The case for the Iraq war has often come down to this: If we don't fight them there, they will come here and kill us. President Bush has said that often, as has Rudy Giuliani. Its not clear that American forces in Iraq truly reduce the numbers of terrorists motivated to come and kill Americans. Indeed some believe that the specter of the American army occupying a Muslim country has helped recruit new soldiers for the Jihad.
Now recent research by New York Times reporters Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez and published last week in the NYTimes raises the question of whether the formula is really backwards. If we send soldiers to fight in contemporary asymmetrical wars like Iraq today (and Vietnam a generation ago), with lots of opportunity for emotional trauma and little of the social solidarity of conventional wars of necessity, will they come home and kill us? Sontag and Alvarez, using only journalistic methods, found 121 cases of Iraq veterans who have been accused of involvement in killings here at home.
One wonders, in retrospect, whether the crime rise of the 1960s and 1970s was linked to the even larger number of soldiers who served in Vietnam. Was the crime decline of the 1990s the fruit of a whole generation coming of age after 1975 with little experience with combat passing through their crime prone years? Will the Iraq war, which for now involves far fewer US combat forces, over time create a new homicide wave at home?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Immigration and Crime: A marriage of convenience (to politicians)
As the presidential campaign continues it becomes clear that American political leaders are in no way willing to level with Americans about how complicated the immigration issues in this country are let alone craft a comprehensive approach that would bring immigrant workers who lack legal documentation out of the shadows. In the absence of serious movement toward a comprehensive solution you can count on one thing, get-tough policies that emphasize the relationship between immigration and crime will continue to get emphasized regardless of how little such policies do to relieve the serious social problems created by a black market in labor, nor how cruel the consequences for individuals and families.
As Julia Preston reports in today's NYT, the current head of our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (that spells ICE, another example of our government's love affair with tough-sounding acronyms, of course ICE melts along the border) is promising to emphasize two forms of crime control of immigration. One approach, which builds on laws and policies that have been enacted starting in the 1990s, focuses on more efficiently deporting non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in American jails and prisons. Many of these people are not "illegal immigrants," but legal immigrants who have been convicted of the same sorts of crimes that citizens are. Under current law, many crimes including relatively minor ones are defined as "aggravated felonies" for purposes of immigration law and require mandatory deportation regardless of the equities involved (it might be the mother of citizen children, convicted of a minor drug possession crime). ICE is promising to speed up the deportation process as a way of relieving the burden on state and local governments.
The second policy promised is an increased crackdown on employers who hire workers without documentation of citizenship or legal residence.
Based on passed experience, neither policy will do anything to stem the flow of immigrants nor make their lives here safer and more governed by law. What they do promise to do is further reinforce the bogus link that has been established in the public mind between immigration and crime.
P.S.
This is not just an American problem. After a video camera in Munich caught two young non-citizens (one Turkish) beating up a pensioner on the subway, Germany's politicians are calling for tough sanctions against foreign juveniles convicted of crime. Read Nicholas Kulish's reporting in the NYTimes.
As Julia Preston reports in today's NYT, the current head of our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (that spells ICE, another example of our government's love affair with tough-sounding acronyms, of course ICE melts along the border) is promising to emphasize two forms of crime control of immigration. One approach, which builds on laws and policies that have been enacted starting in the 1990s, focuses on more efficiently deporting non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in American jails and prisons. Many of these people are not "illegal immigrants," but legal immigrants who have been convicted of the same sorts of crimes that citizens are. Under current law, many crimes including relatively minor ones are defined as "aggravated felonies" for purposes of immigration law and require mandatory deportation regardless of the equities involved (it might be the mother of citizen children, convicted of a minor drug possession crime). ICE is promising to speed up the deportation process as a way of relieving the burden on state and local governments.
The second policy promised is an increased crackdown on employers who hire workers without documentation of citizenship or legal residence.
Based on passed experience, neither policy will do anything to stem the flow of immigrants nor make their lives here safer and more governed by law. What they do promise to do is further reinforce the bogus link that has been established in the public mind between immigration and crime.
P.S.
