Senator Feinstein, the FBI, and the War on Crime

Yesterday in Washington DC, Senator Diane Feinstein and FBI Director Robert Mueller engaged in an extended an colloquy concerning the FBI's general lack of attention to the war on crime since 911. The Senator, who has clashed with the FBI repeatedly over issues in the war on terror, turned in yesterday's hearing to the question of why violent crime was 8th on the FBI's priority list. According to National Public Radio's account (listen to it here), the FBI director testily noted that the rise in priority of counter terrorism and intelligence had inevitably lowered the priority of crime before going on to practically embrace the Senators criticisms about the diminished role in the war on crime.

The episode is another illustration of how bipartisan the war on crime has been in Washington for a long time. It also underlines the danger that the war on terror will only become an additive to a continue war on crime, and that the combination of the two will diminish the practical and legal freedom of Americans even faster that it has declined in the past four decades.

On the real issues of crime it is worth noting that there is virtually no evidence that the FBI's role in combatting drugs, bank robbery, and related violent crime contributed meaningfully to the powerful crime declines of the 1990s, nor that increases in murders last year (mostly driven by a number of large cities) is a response to the "redeployment" of the FBI. The violent crimes that most people rightly fear are local in nature and must be addressed with tools of local knowledge. The Senator is rightly concerned about the recent violent crime surge in California cities, but the right role for Washington to play is providing funding for local law enforcement and crime prevention programs, not the largely symbolic role of the FBI.

Murder

Military Security Poster, 1944
National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/powers_of_persuasion/hes_watching_you/images_html/wanted_for_murder.html


The word comes up in these posts with some frequency. No crime is more important to the world view that produced and has sustained "governing through crime." We would not made capital punishment into the lynch pin of political respectability it is in America without this background obsession with murder. A war on drugs, would never have taken hold in this country without the sustained efforts of government, media, and official criminology, to claim drugs as the source of the criminality that ultimately leads to murder. Nor would the vast efforts undertaken by the American middle class to gate themselves away from stranger danger no matter what the cost in money or lifestyle if murder did not weigh on the mind.

In her brilliant cultural history of murder in America, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, UC Davis historian Karen Halttunen documents that in the course of the 18th and 19th century, murder became the primary imaginary space for Americans to work out their conceptions of social morality in the context of a religiously diverse society. The 20th century assured enough waves of murder (the 20s and the 60s primarily) to give governing through crime a powerful tailwind (and it finally took flight after the '60s).

Most criminologists and others who believe our punitive culture is excessive, would rather talk about anything then murder. We emphasize that punitive drug crimes are the major reasons for prison crowding. But actually the harsh punishment of murder in America is a significant factor in the growth of imprisonment (as our opponents are happy to point out).

If there was good evidence to believe that mass imprisonment is what really broke the back of America's chronically high murder rates during our remarkable 1990s crime decline, it would be hard to argue with our harsh punishment generally and of murder in particular. But the evidence does not actually point to a strong causal relationship, (see my colleague Frank Zimring's book, The Great American Crime Decline, for the most careful effort to sift the empirical record).

Perhaps it would help us as a culture if we faced murder and decided to curb our appetite for punishment and security there first. After that it would be easy work to overthrow the gated communities, mandatory minimums, lock down schools, that characterize the America I describe in Governing through Crime.

1 in 100

It was bound to happen soon. Newspapers and media outlets today carried stories on a just published survey that places the nation's jail and prison population at an all time high proportion of the overall population, the magic number, 100 to 1. The report by the PEW Center on the States (read it here) shows that America's thirty year old prison binge has continued. In the early 1970s, fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 adult Americans were behind bars. Today its 1 in 100.

Actually, 1 out of every 100 is an overall figure that masks severe racial, age, and gender disparities that are well developed in the PEW report. Interestingly white men, and black women, both hover around that precise number, but white men were far less likely to be incarcerated then black men (1 in 15) and black women far more likely than white women (1 in 100 compared to 1 in 355).

