Second Chance

It is almost as rare as the proverbial "man bites dog" but apparently less headline worthy. A California legislator has introduced a bill to reduce the severity of punishment for convicted criminals, in this case those convicted of murder when they were juveniles and sentenced to life without parole. State Sen. Leland Yee has introduced legislation that would make these prisoners eligible for parole after 25 years (read SFChron coverage from the AP).

Senator Yee is to be applauded for opening the door to parole for those who kill while they are very young. The Senator holds a doctorate in Child Psychology believes that the possibility of rehabilitation should be left open (after 25 years in prison). It must be the first step of many to reduce the barriers to releasing life sentenced prisoners in California. Even twenty five years may be too long for those who killed as minors and those who kill as adults must be considered for release after a prison sentence substantial enough to reflect the gravity of the crime and with a prison record indicating real efforts to reform themselves and address the underlying sources of their violent behavior.

In much of the rest of the world, certainly those sectors Americans would consider living in, ten years is about the norm for murder. The fact that 25 to life for those who kill as minors is controversial tells you a lot about how out of whack our penal sensibilities are. Predictably Senator Yee's bill is being opposed by the District Attorney's Association whose relationship to California's imprisonment binge is roughly equivalent between McDonald's and the American waste line.

Murder in California

Lazily browsing the web in search of California homicide statistics I came across a 1973 article, no by-line, in Time Magazine, with this intriguing title, Murder in California. The article covers a horrifying murder in a small town near Sacramento in which nine victims were killed, including an entire family, all found in the family's home. The men arrested were wanted to a similar crime spree in Arizona were described as a drifter and repeat offender who had done a brief stint in a mental hospital.

The year, 1973, was when the nation's practice of capital punishment hung in the balance. The Supreme Court had declared existing US death penalty laws unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Lawyers seeking abolition had argued that capital punishment was increasingly out of line with contemporary American values. Indeed executions and even death sentences had trickled to a halt by the late 1960s. But an ominous surge of homicides was beginning to turn the tide in favor of capital punishment in America and California was ground zero for that shift. Already in 1966, with homicides just beginning to move up, Ronald Reagan defeated two term governor Pat Brown, at least in part on Brown's opposition to capital punishment.

By the early 1970s the homicide rate in California was surging well ahead of the national rate. As the Time writer noted:

The killings were only the latest in a grisly series of six mass murders that have taken the lives of 64 people in California during the past four years. The day after Gretzler and Steelman were arrested, Edmund Emil Kemper III, who stands 6 ft. 9 in. and weighs 280 Ibs., was sentenced to life imprisonment for his most recent murders. When he was 15, Kemper killed his grandparents but later was released from a California state mental hospital, whereupon he began murdering a series of student hitchhikers. He ended by killing his mother Kemper decapitated seven of his eight victims, including his mother.

Last week California was also the scene of a bizarre single murder. Oakland's highly regarded school superintendent, Marcus A. Foster, 50, was ambushed in a parking lot and killed by a hail of fire that included bullets loaded with cyanide. Cut down with him was Robert Blackburn, his deputy, who was expected to live.

Responsibility for executing Foster's "death warrant" was claimed by the "Symbionese Liberation Army," a group unknown to the FBI or experts on local radical groups. In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the organization objected to "fascist" policies supported by Foster, the first black to have headed the public schools in a major California city, that schools were giving police information about Oakland students—a claim that authorities denied.

That year the California homicide rate reached 9 per 100,000 inhabitants, double where it stood in 1966.

Burglary, she wrote

While it gets little attention from crime novels or television shows, burglary resulting in mere theft (as opposed to rape or murder) is among the crimes that most touches the real lives of people, sometimes in ways that are devastating and always (at least with home burglary) with a strong sense of violation and lingering threat. I have long suspected that fear of burglary and frustration with what seems to be the inability of law enforcement to prevent them that has helped anchor popular support for mass imprisonment. Regardless of the real threat posed by burglars, the sense of dread they elicit is anchored in the very high value we placed (at least until last year) on our homes, especially here in the "Golden State" (and even our cars, which for many people are an extension of the house and the body as vessels of self-hood).

Many readers who share my skepticism about the prison state, nonetheless want to know what the alternative is to address this strongly felt concern. A reader of Pt I of the UC Berkeley News Center Interviews wrote in today to note:

My wife, son and I live in a very nice neighborhood - Westwood, Los Angeles, CA. Crime has increased here - burglaries, robberies - no violent crime, but still, we're concerned about our safety.

