a chokehold. Such responsibility can be offloaded by saying the chokehold is ineliminably downstream of a complex metaphysical and sociopolitical combination of factors outside your control. In the case of the general bear-trap oppression of substance culture, your subjection to this apparatus facilitates the goal of social marginalization of addicts, without nonaddicts’ ever having to say outright that they just don’t want to interact with addicts. It justifies elimination of the addict from the community. Addicts are subjected to social penalties; either the implementation of the punishment will change their behavior or else will sanction the introduction of some arcane tribunal process—some three-strike rule—by which they can be graciously and legitimately evicted. Either way, nonaddicts are left not having to feel uncomfortable about addicts’ marginalization from substance-centric or puritanical spaces.

Drug tests, mandatory minimums, open-container laws, substance culture: these things were never meant to operate as punitive structures toward nonaddicts. In particular, the bear-trap model of addict punishment is not intended to punish or deter wealthy nonaddicts’ substance use. The powers that be don’t really care about those people’s use! We view casual users’ subjection to addict bear-traps as a tragedy, and addicts’ subjection to them as an indication that the systems are functioning properly. In the same way that just anyone’s carrying a concealed weapon doesn’t code for legal purposes as reflexively dangerous in the way Black men’s carrying one does, just anyone’s using controlled substances doesn’t bother the relevant structures. (I know I’m anthropomorphizing systemic mechanisms here. I do that a lot, rhetorically. I don’t actually think the United States carceral system is afraid. You get what I mean.) There are some cases in which, to these systems, a particular behavior raises the worry of defiance, of opposition to oppression, or of cascading social consequences. There’s others in which it just doesn’t mean anything. In those cases, the bear-trap grins and winks at the would-be victim who exhibits the relevant behavior but does not belong to the demographic of concern: “I’ll let you go on your way.”

The bear-trap model, I think, underscores general addict oppression. It is unifying—it is the thing that lends justificatory force to interventions that take away addicts’ autonomy. By falling into the bear-trap you demonstrate yourself to be incapable of taking care of yourself. You need a babysitter. Look at you, falling into all these bear-traps! Clearly you cannot look after yourself, let alone anyone else in your care. Hence addicts are subjected to incarceration, involuntary institutionalization, coercive sterilization, family separation—all mechanisms by which an addict’s ability to determine her life plan is removed, handed off instead to some auxiliary actor who is given a sort of de facto power of attorney. Decisions about how your life should go must belong to other people, not just for their good but for yours too. Good God! You can be in the woods, fine, but you need to be on a leash, led by someone who at least has the common sense to avoid the gaping, obvious maw of the bear-trap.

1. Pettit, Becky, and Carmen Gutierrez (2018). “Mass incarceration and racial inequality.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77 (3-4): 1153-1182. url: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12241.