Safety First! School Security Uber Alles

News reports from Knight Highschool in Palmdale, California, brings us the latest images of what life in high school is like under the regime of governing schools through crime. When 16-year-old Pleajhia Mervin dropped a birthday cake she was carrying in the cafeteria to celebrate a friend's birthday, and didn't clean it up to the satisfaction of the school's 300 pound (est.) racist school security guard, she got her wrist broken, got called "nappy headed" and was expelled. When another friend filmed it on his cell phone (watch it here) he got tackled. When her mom came to complain, she got arrested for assault on the principal and spent the night in jail.

How does the school explain such senseless brutality:

"Good afternoon. I can just comment we did have an incident at our school last week. However, I would like to emphasize that we do have a safe campus. I've been working with our staff, with my district office staff, community leaders, and parents, to ensure that we continue to keep our campus safe for all students, but I want people to know that our focus here is academic excellence for all students," (said Dr. Susan McDonald, principal of Knight High School.

How did a "safe campus" become an excuse for brutality? How did sicking security guard who looks like an ex-bouncer from a biker bar on students become the icon of academic excellence at Palmdale High? Thats a good question to ask Dr. Susan McDonald. Her phone number is (661) 533-9000 ext. 184

(Thanks to Paul Hirschfield for calling this to my attention)

Governing Cruise Ships through Crime

Apparently even a cruise is no longer a way to escape from America's pervasive culture of fear. According to Kimi Yoshino's reporting in the LA Times, even these privileged vessels of the high seas now bristle with efforts to govern passengers through the problems of crime.

“Industry and law enforcement officials testified that between April 1 and Aug. 24, the FBI received 207 reports of serious crimes, including four missing Americans, 41 sexual assaults and 13 thefts of items valued at more than $10,000. Of the 18 open cases, 13 involve sexual assaults.”

“The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Cruise Lines International Assn. announced the formation of a "Survivor Working Group," to be composed of victims or their families, senior-level cruise line executives and representatives of industry groups, who will meet quarterly.”

“Among the changes, Royal Caribbean is installing peepholes on cabin doors in its two newest ships and working on an existing ship. The company plans to install peepholes on doors of all its ships, a spokesman said.

“In addition, Royal Caribbean has hired female investigators and counselors, put suicide hotlines in place and required mandatory sexual harassment training. In January, the company will begin notifying guests of a shipboard policy that crew members are not to fraternize with customers.

“Additionally, cameras are being installed in hallways and corridors, though Bald conceded that those cameras were not being monitored.”

Predictably, politicians are jumping on this new opportunity to manifest their concern for the public.

"I firmly believe that to do justice to the noble victims who have so bravely shared their stories, we must take definitive action," [Rep. Doris] Matsui [(D-Sacramento)] said. "There have to be better mechanisms for crime prevention and better systems for handling the crimes when they occur."
“On Monday, Matsui and other lawmakers introduced the Protect Americans From Crimes on Cruise Ships Resolution recognizing the lack of federal regulation of crime reporting, absence of law enforcement officials and lack of information made available to cruise customers. No legislation has been introduced to specifically address the issue, but Matsui and others have expressed interest in drafting such a bill at the request of victims.”

Between Fear and Barbarity

Connecticut's parole system is back in the news a couple of months after a pair of parolees from the state were accused of kidnapping and murdering a mother and her two daughters. Christine Stuart reported in the New York Times earlier this week that Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell has halted paroles of all inmates imprisoned for violent crime.

“Until we can find a better way to determine who poses a risk to the public if released, we will not add to the ranks of people on parole,”

Of course, the parolees who stand accused of the murders were not in prison for violent crime to begin with. More importantly, we have no really reliable ways to predict who poses a risk to the public. But if the answer is to keep prisoners eligible for parole locked up until we have such reassurance, states like Connecticut will soon face the prospects of mass prison overcrowding, and the resulting barbarism we are now witnessing in California's super extended but still grossly overcrowded prison system. Indeed, the LA Times Tim Reiterman reports that the state's collapsed prison health care system may have led to the unnecessary deaths of one out of six inmates that have died in recent years.

Violent offenders should receive close supervision in the community once they have been released. But so long as Governors trade in the promise of total security through imprisonment, prisons will continue to become increasingly barbarous and the resources to make parole supervision more effecive, will never be available.

Between Fear and Barbarity

Connecticut's parole system is back in the news a couple of months after a pair of parolees from the state were accused of kidnapping and murdering a mother and her two daughters. Christine Stuart reported in the New York Times earlier this week that Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell has halted paroles of all inmates imprisoned for violent crime.