By coincidence my neighbor here in north Berkeley came by at 6:30 this morning to tell me my Honda civic stood open and apparently rifled (nothing worth taking since my trunk is full of clothes to take to recycling and sadly used books rejected by our local bookstores).

These kinds of crimes, more than drive by shootings, loom large in many urban neighborhoods were middle class families have been increasingly wanting to move to enjoy the transportation, parks, and stores. These families who have the resources to move to the high security suburbs but want urban values, are highly sensitive to crime pressure. These include upscale neighborhoods, like the Rockridge district of Oakland, but also more working class neighborhoods, like the San Antonio district, or the Mission district of San Francisco.

The key to these kinds of crime is that they are intensely local, driven by very specific dynamics of place, time, and transport. For example, my younger brother Adam and his wife Cassandra, had their home in Melbourne, Australia, burgled one afternoon while out with their child, with a devastating loss of laptop computers loaded with invaluable writing and pictures (both are writers). Not unlike the Bay Area, Melbourne has bustling urban neighborhoods full of young families proximate to blighted areas in which abandoned businesses and homes provide refuge for the drug addicted to congregate, purchase, and consume. Thanks to freeway on-ramps and well designed urban boulevards, an addict watching a house can see a family depart, enter the house by breaking window on the side or back, and fifteen minutes after leaving be engaged in selling the laptops and scoring drugs.

Can you fight this kind of crime by locking up every drug addict for as long as they are addicted? Probably, but at costs that are levels above even our unsustainable corrections budget in California. But there are other more promising strategies.

Well developed community policing strategies can identify this kind of pattern and concentrate police surveillance on both ends of the circuit.

Home alarms and secure windows can make entry harder and police surveillance more effective.

If you ask me giving drugs away to addicts in a secure and hygienic policed environment would be the most elegant solution but we are not there yet politically.

Keep in mind that even more common are burglaries by teenagers in your own neighborhood. They feel safest and most entitled to creep about the place, and they often have short term spending plans that even my worthless junk might help them get. Inviting a police officer over for block meeting if you've had more than one such incident nearby is a good idea and may help identify the culprits.

We can do more of all of this while keeping virtually all of our burglars out of state prison. People convicted of burglary without violence or intent to commit violence, should do a stretch in county jail to remind them that this is a real crime and then be under a beefed up county probation system.

Parole and its Discontents

I discuss California's broken parole system in a two part interview that debuts today on the UC Berkeley News Center website (read the interview with News Center reporter Cathy Cockrell). Please leave any comments on the interview here on the blog.

We are in time of crises and thus one of opportunity for fundamentally reinventing our institutions. For reasons I address at length in the interview, parole cannot work as it was intended to. Instead it is a system that offers a predictably routinely broken promise of control while subjecting thousands of ex-prisoners to a revolving door system of repetitive short imprisonments that can serve no known function of punishment.

It pains me to say so, because I have met so many dedicated and talented parole agents and supervisors over the years but if I became Czar of California I would abolish parole completely, transferring its helping functions to the private sector by giving each prisoner upon release a voucher to purchase drug treatment or job training, and a list of certified providers in their community. I would transfer its control functions to a unit of the state police who would be responsible for conducting regular investigations over a group of released prisoners whose track record of violence or serious gang involvement warrants the additional expense.

Many of these talented agents and supervisors should be absorbed into a revitalized system of county probation where they would have responsibilities to manage in the community (or after a jail sentence) many of the same people who are now routinely sent to state prison but who can and should be kept at the county level.

Is Pot the Answer?

What was the question again? Just kidding, in proper doses (and for those of the right age) marijuana is a largely benevolent drug in my view that can enhance insight and creativity (although not short term memory). Can its decriminalization or even legalization help unwind our prison mess and address the budget deficit?

Marijuana's direct impact on the prison population is hard to gauge. Relatively few people are in a California state prison today for simply possessing marijuana. Some are there for marijuana sales (which presumably would diminish under the legalization scenario). However marijuana is a major (in some states the major) cause of arrests. While those arrests do not lead directly to prison, they do lead to jails, and to a record that can in time make a person go to prison. In that sense marijuana is a gateway crime the criminalization of which pulls people deeper into the criminal prosecution system.

