Putting the Unemployment Prison Fraud in Context

Bay Area newspapers are reporting a first-of-its kind unemployment fraud, in which unemployment claims were filed, and paid, on behalf of prisoners. The latest in the series is this article from the Sac Bee, which purports to explain “How inmates pulled off giant California unemployment scam.” But even having read it, I’m unclear on what exactly happened, and especially on what they mean by “a spider web.” Here’s what we know:

Court records show a handful of inmates contacted friends and relatives on the outside, supplied them with Social Security numbers and other information, and persuaded them to file for pandemic relief on behalf of 30 different inmates. The outsiders had the unemployment payments — in the form of Bank of America debit cards issued by EDD — mailed to them.

“The cards came pre-loaded with upwards of $20,000,” said Sean Riordan, deputy district attorney in San Mateo.

Riordan said the outside accomplices then went to ATM machines and withdrew their pre-arranged cut — usually $3,000 or $4,000 — and arranged for friends or family to deliver the cards to the inmates at the jail. In one case, an outsider was found to have used an ATM in Las Vegas to collect his cut.

“It was thousands of dollars,” Riordan said.

Accomplices arranged for the remaining funds to be delivered to the inmates’ jail accounts, which could be used to buy extra toiletries or other items.

That people commit fraud, behind bars and on the outside, is not difficult to understand, and I’m sure the COVID-related deprivations and difficulties produced the kind of conditions that act as a Petri dish for these kinds of schemes. What I don’t understand is this: to what extent were the people whose names were used in this fraud (the New York Times story names Scott Peterson, convicted murderer of his wife Laci Peterson) part of the fraud? When the article say that people’s “names were used,” was it with or without their consent?

Moreover, how does all of this map onto the bigger picture of COVID relief structures? We already know that CARES Act relief is available for prisoners, because it took a lawsuit to make it happen. I also know from family members of incarcerated people that several facilities are interfering with their population’s ability to complete the claim forms. In one case I heard of, when the family member called the San Joaquin County Jail, they were told the jail would not accept any check if the IRS mails it inside, and that “they [jail staff] don’t care what law was passed.” If this is a widespread problem, as the lawsuit suggests, unemployment fraud scams appear a lot less surprising. What I want to know, though, is whether there’s some connection between the two phenomena, and whether the financial scales of the CARES Act sabotage and the unemployment fraud are on par.

If you, or a family member, are having difficulties with prisons or jails undermining your CARES Act stimulus claim, email me and tell me your story, or post it in the comments.

Fixing Policing Is More Complicated than Cutting Budgets

One of the defining features of the last election was the passage of a slew of propositions diverting funds away from the police department. Inspired by the vocabulary of movements (defund! abolish! dismantle!) but not always referencing this vocabulary explicitly, these propositions aimed at shifting the approach toward addressing social problems toward social services, mental health, and harm reduction approaches to narcotics.

But it turns out that things are more complicated than expected. The Chronicle’s Bob Egelko reports today:

As homicides rise throughout the Bay Area during the coronavirus outbreak, San Francisco police have reported 45 killings this year, compared with 41 for all of 2019. Black people, who make up less than 6% of the city’s population, accounted for nearly half the victims.

The 41 slayings reported in 2019 were San Francisco’s lowest total in 56 years. Police reported four homicides in January and February this year, but the numbers began to rise as the pandemic set in, even as most other crimes were declining. As residents grow more fearful, gun sales are also increasing and have reached record levels nationwide.

Homicides in the Bay Area’s 15 largest cities increased by 14% in the first six months of 2020 compared with 2019, The Chronicle has reported. In Oakland, with a population of 435,000 compared with San Francisco’s 896,000, killings totaled 79 as of mid-October, a 36% increase over 2019.

The homicide totals do not include any fatal shootings by police.

In San Francisco, police said, the victims of the year’s first 43 homicides included 20 Blacks, seven Latinos or Latinas, seven Asian Americans and six non-Hispanic whites, with the rest from other groups. The two most recent killings, a double homicide Nov. 18, are still under investigation, police said.

Indeed, the trend is the same in Oakland, and the political implications are too important to ignore. Earlier this month, Rachel Swan reported:

Heeding the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, Oakland leaders committed over the summer to ultimately slash the Police Department’s budget in half, by about $150 million. The City Council created the 17-member Reimagining Public Safety Task Force to figure out how to meet this lofty goal to “defund the police.” They would write a draft proposal by December and present it to the council in March.

Then a wave of gun violence engulfed the flatlands in East Oakland, home to the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Homicides spiked. Policymakers — and even the most devoted reformers — had to confront a paradox: that the Black and Latino neighborhoods most threatened by police violence are also the ones demanding better and more consistent law enforcement.

Task force members agreed that police brutality against Black and brown people is too common, that gun violence needs to end and that the city needs more services to address the underlying causes of crime. But while advocates wanted swift, dramatic change, others felt conflicted. In neighborhoods with high crime and slow police response times, Black residents winced at what sometimes felt like preaching from outsiders.

A poll released last week by the Chamber of Commerce showed that, citywide, 58% of residents want to either maintain or increase the size of the police force. That figure climbs to 75% in District 7, an area of East Oakland where gunfire exploded this summer.

The reason I get a rash every time I hear the defund/abolish/dismantle refrain is that, years ago, I realized the fundamental problem with American policing: it’s not about too much or too little policing, it’s about the wrong kind of policing. I got there in three parts. First, I read Alexandra Natapoff’s fantastic article Underenforcement, which theorized the problem of too little policing and why it affects especially the neighborhoods where people assume there’s too much policing going on. Then, I read an interview with the wonderful David Simon, who spent the earlier part of his career as a crime reporter following the Baltimore homicide detectives (and writing this marvelous book.) He explained why the reward system for police officers incentivized stop-and-frisk policing and disincentivized crime solving:

How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That’s what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you’re going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who’s burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he’s going to court one day and he’s out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who’s doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work?

Then, I read Jill Loevy’s heartbreaking Ghettoside. Loevy shows how the LAPD homicide detectives are unable to solve murders because witnesses won’t cooperate with them. What she says at the outset of the book (pp. 8-9) is so powerful, and so easy to obfuscate, that it calls for a long quote.

This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.