The PEW report has a message, costs are rising astronomically (due to aging and higher medical costs) while the crime suppression pay off of imprisonment has long ago past optimal levels and is now probably producing more crime. These are important considerations, but in a year of democratic renewal when unusually larger numbers of people have been participating in the highly competitive primary campaigns, let us go beyond the fiscal impact and pay off, to more fundamental questions for our democracy.

First, can any society based on individual freedom and private choice, survive having 1 percent of its adults (and disproportionately the young who will be here for a while) going through a process that has a tendency to obliterate human capital, destroy the likelihood of future family formation, and encourage attitudes favorable to interpersonal violence, racism, and misogyny.

Second, over the last 20 years, while spending on prison has gone up 121 percent in inflation controlled dollars (compared to 21 percent for higher education), a massive unfunded mandated has accumulated in the form of millions of alumni of the prison system, many of them rendered economically and socially isolated by the experience of incarceration. We need to create a program like the environmental super-fund (come to think of it we need to refinance the original one as well) designed to pay for the clean up of industrially polluted locations, aimed at restoring the social ecology of communities damaged by mass imprisonment.

Choosing Between Security and Its Metaphors

"When you let go, you get more control." Those were the words that had to be spoken to me over and over again growing up, when learning to ride a bicycle, how to ski, how to practice tai chi (and perhaps when learning how to walk, but I don't remember that one).

The same lesson often applies to security. Often inclusion works better than exclusion, if we have intelligent ways to use the power that inclusion brings. When you build a wall against what scares you, you give up any hope of influencing what scares you (see Israel's nightmarish relationship with Gaza for a strikingly sad example of the limits of wall building as a security strategy).

New data from California's Sex Offender Management Board, a commission set up to monitor California's sex offender policies, suggests that enforcement of Jessica's law is pushing more sex offenders into homelessness (or transience to use the language of the report). Jessica's Law, passed as Proposition 83 by voter initiative in 2006, forbids people with certain classes of sex offenses on their records from living within 2000 feet of where children congregate (the law is very vague). As described by Michael Rothfeld in the LATimes last week, the data state wide suggest that more than 4000 California parolees are subject to the law's restrictions. The number with no stable address has jumped from 2000 to more than 2800 in a year, suggesting that enforcement of the law on parolees is driving many of them into homelessness. Not only does such a status make efforts at normalizing the lives of people driven by sexual compulsions ever more difficult, it also makes it far harder for parole agents and police to maintain surveillance.

Still the metaphor of space free from the presence of the dangerous is just to tempting. We can't let go, we just keep clamping down hoping that this vertigo will pass, until we fall off the bike...

Why the Drug War Persists: The Progressive Connection

To those who see in America's forty year long war on drugs a right wing plot to roll back the civil rights movement and civil liberties, consider the major feature in Saturday morning's NYTimes on the scourge of cheap smokable cocaine in Argentina's slums. The impressively photographed (as well as streaming video from their website) by Alexie Barrioneuvo is a potent reminder of how progressives end up supporting drug wars. With echoes of the crack cocaine panic in America of twenty years ago (and more distantly progressive concerns about alcohol and immigrants in the years before Prohibition), the article paints a picture of addictive drugs destroying lives in an already disadvantaged slum, while police are helpless to stop the infusion across open borders.

A mother speaks of two sons caught in the grip of "Paco" a cheap smokable form of cocaine waste products. The high is inexpensive, about a $1.50, but its intense pleasure is short lived, leading addicts to constantly pursue another hit. The problems are said to have gotten worse because of the economic crisis of the new millennium (although Argentina's economy is said to have improved considerably of late), relatively open borders between Latin American countries, and the increased production of coca in Bolivia under pro-grower President Evo Morales.

