Jaws

It was the summer of 1975. I was a 16 year old pacing the steets of Hyde Park, on Chicago's south side. Crime rates had been high for a decade, and reports of violence (including police violence) were everywhere. But what scared me that summer 33 years ago was a finned predator attacking a Cape Code beach town in the mother of all block buster summer movies, Jaws. Crime couldn't stop me from walking the darkened streets of the neighborhood with my small dog in hopes of running into one of the girls in my class, but that imaginary great white kept me out of fresh water Lake Michigan (or from enjoying it when pursuit of those same girls required getting wet).

Reponses in the Mexican village of Ixtapa to a series of shark attacks this late spring, recall that movie, and remind us how primal and powerful that predator fear is in humans. As reported by Marc Lacey in the New York Times:

After the first attack, officials eased normally tight restrictions on shark fishing and sent an armada of fishermen out into the ocean to strike back. A number of sharks were brought back and hung as trophies, an effort to send a signal that the crisis was under control.

As a means of reducing shark attack risk, these measures are unlikely to work well and may actually increase fear of shark attacks, but they appear to mimic our response to violent crime (or is it in fact the original). Like the crime control response to the threat of violent crime, they have a powerful intuitive appeal. While it drives criminologists and apparently shark experts crazy, such responses seem to be repetitively embraced by humans facing the specter of a violent predatory attack (and not say a hurricane or a cancer).

Whether or not such responses have deep roots in our evolutionary heritage as the offspring of ancient relatives who got good at avoiding large predators they are clearly dysfunctional in their effects on crime rates or shark attacks. The key is to become conscious of the powerful appeals of these primal response and if possible develop tactics for slowing and moderating our irrational desire to attack tough and display the results.

"you don't deserve... another election that's governed by fear"

That's what Senator Obama said tonight in his speech observing his clinching of the 2008 Democratic Nomination in Minnesota. Hinting at the way in which the tactics of governing through crime have been present in electoral politics (at all levels of government), the presumptive Democrat nominee stated,

The other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of
policies and positions, and that is a good thing, that is a debate I look
forward to.

It is a debate the American people deserve on the
issues that will help determine the future of this country and the future of its
children.

But what you don't deserve is another election that's
governed by fear, and innuendo, and division.

What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is
the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon
- that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to
demonize.

Senator Obama also mentioned his work to reform criminal justice in Illinois, whose "criminal justice system... sent 13 innocent people to death row." Finally, he also emphasized unifying America into a people "united by common challenges and common hopes" rather than bifurcated by fear.

Take that Smokey!

Gun rights and gun control advocates are pretty competitive in their endless battle to keep scaring the wits out of Americans about crime. Score one for the NRA as they lobby Congress to allow National Park visitors to pack fire arms (along with their mosquito spray). According to Jim Robbins reporting in the NYTimes, the NRA claims that lifting the ban is necessary because:

“You read stories about people attacked by animals or who stumble upon meth labs or women who are raped in a national park.”

California Prisons Prepare to Desegregate

Tanya Schevitz reports in the SF Chronicle on California prisons gearing up to comply with a consent decree to desegregate housing for entering inmates. The state's practice of routinely segregating prisoners by race when they first enter or re-enter prison was challenged in the Supreme Court, which held in California v. Johnson (2005) that even in a prison setting, racial classifications must be reviewed with "strict scrutiny" (i.e., to survive, the state must show the classification was "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling state interest").

The story reports on concerns that desegregation may lead to violence in a prison system divided among racially defined prison gangs. But the real question is why Californian's, who adopted Proposition 209 back in the 1990s to prevent higher education from taking race into account, has tolerated the massive expansion of a prisons system based on racial classification. Opposition to affirmative action in education is based on a the real concern (however unjustified) that such state actions may reinforce racial antagonism. But in supporting mass incarceration, Californians have invested in racializing the identities of tens of thousands of young people (who already have a proven track record of anti-social behavior).

The real solution is to implement a single cell policy in the entire state system. Taht would require lowering the prison population by at least 80,000 inmates.

Compromise Justice: Americans are unique in electing judges, but we are also unique in obsessing about crime

In Sunday's edition of the NYTimes, law correspondent Adam Liptak examines the uniquely American practice of popularly electing judges, and the consequences that has for the fairness and neutrality of justice. Liptak profiles a recent Wisconsin election where a state Supreme Court Justice, the state's only African American justice, was defeated by an opponent who linked the Justice to a rapist who he had once defended while a lawyer (also African American); falsely claiming that the lawyer's argument had resulted in another victim being raped.

“Butler found a loophole,” the advertisement said. “Mitchell went on to molest another child. Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler on the Supreme Court?”

Liptak also cites a study that shows that all judges, even those who are already among the most punitive, raise sentences as they approach an election.

The article raises the question of whether judges are superior in most other countries where they are chosen by a system of rigorous exams, relatively insulated from politics.

But while American justice might improve with a more rigorous selection process, the real defects highlighted by the article are more of a product of governing through crime, and the enormous salience crime policy now has for all government officials. We have had elected judges for decades, but until the war on crime these were low key and mostly routine affairs.

Is the Era of Mass Incarceration Over in California?

Early news reports (see Mark Rothfield's May 20th reporting in the LATimes) of a proposed settlement to the epic overcrowding case that has had California facing the possibility of court ordered prisoner releases suggest that a major shift in California policy may be under way. Since the 1980s when Governor Deukmejian promised to replace the problem of criminals invading the houses of Californian's (a trend that had already been going down for a decade and has continued to drop) with the problem of how to house prisoners, locking up as many troubled people as possible has replaced higher education and infrastructure as the way California governed.

The settlement (not yet read by your blogger) appears to place a major focus on keeping short term inmates (with sentences less than a year) at the county level and to serious efforts at rehabilitation. The first is probably a very good idea, counties are much closer to real crime problems and thus in a better position to understand the dynamics giving rise to them. Rehabilitation, however, promotes the underlying claim that criminality is the major problem facing the incarcerated population in California as opposed to a surfeit of legal jobs accessible to the young people in our major cities. Over-promising on rehabilitation now, however, could simply promote more warehousing later.

Pentagon Plans Massive Prison in Afghanistan

In one more sign that the war on terror is replicating the war on crime, the Pentagon announced plans last week to build a massive new prisons structure to hold detainees from the war against the taliban. See the Eric Schmidt and Tim Golden's reporting in last Sunday's NYT.

The Pentagon is planning to use $60 million in emergency construction funds this fiscal year to build a complex of 6 to 10 semi-permanent structures resembling Quonset huts, each the size of a football field, a Defense Department official said. The structures will have more natural light, and each will have its own recreation area. There will be a half-dozen other buildings for administration, medical care and other purposes, the official said.

The plans mark a change in the Pentagon's thinking on the future of the Afghanistan conflict. Until recently officials had expressed belief that the detention phase of the war would wind down. Plans to replace the decrepit facilities at Bagram Airforce Base, which now typically holds more than 600 prisoners in cramped facilities, suggest that the Pentagon now expects the conflict with the taliban to generate a steady flow of detainees.

Signs that a prisoner of war model is being replaced by a penological one, includes plans to improve opportunities for family visits, religious practice, and even a measure of job training.