African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides. Specifically, black America has not benefited from what Max Weber called a state monopoly on violence the government’s exclusive right to exercise legitimate force. A monopoly provides citizens with legal autonomy, the liberating knowledge that the government will pursue anyone who violates their personal safety. But slavery, Jim Crow, and conditions across much of black America for generations after worked against the formation of such a monopoly where blacks were concerned. Since personal violence inevitably flares where the state’s monopoly is absent, this situation results in the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

The failure of the law to stand up for black people when they are hurt or killed by others has been masked by a whole universe of ruthless, relatively cheap and easy “preventive” strategies. Our fragmented and underfunded police forces have historically preoccupied themselves with control, prevention, and nuisance abatement rather than responding to victims of violence. This left ample room for vigilantism—especially in the South, to which most black Americans trace their origins. Hortense Powdermaker was among a handful of Jim Crow–era anthropologists who noted that the Southern legal system of the 1930s hammered black men for such petty crimes as stealing and vagrancy, yet was often lenient toward those who murdered other blacks. In Jim Crow Mississippi, killers of black people were convicted at a rate that was only a little lower than the rate that prevailed half a century later in L.A.—30 percent then versus about 36 percent in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s. “The mildness of the courts where offenses of Negroes against Negroes are concerned,” Powdermaker concluded, “is only part of the whole situation which places the Negro outside the law.” Generations later, far from the cotton fields where she made her observations, black people in poor sections of Los Angeles still endured a share of that old misery.

This is not an easy argument to make in these times. Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth. So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

The crux of the matter is something that has been tragically true for decades, but “my side” of the criminal justice debate is always too reticent to mention: African American people–the people whom “defund” initiatives are purporting to protect–are vastly overrepresented as both homicide perpetrators and victims. Time after time I see mental and linguistic gymnastics in academic and journalistic circles pretzeling around this simple, true statistic (note the quotes above from solid, responsible journalists, focusing only on victimization.) I know there are good intentions behind this–the fear to stereotype–and I also know there are performative reasons: in the era of Kendi and DiAngelo reeducation camps in our campuses, no one wants to appear racist. We are repeatedly admonished that asking the right question (“what about black-on-black crime?”) is in itself racist, so how are we ever going to get any answers? The thing is, there is an obvious explanation for this, and it’s not racist at all: When one lives in poverty and is consistently treated as a second class citizen, and when legitimate opportunities to thrive are not available, a larger proportion of the population will recur to illegitimate ones.

This is so obvious that everyone I speak to behind bars, when reflecting about their own lives and how they ended up in prison, say the same thing: recurring to violence as part of the drug trade is situational and comes from a very diminished repertoire of opportunities and choice. As James Forman explains here, is much easier for “my side” of the debate to focus on drug offenses, where we know that white and black people use and sell at about the same rates, and explain the disparities by overactive stop-and-frisk policing. But what do we do about explaining disparities in violence? Overpoliced poor neighborhoods do not explain disparities in bodies on the ground. It was therefore eye opening to read Scott Jacques and Richard Wright’s Code of the Suburb. In a shorter article, Jacques and Wright explain why it is that suburban, middle-class, white drug dealers don’t get mixed up in homicides: not only were they raised in the conflict-avoiding “code of the suburb”, but they knew that they had bright futures ahead of them and the stakes were too high:

Compared to their urban counterparts, it was easier for the suburban dealers to give up dealing because they didn’t really need the money. Their parents were able to provide for them, so for these teens, dealing was never meant to be a career. It was just another phase on their way to becoming successful adults, which they had no intention of jeopardizing.

In the 1950s, studying juvenile crime was all the rage among criminologists. One promising avenue was the opportunity theory developed by Cloward and Ohlin. They argued that the kind of crime one recurs to–not only whether or not one starts engaging in criminal activity–depends on what kind of opportunities are available in one’s neighborhood in terms of resources, know-how, role models, etc. Some of my colleagues have made a name for themselves trashing Cloward and Ohlin and retroactively branding their theories as racist (again, following the principle that any focus on crime committed by people of color that does not explain it away as discriminatory policing is racist.) The effort to take what was a solid step forward and rebrand it as reactionary and outside the realm of the sayable reminds me of Mark Twain’s saying, “the radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.” But if you read Jacques and Wright, you have to conclude that, in basics, what Cloward and Ohlin said was so spot-on that it still stands: the same systemic racism that produces discriminatory policing also produces differences in violent crime perpetration rates. And the tragedy is that, no matter how you look at it, it’s poor people of color who lose. They are hounded and humiliated by paint-by-numbers policing that doesn’t solve crimes, they are themselves victimized by violent crime at higher rates, and because their uphill battles are not solved from the root in this uncaring, hypercapitalist society, they also recur to crime at higher rates. All these things come from the same roots, but somehow saying the first two is fine, while saying the third out loud runs the risk that your colleagues will treat you as if you have cooties.

I think we’re seeing a refreshing change, though, and more folks–like Simon, Loevy, Forman, Pfaff, Jacques and Wright, and Natapoff are willing to point out that the problems caused by poverty and deprivation cannot be brushed away just because it’s inconvenient to discuss them. Recently, they have been joined by David Garland, whom no one can suspect of being some sort of right-wing reactionary nut. Lisa Kerr summarized the main points in the following tweet thread:

As always, fascinating keynote from David Garland at @CCR_UofA Prisons and Punishment conference this morning. He started by making clear that we should not avoid fact of racial difference in homicide / violent crime rates in the US (in both commission and victimization).

Conservatives repeat and liberals avoid this data – but that’s a mistake. These real differences have nothing to do with intrinsic characteristics. Must ask: how does this fact pattern emerge? Segregation, economic exclusion, absence of social services, deep poverty.

Garland is also clear that policing operates in a more dangerous environment in the US than in other countries, due to guns. Police at work are killed at a higher rate, as are civilians by police.

Central claim was that the relaxation of Democratic commitment to economic politics, after New Deal, in favour of identity politics, has had bad effects. Plus: we should spend more time calling for economic justice, less time calling for defunding police / abolishing prisons.

Garland says that “Defund Police” is “a slogan that can’t mean what it says.” No modern nation has abolished police, would mean (1) private security for rich (2) poor communities exposed and vulnerable.

We should be saying “Defund the Rich.” Tax more to fund police, fund social services and safety net, and transform the police: abolish militarization and improve accountability mechanisms.

