So I'll probably regret this, but here goes: I was convicted of a similar crime to Nesset's, 14 years ago.

I've done a lot of writing about it, and have also done an AMA.

Nothing I say is intended to minimize neither Nesset's, nor my own, actions.

https://medium.com/@guy.hamilton.smith/dear-gay-3f1e779293c4 https://twitter.com/poetrymagazine/status/1356269014713065479

I'm also a survivor of CSA, and I don't say that to excuse my actions either. It, like the harm that I caused, is simply a fact of my past, and also informs my thinking and my writing.

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3714875

Up front, I think accountability is important. I should have been held accountable, just like Nesset was. I was fortunate in that I didn't go to prison, and instead, I went to law school.

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I understand that these are traumatic and difficult issues, both on an individual level, and on a societal level as we grapple with how to reckon with the commonality of sexual harm in our communities, and the impacts that it has on people who experience it.

4/

I pulled the sentencing memoranda filed by his attorney, and the United States, in his case. They weren't fun reads. But I did want to have a sense of the contours of the case that sent him to prison.

And, he was sent to prison -- for more than five years.

5/

Here, @poetrymagazine was publishing the work of people who were prisoners. Nesset was one (now, he's into a period of supervised release).

Once people have been held accountable, does their punishment need to end at some point?

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If not, does that incentivize other people to be accountable? I'm not sure that it does.

And you might say that the harm inflicted never ends, so why should the punishment, but as I wrote above, how does that help anyone?

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But here, what prisoners are acceptable to create art, or to have art published? Only ones who are innocent? Only ones who have committed palatable crimes? If so, when does that calculus cease?

It's the same logic that gave us mass incarceration.

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And, to the extent we want to challenge mass incarceration, we should note that the nature of the carceral state is slowly evolving -- and capitalizing on the impulse to cast out those that the state labels as 'sex offenders' is one way.

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As with the rest of the criminal legal system, Black individuals are overrepresented on public conviction registries, more likely than White counterparts to be classified into higher risk tiers, and 2X as likely to be indefinitely civilly committed .

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While the number of people in prison is now trending south of 2 million, at last count there were almost 1 million people on sex offense registries alone -- not counting other kinds of registries (such as violent crime registries).

And, they operate much like open air prisons11/

Again, none of this is to say that people shouldn't be held accountable. Nesset should have. I should have. But I think this raises important questions about how we seek to reckon with sexual harm in ways that are going to (hopefully) eradicate it

12/

I've seen some people tweet that Nesset used his position as a professor or figure in the literary community to harm others -- I haven't seen anything supporting this, aside from some tweets.

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I've also seen some criticism of @poetrymagazine's stance with respect to BLM, and I can't speak to that.

But I do think that one of the questions that this scenario raises is this:

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If you tell someone that the only thing that they can ever be is the worst thing that they've ever done, what good are their efforts at change, and accountability?

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