tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8197116986886557852024-02-28T15:43:36.087-08:00Governing through CrimeJonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.comBlogger460125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-51303629842967741962015-07-08T09:03:00.002-07:002015-07-08T09:03:09.782-07:00A Summer Classic: Moral Panic over a Pier Shooting
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It is a reminder of how hard the past is to leave behind
(especially when your leading politicians belong to it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By now the whole nation knows the <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Accused-S-F-pier-shooter-pleads-not-guilty-6371391.php">basic
facts</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Francisco Sanchez, a 45 or 52-year-old
Mexican national shot and killed Kathryn Steinle, 32 year old resident of a
nearby suburb in a chance encounter along San Francisco’s popular and seemingly
safe waterfront Embarcadero Boulevard last week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had all the makings of what criminologists
call a “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Devils-Moral-Panics-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415610168">moral
panic</a>” an untoward event, small or large, that becomes a vehicle for vast
social and political anxieties over race, class, and national identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A low status villain---non-White, poor,
non-citizen, long criminal record, multiple incarcerations, kills a high status
victim--White, middle class, citizen, mother of children, never been in trouble
with the law. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It occurs where it should
not, in a place associated with comfort and recreation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Events like this sometimes stay just local
news, but given the right conditions, they can blow up into a policy storm of
significant magnitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will this one?</div>
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It comes at a time when White anxiety over the growing
Latino population in the US has become a dominant obsession with the Republican
party. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed Republican politicians
have found themselves in something of a dilemma over which to attack among two
of their favorite targets; liberal cities like San Francisco, or the Obama
administration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the dominant media
narrative has focused on the San Francisco Sheriff’s Departments decision to
release Sanchez after the marijuana possession warrant he was being held on was
dismissed, without notifying ICE (the Immigration Control and Enforcement
agency) as requested, Republicans and now Senator Diane Feinstein have decided
to focus their rage on the City’s sanctuary policy, which mandates
non-cooperation with the aggressive detention and deportation policies of
recent years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Feinstein-Immigrant-charged-in-killing-should-6371304.php">Feinstein
wrote SF Mayor Ed Lee yesterday</a>, excoriating the City and its sanctuary
policy, and all but blaming them for the crime. </div>
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The story line is a familiar one to politicians of
Feinstein’s generation who rose to maturity and power addressing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Feinstein’s case this was quite literal, as
she became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 after the high profile City Hall
murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor and civil rights leader Harvey
Milk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to the logic that became
common sense during the high crime eras of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, state
and local justice systems were overwhelmed by crime and prone ignoring criminal
threats by dumping known threats on the streets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to this thinking (which I described
at length in my 2007 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Through-Crime-Transformed-Democracy/dp/0195386019">Governing
through Crime</a>) only tough laws limiting judicial discretion, and federal
mandates requiring that felons serve the vast majority of their sentences and
protect Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The result: mass
incarceration and mass deportation.</div>
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A closer look at the narrative surrounding the Sanchez case
reveals it for the ideological construction it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact Sanchez epitomizes why the logic of
exclusion and segregation that undergird our wars on crime and terror can never
achieve public safety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Start with the
focus on San Francisco’s Sheriff and the City’s sanctuary policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seem obvious and outrageous to Senator
Feinstein that Ms. Steinle would not have been killed that night but for the
Sheriff’s and the City’s failure to incarcerate him until he could be deported.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But who was really the proximate cause of
Mr. Sanchez’s presence in San Francisco? He didn’t start here, but instead in
federal prison where he was serving time for repeated unlawful entries to the
United States. Nothing in federal law required ICE to bring Sanchez to San
Francisco to address a twenty-year-old warrant for marijuana possession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such charges are routinely dismissed in San
Francisco and other cities, and the feds had apparently deported him five times
during that period without feeling compelled to bring him to answer justice in
San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most likely the
overworked ICE staff found the warrant and realized it would be easier to dump
him on San Francisco then complete the paper work necessary to deport him
promptly (or even generate the kind of immigration warrant rather than “hold”
that would have prevented Sanchez’s release even under the sanctuary policy).</div>
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A second phony element is the idea that Sanchez was
obviously dangerous because of his seven felonies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, as the media realized pretty early,
all but one of these felonies are for drugs or illegal reentry, one was for
assault (the least serious form of crime against the person, the equivalent of
a fist fight).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If anything, Sanchez’s
record is monument to how stretched the felony concept has become in our
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seven felonies sure sound scary,
until you actually look at them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
is nothing about his record that would have signaled to San Francisco
Sherriff’s deputies that Sanchez posed a serious threat. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He appeared to be a not untypical inmate in
the jail: poor, disorganized, a drug user without a stable family or work life,
and probably some mental illness (indeed I suspect he has a chronic mental
illness and decompensated for lack of proper treatment during his federal
imprisonment).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shooting of Kathryn
Steinle appears to be a tragic escalation of this lifestyle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The weapon was apparently found on the beach
(the latest reports suggest it belonged to a <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Gun-used-in-pier-killing-had-been-stolen-from-6371602.php">federal
agent</a>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He admits to having been
high on cannabis and sleeping pills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
was shot in the back, consistent with his “accident” defense. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
most persistent deliberate pattern was apparently returning to the United
States; not to prey on its citizens <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ala </i>Donald
Trump, but to support himself and perhaps to stay in contact with family here.</div>
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So what to conclude from the Sanchez case?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trying to protect ourselves from random
violence by incarcerating and deporting people on the basis of race and often
inflated criminal records is deeply flawed (and far from the slam dunk solution
that Senator Feinstein believes). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underlying
theory here is that crime is a product of dangerous people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lock up or deport the dangerous people and
problem solved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But criminology now
suggests that crime is situational, a product of people with chaotic lives,
substance abuse, and chance encounters in environments that provide either
accelerants or de-accelerants (think of the gun that Sanchez found).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no perfect solution, save for the
ideal of fixing all our “broken toys” (and even unbroken ones break in the spur
of the moment). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead careful mental
health screening of the jail population and attentive post-release efforts to
keep people with mental health needs and drug abuse histories on the right
medications and off the wrong ones could do far better than incarceration for people
like Sanchez (what about his previous imprisonments protected us?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor quite clearly is deportation a
solution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For two decades now we’ve been
aggressively deporting people we label “criminal aliens”, creating significant
gang problems in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador (as many of them have
recreated the same gang milieus they used to survive in the US) without doing
much to reduce crime here. </div>
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I suspect this moral panic will run its course without
uprooting San Francisco’s sanctuary policy or placing Donald Trump in the White
House.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The general trend is away from harsh
and exclusionary policies in both criminal justice and immigration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sadly, the punitive storm that has arisen
around the Francisco Sanchez and killing of Kathryn Steinle is a reminder of
how powerful the hold of crime panic journalism, and hyperventilating crime
warrior politicians like Feinstein remains on our public policy and how slow
reform will probably be.</div>
Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-33451575861195751062015-06-23T06:57:00.001-07:002015-06-23T14:18:54.110-07:00To Start a Race War: Dylann Roof and the Ideology of White Supremacy<br />
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The mass murder of parishioners at the historic Emmanuel
African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina law week, by a
young white supremacist intensified the already profound national conversation
about racism and violence that has been building since the killing of unarmed
teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are more topics in play around Charleston than any single post (even an over
long one like this) can address.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So a
couple of brief points before an extended discussion of one question, already
taken up here on <a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2015/06/is-honesty-about-american-racism-really-the-best-policy-some-thoughts-on-the-charleston-church-massacre-and-the-ambiguous-v.html#more">Prawfsblawg
by Rick Hill</a> (but I come out a bit different).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whether to categorize the act as one of
terrorism or as an example of a mentally deranged or ill person taking an
otherwise unthinkable action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My answer is: its an act of terrorism that calls for a political response, but we need a
more complicated framework to think about how mental illness and acts rooted in
diseased ideation can parallel acts of terrorism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So briefly, two strands that in my view should not receive
significant attention.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the political right, or at least its penumbras on
Twitter, the bogey of “black on black crime” has been raised; as if to say,
white killers are not the real threat facing black communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suffice it to say that this is a total
dodge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So called “black on black”
violence, overwhelmingly a problem of young men in super segregated communities
of urban poverty is a terrible problem, but unlike acts of racist violence, it
plays no role in maintaining the legacies of white supremacy; including
segregated neighborhoods, white privilege in access to jobs, educational
opportunities, and even sexual partners. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need social and economic strategies to
reduce levels of violence among young men in predominantly black communities
but it is by no means an answer to what occurred in Charleston or a reason not
to vigorously pursue one.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the political left, one major response has been to revive
the ever-flagging gun control debate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
less invidious, I also think this is something of a dodge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roof was not using an assault rifle that
could fire scores of bullets in a short time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He apparently used a 45 caliber handgun and had to reload several times
to carryout all nine killings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No
politically realistic gun control proposal for decades has attempted to bar
access to such weapons and one is not going to emerge now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If President Obama could not lead a national
movement for gun control after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting">Sandy
Hook elementary</a> school massacre, he sure isn’t going to do it now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Period.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A much bigger issue in my view is the question of how this
crime is being characterized, and particularly the politics behind the
alternatives of viewing it as terrorism versus a deranged act linked to some
sort of serious mental illness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many
commentators on Twitter and in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/18/call-the-charleston-church-shooting-what-it-is-terrorism/">columns</a>
and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/06/19/read-jon-stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after-charleston-church-massacre/">Jon
Stewart</a>, have pointed out that early responses from politicians and
mainstream media figures shied away from identifying the perpetrator Dylan Roof
as a terrorist; raising instead the possibility that mental illness lay behind
this terrible act of violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
critique is that white people who kill are rarely described as terrorists (or
other categorical terms like “thug”) while people of color, especially African
Americans and Middle Eastern or South Asian Muslims are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>This point is indeed well taken.</u> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In media and lay discussions, mental illness
tends to emerge as an explanation for behavior that strikes the speaker as out
of character for the type of person involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Since we typically know little about the actual people involved, at
least initially, race is hugely salient in forming this judgment about
character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the people unreflectively
assign white people who kill the label “mentally ill,” the assignment testifies
to the speaker’s probably unconscious assumption that white people do not
engage in unprovoked acts of violence (but that African Americans and Muslims,
do).<o:p></o:p></div>
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It would be a mistake however to go further and assume that
any claim of mental illness to explain a person’s acts of violence is dissembling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are many homicides where the delusional
beliefs generated by psychotic processes are clearly at work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James Holmes, who killed 12 people in an
Aurora, Colorado movie theater in 2012, is a likely example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few people can make sense of his crime
without relying at least in part on his well-documented history of mental
illness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As is typical is such cases,
even the prosecution acknowledges the presence of mental illness but asserts
that it fails to reach the extreme threshold established for a legal “insanity”
defense in most states today (what amounts to delusions so profound that they
prevented the perpetrator from understanding that nature or societal proscribed
nature of their conduct).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also not
uncommon for people living with psychotic mental processes to be attracted to
extremist political ideologies and conspiracy theories, because their content
often has a striking affinity with the paranoid pattern of psychotic ideation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such people may sound like racists or anti-Semites
but their narrative comes from the disease, not their values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same time we should not be surprised
that many of the participants in clearly politically motivated terrorist
attacks, who are drawn to the values behind those politics, also have mental
illnesses (not typically the leaders, but sometimes those persuaded to
undertake the fatal or at least very dangerous acts involved).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Putting aside the legal test of insanity, what should be
most salient to the public conversation about such acts of extreme violence is
whether a particular incident seems to be best explained by political beliefs
and values or by psychotic mental processes that lie behind it (even when both
are involved).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are the key ideas behind
the crimes (and there always are key ideas, describing violence as senseless is
almost always incorrect) rooted in the subject’s values, long-term beliefs, and
commitments?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or are they more likely to
have been filtered from the ever available stream of hateful ideas through a
mind disordered by disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or to put it
another way, is the best way to <u>prevent</u> another such incident to expand
mental health screening and treatment services, or does it require a political
process of some sort (from war to conflict resolution to social movements).<o:p></o:p></div>
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In what follows, I would like to offer a preliminary (and
possibly flawed) framework for thinking about acts of violence so awful that
normal human motivations (jealousy, anger, despair) simply do not seem
sufficient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I start with a typology that
moves from those most clearly influenced by disease, to those most clearly
influenced by values.<o:p></o:p></div>
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No political beliefs or values can explain the Aurora
killer, James Holmes’ actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even his
prosecutors view him as person motivated by individual considerations, e.g., to
achieve fame, or in response to being rejected by a girlfriend, (considerations
that rarely result in actual violence where mental illness is not at least a
background factor).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether or not the
jury decides that Holmes’ deserves the death penalty, few if any people can seriously
believe that executing him will prevent the next movie theater massacre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile, expanding mental health screening,
and treatment, certainly for those seeking to purchase assault weapons, would
provide at least some measure of protection.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the other extreme are the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least one of the convicted plot participants,
Zacharias Moussaui, exhibited behavior throughout his trial (in which he was
most problematically allowed to represent himself) consistent with major mental
illness (although he was found competent to stand trial, that is a fairly low
threshold that excludes most defendants with mental illness).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet even if Moussaoui and other plot
participants were in part influenced by their mental illnesses to become
involved, the plot as a whole had an overwhelmingly political logic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The attack appears to have been motivated by
a strategy of provoking a “clash of civilizations” between the Christian west
and the Muslim world (a strategy that seems at least partially successful in
generating the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the rise of Isis, and a host of other
developments still far from settled).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
is no easy political option to resolve terrorism associated with militant
Islamic extremism, but surely politics represents the only realistic path.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few could believe that even the most generous
expenditures on mental health screening and treatment (presumably on a global
basis) are unlikely to significantly reduce further acts of terrorism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, I do not mean to imply it will always be easy to
determine whether a particular atrocity is best understood as a reflection of political
values or diseased ideation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider
Theodore Kaczynski, known as the “Unabomber” for his practice of sending letter
bombs to scientists and engineers involved in research that Kaczynski
associated with the rise of technological civilization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kaczynski’s <a href="http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt">manifesto</a>, published originally
in the New York Times and the Washington Post, in a controversial deal to end
his attacks, presented his belief that industrialization has done irreparable
harm to both nature and humanity and that therefore killing people in an
attempt to halt it was justified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
ideas clearly have a political logic, one that resembles the beliefs of others
involved in what is sometimes labeled “eco-terrorism”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, a close reading of the manifesto
suggests a highly idiosyncratic perspective and narrative, shared in fact by
few others; and acts far more violent than those typically undertaken by even militant
environmentalists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mental health
screening (perhaps of overachieving academics), seems more promising than a