Notably, someone asked, can’t we do ‘all of the above’? Garland is firm that “Defund Police” is very ill-conceived and has benefited Republicans, even as Democrats worked hard to distance themselves from it.

These tweets don’t do the talk justice. Be sure to watch. (I was transported back to graduate school when I had the ridiculous good fortune to learn from Garland for several years. I have craved his perspective even more in these difficult months.)

Watch the whole thing:

What we need is not more policing or less policing. We certainly don’t need slogans. What we need is to rethink the very nature of policing and rebuild policing from the ground up. How we promote and reward police officers must change to disincentivize stop-and-frisk abuses and incentivize crime solving–for everyone’s sake.

BREAKING NEWS: Von Staich Legal Team’s Response to CDCR’s Petition for Review

Today, the First District Appellate Court team representing Von Staich filed a response to the Attorney General’s petition to the California Supreme Court to review the case. Here is the brief in its entirety; my summary follows.

S265173 Von Staich PFR Answer by hadaraviram on Scribd

In essence, the argument is this: The importance of this case does not lie in some complicated, novel legal question that requires judicial review (such as in the case of contradictory decisions from lower courts): it lies in the fact that it provided a much-needed, urgent remedy for a horrific unfolding situation. The Court of Appeal’s decision was not extreme; rather, it was a measured, mild order, which leaves CDCR vast freedom to achieve population reductions at San Quentin in whatever way they see fit. The AG’s request to review the case does not offer any legal grounds to do so: they continue to argue that they did their best (without providing any expert opinion/authority supporting this claim) and that they are not bound by the findings of the AMEND team (without providing any alternative findings.)

If anything, this assertion is rather generous on the part of Von Staich’s legal team: we now know from two Inspector General reports (1, 2) that even the “commendable” measures that CDCR claimed to have taken (and was given credit for taking in the Court of Appeal decision) were not, in fact, taken in a satisfactory way.

Most importantly, the response highlights what is important about proceeding with the Court of Appeal’s remedy: the upcoming winter, which threatens a serious pandemic wave that could decimate what’s left of San Quentin unless CDCR comply with the order. More on this below.

Von Staich’s attorneys also filed a brief pertaining to the Attorney General’s request to deep-freeze the 311 San Quentin cases hanging before the Marin Superior Court. Here’s the request in its entirety; my summary follows.

Von Staich’s team argues that staying the proceedings in cases of people who are facing illness and death from a second wave is “precisely the wrong response at this time of crisis.” That the AG’s office’s reaction to the order–rather than hustling to save lives–was not only to appeal in Von Staich, but to ask for a stay in all the other cases, is emblematic of their breathtakingly obtuse approach to the crisis itself. At every juncture in these cases, the government has done the wrong thing: caused the outbreaks in the first place, failed miserably at taking any remedial steps, adopted the wrong administrative response, prioritized the wrong people to be released, went for short-term measures that cause outbreaks in jails and other facilities, and–which was notable in both cases–explicitly and repeatedly said that “there is no need to act hastily.” At the oral argument in Von Staich, Justice Kline responded to this with, “yes, there is. Yes, there is. There is a need to act hastily.” The measures he ordered CDCR to adopt are mild, flexible, and give them just enough rope to continue doing the wrong things (more on that in a future post.) I very much hope that the Supreme Court agrees with these response briefs that, in the face of a winter wave of COVID-19 and dire warnings for California as a whole, acting promptly (though, to our collective tragedy, far from preemptively) is exactly what we should do.

In the off-chance that anyone reading this still does not comprehend why, going into the winter holidays, urgent population reductions should be top priority not only at San Quentin, but in all CDCR facilities, here are some sobering facts. As of today, there are huge outbreaks in seven CDCR facilities:

CAL (171 new cases)
CEN (50 new cases)
CTF (303 new cases)
HDSP (649 new cases)
PVSP (319 new cases)
SATF (523 new cases + the prison’s first COVID-19 death)
VSP (155 new cases)

There are also new outbreaks in ten other facilities:
CCC (12 new cases)
COR (32 new cases)
LAC (6 new cases)
SOL (12 new cases)
CHCF (9 new cases)
DVI (3 new cases)
KVSP (16 new cases)
MCSP (3 new cases)
NKSP (7 new cases)
PBSP (6 new cases)

CDCR now “boasts” 2436 new cases per 100,000–ten times worse than the CA rate of 345 per 100,000 that has all of us hurtling toward the purple tier. The spikes in prison infections correlate with spikes in surrounding counties. We are all (sensibly) being asked to mask up, put our holiday travel plans on hold, and cook mini-feasts for our nuclear families. All of this effort and sacrifices are worthless if we continue to incubate this virus in prison. You and yours are far more at risk from aging, infirm people sitting in one of CDCR’s COVID-19 Petri dishes than you are at risk from them in the community (people age out of crime in their late 20s, and the folks most at risk from COVID are less at risk of reoffending than people on the outside.)

CDCR’s hemming and hawing about doing the right thing is not just callous disregard for the lives of people behind bars, but also for your life and mine.

Essential Readings for CCC3: COVID-19 Meets Mass Incarceration

In anticipation of our upcoming symposium about COVID-19 and mass incarceration, here are a few sources that our attendees might like to read. It’s not an exhaustive list; rather, it focuses on some of the themes we will be covering throughout the symposium.

Prisons, Disease, Medicine

Ashley Rubin, Prisons and jails are coronavirus epicenters – but they were once designed to prevent disease outbreaks, The Conversation, April 15, 2020

Misha Lepetic, Foucault’s Plague, 3 Quarks Daily, March 4, 2013

Margo Schlanger, Plata v. Brown and Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, and Politics, Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 48(1) 2013: 165-215.

Osagie Obasogie, Prisoners as Human Subjects: A Closer Look at the Institute of Medicine’s Recommendations to Loosen Current Restrictions on Using Prisoners in Scientific Research, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 6(1) 2010: 41.

