The Prison and the College

Today's New York Times brings a welcome graduation story of Mikki Hidalgo, a formerly incarcerated woman who has completed the transition back from prison to a successful and effective life in the community by completing a bachelors degree (read Dalton Walker's reporting)

The program which helped Mikki and scores of other formerly incarcerated women, College and Community Fellowship, is directed by Rev. Vivian Nixon, an inspiring mentor and leader in the growing movement to stem mass incarceration in America. Prison to college programs like College and Community Fellowship should be seen together with a growing group of programs around the country bringing college students into prisons to study with prisoners, including programs linking UC Berkeley and San Quentin, and at Bard College.

This is not the first time that prisons and higher education have developed channels both ways, but it comes after a long period of mass incarceration in which earlier educational initiatives have been delegitimized and dismantled. It also comes at a time when prisons and colleges are directly competing for public financing.

Twenty years ago, as mass imprisonment in California was hardening and escalating, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of a graduate student activist compelled by the formalities of a brief exchange before an official meeting, to make small talk with UC President David Pierpont Gardner. After he explained why UC's difficult budgetary negotiations with the legislature made any improvement in graduate student funding impossible at the moment, I quipped that he should seek a merger with the California Department of Corrections thereby solving his budgetary, diversity, and student protesting problems all at once. He didn't crack a smile.

Still, there is something very promising about this current circulation between prison and college. College students have been and can be articulate and influential participants in the national discussion about mass imprisonment. Prisoners and the formerly incarcerated are in a unique position to explain and analyze the nature of the carceral power that has been unleashed on America, and whose influence is shaping all our communities.

Hard Time High

Another creepy story about the growing penalization of high school comes from Cal State San Jose Justice Studies Professor (soon to be UC Irvine Professor) Mona Lynch (whose brilliant writings on contemporary penality should be on your summer reading lists). Mona writes about the experience of her high school senior daughter Molly:

For Molly's senior prom, which happened last Friday, the students all were required to ride a bus to and from the event, and were told to arrive an hour before the departure time so that they could each be breathalyzed before getting on the bus. They were also told that they would be breathalyzed as they departed the bus to go into the prom (in case anyone had smuggled booze onto the bus, I suppose). It turns out that they did not breathalyze everyone, but only "randomly" selected students, the majority of whom were boys. Then once at the dance, there were security "chaperones" surveilling from a balcony above and if they observed anything unusual, those students were pulled to be breathalyzed. One of the floor "chaperones" determined that Molly and a couple of her friends who were dancing together, were dancing too wildly or weirdly, so they were pulled from the dance floor and breathalyzed. After passing the test, she and her friends made sure they danced extra wildly for the rest of the night by the chaperone who had been so troubled in the first place.

race, crime, and governance

I was recently privileged to participate in a high speed intellectual collision between people who think about criminal justice and people who think about race (with wonderful efforts made to make sure any intellectual bruises were healed with beauty). I'm still processing most of what I learned and will share the insights on this blog as they come. Many thanks to the Open Society Institute's After Prison Initiative and the Aspen Institute's Round Table on Community Change.

One fall out for me is that two issues I had been thinking about too separately are now more or less pureed. One is the drive by white Americans to control Americans of color, as a matter of political will (whether formed by malice, greed, or benevolence), call it "white man's government," and the other a drive (one shared by many Americans of color) to isolate themselves from those they consider deviant and dangerous (call it governing through crime). Each of these has their own genealogy but as a result of American history they are inextricably bound up with each other.

Both are important. The common history means that "white man's government" will be advanced by even the most progressive efforts to extend crime control measures. The distinct genealogy means that the discourses, motivations, and resources associated with "governing through crime" help lock in "white man's government" despite the cultural and political victory of the Civil Rights movement.

More Governing Schools through Crime

With graduation in the air, more stories are appearing of crime and punishment models infiltrating our high schools. An AP story in today's NYT describes the situation of five students denied diplomas (they still get to graduate) because friends or family cheered during their walk across the stage despite an admonition to hold all applause until the end of the ceremony. Because parents signed a contract promising to act in a dignified way, it may be tempting to view this as a more civil action (even if a bit over the top) until you read that students denied diplomas could get them back by doing 8 hours of community service!

Watching the Detectives

Two recent stories in the NYT spotlight different strategic innovations that are very common today in American policing. Both raise concerns about the futility of creating more secure and prosperous cities by continuing to govern them through crime. They also raise concerns about the ways race and racism are at work whenever we govern through crime.

