Rites of May

As my 10 year old daughter prepares in a week or so take part in an away from home school sponsored camping and learning experience I read with some alarm a story carried widely by the media (here’s the BBC version) about teachers from Scales Elementary school in Tennessee who had “staged a mock gun attack” on their sixth graders during a school camping trip. On the last night of a camping trip, the staff told the students a gun wielding assailant was in the area. Students recall teachers specifically using the term “code red,” which students had been previously trained meant that a gun wielder was in the school. In the face of parental outrage, school officials are describing the fake gun scenario as a “learning experience” that the staff had planned and that students had been told in that a prank would occur for teaching purposes during the trip. As the media storm builds, however, two staff members, an assistant principal and a teacher have been placed on unpaid leave for the duration of the school year.

Coming only a few weeks after the massacre at Virginia Tech it is difficult to believe that the staff members were not more wary that their particular prank might be misread (although perhaps they thought it even more relevant as a teaching issue). But the predictable focus on individual misconduct should not divert us from noting something subtler but pervasive, how central the imagined threat of violent crime has become to the American school experience. As Bill Lyons and Julie Drew argue in their terrific book, Punishing Schools, both inner city and suburban schools now bristle with routines designed to prevent crime in school and how much the remote possibility of violent crime justifies a system targeted at lesser misconduct. In the name of protecting children, we now invest their emerging subjectivity with a code system designed to highlight the salience of violent crime (how many other code colors besides “red” are there one wonders). The teachers in Tennessee seemed blind to the alarming quality of their prank precisely because the mandate to govern schools through crime is itself so deeply ingrained. That the teachers now find themselves facing administrative sanctions and perhaps worst, only underscores how complex this terrain is for responsible actors in all kinds of institutions where the fear of crime has become a constitutive feature. The massacre at Virginia Tech will only raise the salience of any real or imagined threats of violent crime in proximity to schools and colleges.

When to Govern through Crime? The Case of Sport Doping

That American governance practices are highly tainted by the long war on crime toward criminalizing social problems and turning to criminal justice techniques is one of the givens of this blog and my book. But even recognizing that pattern does not relieve of us of the problem of trying to define when it may in fact be appropriate to govern through crime. Drugs and domestic violence both came under increasing criminal justice sanction in the 1990s, but they represent very different issues with distinctive histories and social frameworks. We need a vocabulary for talking about the appropriate subjects of criminalization (indeed that may be come even more important if we can get traction with the American public in spreading skepticism about the reflex reliance on crime). The problem of doping in competitive sports, particularly cycling, provides an interesting example. As detailed in a New York Times article by Juliet Macur, the exposure of a widspread doping at the very pinnacle of competitive cycling, has had devastating consequences on the economic viability of the sport, with sponsors dropping out and fans turning away. The Spanish police have taken part in an aggressive effort to force out doping, one that is winning support from many cyclists.

One may well be tempted to see here a parallel with the disastrous war on drugs in the United States. Illegal drugs are a sticky concept and we can see all kinds of metaphoric and real links between the two. Yet it is precisely the advantage of foregrounding techniques of governing that we can suspend the often false unity of a field like illegal narcotics. In important ways doping in sport differs from other kinds of illegal drug markets. Here are several observations that support my sense that it is quite appropriate for Spain (and other countries) to upgrade the criminalizing of illegal doping in sport, while we used waste little time in decriminalizing and even legalizing most other kinds of illegal drug use and distribution.

• While the case for criminalizing drug users relies on vague social impacts of drug lifestyles, doping in sport represents a rather focused and profitable form of fraud, allowing those willing to do it the ability of some to claim an illicit advantage over those who accept the constraints of the rules.
• While the impact of most recreational drug use is longterm and likely to be manageable by many other kinds of governance strategies, the nature of competitive sport as a field makes the worth of the whole enterprise vulnerable in relatively short time frames to the misconduct of a few.
• While the war on drugs has required a massive proactive law enforcement apparatus to create deterrence (and whether it has created any at all is questionable) sport doping will involve focused investigations of readily identifiable (and thus deterrable) individuals who can compelled to provide biological information for forensic analysis.
• While the war on drugs has produced mass imprisonment, especially concentrated on minority populations, punishment for illegal sport doping could consist of massive fines coupled with permanent or limited exclusion from professional sport; sanctions with far less social collateral damage than prisons bring.

These seem to me good reasons to consider a greater role for crime in the governance of sport doping. This is especially true where there is a history of failed efforts at self regulation. If so it may suggest a new role for criminal justice in a society that no longer relies on mass imprisonment it for routine governance. Criminal justice might be sought not as kind of action for those who lack security carried out against those with even less security, but instead as a kind of knowledge, valuable precisely to those communities most threatened by the corrupting effects of imperfect knowledge.

The Professor and the Governor

If you want to get a feel for how complex is the challenge for an academic who hopes to transform California's culture of mass imprisonment with evidence based criminology, keep your eye on UC Irvine criminologist Joan Petersilia.