This is not just an American problem. After a video camera in Munich caught two young non-citizens (one Turkish) beating up a pensioner on the subway, Germany's politicians are calling for tough sanctions against foreign juveniles convicted of crime. Read Nicholas Kulish's reporting in the NYTimes.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Question(s) for the Dems: Will You Renounce the (Bill) Clinton Pact with the Politics of Crime?
And then there were two...
With the field essentially down to Hillary and Barack (with John Edwards or Richardson capable perhaps of revival should one of the leaders shipwreck) its time for this blog to consider an endorsement. Before that, I have some questions. Unlike the disastrous 1988 campaign (when again a Democrat seemed sure to be elected by public allegedly exhausted by Republican corruption and incompetence in Iran-Contra) crime has not loomed as a big issue. But the mentalities that have flourished in the war on crime constitute a major challenge to any new President that would move this country in a new direction.
Both of you claim to be leaders who can draw from their experiences in the 1990s, to take this country out of its deepest morass of executive incompetence and power grabbing in our history. I maintain that you cannot overcome the Bush legacy without renouncing that part of the Bill Clinton legacy that most anticipated and prepared for the Bush administration, i.e, his commitment to never be outflanked in escalating the war on crime. A Presidency that began with the promise to create new forms of security and effective government for Americans ended up overseeing a vast expansion of American prisons and a crippling rollback in judicial authority in American criminal justice. That Mestiphelian pact haunted his whole Presidency, and came home when the President found himself accused of high crimes and misdemeanors.
It began with Bill Clinton's infamous trip to back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Rector. An Arkansas inmate whose botched effort to kill himself (after a crime spree that left a police officer dead) made him effectively mentally retarded. It escalated after the failure of the health care initiative. The Crime Bill of 1994 began the federal effort to pump up state prison populations and execution rates.
No single law better summarizes the venality of that era and President Clinton's role in it than the act whose title in light of 9/11 should forever damn those who voted for and signed it. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, enacted after the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and the Oklahoma City bombing, invoked the specter of terrorism to justify an unprecedented rollback of federal judicial authority with the goal of speeding up executions. The law did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Al Qaeda's ranks of those seeking martyrdom, nor did capital punishment seem to be particularly frightening to Timothy McVeigh, but it did bully judges around the country into accepting a historic reduction in their habeas jurisdiction. A decade later executions are no more frequent, but the appeals process is increasingly sterile procedural formalities with little ability for judges to actually assess the merits of the legal claims before them.
So Hillary, so Barack, would you have signed ATEDPA had you been President in 1996?
Or if you prefer a more forward perspective please answer any or all of the following:
As President
Will you ask Congress to restore full jurisdiction to the federal courts to consider the state of prisoners of all sort, whether in death rows, super max prisons, and torture chambers in every part of America's vast domestic and foreign prison system?
Will you support an end to mandatory minimum sentences and federal mandates that state prisoners complete 85% of their prison sentences?
Will you lead the country in an objective assessment of whether the war on drugs could be effectively replaced by robust forms of civil governance, regulation, and taxation?
Will you appoint an attorney general to be the nation's top advocate for legal values rather than our top cop?
With the field essentially down to Hillary and Barack (with John Edwards or Richardson capable perhaps of revival should one of the leaders shipwreck) its time for this blog to consider an endorsement. Before that, I have some questions. Unlike the disastrous 1988 campaign (when again a Democrat seemed sure to be elected by public allegedly exhausted by Republican corruption and incompetence in Iran-Contra) crime has not loomed as a big issue. But the mentalities that have flourished in the war on crime constitute a major challenge to any new President that would move this country in a new direction.
Both of you claim to be leaders who can draw from their experiences in the 1990s, to take this country out of its deepest morass of executive incompetence and power grabbing in our history. I maintain that you cannot overcome the Bush legacy without renouncing that part of the Bill Clinton legacy that most anticipated and prepared for the Bush administration, i.e, his commitment to never be outflanked in escalating the war on crime. A Presidency that began with the promise to create new forms of security and effective government for Americans ended up overseeing a vast expansion of American prisons and a crippling rollback in judicial authority in American criminal justice. That Mestiphelian pact haunted his whole Presidency, and came home when the President found himself accused of high crimes and misdemeanors.
