Executions in Iran and North Korea

Students of the sociology of punishment are getting the rare opportunity to look back into the history of penal evolution by watching the penal behavior of two polities that are arguably throwbacks to the absolutist model of government, Iran and North Korea.

According to Nazila Fathi's reporting in the NYTimes, Iran's government was preparing to execute six protesters arrested in December protests this Sunday, for the charge of "waging war against God."

Meanwhile, AP reports that North Korea has executed a former treasure official, not for bribery, but because of the failure of his currency reforms.

Pak was accused of ruining the nation's economy in a blunder that also damaged public opinion and had a negative impact on leader Kim Jong Il's plan to hand power over to his youngest son, Yonhap said.

In his germinal article, Two Laws of Penal Evolution (1902) [for a translation published in 1973, not free unfortunately), Emile Durkheim predicted that the general trend toward leniency in punishment, by which he meant the shift away from capital punishment in particular, and toward less intense punishment of all kinds, had exceptions. Two were when states embraced either theocracy or revanchist forms of absolutism. For the general principle of leniency reflects the rise of the individual as the moral center of penal retribution and away from a demand to punish as away of responding for an affronted God or Sovereign. The US may seem an outlier for executing murderers, but we do so in manner that Durkheim would think quite consistent with our liberal values (mainly an effort to honor the victim and protect others, although a misguided one in my view). In Iran offending God (or his political party) and in North Korea, to interfere with the passing of royal succession remain capital crimes.

One detail of the Iranian case is particularly interesting for Durkheimians. Apparently Sunday is being chosen because it marks the beginning of a Halloween like traditional festival that the Islamic regime considers "unIslamic."

The tradition, the Feast of Fire, goes back thousands of years to Zoroastrian times and has been banned in Iran in recent decades because of its non-Islamic roots. The opposition had called for its celebration this year as a sign of protest.

My bet is neither of these Dinosaur like regimes will be around in twenty years (or perhaps even ten) so students get busy studying them (a bit hard, I admit).

For those following my Legal Studies 160: Punishment, Culture and Society course, who are really bored over Spring break, my question to you is how would Marxist or Foucauldian analysts see the use of capital punishment in recent weeks by these two regimes?

Fear and the Limits of Fiscally Driven Prison Reductions

Monica Davey's excellent NYTimes article today on the growing backlash against budget driven prison releases highlights a number of crucial issues facing those who hope budget woes will help break the states of their addiction to Mass Incarceration and Governing through Crime. She focuses on Michigan which in 2007 found itself with the 5th largest prison population in the country in the company of much larger states, and with a fast dwindling industrial economy. Because Michigan has a parole law, political leaders could both allow sentences to grow longer in the 1990s when fear of crime was rampant and fear based SUV sales kept Michigan's revenues strong. Thus while crime was dropping all over the country in the 1990s, Michigan's parole release rate was dropping. Once the fiscal crisis began, Governor Granholm could use the parole process (which she expanded by 15 new members to speed things along) to reduce the population by raising the parole rate. That is a tool state's like California, that give fixed sentences to most of their felony prisoners do not have.

However, Davey's article also underscores the political resistance to using parole or other early release vehicles. In Michigan, but also Illinois, and Colorado, "victim's rights" groups, prosecutors, and law enforcement, is opposing early release as a threat to public safety. These politically invested and powerful voices are much more significant than the corporate prison industry in keep the state's locked in. How many politicians could resist this kind of rhetoric:

In February, lawmakers in Oregon temporarily suspended a program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) after an anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in alarming tones. “A woman’s asleep in her own apartment,” a narrator said. “Suddenly, she’s attacked by a registered sex offender and convicted burglar.”

