Book Review: Karen Morin, Carceral Spaces, Prisoners and Animals

My two biggest research interests–criminal justice and animal rights–come together in Karen Morin’s new book Carceral Spaces, Prisoners and Animals (New York: Routledge, 2018.) Morin, a geographer by discipline, applies insights from carceral geography to both human and nonhuman confinement contexts.

Carceral geography is a growing area of scholarship that examines prisons through a lens of spatiality. Building on work by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, carceral geographers problematize the overly simplistic notion of prisons as carceral spaces, arguing that prison boundaries are porous and that carceral ideologies of domination through confinement permeate spaces beyond the prison–beyond the formal dichotomy between “inside” and “outside.” Some themes studied by carceral geographers include spaces within prison and how they affect the experience of incarceration (“public” and “private” spaces within the prison; the impact of prison on the body); the interface between prisons and surrounding communities (prison towns, family members, transportation); mobility within and between prisons; and prison architecture and design. Carceral geography is directly relevant to my current research project, which is a book in progress about the COVID-19 catastrophe in California prisons; I rely a lot on the idea of prison permeability, which brings together notions of carceral boundaries, logics of opportunity (for people and for the virus,) insights from situational crime prevention, and miasma theory. In addition to this, I’m deeply interested in animal rights, and am working on a project involving the criminal prosecutions of animal rights activists who break into factory farms to release suffering animals.

In many ways, my interest in liberating nonhuman animals is an obvious extension of my interest in alleviating suffering in prisons. But the comparison is socially fraught from many directions. I often hear prison reform activists and abolitionists criticize prisons for treating people “like animals,” as if treating animals this way is fine; I’ve also heard animal rights activists criticize experimentation on animals, proposing to experiment on prisoners instead (Justin Marceau criticizes the myopic assumptions of the latter phenomenon in Beyond Cages.) I’ve also had to contend with people who find the comparison deeply offensive. Morin is well aware of these emotional and political landmines and writes:

I recognize though that the politics and ethics of making comparisons between racialized and classed human lives and that of nonhuman animals in respective carceral spaces can be problematic and fraught. It is challenging for humans who are embedded in violent, racialized, and criminalized human histories and spaces to not be offended by posthumanist comparisons to animal suffering. As noted above, the category of ‘human’ is contested in any case, and it is important to not move too quickly ‘beyond the human’ without acknowledging the continued exclusion of many human lives from full incorporation within it. And yet thinking particularly about race and animals together is important, precisely because of the way that racialized people have been and continue to be animalized in carceral spaces (Chapter 3). Moreover, the carceral logics of domination are intertwined across human and nonhuman groups. To take one more example, as Deckha (2013b) has shown, animal anti-cruelty legislation has the double effect of selecting certain animals for protection while targeting the behaviors of certain minoritized populations of people as deviant and transgressive. Meanwhile, industrial practices involving the dominant culture – as well as the abuse and killing of most animals – remain immune from critique.

Morin, Karen M.. Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals (Routledge Human-Animal Studies Series) (p. 15). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

This avenue is deeply productive, not only because the analogies and similarities are analytically interesting, but because solidarity across movements is essential for success. Morin’s analysis ties together the prison-, agricultural-, and medical industrial complexes, showing the intricate connections between them and the profit logics that underpin them.

Morin’s book proceeds to analyze a series of contexts in which she sees parallel developments between human and nonhuman carceral spaces. She compares execution chambers and slaughterhouses, discussing the notions of “humane” slaughter and of death sentences that are supposedly not “cruel and unusual.” She discusses the intersection of the medical and carceral spaces in the context of medical experimentation. She even asks difficult questions about prison boundaries when discussing zoos and supermax facilities. The book also makes an important contribution to two seemingly unrelated growing literatures: the one about forced labor in prisons and the one about the possibility and structure of labor rights for nonhuman animals. Throughout these topics, Morin shows deep sensitivity to the broader social structures that allow cruelty to persist.

My favorite part is Morin’s comparative analysis of prison towns and cattle towns. She shows how the introduction of an exploitative industry into a “company town” shapes the economy and the tenor of the entire town, without granting much in the way of economic benefit to the town itself (by contrast to the industry that exploits the town.) Morin doesn’t explicitly say this, but a big thing here seems the creation of a municipality that is collectively impermeable to compassion, which I think is a serious issue even when the industry is profitable.

