Gangs and Governing

When we govern through crime we allow crime (all crime or more typically some particularly frightening sort) to become an invisible thread that binds together larger and larger assemblies of heterogeneous elements. This creates power because it allows resources and social meanings to flow through and organize ever larger systems, attracting more resources and meanings. Ultimately this also creates chaos and suffering as the ever growing system embodies greater and greater levels of heterogeneity and thus a mounting surplus of ungovernability.

Today's New York Times provides an account of sorts of this cycle in action, in a story by Solomon Moore on gang crime and policies that target gangs for more policing and prison. The first part of the cycle is illustrated by the continuing spread of "tough" anti-gang measures that began in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Mobilized around public outrage at some tragic product of an incident said to be "gang related" these laws increase the level of police attention to young people suspected of gang involvement by creating police lists of gang members and emphasizing heavy use of arrest to break up and interrupt gang activities. They also target the same arrested young people for longer prison sentences. In North Carolina, a recent "gang incident" in which a 13 year old "bystander" was killed, has provided the catalyst to enact a similar body of laws there.

The second part of the cycle is evident in the opposition to such gang policies that is growing in Los Angeles, the place where the current wave of gang laws began. As critics in and out of the law enforcement system are recognizing, these laws immediately increase the cultural power of gangs by pulling in marginal youth who are treated as gang members by police and by alienating the typically minority communities in which these tactics are being deployed against cooperation with police.

The speed with which we can turn into the second part of the cycle and more importantly turn out of the cycle before the levels of chaos and suffering get to large depends on the mobilization of effective counter information about gangs. An excellent source of that counter knowledge in recent years has been Justice Strategies, a progressive think tank on crime and justice issues. Justice Strategies, and Judith Greene one of their principals, have worked to get the public to re-examine the gang frame and the policies that have come with it.

We in California should take the lead on disaggregating the bundle of heterogeneity that we call gangs.

To Become a Citizen, Be a Crime Victim

Crime victims may be very reluctant to come forward if they happen to lack citizenship and a valid visa for being in the United States. Coming forward and cooperating with authorities may cause you to be deported. Keeping quite, or even continuing to endure violence (as in domestic violence situations) may be the preferred choice (especially where children may become separated from their parents as a result). Does it make sense to give such crime victims who cooperate with prosecutors a visa to let them stay here lawfully? It certainly seems to be humane and rational, but the federal law that authorized such visas (just now forthcoming according to an article by Anna Gorman in the LA Times) is also a text book example of governing through crime.

In Governing through Crime, chapter 3, I argue that crime victims have become the idealized citizen subjects of our time, literally the model subject through which government imagines the needs of the governed. Here the identity as crime victim literally establishes a citizen (or at least the possibility of gaining citizenship). Moreover, it is only those victimized non-citizens who act out the required role of cooperating with prosecutors who fulfill this idealized picture of the victim (many real victims do not cooperate for complex reasons).

Protection for non-citizens without valid visas against sudden and arbitrary removal from the United States (and mandatory detention until removal) is badly needed. If such individuals are removed it should be after individual assessment of their case, including the protection of their human rights both in their native country and in the impact their removal will have on people here, e.g., their US born children. Carving out a special status for crime victims only reveals our ongoing obsession with crime and our demand that crime victims assume a certain kind of identity, one linked to the state's power to punish.

What to do with Persistent Petty Offenders? Kill them Suggests the SF Chronicle

In one of the most appalling pieces of crime journalism I've seen in some time, this morning's SF Chronicle leads with a story practically celebrating the murder on the streets of Allen Broussard, a drug addicted petty offender who burglarized many cars in the City's hard pressed Hunter's Point neighborhood. The story, by Jaxon Van Derbeken, suggests that the system failed to either "punish" or "rehabilitate" Broussard despite many arrests because of reluctance to send him to state prison (rather than short trips through the county jail). Little disguised is the implication that the most effective way to rid ourselves of the petty criminals in this world is to kill them.

Derbeken's "research" consists primarily of gathering quotes from SF Prosecutors who apparently feel that our judges are too lenient in sending persistent offenders to prison. But with some 180,000 inmates already in a system that has been declared in a state of emergency due to unconstitutional overcrowding and mismanagement, radically increasing the flow of petty offenders can hardly be considered a solution to anything.

