Race Riot in Chino Prison: Racism as Default Government

Sometimes it seems as if mass incarceration is magical mirror in which we Californians see ourselves not as we might hope to be, but in our ugliest and scariest forms. That is particularly true of race in California prisons where news of one of the most serious US prison riots in recent years emerged from Chino California, where a prison dormitory was burned down and 55 prisoners treated for injuries inflicted after hours of fighting, some serious enough to require continued hospitalization. The news coverage (read the LATimes) suggests that the conflict broke out across racial lines.

To many, the fact that African Americans and Latinos are highly over-represented in our prison system is evidence of the continuing existence of racist governance in a state with a long history of white voter fear and animus toward Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. To others, riots like the ones at Chino highlight an underlying violence in California's prisoner population that underscores the danger of reforms aimed at shrinking the prison system. But the truth may be less dramatic on both counts, more the product of institutional failure than deep seated racial animus.

My observations (limited) of California corrections in recent years suggest that race operates as a default way to manage risk (for both the prison system and the prisoners) in a system of mass incarceration which has both lost any semblance of traditional prisoner community, and has failed to provide a secure and dignified life within a penal complex to which hundreds of thousands are consigned for years and many tens of thousands for decades of their lives. This basic lack of planning for anything but warehousing bodies has been exacerbated by the systemic overcrowding that has brought the system under federal court control. Lacking a meaningful set of norms that unify all prisoners in a common society, or a prison program that assures a secure and tolerable common existence, prisoners fall back on easily mobilized alliances of race, geography, and immigration status. Lacking a political mandate to develop a meaningful correctional vision, the prison system falls back on race based classifications (a lawyer recently recounted seeing a "no black visitors today" sign on a prison he recently entered that was under a lockdown).

The problem is not racism itself but racism as a default replacement for decent governance.

Federal Court Orders California to Reduce its Prison Population

In a historic ruling certain to move quickly to the Supreme Court, the 3 Judge court of the Northern and Eastern districts of California, operating under the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the consolidated cases of Coleman v. Schwarzenegger (NO. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM P) and Plata v. Schwarzenegger (NO. C01-1351 TEH ), has found that only substantial reductions in the present prison population can allow remedies in the underlying cases (involving health care and mental health) to move forward. Stating that a reduction to 130 percent of design capacity (currently at about 200 percent) was reasonable, the court nonetheless settled on 137 percent as in keeping with the PLRA's demands for least intrusive remedies. That means a reduction of approximately 45,000 inmates. I will post a lengthier analysis when I can get through 184 page opinion.

Parole Manson?

Film maker John Waters makes a great case in a post on Huffington Post for why "Manson girl" Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted with Manson for the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca forty years ago, should be paroled. Waters argues that Van Houten, like the other tools of Manson's insane meglomaniac plan to become the supreme leader following an apocalyptic race war (or Helter Skelter) which he hoped the Tate and LaBianca murders would create,was brainwashed by the heavy drugs and cult like practices the family engaged in. She long ago broke with Manson, and accepted responsibility for her part in the terrible killings. During decades in prison since (and one short stint free after her conviction was overturned) Van Houton has transformed herself. Waters notes that other women on death row at the time the penalty was struck down and all such sentences converted to life were all parole after nine or ten years. Why is Van Houten (and the others) still in prison? Because no crime has ever generated as much popular fear as the Manson family killings, and fear of crime governs in California.

I second Water's proposal that we parole Van Houten. She is a threat to no one and by the standards of most of the rest of the planet, forty years, even for a brutal murder, is excessive punishment. I would go one further. Maybe, and I say this without having had a chance to review his prison records, we should consider paroling the man himself.

I have come to believe that our state's commitment to mass imprisonment is anchored in a deep fear of violent crime that may well have crystallized first around the Manson murders. Our out of control fear of violent strangers, leads to over-punish both the violent and the non-violent (who we fear may turn violent). We need to purge ourselves of this fear in the most potent proven way; by facing it. Paroling Van Houton in a way is too easy. We really aren't afraid of her. But if Manson himself, now 74, were released, albeit under heavy supervision, and he lived out his days without harming anyone, it would be a dramatic experience akin to a person with a spider phobia allowing a tarantula to walk over their naked body.

