Sandy Hook, Gun Control, and Situational Crime Prevention

Image courtesy clubrunwithus.com.

Among the information that has come to light in the last few days was the fact that the innocent children and adults who were slaughtered two days ago were shot with guns owned by Adam Lanza’s mother–and murder victim–Nancy. This is one more data point consistent with the bulk of peer reviewed research confirming that gun ownership, and keeping guns at home, significantly increases the odds of household members dying of accidents, suicide, and homicide.

The hoarse calls for Second Amendment freedoms, and the ludicrous suggestions that teachers keep guns in the classroom “for protection”, I set aside here. I find them tasteless, misinformed, and impossible to reasonably interact with. But I do want to express some surprise not at private citizens and internet commenters, but at situational crime prevention criminologists. For all the advice on how to make crime more difficult to commit, not a word about gun control?

I learned about situational crime prevention in the early 2000s from David Weisburd, one of the world’s foremost experts on it. After learning many lofty theories about the etiology of crime in grad school–free choice, medical pathology, difficult childhood, racism, patriarchy, deprivation, labeling, strain–there was something almost disappointing about delving into a theory that advocated keeping CDs locked behind the counter at the record store, displaying only one shoe of a pair  at the sports store to prevent theft from the shelves, and placing armrests on park benches to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. Figuring out why people commit crime is a big enterprise, said David at the time; “crime” is a general name for a family of diverse and unrelated phenomena, and there is no shame in manipulating the non-offender factors to reduce its occurrence.

In grad school, and as a postdoc, I confess I looked down on this literature, but I’ve since become wiser and grateful for the time I got to spend with David and read this stuff. Having done some fieldwork on open drug markets, I’ve realized that even the most constrained situations–rife with social inequalities, municipal indifference, and racial injustices–offer offenders some measure of rational choice, however confined it might be. Even within the tough and distressing realities of the Tenderloin drug market, drug traffickers sell their merchandise not under the private SRO surveillance cameras, but away from there, near the municipal cameras they know don’t work. I don’t really buy Ron Clarke’s adherence to rational choice as the principal model explaining human behavior–I find its poverty disturbing–but denying agency and ascribing everything to social ills is equally disturbing and simplistic. To some extent–when done in concert with an effort to understand more deeply what is going on–manipulating the environment to make crime less appealing or more difficult to commit is not a bad idea. Displacement is a problem, of course, but that can be addressed, as David Kennedy reminds us, with tough enforcement at “hot spots”.

But for all the grants, contracts, and consulting that situational crime prevention experts do, their efforts are mostly addressed at quality of life crime and at property crime. Take a look at the advice offered on the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing website, for instance, and click on all the squares. It is geared toward vandalism and petty theft. I expected to see a word about gun control in their “control tools and weapons” tab. Instead, we are told to manufacture “smart guns” and to restrict spray-paint sales to juveniles.

Spray-paint sales?

I think what is happening here is that criminologists who have been dealing with municipalities and police departments don’t want to rock the boat. The minute they make recommendations that might require someone, God forbid, to appear to be pro-regulation or what Americans mistakenly refer to as “socialist”, police chiefs and politicians will stop listening. Sit-lie ordinances, or making benches uncomfortable, do not make politicians tremble. But take something on which there is basically a professional consensus – more easily obtained guns mean more deaths – and everyone is suddenly very quiet.

I want my friends who have given such excellent advice to retailers and housing project managers (I say this with appreciation and admiration, and without a shred of cynicism) to grow a backbone and tell the people who work with them that some government regulation might be necessary. If they are genuine in stating that situational crime prevention is wholly apolitical, and not merely an incarnation of criminological conservatism, isn’t this a good time to argue for gun control? I want my friends to do more than quality-of-life architecture. Research is on their side. All it takes is for one respected scholar in the prevention field, not a shrill-voiced lefty, to say words of reason and science. Who is it going to be?

On Sandy Hook and Violence Prediction

Photo courtesy ibtimes.co.uk.