It began with Bill Clinton's infamous trip to back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Rector. An Arkansas inmate whose botched effort to kill himself (after a crime spree that left a police officer dead) made him effectively mentally retarded. It escalated after the failure of the health care initiative. The Crime Bill of 1994 began the federal effort to pump up state prison populations and execution rates.
No single law better summarizes the venality of that era and President Clinton's role in it than the act whose title in light of 9/11 should forever damn those who voted for and signed it. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, enacted after the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and the Oklahoma City bombing, invoked the specter of terrorism to justify an unprecedented rollback of federal judicial authority with the goal of speeding up executions. The law did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Al Qaeda's ranks of those seeking martyrdom, nor did capital punishment seem to be particularly frightening to Timothy McVeigh, but it did bully judges around the country into accepting a historic reduction in their habeas jurisdiction. A decade later executions are no more frequent, but the appeals process is increasingly sterile procedural formalities with little ability for judges to actually assess the merits of the legal claims before them.
So Hillary, so Barack, would you have signed ATEDPA had you been President in 1996?
Or if you prefer a more forward perspective please answer any or all of the following:
As President
Will you ask Congress to restore full jurisdiction to the federal courts to consider the state of prisoners of all sort, whether in death rows, super max prisons, and torture chambers in every part of America's vast domestic and foreign prison system?
Will you support an end to mandatory minimum sentences and federal mandates that state prisoners complete 85% of their prison sentences?
Will you lead the country in an objective assessment of whether the war on drugs could be effectively replaced by robust forms of civil governance, regulation, and taxation?
Will you appoint an attorney general to be the nation's top advocate for legal values rather than our top cop?
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Fear can kill you
Researchers at UC Irvine have found evidence that random subjects who respond more powerfully to the fear of terrorism suffer from more heart disease. As reported by Tony Barboza in the LA Times, the study controlled for smoking, obesity, and the usual correlates of heart disease. Subjects who reported more intense trauma after 9/11, or who retained a high fear response years later, showed higher levels of heart disease relative to their pre-9/11 health records.
The Irvine data reminds us that we are not governed through our minds or wills alone as bodies. Authority that constantly recharges itself through the repetitive invocation of unspeakable horror, takes a toll not simply on our liberties but on our largely irreplaceable heart cells. Remember that next time you decide to watch a Giuliani commercial.
The destructive power of terrorism fear may relate to its widespread visibility. 9/11 was a global media trauma that almost everyone witnessed in video. The same is true of violent crime, which television began to turn into its staple fare beginning in the 1970s.
It would be interesting to know if heart disease is a risk in all fear based governance, or whether certain fears, like terrorism, and I suspect violent crime, bring out deeply embedded responses that produce short-term gains (fight or flight) and long-term damage. (To the extent these are biological mechanisms, evolution has likely selected to maximize short term over long term individual survival).
For those of us who are nostalgic for the fears of solidarity-based governance (like Roosevelt's New Deal), it would be interesting to know whether fears of economic decline, climate change, and infrastructure rot produce the same kind of heart damage? Or, perhaps, can selecting the right kind of national fears produce individual experiences of solidarity and effective cooperation which result in measurable improvements heart health?
The Irvine data reminds us that we are not governed through our minds or wills alone as bodies. Authority that constantly recharges itself through the repetitive invocation of unspeakable horror, takes a toll not simply on our liberties but on our largely irreplaceable heart cells. Remember that next time you decide to watch a Giuliani commercial.
The destructive power of terrorism fear may relate to its widespread visibility. 9/11 was a global media trauma that almost everyone witnessed in video. The same is true of violent crime, which television began to turn into its staple fare beginning in the 1970s.
It would be interesting to know if heart disease is a risk in all fear based governance, or whether certain fears, like terrorism, and I suspect violent crime, bring out deeply embedded responses that produce short-term gains (fight or flight) and long-term damage. (To the extent these are biological mechanisms, evolution has likely selected to maximize short term over long term individual survival).
For those of us who are nostalgic for the fears of solidarity-based governance (like Roosevelt's New Deal), it would be interesting to know whether fears of economic decline, climate change, and infrastructure rot produce the same kind of heart damage? Or, perhaps, can selecting the right kind of national fears produce individual experiences of solidarity and effective cooperation which result in measurable improvements heart health?
