President's Day Memo: Thank You Mr. President

For an outstanding month of leadership. I know its just the beginning. If I may, sir..

Forget criminal justice, social justice, victims rights, civil rights, it all comes down to this. America's large metropolitan areas, vast urbanized areas in which millions of Americans live in relatively close proximity, and which often have traditional large cities at their centers, are where a sustainable environmental and economic future for America will emerge, or not.

Over the last half century, those metropolitan areas have grown in a familiar but now obviously dangerous direction, i.e., towards maximum dispersal outwards toward the fringes of the metropolitan areas. The motivations and incentives for the change were legion, but all presupposed this, Americans with economic means, to a large extent independent of race and ethnicity (although nothing ever is fully so), sought to distance themselves from the risks associated with large cities and in particular their central neighborhoods. The primary risk was violent crime, associated than by numerous links to other maladies associated with cities, e.g., drugs, chaotic schools, parks with large numbers of homeless people and drug users, etc.

That era is over. Global warming is making this lifestyle unaffordable to the planet. The bursting of the real estate bubble (itself quite linked to the priority of fear of crime) has perhaps now also made this lifestyle unaffordable to the hard-pressed two worker families that make up most of our middle classes in America.

Central cities hold most of the keys to solving both problems. Only by persuading large portions of Americans to live in high density, low energy urban hubs can we create an environmentally and economically sustainable future for the American middle class. Fear of violent crime and the myriad of media charged associations through which that fear is woven through the American imagination (which includes fear of public transportation, housing, schools, etc.) constitutes a major impediment to persuading Americans to move back into central cities and assures that the most marketable forms of reurbanization will reproduce the highly securitized and racially segregated patterns of the suburbs.

For four decades the complex of public policies favoring law enforcement and harsher punishment for crime crime, known as the war on crime, has been our primary strategy for making the fear of violent crime go away. Now, with an unprecedented portion of our population and wealth locked in mass incarceration, it is clear that the war has become a major source of that fear. These practices now assure an ever larger population of prisoners and former prisoners who cannot easily be integrated into a society premised on fear and who cannot easily be governed in ways compatible with democracy and human rights. Law enforcement priorities and parole policies assure that large cities are the primary focus of mass incarceration (even as the rural location of prisons transfers their political and economic value to the peripheries of the metropolitan areas).

The present crisis offers a once in a generation opportunity to cut through the many Gordian knots that now tie political leadership up and with the war on crime (to produce what I call "governing through crime"). A rapid shift of resources from incarceration toward reinvesting social services in central city neighborhoods that house some of the neediest and most expensive citizens (the elderly and very young) in an infrastructure that is often the most expensive can create a robust and economically sustainable civil order ahead of the rebuilding of middle class neighborhoods in the huge swaths of currently underutilized lands that exist near the centers of almost every major American city (just look down at Detroit on your next night flight from Chicago to Washington).

Turning this around will not be easy. The federal government has helped encourage and incentivize the war on crime in many ways, but state law is the primary engine of mass incarceration and its corollaries. From the start of your administration, however, you can take every opportunity to withdraw federal encouragement. For example, instead of funding 100,000 new police officers for American communities, an incentive to invest in law enforcement solutions to insecurity, why not fund 100,000 public safety positions and leave it up to local governments to figure out whether they need another police officer, or another drug treatment provider, or another community mental health worker.

To make sure this is a bipartisan as the war on crime has been, come to California and meet with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who now knows more than any governor in the nation about how mass incarceration constitutes the "toxic assets" of our government sector (the potential costs of which now threaten the future of the whole state). I can assure you and Governor Schwarzenegger of a very warm welcome here in Berkeley if you wish to hold your meeting at our flagship public university (one of those assets that may soon need to be sold off in favor of prison spending) and a city that has long innovated in urban governance.

California Prison Population Ordered Reduced: Three Judge Panel Issues Tentative Ruling

A special panel of three federal judges, Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Lawrence K. Karlton, of the Eastern District of California, and Thelton E. Henderson of the Northern District of California, issued a tentative ruling yesterday in the mammoth prison conditions litigation known both as Coleman v. Schwarzenegger and Plata v. Schwarzenegger after the lead plaintiffs in two class action prison lawsuits that have wound their way through courts since 1995 and 2002 respectively. The judges announced there readiness to order California to reduce its prison overcrowding from its current status of nearly 200 percent above the design capacity, to a level between 120 and 145 percent of design capacity, and below 100 percent of design capacity for those facilities housing "clinical" populations, presumably those with mental illness or acute health problems (with a more precise target likely to be named in the final ruling).