We often talk about dehumanizing conditions in prisons. But perhaps the question is not whether or not we’re all human; the question that should matter is whether we are sentient and whether we suffer. A few years ago I read Michael Dorf and Sherry Colb’s Beating Hearts, which compares the logics of sentience underpinning the pro-life and animal rights movements and finds a way to reconcile them into a cohesive pro-choice and pro-animal perspective. I think there’s a way for advocates and activists to find peace with Morin’s comparison in a way that allows them to support both movements.

Morin admits that she has not analyzed all the scenarios that her comparison speaks to, and I found at least two that I would like to read future works on. The first has to do with the concept of overcrowding. Morin discusses issues of caging in depth, but the book does not delve into the movement toward humane farming and “cage-free” chicken facilities. Now a major selling point for eggs and for pig meats, the notion of no-cage or no-crate is deeply misleading, and some states, such as California, use various parameters to try and measure overcrowding. I’ve seen parallel developments in the context of prison population reduction orders. It’s no big secret that I think the measuring yard used in Brown v. Plata–percentage of design capacity systemwide–was deeply shortsighted, and a more careful calculation of minimal per-person area, as in other countries, would have helped us mitigate the COVID-19 catastrophe we’re experiencing right now.

The second issue I would want to read more about has to do with movement strategy, and with the reform-versus-revolution debate in the prison advocacy community. There is a parallel debate–quite a heated one–in the animal ethics community, between animal welfarism and animal liberation. Movement strategy and tactics, attention to incremental reform, and the use of the criminal justice process to challenge cruelty and obtuseness are relevant to both movements, and I think there’s more room to write about this.

These two issues notwithstanding, the book makes a fascinating read. Unfortunately, Routledge has priced it quite prohibitively, but prospective readers should know that you can rent it from Amazon for a reasonable price.

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.

Noir City Online: A Woman’s Face (1938)

In an effort to set aside the horrors of the present, I am returning to the online Noir City International festival to enjoy this dark Swedish musing into criminality and its causes, A Woman’s Face (1938.) It stars one of my favorite actresses of all time, Ingrid Bergman, in one of her last Swedish roles before being catapulted to Hollywood stardom.

Bergman plays a woman with a disfigured face who leads a criminal extortion gang. When she tries to steal money, she sustains an injury and is caught by the homeowner, a plastic surgeon; he learns more about her and decides to fix her face. His kindness gives her a chance at redemption and at overcoming the trauma of her disfigurement. But the gang has already set in motion a plan that requires her to insert herself as a governess in the home of a dignitary and play a role in the murder of his little grandson so as to affect inheritance plans.

I was engrossed in this movie, which is notable because, as mother to a small child, films with plots endangering children are often too much for me. It didn’t help my blood pressure that the child in question, Lars-Erik, looks and talks a lot like my own son! But the film was captivating because of the origin story of Anna’s criminality. This is not the only noir to suggest that the trauma of physical disfigurement can push people into criminal careers; consider Peter Lorre’s The Face Behind the Mask (1941.) But there are a few notable things here.

Deviance–to the extent that we can even agree on its definition–is complicated. From the 1920s to the 1950s, lots of theories for explaining it emerged, many of them looking at juvenile delinquents’ backgrounds. Some theories attributed it to lack of legitimate opportunities and others to the presence of role models in crime. There’s a wonderful book by James Bennett, Oral History and Delinquency, which goes into how criminologists of the early 20th century dug into people’s narratives about their backgrounds to seek an understanding of how they drifted into criminal behavior. The idea that a person’s experiences, the twists and turns of life, are important milestones in a path toward or away from crime, is again important in criminological theory: life-course criminologists look for milestones in encouraging criminality and desistance.

The thing about narratives, though, is that it’s dangerous to overgeneralize from anecdotes. One needs to systematically analyze life stories of many people to find generalities; not all people who go to college or marry desist from crime, and certainly most of the people who grow up in poverty and trauma don’t go into crime. Which is why the constant reliance on psychological trauma as an explainer of villainry, a-la origin stories of comic book villains, is fascinating and at the same time discomfiting. This is part of what I struggled with when viewing A Woman’s Face: the narrative suggests that Anna’s entry into a criminal life is a direct consequence of her disfigurement, whereas the external remedying of this disfigurement holds the key to her own redemption. It’s a powerful story, and I don’t want to reject its power outright–I know what a difference changes in appearance and external circumstances can make. But I also know some very conventionally beautiful and fortunate people who engage in quite a lot of villainy, so I would enjoy the narrative for its own sake and hesitate to generalize too much from it.