political or security strategy to stop the next Unabomber.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This brings us at last to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Dylann Storm Roof</b>, the perpetrator of the Charleston AME massacre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would not be surprised at all if forensic
psychiatric examination by both defense and prosecution turns up evidence of
mental illness, but the logic of his act and even the words he articulated have
a clear political sensibility to them; one of unremitting racialized hatred and
fear of African Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We still do
not know precisely where in his life, these ideas and values began for Dylann
Roof. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would begin by looking at the
beliefs of his parents (does anyone know whether spelling Dylann with two “n’s”
and giving the middle name “Storm” is any indication that his parents were
involved in Neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups and ideologies?). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of us get our ideas about race and racism
from our parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mine (of blessed
memory) were white allies of the civil rights movement and taught us to believe
that the project of completing emancipation was the defining mission of the
modern American nation. The discovery of Dylann Roofs’ online manifesto of race
hatred provides a direct link to the thinking and language of existing white
supremacist organizations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike
Kaczynski’s, Roof’s ideas are not idiosyncratic or even marginalized but belong
to a well-developed body of ideas that once dominated Southern politics and
continue to have an important influence nationally on Conservative and
Republican politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, Roof
specifically cited the ideas of the <a href="http://conservative-headlines.com/">Council
of Conservative Citizens</a>, a well-known white supremacist group with roots
in the <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/council-of-conservative-citizens">violent
segregationists of the 1960s</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/us/campaign-donations-linked-to-white-supremacist.html?ref=us">continuing
interest in the Republican Party</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What was the strategy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Roof reportedly told a friend that wanted to start a <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/06/19/415809511/dylann-roof-said-he-wanted-to-start-a-race-war-friends-say">race
war</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m no expert in the logic of
race wars, but this rings true to me as the primary motivation for the
act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It explains the target, a historic
church long a focus of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/magazine/before-charlestons-church-shooting-a-long-history-of-attacks.html">white
terrorism against African Americans</a>, and where the victims would draw the
maximum amount of outrage and clarity as to the racial meaning of the
murders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise the date, June 17,
corresponds to date on which a slave rebellion was planned to launch in
Charleston in 1822 and which involved Denmark Vesey, a former slave who was a
founder of Emmanuel AME Church.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I would love to hear from some historians on the origins of
the “race war” trope in American racist ideology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its most significant modern proponent until
now is Charles Manson, who taught his followers to prepare for an apocalyptic race war culminating in a black uprising that would overthrow the United States (a fear he
apparently shared with J. Edgar Hoover) and that his Family would then emerge
to lead what was left of civilization. Manson orchestrated the murders of
privileged white victims and then sought to blame the crimes on African
Americans by leaving stolen items in clearly black neighborhoods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He imagined a law and order crack down on
African Americans would lead to an uprising and ultimately his rise to
power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Manson called his plan <a href="http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam481/groupd/helter_skelter.htm">“Helter
Skelter”</a> after the Beatle’s song which he believed contained a prophesy of
these events. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Manson, originally from
Oklahoma, has been racist all his life, recall the swastika he carved on his
forehead during the trial, who assumed necessarily inferior blacks would lead
the country into a disaster and leave his Family in charge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The whole idea of race war seems to be a distinctively white
supremacist fantasy/nightmare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could
be mistaken, but from my knowledge of history, even armed and militant African
American groups have always used violence defensively, or to eliminate
perceived movement traitors, not to provoke a race war that African Americans, very
much a minority demographically and in political influence, would almost
certainly be the ultimate victims of.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So how to prevent another racist massacre? In my view the
political option of an aggressive social movement to finally drive white
supremacy out of its existing strongholds in American society is what is called for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don't get me wrong we should spend a lot more
money on mental health as well. Compared to money spent on prisons, seeking the
death penalty, or even hiring police officers, mental health spending is
probably a good way to prevent violence <u>in general</u>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fear, however, that it would do little to
prevent the kind of racist violence we are dealing with here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So long as white supremacist narratives are spread
by groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens, and sheltered by the
powerful Republican Party, there will be no shortage of marginal characters,
some of them with mental illness, attracted to its ideology and willing to put
their ideas into action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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If we are to prevent this kind of atrocity, a political
strategy is clearly necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My colleague
here on Prawfs, Rick Hills worries that if forced to choose between their
Southern heritage and common decency, they will choose the former.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel we need a strategy that forces that
choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(We’ve had Fifty years of letting
them slide by on being American and Confederate, its time to choose). It
consists of calling out, boycotting, demonstrating against and generally shaming
the leadership of racist political organizations, and politically destroying
any politician that doesn’t place miles of distance between themselves and this
entire ideology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This requires acts of
public memorialization such as have been undertaken in other countries with a
history of systematic racist violence, like Germany.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means cleansing the American South of
the residual honorific symbols of the Confederacy: everything must go, flags,
statutes of Confederate generals, or parks or streets carrying their
names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This also must extend to the segregationist
descendants of the Confederacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pictures
of segregationist governors should be removed from state houses (they can go to
museums along with the flags and statues).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Congress of the United States, dominated by segregationists for most
of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, should remove any monument to, and posthumously
condemn all of the major figures (most prominently former South Carolina <a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Sculpture_24_00010.htm">Senator
Strom Thurmond</a>). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as importantly
it is time to finally make the history of white supremacy and racist violence
against African Americans visible in every American city through museums (a new
Smithsonian museum of <a href="http://nmaahc.si.edu/">African American culture</a>
is about to open in Washington D.C.), public monuments, and street names
(Charleston can have nine new ones).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Fortunately, American society is lot less prone to race wars
than white supremacists believe in their fevered fantasies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Manson’s murders failed to launch one
(although they did help fuel the punitive turn in American penal policy) and
clearly Dylann Roof has failed in his ambitions as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But let us make sure his victims did not die
for nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their blood calls on all
Americans of conscience to join an unrelenting cultural war against white
supremacy in all of its manifestations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Cross posted from <a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2015/06/to-start-a-race-war-dylann-roof-and-white-supremacy.html#more">Prawfsblawg</a>Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-10508394214618827032015-05-09T14:01:00.001-07:002015-05-09T14:01:13.942-07:00Capital Punishment's Loyal Officer<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">
It was a zinger worthy of a Presidential debate (and almost certainly just as planned). Justice Samuel Alito, confronted Federal Public Defender Robin Conrad in the midst of her <a data-mce-href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/14-7955_1b72.pdf" href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/14-7955_1b72.pdf">oral argument on April 29 in <em>Glossip v. Gross</em></a>, a case challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection execution procedure.</div>
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Yes. I mean, let's be honest about what's going on here. Executions could be carried out painlessly. There are many jurisdictions there are jurisdictions in this country, there are jurisdictions abroad that allow assisted suicide, and I assume that those are carried out with little, if any, pain. Oklahoma and other States could carry out executions painlessly. Now, this Court has held that the death penalty is constitutional. It's controversial as a constitutional matter. It certainly is controversial as a policy matter. Those who oppose the death penalty are free to try to persuade legislatures to abolish the death penalty. Some of those efforts have been successful. They're free to ask this Court to overrule the death penalty. But until that occurs, is it appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerilla war against the death penalty which consists of efforts to make it impossible for the States to obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if any, pain?</blockquote>
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The diatribe won the lions share of media attention on the case and much of it seemingly approving. The stunning nature of his attack on our adversary system has gone little remarked. Indeed Justice Alito seemed to be refreshingly candid (Chris Christie style): “let’s be honest about what’s going on here.” He appealed to his media audiences common sense that executions could be carried out painlessly (although four of his colleagues doubted that the last time SCOTUS reviewed lethal injections in <em><a data-mce-href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/baze-v-rees/#https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.oyez.org%252Fcases%252F2000-2009%252F2007%252F2007_07_5439&ei=hsdMVe_BNo2pyAS1" href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/baze-v-rees/#https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%253A%252F%252Fwww.oyez.org%252Fcases%252F2000-2009%252F2007%252F2007_07_5439&ei=hsdMVe_BNo2pyAS1">Baze v. Rees</a></em>). He acknowledged that abolitionists have been making significant political progress lately winning legislative abolitions, with “red” <a data-mce-href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/category/categories/states/nebraska" href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/category/categories/states/nebraska">Nebraska</a> only the latest state legislature to express a desire to rid the law of capital punishment. He invited direct challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty: an invitation that might have seemed totally empty a few years ago but now seems to have increasing constitutional force (see <em><a data-mce-href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/oped/Calif-death-penalty-decision.pdf" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/oped/Calif-death-penalty-decision.pdf">Jones v. Chappell</a></em> finding the California death penalty unconstitutional on grounds of being arbitrary and capricious). </div>
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But behind this this seemingly candid and refreshing acknowledgment was a remarkable attack upon a lawyer doing exactly what lawyers are supposed to do: zealously advocating for her clients. Justice Alito (echoed by Justice Scalia) cast Federal Public Defender Conrad and her colleagues as duplicitous, pleading the terrible risk of pain facing their clients while working behind the backs of the courts and states to deny states access to chemicals that could painlessly cause death and thus subverting the honorable workings of justice. Absolutely no evidence is presented or even suggested for this conspiracy. In fact, it is a mirror image of reality. The problems American states are confronting in finding drugs to make lethal injections look kind and gentle lie in a growing global movement against capital punishment in which America is increasingly seen as part of an anti human rights “axis” along with Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia. Federal public defenders (and indeed many other Americans) may well sympathize with this global movement but they are hardly relevant to that movement. As Justice Alito must surely know, the European Union-our major trading partner and political military ally and the site of many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical producers---are legally bound to oppose the death penalty where ever it exists. Federal public defenders are even more irrelevant to the completely understandable fact that many businesses will need no additional reason other than publicity to choose to disassociate their products from the deliberate killing of human beings.</div>
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The real guerilla war is being waged by death states that continue to pursue executions even as crime remains at historic lows and public opinion turns against this archaic ritual. Many of these states are making a farce of the Court’s own decades long effort to forge a more legal and more humane death penalty by using all means, legal or otherwise, to acquire execution drugs; and obstructing prisoners and their advocates from discovering even the most basic scientific facts about how the state proposes to take their lives. Meanwhile the death penalty majority on the Supreme Court has fought its own battle to prevent continued judicial oversight of state executions. Indeed, the first named petitioner in the case in which Justice Alito delivered his appeal for honesty was executed earlier this year even as the issue he raised was scheduled for Supreme Court argument.</div>
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Justice Alito is correct that the times are changing rapidly for the death penalty. In retrospect, the rejuvenation of capital punishment in the 1970s after a couple of decades of declining public support may have had more to do with the high violent crime rates and toxic racial politics of that era---conditions that have changed in many respects---than any core American commitment to capital punishment. Serious challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty may soon find themselves before the SCOTUS. One can only hope that Justice Alito will bring a less closed mind to those arguments than he did to the ones Federal Defender Robin Konrad (and Justice Sotomayor) presented him in <em>Glossip</em>. </div>
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It is our common law tradition that judges are to consider the fate of litigants one at a time, and answer the compelling legal questions that their treatment poses. Yet in his exchanges with Ms. Konrad Justice Alito showed an injudicious interest in capital punishment as an institution. In his willingness to defend the death penalty (and his even odder insistence that if it is to end, it must receive the presumably more honorable dispatch of a direct constitutional assault) Justice Alito seems to be more committed to that institution than to our Constitution.</div>
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Justice Alito’s passion for the death penalty recalled for me the curious character of the "Officer” who conducts a “Traveler” to witness the execution of a condemned prisoner in Franz Kafka’s haunting story <em><a data-mce-href="http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/crs/e321/Kafka-PenalColony.pdf" href="http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/crs/e321/Kafka-PenalColony.pdf">The Penal Colony</a>. </em> The story, set in a little described “penal colony,” involves an execution ritual in which the condemned are placed into a complex machine known as the “harrow” that effectively kills them by slowly inscribing the name of their crime into their body with metal needles as they are rotated within the harrow. The harrow requires constant tinkering which the Officer enthusiastically supplies. The Officer acknowledges to the increasingly uneasy Traveller that the colony’s commitment to this strange ritual is in fact waning fast, but he remains so loyal to it that he abandons all restraint and ultimately even self preservation in attempting to obtain for it at least one last victim. </div>
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Like the penal colony’s harrow, our execution machinery needs constant tinkering, both technical and legal. Some Justices, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, once supporters of the death penalty, eventually renounced “<a data-mce-href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.cornell.edu%2Fsupct%2Fhtml%2F93-7054.ZA1.html&ei=PVBOVfb0PNK6ogSnvIDICA&usg=AFQjCNF1rAQP56RtF_MDdf5GD05TB6dbWg&bvm=bv.92885102,d.cGU" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.cornell.edu%2Fsupct%2Fhtml%2F93-7054.ZA1.html&ei=PVBOVfb0PNK6ogSnvIDICA&usg=AFQjCNF1rAQP56RtF_MDdf5GD05TB6dbWg&bvm=bv.92885102,d.cGU">tinkering with the machinery of death</a>” and denounced the penalty as irreconcilable with commitment to the rule of law. More Justices soon must make clear that their decades long servitude to this institution must come to an end. But perhaps the last will be Justice Alito, who like Kafka’s Officer seems increasingly willing to depart from his role in order defend the machinery of death against law itself. </div>
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cross posted on <a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2015/05/capital-punishments-loyal-officer.html">prawfsblawg</a></div>
Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-64197310116466448062015-01-03T10:24:00.002-08:002015-01-03T10:27:15.762-08:00Do we really need the police? Not as much as we need air.The astoundingly crude and arrogant response of NYPD rank and file to the tragic murder of two officers by an unstable young man last month (read the fascinating story by Kim Barker, Mosi Secret and Richard Fausset in the NYTimes on the man who killed the officers <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/nyregion/ismaaiyl-brinsleys-many-identities-fueled-life-of-wrong-turns.html?hpw&rref=nyregion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0">here</a>) raises an interesting question, do we really need the police? Angry at Mayor Bill DeBlasio for winning an election on reforming police practices, and speaking honestly about how people of color feel about the police in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings, NYPD officers have undertaken a public campaign of not using their arrest powers unless the situation absolutely requires it, resulting in an unprecedented drop in both arrests and parking tickets. Angered that citizens and their elected officials should ever question how the police behave, NY "finest" are saying in effect, "you'll have it our way, or you won't have it at all." May be, just may be, its time to say "let's not have it this way at all, and if you can't change, we need a new alternative. "<br />
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My criminological colleagues will be cringing. Cannonical doctrine suggests that while better policing may lead to better public safety results, even the worse police department is better than none at all. In a famous natural experiment in 1944, documented by criminologist Johannes Andeneas, the Nazi's arrested the entire police force of occupied Copenhagen (fearing that they would aid an Allied effort to liberate the city). Despite the Nazi's own credible threats to execute criminals on site, and what one might expect to be strong feelings of solidarity among the citizens of the occupied city, robberies and larcenies soared; similar results have emerged from police strikes (see a summary by Lawrence Sherman of some studies <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/works/chapter8.htm#text1">here</a>). <br />
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But we need not consider replacing the police with nothing. The real question is why, despite a century and a half of incredible urban and political change in industrial democracies, we still cling to the idea of the police invented in the early 19th century to contain the dangerous classes of London and New York? I'm not ready to float a comprehensive proposal now but a few thoughts to get our collective imagination going while we wait to see how NYPD's Copenhagen experiment plays out.<br />
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<li>Most criminologists acknowledge that individual willingness to obey the law (because it seems legitimate to do so), and collective efficacy at naming and blaming those who do not obey the law, are more important than formal efforts at social control carried out by police and courts. Indeed the latter can do little without the former.</li>
<li>Arrogant, aggressive police tactics that cause individuals to lose their sense of the law's legitimacy, and interrupt the communities capacity to enforce norms of civility, may encourage more crime than they deter.</li>
<li>Police departments are really conglomerations of services: traffic, detectives (homicide, robberies), narcotics/vice, SWAT team, patrol. In our current model, the generalist patrol officer who can wield a gun and a pair of handcuffs is the paradigm and all other variations have to come through this central paradigm. Perhaps we should take a lesson from our neoliberal corporate friends and think about breaking up this conglomerate, reshuffling the segments so they can develop training methods and cultures conducive to their greatest efficacy.</li>
<li>In reimagining the police, questions of level of governance are worth considering. Some functions, like detectives or SWAT teams, seem best organized and deployed from the center of the city with equal application to all neighborhoods. Patrol, in contrast, might well be organized very differently in different neighborhoods to achieve the optimal forms of police presence in the community.</li>
