Dare to say No to DARE

Sign of the times? According to Linda Saslow's reporting in the NYTimes school district in Suffolk County New York has announced that it plans to replace its current curriculum based on DARE, for Drug Resistance and Awareness Training, in favor of a more comprehensive health and safety curriculum. DARE, a crime oriented approach to health education in which police officers present curriculum about drugs, alcohol, tobacco and peer influences, was relentlessly promoted by the federal government for decades.

In 2002 a National Academy of Sciences committee assessed the empirical record and found that there was no evidence DARE education improved drug or educational outcomes. In a powerful demonstration of the grip that crime has on our imagination of schools (and everything else), the major response to the study was to try and reinvent the curriculum rather then question its crime and police centered approach.

In calling for a more comprehensive view of health and safety, Suffolk County authorities are helping to shift the knowledge context for parents and students away from America's obsessive focus on crime.

Mayors and Murder: Michael Nutter Takes the Helm in Philadelphia

"The streets are safe in Philadelphia -- it's only the people that make them unsafe." Frank Rizzo

The surprising come from behind candidacy of Michael Nutter, Philadephia's mayor-elect, is a potent reminder that long before the war on terror (and existing on a more primal stage of our political unconscious) the war on crime had reshaped American politics and especially the role of the executive as crime leader. Nutter,formerly a city council representative, won the crucial Democratic primary last spring after coming from the back of a five candidate pack and went on to win the general election this month by a record setting landslide of 86 percent. According to Ian Urbina's reporting in the NYTimes, Nutter's campaign took off after he began promising a crack down in gun violence and specifically to declare certain neighborhoods to be in a "state of emergency" permitting street closures and curfews to be imposed. He also promised a "stop and frisk" strategy to use police to find guns on young men. (Interestingly the wiki-pedia entry on Nutter hardly mentions crime).

For the first election cycle in several, a spike in homicides, including the deaths of police officers, made murder a central problem through which Philadelphian's imagined their future. Not only does fear of violence have a remarkable way of concentrating the imagination of citizens (to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holme's famous quip about hanging)but long before Dick Cheney occupied the Vice President's house in Washington, crime fighting mayors and police chiefs (or both) had ceased the mantle of emergency rule to promise aggressive plans to police city streets.

Like Corey Booker in Newark [see an earlier post], and City Attorney Dennis Herrera in San Francisco [see my earlier post], Mayor Nutter has discovered that violent crime can be like steroids for building political muscle. But as Nutter, a council member who once specialized in issues of property and redevelopment, surely knows, muscle backed fists are poor tools for governing the complex fiscal dilemmas of major cities. All can hope that the spikes in violence which began before, or at least early in, their terms, will turn down (as the laws of statistics suggest they will) on their watch. But they can also keep going up.

The particular tactics embraced by Nutter, neighborhood states of emergency and stop and frisk policing are different but they both share an important truth, violent crime almost always has its origins in locally anchored disputes among individuals and small networks of peers who are known to each other and to others. This truth suggests that mayors and police almost always in a better position to address violent crime than governors, state legislatures, let alone national politicians.

But local problems require solutions crafted to local conditions and both of these tactics are off the shelf of nationally promoted crime prevention strategies (with the talent available in Philadelphia between Penn and Temple alone, Nutter could do better). If forced to choose between the two, I'd put my money on "stop and frisk." pol Declaring states of emergency in narrowly defined sections of the city is a highly symbolic gesture, marked by closing streets and issuing dramatic court orders against gang members, but as a practical matter has little likelihood of bringing down violence rates. Young men with guns aren't stupid and they aren't compelled to remain in the designated crack down zones. Look for gun play to spill over into other neighborhoods if this is relied on.

Stop and frisk is really nothing more or less than the practice of preventive policing. Rather than responding to citizen requests (911 calls), police patrol areas where they expect potential homicide victims and perpetrators to be gathering. When they encounter individuals that they believe may be involved in crimes (past, present or future) police may "stop" them for a brief period of questions. If they have a reasonable belief that the person may be carrying a gun (or any weapon that could be used against them), the police may "frisk" the suspect, passing their hands over their outer-clothing, but in a manner calculated to feel any weapons in or under those clothes. Stop and frisk may reduce violence by discouraging young men in high crime areas (who are the most likely to be subjected to this technique) from carrying guns during their trips through the city. Just making the guns less available can reduce the number of occasions where situational disputes lead to violence.