Either way, this is a fantastic flick–far superior, in my view, to the later American remake with Joan Crawford. I hope you enjoy it!

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.

Noir City Online: Razzia sur la chnouf (France, 1955)

Another cinematic joy in this year’s online version of my favorite film festival: The amazing Jean Gabin stars in this French version of a Damon Runyon underworld yarn. For a country less aggressively moralistic and puritan than the U.S., I was surprised to see the movie open with a warning about drugs a-la Reefer Madness.

This becomes important throughout the movie. One of its most interesting characteristics is the juxtaposition of the drug trafficking operation as a business and as a crime with real victims that causes real suffering. It starts off with Gabin’s character “Henri from Nantes,” returning to France after learning the business in the United States; he’s being brought aboard the drug organization to make it more efficient, as if he were someone who just returns to a senior management position at Peugeot after spending a few years with the Ford factory. The way he surveys the organization and scolds his underlings is sometimes reminiscent of a Dilbert cartoon. And the romance between him and Lisette, who works the bar that doubles as the front for the drug operation, progresses like an ordinary workplace romance. I was reminded a lot of The Wire’s Stringer Bell and his efforts at introducing business norms and concepts to the drug crew.

At the same time, we’re not spared a tough look at the horrors and victims of drugs, especially through the character of Léa (marvelously played by Lila Kodrova.) Léa hits rock bottom several times during the flick, and Henri’s pity for her is evident. The killing of the courier at the beginning of the movie, too, is a reminder of the inherent violence and danger of the trade. Henri’s nighttime journey through the scarier, sadder, more risqué corners of his organization makes for some wonderfully lyrical, tragic moments (as well as some super-dark cinematography):

I don’t want to discuss the plot too much, because it would ruin this fabulous movie for you, but I will mention that the movie raises some interesting questions about the extent to which governments can go with entrapment.

Noir City Online: Leave Her to Heaven (United States, 1945)

Over the years, I developed a pretty strong stomach for noir plots, and can usually watch them without blinking; since the birth of my son, though, pure, unmitigated evil, especially toward children and vulnerable people, is really trying for me. I was surprised to find the anti-heroine of Leave Her to Heaven, Ellen, so monstrous that I had to stop watching the film several times.

So much has been written about femmes fatales that I’m hardly going to innovate anything on the subject, but I did want to draw a strong parallel between Ellen and the absent protagonist of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The film is one of my favorite flicks of all time, especially because of the nightmarish Mrs. Danvers, and because Maxim fills me with ambivalence and dread. But what’s interesting about it is that the dead Rebecca is present throughout the film.

Even though Rebecca and Ellen are very different characters–Ellen is an obsessive lover (first of her father, then of Richard), whereas Rebecca is filled with contempt for Maxim, they share the scary, Hitchcock-esque characteristic of being able to put in place machinations from beyond the grave that make things unbearable for the living (there are also some Agatha Christie characters like that, especially in the short stories.) This sort of plot twist would strain credulity in the hands of less capable actresses than Gene Tierney, but she manages to introduce Ellen’s perversity so gradually that, halfway through the film, one realizes that her evil is utterly believable.

The juxtaposition of bad Ellen and good Ruth plays on a stereotype that many feminist criminologists have highlighted as a shortcoming in media representations of female crime, and it’s a steady cliché of the genre. I would have enjoyed Ruth more if she had more backbone and a bit of an edge, but films dominated by a stereotypical femme fatale seldom leave room for more than one interesting, complicated female character (this, by the way, is part of why I love Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill so much.) Ruth is a literary device for highlighting Ellen’s perversity. My former teachers and now colleagues Odeda Steinberg and Mimi Ajzenstadt conducted a phenomenal study a while ago, in which they examined newspaper coverage of trials of female criminals. They expected to find demonization all over, and instead they found feminization–incessant preoccupation with looks and stereotypically feminine behavior of the defendants. This may fall in line with Manheim’s chivalry theory, hints of which Malcolm Feeley and I found in the treatment of female offenders from the 19th century onward. Ellen’s conventional good looks, her athleticism and prowess, and her diabolical streak tick all the demonization/feminization boxes. As someone astutely commented on Twitter, none of this would’ve been more alarming in black and white–“the overly rich colors lend create a their own world as garish nightmare.”