<li>In 1970, Berkeley voters considered a proposal, supported by radical members of UC Berkeley's School of Criminology, to break up the police department into three neighborhood units and require police officers to live in the neighborhoods they policed. The initiative was defeated overwhelmingly but that was at the height of the crime wave of the 1960s and at a time when middle class voters were becoming collectively traumatized by crime fear. </li>
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Do we really need the police? So far crime has not gone up in NYC, but criminological doctrine suggests it is only a matter of time before the criminally inclined decide there is little price to be paid for acting on those impulses. On the other hand, crime is highly situational, and responsive to individual and collective sensibilities. Perhaps the same emotions that have led tens of thousands of New Yorkers to protest against aggressive policing (and earlier to vote for Bill DeBlasio) has led more individuals to feel a sense of legitimacy in the public order of the city and a sense of collective efficacy. <br />
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I would not want to rely on individual consent and collective efficacy to keep crime low on their own indefinitely. We need something like the police, but not "the police" as we've known them. Police are important, but they are not like air. We can live without them when that is necessary. And we can reinvent them.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-75752171401502446072014-12-05T08:25:00.005-08:002014-12-06T00:14:12.602-08:00If Black Lives Matter, End the War on CrimeFrom the perspective of tens of thousands of protesters around the nation this week, the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, reflected an unfathomable decision by white police officers to kill unarmed black men engaged in trivial criminal (if any) behavior. To thousands of police officers (and their families), these deaths fit in a different narrative, one where very large and powerful men responded to lawful police efforts to complete a stop (in Brown's case) or an arrest (in Garner's) with violent resistance. From the first perspective, these are cases of outright murder, and the failure of grand jurors in Missouri and New York to indict them, evidence of clear racism. From the second perspective, these cases are work accidents, tragedies that might have been avoided with better technique but hardly felonies. <br />
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The gulf seems wide indeed. No wonder President Obama and Mayor Bill DeBlasio wring their hands, utter somber statements about bridging the gap between police and community, and suggest more training. But the gap between police and the black community has always been wide (its ironic that yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the execution style police killing of Chicago civil rights leader and Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969: an event that made this then 10 year old wanna be political activist, permanently afraid of the police), and today's police have never been better trained and equipped (especially the much vaunted NYPD). The problem I believe is not the people or the police, its the political "war on crime" that simultaneously valorizes cops as warriors in an existential struggle with violent crime and compels them to engage in a necessarily brutal campaign to clear the streets of those widely perceived not just by police but by the majority culture and their politicians, as a threat to public safety, i.e., young men of color.<br />
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The war on crime may be a metaphor, but as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011">Metaphors We Live By</a>) taught us long ago, metaphors are a political DNA that reorganize institutions and lives. Wars are about three things: territory, populations, and security. The goal in war is to dominate a territory by eliminating or repressing resistance, pacifying the population, and establishing a regime of security that maintains both states of affairs (just pay some attention to the Israel/Palestine conflict if you need a refresher on what that looks like in its explicit form). America's war on crime, declared by top political leaders of both parties in the face of the high violent crime rates, and political polarization of the 1960s (see chapters 1 and 2 of my book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Through-Crime-Transformed-Democracy/dp/0195386019">Governing through Crime</a>), has made local police forces the frontline troops of a relentless campaign to clear urban areas of those perceived to be a threat to public safety. Whether dubbed "STRESS" (as it was in Detroit in the 1970s), Broken Windows (the 1980s) or Zero Tolerance policing (1990s), this war strategy has required police officers (sometimes with powerful work place disciplinary techniques) to confront young men of color on a daily basis, and to use the opportunity of minor criminal violations to both clear the streets of them and create a security regime in which they choose to avoid public spaces. <br />
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The fact that this war on crime descended on American policing at a moment when it was only beginning to address the culture of ethnic and racial hierarchy that dominated mid-20th century police forces left much of this culture intact and carried it over into the greatly expanded (and much more diverse) forces of the 21st century.<br />
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If that sounds familiar may be its time to stop focusing on individual cops like Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo and whether or not they get indicted (does anyone here in Oakland really feel that much better because Oscar Grant's killer was prosecuted, convicted, and went to prison?). Instead we need to place responsibility at the top, where leaders in the White House, Governor's mansions and Mayor's offices have glorified the war on crime as a patriotic American mission. Its time President Obama and other leaders to come forward and formally declare this war over. The damage it is has done to our society through mass incarceration, militarized policing, and wartime judicial retreats on human rights is already immense. Just as important, the context has changed enormously. Violent crime is down to historic lows (and neither prisons or policing have made more than a partial contribution to that) and many of the sociological processes that drove high crime in the period 1965-1995 (deindustrialization, suburbanization, mass addiction to novel drugs) have run their course. As Bill DeBlasio's campaign for mayor demonstrated, voters today are increasingly repelled by the war on crime and believe that the city and nation face other challenges.<br />
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A formal declaration of an end to the war on crime should include several key elements.<br />
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1. Recognition that the war on crime was an undeclared state of emergency that severely comprised the legal and political rights of Americans.<br />
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2. Instruction to law enforcement agencies that this state of emergency is over and they are to return to maximum fidelity to the principles of our constitution including respect for the dignity, liberty, and equality of every person.<br />
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3. Creation of new human rights agencies to enforce point 2 and to identify the steps necessary to remediate point 1.<br />
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<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-10059962163744700812014-10-21T11:49:00.002-07:002014-10-21T15:19:08.653-07:00Proposition 47: A Simple Step Toward Reducing Mass IncarcerationCalifornia Proposition 47, on the ballot for voter consideration this November, would change the legal classification of many "nonserious and nonviolent property and drug crimes" from felonies to misdemeanors (read the details on <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/">ballotpedia.org</a> <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_47,_Reduced_Penalties_for_Some_Crimes_Initiative_(2014)">here</a>). This simple change has important consequences. A crime classified as a felony may be punished with a sentence in state prison, while a crime that is classified as a misdemeanor may be punished only with probation or a sentence of one year or less in a county jail. If voters approve Proposition 47, Californians convicted of crimes that pose little or no risk of violence like forging a check or receiving stolen property if the amount involved is worth less than $950 dollars (the existing dollar amount was set in the 1970s), or simple possession of drugs, would no longer end up in state prisons. Moreover, the law would allow prisoners currently under felony sentence for one of these crimes to be re-sentenced "unless court finds unreasonable public safety risk," a change that could result in as many as 10,000 fewer prisoners in our dangerously overcrowded and degrading state prisons.<br />
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The debate on Proposition 47 has mostly turned on how dangerous these crimes and the people who commit them are. Proponents, supported by most criminological research, argue that prison is a costly (approximately 62K a year for the average prisoner in California) and unnecessary way to address these non-violent crimes. Probation and if necessary some jail time have at least as good a chance of curbing future criminal behavior (our prisons have had a very high rate of recidivism and make no effort at rehabilitation) and with lower costs fewer prisoners means more money that Proposition 47 would channel into law enforcement, drug treatment, and victim compensation. Opponents, most of the state's District Attorneys, claim that the law would weaken their ability to send truly dangerous people who have been convicted of a relatively minor crime to state prison and use the threat of state prison to compel less dangerous people to accept drug treatment as part of felony probation (probation is also an option for many of these non-violent, non-serious felonies, at least for first offenders). <br />
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But the real issue is not crime (which remains at historically low levels throughout California); it is mass imprisonment. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, California embraced prison as the answer to what was then a historically high level of crime in the state and began to swell its prison population from around 20,000 prisoners in 1975 to nearly 180,000 in 2006. (This was a national trend but California took a typically extreme approach, read more about the causes in chapter 2 of <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/mass-incarceration-on-trial">Mass Incarceration on Trial)</a>. This explosion in prisoners was a product of two different changes in sentencing. First (and the part that Proposition 47 addresses) prosecutors began using their discretion to seek state prison time for crimes that could be charged as misdemeanors and had been historically. This meant tens of thousands of people with relatively short prison sentences flooded our prisons and clogged (along with tens of thousands of technical parole violators) the reception centers where prisoners are supposed to be classified and assigned longer term housing but which instead became packed irregular wards with overcrowding approaching 300 percent of design capacity. Second, law makers (aided by the Determinate Sentence Law of 1976 which gave the legislature power to set prison sentences) lengthened the sentences of most felony crimes, especially violent crimes. This meant that tens of thousands of prisoners who in the past would have left prison as they aged out of serious criminal behavior (generally by 40), remained in prison into and in many cases beyond middle age, when chronic illness begins to generate increasing suffering and costs. <br />
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The inability to manage these mounting problems of overcrowding and health care led to the remarkable 2011 decision of the Supreme Court in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCwQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=839GVODSM7DPiALSyIGgCg&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=9YyUwkcrh3I_NIktTMPHAQ&bvm=bv.77880786,d.cGE">Brown v. Plata</a> to uphold a massive population reduction. The State responded with the realignment package in November 2011 that sent most people convicted of non-serious, non-sexual, non-violent felonies to county jail or probation rather than prison. Proposition 47 expands realignment by taking the least serious of these offenses out of the felony category altogether. That is important because even under realignment, courts can sentence people to years of incarceration (only in county jail rather than state prison); classifying these low level crimes as misdemeanors assures that they have a better chance of receiving probation and caps any jail sentence at 1 year. Moreover, felony convictions on your record make it much more likely that you will go to state prison for your next offense. Eliminating minor offenses that do not warrant the felony label makes that kind of criminal record enhancement inherently fairer and more objective. It is also important because the label felon continues to have important negative consequences that last years or even decades for employment, housing, and social benefits. Conviction of a felony makes it much harder for people to rebound from crime and punishment to become productive citizens.<br />
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Another important group of prisoners that Proposition 47 might help are those who are serving an enhanced "second strike" sentence under the original 3-Strikes law (which had the effect of adding 10 years to the sentence for any felony if the person was convicted of a violent or serious felony previously) but who were not aided by the last 3-Strikes reform (which applied to 3-strikers). This could involve relief for thousands of existing prisoners facing years more imprisonment; helping the state meet its <i>Brown v. Plata</i> obligations with little risk to public safety.<br />
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Beyond helping to directly reduce the number of people actually in prison or exposed to it for minor crimes, the most important feature of a significant victory for Proposition 47 is the signal it sends that the toxic crime politics of the 1980s and 1990s is truly behind us. In those decades a media frenzy about violent crime produced ballot initiatives that pushed crime policy significantly toward the extreme, leaving politicians scrambling to catch up with matching legislation. If Proposition 47 wins it will be the second election cycle in a row in which voters have signaled they want more reform than Sacramento can deliver. Voters are correct. Today's leading politicians in both parties are talking about reform, but their vision is so cautious that we are unlikely to escape mass incarceration through legislated reform alone. <br />
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So far polls suggest Proposition 47 could win handily, even in an election cycle expected to be weak for younger more liberal voters. Prosecutors and victim organizations tightly aligned with law enforcement are kicking up their opposition. The opposition argument comes down to two points, trust and fear. Prosecutors say "trust me" with the discretion to use felony power even on minor crimes and I'll find the truly dangerous criminals before they commit a bigger offense. That was the argument for Three-Strikes (the classic example of toxic crime politics at its worst) and voters are rejecting it now. Instead opponents are increasingly relying on a second tactic, fear, bringing up demonized examples of offenders who might "benefit" from the changes. Two key examples are people caught in possession of rape drugs and people caught in possession of stolen weapons. Assuming the street values of the drugs and the guns were below $950, the possessors could no longer be charged with felonies. Big deal. First of all police and prosecutors have many options in charging. If someone is possessing rape drugs with the intent of raping someone, that is the crime of attempted rape. If someone is in possession of stolen weapons, they may also be guilty of a burglary in which they stole the weapons. Prosecutors will say that it is difficult to convict people of serious crimes, and much easier to use possession offenses to go after the bad guys. But that is exactly the thinking that got us into mass incarceration and what we have to use the initiative system to escape. Besides, Proposition 47 leaves plenty of of "protection" in place. The reduction to misdemeanor status does not apply to people previously convicted of murder, rape, or certain sexual and gun crimes (many of the same folks the prosecutors are demonizing). Moreover, misdemeanor conviction allows for probation or a sentence of up to a year in a county jail, methods address criminal behavior at least as effectively as imprisonment.<br />
<br />
Approving Proposition 47 is a simple and effective way for voters to take another step in leading California away from the moral precipice of mass incarceration. We cannot trust Jerry Brown or the legislature to remove the taint of barbarism that hangs over a prison system that the Supreme Court declared "uncivilized." Brown gave us the law enforcement friendly Determinate Sentencing Law in 1976 which helped speed mass incarceration in California, and he has now aligned himself with protecting the status quo in our prisons. While his re-election is inevitable, voters cannot wait another four years for leadership on restoring dignity and human rights to California's legal system. We will need to do more. With half of California's prisoners now serving death, life without parole, life with parole, or multi decade determinate sentences our prisons are rapidly becoming even more degrading and expensive as they concentrate on aging prisoners with little hope. Incarcerating the vast majority of these older, sicker prisoners makes no penal sense and will continue to limit the availability of tax revenues to solve the state's pressing environmental and educational needs. To change that we will need an initiative to roll back sentences on violent crime. Yes, you read me right, we need shorter sentences for violent crimes. The vast majority of people convicted of an offense against the person (what California's penal code calls violent crimes) are no more likely to commit such an act in the future than those who have not been convicted but come from the same social circumstances and situation. Most violence is situational, ignited by complex combinations of conflicts, propensities and accelerants like drugs and alcohol. For the few that have a long term propensity to violence, proper risk assessment and the use of some indeterminacy in our sentencing laws for violent crime could allow for selective incapacitation. There are far better ways to spend money on reducing violence than incarcerating aging prisoners who once did something violent. But for now few even in the anti-mass incarceration community are ready to take on that fight. Please join me.<br />
<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-47925856996401275582014-09-18T10:53:00.002-07:002014-09-18T12:57:13.137-07:00Carceral Geographies: Mapping the escape routes from mass incarceration<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Today and tomorrow (September 8-19) at UC Berkeley we will be
launching </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">a new undergraduate “<a href="http://coursethreads.berkeley.edu/">course thread</a>” titled “<a href="http://coursethreads.berkeley.edu/course-threads/carceral-geographies">Carceral Geographies</a>”. Our launch will begin with a keynote address by the great <a href="http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Core-Bios/Ruth-Wilson-Gilmore">Ruth “Ruthie”Wilson Gimore</a>, scholar/activist extraordinaire who has given us the definitive
study of California’s descent into mass incarceration, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gulag-Opposition-Globalizing-California/dp/0520222563">Golden Gulags: Prisons,Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California</a> (UC Press 2007). </span>Gilmore’s address, (which I’ll be <a href="https://twitter.com/JonathanSimon59">tweeting</a>) titled “The Present and Future of California Prisons” will take place today,
September 18th, 5:00pm to 7:00pm, Dwinelle Hall, Room 370, on the UC Berkeley
campus (all are welcome).<br />
<br />
Course threads are intended to encourage Berkeley students
to integrate their knowledge of particularly important contemporary themes
across the disciplines they study. They
do not replace majors (like Sociology, Physics, or German) or create a “minor”
(which are generally also disciplinary), instead a course thread is a way for
students to deepen their knowledge of a subject whose pervasive influence on
human life spills-over the boundaries of existing disciplines and
professions. The “thread” connects
existing courses (and we hope their faculty and Graduate Student
Instructors). Students who complete
three courses in a thread, and participate in a course threads <a href="http://coursethreads.berkeley.edu/course-threads-symposium">symposium</a> (offered each semester), will have the course thread noted on their official
university transcript.<br />
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<br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Incarceration belongs among those
topics.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After several decades of rising
imprisonment rates (and the aggressive policing, prosecution, and jailing that
is required to produce that), Americans live in an environment that is
unmistakably carceral. While its most violent aspects are highly concentrated
in communities of color and poverty, the carceral imperatives has touched
virtually all communities.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Whether you
live in a high crime neighborhood with many abandoned buildings, open air drug
markets, and regular police actions, a “gated community” in the suburbs, or a
newly gentrifying neighborhood on the periphery of a revitalizing downtown, the
forms of life, ways of building and dwelling, ways of exercising power, are
marked by America’s experiment with mass incarceration which has placed 1
percent of American men in prison (10 percent of African American men), more
than 3 percent of the American population in some form of correctional custody,
and by some estimates, as many as 1 in 3 Americans have their names in
searchable police and court records.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This calls for a perspective on
incarceration that goes beyond the prison to study the institutions of criminal
justice, the form and structure of the urban (and increasingly rural)
environment, the history of America’s obsession with confining and or excluding
threatening “others” (indigenous peoples, immigrants, the psychiatrically
disabled among others), the biology of chronic illnesses that are deepened by
prolonged exposure to incarceration.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We
think “carceral geographies”, although framed initially by geographers (itself
a very broad “discipline”), fits the scope of this problem.</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Students will explore a range of
foundational questions including: How do we understand the historical and
juridical relationship between carcerality and conceptions of human being? How
do the domains of carcerality move across a range of global sites and scales?
