Haunted Houses (part whatever)

How do you know you are middle class in America? Do you open your wallet and look at how much cash is there (my Uncle Lou Jacobs used to carry around huge wads of twenties, fifties, and hundreds,way back in 60s, but he was a Purple Gang associate and may have been unusual even for his era)? Do you look at your family pictures and think with pride how many generations of your lot went to college? Do you check your employee ID, health insurance membership or social security card?

I think most Americans (at least until the music stopped in 2008) looked out at their home, probably through the car window, on the way to work at 4:30 am, or on the way back at 9:15. Does my home stand physically apart from my neighbors? Does it have a bit of green between us? Does it abut a cul de sac, preferably or at least a curving suburban lane, entered through a drive way, with perhaps a basketball hoop? And most of all, do I "own" it (even if that means I own 5 or now perhaps -50 percent of it)?

For too many Americans, being able to answer yes to most of those questions is what assured them they were middle class, no matter how lousy (or how many) jobs they had to work, no matter how far they had to commute, no matter how distant any amenities like parks, libraries, museums, or shops might be from their door.

Here in the Bay Area, where prices to own a home on one side of the Bay or the other long ago went beyond starter range for most middle class families, pursuing that middle class status meant locating in places like Pittsburgh and Antioch, where subdivisions rapidly filled in the canyons in the dry hills behind San Francisco and San Pablo bays. Its a place now haunted by the ruinous financing schemes behind the housing bubble. But it is also haunted by the unsustainable life styles that government promoted in this country right up to the crisis, an in the name of producing more secure "crime free" communities. The perverse relationship that Americans have developed to their houses (that has gone along with a loss of serious political movements directed at jobs) has a terribly dark side to it. Its a dark side of methamphetamine, of domestic violence and child abuse, of heart attacks and bankruptcies. And occasionally a twilight zone of unspeakable sadness. Case in point, penned by veteran crime reporter Henry Lee in today's SFChronicle, "Antioch baby girl dies after being left in car."

Sofia Wisher, 7 months old, was sitting in her car seat in her parents' Toyota station wagon when the family pulled up to its Antioch home late Saturday after doing laundry at a relative's home. Each parent thought the other would be taking Sofia inside.

Tragically, neither did....

The parents, both of whom work two jobs, went to bed about 3 a.m. Each saw the door to their infant's room closed and assumed the other had put her in her crib, Orman said.

The parents told police that Sofia was a "light sleeper, so it wasn't their practice to be going in there all night checking on her, because she'd wake up," Orman said.

After Sofia was found dead, Contra Costa's Child Protective Services agency placed the couple's 2-year-old daughter into protective custody, authorities said.

The Bay Area's Death Belt

The ACLU of Northern California has published an impressive new report showing California leading the country in the use of death sentences in 2009, leaving once blood thirsty states like Texas and Florida far behind. Driving California's rush in the opposite direction from the rest of the country is a death belt in Southern California that includes Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange Counties that accounted for more than 80 percent of all California death sentences last year. The website also includes a nifty interactive map that allows you to examine each county in the state for how much money has been spent pursuing the death penalty since 2000, how many people have been sentenced to death since 2000, and how many people on death row total come from the county.

When you work your way around the Bay Area, it turns out that only two counties in the five county area have spent in $1 on seeking the death penalty. In my home county of Alameda, the District Attorney has spent more than 16 million dollars to send 15 people to death row since 2000. In next door Contra Costa county, the District Attorney has spent 12 million to send 11 people to death row. Keep in mind, that in California, a death sentence means mostly that you are very likely to never be released from prison and to die there (the fate of most death row occupants who have died over the last 35 years). But that is basically the same fate that awaits those sentenced to life in prison without parole under the state's capital sentencing alternative (and indeed for far too many of the 1st and 2nd degree murderers who the law assumes to be paroled but are not). In San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, and Santa Clara counties, DAs have chosen spend 0 dollars to send 0 people to death row during the same time period. It makes you wonder why these local East Bay leaders seem so out of touch with local priorities and values (may be we need to let them know we are here and know who they are on the ballot this November).

To me, at least in these years of dire need and fiscal crisis, this kind of squandering of public resources when those same funds could go to so many other public safety agencies with the ability to stop future murders including police, probation, community mental health treatment, among others, is outrageous (whatever you think about the abstract moral validity of the death penalty).

For those of you in the East Bay who are interested in this topic, there will be a forum on California's death penalty and what it means for us at the local level, Congregation Beth El, 1301 Oxford St in Berkeley, from 7 to 9 pm. Come hear, Stefanie Faucher, Associate Director, Death Penalty Focus; Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California; Judy Kerr, sister of murder victim Robert Kerr; Darryl Stallworth, former Alameda County prosecutor with a discussion to follow.