Watch Leave Her to Heaven here:

Noir City Online: Rusty Knife (Japan, 1958)

Had lots of fun this evening at Noir City International watching the fantastic Yakuza film Rusty Knife. The plot is thrilling and engaging: Postwar city Udaka is run over with gangs mixed in political corruption, complete with the recent suicide of a local politician–except it turns out it wasn’t suicide. The prosecutor receives an anonymous letter from a gang member; the author had been a witness to the murder and staging of the crime scene as a faux suicide by the powerful Katsumata gang. When Katsumata finds out, they start looking for the snitch by process of elimination. One of the last men standing is Tachibana, a bartender recently returned from a prison sentence for the murder of the man who raped his fiancée and drove her to suicide. Tachibana wants to go straight, but he’s besieged from all sides: the prosecution and the police want him to testify against Katsumata, and Katsumata’s men are trying to hound him down. Complicating matter is his youthful sidekick Keiko, the daughter of the murdered politician.

Even though I’m far from an expert on Japan’s organized crime scene, I love Japanese crime movies, especially the classics from Nikkatsu studios. Some of the plot lines and styles are quintessentially Japanese, but some are very universal. This film spoke to me in two ways. First, Tachibana comes off as an incredibly sympathetic character, and the pressures he’s subjected to were complicated and realistic. As opposed to Jean Gabin’s Charles in Any Number Can Win, Tachibana truly wants a quiet, uncomplicated life, but can’t seem to catch a break. The film made me wonder whether people who come home after a prison sentence in Japan have an easier time clawing their way back into law-abiding life than people in the United States, whose reentry journey is mostly marred with crippling poverty. I’ve read that the length of life sentences in Japan continues to rise, and was interested to find out about the recent release of the man who’s served the longest sentence in the country‘s history–note that his name and crime have been kept out of the papers to help with his reentry. It’s hard to imagine such concessions here. It has also been interesting to learn that there’s a lot more interface between prisons and the surrounding community, which should help with the inevitable culture shock of returning to the outside society.

The film also made me think of plea bargaining, confidential informants, and the power of prosecutors in and out of court. David Johnson’s groundbreaking book about Japanese criminal justice highlights the extent to which the system there relies on confessions, and the ensuing pressures by the prosecutorial machine to confess. The prosecutor’s relentless pressure on Tachibana in this movie tarnishes the boundaries between “good guys” and “bad guys” somewhat, though Katsumata definitely takes the cake as the story’s sadistic villain. It’s interesting, though, that I found myself rooting for Tachibana and Keiko and wishing that the prosecutor wasn’t embroiled in any of this.

It’s a gem of a flick, and you can find it on the Criterion Channel. Here’s the trailer:

Noir City Online: Any Number Can Win (France, 1963)

Here’s one more post reviewing the terrific flicks shown as part of the AFI and the Film Noir Foundation’s festival Noir City International, and this time it’s the French Any Number Can Win, starring the phenomenal Jean Gabin and a (super young and handsome) Alain Delon. It’s a wonderful heist movie: the Gabin character, Charles, has just come home after a long period in prison. Contemplating his grim chances at reentry with his wife (they have such a great relationship) he realizes that going straight isn’t worth it. He partners with Francis (Delon) and Louis (Maurice Biraud) to plan a big heist at the outrageously named Palm Beach Casino.