How does this relationship inform concepts of time, place, culture, policy,
etc.? How have artists, scholars, and activists, including those who have
experienced incarceration, produced representations of, knowledge about,
and challenges to carceral life?</blockquote>
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<o:p>This moment is right to raise these questions also because of the historic and contemporary importance of Berkeley and the Bay Area as a hub for students, faculty, and activists engaged in contesting mass incarceration. The growing body of formerly incarcerated students and (soon) faculty at Berkeley and other leading institutions are at the core of this intellectual in-gathering and the opportunity it offers to understand and overcome this dire period in our common American history. Just as California has been the Mississippi of mass incarceration (see chapter 2 of <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/mass-incarceration-on-trial">Mass Incarceration on Trial</a>), California's premier public university should be the leading national center of research, resistance, and restorative justice work.</o:p><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The kind of synthetic thinking that
a course thread invites is particularly critical at this moment when signs of
change are everywhere and yet evidence of mass incarceration shape shifting and
hardening into the American landscape is undeniable.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Compared with the mid 1990s, when a broad
consensus on expanding extreme punishments (life imprisonment, the death
penalty) for felons that were perceived as threatening every corner of America,
including its supposedly safe suburbs (remember Polly Klass), the climate of political
discussion has changed dramatically. Decriminalizing or even legalizing soft
drugs like cannabis, and ending routine incarceration for even dealers in hard
drugs has become politically acceptable, while a wide range of political
leaders call for strategies to reduce our reliance on incarceration for public
safety (read Barry Krisberg's contemporaneous article <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766824">here</a>, may require library id).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">For three years, from 2009 to
2013, the nation’s prison population actually dropped in absolute numbers as
releases crept over admissions. At the same time, powerful narratives of the imperative
to incarcerate “violent”, “sexual”, and “serious” crime remain fully active
despite a dramatic drop in violent crime since the 1990s.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">These terms, are inextricably embedded in
racial meanings that are likely both historical and cognitive in operation,
which means a carceral geography refocused on repressing crimes of these types
will produce the same kinds of degrading policing, prosecution and imprisonment
that we have now (only slightly smaller in scale).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We do not even have confidence that the
latter point will be true.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In 2013, according
to the federal government’s latest <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5110">statistics</a> (the prison population ticked up by
a fraction (thanks to immigration based population growth our incarceration
rate, prison population compared to overall national population, continued to
tilt down). </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The struggle to overcome mass
incarceration and its pervasive effects on the US population and landscape will
take a generation or more, and it will require large numbers of active citizens
with a commitment to see the job done.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Those citizens will need not a broad toolkit of analytical frames and
historical insights to address not just mass incarceration as it exists today but
in the myriad of forms it is likely to take as the current crisis of legitimacy
either deepens or stabilizes (its is already shape shifting before our very eyes).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">This years marks the 50</span><sup style="text-indent: 0.5in;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
anniversary of the year Civil Rights as a social movement triumphed in its half
century long quest to outlaw “Jim Crow” segregation with the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, today the major platform for equal rights in employment,
education, housing and commerce.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Segregation
quickly lost its defenders, and its public narratives.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What remained however were pervasive patterns
of residential and employment segregation that has tended to reproduce
itself.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Today we live with far higher
levels of segregation than activists would have settled for in 1964.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I’m not counting on being there, but I invite
readers to hold this moment accountable in 2034, or 2064, did we end mass
incarceration or did it simply shift its shape, reframe its narratives, and
morph into a new carceral normal?</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment-->Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-79447278362884630272014-08-26T11:06:00.001-07:002014-08-26T11:06:55.093-07:00Ferguson and Human DignityMichael Brown was buried yesterday (August 25, 2014) in St. Louis, near his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri. As the world knows by now, two weeks ago the eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate was shot six times and killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Michael Brown was unarmed, and the reasons for Officer Wilson’s actions have yet to be publicly explained. In a recent <a href="http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/?p=2455">post</a>, Professor <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/justicestudies/our-department/our-people/f-s/degiorgi-a/">Alessandro De Giorgi</a> of San Jose State University (and editorial board member of <a href="http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/">Social Justice</a>) puts those still unclear facts into the very clear context of what he aptly describes as the “complex penal machinery that has gradually colonized the US public space—from schools to university campuses, from urban centers to gated communities, from shopping malls to public transportation systems.” As De Giorgi argues, deaths like Michael Brown’s are routine in the age of mass incarceration. The protests in Ferguson this month have helped a great deal to broaden public knowledge and media recognition of how that “penal machinery” looks and feels to minority citizens in America. But as De Giorgi would insist, the future will look a lot like the present unless the larger structure upholding a war on segregated minority neighborhoods is brought to an end.<br />
<br />
Short of outright defeat by the enemy (always unlikely in asymmetrical conflicts), wars end when the moral legitimacy that underwrites the mass complicity required in any modern bureaucratic society collapses. Images of human suffering and human fragility play a big a role in creating such moments of delegitimation. For my generation, the news photograph of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road to escape burning napalm behind her seared our consciences and will remain with us until our death. The photograph taken by AP photographer Nick Ut outside Trang Bang, Vietnam, in June 1972 (read about the photograph of the “napalm girl” <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/06/the-historic-napalm-girl-pulitzer-image-marks-its-40th-anniversary/">here</a>) embodied the war’s illogic and cruelty for a growing majority unwilling to consent in its prosecution. Napalming little girls to prevent even something as feared as communism from emerging in South Vietnam came to seem intolerable to all kinds of Americans who were not in any way radical. Although we do not always name them as such, moments when the organized violence of war is delegitimized are moments when human dignity emerges and becomes a counterbalance to the trust in authorities and the bureaucratic layers that separate the organized violence of war from its alleged beneficiaries. It is in these moments that people start demanding change.<br />
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Perhaps the most searing images out of Ferguson are the many captured by cell phone cameras and videos that show the uncovered body of Michael Brown, already dead, lying with his terrible wounds exposed for more than four hours on a hot summer day (read the NYTimes article on the treatment of the body <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html?_r=0">here</a>). In the aftermath of Michael Brown's funeral, it is fitting to recall how fundamental the treatment of dead bodies is to the humanity of those bodies and the decency of the society controlling them. Funerals, which are routine even for those who place little faith in religion, are a great expense in money and emotions, and seem to serve no practical goal. Searching for utilitarian rationales, we can see their function as allowing psychological or emotional healing. And this is because of something more fundamental: the human dignity that inheres even in a body from which life has departed. This human dignity, which outlasts life, demands respect for the body. The failure of the Ferguson Police Department and their colleagues to accord Michael Brown’s body that respect communicated in the most explicit way their failure to see his humanity. Nor was this a context that allowed degrading behavior to be overlooked by the vast majority. Whatever happened moments earlier, Michael Brown was no cop-killer; he was a victim with six bullet wounds in him, some of them terrible. Like the horrific photographs of lynchings, the exposure of the abused and killed body is as shocking as the death itself. The failure of those police officers to cover Michael and his wounds was an affront to both his human dignity and to the fundamental decency of our society.<br />
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Mass incarceration and the penal machinery that operates in segregated neighborhoods all over America has long enjoyed a low visibility that has allowed its fundamental inhumanity and basic lack of decency to be ignored by key institutions necessary to American democracy—journalists, courts, and ultimately popular expression of non-consent. In my recent book, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html?_r=0">Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of American Prisons</a>, I discuss the role that images of suffering and chaos in California prisons played in compelling the Supreme Court to uphold a radical order to reduce prison population. Like the images of Ferguson, those photographs of suffering prisoner bodies only do the work of delegitimation when viewers can acknowledge the humanity of those depicted. They work against the odds of enormous cultural prejudgment that authorizes violence against “dangerous” others, especially young male black and brown bodies or anyone convicted of a felony.<br />
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The control bureaucracies, which find themselves on the defensive at such moments, have powerful discursive resources to dehumanize those whose suffering might otherwise end our complicity. Violent crime, especially when it can be linked to minorities, has been a crucial locus of mobilizing popular consent to the wars on crime and drugs since the 1970s. Images of looting and claims of violence in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 shut down a cycle of growing sympathy for people trapped in New Orleans and outrage at the Bush Administration’s clear indifference to their fate. That has not happened this time. Neither the images of looting and violence nor the video showing Michael Brown stealing cigars and shoving a store clerk has stalled the cycle of sympathy and outrage that continues to resonate from Ferguson.<br />
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Human dignity arose on the streets of Ferguson, hovering over Michael Brown’s body, growing ever larger as that body was degraded in the hot sun. Not his soul or his ghost, but the specter of the humanity he shared with all of us. May Michael Brown rest in peace. May Michael Brown’s proper funeral in St. Louis bring comfort to his family and friends. May the specter of human dignity walk the streets of Ferguson for a long time, forcing all of us to decide whether we wish to belong to a decent society.<br />
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Cross Posted from <a href="http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/?p=2491">Social Justice</a>Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-51895007759447169752014-07-29T07:59:00.001-07:002014-07-29T07:59:18.136-07:00Inhumanity: The Real Problem with Mass Incarceration<div class="MsoNormal">
We may disagree on who belong and who does not belong in
prison, or on how long prison sentences should be, or what goals those
sentences should be meted out to accomplish those goals, but one thing we
should not, must not disagree on, is that those prisons should be humane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is humane?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Humane means, treating a person consistently
with their status as a human being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
other words, recognizing their humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As I argue in my new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Incarceration-Trial-Remarkable-Decision/dp/1595587691">Mass Incarceration on Trial: A RemarkableCourt Decision and the Future of Prisons in America</a>, the real problem with the
prisons of mass incarceration in America is precisely that they are inhumane
and incapable of respecting human dignity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This core reality of mass imprisonment came to light in an agonizing
slow series of cases that began in the early 1990s with two law suits
challenging<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>California’s treatment of
prisoners with psychiatric disabilities resulting in sweeping orders to reform
both California’s notorious Pelican Bay supermax prison, and to reform mental
health care and suicide in prisons throughout the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It continued in 1999 with a lawsuit arguing
that the same indifference to the suffering of prisoners gripped by disease was
true for physical illnesses and injuries as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, in 2011, the Supreme Court upheld
the largest prison population reduction suit in history, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Plata">Brown v. Plata</a> 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011), in
order to allow adequate medical and mental health care to be finally
established.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Brown decision, although broad
in its demand that prisons respect human dignity, focused in deep detail on
California’s degrading prisons and chronic-hyper overcrowding.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The question remains, is California an
outlier? Is the problem mass incarceration or badly managed mass
incarceration?</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Recent media coverage
from around the country, possibly sparked by the <u>Brown v. Plata</u> case, is
bringing to light remarkably similar problems around the country.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The plight of prisoners with significant
psychiatric disabilities is a ubiquitous feature of this national problem.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The very presence of such prisoners is a
clear sign that the legal system (not just prisons) do not treat people
convicted of felonies as individuals with particular circumstances and features
that condition both their crimes and the kind of prison time they are likely to
do, rather they are imprisoned indiscriminately on whole categories of people
(that’s the mass in mass incarceration).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Their treatment in prison is a sign of something else, a prison order
based on war model where prisoners are an enemy force to be contained or if necessary
crushed.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In a powerful example of such
documentation Erica Goode in the NYTimes tells the story of Charles Toll, a 33
year old man suffering from diabetes and serious psychiatric disabilities, who
died of asphyxiation after a “cell extraction” from a supermax cell in a
Tennessee state prison (read the article </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/us/when-cell-door-opens-tough-tactics-and-risk.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">here</a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, one of a series titled “Locked
In” intended to document prison conditions nationally).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Toll had sprayed correctional officers with
an unknown liquid (prisoners in supermax cells have been known to “gas”
correctional officers with a mixture of urine and feces) and correctional
officers had decided to perform a “cell extraction.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Outside the door of his solitary confinement cell at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution here, five corrections officers in riot gear lined up, tensely awaiting the order to go in. When it came, they rushed into the small enclosure, pushing Mr. Toll to the floor and pinning him down with an electrified shield while they handcuffed him and shackled his legs.</blockquote>
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Such operations are not the exception. They are routines.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In some institutions, extraction is viewed as a last resort. Training emphasizes the need to defuse the situation in other ways if possible, and extractions are tightly supervised. Special care is taken when mentally ill inmates are involved.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But in many facilities, training is minimal, supervision is lax and forcible removals are conducted reflexively, with little or no attempt at alternate solutions. Corrections officers who are so inclined can easily turn the process into a vehicle for beatings or other prisoner abuse.</blockquote>
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More importantly it is deeply embedded in the logic of mass imprisonment. The very same issues and behaviors were the subject of <u>Madrid v. Gomez</u> 889 F. Supp. 1146 (1995) in which a federal judge found such indiscriminate and violent cell extractions and keeping prisoners with serious mental illnesses in supermax conditions both cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment. Despite the fact that courts in other parts of the country have agreed with Madrid, it is clear that state prisons continue to ignore the constitution. Why?<br />
<br />
The story of Charles Toll highlights a number of features of mass incarceration that are endemic to it and which tend to reproduce themselves across the country.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Prisons incarcerate lots of people with serious psychiatric disabilities. These disabilities are probably largely responsible for their crimes but prison regimes do not treat these problems, but rather deny and ignore them.</li>
<li>Prisons rely on supermax units (where prisoners are isolated from all programming and other prisoners and let out of their cell only one hour or two a week for showers or exercises), not just for “worst of the worst,” but as a routine tool to “manage” recalcitrant prisoners.</li>
<li>Prisons generate and exacerbate, chronic illnesses, physical ones like diabetes, and mental ones like schizophrenia, depression, or bi-polar disorder. That did not make much of a difference in the past when prison sentences mainly went to young and relatively fit men, and were for the most part short. Today, when prisoners are older and in worst physical shape, and prison sentences last far longer, prisons are becoming engines of disease. For the individual this can mean a lifetime of deeper illness and suffering (what I call “torture on the installment plan”). For the government, which after the Affordable Care Act has become responsible for financing the health care of the poor in America which includes most of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, this an explosive source of cost inflation.</li>
<li>Prison officers do not view themselves as involved in rehabilitation (despite the label correctional officer), or even protection of prisoners, but instead in a tense containment of an enemy mass that can degenerate into lawless war at any time. The only form of recognition that is routinely given to prisoners as individuals tends to be directed at humiliation. This is not a result of hiring sadistic, but a predictable result of operating prisons. Research since the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” has shown that custody regimes predictably turn “guards” and “inmates” into enemy armies highly motivated to hurt and humiliate each other unless systematic steps are taken to counter act that tendency.</li>
</ul>
These features frequently lead to torture-like conditions when combined with the chronic illnesses (both mental and physical) they give rise to, and make it impossible for prisons to respect the human dignity of prisoners or of the correctional officers. They lead to the conclusion that mass incarceration itself, that is policies which indiscriminately send people prison based on crime or criminal record with out individual consideration, is unconstitutional. Human dignity, according to the Supreme Court majority in <u>Brown v. Plata,</u> “animates the Eighth Amendment.” It is clear that the kinds of conditions described in this and many stories violate the constitution, but it will take innumerable lawsuits and decades of litigation to enforce that individually. Instead we badly need a national commitment to restoring humanity to our prisons. At a minimum that will require reducing the chronic overcrowding that exists in more states than not, by dismantling the web of state laws that indiscriminately send people to prison and which extend prison sentences beyond all rational penal purposes despite the grave risk of prolonged incarceration on mental and physical health.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
</blockquote>
Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-7080912586615064252014-07-17T10:19:00.003-07:002014-07-19T09:45:44.702-07:00Life in Prison with the Remote Possibility of Death: The Death Penalty and California's Broken Punishment ParadigmJudge Carney's 39 page opinion finding California's death penalty is already setting off a wave of debate in the media. We will see yet whether it catches any political fire in this dry but so far politically placid season in California. There is much to recommend in the opinion (read it <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-death-penalty-federal-judge-experts-20140717-story.html">here</a> courtesy of the LA Times). At its core is an unassailable principle of contemporary 8th Amendment law, that a sanction as severe as death cannot be administered arbitrarily. The constitutional basis of the contemporary death penalty is that the statutes "narrow" the realm of death eligible crimes so that a rational basis existed for distinguishing those convicted of murder and sentenced to death and those convicted of a similar murder and given life. Judge Carney reviewed California's system that has handed out around 900 death sentences, but only executed 13 people, and concluded that the system was unconstitutionally arbitrary because no rational basis exists distinguishing those actually executed from many not, and likely never, executed. His conclusion, summarized in our title quote, is that a death sentence in California is actually a sentence to "Life in Prison with the remote possibility of death." That is not what the Supreme Court decisively upheld as constitutional back in the 1970s (see Gregg v Georgia 428 U.S. 153, 188 (1976))<br />
<br />
The Judge also turned to an analysis of the purposes of punishment that is increasingly central to 8th Amendment analysis of both death and long prison sentence cases. Clear Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that only two (deterrence and retribution) of the four classical purposes of punishment (those plus rehabilitation and incapacitation) can justify the death penalty. Why? In a nutshell, long prison sentences can deliver as much rehabilitation and incapacitation as death, so if such a severe sanction can be justified on penal grounds it must be on deterrence (scare potential offenders) and retribution (satisfy community/victim outrage at a particularly heinous murder). Here few will argue with Judge Carney's bottom line argument that whatever deterrent or retributive value executions might have in a system (Texas? Virginia?) that delivered them more efficiently and effectively (of course those systems may violate other constitutional rights in order to achieve high execution rates, probably do), California, where delay between sentence and execution (if it ever occurs) is around 25 years, cannot deter or deliver retributive justice.<br />
<br />