In several fascinating articles and video reports in the Regional section of the Times, Andrew Jacobs has reported on a multi-night mini-ethnography he did with Newark police officers in some of the sections of that beleaguered city. (Newark Battles Murder and Its Accomplice, Silence). The very title of Jacob's story represents how powerful the pull of crime is on his imagination after a few nights with the police in Newark (metaphors of war and of criminal law intertwine).

The background of rising murder rates over the last several years is truly alarming (since it has wiped out most of the homicide reductions that Newark like most American cities had in the 1990s--- On the general phenomenon See, Zimring's The Crime Decline). But as the accompanying charts show, the rape and robbery rates, which also plunged in the 1990s, have continued to fall. This suggests that the that homicide spikes in Newark (and cities like Oakland California as well), are largely due to score settling among a very specific network of young men.

Yet rather than a strategy aimed at addressing that network, the Newark Police Department has embraced the widely used "broken windows" method of intensive policing of low level criminal activity in an entire neighborhood in an attempt to deter more serious crime. The flaws in this strategy have been widely aired (See Bernard Harcourt's Illusions of Order). For our purposes one need only note that it is a strategy totally invested in the unity of "crime" as a category (rather than structure of knowledge and power created by governing through crime).

Moreover it is a category that permits race and racism to be reinvested in countless ways from the fact that Jacob's story itself (without any apparent malice) links the blackness of neighborhoods to their criminality (by reinscribing its police ethnography in the familiar story of racial demography since the '60s), to the florid Sgt. Juliano who tells the clearly enthusiastic Jacob's that catching criminals in the Fifth war is like "shooting fish in a barrel."

The limits of a crime control strategy to control, yes, even the worst crimes like murder, are also well on display in the story and its title. Because of fear and mistrust of the police, there is virtually zero cooperation from the community in solving homicides.

An interesting recent effort to escape those limits of community support are shown in a much shorter story by Richard Jones, Crime Rate Drops, and a City Credits its Embrace of Surveillance Technology. In this approach the police cease trying to act on the community (whether through the hard or soft approaches to community policing) and instead rely on high technology equipment to speedily identify the location of gun shots, to video tape car thefts in progress, and to DNA test all persons encountered at crime scenes.

This Terminator like approach to carrying the battle against crime safely behind any form of popular consent invokes more constitutional and other objections than I have time for just now. But simply consider the way in which this kind of technology is certain to mechanically lock in the relationship between racially defined neighborhoods and crime (what are your odds of ending up in the East Orange DNA data base? I would guess it depends a lot on your race). Here, unlike the reportage on Newark, the technique is given unchallenged credit for a drop in crime so steep that it does suggest some effort by police to repress the count, a practice that Jones reports had gone on before).

Governing Campus through Crime

Reading about Alette Kendrick's 3 year suspension from UC Santa Cruz after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges sent chills down my spine this morning of recognition and change. Kendrick, apparently the only "black student" among protesters at an October 18, 2006 protest of a UC Regents meeting held on the campus, was also the only one to receive substantial disciplinary sanction (read the SF Chron story by Leslie Fulbright; read Alette Kendrick's account). According to David Sherman, the prosecutor who negotiated Kendrick's guilty plea: "Alette was one of the people who was very aggressive. She got knocked down, bit an officer's leg and was basically out of control and screaming."

Sherman's explanation seems oddly ambivalent. If Kendrick was "one of" the aggressive people, why was she the only person facing serious charges (originally three felonies)? If she was knocked down, an assault on her body by the police officer(s), wouldn't screaming, biting, and being out of control be reasonable responses (certainly ones easily understandable in the calm deliberation of the prosecutor's office). Also, we have every reason to assume that Kendrick's race helped define the relative level of aggressiveness that police observed. The populist and professionalized mentalities that associate blackness with criminality in American governance make black individuals of either sex more readily seen as acting in accordance with that stereotype. Substantial cognitive science now shows that in controlled experiments observers more readily read black faces as expressing anger or threat.

The 3 year suspension, also reflects a degree of governing through crime that was not on UC campuses in the 1980s when I faced similar charges to Kendrick after the infamous Shanty-Town riot at Berkeley in Spring 1986. While I was charged with felony offenses (along with hundreds of others) and pre-emptively banned from coming to campus, only to plead guilty to a misdemeanor later (just like Kendrick), neither I nor any others from my recollection, were ever disciplined by the Berkeley campus. Instead, angered by campus administrators' decision to allow police to mass arrest peaceful demonstrators, I exiled myself from campus for a semester to take a visiting lecturer offer from the University of Michigan. I would bet that campus disciplinary bodies have gotten increasingly willing to bring down heavy sanctions on students when criminal charges are involved. Governing through crime tends to break down traditional boundaries among institutions, and centralize the flow of all "trouble" toward criminal justice "solutions."