COVID-19 In Prisons

Brendan Saloner, Kalind Parish, Julie A. Ward, Grace DiLaura, Sharon Dolovich, COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Federal and State Prisons, JAMA, July 8, 2020

Hadar Aviram, Triggers and Vulnerabilities: Why California Prisons Are So Vulnerable to COVID-19, and What to Do About It, Tropics of Meta, July 3, 2020

Hadar Aviram, California’s COVID-19 Prison Disaster and the Trap of Palatable Reform, BOOM California, August 10, 2020

Sharon Dolovich, Mass Incarceration, Meet COVID-19, University of Chicago Law Review Online, Nov. 2020

Matthew J. Akiyama, M.D., Anne C. Spaulding, M.D., and Josiah D. Rich, M.D., Flattening the Curve for Incarcerated Populations — Covid-19 in Jails and Prisons, The New England Journal of Medicine, May 2020

Oluwadamilola T. Oladeru, Nguyen-Toan Tran, Tala Al-Rousan, Brie Williams & Nickolas Zaller, A Call to Protect Patients, Correctional Staff and Healthcare Professionals in Jails and Prisons during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Health and Justice, July 2, 2020

The San Quentin Catastrophe

Megan Cassidy and Jason Fagone, 200 Chino inmates transferred to San Quentin, Corcoran. Why weren’t they tested first? San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2020

AMEND SF and UC Berkeley, Urgent Memo – COVID-19 Outbreak: San Quentin Prison, June 15, 2020

Megan Cassidy, San Quentin officials ignored coronavirus guidance from top Marin County health officer, letter says, San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 2020

Al Jazeera Front Lines, Pandemic in Prison: The San Quentin Outbreak, October 28, 2020

In re Von Staich on Habeas Corpus, A160122, California Court of Appeal for the First District, October 20, 2020

Solutions and Policies

Hadar Aviram, Gov. Newsom’s Release Plan Is Not Enough, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 2020

James King and Danica Rodarmel, Gov. Newsom must release more people from prisons to protect Californians and save lives, The Sacramento Bee, July 11, 2020

Jason Fagone, California could cut its prison population in half and free 50,000 people. Amid pandemic, will the state act? San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2020

Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Naomi Murakawa, Haymarket Books, April 17, 2020

Reproductive Justice, Women, and Gender in CA Prisons

Sulipa Jindia, Belly of the Beast: California’s dark history of forced sterilizations, The Guardian, June 30, 2020

Jason Fagone, Women’s prison journal: State inmate’s daily diary during pandemic, San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2020

Valerie Jenness, Transgender Prisoners in America, September 5, 2016

AJ Rio-Glick, COVID-19 Adds to Challenges for Trans People in California’s Prisons, Vera Institute of Justice Blog, July 7, 2020

COVID-19 in Immigration Detention Facilities

COVID-19 in Jails, Prisons, and Immigration Detention Centers: A Q&A with Chris Beyrer, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, September 15, 2020

American Bar Foundation, Impact of COVID-19 on the Immigration System

Carmen Molina Acosta, Psychological Torture: ICE Responds to COVID-19 with Solitary Confinement, The Intercept, August 24, 2020

SAVE THE DATE: California Correctional Crisis: Mass Incarceration, Healthcare, and the COVID-19 Outbreak

Dear Friends,

Three UC Hastings journals are coming together to organize an important symposium on incarceration and healthcare, focusing on the COVID-19 prison crisis. We are excited to invite you–details will follow. For now, please SAVE THE DATES!

When?

  • Feb. 5, 12-4pm: California Correctional Crisis, Meet COVID-19
  • Feb. 12, 12-4pm: Focus on reproductive justice, trans incarcerated people, and special populations
  • Feb. 19, 12-4pm: Focus on immigration detention and healthcare

Where? Online (registration details to follow)

The conference will feature amazing speakers: advocates, activists, academics, officials, formerly incarcerated people. Among our confirmed speakers are renown prison historian Prof. Ashley Rubin; prison law expert Prof. Sharon Dolovich, Director of the UCLA COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project; Adnan Khan, Executive Director of Re:Store Justice; Richard Braucher of the First District Appellate Project, counsel for Ivan Von Staich in the landmark case that resulted in a San Quentin population reduction order.

MCLE Credits for lawyers pending. Please plan on joining us!

Your hosts:

COVID-19 Prevention in Prisons and the Problem of Buy-In

Throughout the last few months, there’s something that’s been constantly gnawing at me and I haven’t had a moment to process in an organized way. I started thinking about this a lot when the AMEND report came out in June, reporting that people at San Quentin were afraid to get tested or report symptoms, lest they be placed in isolation in a death row or solitary confinement cell. And it came up again when I listened to the Assembly hearing on the PPE wearing failure and the commentary about the “physical plant” being “not conducive to compliance.” Then, I thought about it again when I read the AG’s briefs yesterday, detailing all the “reasonable” COVID-19 prevention steps they took. And finally, I felt a sense of despair and futility when I read this well-intended missive from Brendon Woods:

My immediate, gut reaction to the idea of vaccination priority was this: If I were incarcerated in one of the places that experienced horrific outbreaks–or anywhere else in CA, really–why would I believe anyone from CDCR or CCHCS offering me a vaccine, treatment, PPE, quarantine space, transfers, or anything else, except a ticket out of the system? And why on earth would I want to cooperate with anything short of being released? The sense of futility comes from a strong core realization that the trust between the state and incarcerated people is so deeply broken that, even when reasonable steps are being proposed, they’ll be understandably doubted. The long history of being swindled and harmed, especially in the context of healthcare, is so embedded in the system’s DNA, that any prevention or treatment initiative must take into account poor buy-in.

I’m not a doctor or a public health expert, but it seems obvious to me that, when designing a public health response, one important consideration is public buy-in. As this paper explains, effective COVID-19 prevention measures depend, in big part, on an enormous amount of groundwork to foster compliance, including virtual community building, fostering solidarity between high-risk and low-risk groups, and trust building between decision-makers, healthcare workers, and the public. What we’ve seen in the U.S. on the national level is instructive of what happens when the government not only fails to make this effort, but actively stokes the opposite sentiments. I suspect that even a reasonable administration would have had trouble containing the virus in such a big country with deep pockets of ignorance and misinformation, but given the Trumpian legacy of actively creating misinformation and division, this is going to be a huge challenge for whoever runs the COVID-19 response for the Biden administration.