Without contesting the facts it is worth stepping back and looking at what the story tells us and does not. The power of addictive drugs is always shown to be irresistible, while the massive joblessness and subsequent spread of anomic social patterns (breakdown in family formation, etc) are ignored, their influences on behavior invisibly added to the seemingly irresistible pull of the next high (leaving mysterious how middle class people who could easily afford the same drugs aren't ruined by the same forces.

The story is artfully told but relies heavily on the identified voices of only a Brazilian narcotics officer in the São Paulo State Police Department and a 46 year old resident of the eponymous Ciudad Oculta, a neighborhood of some 15 thousand in the city of Buenos Aires, and who has become an activist against drugs (her means of support are not described).

More subtle is the story's implications that only a more concerted effort to interdict the flow of cocaine and to suppress its sales on the streets of Ciudad Oculta will benefit its residents. But how realistic is that? Imagine the billions it would take to bring up the Argentine drug war to say the effectiveness of the US drug war, which means it would still have no impact on the lives of people in Ciudad Oculta, other than to assure that many more of them are dead or in prison.

Moreover, the fact that the entire global drug trade could be managed in ways that would dramatically reduce its collateral harm to communities, while capturing the pockets of wealth necessary through taxes and liability to regulate the use and sales of drug, is never suggested.

The feature has all the feel of one that may win Barrioneuvo and the Times, the Pulitzers they crave. I bet you could find ones telling the same narratives from the same sources two decades ago about crack in New York City. I bet they won Pulitzers to. Thats why the war on drugs is not a vast right wing conspiracy. Its a vast left and right wing conspiracy

1969

Joseph Pannell in custody, 1969, Chicago Sun Times, Associate Press

Although its a premature anniversary year, and there is plenty more to "celebrate" (if thats the right term) looking back forty years to 1968, Catrin Einhorn's reporting in this mornings NYTimes about an extraordinary plea bargain in Chicago, brought that year and that place back to me with a cold awakening.

It was my first full year back in the city of my birth. We had moved in the summer of 1968, sometime between the deadly riots that had followed Martin Luther King's assassination in April and the less lethal but spectacular events in the streets outside the Democratic Party's national convention in August. Both waves of violence had involved heavy handed police brutality.

As 1969 dawned, the city was divided and dismayed. Long a bastion of the national Democratic Party, the campaign that began in that ruinous convention had ended with the election of Republican Richard Nixon (who may have had Mayor Daley's tacit support but not his affections). For African Americans, long held to a humiliatingly thin slice of the city's racially hierarchical machine politics, the King riots had opened up a chapter of new vulnerabilities. The Chicago Police Department, dominated by sons of the city's Irish, Italian, and Polish neighborhoods, had always been a force of terror for African Americans. The Mayor's "shoot to kill" order during the riots took that to a war like level that would culminate in December of 1969 in the execution style slaying of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by a unit of the Cook County State Attorney's office (read the Wikipedia article on Hampton).

Hampton's murder, which I remember reading about in the Sun-Times over a bowl of breakfast cereal, scared the hell out of me. A pudgy 10 year old from a Jewish left-wing family, soaked in post-Holocaust consciousness, it seemed quite plausible to me that if they could murder a leader of the city's huge black population in his bed, they could build camps and gas a few unpopular lefty Jews with impunity (and hadn't Daley called Abe Ribicoff a "Jew Motherfucker" on the floor of the convention after Ribicoff explicitly compared the Chicago Police to the Gestapo).

In March of 1969, in an event that I have no memory of but fits a like glove in the sequence of that terrible year, Joseph Pannell, then 19, fired a bullet at Terrence Knox, then a 21 year old Chicago Police officer. Knox survived but has suffered from the wound in his arm ever since. The officer testified that he was asking the black teenager why he was not in school (but he was 19?). Pannell, long known in Canada, where fled on bail from the crime, as Gary Freeman (clever), may have been a member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, and according to one of his earlier lawyers, shot in self defense.

