Culture or Poverty? Try Dignity

British Prime Minister David Cameron's speech (listen to excerpts here) to Parliament yesterday on the recent rioting dripped with all the racially charged rhetoric of forty years of war on crime in both the US and the UK (read the Guardian's backgrounder by Nicholas Watt here):

This is not about poverty, it's about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. In too many cases the parents of these children – if they are still around – don't care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing. The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken."

Cameron was clearly hoping that Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, would fall into some Michael Dukakis like time warp and begin to blame the rioting on Cameron's severe cuts in social spending. No such luck, predictably Miliband attacked instead on the New Labour ground that the coalition has imposed cuts on police budgets all over the country. Everyone seemed to agree that the police, perhaps aided by the army, were the thin blue line separating civilization from the chaos spread by the brawny spawn of the underclasses. Even the left oriented Guardian's writers have speculated on whether announced plans to reduce incarceration has sapped the deterrent threat of prisons (read Zoe William's interesting column discussing criminological views of the riots).

Observers should be reluctant to embrace either the view that rioting is the inevitable or at least direct result of increasing poverty on the one hand, or the product of a culture, i.e., practices of child rearing, which produce violent and narcissistic adults, on the other. The alternative view is well expressed in another Guardian comment by Seamus Milne (read it here) who notes that riots, unlike the dangerous classes, are not with us always, but why?

This time, the multi-ethnic unrest has spread far further and faster. It's been less politicised and there's been far more looting, to the point where in many areas grabbing "free stuff" has been the main action. But there's no mystery as to where the upheaval came from. It was triggered by the police killing a young black man in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than their white counterparts. The riot that exploded in Tottenham in response at the weekend took place in an area with the highest unemployment in London, whose youth clubs have been closed to meet a 75% cut in its youth services budget.

For my money it is not poverty that links the cuts in social benefits, to rioting, but dignity, or one should say, indignity. While many of the cuts have yet to take place yet, the communication of who has standing in our societies has come through loud and clear. The world's leaders tremble over the narcissistic rage of bond holders whose pursuit of shameless risk free profits in investments they should have known were gambles, has placed them and the entire global financial structure in peril. But in Washington and London (and one suspects in Paris and Berlin as well) there is no element of urgency about the situation of communities locked into degrading helplessness by anomic and dysfunctional education and employment practices. It is this sense of relative deprivation that goes to the basic sense of dignity, the equality of which is essential to the survival of any truly democratic society. The reason young people, apparently of many races and in some cases classes, are so prone to riot, I would suggest, is not their lack of impulse control or high discount rate on the future, but their heightened sense of dignity/indignity.

In the meantime, it is not lost on those rioters that the deep financial crisis that has cast both the US and the UK into huge budget deficits was caused by behavior which has been frequently and obviously compared to looting. Where is Prime Minister Cameron's outrage at the poor parenting and deformed culture of his class peers in the executive suites of the top London and Edinburgh banks? Where is London Mayor Boris Johnson's statement that the City of London's efforts to aid corporate clients in avoiding lawful taxes (thus furthering the deficit crisis) was "criminality, pure and simple"? And while both Cameron and Johnson are invoking painful punishment to malefactors as the only sensible government response to rioting, there has yet to be a single prosecution in either the US or the UK for behavior involved in causing the crash (put aside criminals like Madoff whose crimes were discovered because of the crash). If there is a failure of deterrence, it is there.

Policing the Crisis

One of the more interesting angles on the violent rioting going on in parts of London over the past three nights is the increasingly toxic relationship between the Conservative party dominated coalition government and the police (especially London's Metropolitan Police Department). In an insightful backgrounder in the Guardian, Sandra Laville points out that when Margaret Thatcher faced similar rioting in the 1980s over a poor economy and cuts to government social benefits, she could count on her close relationship to police on whom she frequently lavished ideological support and which was a part of government she did not seek to cut. In contrast, David Cameron's mix of law and order populism and cross the board cuts in government spending have put his government increasingly at odds with police forces around the UK that are facing both severe cuts and the prospect of rule by locally elected police commissioners (a move many have described as an effort to unleash more American style populist pressure on policing).