Professor Petersilia, one of the nation’s leading experts on parole and reentry, has become Governor Schwarzenegger’s main policy advisor on reforming California’s behemoth and crisis ridden prison system. Governors in recent decades have largely foresworn academic policy experts, especially on topics like crime but through that analogy on many others. Instead they have privately surrounded themselves with pollsters and political consultants while publicly surrounding themselves with uniformed law enforcement officers and victims. Governor Schwarzenegger is doing both. A visit to the prison reform section of his very dynamic webpage shows you both visions.

In the still frame that begins the video of Governor Schwarzenegger signing AB 900, a massive new prison construction bill, he is surrounded by uniformed law enforcement officials and in the background, some victim’s advocates. This is how governors have represented themselves in the age of governing through crime. Victims are stand ins for all citizens, and law enforcement as representations of a state protecting people from crime (while being exposed to it themselves). In this pose Schwarzenegger, as many governors before him, is represented as governing by providing direct personal protection from violent crime to ordinary citizens and to law enforcement, largely by moving massive numbers of Californians from their communities to prisons. The bill he signed and declared a major break with California penal policy, will actually add 53 thousand new prison beds to a system that has grown from about 20 thousand total prisoners in 1980 to almost 200 thousand today.

If you click the link labeled, “comprehensive prison reform,” you see a picture of Professor Joan Petersilia in the upper right hand corner.

On the accompanying video, Professor Petersilia touts the emphasis on rehabilitation in the new law. No governor in nearly thirty years has chosen to associate themselves with academic criminology as a form of state knowledge. In doing so, Schwarzenegger is invoking a New Deal style of leadership (“the brain trust”) that has been virtually absent in the era of governing through crime. Professor Petersilia in her many public appearances and publications in recent months has emerged as an advocate for reducing California’s prison population and its chronic use of parole to recycle the vast majority of released prisoners back to prison. This possibility, embraced by the governor as well, is represented in the recent law by provisions requiring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to reach certain benchmarks in establishing effective rehabilitation programs before a second round of money is released to build more prison bed space. Other provisions supported by Professor Petersilia, including establishment of a sentencing commission to reconsider who gets sent to prison in the first place, and program to house most of California’s growing female prisoner population, in special facilities nearer to their communities, never made it into the final bill.

Petersilia has taken a hard and exposed road. She has become a public icon for criminology in the service of a political leadership that has continued to support the principle of mass imprisonment. She has remained a clear spoken truth teller committed to empirical rather than ideological answers to the state’s prison crisis. During her recent appearance on Forum, a Bay Area public radio show frequently devoted to debating public policy, Professor Petersilia embraced these tensions, strongly supporting the law as a necessary step forward while agreeing with every critic about the fact that California imprisons far too many of its people.

Can Joan help lead us out of an age of governing through crime and back to a time when American political leaders viewed empirical socio-legal research as a key technology of governance? I don’t know, but I think She is a hero for trying. I’m going to keep watching (and help if I can).

Secret Agents from the War on Crime

The alleged plot by a small group of Muslim men to attack soldiers at Fort Dix shares some disturbing features with virtually all of the other examples of domestic terror cells exposed by the Federal government since the War on Terror began, and its not the violence of their plots. The supposed terror cells exposed since 9/11, look to all appearances like rank amateurs. Compare the men allegedly involved in a Fort Dix plot to the 9/11 terrorists. The latter were educated men of some sophistication, financed by generous wire transfers, who worked relentlessly and largely silently across a narrow period of time to weave together a complex plot requiring astonishing coordination and discipline. The former appear to be unevenly educated men of working class backgrounds and trajectories, who meander through wordy discussions about possible acts of terror like characters in a Don DeLillo novel (who sometimes are terrorists) or a jihadi version of Seinfeld. The American suspects also differ from Britain’s suspected terror cells. The latter were making rapid progress toward launching actual attacks (like the one launched on July 7, 2005). The former seem barely beyond the stage of fantasy.

There may be a common cause to these differences, i.e., the heavy American reliance on professional informers who typically have strong personal incentives to get their suspects to say and do incriminating things, and who have sophisticated legal knowledge of just what sound bytes and actions they need. This reliance is driven by many things, including the ham handed way American security forces mistreated domestic Muslims after 9/11, but the most important is the deeply ingrained effects of the war on crime on American governance generally (what I call governing through crime) and now on the war on terror. One of the most important features of the American war on crime was the heavy reliance on informers to make the largely futile drug war work. After all, unlike real crime, drug dealing mostly involves cooperative relationships between people who want to buy and sell the stuff and who have few incentives to call the police. Investigation therefore requires professional moles who have the street credibility to get inside drug deals, but the incentives to work for the police (a very unattractive subset of the population by all accounts). These informants generated untold numbers of wrongfully convicted Americans, many of who still probably languish in prison (we’ll never know because of the absence of DNA type evidence, but the nightmare of Tulia Texas where scores of people were sent to prison by just one such informant, is a case study in just what can happen).

