Justice and Social Control? Neither support harsh sentences for rioters

Does punishment restore a state of justice that has been ruptured by a crime, or is it a tool of social control? That is a question on which a great deal of punishment and society scholarship turns. It is also one raised a new by the latest turn in the London riot of 2011 story, the wave of very harsh sentences for riot related crimes. As Polly Curtis and Vikram Dodd report in the Guardian (read the whole story here) that legal experts in the Liberal Democratic party have expressed grave misgivings about the substantial prison terms being handed down in many such cases, while Prime Minister David Cameron has praised judges for using their considerable sentencing discretion to send a message on rioting. The debate may force a confrontation within the coalition at a time of high stress.

Lord Macdonald, who led the prosecution service in England and Wales for five years, warned that the courts risked being swept up in a "collective loss of proportion", passing jail terms that lack "humanity or justice".

Meanwhile his fellow Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, the barrister who was until this year the government's independent adviser on terrorism strategy, warned against ministerial interference in the judicial process, arguing that "just filling up prisons" would not prevent future problems.

David Cameron, who last week promised severe punishments for rioters, saying he hoped courts would use "exemplary" sentences to deter future riots, praised the sentencing decisions, which have included two jailed for four years each for inciting riots on Facebook – riots that never took place – and one person sent to prison for six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water.

Is it just to punish someone more harshly because the crime they committed took place in the context of an alarming collective disorder? It depends on whether the crime was itself aimed at taking advantage of an existing social disorder. Those that rob people who are fleeing from a natural disaster, knowing there is not likely to be much help for them, or who burglarize their vacated houses, arguably deserve more severe punishment. But in the case of the riots the crimes are themselves, in aggregate, what makes the disaster. Indeed, once we acknowledge the collective aspect of riots, there is an argument that participants are less culpable for their crimes since they are giving into a much observed tendency to follow the example of others. Instead, this appears to violate one of our central values about criminal punishment, that people face punishments proportionate to the their desert and uniformly with equally culpable individuals. Instead we have the price of crimes moving like equity prices to reflect gyrations in public anxiety.

Nor is it clear that tough sentences for rioters is good social control for the increasingly tight resources of the UK and the US. As Lord Carlisle suggested in the passage quoted above, there is no reason at this point in our history to view expanded incarceration as a good way to bolster social control. England has more than twice the incarceration rate it had in the mid-1990s, a period of few if any riots. Some no doubt believe that future rioters will heed the harsh lesson being taught their cousins. No doubt Charlie Gilmore, university student (and son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmore) who was given a 16 month prison sentence for participating in some disorderly events during the student fee demonstrations last December (read Stephen Bates' reporting in the Guardian) is unlikely to offend in that way again. That may be true for some of the individuals being punished now as well, although we will never know whether far more lenient but still undesired sentences would accomplish. But it is not clear it is true for the next Charlie Gilmore or young riot looter.

Chairman of the Board

Whether you view him as the archetype of the neoliberal marketization of security or the urban miracle worker who reduced crime while healing the reputation of police force tarnished by racism (at least in LA), Bill Bratton, who has been police chief of both New York City and Los Angeles and is now chair of Krull an international private security consulting firm, is the world's most influential police thinker (the Patrick Colquhoun of our time). Announced plans by British PM David Cameron to meet with Bratton prompted interviews with the chairman of the board of Krull in both the Guardian [read David Batty's story here](which calls Bratton the PM's new crime adviser) and the New York Times [read Al Bakers story here].

While the upper ranks of British policing are sure to bridle at yet another sign of the PMs contempt for the current leadership, Bratton's public profile is one they might, in fact, benefit from as they negotiate a budgetary modus vivendi with the real power man in White Hall, Chancellor George Osborne. For one thing, Bratton's LA profile is very much about winning the hearts and minds of frontline communities that experience the brunt of the war on crime and drugs. The PMs Dickesian rant this week in which he battered the police for not snuffing out the riot to start with and held out harsh justice as the only way to curb the feral children of the underclasses is not compatible with Bratton's public statements or profile. In both interviews he stated baldly that "“You can’t just arrest your way out of the problem,” adding in the NYT that “It’s going to require a lot of intervention and prevention strategies and techniques" and in the Guardian that:

"Arrest is certainly appropriate for the most violent, the incorrigible, but so much of it can be addressed in other ways and it's not just a police issue, it is in fact a societal issue,"

Neither statement is compatible with Cameron's Victorian celebration of the Big Society as the simple solution to most social problems. Nor is Bratton's focus on putting racial justice into practice inside the police going to sit easily with a government that thus far has regularly made vaguely Malthusian statements about immigrants and the limits of community tolerance for diversity.

Intriguingly, Bratton and the New York effort he led in the 1990s is perhaps best known for using effective policing to drive down reliance on incarceration, thus helping New York to be come the leading state thus far to have abandoned the practice of mass incarceration which is destroying government and society in California and much of the nation. Given the disappointing recent follow ups to the coalition government's once promising objectives of reducing the UK's incarceration rate, Cameron could do worst than to listen to Bratton and Ed Miliband should schedule a chat too.

Finally, police in the UK should appreciate that Bratton's strategy has not generally been a plan for community disinvestment. Like most surge strategies, it can only be viewed as cost reducing in the long run when tied to real reductions in incarceration.

There is a dark side to the Bratton rap, however, and that is the emphasis on fighting gangs with sophisticated technologies and strategies. Gang talk should always be filtered through two facts. One is that people, and young people in general, almost always act in and through social networks. So behind the term "gang" we have no problem finding something real. On the other hand police, politicians, and ironically some usually incarcerated "gang members" have a huge huge huge incentive to blow up that social network reality into something far bigger and badder than it really is. Gangs will be with us always, especially as long as we cling on to war on crime metaphors that favor a way of imagining crime as an organized army of enemies.

Bibliographic resource:

The debates that Bratton's intervention are likely to unleash will involve urban geography and race in countless and overlapping ways. Fortuitously I've just learned from Stuart Elden that the journal Society and Space--Environment and Planning D, has posted "virtual theme issue" on "urban disorder and policing" that includes some classic and more current papers from the journal on issues of race, policing, and urban disorder. The issue will be open for reading without the usual electronic subscriptions until October.

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)