Email me for more information, jonathansimo@gmail.com

Jessica's Law: Protecting Property not People from Sex Offenders

Kudos to Maria Lagos and the SF Chronicle for a well researched, powerfully written, and well supplemented (with helpful explanations of the law that are usually ignored by journalists) feature on Jessica's Law, California's sex offender zoning restriction adopted by voters in 2006 [no online version until Tuesday]. Proposition 83 made any place within 2,000 feet of parks, schools, or other places habituated by children, off limits to residence by registered sex offenders. The latter include all persons convicted after 2006 of any of a long list of crimes (some of which are helpfully listed in the story, including kidnapping and rape, and annoying or molesting a child among others). The law allows authorities to monitor those under the registration with GPS, but does not require authorities to do so, nor does it authorize the funding to pay for that very expensive equipment. As a result, according to Lagos, the law only really impacts those registered who happen to be on parole or probation, where state or county officials have a mandate (and resources) to monitor them, a status that under current law ends for most registered offenders within five years. In short, the law does not apply to most of the state's actual sex offenders (that is those convicted before 2006 and those who have not yet been convicted, surely a larger number than those convicted after 2006), and only applies to those folks for three or five years; after that has little practical enforceability.

Lagos demonstrates that it is not just the under reach of the law that is fatal to its purported public safety mission. Jessica's law emerged in Florida where a sex offender on probation kidnapped the nine year old girl next door, raping her, burying her alive, where she later died. Because of the outrage, the law focused on where sex offenders live (really the outrage should have been about the failure of probation to notify the Lundfords), but experts see no real link between where sex offenders live and where they can contact their victims. After all, some pedophiles will attempt to contact kids in parks, at school, in church, at the homes of their relatives. in none of these situations is it necessary or even particularly helpful for the sex offender to actually live nearby (only those with the least self control since it will obviously bring great attention to their immediate vicinity). The most visible impact of the law is on the large number of registered persons who because they are on parole or probation are forced to be officially homeless. As the Chronicle illustrates in a graphic with the story, only several small areas of San Francisco, the Presidio (a national park), Lake Merced, and a few bits of Bay side waterfront are outside the ban zone.

So what does Jessica's law do? It protects property values. Economic research has documented that home prices drop measurably in the vicinity of a sex offender. Leigh Linden and Jason Rockoff, in an innovative study (published in the American Economic Review but here's the ssrn version) using registration information to calculate price variations in home sales by proximity to actual sex offenders, found that the home next door dropped 12% in value and the average home in the immediate vicinity was 4% (that may seem small, but given the signal to noise ratio in this kind of research its amazing they found a significant effect). One way of understanding the underlying logic of Jessica's law is that it protects homeowners from the danger that their home will be very close to that of a sex offender.

In several forthcoming articles I argue that home ownership, especially in the inflated form it took (especially here in California) in America from 1980 on, has been a crucial predisposing factor in making Americans prepared to support governing through crime and mass incarceration. Most of the war on crime makes no sense in terms of protecting victims from violent crime (sex or otherwise). If that is what we wanted to do, we would flood inner city neighborhoods with cops and social services at a fraction of the cost of our prisons. But that is not where the home owners are. Prisons, and expensive supplements like Jessica's law, make little sense as crime fighters, they make lots of sense as ways for politicians to reassure homeowning voters that those politicians are doing everything possible to protect their property values.

The Media Mass Incarceration Link

A good example of how the media continues to be wed to the "crime run amok, government doesn't care" scare story of the 1960s and 1970s is Associated Press' apparent campaign against parole reform (for predictions of such backlash, see my last few posts on this). Despite decades of ever tougher laws, to many in the media, its always the summer of love, and murderers are clocking out of prison faster than their victims' corpses will decompose. Forget the fact that murderers in California now serve longer than genocide convicts in Europe and many will never leave prison alive. It was the media, abetted by politicians, who succeeded in turning New Orleans, after Katrina, into a crime story, and who beat the drums in anticipation of the looting in Haiti for days while no looting happened and aid shipments waited for military to deploy ahead of water and food. Now the AP is pushing a story that violent criminals are being released in California (and other states doing parole reform) despite promises that "early release" measures would apply only to the non-violent. Read Don Thompson's reporting published here by the SFChron. The AP takes credit for causing one state to back off reform.

Gov. Pat Quinn suspended Illinois' program in December after the AP found that hundreds of inmates were being released too early. About 200 of the paroled inmates were returned to prison within the first four months of the program because of violations.

Precisely what happened is very hard to figure out. The law was mainly about state prisons and parole, but the stories of early release all focus on jails. It may be that these are parole violators, released from jail where they were being held on parole holds for non-violent parole violations but who are listed as violent offenders because their original commitment offense was violent. In any event, I have some research assistants working on this and will report back. In the meantime, the fact that California has a lame duck Governor will protect the current program for at least the ten months or so until the election. But if this kind of toxic reporting continues, look for the Gov-Elect to announce plans to cancel it before their even inaugurated.

Mess with Texas

Robert Perkinson's Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books) is at last out and receives a strong review by Daniel Bergner (author of the God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison”). Perkison, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, takes a historical approach, situating the hyper punitive but presumptively racially neutral Texas penal syste today, with a system that developed to replace slavery within the broad parameters of post-Reconstruction federal law. Texas has come from being the strongest (and most brutal) example of the regional penality of the South, to being a dominant model for corrections today. While Texas is frequently cited as a possible role for our failed penal state here in California, I doubt many readers of Texas Tough will want the Golden State to look to the Lone Star State for a makeover.