Lots of fantastic things happen; the cinematography is phenomenal, as is the ensemble acting, especially the dance of suspicion between Charles and Francis. But from a criminological perspective, what sticks out is the use of physical environment as a partner in crime as well as an incriminating accomplice. This dovetails with a theory that came to prominence in criminology in the 1980s, Situational Crime Prevention. Despairing of grand theories involving the criminal’s character or big social structures, leading criminologists at the time turned their attention to the physical environment of crime, to check whether it creates opportunities to commit crime or to avoid detection. The leading theorists advancing these theories seem to assume some rationality and planning on the part of criminals (there’s still excellent work being done on this, specifically regarding burglaries and poaching), and are looking for ways in which the setups in stores, for example, entice stealing, hinder detection, and enable getting away. This theory was very attractive to the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, respectively, and shaped much of the physical environs in both countries. If you’ve ever seen an athletics store with a display wall with only one sneaker, or a park bench with armrests in the middle (to prevent sleeping) you’ve seen situational crime prevention in action.

Anyway, the way this plays out in Any Number Can Win is fascinating. According to Charles’ plan, Francis takes a room in a mansion next door to the casino, and rents a pool cabana. It turns out that the air vents in the cabana lead to the ventilation inside the casino, and the entire plan is based on using the infrastructure between the two buildings effectively. This means we get to see Delon in some hairy situations, which require athleticism and agility, such as crawling through air vents or leaping inside an elevator shaft. But what makes the plan appealing is also what brings about its inevitable failure: the environment does not cooperate. I won’t tell you what happens–I’ll just mention that some of the most fantastic 1960s-style resort extravagance ends up tripping our fellows and sabotaging their best-laid plans.

A great accompanying read to this movie is Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City.

Noir City Online: El Vampiro Negro (Argentina, 1953)

Long-time readers know that the highlight of my year is Noir City, the fantastic film festival at the Castro Theatre, created and sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation. As this year’s events were gradually canceled, I started preemptively mourning the ten days I typically spend glued to my seat (audience left, near the exit) watching twenty-something phenomenal films.

Much to my delight, the Film Noir Foundation and the American Film Institute are hosting the program online, at this link. The movies come with terrific introductions by Eddie Muller, known to us noiristas as “the Czar of Noir” and other members of FNF, as well as expert film critics and scholars. I thought it might be fun if I supplemented some of these with a bit of criminological commentary.

This first comment is about the fantastic film El Vampiro Negro (Argentina, 1953), which starts with a title frame explaining that the film is based on real-life events from Europe. Indeed, like Fritz Lang’s M (1931), El Vampiro Negro is based on the life and crimes of Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf.” Both films are excellent and, while cinephiles and Lang fans may see this as blasphemy, I think that El Vampiro Negro is the best of the two, for various cinematic and criminological reasons. Both Peter Lorre and Nathán Pinzón are excellent in the respective title roles of the serial killer, and the atmosphere is well-captured in both, but I think that the Argentinian script’s inclusion of the nightclub singer, played by Olga Zubarry, makes such a terrific, truly moral, appealing counterpart not only to the rotten morality of the serial killer, but also to the hypocrisy of the prosecutor. One roots for Zubarry’s character as she plays an important role in catching the criminal.

But more importantly, the inclusion of the nightclub singer provides a much more interesting criminological statement. In M, the murderer is apprehended and tried by a kangaroo court of the underworld, in which a “prosecutor” and a “defense attorney” respectively argue for positions corresponding to the classicist (“he chose to do evil and we must deter others!”) and positivist (“he can’t help himself!”) schools of criminology. This dichotomy emerges in El Vampiro Negro as well, not through a kangaroo court but through scenes from the murderer’s trial, which are interestingly portrayed at the beginning of the movie. I think the playwright made this decision because the film wants to say something more interesting.

At some point in the movie, there’s a scene from the prosecutor’s home life, including his wife, who is disabled. Later, the prosecutor befriends the nightclub singer, coming to her home, and warning her that her daughter might be taken away from her because of her occupation. He then bemoans his own loneliness, tells her that she, too, must be lonely, and makes his move. The nightclub singer–what a terrific character!–pushes him away, screams at him that he’s scum and that she prefers the lowlifes from the club, and throws him out of her home.

The inclusion of these two scenes frames the main dilemma in the movie in a much more interesting way. It’s not just a good-versus-evil flick (though the serial killer is, indeed, evil), and it’s not just a choice-versus-predetermination flick (though the serial killer does evoke this conversation): it’s also a conversation about the hypocrisies of the lawmakers themselves and their audacity to judge others. This folds in labeling and conflict theories, which I think make the latter film richer from a theoretical perspective.

Watch both (M; El Vampiro Negro) and tell me what you think!