The plea bargain that brings this case to light, and to an end, has all the feel of a movie. Pannell, arrested in Canada in 2004, gave up his fight for extradition, impressed he said, by what it meant that the current Mayor Daley (son of Hizzoner), had endorsed Barak Obama for President. Terrence Knox, who left the Police Department for a career in business, questioned what would be gained by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute and imprison a man who had lived a crime free and socially responsible life ever since. So instead of up to 23 years in prison, Pannell and his family are coming up with $250,000 (that better be Canadian!) in a donation to a relief fund for families of wounded Chicago Police officers. Mr. Pannell will spend 30 days in jail and two more years on probation.

The resolution has drawn comparison to a bribe, but it has many attractive features, practical healing, appropriate atonement, dignity and parsimony. The Pannell/Knox case seems an especially appropriate sign as we move toward the anniversaries of a sequence of events that began 40 years ago this spring, when assassinations of Martin Luther King, and a few weeks later, Robert Kennedy, would produce riots and a terrible new kind of federal crime bill, and soon, a law and order administration in Washington. By the following winter when Joseph Pannell shot Terrence Knox (March is winter in Chicago, believe me) a war on crime had begun in earnest on the streets of Chicago and other large cities. Forty years of casualties have accumulated, too many of them wandering the corridors of state prisons or on death rows, while the community pays an ever higher price to keep them locked up.

In the Safe Zone: At the heart of governing through crime is an impossible dream of the perfectly safe space

One of the most distinctive features of America's late 20th century engagement with crime as a problem of governance is the relentless recourse to spatial constructions of crime and the possibility of security from it that have at their core the creation of a pure space of safety in which dangerous people have been excluded. This is a distinctive vision of order and security. The great cities of 19th and 20th century America were built to encourage maximum freedom of access to stoke commerce and probably class mobility (of course this was an idea betrayed in a thousand ways). They relied on police and the criminal justice system to deter crime before the fact or correct it afterwards. Since the 1960s Americans have increasingly rejected this model of security and in favor of a very different and extreme model, one that placed crime prevention right at the heart of the polis.

In the 1960s, when I was growing up, it was moving to the suburbs that provided the most palpable expression of this priority and its spatial imperative, an act of family governance, but one affirmed and subsidized by numerous acts of official state support from highway building to FHA loans. As city spaces, especially streets, got painted with the primacy of crime, kids in my neighborhood near the University of Chicago on that city's south side, disappeared to new towns with Scottish names (Glencoe, Flossmoor, etc.) that had no taint of crime and sometimes no real streets.

In the early 2000s, the specter of pedophiles lurking in suburban libraries and through the internet (brilliantly captured in Todd Field's film, Little Children, New Line Cinema 2006) has made that way of creating safe zones increasingly untenable. In its place is coming a steady demand to turn all spaces into zones of prison like security, with surveillance cameras, identification checking, and exclusion of categories of high risk subjects.

California and several other states have added laws requiring certain categories of sex offenders to live more than 2000 feet from spaces associated with children, including schools and parks. But even as these laws, if enforced, would stretch correctional and police resources beyond the breaking point, new demands build to intensify the policing of space on a more cellular level.

In the New York Times, Katie Zezima reports on a new ordinance in Massachusetts aimed at cleansing libraries of any sex offenders.

The problems of over and under inclusion of these laws are well known, and in my view fatal. By excluding a class that will inevitably include lots of people who pose no threat to children, while including the pool of those people willing to rape a child inside a public library who have not been convicted of the predicate offenses necessary for exclusion (the latter inevitably being a larger group then the former), such laws can only mislead parents as to the security of libraries and reduce the odds of other precautions being taken. At the same time, the new security regime will detract from the value of libraries in countless ways, beginning with their already meager resources.

The classic security regime of the great 19th and 20th century cities remains an open option. That does not mean placing a literal cop in every library. But imagine hiring a young person or two to staff the children's library, and to be aware of which kids are going off the bathroom, with whom, as well as helping kids with homework, keeping an eye on misuse of the library computer, etc. Such resources are currently beyond the reach of many libraries that can barely maintain open hours.