Here's another idea. Why don't we end the 40 year long and utterly counter productive war on drugs and replace it with a robustly regulated and taxed legal market. We would still have homeless drop outs like Allen Broussard, but they would have less need to steal and more chance of getting drug treatment.

Alert. A Murder has Taken Place in your Community. Proceed with Caution and Alert

The expert commission appointed by Virginia Governor Tim Kane has concluded that one of the mistakes made by Virginia Tech officials during mass killer Seung Hui Cho's rampage last spring, was waiting two hours to alert students and employees that murders had taken place. (read a summary in the Washington Post). In this day of instant messaging and peanut allergy warnings on the glass case at Starbucks it may seem obvious in retrospect that University officials should have sent out notice. Indeed universities are required by federal law to make crime information widely available.

I wonder however about the value of making everyone aware that a homicide has just taken place, especially when, as here, the police are quite confident that they have a suspect. After all, it is the extremely rare murderer who is out to kill just anyone they can find (although for that reason they are especially terrifying and movies find them irresistible), most killers have very specific reasons for using violence against very specific people (specific, not good).

A campus like Virginia Tech (or Berkeley for that matter) is a small city of 30 to 50 thousand people. If you live in a city do you really want the police to alert you right away that a murder has taken place? The "costs" of such information include a level of fear and trauma that may not be trivial. Since follow up information on what happened is far less likely to succeed in the typical case of a single incident killing, the informed subject may never learn the ultimately "reassuring" (even if desperately sad) facts, e.g., that the victim and perpetrator had known each other and endured interpersonal violence for years.

Americans often act in their lives as if the chances were relatively good that sudden and relentless violence might descend on them. Events like 9/11 and Virginia Tech remind us that these fears are not totally baseless. But the precautions we take are not costless either. They have effects on our physical and mental health, as well as in the inefficiency of environments that have become heavily securitized (notice how often security delays are now part of your internet experience).

Sometimes what you don't know can kill you. Sometimes what you know can kill you too.

Tangled Up in Crime: Kids, Schools, and Violence

A weekend feature in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle describing the impact of violence on urban youth and their school performance, and its Tuesday "follow up" (what are the politicians going to do about it?) shows how difficult it is to address contemporary urban problems without navigating the dense web of governing through crime.

The feature by Jill Tucker argued that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) most commonly treated in adults, exists among many young urban residents exposed to violence deaths and injuries of people close to them. The implication was that this untreated PTSD pandemic was a significant factor in the educational difficulties of SF's public schools.

The Tuesday follow up, also by Tucker, covers the response including specific proposals by political leaders to seek a stream of funding from the County government's share of Prop. 63 money. Proposition 63 established a complex new funding line for addressing California's massive community mental health gaps, with the catch that County's have to develop programs that are themselves usually politically controversial to get the money. The follow up also adds an additional wrinkle to the PTSD story. Many kids in the same schools are traumatized by having a loved one disappear into jail.

Ironies abound here. Fear of violent crime is what has most motivated the war on crime from the perspective of the public across the last forty years. The kids described in Tucker's well researched articles are the kids who actually experience the feared reality of a social landscape dotted with the memories of those disappeared to violent crime. But in forty years of crime rates going up and down (they remain lower then in the late 1980s) its the same kids in most of the same neighborhoods who continue to be exposed to the violence.

During the same period, the generalized fear of violent crime promoted by the war on crime and the media helped drive the middle classes out to more and more distant suburbs, exacerbating the social and economic isolation of urban youth, and leading to a high carbon, high obesity life style that many are now stuck in.

In the meantime the harsh war on crime, with its mass incarceration and lengthy prison sentences, have disappeared as many or more of the significant social connections of these same kids.

So how can local government get funds to address problems of urban youth and especially the hard-pressed schools? By focusing on PTSD, the article builds from a well established extension of how we understand crime victims (not just those felled by the bullets but those shattered by the consequences). Tucker's article was able to expose a new class of crime victims. This has significance because crime victims as a category of citizens have become one of the most politically salient symbols ever in American political culture, during and as a consequence of the war on crime.

The ultimate irony being that while we politically pay a lot of attention to crime victims (who unlike the kids here are typically imagined to be white), we do not spend money on them per se (we spend it on locking other people up in the name of those victims). So where to find funds that can be spent once you have political attention? Since PTSD's are recognized mental illnesses they should fit into the legal terms of Prop. 63 spending. Since the programs involved would be school based they do not create the kind of NIMBY problems (not in my backyard) that normally accompanies plans to address untreated mental illness in dense urban areas where high property value neighborhoods are not all that far from any proposed program.