Legalization or decriminalization could both reduce the tension that is produced between police officers and those they find marijuana on, and thus make it easier for police to interact with the public and solve more serious crimes. Even more significantly, as an experiment in civil governance, a well regulated system permitting legal sale and use of marijuana (such as exists now in California for medical marijuana consumers) would be a huge confidence builder in our ability to shrink the criminal system without undermining public order (indeed with improvements in public order).

As for our deficit, I don't have the numbers at my fingertips this morning, but well taxed marijuana, even if a lot of money were devoted to enforcing civil regulations on pot, would bring millions if not billions into state coffers. It is at least as morally worthy a source as the lottery.

The good news this morning is that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was quoted Tuesday as welcoming a debate about marijuana legalization (read Wyatt Buchanan's reporting in the SFChron). Like our new President, the Governator knows first hand that marijuana is no great threat. The former weight lifter famously takes a hit off a joint at the triumphant end of the popular documentary, Pumping Iron.

Homicide

John F. Thomas, Jr. LAPD suspect in unsolved homicides from the 70s through the present (in arrest photos from '64, '71, '82, and '09)



Why do we fear crime so much? For decades homicide, more than any other crime, has anchored public fear of crime and the penal state and culture of control that fear has sustained. Homicide was the one crime that both popular culture and criminological experts seemed to agree was a unique and severe American problem (a function of anything from too many guns to the elimination of prayer in public schools depending on your politics).

It is true that homicide rates doubled between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s, and remained well above their mid-20th century lows until the crime decline of the late 1990s began to drive them down close to those lows in some cities (New York in particular). But even at its height the homicide wave never moved the actuarial risk of Americans dying of homicide to any great degree, which other than for very specific demographic groups (young African American men) has always been tiny and dwarfed by automobile accidents, heart disease, etc. Instead we need to explore the historical and cultural framework in which homicide became not only a spectacular fear, but a matter of state policy at the highest level.

A bit of that history is on display in Los Angeles case in which authorities now believe a 72 year old LA insurance adjuster, is responsible for a series of homicides, rapes, and burglaries going back to the mid-1960s and including a series of highly publicized rape murders of older single female victims in the 1970s and 1980s known as the "Westside Rapist" murders (read Solomon Moore's reporting in the NYTimes). With victims who are among the most vulnerable imaginable and in the most media saturated city in America, it is not hard to imagine that these unsolved murders drove fear across the state of California which in these very years was adopting an increasingly harsh attitude toward crime.

Baby Steps Away from Mass Imprisonment

As Matthew Yi reported in the SFChronicle over the weekend, California's mammoth correctional system has announced some first steps toward reducing its prison population. Faced with a mammoth federal lawsuit that may soon lead to court orders for population reductions, and the worst state fiscal situation in several decades, California's traditionally cautious correctional leadership has identified a series of steps it will take to reduce the prison population. These include:

Matt Cate, Schwarzenegger's prison secretary, said his proposal centers around drastic changes to the state's parole system - including releasing a quarter of the lower-risk parolees.

He also wants to cut the prison population by expanding good-behavior credits for inmates who take education and job-training classes, and shorter prison sentences by increasing the dollar-value threshold for grand theft.

Make no mistake, these are baby steps. Reducing the prison population by 8,000 persons will leave most of state's prisons dangerously overcrowded and only marginally improve the chances that the remaining prisoners will get access to education and other rehabilitation programs. The federal court considering California's prison population has indicated that a reduction of 20 to 50 thousand prisoners is in order. Reducing parolees will indirectly reduce the prison population by reducing the number of parolees returned to prison for technical parole violations, but the low risk prisoners who are going to be eliminated from parole are also less likely to produce technical violations, so the reduction will be minimal.

Nonetheless, all of these changes are in the right direction and can be carried out with no loss of public safety. They are already generating resistance from organizations representing correctional officers and some crime victims. This will be a good test of the ability of state leadership to respond to such resistance and ultimately for whether these groups can come to terms with the reality that California's era of ever-growing prisons is over.

In short order, however, we will need bolder steps. We should aim to reduce the prison population by at least 50 thousand over the next five years. We should consider eliminating parole in favor of a voucher based system to help released prisoners access drug treatment and other rehabilitative assistance and a modest expansion of the state police with a commitment to monitor a limited number of released prisoners with a track record for violent crime. We should reform the penal code to dramatically reduce the number of crimes for which prison terms are the presumptive sentence.