What we’re seeing in CDCR facilities is a crystallized example of this problem. Efforts to implement pandemic prevention methods have to contend with deep mistrust of prison authorities in general, and prison healthcare in particular, which have profoundly painful historical roots. Osagie Obasogie reminds us of the horrific history of harm and deception in prison healthcare in this piece:

As early as 1906, Dr. Richard P. Strong—director of the Biological Laboratory of the Philippine Bureau of Science who later became a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard—gave a cholera vaccine to twenty-four Filipino inmates without their consent in order to learn about the disease; thirteen died. Though this provides an early modern example of using prisoners as human subjects, it certainly was not the last. Twelve inmates from Mississippi’s Rankin Farm prison became test subjects in 1915 to study pellagra—a disfiguring and deadly disease characterized by skin rashes and diarrhea. Though common wisdom at the time suggested that pellagra was a disease caused by germs, Dr. Joseph Goldberger—a physician in the federal government’s Hygienic Laboratory, predecessor to the National Institutes of Health—thought it was linked to malnutrition characteristic of Southern rural poverty. After Mississippi Governor Earl Brewer promised pardons to all participants—an inducement to participate in research that would be intolerable today–Goldberger tried to prove his theory that poor diet caused pellagra by subjecting inmates to what many called a “hellish experiment”: eating exclusively high-starch foods such as “corn bread, mush, collards, sweet potatoes, grits and rice” that caused considerable pain, lethargy, and dizziness. Despite their pleadings to end the study, prisoners were not allowed to withdraw. And, in an early 1920s experiment that was as bizarre as it was gratuitous, 500 inmates at California’s San Quentin prison had testicular glands from rams, boars, and goats implanted into their scrotums to see if their lost sexual potency could be rejuvenated.

But one needn’t go that far back. Nonconsensual sterilization of incarcerated women was still going on as of 2013, when the practice was exposed and excoriated. The Guardian’s Shilpa Jindia explains:

Despite federal and state law prohibiting the use of federal funds for sterilization as a means of birth control in prisons, California used state funds to pay doctors a total of almost $150,000 to sterilize women. That amount paled in comparison to “what you save in welfare”, one doctor told the news outlet.

Against this backdrop, you would expect public health experts at CDCR to bend over backwards to build trust, so as to engender cooperation. Instead, they’ve done exactly the opposite. The most obvious problem, of course, has been the botched transfer from CIM. I can finally put my finger on what seemed so disingenuous in the AG’s brief from yesterday: “[P]etitioners’ attempts to suggest prisoner transfers of any kind are not safe or effective is not well taken.” The irony of taking offense at people’s understandable mistrust after this colossal fiasco is completely lost on them, which I find breathtakingly obtuse.

But the transfer issue is just one of many. Why would prisoners comply with PPE-wearing requirements when they see guards, frequently and openly, flouting these requirements with no consequences? Why would people rush to report symptoms and get tested when the consequence is that they’ll be put in places which they’ve associated, for decades, with punishment and deprivation? Most importantly, given the history of using prisoners as experiment subjects, how could CDCR and CCHCS possibly lay some trust groundwork when rolling out a vaccine, so that people don’t suspect them, understandably, of subjecting them to untested, unreliable treatments?

This is the real crux of the problem. It’s not that “the physical plant is not conducive to compliance.” It’s that the atmosphere of neglect, indifference, and cruelty, and the resulting deep mistrust, does not engender compliance, and at every turn in this situation, prison authorities have moved the compliance needle further out of whack. This problem is a big part of why the only way out is to release people. Whatever other preventative steps the authorities are taking, regardless of their objective usefulness, need to actually be adopted by people on the ground to succeed. Hanging informational posters and handing out masks might work with some fantasy environment in mind, but it doesn’t work with the institutions and people we actually have. And it doesn’t seem like the AG’s office, or CDCR officials, have even begun to comprehend the depth of this problem.

AG Asks Marin Court to Halt Proceedings in San Quentin Population COVID-19 Cases

On the heels of the AG’s petition to the Supreme Court to review Von Staich comes this brief, submitted to the Superior Court that is handling the consolidated habeas corpus petitions of more than 300 people from San Quentin. In the brief, the AG is asking the court to halt all proceedings and stay all orders until the Court of Appeal decision in Von Staich becomes final. Here’s the full thing for you (13 pages of reading); my comments follow.

Respondent's Brief Regarding Effects of Von Staich Decision (1) by hadaraviram on Scribd

In case words like “abeyance” and “remittitur” set your teeth on edge, what this means is that the AG wants the 311 pending cases to go into hibernation until the Supreme Court (1) denies review in Von Staich or (2) reviews Von Staich, issues a ruling (upholding or overturning Von Staich) and that ruling becomes final. In practical terms, we are talking about a possible delay of several months.

What will happen in the meantime? According to the AG’s brief, they are going to spend this time working with the Receiver on the COVID response strategy. This strategy will be based on transfers, not releases, and apparently the AG’s office becomes upset when reminded that their transfers are what caused this mess in the first place: “Obviously, CDCR does not intend to conduct mass transfers of the same kind that were previously unsuccessful.” Thousands of infections and 28 deaths? “Unsuccessful” would perhaps not be the word I’d pick from my thesaurus, but okay. It goes on: “[P]etitioners’ attempts to suggest prisoner transfers of any kind are not safe or effective is not well taken.” Thousands of people sick, dozens dead from a preventable outbreak on your watch that started with a transfer, but heaven forbid your fee-fees might get hurt by mentioning that CDCR doesn’t have quite the flawless track record on transferring people without infecting or killing them.

The rest of the brief is, essentially, a game of Tetris: they argue that they could easily shift people around and move them to other prisons “even (!!!!!) omitting the prisons that are currently at more than 100 percent capacity.” As in, adding people to institutions that are already overcrowded is a viable option (remember the track record?), but we’ll go the extra mile and show the court that we can achieve the desired population reduction by transferring people to facilities that are only at or near 100%.

If you don’t feel like you’re quite disgusted yet, in the last page we are told:

Arguing that [people incarcerated at San Quentin] should not be transferred because it is stressful, their family will be unable to visit, and they will be unable to participate in programs that may support their bid for parole necessarily implies that petitioners view the foregoing factors as mutually exclusive and more important than their need to be free from San Quentin’s alleged unsafe environment. Neither can be true.

Seriously, who writes this stuff? The cynicism drips from “it is stressful.” Implied is the comparison between the “stress” associated with being moved around by the people who brought you the outbreak, and consequently facing possible targeting and violence from strangers in the new facility, and whatever the author of this magnum opus considers “stressful”, like, I dunno, deciding whether to go with vinaigrette or ranch on their side salad. Same thing for families being unable to visit–a serious mental health issue not only for the prisoners, but also for their young children–which is not the same as the family “stress” involved in the government lawyer’s need to balance the time it took them to author this masterpiece with the need to help their kids with their Zoom homework.