"We can't control ourselves"

The New York Times gives California's prison crisis and parole reforms front page billing today in an excellent article by Randal Archibold. The litany of problems will be familiar to readers of these posts. Our massively overcrowded prisons are being slowly reduced only under great pressure from federal courts. The main solution is to reduce the capacity of the state to return paroled prisoners for relatively minor crimes by eliminating parole supervision altogether for many and creating more alternatives to reimprisonment for others. Of course problems have arisen with early implementation, and some backlash is brewing. But the key line in what is mostly an up-beat story is that of State Senator Mark Leno (Dem San Francisco) who sums up the problem in one sentence, "we can't control ourselves."

Note the paradox that we are talking about a system of social control, or corrections as we like to call it, whose fundamental purpose is to promote law and order, but which is fundamentally out of control. But it is not the administration of the prison Leno is talking about.

But even with the progress in recent months, State Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco who helped push through changes in the prison system, suggested that further reductions would be a hard sell. Mr. Leno called the changes under way “a noble effort” and the best that could be achieved in the current political climate.

Many lawmakers, he said, still want to lengthen sentences and spend more on incarceration, both politically popular notions.

This is why I cannot yet agree with my friend Stanford Law professor and criminologist Joan Petersilia, who has done more than anyone to create the criminological conditions for rationality in California penal policy, and who is quoted in the article as suggesting California has been through a "seismic shift." The shift is not yet near seismic enough. Or perhaps, we can agree that the system has experienced at 6.4 on that continuous seismic scale, but not the kind of 8.0 that would allow us to truly rebuild from the rubble of our current system which is flawed right down to its molecules. The major problem, as Mark Leno underscores, is not penological but political. So long as parole reform remains the limits of this (I think ironically characterized by Leno) "noble effort", we remain inside a prison crisis whose vicissitudes I may well be charting into my retirement, or furlough-hood (if the state budget caves sooner).

Parole Policies Weak Link in Prison Reduction Plans

Danielle Cervantes and Jeff McDonald of the San Diego Union Tribune report on the growing criticism from parole agents and others, that California parolees are being allowed to violate the conditions of parole without consequences and dangerous offenders who could be locked up again are being left on the streets until they commit a really heinous crime. They also include some really neat charts that show how much parole revocations (the administrative process by which a California parolee can be returned to prison for up to a year for violating the conditions of parole) and ominously, that the prison population has pushed back up, after a couple of years of falling after 2005.

California's current plans to comply with the federal court order to reduce the population by at least forty-thousand inmates depends heavily on "parole reform." Already thousands of California prisoners are being classified as needing only limited parole, which will mean in practice that they receive no supervision or services, nor can they be administratively revoked (what remains is a police license to search and seize without normal constitutional limits, although that could itself be unconstitutional in my view). Parole reform has always been the politically preferred path to prison population reduction because it does not involve changing front end sentencing laws or practices which in turn would require the legislature to vote to keep prosecutors from sending some people to prison who now can be sent there, or encouraging prosecutors to keep more felons in county correctional systems (through a subsidy also requiring legislative approval). The California legislature has already gone beyond its comfort level by approving the parole-lite concept last August.

Critics of the plan (both those who favor no change, and those who favor more radical steps) expect that sooner or later, a pattern of murders or rapes attributable to parolees who theoretically might have been taken off the streets (albeit from a maximum of one year) will cause enough public and media outcry to work a reversal of the parole reform approach. It already happened in 1994 another electoral year in California in which parolee Richard Allen's murder of Polly Klaas made history and created the hyper-penal state we have now.

Cervantes and McDonald suggest we may already have the Polly Klaas case of this year.

The criticism rang anew last week with the release of the corrections file of John Albert Gardner III, the sex offender accused of raping and killing Chelsea King, 17, of Poway. Gardner is also being investigated in the death of Amber Dubois, 14, of Escondido.

Gardner’s case file showed seven parole violations from a previous molestation sentence that could have resulted in a return to prison and stricter post-release supervision.

“The whole concept of parole is prevention,” said Graham McGruer, who spent more than 20 years as a parole agent and manager and is now a private consultant. “There’s a greater possibility that these girls would be alive today if parole had been watching.”

Of course the premise of these arguments, that parole officers would have sent him back to prison but for political interference is specious. As Philip Garrido taught us, sex offenders can hide in plain sight all day long with California parole so long as they are not turning in dirty drug tests or signs that can be routinely tracked. Indeed the whole edifice of corrections rests on the very dubious premise that the people we have already identified as felons are more dangerous to us, than the person next to us on the bus who has never been marked us such by our criminal justice system.

My solution? Get rid of state parole completely but require all California prisoners to report periodically to local police or probation. Return the money now spent on parole to the counties along with a list of prisoners within six months of release to that county from state prison. Let the counties use their enhanced police, probation, and other resources to provide the best locally crafted solution to reduce the future offending risk of that returning prisoner causing significant harm to the community.