Monday, January 7, 2008
The Bush Legacy of Mass Imprisonment in the War on Terror
Prisons are usually a domestic policy issue, and one that candidates from both parties have been enthusiastically "for" over the last several decades. George W. Bush changed that when he took the war on crime strategy of mass incarceration and deployed it in his war on terrorism. His administration's grotesque interrogation and torture policies then exposed these prisons to catastrophically bad publicity undermining US prestige and security.
As Tim Golden's reporting in the NYTimes today about the US prison at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan suggests, the real problems with the strategy are more fundamental than those much denounced examples of inquisitorial excess. Mass imprisonment (or incarceration) involves sweeping up and incapacitating large numbers of subjects who are considered dangerous without much effort to discriminate among them. It almost always relies on racial, age, and gender profiling.
In the domestic war on crime, the hundreds of thousands of people in prison are all presumably guilty of a criminal offense (however, see the Innocence Project), but many of those "crimes" involve the criminalization of suspicious or dangerous behavior (that is true of most possession crimes, for example). Here in California, many prisoners are incarcerated for parole violations that do not amount to criminal offenses but are, again, manifestations of dangerousness.
In the war on terror version of mass imprisonment, there is no phase of judicial process to provide even the pretense of individual due process. Prisoners are literally swept up in battlefield or, more commonly now, urban street sweeps by soldiers or armed militias and then locked up. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the immediate result is a degeneration of living conditions to the point where, even without torture, human rights are being violated. This again tracks the war on crime where California's prisons have become unconstitutionally overcrowded and dysfunctional to the point where inmates regularly die of neglected but treatable medical problems.
My question for the candidates is this: Will you denounce not just Bush's disastrous policies of torture (which all the Democrats, and the once and future Republican front-runner John McCain would do), but his mass imprisonment policies, at home and abroad?
As Tim Golden's reporting in the NYTimes today about the US prison at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan suggests, the real problems with the strategy are more fundamental than those much denounced examples of inquisitorial excess. Mass imprisonment (or incarceration) involves sweeping up and incapacitating large numbers of subjects who are considered dangerous without much effort to discriminate among them. It almost always relies on racial, age, and gender profiling.
In the domestic war on crime, the hundreds of thousands of people in prison are all presumably guilty of a criminal offense (however, see the Innocence Project), but many of those "crimes" involve the criminalization of suspicious or dangerous behavior (that is true of most possession crimes, for example). Here in California, many prisoners are incarcerated for parole violations that do not amount to criminal offenses but are, again, manifestations of dangerousness.
In the war on terror version of mass imprisonment, there is no phase of judicial process to provide even the pretense of individual due process. Prisoners are literally swept up in battlefield or, more commonly now, urban street sweeps by soldiers or armed militias and then locked up. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the immediate result is a degeneration of living conditions to the point where, even without torture, human rights are being violated. This again tracks the war on crime where California's prisons have become unconstitutionally overcrowded and dysfunctional to the point where inmates regularly die of neglected but treatable medical problems.
My question for the candidates is this: Will you denounce not just Bush's disastrous policies of torture (which all the Democrats, and the once and future Republican front-runner John McCain would do), but his mass imprisonment policies, at home and abroad?
Friday, January 4, 2008
Hope v Fear? To Win Go with Both
Yes, he's inspiring (Obama), and yes, he's funny and upbeat (Huckabee), but it would be foolish for either candidate to think that they will win the White House with a campaign based solely on hope. As a new ad for Giuliani pointedly reminds us: “A nuclear power in chaos,” the announcer says. “Madmen bent on creating it. Leaders assassinated. Democracy attacked. And Osama bin Laden still making threats. In a world where the next crisis is a moment away, America needs a leader who’s ready.” (Read Michael Cooper's analysis of the ad in the NYT.) Whether Giuliani can regain momentum after a bad month, he is correct to believe that fears will almost inevitably play a major role in this election.
To go the long run, these aspirational candidates (who share a deeply religious kind of tone in their speeches, even if disguised in Obama's case) need to take a leaf from FDR and combine hope with real efforts to rally the country around very real threats from climate change, to terrorism, to rotting infrastructure. FDR had an optimistic pitch to his speeches even as a fighter against entrenched economic interests (somewhat more like Edwards' 2004 voice than his '08 edition). At the same time he articulated very clear rationales for the country to recognize the threats of Depression and later the Axis powers.