But most importantly, the dichotomy the authors are setting up is false, because the AG only presents people with two options: stay in a dilapidated, decrepit facility and face death, or face health risks and other negative outcomes by being transferred. That the Court of Appeal didn’t order them to transfer people doesn’t mean the Court didn’t prefer this strategy. It did, and it said so explicitly at least thrice in the decision, specifying the population of aging and infirm people doing time for violent crime as the key to a successful release strategy. That the authors of this brief don’t see it is emblematic of their inability to truly “see” this population: that’s why, when they reviewed 6,000 cases for release, they only found 44 (!!!!). That to the AG representatives, through their biases and blinders, release is not a viable option, does not mean that it is not the obvious, sane solution to everyone else.

This is infuriating, beyond offensive, and breathtakingly vicious, and I’m at the edge of my seat waiting to see how the Superior Court will respond.

BREAKING NEWS: CA Attorney General Petitions CA Supreme Court in Von Staich

Today was the last day for the Attorney General’s office to petition the Supreme Court for review, and unsurprisingly, they went for it. If you want to read the entire thing, here it is, in its 30-page glory–just be sure you’re sitting first:

VON STAICH Petition for Review w Exhibit – Final by hadaraviram on Scribd

Here are some of the highlights. The petition frames the legal question as follows:

May a court hold that prison officials, facing the challenges of the emerging novel coronavirus pandemic, were deliberately indifferent to an elderly inmate’s medical needs where the evidence showed officials operated under the authority and supervision of a federal Receiver with responsibility over the prison medical system, and consistent with the Receiver’s directives and guidance, undertook a suite of reasonable measures to arrest the spread of the virus, including reducing the inmate population, but had not at the time of hearing reduced the prison’s total inmate population by 50 percent? And may a court on that basis order officials to reduce the total prison population by 50 percent?

In other words, there are two things going on here: (1) they argue that the presumably “reasonable steps” they took were sufficient, and (2) they’re dumping the blame for this on the Receiver.

Of course, the absurdity of this is twofold. First, by their own admission, the Receiver is not the only responsible party here (the petition argues that they share the responsibility with the Receiver.) I suppose they’ve finally found an opportunity to try and throw Kelso under the bus; I assume the Receivership will claim that the prison was deliberately indifferent, the prison will argue that the Receivership was deliberately indifferent–and they will both be right.

But then things get truly. bizarre when the petition moves on to describe the “reasonable actions” CDCR took:

These actions included suspending intake from county jail, canceling visitation statewide, canceling large events and prison tours, distributing fact sheets, posters, and information to the inmate population, mandatory verbal and temperature screening for all persons entering prisons, and limiting movement between prisons, among others.

This is really rich. Wow–they hung posters? Such prescience! Such diligence! Such care for human life! As to “limiting movement between prisons,” we all know that the movement they failed to limit was the actual reason for this catastrophe, so forgive me for not bursting into a standing ovation. The cancelation of visitation is nothing to brag about–they would not have had to punish people in prison and their families if they did what they were supposed to. And as to the “verbal and temperature screening,” they have some nerve continuing the web of deception they pulled before the Court of Appeal, but of course now we know this is all fiction, because of the Inspector General’s first report. Note that they at least had the sense to refrain from lying about their flawed PPE practices, for which they were skewered by the legislature just a few days ago. They also list the release programs, which were insufficient at the time and also turned out to be largely fictional–out of 6,000 cases they reviewed for suitability, they found only 44 (!!!!!).

Again, we are treated to arguments that 50% is too much without the factual evidence that they didn’t bother to provide in the Court of Appeal, including the new information that they “acted under the advice of different experts” of which they said not a peep in the previous proceedings.

The rest of this is essentially a sob story about how unexpected, surprising, and overwhelming this crisis was, which apparently means the standard for deliberate indifference drops–as if we haven’t had evidence since 1918 of how outbreaks can ravage prisons or decades-long experience examining the connection between prison population density and health outcomes in every possible court.

This would be funny, but there’s absolutely nothing to laugh about. As the AG’s office spends its time and money congratulating CDCR for their “reasonable measures”, COVID-19 is ravaging our prison system again. In the last 14 days, the system has seen a whooping 1,474 new cases. There are huge outbreaks at CVSP (222 cases), CTF (269 cases), HDSP (283 cases), and SATF (433 cases.) There are new outbreaks in SOL (9 cases), CAL (49 cases), and CEN (28 cases.) Whatever they claim they’ve done with “limiting movement” is a blatant falsehood: the total prison population is up to what it was 7 weeks ago. The new Covid cases just in the past 2 weeks make up 1.48% of the entire prison population. This is over 6 times the per-capita rate statewide. The dissonance and immorality are breathtaking.

The Supreme Court has 90 days to decide whether to take this up, so now we wait.

The Prison Guards’ Union: Political Capture, Rot, and Risk

Amidst the cries to make profound changes to our incarceration policies, the silence from CCPOA, the prison guards’ union, has been deafening. While SEIU Local 1000, which represents prison workers, has filed a grievance against CDCR for putting their lives at risk, no such steps have been taken by CCPOA.

But it’s not just silence: When watching the legislative hearing on COVID in prisons, I was struck by the exchange between Assemblymember Ting and the CCHCS doctor who testified about PPE-wearing deficiencies in the prison authority’s COVID-19 plan. Here’s the bit I’ve been ruminating about. When the doctor was asked about the deviations from protocol regarding mask-wearing, which were plastered all over the IG report, he hastened to clarify that he did not doubt the efficacy of masking for preventing infection. Nonetheless, he attributed masking noncompliance in CDCR facilities to the fact that the masks were “thick, hot, hard to breathe.” The doctor explained that we should “extrapolate” what it was like for people on the outside to wear them for part of the day to people who “are expected to wear them 24/7, 365, because they cannot get away by themselves in a closed room with no one else. It’s a heavy lift. The overwhelming majority of patients and staff are doing a good job – they are not being perfect, they are fallible. Our physical plant is not conducive to people complying.”