Proponents of the death penalty are and will argue that the delay argument is flawed because the system can be fixed to speed up executions. This is the crux of Judge Carney's analysis. <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
California’s death penalty system is so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay that the death sentence is actually carried out against only a trivial few of those sentenced to death. Of the more than 900 individuals that have been sentenced to death since 1978, only 13 have been executed. For every one inmate executed by California, seven have died on Death Row, most from natural causes. The review process takes an average of 25 years, and the delay is only getting longer. Indeed, no inmate has been executed since 2006, and there is no evidence to suggest that executions will resume in the reasonably near future. Even when executions do resume, the current population of Death Row is so enormous that, realistically, California will still be unable to execute the substantial majority of Death Row inmates. In fact, just to carry out the sentences of the 748 inmates currently on Death Row, the State would have to conduct more than one execution a week for the next 14 years. Such an outcome is obviously impossible for many reasons, not the least of which is that as a result of extraordinary delay in California’s system, only 17 inmates currently on Death Row have even completed the post-conviction review process and are awaiting their execution. See Appendix A. For all practical purposes then, a sentence of death in California is a sentence of life imprisonment with the remote possibility of death—a sentence no rational legislature or jury could ever impose.</blockquote>
Those who insist that California could have a "normal" death penalty (whatever that means) quickly enough has to address Judge Carney's assessment of the overall system (which includes the paralyzed legislative politics around capital punishment) and its incapacity. More importantly, those prisoners who have already served more than twenty-five years have an excellent argument that whatever might be true in the future, to execute them now after being degraded or even tortured by decades of uncertainty violates the Eighth Amendment.<br />
<br />
Judge Carney's opinion now joins the 3-Judge court opinion on California's mass incarceration system upheld by the Supreme Court in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=IQDIU-CXONbqoASMo4HIBQ&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=NMLoVfcrOZzbeoT4ZcfLuA&bvm=bv.71198958,d.cGE">Brown v. Plata</a> (2011) in condemning not the means of punishment but the political system in California whose highly politicized and inconsistent crime policies has produced forms of both capital punishment and imprisonment that violate the Eighth Amendment and offend human dignity. California, the homeland of governing through crime for decades, needs not just realignment and a repeal of capital punishment, it needs a re-boot of a fundamentally broken justice paradigm (for further details of what might replace it see the last chapter of my new book <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/mass-incarceration-on-trial">Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America</a> (New Press) out next month)<br />
<br />
It is not clear this case will ever be reviewed by the Supreme Court (because the facts are so California specific it is unlikely to establish a precedent for other states), but the question whether even to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals provides <a href="http://kamalaharris.org/">Attorney General Kamala Harris</a>, who has already distinguished herself as having a pro-active system view of California's justice problems, to make the case to Californian's that Judge Carney (appointed by President George W. Bush) is right and California's current law does not deserve a defense in the appeals court. An opponent of capital punishment who has both pragmatic and principled reasons to be reluctant to impose her views on California voters who remain highly divided, she could invite the legislature and citizen initiative groups to propose new capital statutes and put them before the voters. The backlash at converting existing death row inmates to life without parole will be brief, and easily answered by Judge Carney's findings that almost none of them faced an actual likelihood of execution (one suspects it will be further muted once word of massive unhappiness among the current occupants of death row at being transferred into California's degrading prison system will further allay political damage to the Attorney General from pro-death penalty voters).Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-10127277463110490562014-04-30T08:23:00.001-07:002014-04-30T09:10:22.058-07:00A Botched ExecutionTo "botch" something is to carry out a task "badly or carelessly." Oklahoma's botched execution Tuesday, April 29, 2014, demonstrated that word in its absolute in-glory. (read the New York Times account <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/us/oklahoma-executions.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0">here</a>). Badly? Executions always cause at least psychological pain. Even if everything goes perfectly, the physical pains involved in injecting the drugs may not be trivial either, especially when stripped of its normal healing association and replaced by the grimmest. Still, an execution can be carried out badly in countless ways when it causes <u>additional</u> anxiety, humiliation, and physical pain. The execution of Clayton Lockett as witnessed by reporters was badly done in just this sense. Prison officials said Lockett's vein "exploded." Lockett was seen to writhe and shake uncontrollably, attempted to rise up from the gurney to which he had minutes earlier been completely strapped down, and cried out "man"; all after execution officials had announced him unconscious. Officials apparently blamed the condition of Lockett's veins and further investigation is promised, but these events are extreme for executions in the modern era and fully profile the case that defense lawyers have been making for years that lethal injections in some cases can amount to torture.<br />
<br />
But where Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and the State's legislators wrote the book on botched is on the "carelessly" branch of the term. In their zeal to assure a supply of lethal chemicals to kill prisoners at a time when supplies have become scarce due to international revulsion at American capital punishment, Oklahoma politicians passed a law shielding the sources of the execution drugs and adamantly refused defense requests for information about their origins. When the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (the state's highest court for criminal appeals) refused to stay the execution despite a lower court having found that Lockett's had right to information about the drugs, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which has no regular jurisdiction over criminal appeals, stepped in to issue a highly unusual stay in the interests of justice, only to retreat after the Governor and legislature furiously attacked the jurists, threatening to ignore their decision and impeach them as well. <br />
<br />
Not content with having bullied the courts out of the way, and eager to show how trivial defense concerns about the execution drugs were, Governor Fallin ordered a double execution, a rarity in the modern era and the first in Oklahoma since 1937. Executions, even when they are not botched, exact a horrible toll on remaining prisoners (both those on death row and in the general population) and on prison staff. A double execution is a heinous act of cruelty on the entire prison system which was motivated by the unseemly rush to see executions carried out before courts could fully examine the defense arguments that these lethal chemicals might cause extreme pain to Clayton Lockett and other condemned prisoners. <br />
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Careless is not just bad, in a real sense, its evil. You can do something badly for a lot of reasons (often conflicting interests or roles) but to do it carelessly is to do it without care. When we say that carpenter was "careless" in building a stair case that collapsed, or a designer was careless in designing an automobile that crashed, what we really mean is that they did their task without caring about the humanity of those who would walk on the stairs or drive the car. Governor Mary Fallin and Oklahoma officials rushed an execution without caring about the humanity of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner. In doing so they raised serious questions as to whether Oklahoma's death penalty inherently violates the Eighth Amendment which as been recently found to be animated by respect for human dignity. <br />
<br />
...And then they botched the execution.<br />
<br />
Austin Sarat shows in his just published (and incredibly timely) book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gruesome-Spectacles-Botched-Executions-Americas/dp/0804789169">Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty</a> (Stanford 2014) Oklahoma's botched execution may be textbook but it's not unique. Botched executions are persistent theme in America's capital punishment history, largely fueled by our national combination of uncertain respect for human dignity, and misplaced technological optimism.<br />
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By the way, the intensity of Oklahoma's leaders in their pursuit of retributive justice should be put in context of their general lack of interest in governing. The state ranks 44th in overall <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate">poverty</a>, 43 in <a href="http://www.ok.gov/health/Child_and_Family_Health/Improving_Infant_Outcomes/Infant_Mortality_in_Oklahoma/">infant mortality</a>, 47 for <a href="http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/cancer-death-rate-per-100000/">cancer mortality.</a><br />
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Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-71817806612538804092014-03-20T09:53:00.001-07:002014-03-20T10:47:54.049-07:00Dying Inside: Lifers, the Dying, and California's Correctional ParadigmBefore the hospice program started by prison chaplain Lorie Adolff, dying prisoners in California's state prison in San Luis Obsipo (California Mens Colony) just expired alone in their cells, with prison nurses looking in periodically until their vital signs ceased. Her project, Supportive Care Services, trains other prisoners, most of them lifers, to sit with and comfort dying prisoners. The hospice, featured this morning on KQED's California Report (listen to it <a href="http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201403200850/d">here</a>), sounds deeply moving and likely a powerful healing experience for everyone involved. I have had the privilege of being at the bedside of the dying myself (my father) and I have no doubt that that small space is one of freedom and transcendence even in the midst of prison. It has been movingly described in the correctional setting before (see Ben Fleury Steiner, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Inside-Limestone-Meaning-Violence-ebook/dp/B002LE8JBA">Dying Inside</a>).<br />
<br />
Any bit of humanity and kindness is worth encouraging, but I hope the prison hospice is an idea that spreads fast enough to put itself out of existence. First, by underscoring the barbarity of California having a large stock of aging "lifers" fated to die in prison (perhaps alone at the prisons that do not have a Lorie Adolff on staff). There is no penological justification for allowing people to linger in prison long enough to die of old age after serving decades in many cases. Prison is, for the moment, our society's way of expressing moral outrage against heinous crimes and protecting the community against people with a habit of using violence to get their way, and spending a piece of your life in a humane prison may be considered justly deserved punishment for crimes that deprive other people of their lives or physical or mental integrity. But prison sentences must have limits to be rational and just and almost everyone agrees that California's years of penal populism led legislators and prosecutors to produce sentences that having little relationship to either moral desert or risk. <br />
<br />
Prison hospices might help eliminate themselves by driving home a different point. Prisoners experience change. Prisoners can change through the the kind of work described in the Supportive Care Services project in which they touch their own humanity. Prisoners also change through the processes of aging and recognizing the profound gifts of family, community, and freedom. Our current correctional was built on the premise that such change does not happen, but it happens constantly. Its the paradigm itself that remains caught in a kind of time warp, like a 1980s mainframe where the calendar is permanently locked on <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/EXIT-THE-DRAGON-It-s-been-30-years-since-George-2888071.php">September, 1971</a>.<br />
<br />
We now know that crimes are highly situational, contingent, dynamic events. The best way to reduce crime, even violent crime, is to identify and interrupt the spatial/temporal patterns of human activity that presage and promote violence. Prison does not do that (by and large, used precisely it might). Our current mass incarceration policies were baked into our correctional commonsense back in the 1970s (remember when lapels were wide and Jerry Brown was Governor). Back then most criminologists were throwing up their hands at any way to stop the escalating violent crime rate and some endorse increased prison sentences as the only hope. Crime went down long after prison populations skyrocketed and even the most supportive criminologists credit incarceration with no more than a quarter of the national crime drop that occurred in the 1990s. California's heavy investment in incapacitation has been particularly counter productive. Indeed, having abandoned rehabilitation and reentry, California allowed the formation and stabilization of a racist gang system in prisons that helps prevent prisoners from desisting from criminal lives and life styles. (Even the gangs have evolved as the recent peace calls and hunger strike suggest, and I currently rate the gangs and the correctional officer's union more ready for change than California's fear based correctional leadership). <br />
<br />
Prison hospice can indeed be a model for prison projects that breed a sense of humanity in everyone involved, which both prisoners and prison officers need to prevent dehumanization and demonization from setting in. But all prisoners need a realistic hope of life on the outside if prison is to be a truly humane and penitential place. Dying on the inside may happen, when arrangements cannot be made quickly enough for compassionate release or when a prisoner prefers to remain among close prison friends, but dying on the inside should be a rare and unfortunate event. Governor Brown, to his credit, has unblocked California's executive heavy parole process but it is still far too slow, too cautious, and a huge backlog remains. Far too many prisoners remain caught by long determinate sentences that do not allow for parole. Governor Brown, who faces no real challenge to a second term, should use his executive clemency powers to speedily move aging prisoners out of prisons, with those needing the most health care the first in line. This would help the state cope with the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDcQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=iB0rU-HZLYL1oASjjIG4DQ&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=bswsOzJo1TXZQVd_2zkxlg&bvm=bv.63316862,d.cGU">Brown v. Plata</a> medical and population orders and begin to create a climate of compassion and dignity in which the state might begin to revise its pointlessly punitive sentencing laws.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-64377680467350532542014-02-21T08:06:00.002-08:002014-02-21T08:06:41.436-08:00Abandoning a Failed Penal Experiment: New York's Historic AdvantageNew York has made it share of bad penal policy choices. Remember the "Rockefeller Drug Laws"; mandatory life sentences for persons arrested with large quantities of dangerous drugs that helped set the nation on the path toward indiscriminate use of incarceration? But the "Empire State" has also had a historic knack for getting out of bad penal positions early. The state began to wind down its position in mass incarceration as early as the mid-1990s, closing as many as 14 prisons, and in recent years has eliminated its mandatory drug laws. This week the state announced a sweeping settlement with the New York Civil Liberties Union that will bring major reforms aimed at reducing the state's use of isolation prison units (read the NYCLU statement <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/news/nyclu-lawsuit-secures-historic-reforms-solitary-confinement">here</a>). These units, common in the US, keep prisoners isolated full time, with no programming and no access to other prisoners or correctional staff. All too often, such isolation can continue for years and result in serious mental degeneration of the inmate. The New York settlement will eliminate the use of this kind of incarceration for juveniles and people with mental illness and begin an expert led process to reduce the state's use of isolation as a disciplinary tool, especially long term use. The experts, James Austin and Elton Vail, are two of the nation's best penologists and can be expected to seek dramatic reduction.<br />
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Interestingly New York's ability to pivot seems to have historic roots. I was just lecturing to my undergraduate course on prisons about the infamous experiment in solitary confinement at the outset of America's correctional history. Under the belief that separation of law breakers from society was essential to their reform, Jacksonian prison designers believed that total separation would be best of all. When New York opened its new cellular penitentiary at Auburn in 1821 it conducted an experiment. The prisoners deemed least redeemable (oldest and most hardened), were placed alone in cells day and night. Other prisoners were isolated in cells only at night, and worked together in workshops during the day. According to historian <a href="http://history.berkeley.edu/people/rebecca-m-mclennan">Rebecca McClennan</a> (in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Crisis-Imprisonment-1776-1941-Historical/dp/B007MXHC7C">The Crisis of Imprisonment</a>) the results of the experiment were clear within two years. The prisoners kept in total isolation were so mentally damaged that the public outrage led a new governor to pardon the prisoners and end the practice. New York's "congregate" model of common work became the national model for the 19th century. <br />
<br />
At around the same time Pennsylvania opened a total isolation prison in Philadelphia. Aware of Auburn's results, the designers in Philadelphia endeavored to provide the isolated prisoners with a larger cell in which to conduct some kind of distracting labor. The isolation regime there also resulted in mental degeneration according to its many critics (Charles Dickens among them), but the state stubbornly held on to its regime for another fifty years (the result of organizational factors my former student <a href="http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/faculty-ashley-rubin.php">Ashley Rubin</a> analyzed brilliantly in her dissertation "“Institutionalizing the Pennsylvania System: Organizational Exceptionalism, Administrative Support, and Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1875”).<br />
<br />
What makes New York so good at getting out of losing positions? Could it be the State's long association with the financial industry (which survives by being adept at getting out of losing positions with the least damage possible)? Is it the Empire State's corporatist style of consensus government as described by <a href="http://people.su.se/~vbark/">Vanessa Barker</a> in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=PMxSBl1pV6UC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=politics+of+imprisonment&source=bl&ots=0NcKhL7pgX&sig=eyJWfbkyzzyCmq6MueAbStnkUmQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=y3QHU7rsNdGGogSz_YDoAQ&ved=0CGkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=politics%20of%20imprisonment&f=false">The Politics of Imprisonment</a>? It would make a good research paper. Other states are moving. Just today, Colorado Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch published an op-ed in the New York Times (read it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/my-night-in-solitary.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=0">here</a>), reporting on a night he spent in one of his state's isolation cells, and why he is so motivated to wind down the state's use of the practice.<br />
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Sadly California seems destined to play Pennsylvania in the 21st century replay of the 1830s debate about solitary confinement. Under the administration of Governor Brown and Secretary of Corrections Beard, the Golden State has dug in its heels to defend the states typically outsized reliance on total isolation imprisonment. No state holds more of its prisoners for longer periods of time than California. And while most states use isolation as a penalty for specific disciplinary violations (albeit in New York sometimes very trivial ones), California makes gang affiliation the primary rationale for isolation on a longterm or permanent basis. A lawsuit has been mounted on behalf of prisoners held in isolation for more than ten years at the state's worst isolation unit, Pelican Bay's notorious SHU (read about it <a href="http://ccrjustice.org/pelican-bay">here</a>). Brown and Beard should follow New York's lead and seek to settle this lawsuit now with a broad strategy to end this shameful second era of solitary. Perhaps Secretary Beard should follow the example of his Colorado colleague and spend a night at Pelican Bay. While there he should sit down and talk with the gang leaders whose unified actions during last summer's hunger strike suggests more than worthy interlocutors, and whose lifetime isolation against all international human rights standards has clearly done little to make California prisons safer or less gang identified.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-449809466448864392014-02-06T09:44:00.002-08:002014-02-06T11:07:40.936-08:00From Humanity to Health: Why Can't California Get Prison Healthcare Right?Yesterday to no doubt considerable embarrassment in the Brown-Beard administration, admissions to California's newest prison near Stockton California, were halted by the court appointed health care receiver, law professor Clark Kelso. The prison, the first new facility in a decade, is the lynch-pin of the administration's frequent claim to have gotten on top of California's decades old prison health care crisis. The prison is the first of its kind to be purpose built to house and care for many of the state's seriously ill prisoners whose suffering in the grip the state's chronic overcrowding led the Supreme Court to describe the state's system as unfit for a civilized society in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=w8TzUseDAYPioASB54HQBA&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=ENmBOgqyhD-q49KbgkD6JQ&bvm=bv.60983673,d.cGU">Brown v. Plata</a> (2011). Under pressure to show that it can make progress in reducing that overcrowding, the administration is no doubt frustrated to have to halt adding inmates to the facility intended to hold nearly 1800 prisoners at full capacity, but Receiver Kelso's order and the report accompanied it raises more basic questions as to whether the State has yet drawn any lessons from its decades of human rights abuses about what it takes to operate prisons that respect human dignity as required by the Constitution (as well international human rights conventions to which the state is answerable through the courts of the United States).<br />
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So what went wrong in this brand new prison designed from the ground up to deliver health care? Problems with the radiation treatment equipment for cancer patients? Problems staffing the dialysis center? Actually the problems were a bit more basic. As reported in the Sacramento Bee (read it <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/05/6130729/admissions-halted-at-stockton.html">here</a>):<br />
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A shortage of towels forced prisoners to dry off with dirty socks; a shortage of soap halted showers for some inmates, and incontinent men were put into diapers and received catheters that did not fit, causing them to soil their clothes and beds, according to the inspection report and a separate finding by Kelso.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 22.5px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
The report also said there were so few guards that a single officer watched 48 cells at a time and could not step away to use the bathroom.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.454545021057129px; line-height: 22.5px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
Kelso said the problems at the facility call into question California's ability to take responsibility for prison health care statewide. He accused corrections officials of treating the mounting health care problems as a second-class priority, the newspaper said.</div>