The court dismissed as unworthy of further discussion the questions of whether current prison overcrowding was preventing the remedying of unconstitutional gaps in the provision of treatment to the mentally ill among the prison population, and general medical care to the full population, or whether there was any current alternative to prisoner release (as defined broadly by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the primary piece of federal statute law governing prison remedies in federal court). Remarkably the state's main argument seems to have been that the Special Master and Receiver appointed by the panel previously are doing such a good job managing the implementation of better mental health and general health services that their work alone constitutes adequate relief short of a prisoner release order. As the tentative ruling notes there is some irony here. "[T]he defendants have opposed the Receiver's work in Plata and are seeking the dissolution of the Receivership."

The main focus of the opinion was on whether this relief could be achieved without an adverse impact to public safety (which the PLRA requires courts to give "substantial weight" to prior to ordering any prisoner release). Drawing on well known researchers on the California prison population like Dr. James Austin,the panel strongly endorsed a combination of parole reform (presumably aimed at reducing parolees being returned to prison for minor violations of their parole conditions), diversion of "low risk" prisoners to other sanctions, and some form of "good time credits" to reduce the sentences on a gradual basis for all California prisoners that perform to a specific standard (like good behavior and active rehabilitative programming where available).

Gitmo Blues: Don't Worry Closing Guantanamo Won't Endanger America's Lead in Global Incarceration

Daily Show host Jon Stewart last night skewered Republicans who have been decrying the closing of Guantanamo and suggesting that Americans ought to be terrified by the prospect of having Gitmo terrorists like Khalid Sheik Muhammed housed in American prisons by pointing out that the USA is simply number one in the world when it comes to locking up people. [Watch the episode, may be time limited].

Indeed, there is something comical about the degree to which mass incarceration remains invisible to American political leaders both left and right. On the left, lawyers, activists and politicians have decried Guantanamo without mention of the fact that preemptively locking up members of a dangerous class has been our policy toward domestic urban insecurity for decades. On the right, references to closed Alcatraz as a possible site for Gitmo detainees belie the proliferation of super-max prisons across America since the 1980s.

But in the spirit of John Stewart, we should note that at at time when American global prowess in industries like banking and automobiles is melting away, the closing of Guantanamo poses little danger of a long term decline in our status as the clear global leader in incarceration.

The Logic of Deterrence from Gaza to Oakland

Israel's fierce air war against Hamas and its operatives and infrastructure in Gaza provides a window into one of the most important forces at work in our own war on crime, i.e., deterrence. Deterrence is the economic theory, dear to both criminology and state-craft, which holds that actors will alter their behavior to maximize the net sum of costs and benefits.

Both Israeli officials and citizens defend the action as necessary to restore deterrence by making Hamas understand the high cost of shooting their rockets into southern Israel. For example, in today's New York Times, peacenik David Grossman even while making the case for restraint emphasizes this logic:

NOW, after the heavy blow that Israel has dealt to the Gaza Strip, we would do best to halt, turn to the leaders of Hamas and tell them: Until last Saturday, we restrained ourselves in responding to the thousands of Qassam rockets fired at us. Now you know how severe the retaliation can be.

But as with the criminal law, deterrence works well to curb opportunism among those actors who already have strong incentives to continue non-aggressive (even if generally chilly) relations, but works very poorly to curb those actors who have no incentives to avoid the chaos of crime or war; and indeed may have psychic or political incentives to foment violence and chaos.

Is Israel's deterrence broken? There are dozens of Arab and Muslim states in Israel's vicinity. None of them, not even the broken state of Lebanon, has lifted a military finger against Israel. Deterrence works. However for Hamas and for the people of Gaza generally, the base line conditions of life are not high enough to establish the normal incentives that deterrence presumes. If life is one of bare survival and abject humiliation, even a relatively high risk of death, especially an exciting, quick, and morally honored death is insufficient to restrain their desire to inflict pain and fear on their hated enemy (at least for the masculine culture which appears to dominate Palestinian society).

Israeli's understand deterrence probably better than any other people on earth, but their basic anger and mistrust of the Palestinians, especially after the second intifada, is such that they cannot bring themselves to do what they know they must. They know they must build up a true political alternative to Hamas, in the form of President Abbas and his Fatah Party in the West Bank, but they cannot bring themselves to make the political concessions necessary to produce for Abbas gains in sovereignty and legitimacy. They know they should be creating an economic alternative to Hamas in Gaza, by creating the possibilities for economic exchange that will pull young men into the entanglements of markets and diapers rather than honor and death, but they are too angry at Hamas for the humiliating capture of one of their soldiers. So they turn in the inevitable logic of deterrence to raising the collective punishment of Palestinians ever higher, even full while knowing it only exacerbates the fundamental limits on deterrence.