Finally, the doctor admitted that the missing piece was the “disciplinary component of what we’ll do with folks who are just not willing to comply. That component is being strengthened and it will improve even more.” Ting wondered why this had not been done previously: “You work for Mr. Kelso, and he has fairly broad authority in this realm. why didn’t you use your authority to ensure everyone was wearing a mask?” The doctor insisted that wearing a mask was “not a choice” and that there was a “firm consistent message from secretary and receiver about our expectations about face coverings. I’ve personally been to 14 facilities since July and reminded staff and patients. There’s been a really clear expectation. The part that was not there was a progressive disciplinary process. I guess we hoped that people would do the right thing.”

This hope is extraordinary, given how CCPOA has been investing its time and money. A story in today’s Sac Bee shows that, instead of fighting for union members’ lives and wellbeing by demanding population reductions and preventative measures, or at minimum instructing them that they should wear masks, CCPOA leadership has been busy… politically and financially backing the punitive ballot propositions that lost last week. The article explains:

The prison guards’ union, through its political committees, spent $1 million to support incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, but she lost to progressive criminal justice reform advocate George Gascon, a former San Francisco district attorney.

It gave $2 million to support Proposition 20, which would have stiffened prison sentences and restricted parole, but the measure is failing by a 24% margin.

And the union spent at least $1 million to support Efren Martinez, a Los Angeles businessman who lost his race against incumbent Democratic Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee.

The union also backed some winners, potentially including Dave Min, a Democrat who defeated Republican state Sen. John Moorlach of Orange County.

Even my rudimentary math skills suffice to determine we’re talking about more than $4 million in union money, presumably garnered from union fees. And there are two ways to parse what’s going on here, both unsavory.

The more pessimistic one is that a substantial percentage of the rank-and-file correctional officers are virulent Trumpers, conspiracy theorists, or QAanon nutcases. Perhaps they think COVID-19 is a hoax despite the fact that it has infected and sickened thousands of people behind bars and claimed dozens of lives, including one of their own. And if so, perhaps the same virulent Trumpism makes them happy that their member fees were used to support Trumplike regressive, pre-recession criminal justice policies.

The less pessimistic, but still incredibly upsetting, possibility is that CCPOA members are being taken for a ride by Glen Stailey and his own Trumpian methods, which apparently include financing political ads that put bullseyes on legislators. Stailey is apparently interested in “regaining the union’s once-renowned clout in a changed political environment”–as evidenced by his response to the Sac Bee article about the humiliating and expensive campaign losses:

Through a spokesman, Stailey declined an interview request but responded to emailed questions.

“We’re only getting started,” he said in the email. “We want to build our profile as an active participant in policymaking in California, and working on campaigns is one small piece of it.”

In other words, he’s hoping to drag us all to the house of horrors that his predecessors built.

Because I’m not an idiot, I don’t imagine this blog is particularly popular with CCPOA membership. But in the off-chance that you, dear reader, are a correctional officer, my message to you is: WAKE UP. I don’t hate you, I don’t wish bad things for you, I don’t want you to get sick and die. Stailey doesn’t give a fig about your health and work conditions. Your interests and those of the people you guard are the same. None of you wants to get infected with COVID-19. The way to do this is to safely reduce prison population so that everyone can safely distance, and to be rigorous in wearing PPE and washing hands. Look at the protection your non-CO colleagues are getting from SEIU-1000 and ask yourself whether Stailey and his cronies care about you, or whether they’re just taking your money on an expensive trip to the land of political capture.

Post-Election Thoughts

The Scorpion and the Frog

The results of the election did not bring me immediate solace. I’m sure this has been the case for many folks who found it difficult to take off the psychological backpack we have been carrying for so long. In my case, the psychological weight is the product of daily engagement with this administration on various public forums, including having to spend least thrice a week, WEEKLY, for the last four years, in TV stations and radio studios talking about this. In November 2016, when I lost the fight for death penalty abolition and my beloved cat Spade on the week of the election, I made it my mission to be an expert in everything these cartoon villains were cooking up, and every morning I sat up abruptly in my bed, with my first thought being, “it’s already morning in D.C., what has he done today?” Every time I saw an unrecognized number on my phone it was a TV producer or journalist asking me things that I had to cram on. I’ve crawled through information on abominable, underhanded things that I could not have even imagined possible before the last four years. Engaging with this sewer of an administration every day, including weekends, has brought exhaustion and stress into our family life, soured my good humor and my patience at work, and taken a real, measurable toll on my health. Doing upbeat explainers, volunteering, and taking abuse via phone and text from voters has felt like wading through a swamp, and even though I wore my psychological hip waders, I resent and revile this administration for demanding that I set aside my own grief, decency, and decorum, and be constantly on-call to respond to venal, opportunistic excrement. After I gave the explainer on Justice Ginsburg’s replacement process, I could barely get out of bed for a few days.

But the miasma in my soul is slowly dissipating. The first time I felt truly rapturous was when I got a letter from Traci Felt Love, the organizer of Lawyers for Good Government. The letter reminded me of when we started L4GG and brought back the incredible week in which we shut down San Francisco International Airport in reaction to the Muslim ban. It was only then that the magnitude of our success in dethroning this monster started to hit me, and I’ve been slowly digesting it.

One thing that has greatly helped is ignoring the legal pageant of the absurd that Trump is mounting in various courts around the country. I have given myself permission to disengage from all his frivolous lawsuits, antics, last-minute personnel juggling, and desperate cries for attention. In January, no matter what happens in the interim, Joe Biden will be President of the United States. Whether Trump concedes (ya think?), resigns (hmmmm), flees to the Cayman Islands to a mansion with golden toilets (on brand) or is dragged out of the White House in handcuffs (appealing but dangerous), the outcome will be a change in administrations.

It’s useful to keep in mind the story of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion, which cannot swim, asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog’s back. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion assures the frog he won’t do that: “If I sting you, we’ll both drown, right?” This argument convinces the frog, which agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

Trumps are going to Trump. Giulianis are going to Giuliani. McConnells are going to McConnell, with or without us as their audience. It’s far more productive to focus our attention on the upcoming races in Georgia.

Drug Truce

Throughout the country, drug law reform gained more momentum. This wonderful post on the Drug Policy Alliance blog summarizes some of the main reforms, the most impressive of which was Oregon’s approval of Measure 110. The next step in procuring a truce on drugs was always going to be branching beyond marijuana, and for various political reasons that are difficult to explain to people outside California, I expected another state to move in that direction first.