At the same time, both Conservatives and the Metropolitan police leaders have been badly damaged by their close association with Rupert Murdoch's toxic tabloid newspapers, especially the now terminated News of the World which has been shown to have engaged in wholesale violations of privacy laws by "hacking" into the mobile phone voice mails of countless celebrities, politicians, Royals, and most outrageously, murder victims and the families of military personnel killed in Afghanistan. Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson announced his resignation last month after facing massive criticism for the fact that his own media adviser was a News of the World heavy and that one of his top commanders, John Yates, had rejected a renewed investigation of the phone hacking scandal after it was brought back to life by coverage in the Guardian during 2009. Stephenson, whose resignation was not rejected by either London Mayor Boris Johnson (a Conservative) or Prime Minister Cameron, publically slammed the PM by drawing the not fantastical parallel with the Prime Minister's employment of Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World who had resigned that job because of hacking problems, as his major media adviser during the 2010 general election as during the first half year of his government (Coulson resigned as the hacking issue heated up again in December). [The fact that both party leadership and police leadership were operating on political scripts written by tabloid media wizards adept in playing on the themes of fear and scandal is worthy of a post its own right.]

Against this tense background, the coalition government's commitment to substantial cuts in almost all government spending program (excluding some health, but that is facing its own coalition led upheavals) and student fee increases for university students has generated increasing public order problems for the police, especially in London. Since the spending cuts were announced last Fall, there have been several massive demonstrations in London that have spilled over into riotous behavior by fringe groups and major embarrassments for both the police and the government. And now, the worst rioting in a generation. To add to the sense of existential crisis for the tradition rich Metropolitan Police, according to Laville, Cameron would like to see former New York Police Commissioner (and since global security entrepreneur) Bill Bratton as the new Commissioner in London.

Like Ronald Reagan in the US, Thatcher could combine hostility to government welfare and regulation while strongly identifying with the military and criminal justice aspects of state power. That option seems to be foreclosed precisely as the global economic restructuring of the once rich west picks up its pace and seems likely to place governments of all parties in the position of cutting military and security budgets while continuing to generate excess insecurity for their populations. It will take a leader in the UK or the US of real vision to talk their respective publics down from the crime fear based consensus on security that Reagan and Thatcher helped promote, and which both Clinton and Blair expanded on, while navigating toward a new economic model that can produce sustainable economic growth (rather than debt based construction booms and busts). Both David Cameron and Barack Obama once looked like leaders who might have such a vision. Right now I wouldn't bet on either.

Punished: The Culture of Control as Seen from Oakland

Punished:Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by UC Santa Barbara sociologist Victor Rios and should be on your summer reading list if you are interested in how the culture of control works. Rios closely studied a group of 40 Oakland youths of color as they navigated the terrain of poverty in a city governed through crime. Rios, who himself came up in the Oakland gang scene before receiving a doctorate from UC Berkeley, has an unparalleled set of insights into how the logic of crime control has pervaded the institutions of everyday life in a city like Oakland and come to shape the identities and aspirations of young men of color.

The most powerful insights in the book take us into how routine physical and especially verbal harassment by police of young men of color erodes their often significant positive aspirations and anticipates the pains of formal criminalization and punishment. The police ethno-theory of crime is that young men of color are so full of pride and arrogance that only a constant stream of insults and injuries can dissuade them from delinquency and drift. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not just, or even primarily racialized assumptions about these youth, but deeply faulty assumptions about the crime risk they (police) themselves face in low income urban neighborhoods, that drives these logics.

The study does far more than critique, however. By giving insight into how the effects of routine degradation push youth toward seeking a more dignified life in gangs, Rios points the way to truly effective crime reduction strategies. It is a cliche, but in this case true, that this book should be on the desk of every police chief, school principal, and community agency director in urban America.