Save Education in California

I'm going up to Sacramento today, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in California since the Great Depression, to urge our legislators not to continue to gut education in California. March 4 is a statewide (and apparently nationwide) day of strikes and protests against public education cuts from K-12 through higher education. It is not an easy sale. More Californians are out of work than at any time since WWII. The State's income and real estate based revenue stream has dwindled and our safety net spending for all categories of need have risen to unprecedented levels. The budget is bleeding red from every pore. Let's be honest here, I'm also an interested party (or stakeholder as we like to call ourselves) with a job in the UC system and two kids in Berkeley public schools.

For what it's worth, here's my pitch for education (although I'm going to focus on higher education, the same points apply to k-12).

It's not about today. It's about tomorrow. We are still riding on the good decisions made by people who are mostly now dead (Governors like Earl Warren and Pat Brown, may they rest in peace). What can we decide today to make sure California's promise is there tomorrow?

Much has been made of the fact that the portion of public spending on higher education and the prison system are roughly on par, compared to periods as recently as a decade ago when higher education received twice as much or more than corrections (Sac Bee Chart). That is a sad and revealing fact about our state. I moved here to go to college in 1977, stunned to find this Golden state with its amazing universities and gleaming infrastructures (BART had just opened a few years earlier) hidden at the end of the continent like the proverbial pot of Gold at the rainbow's end. In those storied days California spent more than five times more on higher education than it did on prisons. But while it makes a great rhetorical point, obsessing about what Sora Han and Kate Kenne of UC Irvine call the "prison/education binary" is also a misleading one.

The real problem is not that corrections costs as much as higher education these days. Considering that we've incarcerated nearly six times the number of Californians we did when I moved here, it's not surprising, and it's not enough (as federal courts have ruled). The real danger is that continuation of the present penal policies could see us a decade from now spending 5 times on prisons what we do on higher education. That could happen even without increasing the number of prisoners simply because the health costs of our prisoners is escalating out of control and will grow even higher as our draconian sentences keep prisoners locked up during their low crime/high medical cost middle and old age.

To sustain and ultimately increase our capacity to invest in education, and other vital needs like infrastructure and health care, we need to dramatically improve the efficiency of our approach to public safety. Our "prison first" policy of recent decades has concentrated California's social problems in an environment where it is most expensive and least effective to solve them. The ways of unwinding this catastrophe are broad indeed and should involve the best minds in the public and private sector. But they cannot be solved by ignoring the deficit in social control capacity in California communities that have suffered from decades of private disinvestment and public neglect.

In the short term, closing poorly designed and unsustainable prisons and releasing thousands of our aging "lifers" can produce real savings for the budget (by avoiding court ordered hospital construction). But those of us committed to education should not seek to grab those funds (it will be enough that the state will stop raiding education to pay for incarceration). That money should be shifted to California's vital but invisible county governments, where instead of the blunt but expensive tool of state prison, public safety can be pursued efficiently and precisely through targeted strategies like probation, after school programming, community policing, drug treatment, mental health treatment, and jail.

In the long term, this sustainable public safety model will generate billions of dollars in budget savings to invest in education, and assure a far more diverse flow of students to California's colleges and universities. But the most important reason to do it is that local agencies know where the crime problems are and how to solve them, we can have less crime in California and save money.

Paging Dr. Durkheim

Its been a busy week, but I would be remiss to let Campbell Robertson's fine story on murder, capital punishment, and wrongful conviction in post-Katrina New Orleans go by with out a comment.

Early one morning in June 2006, when this city was only half full and in many areas still desolate from the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, five men were shot to death in an S.U.V. in the Central City neighborhood.

The killings sent the city into an uproar, galvanizing politicians, who spoke of “Hurricane Crime,” and adding urgency to the city’s request for hundreds of Louisiana National Guard soldiers to return and patrol the streets.

The criminal case that followed was just as incendiary in many ways, and it ended this past August with a death penalty verdict, the first in a dozen years in a New Orleans murder case, against a 23-year-old man named Michael Anderson. It was a trophy verdict for the district attorney’s office, a sign that law and order had triumphed in one of the city’s most heinous and high-profile crimes.

But there is a problem. New evidence from the state’s key witness released in early January by the district attorney’s office — evidence that the office had for over two years — could put a hole right in the middle of the case against Mr. Anderson.