Thus one further irony, some one of the rare sources of spending for mental illness (a social problem that has been neglected for years often in favor of tough on crime spending) finds itself drawn into a collateral dimension of crime and the war on crime.

Behind the Surge: Mass Imprisonment and our Strategy in Iraq

Only in its fantasy moments of "mission accomplished" and "shock and Awe" has the "war on terror" succeeded in escaping its intellectual roots in the war on crime. The Baghdad surge is only the latest of those fantasy moments. In the fantasy, the surge is about American forces obtaining enough strength to overwhelm the insurgents and death squads whose terrible toll on Baghdad's civilians was supposed to have been what justified the troop buildup. In real time however, accumulating right behind the surge, is a rapidly growing population of prisoners. According to Thom Shanker's reporting in the New York Times, the surge has produced a fifty percent increase in the number of detainees under US control, to 24,500 from around 16,000 in February.

The vast majority of the detainees are Iraqi men of Sunni background. Most are suspected of setting or aiding in the setting of the roadside bombs that have produced most of the US casualties in Iraq (note the focus on suppressing US casualties). Like the US prison population, the US Iraqi prison population keeps growing despite releasing lots of its inmates. More than 3 thousand have been released since the beginning of 2007, with the average length of detention being approximately a year. While there is no indication at this point of any repetition of the abusive tactics at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, there is also little reason to believe that the US can mass imprison its way out of insurgents.

Here in California, where the majority of state prison admissions are men already on parole who can be sent back for up to a year with a minimum of legal procedure, the system has regularly faced severe overcrowding problems despite building dozens of new prisons. While no one believes a year back in prison will alter the life patterns that are producing the behavior the state seeks to suppress, neither can the state muster the political will to question the basic strategy of mass imprisoning a troubled population.

A more immediate parallel for Iraq is the Israeli use of mass imprisonment against the Palestinian intifada brilliantly described by Jeffrey Goldberg in his book Prisoners detailing his own work in an Israeli prison for Palestinian militants and later as a journalist interviewing many of the same militants. The strategy of mass imprisoning young Palestinian men believed to be involved in Palestinian militancy has gone on since the 1980s and has produced a permanent problem of managing a large mass of resistant prisoners whose captivity is a constant provocation to the larger Palestinian population. Even more ominously for Israel, the strategy of mass imprisonment has shown no ability to cut the strength of the militants or move them toward compromise.

The age old prison paradox is repeating itself in Iraq. Echoing centuries of prison observers and reformers, Shanker observers.

But the detention system itself often serves as a breeding ground for the insurgency and a training opportunity for those who, after they are released, may attack Iraqi or American-led forces, military officers say.

It may be that there is no good alternative for the surge than to produce prisoners (the alternative of deliberate killing of non-resistant arrestees is hopefully too abhorrent to be considered, even for this administration). If so, however, it is another reason to question whether American strategy should continue banking on the surge.

Mandate for Fear

One of the central dynamics of what I call "governing through crime," is the systematic production and dissemination of knowledge about crime. Knowledge is power. What we know about is generally what we try to act on (or at least avoid). In recent decades a variety of laws have made crime knowledge more generally available. This aspect of the law is generally unnoticed (even as the result is more notice of crime). Thus the well known "No Child Left Behind Law," (which I argue in Chapter 7 of the book Governing through Crime is largely modeled on crime, treating educational failure as a crime) included a little discussed provision which requires states to maintain lists of "persistently dangerous schools." The result is media coverage such as the story reported by Jennifer Medina in yesterday's New York Times, describing the list of such schools in New York (here is the list) and its growth or shrinkage. (Unlike most such stories, Medina helpfully reports on the law itself and process of setting the terms of dangerousness which the law leaves up to states).

For many it will seem benign and appropriate for information to be provided on which schools are dangerous. Schools may be quite reluctant to disclose the level of crime (indeed New York and other states, according to Medina, have been accused of keeping the lists too short) and the incidents involved are serious crimes like robbery, assault, and use of a weapon. The point however is that law is mandating your awareness to crime risk and not to others. Parents can learn whether the school they are considering is a "persistently dangerous" one in terms of crime but not, for example, whether it is a persistently racially segregated one, or one with high levels of diabetes, high exposure to pollution, or automobile accidents.

What we know about, we act on.