Hunger Strike for Human Rights in California Supermax

Since the start of this month prisoners at California's notorious Pelican Bay supermax style prison (known as the Secured Housing Unit, or SHU, in California prison bureaucracy language) have been refusing food and in some cases water in support of demands to modify the rules that keep prisoners in isolation regardless of their disciplinary record and practices which have been found to reduce human beings to the point of mental illness. According to Sam Quinones reporting in the LA Times, as many as 400 prisoners at Pelican Bay are participating in the hunger strike, and they have been joined in solidarity by prisoners at 11 other prisons of the state's massive system.

The prisoners' demands are the following (read the full statement here):

1. End Group Punishment & Administrative Abuse ...

2. Abolish the Debriefing Policy, and Modify Active/Inactive Gang Status
Criteria..


3. Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons
2006 Recommendations Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement –...


4. Provide Adequate and Nutritious Food – cease the practice of denying
adequate food, and provide a wholesome nutritional meals including special
diet meals, and allow inmates to purchase additional vitamin supplements....



5. Expand and Provide Constructive Programming and Privileges for
Indefinite SHU Status Inmates....

Note that these demands are hardly "revolutionary" except in the basic deprivation of humanity that they reflect. Mostly prisoners want contact with family, warmer clothing, tolerable food, adequate health care and due process.

So far the CDCR has refused to negotiate with the prisoners or a mediating committee approved by the prisoners. Despite the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v Plata upholding findings of chronic and grossly unconstitutional conditions throughout California's distended prison system, the strikers and their demands have gotten very little attention from California politicians or the media. It is time for citizens to press Governor Brown and the CDCR to agree to a broad re-examination of the whole supermax model in California. The Pelican Bay SHU reflects in concentrated form the pathological policies that have brought California prisons to a state of crisis. People are sent to the SHU not because of what they have done, or for proportionate terms, but based on unproven assumptions that they are gang members and without any viable path toward progress or release. Instead of programming, work, or education, to provide prisoners a meaningful way to serve their time, the SHU relies on shear deprivation and isolation to produce order. The resulting conditions have been found to diminish the mental health of normal adults subjected to them to the point of insanity. The prison is intended to protect security in the broader prison system by incapacitating suspected prison gang activists but has left a system that most observers agree is organized around gangs.

Like mass incarceration in general, supermax or SHU imprisonment is a scandal that unconstitutionally deprives prisoners of their human dignity while failing to protect anyone. If California wants to guarantee its prisoners safety from racist prison gangs they should implement a one prisoner to one cell policy and begin providing work, education, and health care practices that can give prisoners a constitutional civic order in which to serve their sentences.

Contact Governor Brown here

Lone Star Justice

Today's NYTimes carries an obituary for Randall Dale Adams, who died last year of a brain tumor, with only local media taking note. Adams was the unintended star of Errol Morris' epic documentary on Texas justice, The Thin Blue Line (1988). Texas has no dearth of serious miscarriages of justice, including the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, a very likely innocent man. But no miscarriage was ever better covered than Adam's wrongful conviction and death sentence for the murder of a Dallas police officer. Adam's came within three days of execution before the Supreme Court stepped in to review the case based on errors by the trial judge in dismissing jurors who expressed misgivings about capital punishment, but a willingness to follow the law. Perhaps realizing they had the wrong man, the governor quickly commuted Adam's sentence to life in prison, rather than allow further litigation. Adam's may well have spent the rest of his ultimately short life in the Texas Department of Corrections but for Morris' documentary. Morris went to Texas to do a documentary on the infamous Dr. Grigson (better known as Dr. Death), a forensic psychiatric "expert" who routinely testified for the prosecution in Texas capital cases (where future dangerousness is a required finding for death sentences) that defendant was dangerous, usually without bothering to even interview the subjects. But Morris became fascinated with Adam's case (he was one of Grigson's victims) and decided to focus the documentary on him.