The current reporting on the Fort Dix plot (read David Kocieniewski’s article in today’s New York Times) shows plentiful signs of having been heavily distorted by professional informants. Compared to the plotters, the informants presented themselves as more sophisticated and more committed to escalating the plot. The government will eventually be forced to turn over far more of the tapes and notes of the informants than they have so far. But there is no guarantee that this will allow the media to expose whether this plot was cooked. Informants are not required to make full recordings of their activities or to take comprehensive notes. More important, the federal criminal code now bristles with so many security crimes requiring minimal conduct that juries may well be led into convicting them regardless of how credible it is that they would have attacked Fort Dix without government prodding.

California's Prisons and its Communities

At the vortex of Governor Schwarzenegger's tortured efforts to extricate the state from an ever deepening human rights and legal crisis of its prisons, while not appearing to jeopardize the security of California's in any imaginable degree, is the relationship between prisons and communities in California. In the decades during which California leaders have been governing through crime, prisons have been offered time and again as the major way the state acts to help communities. In terms repeatedly made explicit, these leaders have portrayed the prison as a channel through which troubled and troubling members of the community go, leaving a community less threatened by their presence. This geographic and demographic logic has led the state to build and fill a constellation of new prisons, most of them situated in economically depressed and less populous areas of the state (see Ruth Gilmore's analysis of this spatial logic in her new book, Golden Gulags). At the same time the prisoners that emerge to return to California communities (now called parolees and by law the very same communities from which they came) are constantly perceived as a new threat to those communities. Increasing sentences and resisting every path of release has become the path of least resistance to this contradiction. No Governor Schwarzenegger seeks to cut through this knot by building new community based "reentry" prisons to which prisoners approaching their release date, and parolees returned for violations of parole would be sent. The idea behind these centers is attractive; provide the reassurance of a locked facility, but the economic and social benefits of close contact with families and jobs. But here the spatial logic of governing through crime in California comes home. Those communities, mostly large urban areas in which the economically disadvantaged are often spatially proximate to the better off, are likely to strongly resist the construction of prisons inside their boundaries.

Mass Incarceration, Not

Imagine if after years of packing ever greater numbers of offenders into prisons lacking in rehabilitation and rife with interpersonal violence, county courts, realizing that public safety could never improve this way, decided to keep an increasing portion of its offender population at home and outside of bars, while investing in innovative rehabilitative techniques. Seem impossible? it has up until now to me. In Governing through Crime I argued that mass imprisonment is a policy held in place not by crime (or even its repressed others, racisms, class exploitation, etc.) but by changes in the structure of our political institutions around the problem of violent crime that had made the physical transfer of threatening populations a central tendency of governing late modern America. Yet as detailed in a recent series by James Sterngold in the San Francisco Chronicle (read it now) the scenario I began with has actually occurred in California, the carceral behemoth itself, only not in its adult system. Instead, the youth prison system, aimed at juveniles who have committed serious or violent crimes, after steadily growing through the 1980s and early 1990s, went into a steep decline after reports of abuse emerged in the mid-1990s, and today fewer than 636 of the more than 200 thousand juveniles arrested in a typical year are sent to a prison.

How did this happen? This is a story waiting to be told, and of vital importance to those of us most anxious to dismantle both mass incarceration and the culture of fear and control that sustains it. Here are a few speculative hypotheses (i.e. guesses):

• Demons and Daemons: Youth are easy to demonize, they can morph quickly into super predators more frightening than a hardened repeat offender, but they can also morph back. As a subject of imagination, youth embody both our greatest fears and hopes (see generally popular culture of the last century or so)

• Responsible governance: This process of decarceration was not ordered by any court or the legislature. Rather, prodded by scandals involving abuse of youth inmates, county level officials seem to have made the decision to take on the burden of creating alternative strategies for addressing the crime risk posed by these youths (not inconsiderable risks at all) and to do so at home in the county of residence, and without recourse to locked doors. These are the same counties that are sending thousands of adult prisoners to an equally failed adult prison system. They key may be that different people in the counties are making these calls. In the adult system it is prosecutors, the elected officials who in some ways have the most stake in governing through crime.

French turn to Governing through Crime?

Does the election of Center-Right candidate Nikolas Sarkozy in the French Presidential elections (read Seb Rotella's coverage in the LA times) signal that France is now preparing to take an American style turn toward governing through crime? As interior minister during the 2005 riots that swept many immigrant neighborhoods in France, Sarkozy called rioters "scum" and threatened to use a hose to clean them out of France. More than previous Center-Right candidates Sarkozy has invoked themes law and order and promised to hold juvenile offenders and illegal immigrants to account. But Sarkozy is also seen as a stalking horse for a more neo-liberal approach to governing with more risk and responsibility placed on French citizens and a less powerful welfare state. The opening months of the Sarkozy government should provide signs to whether accountability talk will focus on crime control and bashing immigrants, or whether Sarkozy will really turn to the harder task of breaking up the social management of the French economy and unleashing more market forces. My opening prediction is that since resistance will be greatest to economic reforms (look for massive street demonstrations in response to any serious efforts to cut back job benefits and vacations), Sarkozy will turn to the easier road of governing through crime.