“Until we can find a better way to determine who poses a risk to the public if released, we will not add to the ranks of people on parole,”

Of course, the parolees who stand accused of the murders were not in prison for violent crime to begin with. More importantly, we have no really reliable ways to predict who poses a risk to the public. But if the answer is to keep prisoners eligible for parole locked up until we have such reassurance, states like Connecticut will soon face the prospects of mass prison overcrowding, and the resulting barbarism we are now witnessing in California's super extended but still grossly overcrowded prison system.

Violent offenders should receive close supervision in the community once they have been released. But so long as Governors trade in the promise of total security through imprisonment, prisons will continue to become increasingly barbarous and the resources to make parole supervision more effecive, will never be available.

Governing through Crime in the UK?

I'm posting from London where I've been attending the annual conference of the British Society of Criminology. I had the great privilege of giving an opening plenary lecture on the topic of Governing through Crime and raised the question of whether the UK is already following in our path. In his brilliant book (to which my heavy indebtedness will be obvious if you read both books) The Culture of Control, David Garland suggests that both nations have reshaped their politics around the problem of crime and turned punitive for similar reasons rooted in the conditions of late modernity and the exigencies of welfarist governance.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the UK is being shaped by fear of crime. As you walk through London, closed circuit TV cameras are visible on virtually every intersection. The New Labour government, enjoying its 11th year in power, has made no bones about being both "tough on crime" and "tough on the causes of crime." One of their most discussed initiatives involves Anti-Social Behavioral Orders (or ASBOs) which can be issued by courts to require a person to refrain from behavior that is not criminal but makes others afraid of crime (like wearing a hoodie in the shopping mall). If you violate an ASBO, it is a crime.

On the otherhand, British society remains far more open to debate about these policies than is true currently in the US (indeed Tory leader David Cameron last year spoke out against ASBOs for hoodies, which the tabloids dubbed "hug a hoodie". At the very least there are strong forces here that are likely to resist a full embrace of governing through crime as a mode of governance,including:

A constitutional system that gives ruling parties plenty of power to govern in many areas of life without having to compromise with the opposition or with other levels of government

A national agency in charge of criminal justice, the Home Office, which remains far more open to criminological influence (rather than the populist impulse that dominates both national and state criminal justice policy in the US)

A stronger commitment to the idea of government as a tool of social solidarity than exits in the US

Treason: Among Prosecutors any Questioning of the Harshness of Punishment is Treason

Even many people who support the death penalty believe that it is unjust when a person most responsible for a murder is spared death while someonhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife less responsible faces execution. Some death penalty states do not permit the less culpable party to face execution if the more culpable party is spared. Thus in Tennessee when a death sentence against Marcus Presley for shooting two people during the robbery of a pawn shop, was reversed because Presley was only 16 at the time, the prosecutor in the case, Robert Owen, testified in court that Presley's non-shooting accomplice LeSamuel Gamble, should also receive a life sentence.

Quoted in a story in today's New York Times, Own expressed the difficulty he faced.

“It’s difficult for me. I’ve been a career prosecutor. I don’t like taking a position that’s not what my victim would like to take, but I couldn’t lay my head on my pillow at night if I stood by and let a person who didn’t kill somebody be executed when the person who did kill somebody was not.”

That might seem a thoughtful instance of prosecutorial judgment. Just the kind of careful weighing we want these officials who exercise so much discretion to be engaged in. But in the era of governing through crime, prosecutors have become icons of the war on crime whose status is much sought after by other executive officials. As I argue in Chapter 2 of the book, politicians like Attorney Generals and Governors openly compete with prosecutors for the title of being the most loyal champion of crime victims.

Seeing an opportunity, Tennessee Attorney General Troy King announced he would intervene in the case to try an reinstate a death penalty against Gamble. According to Brenda Goodman's reporting in the Times, Mr. King's intent "was to protect the interests of the victims in the case and that Mr. Owens had acted on the side of the criminal."

Governing through crime has created enormous opportunity for expanding the power of executives, but only when the operate in the black and white terms dictated by governing through crime in which the world has only victims and evil doers, and in which any questioning of the harshness of punishment is a form of treason.

Welcome to Your "Gang Reduction Zone"

Los Angeles, long imagined as a site of dystopian futures, seems determined to embed crime fear into its present. As Mike Davis' books on the city have shown, LA since the 1980s has increasingly shaped itself around fear of crime with gated communities, its privatized high security downtown, and its "gang reduction zones". A recent story in the LA Times shows how the city creates ever new layers on the surface of its crime centered life. In the latest effort to reassure the public, “Los Angeles leaders unveiled several initiatives Wednesday to reduce crime at and around 20 public schools, including a computerized tracking system that authorities have already used to tailor violence-fighting strategies to the specific conditions in hot spots around the city."