On the other hand, stop and frisk can exacerbate the mistrust that may already exist in Philadephia's poor neighborhoods. If it is seen as racial profiling, stop and frisk may backfire, even on an African American Mayor.

Supreme Court Battle Over Gun Rights:Crime will be the argument on both sides!

Linda Greenhouse delivers up a fascinating overview of the gun rights case that is likely to be among the most awaited of this term's Supreme Court docket (read her analysis here). The case presents the gun debate in its most iconic form since the DC law at issue, which dates back to 1976, bars gun ownership anywhere in the District, including in a private home. If the Supreme Court strikes the law down they will break new ground by holding that the 2nd Amendment creates a personal right to possess fire-arms. Such a decision will open up many questions to keep lawyers busy in terms of the standard by which regulations short of prohibition must be judged.

The case will also give the country a chance to talk about gun-control during a Presidential election and in the midst of an alarming surge in violence in many large cities after more than a decade of dramatic declines in crime (see my colleague Frank Zimring's definitive book on the topic).

It is an equally good time to note that both sides in this long running culture war are highly motivated by fear of crime and both gun control and gun rights belong to what I have called "Governing through Crime." The gun control advocates will argue that DC's city council was well motivated to respond to an epoch plague of gun violence which was (and is again) threatening the vitality of American cities. Gun rights advocates will argue that DC's high crime rate and poor police success at clearing homicides, warrants permitting citizens to defend themselves (at least in the sanctity of their homes). With fear of crime driving both sides of the debates, expect any decision to set off further alarms about crime.

Death States: Will New Jersey Abolish the Death Penalty

It remains one of the most decisive political turns in American history. In the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, the US Supreme Court struck down all existing death penalties, while leaving the door open to the possibility that better drafted statutes might be upheld. By the time the Court considered a host of new statutes in the 1976 case of Gregg v. Georgia, thirty five states had re-enacted the death penalty and scores of individuals were already on death row (following years of actual death sentences declining). As I argue in Governing through Crime, this come back represented the empowerment of a whole new constellation of political power at the state level, anchored around governors, attorney generals, and prosecutors.

Now, for the first time since this new constellation was formed more than thirty years ago, a state is moving toward repealing its death penalty. According to the reporting of Jeremy W. Peters in the NYTimes, a bill that would do just that has come out of a Senate Committee and is on track to be considered by both houses. The reasons are not hard to understand. Like other states outside the death belt, New Jersey has found capital punishment to be very expensive and very difficult to actually execute (in fact no one has yet been executed under the revived death penalty law).

Yet even where the death penalty is moribund, renouncing the right to kill involves a huge modification of political authority (and the opportunities for politicians to act in the charged space of power it creates). Look for politicians on the margins to cease this opportunity to occupy the center of voter fears by rushing to defend the death penalty (which is never more productive politically than when under attack).

Feedlot Government: Coalinga and the Consequences of Our Fears

Our desires have consequences. For meat eaters in California that becomes evident near a place called Coalinga, where extensive cattle feedlots abut Interstate 5 which runs between LA and Northern California. Coalinga by happenstance (one assumes) is also the home to a different kind of animal storage facility, although not one you can see or smell from I5. Coalinga State Hospital, the first state mental hospital built in nearly half a century in California (a subject in itself I will blog on soon), is dedicated fully to housing a special category of California criminals that California (and other states) invented in the 1990s. Sexually violent predators, a term which has no known scientific basis, are convicted sex offenders who are civilly committed on the completion of their prison sentence on the grounds that they are mentally abnormal and a continuing danger. The programs are supposed to provide treatment, and periodic hearings are intended to prevent the state from confining people unnecessarily (being they've already served punitive prison sentences).