In the aftermath of the dreadful Sandy Hook tragedy, much of my Facebook wall is the arena of political debates about gun control and about national mental health care. But what of the human factor? Can we predict such horrific violence?

A recent story in the New York Daily News provides a profile of mass murderer Adam Lanza as described by former classmates and neighbors. He’s described as having either Asperger’s syndrome or some other disorder, and there are abundant details about his parents’ amicable divorce and generous alimony arrangement. What is interesting to me is that many of the commentators on the piece express lack of surprise at the identity of the murderer.

 . . . 

 A “longtime” family friend said Lanza had a condition “where he couldn’t feel pain.” “A few years ago when he was on the baseball team, everyone had to be careful that he didn’t fall because he could get hurt and not feel it,” said the friend. “Adam had a lot of mental problems.” 

 . . . 

 Lanza walked the halls of his middle school carrying a black briefcase while most students lugged their belongings in backpacks. “That stuck out,” said Tim Lalli, 20, who graduated with Lanza in 2010. “It was different.” Lalli said Lanza wasn’t a total outcast, but he didn’t speak much. “Everyone just assumed he was a smart kid and that’s why he didn’t like talking to people all the time,” he said. “He hung out with the smart crowd.” 

 . . . 

 One family friend described Adam Lanza as a gamer who “rarely spoke.” “He was weird,” said the friend, who asked to remain anonymous. “He was quiet.” 

 . . . 

 Do these remind you of anything? In the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, the media and the public were quick to blame and label Goth youth who wore trench coats to school. Dave Cullen’s 2009 book Columbine debunked these stories. The killers’ personal journals reveal that Eric Harris was a sophisticated psychopath, while Dylan Klebold was deeply depressed and captivated by Eric. But it was much easier to look for external signs of not fitting in than for the killers’ personal psyche.

And so, after every senseless tragedy that claims the lives of innocent people, we are subjected to these generalizations. The price we pay is much more intangible and less noticed. And that is the stigmatization of entire populations of youth who may not fit in at school, who carry a briefcase in lieu of a backpack, whose hobbies involve gaming. Fortunately, the vast majority of these people will never kill. And this is true for the many harmless, kind, nonviolent people many readers probably know who have Asperger’s or other personality disorders.

So how can we tell who might do this? The answer may be more situational than anything, really. As Gavin de Becker reminds us in The Gift of Fear, watching a situation attentively and paying attention to our feelings is important, and it is equally important not to let fear paralyze us so much that we stop paying attention in the situations in which it is there as a friend, to warn and alert us. If we now fear and loathe all our fellow human beings who behave eccentrically and suffer from mental illness, we will lose our valuable, precious instinct for predicting a violent situation near us. Because we will start stereotyping and hating, and we’ll stop watching and paying attention.

And after all that is said and done, the only thing left to do is cry for the many lives that were lost, for the potential squandered, for friendships and toys and notebooks and story time, for fish fingers and peas and coloring books, for a love of learning and a love of teaching. And maybe to remind ourselves that these incidents are horrific, but uncommon. And that love wins over fear. Most of the time.

Prop 36 and the Gift of Fear

Current polls show Proposition 36, the initiative to amend the Three Strikes Law to require that the third strike be not just any felony but a serious or violent felony, leading by a significant majority. In a previous post, we provided an analysis of the proposition, concluding that it was a step in the right direction, though we would have liked to see more reforms (including some hope for second strikes and a consideration of the simultaneous strike problem.) Today I’m thinking about the minority of Californians who still oppose Prop 36 and pondering the sources of said opposition.

As my colleague and friend Josh Page argues in The Toughest Beat, the original Three Strikes Law was heavily promoted by the CCPOA–California’s prison guard union–and victim organizations puppeteered by the union. Spearheading the law were families of victims of heinous crimes perpetrated by habitual offenders on parole. The original idea behind the law was not to deter potential criminals from committing crime; if we allow simultaneous strikes to be counted in the same trial, we’re pretty much dismissing the deterrent effect. Rather, the idea was to incapacitate; namely, to identify risky individuals and put them behind bars for life.