The parallels with our own war on crime, almost the same age as the four decade long Israeli occupation of Palestine, should be clear. Let us pray that President Barack Obama will show the wisdom necessary to save both Israel and the US states from this destructive logic.

Happy New Year

Crime and the Mayor: Not just an Oakland tale

As Mayor Ron Dellums reaches the midpoint of his term as Oakland's Mayor, the celebrated politician who served for years as one of Congress' few lions of the left, finds himself crucified on the issue of crime. So long as the public and the media (read the SFChron midterm report card) views Oakland as an unacceptably dangerous place do to crime, nothing else Dellums accomplishes will be considered success. However, mayors have few significant tools to address either crime or fear of crime.

In recent years many have come to believe that police, one of the few crime control tools that mayors at least influence, can make a difference. The best case of this, as my colleague Frank Zimring has shown in his book The Great American Crime Decline is New York City, which enjoyed approximately twice the crime decline that the rest of America enjoyed in the 1990s. But New York may turn out to be a unique case because of the enormous urban density that allows police pressure (especially on the heavily used subway system) to be maximally effective on both potential perpetrators and the general public (thus impacting both crime and fear of crime). Few American cities are like NYC in this regard, and certainly not sprawling Oakland.

The Mayor (and beleaguered Chief Tucker) are right to resist pressure to ratchet up arrests for the sake of a show of force. Simply feeding more young men into the jail and prison system can have little if any effect on crime or fear of crime. But what are they to do? Nobody I know has a great answer. The simplest solution, taking the drug trade away from criminal gangs (by creating a legal and heavily regulated and taxed market for the most popular and safest drugs) combined with new jobs for urban youth would produce a dramatic change in both crime and fear of crime, but mayors and chiefs of police can do nothing about that.

However, the Mayor is wrong to think that it is simply media failure to highlight the positive that is generating his political malaise. After a generation of war on crime, Americans, even in progressive Oakland, have come to believe that security against violent crime is the one and virtually only right that citizens have a claim to with government (read the case for this in my book, Governing through Crime).

My recommendation for the Mayor's New Year's resolution list is to play to your strengths. The Mayor must engage the public and the media in a sustained discussion of the real security challenges facing Oakland in which crime plays only a part. Moreover he should turn his formidable oratorical skills to a sustained attack on the failed war on drugs including shaming the incoming president (who has already signaled his timidity on this issue) to fundamentally reconsider it. His question should be the following.

Mr. President, as you have suggested, Oakland and other cities can help save America (and the world) from global warming by offering Americans a sustainable low carbon lifestyle based on diverse multi-use walking communities and public transportation. But how can you ask Oakland to help solve our national problem when the federal government continues to impose demonstrably failed policies that are sustaining a violent subculture that keeps middle class Americans from taking the responsible decision and moving back to the cities?

The High Cost of Paying Hommage to Virtue

In Mexico, the bodies continue to pile up. By the count of Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Mora, over 8,100 people have died violent, drug trafficking-related deaths since Felipe Calderon became president in December 2006. The Brookings Institute recently published a Latin America report, "Rethinking U.S.-Latin American Relations," that includes a sizable section on drug trafficking- which they consider to be “at the core of organized crime in the hemisphere” – and which notes that, this year alone, the same number of people have died in Mexico as have died fighting for the United States in Iraq since the start of our war there almost six years ago. Increasingly, that seems like an understatement.

A quantitatively problematic turn of a long-simmering conflict has been accompanied by a qualitative one: bodies are now increasingly headless, pinned with narco-messages, or placed in very public places. Sometimes corpses are even physically arranged to form rough but explicit messages themselves. Today, in a front page story accompanied by a grainy mugshot, the LA Times reported on corpses in Tijuana that were found arranged to spell out “3 L”. Tijuana drug kingpin Teodoro Garcia Simental goes by the three-letter moniker Teo, and the arrangement was supposedly a message, both threat and boast, of his domination of the city.