“The anti-crime plan also calls for rookie police officers and their supervisors to mentor students at the schools -- in South Los Angeles, on the Eastside and in the San Fernando Valley -- starting next month. And it envisions greater community involvement, enlisting adults to walk with groups of children who must pass through some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods en route to classes.”

But organizing life around crime only increases the fear.

Gangs and Governing

When we govern through crime we allow crime (all crime or more typically some particularly frightening sort) to become an invisible thread that binds together larger and larger assemblies of heterogeneous elements. This creates power because it allows resources and social meanings to flow through and organize ever larger systems, attracting more resources and meanings. Ultimately this also creates chaos and suffering as the ever growing system embodies greater and greater levels of heterogeneity and thus a mounting surplus of ungovernability.

Today's New York Times provides an account of sorts of this cycle in action, in a story by Solomon Moore on gang crime and policies that target gangs for more policing and prison. The first part of the cycle is illustrated by the continuing spread of "tough" anti-gang measures that began in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Mobilized around public outrage at some tragic product of an incident said to be "gang related" these laws increase the level of police attention to young people suspected of gang involvement by creating police lists of gang members and emphasizing heavy use of arrest to break up and interrupt gang activities. They also target the same arrested young people for longer prison sentences. In North Carolina, a recent "gang incident" in which a 13 year old "bystander" was killed, has provided the catalyst to enact a similar body of laws there.

The second part of the cycle is evident in the opposition to such gang policies that is growing in Los Angeles, the place where the current wave of gang laws began. As critics in and out of the law enforcement system are recognizing, these laws immediately increase the cultural power of gangs by pulling in marginal youth who are treated as gang members by police and by alienating the typically minority communities in which these tactics are being deployed against cooperation with police.

The speed with which we can turn into the second part of the cycle and more importantly turn out of the cycle before the levels of chaos and suffering get to large depends on the mobilization of effective counter information about gangs. An excellent source of that counter knowledge in recent years has been Justice Strategies, a progressive think tank on crime and justice issues. Justice Strategies, and Judith Greene one of their principals, have worked to get the public to re-examine the gang frame and the policies that have come with it.

We in California should take the lead on disaggregating the bundle of heterogeneity that we call gangs.

To Become a Citizen, Be a Crime Victim

Crime victims may be very reluctant to come forward if they happen to lack citizenship and a valid visa for being in the United States. Coming forward and cooperating with authorities may cause you to be deported. Keeping quite, or even continuing to endure violence (as in domestic violence situations) may be the preferred choice (especially where children may become separated from their parents as a result). Does it make sense to give such crime victims who cooperate with prosecutors a visa to let them stay here lawfully? It certainly seems to be humane and rational, but the federal law that authorized such visas (just now forthcoming according to an article by Anna Gorman in the LA Times) is also a text book example of governing through crime.

In Governing through Crime, chapter 3, I argue that crime victims have become the idealized citizen subjects of our time, literally the model subject through which government imagines the needs of the governed. Here the identity as crime victim literally establishes a citizen (or at least the possibility of gaining citizenship). Moreover, it is only those victimized non-citizens who act out the required role of cooperating with prosecutors who fulfill this idealized picture of the victim (many real victims do not cooperate for complex reasons).

Protection for non-citizens without valid visas against sudden and arbitrary removal from the United States (and mandatory detention until removal) is badly needed. If such individuals are removed it should be after individual assessment of their case, including the protection of their human rights both in their native country and in the impact their removal will have on people here, e.g., their US born children. Carving out a special status for crime victims only reveals our ongoing obsession with crime and our demand that crime victims assume a certain kind of identity, one linked to the state's power to punish.

What to do with Persistent Petty Offenders? Kill them Suggests the SF Chronicle

In one of the most appalling pieces of crime journalism I've seen in some time, this morning's SF Chronicle leads with a story practically celebrating the murder on the streets of Allen Broussard, a drug addicted petty offender who burglarized many cars in the City's hard pressed Hunter's Point neighborhood. The story, by Jaxon Van Derbeken, suggests that the system failed to either "punish" or "rehabilitate" Broussard despite many arrests because of reluctance to send him to state prison (rather than short trips through the county jail). Little disguised is the implication that the most effective way to rid ourselves of the petty criminals in this world is to kill them.

Derbeken's "research" consists primarily of gathering quotes from SF Prosecutors who apparently feel that our judges are too lenient in sending persistent offenders to prison. But with some 180,000 inmates already in a system that has been declared in a state of emergency due to unconstitutional overcrowding and mismanagement, radically increasing the flow of petty offenders can hardly be considered a solution to anything.

Here's another idea. Why don't we end the 40 year long and utterly counter productive war on drugs and replace it with a robustly regulated and taxed legal market. We would still have homeless drop outs like Allen Broussard, but they would have less need to steal and more chance of getting drug treatment.