The Thin Blue Line is perhaps the best movie ever made about contemporary criminal justice and should be watched by anyone interested in law enforcement and especially anyone who still supports the death penalty. It was a primer in why states cannot be trusted to wield the power to execute persons (or perhaps even the power to imprison them for life). When a police officer is murdered there is a consensus among law enforcement officials that someone must pay, preferably with their life, no matter what it takes, even if its the wrong man. The title comes from the frequent metaphor for the way police protect society, which was repeated by the trial judge in an interview with Morris, expressing why he felt so strongly that the officer's death must be avenged. The police and prosecutors in Dallas actually had a suspect that was almost certainly the right man, unfortunately (for the prosecutors), David Harris was 16, too young to receive a death penalty in Texas. But when Harris blamed the shooting (which was done with a gun that belonged to Harris' father) on Randall Dale Adams, who Harris had picked up hitch-hiking and then spent the day before the murder smoking pot and drinking beer with, Texas law enforcement knew they had their man. Adams was a perfect suspect, he was newcomer to the state, with no local friends or supporters, and no resources to pay for an adequate defense (he actually ended up with an excellent lawyer but there was little she could do to overcome the prosecution's cooked evidence). Despite the absence of a criminal record or a motive (which Harris had plenty of), Texas decided he was executable and pinned the murder on him.

The prosecution case was a textbook example of how to wrongfully convict a man. The police hid evidence that pointed to Harris and provided incentives for witnesses to come forward to identify Adams (the prosecutors after all, have a "get out of jail free" card to give anyone they want help from). Not only was Adam's almost executed, and deprived of years of freedom (and probably his health), but David Harris, a young man on an escalating curve of crime, went on to kill another man, and for that crime was himself eventually executed. Thus two unnecessary deaths were caused by the prosecutors in Dallas. In a just society, some of them would have spent years behind bars for their crimes, but none of them was ever even disciplined (nor ever apologized) and Adams was never compensated.

Now you know why I like to say, go ahead, Mess with Texas! a state that never looks back and still executes more than almost the rest of the states in the union combined. If Governor Rick Perry, the man who authorized the execution of Cameron Willingham, runs for president, hopefully Texas justice will get some long overdue national attention. (Read Ta-NeHisi Coates excellent column in the NYTimes discussing Perry and Willingham)

(Governing through) Crime Wave Strikes UK

Rates of crime reported to the police in the UK appear stable, maintaining a long term downward trend of over a decade. The politics of crime however is very much on the rise in England and and from where I write in Edinburgh (ironically, Northern Ireland, where sectarian rioting took place this week, crime policy remains on a steady course of reform). My earlier optimism that I would observe the UK moving away from governing through crime in my year long sabbatical here, is rapidly proving misguided as I prepare to return to a state and nation nearly ruined by those politics.

More than six months after the new coalition government in the UK Parliament proposed significant measures to reverse the rise of mass incarceration in England Wales, the Justice Minister on Tuesday was forced to admit the abandonment of most of those proposals. Meanwhile the Prime Minister (the man who once earned the wrath of the tabloids by defending hoodie wearing youths from ASBOs) held his own press conference to bring out some vintage Tory tough on crime talk,including an old new "two strikes and you're out" law with life sentences for repeated serious offenses, and hoary rhetoric about citizens' rights to use force against intruders (read Richard Garside's commentary in the Guardian). Meanwhile, Labour party and opposition leader Ed Miliband, whose own "shadow" Justice minister had generally approved of the government's plans to reduce reliance on imprisonment, continued channeling Tony Blair, using his opportunity to question the Prime Minister in the House yesterday to beat him around the head with another government reform proposal to reduce somewhat the range of persons subjected to having their DNA held by the police (read Alan Travis' analysis in the Guardian). Miliband once again invoked rape victims, already symbolically deployed in the past several weeks to wound the government's proposed sentencing discount for early guilty pleas (see my earlier post).