What I find especially thrilling about the passage of Measure 110 is that it could open the door to an important dialogue about the value and benefits of psychedelics. MAPS has been leading the charge on declassifying these important substances and acknowledging their potential to help people with depression and trauma, as well as foster spiritual growth. Little by little, the hypocrisy is dissipating, but it’s going to happen on the state and local level first.

When the Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

Amidst my joy about the passage of Prop 17 and the failure of Prop 20–a reactionary law-and-order package–the demise of Prop. 25 brought me some anguish. As I explained elsewhere, all the arguments against the abolition of cash bail were ridiculous except for one, which had superficial appeal: the idea that “algorithms are racist” and that we would end up with “something worse” than cash bail. Aside from the fact that it’s hard to imagine how risk assessment is “worse” than debtor prisons straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, there’s a basic misunderstanding of how algorithms work. I have been explaining and explaining, but for some reason am not getting through to people captivated by woke rhetoric: ALGORITHMS ARE NOT RACIST. They predict the future on the basis of the past. If they have racially disparate outcomes, it’s because they reflect a racist reality in which, for a variety of systemic, sad, and infuriating reasons, people who are treated like second-class citizens in their own country commit more violent crime. The overrepresentation of people of color in homicide offenses and other violent crime categories is not something that progressives like to talk about, but it is unfortunately true–not just a mirage caused by stop-and-frisk in low-income communities. The reasons why more African American people commit more homicides than white people are the same reasons why they are arrested more frequently for the drug offenses they don’t actually commit more than white people: deprivation, neglect, lack of opportunities, dehumanization and marginalization on a daily basis. Solving these problems requires an administration committed to treating its citizenry fairly, not sweeping them under the rug by ignoring predictive tools that show what is actually going on. So powerful is the progressive self-deception that the ACLU, initially a supporter of eliminating cash bail, opted not to have a position on the ballot, because of the optics. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people I like and respect opposed Prop 25 using organizations’ positions as proxy, as if they couldn’t think for themselves. These organizations’ and people’s fears of being perceived as racists by supporting “algorithms,” the bogeymen of the left, was so overpowering that it hijacked the very real possibility to get rid of an actual, real, on-the-ground, in-the-open perversity: the only-in-America notion that people should pay money for their pretrial release.

The counterargument, made by some thoughtful folks, was that rejecting Prop. 25 would lead to a better proposal to abolish cash bail. But this argument exhibits deep ignorance of how political gains are made. Part of why I’m so upset about this is that I’ve already lived through a horrible round of the Perfect-Is-the-Enemy-of-the-Good game. Back in 2016, when we campaigned for death penalty abolition, I had to respond to arguments by progressives who thought that abolishing the death penalty was going to somehow “retrench” life without parole. The preciousness of this view infuriates me. As I explained until I was blue in the face, political progress is made incrementally. You can’t get to LWOP abolition without death penalty abolition. Expecting ballot propositions, which have to rely on broad coalitions, to be tailor-made to one’s exquisitely purist views about the public good is a recipe for disappointment. And, as Gov. Newsom said, the demise of Prop 25 essentially eliminates any possibility, motivation, or energy for getting together the “more perfect” solution to the bail problem that activists are yearning for. So, instead of celebrating the end of cash bail, progressives have yet again been duped into failing their own cause because the compromise wasn’t photogenic enough for them, and the big winner has been the bail bonds industry–you can see in this piece how effectively these scoundrels have coopted wokespeak to keep Victorian debt prisons alive.

Got a Sane Idea? Great! Wrap It in Sane Packaging

Just read a terrific Mother Jones article, which highlights the success of various local initiatives to divert resources from policing to less confrontational alternatives. Beyond my satisfaction with this outcome, I’m pleased with the rhetorical strategy used in these initiatives.

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, many advocates were making proposals that sounded scary, because they were wrapped in odious movement jargon (defund! abolish! dismantle!). Thing is, the proposals themselves were not radical or insane; they were sane enough that even people who were victimized in scary ways could see the logic in them–if they had the background to understand them. Alternatives to policing are not earth-shattering discoveries. Anyone, not just hyperprogressives, who walks around the Tenderloin these days can sense the palpable shift in energy since the arrival of the wise and conciliatory Urban Alchemy folks. All these propositions are doing is rolling back the Nixonian logic, according to which you somehow get more justice if there are more cops, riot gear, and weapons on the streets. We were sucked into this insanity in the 1970s with the LEAA funding scheme, and later in the 1980s with civil asset forfeiture. You could be forgiven for thinking that “defunding the police” is an extreme proposal if you’re not familiar with how police departments used to be run before they became bloated paramilitary organizations.

But the success of this measures was not only rooted in their inherent reasonableness (and cost-effectiveness.) It was rooted in wise, matter-of-factly packaging, which offered positive alternatives to policing that people could get behind. There is an important lesson here for progressives looking for referendum victories, which I very much hope will be learned: packaging matters. Offering people a realistic vision of humane, therapeutic, preventative public safety works better than wrapping sane, totally plausible ideas in flurries of self-righteous performativity. And that means resisting the cultural zeitgeist, which pushes the movement to flood social media with the most preposterous, off-putting jargon, even when proposing things that would appeal to a broad swath of the population.

When incendiary terminology is used to explain sane, effective reform, more time is spent debating the terminology and performatively defending it than discussing the policies themselves. People who are put off by the rhetoric are exhorted to “check the website,” “do the work,” and “educate themselves” by folks who do not inspire any desire to engage any further with them or with their ideas. Indeed, one of the dumbest aphorisms of this movement is the classic “it’s not my job to educate you.” It’s nobody’s job to educate anyone else (except, in the case of teachers, their actual students.) But hurling insults and disdain on people, piling nonrequired homework on their backs, hiding good ideas behind performative nonsense, and finding fault in people asking to know what they’re expected to support and vote for, is not particularly likely to induce them to take the trouble to learn somewhere else. Decrying the burden of “unpaid emotional labor,” another unfortunate classic, is also not particularly persuasive. Not everyone needs to dance through their revolution like Emma Goldman, but very few people want to get flogged through it. Corollary: If you call yourself an activist, and you want to bring people to your coalition, yes, it is part of your job to educate them. I’m so pleased that the advocacy for these proposals took a different approach, one that voters could get behind. The result will be safer and happier streets in many U.S. cities.