A Legal Analyst’s Office analysis conducted in 2004 stated that only a third of the then-Three-Striker population had committed their third strike offense against a person. The remainder two thirds had committed a nonviolent third strike–a drug or a property offense. Moreover, less than half of the Three Strikers had committed an offense that could be considered serious or violent. However, as the report stated, while the third offenses were often not serious or violent (and sometimes, according to distressing news reports, rather petty), third strikers do have more serious criminal histories than other state inmates.

So, let’s look at this from a prism of risk. Does a serious or violent criminal history consisting of two prior offenses predict that more violent might be perpetrated in the future, even if the person’s third offense is actually not a violent one? The answer to that question is fairly complicated. Some criminal offenses are better predictors of risk than others.

I’ve recently read Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. De Becker is a private consultant, specializing in violence prediction. The book examines various scenarios of violence–death threats, stalking, abuse, violence wrought by fired employees, stranger violence–and strongly advocates that readers pay close attention to their own intuition in situations that feel instinctually wrong or dangerous. De Becker’s point is that, in any given situation, there are many clues that might help a potential victim predict a violent eruption. Some of these clues may be difficult to verbalize, as the potential victim might only notice them briefly, but our intuition works faster than our logic; therefore, the gut feeling in itself, without the verbal articulation of the grounds for danger, is important.

De Becker’s message is well taken in the context of individuals and immediate violence. He is combating many years of socialization that implore us, especially women, to be “nice” and kind to strangers even when we feel something is awry, and the good will that might lead us to discount our instincts as stereotypes which must not be heeded. Being wise, rather than nice, could save our lives, which I think is an important message.

But it would be a big mistake to confound de Becker’s message with a message to vote no on 36 because our instinct tells us that people with two prior violent offenses are dangerous, and here’s why. First, there’s a big difference between predicting imminent violence at the interpersonal, immediate level, and predicting it at the policymaking level as an uncertainty that might occur sometime in the future. For the latter task, one has the luxury of employing statistical predictions that a layperson cannot access in a given situation. Also, assessing a particular situation based on its context is an entirely different task than trying to predict violence without any reference to time, place, and circumstances. The factors that come into play in the latter situation will necessarily be generalized and based on many years of statistical prediction – which is why most parole boards have come to rely on statistical software, rather than on individualized clinical predictions.

Second, it’s important to keep in mind that risk prevention in general only goes one way. Sure, if we lock up all convicts with a criminal history indefinitely we might end up safer; we eliminate the risk of false positives; our pity or compassion would be neutralized and we’d make no predictive mistakes. But what about all the people whom we may be locking up needlessly? And what about first-time offenders, for whom we have no such predictors?

And third, violence prevention is only one factor in designing penal policy. The third strikers we incarcerate for twenty-five years to life have already been punished for their two prior offenses. Retribution and proportionality are also important from a justice standpoint, as is the prospect of hope for release.

Which is why I wholeheartedly recommend The Gift of Fear – and voting YES on 36 – and do not see these messages as contradictory at all.

Concern in Pelican Bay: Increase in Solitary Confinement?

A disconcerting trend predicted on the San Francisco Bay View: The depopulation of prisons may be accompanied by an increase in the use of solitary confinement. The mostly-unreported hunger strike of September and October was in manifestation of inmate concerns with the change in security groups. Here’s more information, as per letters from Todd Ashker, the strike organizer:

Written Jan. 22, postmarked Jan. 27, 2012 – As soon as I first heard during our face to face meeting with former Undersecretary Kernan of CDCR’s plans to go to a “security threat group” (STG) system of classification, I recognized the very real potential for manipulation and abuse of such by certain factions in power positions in CDCR – e.g. CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association), gang unit etc. I immediately detailed my concerns to our attorneys – this was part of the reason for hunger strike no. 2 in September and October.