The city's response to the murder is a classic reminder of Durkheim's claim that crime and punishment form one of society's most powerful devices to reaffirm its existence as a moral community. Although New Orlean's is not an entire society, that community was devastated by the flood, which quite literally displaced its population, and by the clear failure of social institutions to protect the populace. The murder only nine-months into the recovery was clearly read by New Orlean's citizens as a direct challenge to the existence of common consciousness in the city, just the kind of event that Durkheim predicted would be met by the most explosive demands for punishment.

But the terrible miscarriage of justice that may have subsequently occurred is a reminder of how double edged the creation of professional law enforcement is for the evolution of social control. On the one hand, unlike the "primitive" societies that Durkheim compared "modern" Europe to, professional law enforcement brings about the potential to solve crimes that would have gone unsolved altogether in the past, and perhaps to avoid lynchings and other popular miscarriages of justice. On the other hand, the creation of distinct institutions with unique responsibility for addressing the communities desire for punishment, and significant powers to coerce testimony, opens the awful possibility that unconsciously or consciously, law enforcers could seek to give the community the Durkheimian release of convicting and condemning a target of their rage, even if they have the wrong man. I'm not saying that many (let alone most) in law enforcement succumb to this temptation, but we need to start by acknowledging some of the cultural forces that facilitate it.

Class-Based Law Enforcement...

... may be nothing new, nor is the argument that when money gets tight, city and state governments gut services to socially disadvantaged people first and foremost (as the past couple years in California have confirmed). Still, a recent SF Chronicle story has exposed an Oakland parking policy so blatantly unfair that it would perhaps surprise even the most cynical political observers. This story is also a good example of the fact that although they may be the "boots on the ground" of crime control, local beat cops often know far more about what's ineffective and what's unfair in policing than do the politicians and technocrats who spout rhetoric and design law enforcement policies. Police bureaucrats and communities alike would do well to absorb some of the firsthand knowledge of people like Shirnell Smith.

The mudraking and speculation as to who's responsible for this debacle has only just begun, but more is sure to come given the predictability of unified public disgust. When plainclothes citizens and thoughtful beat cops become more involved in policing their communities, relative to elite decisionmakers in statehouses and mayor's offices, it's probably a good thing. For analytical and practical purposes, crime is often better understood as a block-by-block problem than a "statewide" or "national" one.

Victims and Punishment

While we throw terms like"harsh", "retributive" and "punitive" around in describing the American penal system(s) today, the language has yet to capture the distinctive role that the subject position of the crime victim has in shaping the measure of punishment being handed down in US courtrooms and parole boards. While state penal codes continue to list punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and even reform as primary goals of imprisonment, judges are increasingly vocal in insisting that sentences incorporate the scope of the victim's future suffering.

Case in point is the 30 year sentence handed down to a former hospital worker, Karen Parker, who admitted stealing syringes meant for patients and replacing them with used syringes contaminated with Hepatitis C, by Federal District Judge Robert E. Blackburn in Denver this week (read Kirk Johnson's reporting in the NYTimes). It is hard to imagine a stronger case of victim damage (short of death). They were "attacked" at a time of maximum vulnerability, while receiving pain medication prior to surgery in a hospital (Hobbes thought the fact of having to go to sleep at all was enough to justify a punitive sovereign, he did not anticipate surgical anesthesia) and now face a lifetime with an incurable, chronic, sometimes disabling and life threatening disease. Apparently it was hearing the victim testimony that lead Judge Blackburn to the unusual move of rejecting a 20 year sentence agreed to by the prosecutors, and imposing a 30 year sentence this week.

Parker's actions epitomized "selfishness" as the Judge emphasized. But neither was the admitted heroine addict the epitome of the cool calculating "hit-man" or "terrorist" who decides to sacrifice lives to their own deliberated ends.