The catalyzing combination of a steadily rising body count and a new level of viscerally disturbing gore has led to the focus of a considerable amount of American media attention on Mexico’s drug trafficking industry. Mexico is the new Colombia. Often, as today, that coverage is transmitted in simple narrative form. The violent end product of a toxic mix of factors- including an insatiable American appetite for illicit drugs, the lack of viable alternative livelihoods for many well-intentioned, supply-side citizens, and cross-border policies that have the effect of increasing inequality and enmity- is boiled down to the story of a particularly ruthless or fascinating drug kingpin. Today, proclaimed the LA Times, that man is Teodoro Garcia. We always seem to learn fascinating personal details: Teo supposedly likes to arrange private horse races, at which he bets heavily, at ranches outside of Ensenada.

As a literary device, the biographical news sketch has the advantage of breaking a complex tangle of issues into a manageable chunk of digestible information, convenient and accessible to a casual news-follower. For the same reason, it brings with it the danger of oversimplifying a multi-faceted problem, of reducing to black and white, hero and villain, a tricky interplay of factors and characters, and in the process distorting the way things really work. So, while such devices are understandably used to convey mass media news, they are disastrous as a basis for policy formulation.

Nonetheless, since the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, the first real drug super-villain, in the early 1990s, this has been America’s approach to counternarcotics work. Taking out the kingpin and his cartel, or the kingpins and their cartels, will eliminate the supply of drugs in America, or at least reduce them to a level where prices are unaffordably high, the theory goes. Accordingly, when Escobar was finally hunted down and killed in 1993, there was a sense, according to John Carnevale, then budget director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, that this military triumph was “a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs.”

History has not been kind to that vision. Escobar’s Medellin Cartel was merely replaced by the Cali Cartel (rumored to have colluded with Colombian security forces against him to eliminate their chief business competitor). The center of the drug trafficking world eventually shifted to the Caribbean, and then to Mexico, and drug kingpins continued to be killed, and their organizations dismantled, at an impressive rate. Still, new groupings of traffickers, ever more inventive and sophisticated, kept popping up. Now, 15 years after Escobar’s demise, cocaine prices in the United States (according to Brookings calculations) are lower than ever, which suggests that the flood of drugs north remains unabated, and has maybe even increased.

Until Teo Garcia made the front page, the drug super-villain of the moment has been Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The story of "El Chapo", or "Shorty," and his rise in Culiacan, on Mexico’s Pacific coast 650 miles south of the border, formed the foundation for recent articles in New Yorker and Rolling Stone that explored the Mexican crisis, and political attention has lately been focused on his reigning Sinaloa Cartel. Guzman, 53 years old, married an 18 year old beauty queen last year; he also reportedly likes to stay up late drinking and dancing at his Sinaloa hill country hideouts. While El Chapo and his fellow 'capos' may have colorful personal lives that provide fodder for fascinating character studies, they don’t provide the key to efficient counternarcotic strategies, or ways to reduce the damage of drug use and abuse.

More focus and attention, it seems, needs to be directed to less flashy, though more substantively important, underlying factors. For instance, 2,000 guns cross the border from the United States, where they are legal, to Mexico, where they are not, on a daily basis. This becomes very significant when you consider that, according to the ATF and their Mexican counterparts, approximately 90% of the weapons that are the physical means of Mexican drug violence originate in the United States.

The Brookings report ends by recommending that the United States “undertake a comprehensive, cross-country evaluation of counternarcotics policies,” which it concludes are “failing by most objective measures.” America’s drug war is “more a balloon than a battlefield,” and it seems like the sooner U.S. policymakers realize that, and that every Pablo they kill is going to beget a Chapo or Teo, the sooner they can begin preparing an effective response.

Don't Mix Crime and Politics

Check out the Daily Show's lengthy riff (12/10/08) on crime and politics in the context of the Rod Blagojevich implosion in Illinois. Jon Stewart compares the imprisonment rate of Illinois governors to murderers (point out that the odds of staying free are higher for the latter). He also compared Blagojevich to a boogey man figure from medieval German fairy tales, making the latent reference to the highly politicized field of sex offenders, a theme Stewart then made explicit by shifting into a satirical special news segment for children, ill-tabbed "Jon Stewart touches kids."

Nicely underscoring the irony that governors as criminals (and presidents one might add since four of the last eight of so presidents have been at least linked to crimes that could result in prison, two of them actually facing impeachment charges), is just the other side of an executive branch that has made fear of crime a major foundation for its style of rule, Stewart shows a snippet of Patrick Fitzgerald opining that people get into trouble mixing politics and crime. Stewart points out that the same could be said of crime and mothers day.