The difference between FDR and Giuliani is that FDR had an optimistic sense that innovative forms of civil government and new structures of democratic participation (like unions) could prepare America to overcome these threats, while Giuliani, following Bush and Cheney, appeals to a strong, punitive, and unaccountable executive as the source of American resolve in the face of current threats. If Barak emerges as the nominee, he must be prepared to draw a strong contrast in his approach to fear rather than only articulate hope.
To go the long run, these aspirational candidates (who share a deeply religious kind of tone in their speeches, even if disguised in Obama's case) need to take a leaf from FDR and combine hope with real efforts to rally the country around very real threats from climate change, to terrorism, to rotting infrastructure. FDR had an optimistic pitch to his speeches even as a fighter against entrenched economic interests (somewhat more like Edwards' 2004 voice than his '08 edition). At the same time he articulated very clear rationales for the country to recognize the threats of Depression and later the Axis powers.
The difference between FDR and Giuliani is that FDR had an optimistic sense that innovative forms of civil government and new structures of democratic participation (like unions) could prepare America to overcome these threats, while Giuliani, following Bush and Cheney, appeals to a strong, punitive, and unaccountable executive as the source of American resolve in the face of current threats. If Barak emerges as the nominee, he must be prepared to draw a strong contrast in his approach to fear rather than only articulate hope.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Governing Tigers: Behave Yourself or Beware
Readers of this blog will recognize the pattern. A major (or minor) public (or private) institution fails to protect its constituents (or customers, or clients), and then compounds failure by making self-serving misstatements and lies. Faced with sudden questions about its competence (or legitimacy), the institution and its leaders look to see if there is some kind of personal irresponsibility connected in any way to the failure and the damages caused by that failure.
In New Orleans, when thousands of dependent people were left unprotected from the aftermath of Katrina, and nearly drowned in the process, it was looting (of which there was predictably some) and then claims of rapes and murders (which proved utterly false). In Los Angeles, after this fall's damaging wildfires, it was a ten year old playing with matches who prosecutors were considering charges against. In San Francisco, after a Siberian Tiger escaped from its pen on Christmas day and mauled three teenage visitors (one fatally), the Zoo compounded its failure to respond promptly and effectively to the escape (the cat was eventually shot to death by police officers, but only after chewing on its victims for sometime after officials learned of the problem), by mis-stating its own precautions (the trumpeted 18-foot wall separating the cat from the visitors turned out to be 12 feet). Zoo leaders also quickly turned to blaming the injured visitors, claiming that only extreme provocation on their part could explain the cat's sudden motivation to escape the cage (even though a year earlier the same cat ate the meat off the arm of a keeper who was engaged in a public feeding of the cats).
In today's SF Chronicle, Patricia Yollin, Tanya Schevitz, Kevin Fagan report on the Zoo's continuing effort to push that story. On Wednesday, witnesses emerged who claimed to have seen as many as four teenagers "taunting" the tiger, although it is unclear whether these apparently misbehaving teens were the same unfortunates who met the tiger's claws and teeth.
How much taunting can a tiger take? I'll invite your speculations, but as long as I've been going to zoos, kids (ok, boys especially, of all ages to my observation) have been drawn to taunting big cats. Maybe that is irresponsible or even cruel behavior, but it is utterly predictable and perhaps even capitalized on by zoos (like SF's which has made its cat feeding one of its biggest draws for years).
Although taunting zoo animals is apparently a misdemeanor, SF Police (who were able to down the cat within minutes of their arrival during the Christmas escape) seem skeptical about the provocation theory. Police Inspector Valerie Matthews noted: "I don't know if what they did was any more than what kindergartners do at the zoo every day." Police did apparently find an empty vodka bottle in the car in which at least some of the injured visitors arrived (read the AP story).
Look to Zoo officials to continue to focus on the crime story even while doing the environmental security fixes that should have been done decades ago. Perhaps the whole saga is no big deal (visitors flocked to the still open Oakland Zoo the day after the tragedy). But the SF Zoo is only a small part of the mentality of governance which prefers to emphasize the role of personal responsibility in managing risks of all kind.
Don't feel threatened by tigers? How about earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes?
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