What troubles me is using prison sentences to work out some kind of just measure of the victim's suffering. This logic inherently leads to excess. What if hundreds were contaminated (as has happened), would Parker have sentences her to life without parole? In other cases judges have handed down life-trashing sentences in the name of the victims' suffering even where the defendant clearly lacked meaningful capacity for responsible action due to severe schizophrenia (consider the Kip Kinkel case in Oregon in the late 1990s).

Clearly the victim's cannot be "compensated" through the punishment of Parker. They deserve better, starting with health insurance for those dropped or forced into a more expensive plan because of their condition. A stiff prison sentence is an appropriate way to communicate the seriousness of crime to the community, and thus to provide the victims public recognition of the terrible wrong they suffered. It is also an appropriate way to deter, although we have every reason to doubt the Karen Parkers of this world respond well to threats of lengthier punishment. A proper combination of restorative justice for the victims and appropriate restraint and punishment for the community is something we can achieve without decades of prison time. But trying to carve justice out of the time a body is locked in prison can only prove futile and cruel.

With our prisons filling with inmates facing lifetimes of punishment, we need to find a way to restore some measure to prison sentences.

Exporting American-Style "Law and Order" to Imploded Postcolonial Cities, Haiti and Beyond

In his request to Congress to authorize American entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson cast the war as a crusade "to make the world safe for democracy." A century later, this sort of rationale is an old standby for Presidents seeking to justify muscular calls for "law and order" both abroad and at home (tellingly, Wilson also called D.W. Griffith's paeans to the Ku Klux Klan as champions of law and order "history writ with lightning"). Some might argue that we’ve come a long way since Nixon’s (or Reagan’s) Southern Strategy, though cloaked racial appeals live on in talk of "real Americans" and have played a role in popular perceptions of the ongoing catastrophe in Haiti.

Any time that the problems of urban marginality are publicly exhibited, calls for self-critique and aid are soon drowned out by a clamor for “law and order” and ruthless crackdowns on miscreants (typically portrayed as poor, hostile, and dark-skinned) perceived to threaten order. When massive earthquakes struck Haiti earlier this year, media portrayals of looting panic seemed to outpace actual looting. These fears likely did more to slow delivery of aid than prevent property crimes, which were likely largely of necessity. The New Orleans example is illustrative here. Analysts have largely ignored deeper structural reasons for the devastation caused by the earthquake – such as the destruction of the Haitian food economy, largely driven by the intrusion of huge, heavily subsidized American agricultural interests often cast as aid. Instead, they’ve preferred to incite looting panic and valorize the individual efforts of predominantly rich, white, foreign interveners, at least until they go terribly wrong.

What is the theoretical apex of such "humanitarian" discourses and efforts? Now, neoliberal paragons, appealing to trickle-down economics and gated community logic, have begun to call on the U.S. and its economic peers to create enclaves of wealth and privilege in Haiti, imploring the country to grant special rights to foreign investors akin to deals that drove "development" in Hong Kong and Guantanamo Bay. The connection between crime and neoliberal economic success (which, for all but a few, is no success at all) is explicit: "[Poor countries'] leaders cannot make credible commitments to would-be investors. Rich nations use well-functioning systems of courts, police and jails, developed over centuries, to solve such problems." This call jells troublingly well with critiques of efforts to make over cities as playgrounds for the rich, driven by an increasingly barricaded, crime-obsessed "middle class." Paper over poverty or drive it out of the city and into the prisons.

More persuasive than this hollow, Wilsonian call for advancing prosperity, given what’s happened in New Orleans and what some hope to happen in Haiti, is sociologist Thorsten Veblen’s skewering of Gilded Age economic principles (principles which have enjoyed a great resurgence in the supply-side systems built over the past three decades, and which loom large in debates over what to do about poverty and violence). Only a few years later, while a roaring America bathed in the afterglow of Wilson’s claimed euphoria for spreading democracy, Veblen saw a different goal: "This is also what is meant by democracy in American parlance… democracy is best to be worked out by making the world safe for Big Business."