The problem is that only a tiny handful of people have gotten out so far, and they have found themselves celebrity monsters, chased across the landscape by television and sometimes real mobs. The result is a growing new sector of California's mass incarceration government. It may not churn the stomach as much as the feedlot's you see from I5. But as a recent story by Scott Gold and Lee Romney of the LA Times suggests, human feedlots produce their own kind of disgust.

Two years after California opened the nation's largest facility designed to house and treat men who have been declared sexually violent predators, Coalinga State Hospital is described by both patients and staff as an institution in turmoil.
Convinced that they stand little chance of being released and angry about perceived deficiencies at the hospital, patients are engaged in a tense standoff with administrators, according to interviews with more than 40 patients and staff members.

Almost all of the detainees at Coalinga have served time for serious sexual offenses. But instead of being released after completing their sentences, they were transferred to the state hospital system under a 1995 law that allows the state to declare certain high-risk sex offenders mentally ill and commit them to psychiatric facilities.
Detaining someone under the law is constitutional provided that the patient receives treatment. But today, significant treatment at Coalinga is rare. Administrators acknowledge that three-quarters of the hospital's 600-plus detainees refuse to participate in a core treatment program, undermining a central piece of the $388-million hospital's mission.

Some patients have also declined to eat for days at a time to protest alleged inadequacies in psychiatric and medical care as well as less important issues, including limited access to phones. Many have boycotted educational and improvement programs that include anger management workshops, computer training and Spanish classes -- a protest known inside the hospital as a "strike."

A severe staff shortage has further impeded treatment, patients and staff members say. As of last week, 26 of the hospital's 37 budgeted staff psychiatrist positions were vacant. On many wards, hospital police officers fill roles assumed by clinicians at other hospitals.
"We're calling it the Titanic State Hospital," said a psychiatric technician who, like most other current employees, spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from administrators. "We've lost control. I've been saying for a couple of months now that the monkeys are running the circus."
Coalinga opened in September 2005 amid promises of a new era, both in protecting the public and in treating sex offenders. Even empty, the facility stood out; its sleek architecture and tidy topiaries presenting a jarring contrast to the tumbleweeds and dust devils that dominate the surrounding landscape.

But the operation of Coalinga -- the only mental hospital built in California in half a century -- was never going to be effortless.

Read the article by Scott Gold and Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

It Rhymes with Crime: Sub "Prime" Crisis and the Crime Angle

It had to come up. If crime is the ideal against which all social problems are measured, and forms of governance imagined (more or less my thesis in Governing through Crime), it was only a matter of time before the rippling sub-prime loan crisis would be recast as a story of crime.

In one sense there is much about the sub-prime scandal which invokes crime, especially the highly premeditated strategies employed by many in the loan supply chain to manipulate the rules in order to enrich their personal bottom line (while exposing unsophisticated consumers to high risks of financial ruin). But the preferred crime story in America emphasizes poor people and minorities involved in street crimes, not educated professionals involved in "suite crimes."

Thus MSNBC's coverage:

Eighty-five bungalows dot the cul-de-sac that joins West Ontario Avenue and East Ontario Avenue in Atlanta. Twenty-two are vacant, victims of mortgage fraud and foreclosure. Now house fires, prostitution, vandals and burglaries terrorize the residents left in this historic neighborhood called Westview Village.

Squalor, crime follow wave of foreclosures, MSNBC.COM

(thanks to Keith Hiatt for calling this to my attention)

Governing through Crime Italian Style

A terrible crime against a vulnerable victim generates massive media coverage. When the suspect turns out to be a foreigner, part of an immigration flow from a bordering country drawn by the relatively high wages and labor needs at the bottom of the pyramid, politicians at all levels rush to assure the public by promises of crackdowns against dangerous members of this suspect class.

Its an all too familiar story in America over the last several decades, only its playing out in Italy. The arrest of a Romanian suspect in the murder and molestation of an Italian woman last week led to a great deal of public turmoil about immigration and crime. The Center-Left government of Romano Prodi responded by authorizing municipalities to deport immigrants they considered dangerous (apparently with no hearing of any sort). As many as three dozen were deported. The government maintains it will resist calls from the right for mass deportation.

Read the reporting of Ian Fisher in the November 8th edition of the NYTimes