Is it absurd to consider paroling Manson? Again, I don't know what his prison record is like and I doubt he has ever accepted responsibility for the crimes. Still, at 74 he is unlikely to develop another group of LDS popping disciples around him. Of course the families of Sharon Tate and other victims will feel outraged, but really how much punishment is warranted? In much of the world even mass murderers get out of prison eventually. Indeed, most of the Nazi high command that was not executed, was imprisoned for less than 25 years. Perhaps Manson should never be paroled, but a parole process that gave him real consideration would be step in the right direction. In the meantime lets parole Van Houton and the rest of that sad and misguided group of former devotees for whom "creepy crawling" for Manson was the ultimate "bad trip."

President Obama and the Paradoxes of Policing

The end of the week controversy over Professor Henry Louis Gate's arrest in Cambridge, and President Obama's own comments on that arrest, may have presented the nation with a "teaching moment" about race and policing (Gate's words quoted in the NYTimes story by Peter Baker and Helen Cooper). It has already been one about the national importance of police power since the "war on crime."

First, the idea tha President Obama erred by making a "neighborhood story" into a "national" one is wrong historically. Policing the neighborhood has been a national issue since the mid-1960s. Every president since LBJ has posed as frequently as possible with large phalanxes of uniformed local police. The politicians who have most sought public police support, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Rudolph Guliani, have all reaped national benefits. If President Obama did something different it was varying from the tone of reverential solemnity and adoration in describing the "boys in blue". I will leave it to our linguists to parce whether the President's use of the phrase "stupid" was a mistake that opened the door to class conflicts, I suspect that no matter how carefully he had crafted his message, anything recognizably critical would have been met by the kind of response it has. The first paradox than is that police operate locally but since the "war on crime" became a national crusade, police have become what the military is in foreign wars, a sacralized metaphor for the national public itself. Sgt. Crowley, once surrounded by the national police community and the deeply ingrained media love affair with the police (anchors are almost as eager as politicians to pose with them), is actually the equal of President Obama in stature.

[read the rest of this post on Prawfsblawg]

Memo to the bond market

Ok, I know nothing about bonds (its basically a loan, right?), but I have watched California prisons grow steadily over the second half of my now 50 years. While it looks certain that the California legislature will pass, and the governor sign, the complex budget compromise (read the SFChron coverage), if I were loaning money to the state on the basis of there budgetary projections, I would start worrying now. Specifically, 1.2 billion in savings in the fiscal year is promised from cuts to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Republicans initially balked at voting for the overall package if it included the corrections cuts which assumed prisoner populations reductions (the dreaded early release). They compromised at voting for the 1.2 billion cut without any specification as to how it would be obtained. That will leave the Democratic majority free to enact specific prison policy shifts on a majority vote (rather than the 2/3 constitutionally required for budget resolutions) and the governor, theoretically willing to sign it. But the Republicans have promised a major debate against "early release" backed by law enforcement and the correctional officer's union. It is quiet possible that enough Democrats will defect or that Schwarzenegger will decide not to sign the bills that emerge. More importantly, for any promise of long term sustained correctional cuts to be believable, you need to see the magic words "sentencing commission" in any package of correctional policy changes. Short of that, do not loan us money withoug "juice loan" premiums.

Read my lips, "no early releases from prison"

As day light breaks over the second day of California's epically ugly budget compromise there are signs the deal may yet fall apart on the way to a legislative vote later this week. The problem is not that draconian cuts in social services to the poor and disabled, the open thievery of county revenues, or the very obvious gimmicks like moving the dates of pay days from one fiscal year to another, its the possibility that some California prisoner, somewhere, may leave a prison early.

[read the rest of this post at Prawfsblawg]

The Wise Prosecutor

In chapter 2 of my book, Governing through Crime (OUP 2009 pap), I describe how the war on crime transformed the political significance of prosecutors:

The prosecutor has long been a unique and important officeholder within the American systems of justice and government, with deep but limited powers and a special claim to represent the local community as a whole. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the war on crime reshaped the American prosecutor into and important model for political authority....

That authority was on display in the past two days of Sotomayor hearings as the Judge deflected some of the harshest attacks of Republican Senators by invoking either her law enforcement perspective generally, or her prosecutorial experience in particular. The tactic has been quite effective. Not surprisingly, Senators of both parties are disinclined to follow their critique of Judge Sotomayor's subject perspective into a concern for her possible bias against criminal defendants or to question the appropriateness of empathy when it comes to real or possible victims of violent crime. Below the fold I offer a few examples.

[read the rest of this post at Prawfsblawg]