War Crimes and Crime Wars

The Bush Administration added another terror suspect to its emerging line up of planned war crimes trials before military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani stands accused of central involvement of the bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania in 1998, a crime for which he was indicted then a decade ago. Captured in 2004, Ghailani will now get the post-9/11 treatment along with 9/11 planner, Khalid Sheik Muhammed. The announcement suggests the administration is planning to make sure that the rest of this election year will focus on its preferred topics, the existence of men intent to killing scores of Americans at a time and the appropriateness of torture, limited due process procedures, and ultimately the death penalty for doing justice in such cases.

Read William Glaberson's reporting in today's NYTimes

It's Not Apartheid, It's Security

“The basis of separation is not ethnic since Israeli Arabs and Jerusalem residents with Israeli ID cards can use the road,” argues Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a conservative research organization. "The basis of the separation is to keep out of secure areas people living in chaotic areas."

Israel's increasingly malignant 40 year occupation of Palestine provides an ongoing mirror for the consequences of governing through crime. For most of those years, the Israeli governments have insisted on treating an apparently insolvable political conflict as a manageable security problem (with some moments of insight like early Oslo). But as security increasingly demands the destruction of democratic ideals that have been central to Israel's state building project, the slow deformation of institutions is becoming apparent. The Supreme Court, long a check on the power over the military and state to govern autocratically in the name of security, has with increasing frequency accepted practices of gross categoric inequality as necessary accommodation to the permanent state of tensions that followed the second intifada and the breakdown of the Oslo process.

The most recent decision, reported by Ethan Bronner in this morning's Times, upholds the exclusion of West Bank Palestinians from a highway running through the area on land taken from private Palestinian land owners.

White Americans have also increasingly accepted a state of defacto hyper-segregation, even while celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday, all in the name of necessity of separating the orderly from the chaotic and dangerous.

Department of Corrections

This mornings papers and radio news is covering the "return" of former SLA radical Sara Jane Olson to a California prison just days after her release following six years in prison. According to the Department of Corrections they made a mistake in calculating her sentence back in 2004, and she really needs to serve an additional year, with release now scheduled for March 17, 2009. According to the SFChron coverage by Carolyn Jones and Bob Egelko

"The department is sensitive to the effects this has had. The department sincerely regrets the mistake," said Alberto Roldan, chief deputy general counsel for the Department of Corrections.

California's massive and catastrophically poorly managed prison bureaucracy (read many of the previous posts on this blog concerning California's prison crisis) is now actually called the "Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation" in testament to Governor Schwarzenegger's original zeal to try to alter the state's policies of warehousing people in prisons. However the Sara Jane Olson story gives new meaning to the department's "correctional" mission. Can an agency incapable of calculating a determinate sentence (fixed term, minus time reductions for good behavior at a fixed rate) undertake anything as complicated as trying to rehabilitate prisoners damaged by life times of child abuse, educational failure, poor lifestyle choices, and chronic bad health? Indeed can an agency incapable of calculating such a sentence undertake to safely house, feed, and care for nearly 170,000 adult human beings?

The answer to both questions is clearly no.

The sad truth is the Department, swaddled in the state's tough punishment at any cost political philosophy, has not been held accountable for any kind of performance objectives for so long that it has created a chronic culture of incompetence that could well explain this sad mistake and may account for thousands of unreported or undiscovered errors (shall we do an audit now and at least figure out who we are holding past their release date?).

It is also certain that this "mistake" was discovered because of the extraordinary pressure placed by the law enforcement community (cops, DAs, COs), by far in a way the most powerful and privileged special interest group in the state. Law enforcement has long viewed the state's prisons and execution chamber as a special zone for their personal vengeance against those among the mass imprisoned hordes, mostly characterized by luckless incompetence, whose crimes have personally affected members of that community.

At the Heart of White Resentment

"So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when theyhear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

Senator Barack Obama, March 18, 2008, Philadelphia
(read the entire speech in today's NYTimes )

Like a specialist who combines brain surgery with psychoanalysis, Dr. Barack Obama reached into the souls of white folks yesterday in Philadelphia and displayed, as if in anatomy lab, ugly and wiggling, still very much alive, the viscera of white anger about race in America.

And at the very heart of that tangle was fear about crime in urban neighborhoods. Obama named two other iconic sources of white political heat (and not surprisingly, the very stuff of racial wedge issues in American politics) busing and affirmative action, but busing itself was very much about fear of crime and the outrage that white parents felt (and feel today wherever its active) they were being forced by government to expose their kids to risks of crime in neighborhoods they had sought to separate themselves from.

For white Americans since the 1960s, urban crime has appeared as a kind of civil war or insurgency directed against them. In return they have authorized a war on crime that has often been nothing short of a real war against minority/majority inner city urban neighborhoods. That reaction and response have dominated American politics and government for two generations. (see my book if you want that elaborated on a bit).