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Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/05/6130729/admissions-halted-at-stockton.html#storylink=cpy</div>
</blockquote>
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Spokes persons for the administration described the situation as a normal glitch associated with the rolling out of a new facility. Perhaps. But it also looks like business as usual in a system where medical neglect of chronically ill prisoners went on for decades under the deliberate indifference of prison administrators and governors. Rather than apologize to the citizens of this state and seek to make amends to the prisoners, former prisoners, and correctional workers forced to experience and participate in those degrading conditions, the administration has continued with smugness to defend the status quo with an attitude that borders on contempt to the courts. Is it surprising that actors never held to account for their human rights violations cannot create conditions that respect human rights? Good healthcare takes medical professionals and modern infrastructure, which appear to be still lacking to a significant degree even in this brand new purpose built "Health Care Facility". But healthcare also takes humanity. A prison system that can't get that right, can 't run its healthcare system and shouldn't be allowed to continue to operate prisons on which the good name of the people of California is stamped.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-8584410540247435542014-01-08T09:41:00.001-08:002014-01-08T09:41:32.535-08:00From the War on Crime to World War Z: What the Zombie Apocalypse can Tell Us About the Current State of our Culture of FearZombies are everywhere. Ok not (yet) on the streets (so far as I know); but in our cultural imaginary they are everywhere. You can find them (in small groups and hordes) in high budget nail biting thriller movies like Brad Pitt's <i>World War Z</i> (2013), on television, and all over print and digital reading material, much of it spoofing both our literary and political histories (including Zombies in Jane Austen and Abraham Lincoln). For those of us engaged in probing America's culture of fear, and its highly toxic institutionalizations like mass incarceration and mass deportation zombies seem to be a potentially important proxy for the demons that haunt contemporary society, but what do they tell us? Actually, I think, quite a lot, and the news is mostly good.<br />
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First consider the ugly truth about zombies, at least the kind that have appeared in popular culture since1968's <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/">Night of the Living Dead</a></i>. Zombies form an undeniable symbolic stand in for the twin racialized fears that have helped fuel our punitive culture of control producing both mass incarceration and mass deportation. <br />
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One is fear of violent crime and riots, which were reaching one peak in 1968, and were mostly linked in the popular imaginary to African Americans (Director and co-writer George Romero may have subverted this by casting a black male as the heroic protagonist of the movie). While the riots mostly subsided, sustained high homicide rates in inner-city neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980, shaped an image of violent youth who did not respond to normal human incentives, some criminologists called them "super-predators" because zombie would have been to self parodying. The crack epidemic further crystalized this association with its imagery of stick like figures shambling toward anyone who could feed their craving. <br />
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The second image channeled by the contemporary zombie is that of the "illegal" or "undocumented" immigrant. Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fears of economic decline and national weakness fused with images of "out of control" illegal immigration. This has always had an undeniably racial cast, associated with migration from the South, Cuba, Mexico, Central and Southern America. <br />
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The zombie films from the 1ate 1960s through the 1980s played on and sometimes subverted the fears of suburban middle class Americans that their security and life style was under assault by predatory others whose claim on our humanity was both troubling and potentially treacherous. Raced without race, the undead took on the otherness that dared no longer be precisely named.<br />
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Therein the good news. The zombie genre is changing in directions that both suggest and support a shift away from the punitive culture of control. The fact that so much of the genre is now satire suggests and audience prepared to laugh its fears, with a sense of greater mastery. Even in its latest scary forms, like <i>World War Z </i>the zombie has morphed from drug deranged criminal or rioter to virus carrier. While this new medical model of the undead may not lead to a cure, it suggests, as those who have seen the movie know (no spoiler here), different ways of coping with them. <br />
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Indeed the author of the novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Mass-Market-Movie-Tie/dp/0770437400">World War Z</a> </i>has also written <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Zombie-Survival-Guide-Protection/dp/1400049628/ref=pd_sim_b_2">The Zombie Survival Guide</a> </i>which offers in its own way a scathing critique of the culture of control suggesting among other thing that:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Schools will make excellent positions from which to defend against a zombie attack because of their high level of anti-crime oriented security design and tall fencing.</li>
<li>Prisons, at least once the prison officers and prisoners have made common cause against the undead, are perhaps the best possible defensive location given their high fences (zombies can't climb) and we can thank mass incarceration for preparing a large number of such formidable redoubts.</li>
<li>SUV's only look formidable, but will turn into a zombie restaurant once they get stuck or run out of fuel, you are much better off on a bicycle or a motor cycle.</li>
<li>Apartments are much better for security than private homes (especially single story ones) which are inevitably penetrable and have fewer escape options or ready to hand neighbors to defend with.</li>
</ul>
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<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-89653356727831796712013-12-25T10:52:00.001-08:002013-12-25T21:18:16.604-08:00Yes Virginia, there is a death penalty: Reflections on the Christmas MoratoriumOn the 19th of December, the paper of record, the New York Times, ran a story discussing the lower number of executions (39) in 2013 than in a previous years; a trend that began sometime ago (read it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/us/in-death-penaltys-steady-decline-some-experts-see-a-societal-shift.html?_r=0">here</a>). The causes of this trend are complex and fascinating and worthy of more comment, but here I want to point out something else. How did the Times know on December 19th how many executions there would be in 2013? That still left more than ten days in 2013 and with more than 30 states with capital punishment still on the books, and more than 10 that regularly execute people, surely a last minute surge might have carried 2013 up and over the not much higher number of executions in 2012. <br />
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In fact some real problems with execution drug supplies might actually prevent a surge of executions but even a trickle might have done it but that isn't the reason either. The truth is that the Times and everyone who knows about capital punishment in America knows that in fact (although nowhere prescribed by law) there is in America (even in the most die hard death penalty states) a Christmas moratorium. Actually, I'm told it begins somewhat before Thanksgiving and lasts until after January 1.<br />
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But why? Surely if the story we tell ourselves about the death penalty is true this is a very strange outcome. If executing a murderer is a positive moral act which delivers necessary justice to the community and especially the victims, why don't we work up to the last minute on Christmas Eve executing the large backlog of prisoners under sentence of death who have exhausted their appeals? Hell, the states are not bound to obey federal work holidays and law enforcement operations continue round the clock generally, so why not executions?<br />
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Ok, so perhaps this is a concession to the families of the condemned. It can sure spoil your Christmas to be contemplating a son, brother, or father who was just strapped to a gurney and shot full of lethal chemicals by state officials acting at the behest of your community only a few days or hours earlier (indeed any death at or near Christmas is almost always considered an especially stiff blow in our culture). But what about the victim families? They have to spend every Christmas thinking about their murdered loved ones. Wouldn't giving them the first Christmas following the delivery of usually long promised execution of "justice", "closure" as it is approvingly called by everyone, be the best kind of Christmas present? Even if they don't outnumber the families of the condemned, it seems a strange that in almost every other thing respecting the death penalty we favor the families of the victims, why not here?<br />
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Is it because Jesus wouldn't like an execution, and, after all, its his birthday (observed)? Ok, I'm not a Christian, so I'll tread carefully here. From my reading of the New Testament I would have no problem coming to that conclusion (and he was after-all, executed himself); but a fair observer of our culture would have to conclude that real Christians as a community are split on the question of what Jesus would do about capital punishment.<br />
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The answer it seems to me is inescapable. Christmas, whether you are a Christian or not, is globally recognized and admired for the its message of celebrating humanity (of course many of my Jewish ancestors in the Russian Pale during the 19th century would have found this deeply ironic as a Christmas pogrom came down on them). The divinity of Jesus may be debatable, but the message that the dignity of divine creation is one embodied in humanity itself has become a central core of our international human rights tradition and deserves universal acceptance. It is a message that finds independent expression in Judaism, Islam, and most of the world religions. The death penalty is incompatible with recognizing the humanity of the person being executed and the humanity of the people who have to carry out the execution. That is the reason a Christmas moratorium (I almost wrote truce) is observed in Texas, Virginia, and everywhere in the United States. Whatever may have been true in 1789, or 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was adopted), in today's world what denies humanity is not a moral good. At Christmas, at least, we acknowledge that.<br />
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So Virginia, the hard truth is this. Santa Claus is a myth. That means its not true or false; it depends on beliefs and the cultural practices that give them life. If you woke up this morning and found presents under your tree Santa Claus does exist. The idea that executing people is a positive moral good, in contrast, is simply a lie; and the Christmas moratorium proves that everyone knows that.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-4979872724992047812013-12-23T09:16:00.000-08:002013-12-25T10:14:30.375-08:00Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation: Twin Legacies of Governing through CrimeOne afflicts mostly American citizens, disproportionately those of African American and Latino backgrounds from areas of concentrated poverty, but also many white and middle class citizens who fall into the hands of police and prosecutors. The other afflicts exclusively non-citizens living in the US without federal authorization, or in violation of the terms of their permission. One results in people being kept in prisons for years and decades at a time. The other often starts with detention that looks and feels a lot like imprisonment, and then culminates in the person's forcible removal from the US to a country in which they hold formal nationality but may have few or no connections and often face grave dangers. One is driven largely by state and local officials, with considerable encouragement and support from the federal government. The other is driven by the federal government, with considerable encouragement and support from state and local governments (although now also increasingly some opposition). One is considered punishment for crimes. The other is consider a civil action to protect the national integrity of the US. But despite these differences mass incarceration and mass deportation are off-spring of a common source, the US political system's broad turn toward race tinged fear, violence and coercion to govern American society since the 1970s (of what I call, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Through-Crime-Transformed-Democracy/dp/0195386019/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387817051&sr=8-1&keywords=governing+through+crime">governing through crime</a>"). What follows are some common features.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Both mass incarceration and mass deportation are rationalized on the basis that they are primarily necessary to keep Americans safe from violence. This persists despite the fact that violent crime metrics in most parts of American society are at the lowest level in decades, few criminologists believe that mass incarceration played a significant role in reducing violence, and almost no credible evidence exits linking non-citizens here without federal permission to violence (quite the contrary).</li>
<li>Both mass incarceration and mass deportation are forms of governing that operate on masses, groups, classes, and races, rather than individuals. They rely on racial profiling and rigid rules designed to remove the ability of judges or other officials to take individual and contextual circumstances into account.</li>
<li>Both mass incarceration and mass deportation (therefore) systematically deny the human dignity of the individuals their operations inevitably target, and result in conditions of confinement and forced removal that have been repeatedly found to violate human rights obligations of the United States under our Constitution and which also offend international treaties such as the <a href="http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a>, and the I<a href="http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx">nternational Covenant of Civil and Political Rights</a>.</li>
<li>Both mass incarceration and mass deportation deliver some of their most destructive effects on the family members of the individuals imprisoned or detained who find themselves denied parents, partners, and vital emotional and economic support despite having broken no laws. The spillover effects also diminish the freedom and dignity of whole communities whose residents must move through life with their heads over their shoulder looking out for police or immigration enforcement officers.</li>
<li>Both mass incarceration and mass deportation remain powerful engines of destruction, despite lack of current visible public support, and despite tremendous fiscal costs, largely because of political calculations that any deviation from rigid punitive policies will be risky, and the resistance of powerful financial interests with great lobbying ability to policy changes that would diminish the high profits they receive from servicing the imprisonment-deportation complex.</li>
</ul>
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<br />
As we end a year in which President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have given important signals that they are aware of the moral and human destruction of both mass incarceration and mass deportation, we must endeavor to produce the kind of grass roots social movement that will demand a full dismantling of both these legacies of the era of governing through crime. As the New York Times reports in a story today on immigration (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/us/fears-multiply-amid-a-surge-in-deportation.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0">read it here</a>) there is an increasingly visible protest movement against mass deportation. We need an equivalent movement against mass incarceration.<br />
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<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-74843289173141162952013-12-02T23:14:00.003-08:002013-12-02T23:14:37.119-08:00"Justice" in the Murder Years: More Tales from the Brooklyn CryptThe New York Times continues its on going series of investigatory features on wrongful convictions or likely wrongful convictions produced by Brooklyn's law enforcement and court system in the 1980s and early 1990s with a gripping and sad story by Frances Robles on two Brooklyn teenagers (now 30 and 31) convicted of killing a corrections officer in an apparent car jacking in 1991 (read it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/nyregion/detectives-errors-were-just-the-start-of-a-nightmare-case.html?hp&_r=0">here)</a>. Many of these cases have involved Louis Scarcella, a detective with an reputation for always getting a confession and television detective looks that landed him frequently on television as a celebrity detective in the 1990s and 2000s, but whose repeated frequent use of the same boiler plate language in the "confessions" he extracted and repeated use of the same crack addicts as "eye witnesses" has more recently come under critical scrutiny by both the Times and the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. <br />
<br />
I will leave you to read the details of this particular case. It involves evidence of systematic malpractice in the Brooklyn detective's unit and the District Attorney's office, that points to a culture of indifference to legal or factual guilt. Robles also gives us a fuller portrait of the trial process than we get in previous stories and it looks about as summary as some of the 18th century records from the Old Bailey. Here was a trial for the lives (in prison, New York had no death penalty at this point) that lasted barely a day and involved an almost shocking lack of evidence. Here I want to reflect on a few general features of the world of crime and criminal justice we see through the dark glass of these fragments from the crypts of Brooklyn's recent criminal justice past.<br />
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There is a sense of violent crime and in particular murder as a kind of normal drum beat. These were years when the national and local murder rates were approaching their 20th century highs and many of these homicides were happening in the Brooklyn neighborhoods where Scarcella and his colleagues worked. Both the teenagers caught up in the likely wrongful convictions here had been involved in repeated serious to violent crime and in the case of one of them seemed to be on an escalating path toward more violent crimes (which have apparently continued during a long prison career). The extreme nature of crime in these years, and the wide dispersion of criminal behavior in the youth population, both operated as a context for police, lawyers, and court personnel, what law and society scholars call the "court working group", to develop a working philosophy in which the obviousness of the threat and the frequency of guilty justify systematic departure from the model of individual justice and the presumption of innocence. I say this not to justify it, but to highlight how clear the danger signs were that justice could go astray. High crime and concentrated crime are reasons to strengthen court independence and legal constraints, but the politics favors weakening both.<br />
<br />
It is often noted today that lengthy rigid sentences have driven defendants to give up their trial rights and plead guilty, perhaps even when they are innocent. Here though the defendants demanded and got a trial, and the reasonable doubt it exposed seems staggeringly obvious from twenty years distance, they were convicted and sentenced to life (in one case even over the fact that the defendant was a juvenile being sentenced as an adult). The defense lawyer seems to have done a good job addressing the holes in the prosecution case. What went wrong? A hint is captured in a quote Robles got from one of the murder victim's daughters who attended the trial:<br />
<br />
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Mr. Neischer’s daughter, Nakeea, who was 12 at the time of the trial, remembered of Mr. Bunn: “When they brought up the charges, he was laughing. I don’t know if he thought it was a joke, but as they read the charges and said ‘murder’ it went from giggles to not giggles. I remember thinking, ‘If you didn’t do it, why would you be laughing?’ ”</blockquote>
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How the victims and the largely white professionals who made up the Brooklyn court system in the early 1990s saw these young black men is something we can only speculate on but two things resonate with other sociological work on the topic. First, young men of color appear arrogant and socially hostile to white observers so commonly that it is hard not to think this is a feature in the eye of the beholder. Second, to a shocking extent, the professionals couldn't see these young men as individuals. The witness reported light skinned black men in the early 20s or late teens, the two men convicted were dark skinned and younger. The original story suggested one had been shot, but neither had a wound. <br />
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Investigations are now continuing into other Brooklyn cases, especially those connected to Det. Scarcella. However one wonders whether such procedures, launched decades after the events can hope to restore those injured by the abandonment of individual justice principles during this dark period of degrading fear (even more so after reading about the evidence of cover up efforts by police in this case). Perhaps what is needed is a systematic solution. Those whose demographic and social circumstances were once used against the should not have it work in their favor. All prisoners from the era of near hysteria about homicide, 1975 through 1995, who are still in prison should be considered for clemency on the grounds that the entire system was so corrupted by fear and an abandonment of rule of law principles that no convictions produced by it can be fully trusted. <br />
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<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-86477692021232567922013-11-26T18:57:00.001-08:002013-11-26T18:59:44.319-08:00Dallas 1963 and the Culture of FearToday Americans in many large cities are experiencing levels of homicide last experienced in the mid-1950s. This is the result of a crime decline across the country that began in the early 1990s when homicide levels were twice has high (or higher). When you look at homicides on a graph, this steep decline marks the end of a period of high homicide that began in the early 1960s and which reached peaks in the mid to late 1970s and late 1980s. This pattern has never been adequately explained by criminologists but its impact on American crime policies seems clear enough. In the periods following both peaks American states adopted "tough on crime" sentencing laws designed to send more people to prison, for more time, and for more crimes than at any time in our history. As a result our national imprisonment rate rose nearly 4x from 1975 to 2005.<br />
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I argued in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195386019/ref=rdr_ext_tmb">Governing through Crime</a>, that this was not a simple response to an exogenous shock, but rather one that became deeply intertwined with endogenous features of our political system, particularly the transformations in civil rights law and metropolitan governance that were already underway. Cities were being transformed by the planned transfer of large portions of their middle class population to newly built suburbs and the traditional city political "machines" that had governed more or less since the gilded era through a structure of racial hierarchy were being destabilized by civil rights and deindustrialization. It was not just violent crime spiking, but violent crime spiking in the midst of this reterritorialization of everyday American life that led to a period when America was in some respects at least governed through their fear of crime. Kennedy's assassination may have been a foretaste.</div>