Meanwhile, here in Scotland, the new Scottish National Party (SNP) government, just a month away from its smashing victory over a Scottish Labour party that tried impotently to attack them as soft on crime, has unfurled its own headline driven crime agenda. One measure directed at Glasgow's notoriously sectarian football fans (the main "old firm" teams are identified along Protestant and Catholic lines) threatens a five year prison sentence for those making offensive remarks likely to incite listeners at or around football matches. In the Holyrood Parliament on Tuesday, the government's Community Safety Minister admitted that under the new law, singing "God Save the Queen," or making a sign of a cross, could be illegal (read Tom Peterkin's article in the Scotsman). This comes after weeks in which SNP leader, and Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond (whose popularity was largely credited with the SNP's election victory) has carried on a running diatribe against the UK Supreme Court and human rights lawyers in general, for the reversal of a Scottish murder conviction in Human Rights Act challenge (read Andrew Whitaker and John Robertson's reporting in the Scotsman).

What explains this sorry season? I have always argued that governing through crime is about the search for legitimacy in an age when political parties no longer adhere to coherent social and economic philosophies. In most cases, crime talk is a "second best" approach for politicians that no longer feel confident about their approach to governing. Here in the UK, the Conservative Party turned to "prison works" rhetoric in the early 1990s, after the wheels started coming off full strength economic Thatcherism, and Tony Blair found his footing on crime as he led the "New" Labour party to abandon its commitment to socialism.

In the UK parliament, with a coalition government for the first time in more than half a century, none of the major parties has a coherent narrative to offer on social or economic policy, or for that matter on Europe, human rights, on military intervention, on climate change. Tory leader and Prime Minister David Cameron has talked about a "Big Society," and intimated in all kinds of ways that he is not a naive Thatcherite on the role of the state; but so far his government is largely known for the massive budget cuts it is planning to impose on the British people (where most spending goes) and plans to increase the private sector's role in both the NHS and schools. Labour leader Ed Miliband struggles to provide any kind of picture of what a Labour government would do if it got back in power (failing in an infamous BBC interview last Fall to even explain who the "middle" was in his frequent rhetoric about needing to held Britain's "squeezed middle"). The Lib-Dem leader, and deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who has suffered the most sustained political losses in the recent elections (losing the party's base in local councils in Northern England and in the Scottish regional government, and losing its signature Alternative Voting referendum, all by wide margins), has offered mostly self pitying statements about his own feelings and experiences rather than a political vision for the country. Thus although none of the three leaders has the kind of visceral instinct to govern through crime that Tony Blair did, all of them are falling back on it in the face of a broadly scary historical juncture and public communications environment (media, popular subjectivity) still powerfully oriented toward fear of crime and victim centered anger.

In Scotland the May elections seem to have worked the other way around. The SNP's unexpected triumphs may have been a mixed blessing for a party that is now expected to forcefully proceed toward its existential goal of an independent Scotland and show case the kind of government they would bring to such a nation. But the SNP is a coalition of its own with a base that shares little agreement on how Scotland should be governed.

All in all its a disappointing end to what has been a fascinating political cycle (which began in the May 2010 UK national elections) to observe. Of course much more is at stake than my edification. As in the US, accumulating social, economic, and foreign policy challenges mount while politics degenerates into an increasingly incoherent jumble of recycled themes.

Note: Read Ian Loader's commentary at the New Stateman's blog on the same turn of direction here.

Troubling Questions on the Border between the Prison and Hospital

Deborah Sontag's outstanding feature on the murder of a psychiatric facility worker by a schizophrenic patient with a history of violence is a great overview of one of the most complicated corners of our domestic security governance problem. As recently as the 1970s there were still far more people in mental hospitals than there were in the nation's prisons (read Bernard Harcourt's article on this). The situation today is vastly different, with the prison system bigger by a factor of nearly 10. Of course most of the residents of mental hospitals then and now have nothing to do with crimes, let alone violent crime. But for a small portion of people with serious mental illness, perhaps less than one percent, a history of violence tinged psychotic ideation, and actual violence, is a strong predictor of future violence (but only if the person is untreated). Meanwhile a shockingly high level, perhaps 20 to 30 percent, of our inflated prison population suffers from a major mental illness.