But Obama's insight is so keen that he sees as even a greater burden on the white soul, the perception that this fear reaction and response is itself racist (essentially what Rev. Wright noted in his 3-Strikes sermon).

In far less then the analytic 50 minute hour, Dr. Obama took white Americans right down to the heart of our racial neurosis and offered us a path toward healing.

Stop the war on crime, which is not a reflection of white racism, but a source of racial division.

California Prisons and the Long Haul

At a conference organized by the University of San Francisco Law Review this past Saturday, lawyers and prison reform experts gathered to discuss California's catastrophically overcrowded prisons and the pair of lawsuits that have brought the state's correctional system to its legal knees. The legendary federal judge Thelton Henderson, in whose court one of the two epic legal battles originated, gave the keynote speech, promising those in attendance that he was ready to "go the long haul" in his battle to create a constitutional health care system for the state's 160K plus prisoners, a system in which currently prisoners die routinely from treatable conditions due to the lack of adequate facilities, staff, and management capacity (Read Bob Egelko's coverage in the SFChon).

The effort to create decent health care will likely take years and involve as large a scale restructuring of the state's health care economy as has ever been taken at one time. Along with a parallel case involving mental health in the prisons, the litigation has raised the possibility of a cap on California's mammoth prison population.

The ongoing prison crisis which is certain to cost the state billions at a time of painful budget cuts, provides the nation's most potent display of the dangers of a political system that has prioritized governing through crime for decades through the enactment of an endless stream of punitive crime legislation, and through building prisons that literally treat their inmates as if their criminality was the only feature of their existence worthy of government attention. The resulting prison system is beggaring the state's once worthy public universities and ambitious infrastructure projects while Californian's remain deeply insecure and vulnerable to crime politics.

The great jurist who went to Cal on a football scholarship, brings decades of insight about institutional reform litigation and specific success with reforming California prisons. Judge Henderson describes himself as a catalyst for change. By compelling the state to spend billions to bring its prison up to constitutional standards. But even with his great insight and courage as a jurist, Judge Henderson cannot compel California to stop governing through crime.

Drug Moms: Here we go again

A decade ago, sociologist and law professor Laura Gomez studied the movement to prosecute and punish pregnant women and mothers of new born babies, where evidence emerged (usually from the medical system) that the mother and or baby had metabolites of illegal drugs in their bodies. Gomez's fascinating book,Misconceiving Mothers, traces the ways that this new frontier in the war on crime was largely resisted through the counter pressure of the medical profession and feminism.

Today's NYTimes carries news that a new wave of such prosecutions has begun. Read Adam Nossiter's reporting on prosecutions in Alabama).

Its a reminder of how tenacious the governing through crime mentality remains in America notwithstanding the crime decline of the 1990s and the emergence of new threats to security from climate change and infrastructure decline in America.

From Crime Fighter to Criminal: The Arc of American Leadership

Revelations that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a regular customer of a high end prostitution ring has shocked veterans of the state's famously partisan politics and led to immediate calls for his resignation (read Michael Powell and Mike McIntire's analysis piece in today's NYTimes).

The exposure of the Governor's appetite for paid sex is different then the scandals that have swirled around American politicians caught in adulterous affairs for one simple reason. Most Americans do not consider adultery a crime anymore (although it remains one in many states), while patronizing a prostitute is.

Spitzer's came to power along the path that has become well marked for leadership in the era of governing through crime. As a prosecutor and later Attorney General, he made a reputation for being a fierce antagonist of crime wherever it lay. Indeed, his reputation as a reformer who could change Albany's fatally gridlocked political system was largely based on his ability to use crime war rhetoric against the rich and powerful in business and politics (rather than directing it mostly against the deviant and marginal which is the more favored strategy, see, for example Pete Wilson or George W. Bush as governors).

As I note in chapter 2 of Governing through Crime, the enormous power of crime to lift the authority of executives goes along with tremendous vulnerability on anything that looks like crime. President Clinton's sexual tryst was legal, but his attempts to lie about it almost cost him the job. Now Governor Spitzer has found the steep backside to the mountain of crime war.

The real shame is that breaking through the gridlock that prevents any substantial governing project from being launched whether in Albany or Sacramento is the key to opening up new modes of governing less locked to crime and Spitzer appeared to be someone capable of turning his crime warrior capital into such change.

The Governor will almost certainly have to resign, but perhaps the very magnitude of that result from what all must concede to be a marginal crime (compared to say bribery or drunk driving) will hopefully produce some head scratching. Is it better that all our politicians must spend their nights entertaining lobbyists with their attentions in order to raise campaign funds, than that some pay for sex in high end prostitution rings (probably ones with better working conditions and less exploitation than many)?