Governing through Crime or Governing by Race

Does America accept the moral necessity of a war on crime despite its clear tendency to reinforce almost every aspect of racialized disadvantage and disparity, or is that war on crime a barely disguised strategy to maintain a system of unequal citizenship on the basis of race?

The historical pattern is consistent with both interpretations. The beginning of efforts to reshape governance around the problem of repressing violent crime coincided with the high water mark of the civil rights movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970. Many of the astounding gains achieved that movement have been visibly weakened (according to Bryan Stephenson, black male disenfranchisement in his home state of Alabama due to felon disenfranchisement laws is approach the levels that prevailed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Moreover the white southern elite, discredited by segregation, were able to strike a much better deal wit the national parties after Richard Nixon's "law and order" plus "southern strategy" worked in attracting Northern Democrats in 1968. The present system of mass incarceration, produces a toxic mix of effects on communities of color, lowering their social and economic viability while squelching their political voice all at once (Bruce Western's new book, Punishment and Inequality, spells all this out in convincing detail).

Clearly some Americans who wanted to reverse the Civil Rights movement, found in crime control, a new model of government through which to continue the campaign for "white mans government." (Katherine Beckett makes this case in Making Crime Pay). But many other Americans who were genuinely moved by the cultural force of the Civil Rights movement, found the problem of violent crime a compelling moral mandate to transform both their expectations of government and their own governing activity (in the home, workplace, community). It was these Americans who politicians like LBJ and Robert Kennedy hoped to reach with the crime commission put in place in 1965 and the promise of a growing federal role in crime control. They clearly didn't want to reverse the impact of Civil Rights legislation they had just supported (although they may have seen it as a kind of balancing act, substituting one kind of hopefully race neutral social control for another expressly racist variant).

Crime control had always been a potent way to govern in America. As recent histories of the 1930s show, war on crime was explicit theme of the early New Deal. Had the reactionary Supreme Court succeeded in shutting off the economic recovery strategy completely, we might have seen a much bigger war on crime in the mid-30s. But like the New Deal itself, governing through crime brought along two quite inconsistent but racially charged traditions. One tradition is the long chain of populist law enforcement and racial violence going back to the "slave patrols" and continuing into the racially charged urban police forces of the 20th century. The other tradition is associated with bureaucratic centralization, professionalism, and positivist criminology. The populist tradition has often been associated with visceral express racism. The professional criminological tradition generally rejected and disparaged that kind of racism, but was profoundly influenced by the tradition of scientific racism, by which the disadvantages of Africans and other colored races were attributed to biological and cultural inferiority (epitomized by the influential work of Cesare Lombroso, see David Horn's The Criminal Body and the new translation of L'Uomo Delinquente done by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter). This generally liberal tradition would eventually repudiate scientific racism as well, but the association between social pathology, crime, and non-white racial status would remain. Moreover, as an approach to governmental action, this progressive wing of criminology has always pushed for earlier intervention. Crime is a product of social pathology that produces early signs of deviance that can be themselves made eligible for intervention through criminalization.

So back to the 1960s for a moment. As both liberal and conservative politicians find in crime a politically viable surface on which to rework post-New Deal strategies of governance, they are investing in both of these traditions; more racially tinged populist punitiveness, and more focus on social pathology and more criminalization of pathological behavior. Moreover, deep economic restructuring, beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s is producing a collapse of the inner city economies on which the many communities of color still depended. The predictable result was a vast increase in the amount of social pathology to be criminalized, and deep concentration of this pathology inside communities of color (the emergence of the underclass).

Two things follow.

In an era of governing through crime it may be relatively easy to fight the racist implications of populist punitiveness (racial profiling and Frank Rizzo style racist policing are largely discredited), but very hard to stop the professional criminological focus on pathology from reinforcing the racial disadvantages of the war on crime. Thus the hidden danger in all the talk around re-entry about risk assessment and rehabilitation is to deepen the assumption that social pathology must be treated as crime in ways that will structurally disadvantage communities of color.

The struggle against mass imprisonment must become a struggle against the priority of crime over American governance.