Twenty seven year old Deshawn James, accused of murdering 25 year old Stephanie Moulton in a Massachusetts "group home," came from a strong church background and gave little indication of being headed for trouble, before symptoms of schizophrenia emerged in late adolescence. Since then James has been in both prison and in group homes. At least according to his mother, James responded well to medication. But like many people with serious mental illness, he went off his medication with frequency. Massachusetts current regime, although better than most nationally, is under going both budget cuts and a philosophy shift toward ending state oversight for patients.

The murder trial is on hold for now since James, who was clearly psychotic at the time of his arrest, was found incompetent to stand trial, which means he will continue to be held and treated in a secured hospital for at least a few months with the aim of resuming the proceedings if treatment makes it possible for him to assist in his own defense (if not he may be committed under civil powers). The civil suit, being brought by Stephanie Moulton's mother, is proceeding. The case is likely to put the group home operators on trial for failing to identify the level of risk posed by James (because of his criminal record) and the light staffing.

The primary response to the risks posed by someone like Deshawn James over the last thirty years has been criminal prosecution and incarceration. His trajectory underscores some of the ways that approach fails. Someone whose violence is triggered by psychotic ideation is not likely to be deterred by prison, and years of stable behavior cannot preclude a resumption of violence if the psychosis resumes. At the same time, the tens of thousands of California prisoners with serious mental illness were revealed by the Brown v. Plata case to be utterly failed by the prison mental health system which leaves them to decline into deeper illness frequently in overcrowded and degrading conditions sure to exacerbate their paranoia.

As we think about rebalancing our approach to public safety, people like Deshawn James, and the much larger population of prisoners with serious mental illness who have no history of violence, should be a prime focus of reform efforts. We must be able to do abetter than a system that manages on its penal side to be both ineffective and unsustainably expensive, while on its civil side weak and inconsistent.

Following Brown v. Plata, California and other states should clearly seek to divert almost all their prisoners with a serious mental illness to a hospital setting. Prisons are not suitable places for people with serious mental illness and their presence their creates unacceptable risks both to them and others. These hospitals could be specialized prisons, but in the great many cases where it is apparent that untreated mental illness was the primary cause of the crime, states should ultimately clear their criminal record in favor of a long term mental health treatment plan, enforceable by a mental health court with long term jurisdiction and the power to order involuntary commitment to a secured hospital setting.

State mental health powers ought to be concentrated in specialized courts that are expert both at therapeutic jurisprudence and identifying evidence tested risk factors that require tighter supervision. Currently, the power to forcibly treat and if necessary confine to a closed treatment hospital, is limited to episodes where the person poses a clear and imminent risk, and then only within strict time limits. Laws should be changed to give courts long term powers over adults with serious mental illnesses who have ever met the criteria for emergency hospitalization and forced treatment. Serious mental illness is a chronic disease. While treatments are effective in preventing the most alarming and dangerous symptoms of disease, they do not "cure" people, and ultimately long term management of their condition is a personal and social value that deserves to be honored.

The courts that exercise this power must be infused with a commitment to human rights and to protect the dignity of both people with mental illness, and potential victims of people whose serious mental illness makes them prone to violence. Honoring the first means always using the least restrictive alternative and directly respecting the autonomy and preferences of people with mental illness who are under the court's jurisdiction. Honoring the second means taking maximum advantage of known risk factors to closely supervise and when necessary confine individuals prone to violent behavior when their symptoms worsen and or when they seek to self medicate with drugs like speed and cocaine.

Existing institutions like the Behavioral and Mental Health Court of San Francisco provide a good model for a court that can do both. Its work should be overseen by a human rights agency, perhaps modeled on the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (read my previous post on the CPT and prisons).