I'm posting from London where I've been attending the annual conference of the British Society of Criminology. I had the great privilege of giving an opening plenary lecture on the topic of Governing through Crime and raised the question of whether the UK is already following in our path. In his brilliant book (to which my heavy indebtedness will be obvious if you read both books) The Culture of Control, David Garland suggests that both nations have reshaped their politics around the problem of crime and turned punitive for similar reasons rooted in the conditions of late modernity and the exigencies of welfarist governance.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the UK is being shaped by fear of crime. As you walk through London, closed circuit TV cameras are visible on virtually every intersection. The New Labour government, enjoying its 11th year in power, has made no bones about being both "tough on crime" and "tough on the causes of crime." One of their most discussed initiatives involves Anti-Social Behavioral Orders (or ASBOs) which can be issued by courts to require a person to refrain from behavior that is not criminal but makes others afraid of crime (like wearing a hoodie in the shopping mall). If you violate an ASBO, it is a crime.
On the otherhand, British society remains far more open to debate about these policies than is true currently in the US (indeed Tory leader David Cameron last year spoke out against ASBOs for hoodies, which the tabloids dubbed "hug a hoodie". At the very least there are strong forces here that are likely to resist a full embrace of governing through crime as a mode of governance,including:
A constitutional system that gives ruling parties plenty of power to govern in many areas of life without having to compromise with the opposition or with other levels of government
A national agency in charge of criminal justice, the Home Office, which remains far more open to criminological influence (rather than the populist impulse that dominates both national and state criminal justice policy in the US)
A stronger commitment to the idea of government as a tool of social solidarity than exits in the US
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Treason: Among Prosecutors any Questioning of the Harshness of Punishment is Treason
Even many people who support the death penalty believe that it is unjust when a person most responsible for a murder is spared death while someonhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife less responsible faces execution. Some death penalty states do not permit the less culpable party to face execution if the more culpable party is spared. Thus in Tennessee when a death sentence against Marcus Presley for shooting two people during the robbery of a pawn shop, was reversed because Presley was only 16 at the time, the prosecutor in the case, Robert Owen, testified in court that Presley's non-shooting accomplice LeSamuel Gamble, should also receive a life sentence.
Quoted in a story in today's New York Times, Own expressed the difficulty he faced.
That might seem a thoughtful instance of prosecutorial judgment. Just the kind of careful weighing we want these officials who exercise so much discretion to be engaged in. But in the era of governing through crime, prosecutors have become icons of the war on crime whose status is much sought after by other executive officials. As I argue in Chapter 2 of the book, politicians like Attorney Generals and Governors openly compete with prosecutors for the title of being the most loyal champion of crime victims.
Seeing an opportunity, Tennessee Attorney General Troy King announced he would intervene in the case to try an reinstate a death penalty against Gamble. According to Brenda Goodman's reporting in the Times, Mr. King's intent "was to protect the interests of the victims in the case and that Mr. Owens had acted on the side of the criminal."
Governing through crime has created enormous opportunity for expanding the power of executives, but only when the operate in the black and white terms dictated by governing through crime in which the world has only victims and evil doers, and in which any questioning of the harshness of punishment is a form of treason.
Quoted in a story in today's New York Times, Own expressed the difficulty he faced.
“It’s difficult for me. I’ve been a career prosecutor. I don’t like taking a position that’s not what my victim would like to take, but I couldn’t lay my head on my pillow at night if I stood by and let a person who didn’t kill somebody be executed when the person who did kill somebody was not.”
That might seem a thoughtful instance of prosecutorial judgment. Just the kind of careful weighing we want these officials who exercise so much discretion to be engaged in. But in the era of governing through crime, prosecutors have become icons of the war on crime whose status is much sought after by other executive officials. As I argue in Chapter 2 of the book, politicians like Attorney Generals and Governors openly compete with prosecutors for the title of being the most loyal champion of crime victims.
Seeing an opportunity, Tennessee Attorney General Troy King announced he would intervene in the case to try an reinstate a death penalty against Gamble. According to Brenda Goodman's reporting in the Times, Mr. King's intent "was to protect the interests of the victims in the case and that Mr. Owens had acted on the side of the criminal."
Governing through crime has created enormous opportunity for expanding the power of executives, but only when the operate in the black and white terms dictated by governing through crime in which the world has only victims and evil doers, and in which any questioning of the harshness of punishment is a form of treason.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Welcome to Your "Gang Reduction Zone"
Los Angeles, long imagined as a site of dystopian futures, seems determined to embed crime fear into its present. As Mike Davis' books on the city have shown, LA since the 1980s has increasingly shaped itself around fear of crime with gated communities, its privatized high security downtown, and its "gang reduction zones". A recent story in the LA Times shows how the city creates ever new layers on the surface of its crime centered life. In the latest effort to reassure the public, “Los Angeles leaders unveiled several initiatives Wednesday to reduce crime at and around 20 public schools, including a computerized tracking system that authorities have already used to tailor violence-fighting strategies to the specific conditions in hot spots around the city."
“The anti-crime plan also calls for rookie police officers and their supervisors to mentor students at the schools -- in South Los Angeles, on the Eastside and in the San Fernando Valley -- starting next month. And it envisions greater community involvement, enlisting adults to walk with groups of children who must pass through some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods en route to classes.”
But organizing life around crime only increases the fear.
“The anti-crime plan also calls for rookie police officers and their supervisors to mentor students at the schools -- in South Los Angeles, on the Eastside and in the San Fernando Valley -- starting next month. And it envisions greater community involvement, enlisting adults to walk with groups of children who must pass through some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods en route to classes.”
But organizing life around crime only increases the fear.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, September 7, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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.
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.
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