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Of course Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was no ordinary urban crime, and Dallas no ordinary American city. As <a href="http://www.npr.org/people/1939802/wade-goodwyn">Wade Goodwyn</a> of NPR who has covered Texas and crime issues for thirty years, noted in a discussion of the Kennedy assassination this morning on <a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/">Morning Edition</a> Dallas then was a small city of about 700,000, 80 percent white, and with a leadership strongly committed to the Jim Crow social system that had dominated the city for 75 years. Hatred for JFK among the city's elite had everything to do with race and with the Department of Justice's support for the civil rights position (never strongly enough for the supporters of civil rights). If those elites didn't pull the trigger, it was easy for many Americans to conclude that the poisonous atmosphere of the city may have some how encouraged or abetted the crime (a conclusion Goodwyn notes, many Dallas residents came to share).</div>
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Yet visually the images of JFK's assassination that inscribed themselves on the brains of my generation were inseparable from the urban street scape where the murder took place. Dealey plaza, a place that probably had no common name for many people until the event, was not a ceremonial space but the kind of city edge space between the more valued bits of downtown and the freeway that still connects central Dallas to its suburbs. In my childhood, much of it spent in Chicago a city that experienced both the crime and the political turmoil of the time, those spaces always seemed to be places of menace, glimpsed quickly from a car on the way from a symphony orchestra performance, or downtown department store shopping trip, on our way back to an outer-borough neighborhood (my parents would never have lived in a "suburb").<br />
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Oswald himself, a drifter (in an extreme sense, having defected to the Soviet Union), the child of a single mother in an age that heavily pathologized such children (read my article on the role of criminological knowledge in constructing Oswald's "criminal biography" <a href="http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=facpubs&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dsimon%2Bghosts%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bdisciplinary%2Bmachine%26btnG%3D%26as_sdt%3D1%252C5%26as_sdtp%3D#search=%22simon%20ghosts%20disciplinary%20machine%22">here</a>), a communist, a traitor, a person given to street fights, and who was adjudged likely to kill by a probation officer when he was only 13, became a prototype of a dangerous killer for a society about to have a well justified moral panic about homicide. For those of us who save the assassination in political terms Oswald may have been a patsy, for a majority of Americans, particularly in the first decade after the Kennedy assassination, Oswald was evidence of monstrous offenders lurking in the shadows of American cities like New York, New Orleans, and Dallas.</div>
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The other respect in which the assassination I believe would echo through the culture of control that followed was in its shock to the Presidency. Franklin Roosevelt as "Dr. New Deal" had ushered in an era where the President was personally responsible for managing an ongoing existential crisis for the country, surrounded by expertise, but reliant on his own capacity for judgment and execution. When Dr. New Deal became the war leader, this leadership model was fused with the warrior king model of sovereignty. Kennedy's murder was a crushing blow to this complex. Ever since Presidents have struggled to re-establish a mantle of competence while being routinely accused of monstrous conspiracies</div>
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Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-33691849255752939552013-10-04T08:59:00.002-07:002013-10-04T11:51:50.121-07:00To the Fruitvale Station<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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Thanks to the persistence of my wife who has insisted for some time that as residents of the East Bay we must see it in the theater along with fellow East Bayers, our whole family saw this remarkable film a couple of weeks ago. The film moved me to tears and then settled into my imagination where it has been ruminating since. I'm not sure it is still in theaters, but if it is go see it now and root for writer director <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3363032/?ref_=ttfc_fc_dr1">Ryan Coogler</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334649/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm">The Fruitvale Station</a> to get some Oscar nominations. As has been well reported the movie takes up the last day of Oscar Grant, a young black East Bay man killed by a BART police officer during a bizarre and confusing encounter in the early hours of New Years day 2009. Coogler, a 27 year old Oakland native, does not so much tell the story of Oscar Grant's death as set it in the contexts of his life, of what it is like to be a young black man in 21st century urban America, and also of the new geography of race and class in the East Bay.<br />
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The superb cast does an extraordinary job creating a full life for Oscar Grant (played radiantly by Michael Jordan who many <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Through-Crime-Transformed-Democracy/dp/0195386019">GTC</a> readers will remember from <a href="http://www.hbo.com/the-wire">The Wire</a>) as its last day plays out. We meet his daughter Tatiana, played by Ariana Neal, his longterm significant other (and Tatianna's mother) Sophina (played by Melanie Diaz) and his mother Wanda (played by the amazing Octavia Spencer). Sophina and Wanda, two strong adult women in his life, along with Grant's healing love for Tatiana, seem to be anchor cables that will keep Oscar, clearly going through a troubled patch with recent time in one of California's overcrowded and unhealthy prisons and losing his job, on positive path. We also see how narrowed the economic space for working class men like Oscar seems in the East Bay. Having his lost his job in a popular Oakland food store, we see Oscar driving through an urban landscape that appears to have lost most of its economic muscle.<br />
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One of the film's less obvious but insightful and significant dimensions is its portrayal of Oscar's male peer group as including a multi-racial set of young men in various locations in the crime, employment, incarceration landscape. Resisting the overwhelming tendency of popular media to suggest that any criminally involved characters must be relentlessly and malignantly criminal, the film portrays the men overall as not only caring deeply for Oscar and being ready to be there for him in celebration and tragedy, but as providing an important resource for Oscar in finding employment, staying out of trouble, and remaining in a committed relationship. The strong presumption that "bad apples" spoil the whole barrel has long legitimized "zero tolerance" policies in schools and mass incarceration policies on the streets. Research I had the privilege to participate in drawing on life histories and interviews from young adults who grew up in Oakland's San Antonio neighborhood (not far from the Fruitvale BART station) produced lots of suggestive evidence that a diverse social network is a powerful resource to keep young adults in a position to access employment and educational opportunities. An analysis of the data by my colleagues Deborah Lustig and Kenzo Sung, <a href="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-6091-961-9_10">Birds of a Feather: Peers, Delinquency, and Risk</a> (may require digital library access or pay wall) suggests that having close friends who have been involved in criminal activity or criminalization does not divert successful young adults who continue to know and benefit from contact with their delinquent peers without being "contaminated." <br />
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The East Bay, with its extraordinary diversity, unique history of racial and ethnic cross-alliances in labor and political struggles, and its potent and tasty civil-izing society of food, fresh in stores and wonderfully cooked in restaurants, lively streets, and yes, BART itself (too expensive but perfectly located for East Bayers) comes across beautifully in the movie. If Fruitvale Station wins an Oscar nomination the nation may finally get a look at this extraordinary piece of itself that has long been a footnote between aging snap-shots of Berkeley in the 60s and celebrations of whatever San Francisco or Silicon Valley are up to next. <br />
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But if the film gives us reason to be celebrate the way civil society can heal itself, state forces, particularly police and prison officers, are powerfully and accurately portrayed as nothing short of catastrophic for the security of the community. Grant's prison experience, portrayed in flashback and then terrifyingly in real time (no spoiler here), highlights the racial gang system which compels virtually all California prisoners to "join up" for what passes for a social order in prisons that the state long ago abdicated any responsibility to maintain civilization in. The fact that tens of thousands of our fellow citizens have passed through these degrading and racializing prisons is a shame that our state will live with for generations. In the one scene in which we see Oscar strike a more menacing pose (toward the store manager who has apparently fired him some time ago), we can only wonder how time in the organized menace of the prisons now weighs like burden on his own sense of humanity. <br />
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The film's most searing portrayal is of course its close up on the conduct of the BART police. Everyone knows the tragic way this ended, but the film offers a realistic view of how the attitude of relentless contempt that many police officers, not just BART police, project at young men of color (as documented by Victor Rios in his compelling ethnographic study also set in Oakland, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Policing-Latino-Perspectives-Deviance/dp/0814776388">Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys</a>) sets up the conflicts that inevitably and too often lethally fall-out between them. The film makes the rather unexpected but to my criminological eyes quite convincing choice to highlight that contempt rather than the still mysterious motivations of police officer Johannes Mehserle who was tried for Oscar Grant's murder and went to prison for manslaughter.<br />
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If the Fruitvale Station has a political agenda it is to dis-establish these destructive state apparatuses which are so costly and now stand in the way of a serious effort to reinvent urban security for the 21st century (consider the heavy handed policing of Oakland's monthly <a href="http://oaklandartmurmur.org/">art murmers</a> since a shooting last spring). But for all its ethnographic realism, and critical edge, the film does the job of all cinema, perhaps all stories, turning the quotidian details of real people and places into the mythic material of a universal. The film is an elegiac invocation of both how much our lives are determined by forces beyond our control, but also how much power all of us have to change and to be a force for repairing and restoring our communities. It deserves an Academy Award.<br />
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<br />Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-33285434617647495872013-08-08T08:46:00.003-07:002013-08-08T09:43:08.719-07:00Beard Must Go: California Needs a Fresh start in Corrections, not a Cover-up for Business as UsualWhen Governor Brown <a href="http://cdcrtoday.blogspot.fr/2013/07/cdcr-secretary-jeff-beards-appointment.html">appointed</a> Jeffrey Beard to be the new Secretary of Corrections in California last year, it was supposed to signal a new era. After decades of Correctional leaders who were insiders, brought up in a system that had normalized a state of permanent crisis and systemic inhumanity, Mr. Beard looked to be reason for hope; a respected correctional leader from a State without such a disgraceful record and indeed, an outside expert who had provided testimony against California in the landmark <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDgQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=Y6wDUsqgDYbt0gXftoHwCA&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=jcUUsBnW9KRrPTjoVjIXPg&bvm=bv.50500085,d.d2k">Brown v. Plata</a> case. Unfortunately, Secretary Beard's public statements since coming to the job reflect a complete failure to acknowledge the gravity of the human rights abuses his agency is guilty of and an apparent commitment to defend the status quo at any cost. Recent examples include his petulant refusal to take seriously the danger posed by <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_23805193/california-seeks-move-inmates-private-prisons-avoid-releasing">Valley Fever</a> to vulnerable inmates (this in a system that the US Supreme Court castigated for its "deliberate indifference" to the medical care of prisoners for decades) and his fear mongering on the consequences of complying with the federal courts population cap. Now his public statements demonizing the hunger strikers and defending California's indefensible SHUs (their terminology for total lockdown isolation prisons, known generically as supermax) make clear that all hope for change in this administration should be abandoned. Its time for a protest movement and direct action campaign to force real change starting with Secretary Beard's resignation.<br />
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Secretary Beard's recent <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beard-prison-hunger-strike-20130806%2C0%2C636927.story">LA Times Op-ed</a> piece trashing the hunger strikers and defending the SHU is a perfect example. As major human rights organizations have established (read the Amnesty International report <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amnestyusa.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fedgeofendurancecaliforniareport.pdf&ei=dboDUoCtMaS40QWZmoCYCQ&usg=AFQjCNEr3HyNK6MIyhV5uASTXNHf1K9Oyg&sig2=ZtOuei65-OsTasoj9k0QAw&bvm=bv.50500085,d.d2k">here</a>), California's super isolation facilities are an outlier in a country that is already a global outlier in its reliance on these inhuman prisons. While in most states that use supermax prisons, prisoners are there for specific acts of criminal violence, and for a limited period of time, California uses its SHU mostly for prisoners suspected of being members of prison gang, and keeps prisoners there indefinitely. As a result scores of prisoners have been held in the SHU for decades (far longer than any Guantanamo prisoners). I have written before about the Orwellian quality of California's "gang problem." Having long ago abandoned any effort to offer meaningful work, education, or rehabilitative treatment in its insanely large and overcrowded prisons, the creation of a gang system to provide some level of predictable order was inevitable, and must be seen as a <i>defacto</i> public policy of California (and indeed there is plenty of empirical evidence of the system's complicity in organizing and sustaining the racially defined gangs). <br />
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Secretary Beard is not responsible for this situation, but instead of working to change it he appears to be committed to defending the status quo. His Op-Ed piece is full of alarming claims about the murderous behavior of the "gang leaders" who are supposedly forcing the strike on others, but CDCR denies journalists and external experts access to the prisoners so we have to rely completely on Secretary Beard for the veracity of claims that conveniently fit his interest in ending the strike and the public attention it has brought.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">Many of those participating in the hunger strike are under extreme pressure to do so from violent prison gangs, which called the strike in an attempt to restore their ability to terrorize fellow prisoners, prison staff and communities throughout California.</span></blockquote>
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Really, I thought the whole justification for the SHU was to prevent these leaders from terrorizing and pressuring other prisoners. If they can force inmates who are locked down 23 hours a day to deny themselves food, what exactly is the SHU supposed to be accomplishing?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">For decades, California has had the most violent and sophisticated prison gangs in the nation. When gang violence exploded during the 1970s and 1980s, and crime rates around the state rose to record highs, state prisons felt the impact. Between 1970 and 1973, 11 employees of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation were slain by inmates, and many others were brutally assaulted.</span> </blockquote>
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This is internally contradictory. The violent explosion took place between 1970 and 1973, more than a decade before the first California SHU was opened. By then violence (much of it related to the political struggles across the country in the early 1970s) had largely abated. As plenty of evidence suggests, the SHU was really created to help justify and manage California's mass incarceration juggernaut. There is no public evidence linking California crime rates with internal gang activity in prisons. If Secretary Beard has the statistics to prove this he should publish it.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">After this turbulent and violent time, and in response to the growing threat of gangs, the corrections department created SHUs to safely house gang members and their associates while minimizing their influence on other prisoners. Restricting the gangs' communication has limited their ability to engage in organized criminal activity and has saved lives both inside and outside prison walls.</span></blockquote>
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Huh? Again, if the SHU works, how is it that these gang leaders can manipulate prisoners throughout the state. If it doesn't work, why are you defending it?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">There are SHUs at four prisons in California. At three of them — in Tehachapi, Corcoran and Folsom — there are outdoor-facing windows in the cells that allow for direct sunlight. At Pelican Bay, all SHU cells have skylights. In all of the facilities, inmates in the SHU have radios and color TVs with access to channels such as </span><a class="taxInlineTagLink" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/sports/espn-%28tv-network%29-HOC792.topic" id="HOC792" style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px; text-decoration: none;" title="ESPN (tv network)">ESPN</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">. They have weekly access to a law library and daily exercise time. </span> </blockquote>
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Please, being locked in a closet 23 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 10, 20, or 30 years is ok because you have a skylight, and access to ESPN? I'm sure the access to television and radio does mitigate the isolation, but only to a point. Indeed Amnesty International was well aware that California SHU inmates can purchase a television (see page 24 of their report) and still condemned the SHU in unambiguous terms:<br />
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Amnesty International considers that the conditions of isolation and other deprivations imposed on prisoners in California’s SHU units breach international standards on humane treatment. The cumulative effects of such conditions, particularly when imposed for prolonged or indefinite periods, and the severe environmental deprivation in Pelican Bay SHU, in particular, amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of international law.</blockquote>
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If you doubt that, try spending a week locked in your bathroom accompanied by a radio and a color TV.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">Even so, we remain committed to improving our facilities and policies. The department has brought in outside experts to evaluate our gang-management strategies. Based on their recommendations, we implemented a new comprehensive gang-management strategy last fall.</span></blockquote>
And why should anyone believe you when you are willing to manipulate facts and demonize people who are risking their own lives to demand some recognition of their humanity?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">So what is this really about? Some of the men who participated in the last hunger strike have since dropped out of the gangs for religious or personal reasons, and they said it best in recently filed court declarations. "Honestly, we did not care about human rights," one inmate said about the 2011 hunger strike. "The objective was to get into the general population, or mainline, and start running our street regiments again." Another described the hunger strike this way: "We knew we could tap big time support through this tactic, but we weren't trying to improve the conditions in the SHU; we were trying to get out of the SHU to further our gang agenda on the mainline."</span> </blockquote>
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How convenient that they are saying things that exactly fit your narrative that SHU prisoners are craven manipulative terrorists. Where is the objective evidence that anyone actually made these statements? No one else has regular access to these prisoners and you and your staff have zero credibility when it comes to determining why prisoners would engage in a strike that is directly challenging a policy you remain deeply committed to. Let the strikers hold a press conference, or give the media individual access to any SHU prisoner they want to speak with, and then we'll see.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 14.399999618530273px; line-height: 16px;">The leaders of these four gangs are directly responsible for at least five ruthless murders, 35 violent assaults, including stabbings, and they have racked up more than two dozen violations for possession of weapons and other contraband.</span></blockquote>
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Who are we talking about? California has thousands of people locked up in the SHUs. Are they all responsible for these murders? If there is evidence that people have killed others or even engaged in weapons and drug smuggling, why isn't SHU placement based on those kinds of charges rather than the Orwellian charge of being a "gang associate."<br />
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Secretary Beard has been on the job less than a year. That may seem very little time to give an administrator to change a system that has hardened into a grotesque structure of inhumanity over decades. But it is not too much time for a leader to send clear signals to the public about what kind of system we have, and what kind of system we want to have. A reform leader would have spoken to the public honestly about the difference between tough and deserved punishment and cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and would be taking the opportunity of a fresh start to begin the process of atonement, accountability, and forging new directions. In making the hunger strike an occasion for demonizing and deception, Secretary Beard has already proven he's not that leader. It is time for change, starting at the top. Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-54056900664684769152013-07-31T13:48:00.002-07:002013-07-31T13:48:34.800-07:00Civil Disobedience and Uncivilized Punishment: Run Edward and Keep RunningEdward Snowden's father recently gave an interview in which he rejected the idea that his son should come home to face US punishment (read the full story in the Guardian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/edward-snowden-father-fbi-moscow">here</a>):<br />
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<span style="color: rgb(20.000000%, 20.000000%, 20.000000%); font-family: 'ArialMT'; font-size: 8.000000pt;">He is going to be thrown into a hole. He is not going to be allowed to
speak." The 52yearold said he had been as "surprised as the rest of
America" when his son, who worked for a contractor, was revealed as
the source of the leaks about surveillance by the </span><span style="color: rgb(0.000000%, 33.720000%, 53.720000%); font-family: 'ArialMT'; font-size: 8.000000pt;">National Security
Agency </span><span style="color: rgb(20.000000%, 20.000000%, 20.000000%); font-family: 'ArialMT'; font-size: 8.000000pt;">to the Guardian. "As a father it pains me what he did," Snowden
said. "I wish my son could simply have sat in Hawaii and taken the big
paycheck, lived with his beautiful girlfriend and enjoyed paradise. But as
an American citizen, I am absolutely thankful for what he did." </span></blockquote>
With Bradley Manning facing the likelihood of dozens of years in prison, despite no evidence he harmed anyone, I could not agree more. There was once a tradition in this country of people breaking the law for principled reasons, typically to protest or expose even greater moral wrongdoing, but accepting their lawful punishment as a way of underscoring their personal commitment to the polity and its laws. However that belonged to a time when America believed in civilized punishments that had some proportion to the crimes committed. <br />
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In the age of Bush and Obama, American punishments reflect a level of viciousness and degradation that no principled person should be willing to accept for themselves or others. Bradley Manning, even before he was convicted of anything, was subjected to treatment that would be considered a human rights violation in any civilized country but raised hardly a word of concern from press or politicians today. While criminals on Wall Street who have ruined the lives of millions receive no punishment and indeed the solicitude of the Obama Administration, ordinary and political criminals in this country are subject to punishments that are cruel, degrading, often amount to torture, but are by no means unusual (in fact they are routine).<br />
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Given that fact, the days of sacrificial civil disobedience are behind us. Put principle and pious appeals to come home aside Edward, and follow your Dad's wise advice. Run Edward, run, run, run....Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-84392136141957280492013-07-15T08:48:00.004-07:002013-07-15T08:57:12.875-07:00Race and Reasonable Doubt: Notes from the Sanford Florida VerdictThe official media narrative is in. The acquittal of wanna-bee neighborhood guardian George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin reflects the impenetrable wall that the law and the trial judge set up between the narrow legal questions of culpability and the broad social issues that had animated passions in the case: gun carrying in public and racial profiling. But do not buy this part of the narrative. While the legal issues may have been narrow and the evidence carefully filtered by the judge, whether consciously or not, race was central to the jury's considerations in Sanford this past weekend.<br />
<br />
George Zimmerman admitted he fired his gun into the center of Trayvon Martin's body, from which a jury could and normally would infer that he intended to kill Martin. Normally that would be enough to establish 2nd degree murder. Here however Zimmerman claimed "self defense." Even though Zimmerman never took the stand, the jurors had to consider his story presented in police reports and forensic evidence. The jury had to consider whether Zimmerman reasonably feared that he would die or suffer grievous bodily harm if he did not use lethal force. Does an adult with a gun in his pocket have a reasonable fear that someone who has punched him and is now straddling him and pounding his head on the pavement is going to cause his death or at least grave bodily harm? That is where age, gender, and race do their work. <br />
<br />
Imagine that Trayvon was a 17 year old female, a 54 year old white male, or even a 17 year old white male. In all of those cases the prosecutors would have had an easier job convincing the jury that Zimmerman acted recklessly in firing his gun. It is true that teenage males are more associated with aggression, anger, and violence in our culture than either females or older males; but young black men are endowed with a legendary level of anger by our cultural imaginary (and one typically associated with danger to white people). In scores of popular cultural references young black men are depicted as exploding into legal violence with little provocation or warning. In its own way this cultural construction reflects an acknowledgement of the historical wrongs done against African Americans and the resentments which this treatment would give rise to. It is this cultural imaginary that was so successfully invoked by "black power" political leaders of the 1960s and 1970s from Huey Newton to Jesse Jackson Sr. and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and which candidate Barack Obama had worked so hard to distance himself from with his calm demeanor, starched shirts, and studied refusal to give voice to racial grievance. <br />
<br />
It is true that the defense was not able to introduce potentially prejudicial evidence about Trayvon Martin's past, including that he had used marijuana and that he had been involved in some minor fights at school. But in convincing the jury that George Zimmerman was reasonable in fearing for his life, the defense had a wind at its back that would not have been there had Trayvon been female or white. Think about Zimmerman's story again.--- He was on his way back to his car in the gated community. Suddenly, out of the dark, Trayvon attacks him, punching him to the ground, straddling him, pounding his head into the pavement with a vicious force.--- Now the jury knew that Trayvon had gone to the store to get candy and that he was talking to a friend on his cell phone just before the incident; so they had no immediate context which could explain why he might suddenly act with violence. All they had was his race and the racialized cultural narratives about anger and violence that are part of the American legacy of racist violence. For reasonable doubt, that may have been all they needed. Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-2314930660525611762013-07-08T08:04:00.000-07:002013-07-08T08:04:01.372-07:00HungerToday, July 8, 2013, prisoners in California's supermax "SHU" units (for Secured Housing Units), are commencing a hunger strike and work stoppage, their second in two years (read the solidarity statement <a href="http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/peaceful-protest-to-resume-july-8th-2013-if-demands-are-not-met/#more-2219">here</a>). This is tragic. Hunger strikes are an extraordinary act of self deprivation by people who have almost nothing. They can result in the deaths of those involved and compel prison staff to engage in degrading practices like force-feeding to prevent that. <br />
<br />
This desperate step indicates the depravity of California's SHU policy and its recalcitrance in reconsidering it in the face of mounting criticism from human rights organizations (read Amnesty International's 2012 report <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amnestyusa.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fedgeofendurancecaliforniareport.pdf&ei=_9HaUeWZJobmigLAzoHwCw&usg=AFQjCNEr3HyNK6MIyhV5uASTXNHf1K9Oyg&sig2=tA1wA_fvkVZ8tFgJ0lToyg&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE">here</a>) and the lack of any empirical evidence that this exceptional penal method is justified. We keep more people, in worst SHU conditions, for longer, than any-other state on the planet. I ask all readers of this blog to use their social networks to call on <a href="http://govnews.ca.gov/gov39mail/mail.php">Governor Brown</a> and California's Secretary of Corrections <a href="http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/About_CDCR/Secretary.html">Jeffrey Beard</a> [Actually a search of their website shows no way to contact them other than to do business] to meet the prisoners' five core demands (read them <a href="http://www.prisons.org/documents/FinalNoticewith5CoreDemands.doc">here</a>) which amount to respect for basic human rights: to be treated as an individual; to have a horizon of hope for release from inhuman isolation conditions; to be given an environment fit for human psychological and physical health.<br />
<br />
Supermax style prisons are an American abomination that are rejected by most other societies and considered a human rights violation in many. Total isolation of prisoners without meaningful activities, visitors, or meaningful human contact has historically been reserved for disciplinary punishments limited to weeks or months. In California's SHU scores of prisoners have served more than twenty years of such conditions, and hundreds for more than ten.<br />
<br />
Most SHU prisoners are there not for any crimes committed on the outside, or disciplinary violations on the inside, but because prison officials have determined that they are an "associate" of one of the racist prison gangs that dominate the social order of California prisons. Once dubbed an associate, based on evidence that does not have to be tested, a prisoner can never be released unless they "debrief" against the gang they are suspected of being an associate of. For those falsely believed to be associates, this is impossible. For those who in fact were associates, this means they are a "snitch" who will need to be in protective custody for the rest of their term (a somewhat less brutal version of the same isolation). <br />
<br />
The State continues to claim that SHU isolation is necessary to keep gang violence under control in the State's sprawling and still extremely overcrowded prisons, but there is no good evidence that this works according to criminologist and legal scholar <a href="http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/reiterk">Keramet Reiter</a> who carefully examined the State's case in her Berkeley dissertation (a recent article on supermax and California <a href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cjpp.2013.5.issue-2/cjpp-2013-0009/cjpp-2013-0009.xml">here</a>). <br />
<br />
More accurately, the SHU is necessary to maintain the State's ideological justification for its draconian prison sentences and inhuman prison conditions. That justification, which holds that California prisons are filled with committed criminals who represent an unchanging risk of violence to Californians, implies that within this class must be an even more threatening elite, "the worst of the worst". Since our prisons offer no meaningful rehabilitation or incentives for self reform, only deeper deprivation can provide a tool for control for this class. In fact, the State has long ago ceded to the prison gangs responsibility for maintaining a social order inside the prisons, and openly cooperates with their recruitment and operations, but the need to justify this monstrous enterprise of human warehousing requires a veritable monster factory, which is what the SHU is. <br />
<br />
The warped security logic behind SHU and CDCR generally is well expressed in a particular policy on photographs highlighted this morning by KQED's California Report in their excellent <a href="http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201307080850/a">reporting</a> on the strike. Under the policy, in place for over 25 years before it was finally changed after the 2011 hunger strike, SHU prisoners are not allowed to have photographs taken of themselves to send to their families or anyone else. The policy was justified based on the claim that these prison gang leaders used their photos as "calling cards" to intimidate other prisoners. While this claim is fascinating to a student of penology like myself (with its intriguing echoes of Victorian social customs), it turns out to have been based on mere anecdotes and passes not even the most basic tests of logic (does anyone believe a prisoner will be less intimidated because a prison gang leader can't leave his photo but has to leave something else, maybe a dead fish). <br />
<br />
For this, people were stripped of the simplest piece of human dignity; the ability to be remembered as you are, by family members who have already lost all ability to touch or speak with you.<br />
<br />
The hunger strike that begins today is a terrible thing. If it is allowed to go on people will die for the crime of demanding to be treated like human beings. Soon we will be debating force feeding. Enough...There is simply no reasonable justification for anything like California's SHU practices. It is worst than Guantanamo and based on even less evidence. The longest held Guantanamo inmates have been there for around 10 years. The longest held SHU prisoner has been in for an astounding 42 years. For generations Californians managed dangerous criminals of all sorts without a debasing their moral integrity by operating a SHU. <br />
<br />
End this disgrace on our state. Call upon Governor Brown and Secretary Beard to meet the prisoners' demands, and further, to announce plans soon to close these institutions and relocate all current prisoners within one year.Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-819711698688655785.post-38692277823866887552013-06-22T11:52:00.002-07:002013-06-22T11:56:28.596-07:00Prosecution Complex: Persecuting Aaron Swartz and Degrading the Constitution<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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There should be a difference between prosecution and
persecution</div>
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The long “War on Crime,” America’s longest, has gone on a
lot longer (’67 to now), and done a lot more damage to American law and
society, than most people reckon (at least those who missed my 2007 tome,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Through-Crime-Transformed-Democracy/dp/0195386019">Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracyand Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press)</a>). Perhaps the most troubling and persistent
feature is not our outsized prison population, what we call “mass
incarceration,” but an institution that arguably lies primarily behind that
pathology, the outsized power of American prosecutors. On a comparative basis, no other democratic
society comes close to the discretion and politicization that combine in the
American prosecutor. <o:p></o:p></div>
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First, in most countries, prosecutors are career civil
servants working for nationally organized bureaucracies with a long history of
being (relatively) depoliticized (often quasi judicial in nature). In the United States we have two kinds of
prosecutors, both in their own way deeply politicized. In the states,
responsible for more than 80 percent of all prosecutions, prosecutors are, or
work directly for, individual politicians who run for office regularly in a
local constituency (generally a county).
In the federal system, prosecutors are appointed by the President,
generally on the recommendation of the state’s senators (a potentially
politicized process), and overseen by the Attorney General, often one of the
most politically connected players in the executive branch (Robert Kennedy,
Edwin Meese).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Second, in most countries prosecutors are circumscribed
fairly tightly by a criminal code that has been developed overtime by a depoliticized and autonomous judiciary.
In the United States, prosecutors are free to rummage at will through
state and federal criminal codes that are more like Harry Potter’s room of requirement
than a legal instrument designed to bind law enforcers as well as citizens,
overseen by judges that are themselves often elected and reliant on prosecutors
and police unions for endorsements and donations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Finally, in many other democracies countries, truly
disproportionate sentences are rare, because the length of punishment is set by
relatively autonomous specialist bureaucracies and because the conditions of
imprisonment are regulated by human rights charters and enforcement
organs. In the US, disproportionate
sentencing has become the norm and our Supreme Court has expressly held that it
reserves judicial intervention to extreme examples like “life in prison” for a
parking violation (Michigan v. Harmelin, Kennedy, J. concurring).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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These features of American prosecution have always been
there, but historically they were held in check by two forces. 1) Local politics meant that well organized communities
could use their influence on “city hall” to push back against over zealous
prosecution. 2) The limited scope of
federal criminal law meant that federal prosecution was largely reserved for
specialist criminals like bank robbers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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All of this changed with the “War on Crime”, declared by
both parties in the 1960s, LBJ and Nixon in ’67 and ’68, and which began to transform state
institutions a decade later in the late 1970s. This federal influence continued with two further waves of both cash and policy initiatives aimed at increasing use of imprisonment under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush (1986-1991) and under President Clinton (1994-6).
The global war on terror, declared by President George W. Bush in 2001, and pursued with some vigor by President Obama, represents a
direct continuation of this original "War on Crime" and its forms of political
subjectivity, logic and sovereignty. Not accidentally, the War on Crime placed prosecutorial prerogative and power and the very heart of
its strategy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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First, prosecutors were viewed not as one side of an
adversary justice process, but as the very head of a unilateral crime control
process. Both state and federal laws and
practices have changed to give prosecutors unprecedented power to target
individuals and groups. With their unique posture of being an executive leader with a mandate to fight
crime, prosecutors have become the model political posture for all politicians
hoping to become mayors, governors, or ultimately President. Barack Obama was our first President since
Gerald Ford who did not prove his <i>bonafides</i>
first as a Governor by signing tough new criminal statutes into law or by
seeking any carrying out executions of convicted death row prisoners. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Second, convinced that slow court processing was preventing
law enforcement from containing crime in the 1960s, state and federal reforms
ever since have aimed at turning our justice system into a super efficient
conviction and incarceration machine.
The best way to do that was to eliminate the right to a jury trial by
gutting substantive criminal laws so as to remove any room for jurors to
exercise any judgment about the seriousness of the criminal activity, and by
raising criminal sentences so high that only the most fool hardy would go to
trial rather than accept a “plea bargain” on the prosecution’s terms. This of course also eliminate the one way communities could directly check prosecutorial overreach.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Third, violent crime in the 1960s and “terrorism” now,
provide an emotional tenor to the justice process that inevitably raises the
rhetorical and actual power of the prosecution and pushes it toward an
identification of professional dedication with zealousness and down right
meanness (think <a href="http://www.hlntv.com/shows/nancy-grace">Nancy Grace </a>or any of the female prosecutors on <a href="http://www.nbc.com/Law_and_Order/">Law & Order</a>
over the years).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Fourth, wars are territorial, racializing, and preemptive by
their nature. The war on crime has
pushed prosecutors from retail dealers in punishment to the kind of racial
profiled whole sale targeting of young people of color and young people of any
race engaged in activities view as radical.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The prosecution of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz">Aaron Swartz</a>, the brilliant young inventor and free access netactivist who took his own life while in the increasingly threatening grip of a federal prosecution that arose out of his successful efforts to copy large numbers of scholarly articles from jstor for purposes of free access to the public (whose tax money funds almost all of that research and many of the publications themselves), exemplifies many of these
features of our persecutorial/prosecutorial complex. (I agree with the analysis in this <a href="http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/06/21/aaron-swartz-plea-leveraging-the-bordenkircher-problem/">post</a> which highlights the links between constitutional compromises made early in the War on Crime, and today's overreach).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The federal prosecutors used increasingly wide and expansive
definitions of traditionally narrow but highly stigmatized criminal acts, like
theft and burglary, to reframe clearly political acts into self interested acts
intended to deprive others of their rightful property.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The close integration of federal and state law enforcement,
forged during the war on drugs phase of the long war on crime, means that
federal can defer to state when that serves their interests (as it appeared to
when Swartz was initially handed over to the local Cambridge/Middlesex County
court, and the state can defer to the federal as they did when the state
indictments were withdrawn in favor of federal charges. This kind of state federal cooperation, so
celebrated as an achievement by politicians, effectively guts the local
political pressure that is the only accountability on our justice system (see
the late William Stuntz’s great final jeremiad, Collapse, for that case).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The expectation that you will plead guilty immediately or
face extreme punishment meant that when Swartz balked at pleading and becoming
an informant against other members of his movement (oh, did I forget to mention
that routinely dangerous, degrading, and actually criminal behavior against your
own associates is part of what the government now means by “accepting
responsibility” for your crimes), his indictment was superseded more than a
year later with a steroidal 13 count indictment that bore no reasonable
resemblance to whatever harms or risks his deliberate actions had imposed on
others. When he took his own life he had
real reason to believe he would spend the better part of his life in prison if
he did not finally cave to the prosecutors demands. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is enabled by a normalization of prison time for even
innocuous and sometimes virtuous crimes.
Carmen Ortiz, the US Attorney in charge of Swartz’s prosecution later
claimed she would have accepted a mere 7 months in prison for Swartz’s plea,
but why should incarceration a potentially devastating event even when kept to
a minimum ever have been on the table.
If deterring Swartz and others from future acts of civil disobedience
was the main point, a hefty fine would probably have done the job.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, while Mass Incarceration has a Jim Crow color to
it, whiteness is not ultimately a form of immunity, especially when its coupled
with radical politics of any kind. The
war on crime was framed at moment when riots in cities were linked in the
popular and law enforcement mind with radical political activists of all
sorts. This is especially true if your
activism is reaching and appealing to privileged well educated citizens who
have potential political clout. Back in
the 1960s new left activists of diverse racial backgrounds began to make considerable
in-roads among educated younger people.
When largely symbolic acts of violence emerged, the federal government
defined most of them as terrorists and killed, exiled, or imprisoned many of
them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What should we do if we are truly appalled by the
persecution of Adam Swartz and so many others?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Demand that President Obama and state governors, formally
declare the 1960s war on crime over, and announce that with crime at rates
lower than it has been since that era, the emergency like basis on which
prosecutors and law enforcement agents have operated must come to a close. Justice, restoration, reconciliation and
prevention must become the new focus of a rebalanced truly realigned justice
system.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Begin to make over-criminalization and persecutorial prosecution
a political issue in its own right. Let
your local elected district attorney or county attorney know that you support
an end to racial profiling, fair charging practices, and an emphasis on
alternatives to incarceration and that you are prepared to campaign against
them in the next election if you don’t see that happening in your community.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, we need to take seriously Justice Kennedy’s
invitation in <i><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supremecourt.gov%2Fopinions%2F10pdf%2F09-1233.pdf&ei=SfLFUfGgOObziwLjpIGgBw&usg=AFQjCNEd6TYX_sYf3vqLSQuf-B7e5EkTFw&sig2=W3VMx-M1JW2_CMHmvh4z7w&bvm=bv.48293060,d.cGE">Brown v. Plata</a></i>, to
place human dignity at the very center of our constitutional vision for
criminal law. Prosecutors take an oath
to uphold the Constitution. When prosecutors
like Carmen Ortiz use the kind of ruthless methods she used against Swartz,
even when it does not lead to the tragic end it did here, she not only fails to
recognize his human dignity, she violates our right to be represented as the
United States in way compatible with our commitment to that value.<o:p></o:p></div>
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ps. for anyone at <a href="http://www.netrootsnation.org/">Netroots</a>, I'll be talking on this topic along with <a href="http://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/marcy-wheeler/">Marcy Wheeler</a>, <a href="http://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/elliot-peters/">Elliot Peters</a> (Aaron Swartz's lawyer), and <a href="http://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/shane-kadidal/">Shayna Kadidal</a> of the Center for Constitutional Rights, today at 3pm. at a session appropriately titled Beyond Aaron's Law.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Jonathan Simonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15217567476776700363noreply@blogger.com0