Briefly, here’s what I’m concerned about: Right at the time – in May – when the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s prison population reduction order, in seeming response to our July hunger strike, CDCR unveils their STG plan. Here’s how it looks to me: The prison population reduction of 35,000-40,000 prisoners equals a potential loss of $2 billion in the yearly CDCR budget and the loss of approximately 7,000 CCPOA members. That’s the loss of a lot of union dues!


A clever way to offset some of this loss is to create a “new” security threat designation scheme – used in a lot of states, including Arizona, where it’s used to isolate all inmates labeled southern Hispanic from California – enabling CDCR to segregate a lot more men. Segregation costs nearly double general population and requires more staff.

Does any of our readers have more information about this?

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman‘s new and fantastic book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a fascinating journey into an intellectual career spanning more than forty years. Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize for his work on rationality with Amos Tversky, presents a lifetime of research and findings into human rationality and its fallacies in a coherent, intriguing and convincing way. It is a book I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone regardless of the context of criminal justice. Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas on rationality, however, have special bearing on issues of criminal justice policy, and the book might therefore be particularly interesting to this blog’s readership.

To fully understand the novelty Kahneman’s (and Tversky’s) Nobel-winning ideas, it is important to keep in mind that they were generated against the backdrop of very traditional ideas of human rationality in economics. Classic economic theory assumes a human subject who is fully rational, fully knowledgeable, and operates within a framework of cost-benefit analysis. Kahneman and Tversky, students of human behavior rather than of economics, devoted their careers to questioning and refining this model of human cognition to accommodate flaws and fallacies in rationality, revolutionizing the field of economics and enriching it with empirical insights about the actual and irrational workings of human behavior patterns. Which is how a psychologist ended up receiving a Nobel prize for economics.

Kahneman introduces his ideas to the public through a fresh perspective that serves as the leitmotif of the book. Our thinking, he argues, is characterized by two modes, or systems, if you will. System 1 is responsible for the quick-and-dirty judgments and conjectures that allow us to instantaneously make sense of the world. When more effort is needed, System 2 snaps into action, and engages in the complex thinking required to solve problems or think outside our cognitive box. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. It does not come into play unless it absolutely must, and it takes an effort to engage. So, our default mode is to slack and allow System 1 to do our work for us. The result is that we generate our opinions about the world in ways that rely on shortcuts, assumptions, stereotypes, overly causal interpretation, and anchors, that are flawed and lead us to making a myriad of mistakes.

Kahneman proceeds by mapping for us, chapter by chapter, a series of these fallacies. Among the heuristics and biases he mentions are the halo effect (forming an opinion of something based on one or two qualities and extrapolating), What-You-See-Is-All-There-Is (WYSIATI – relying on whatever information is available, no matter how flimsy and unreliable), anchoring (linking our assessments to whatever number is thrown out, no matter how improbable), substituting difficult questions for easy ones, ignoring base lines, ignoring regression to the mean, and creating overly causal narratives for things that could be accounted for through pure chance. He then walks us through the impact these fallacies have on professional decision making, and finally through his more recent work on happiness.

The book is fascinating for anyone who is interested in understanding human behavior, but I found its implications for criminal justice policy particularly startling. The insights on flawed rationality can explain not only public punitivism and voter initiatives, but also the flawed behavior of professionals: judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. Here are some of the many examples of possible applications.

A recent Supreme Court decision grappled with the question how to prevent injustices stemming from the prosecution’s failure to comply with the Brady requirement to disclose to the defense “any exculpatory evidence”. The assumption made by the Court is that monetary compensations to exonerees who were wrongfully accused without an opportunity to receive evidence in their favor are only effective when prosecutors acted out of malice. In a paper I presented at a Constitutional Law conference in Chicago, following Kahneman, Tversky, and a solid body of behavioral research, I suggest that many Brady violations may not be attributable to anyone’s fault, but rather to confirmation bias: Prosecutors and defense attorneys simply read evidence differently, and prosecutors, given their professional environment and their pro-government bias and socialization, are less likely to view evidence with an eye toward its exonerative potential. I’m in the process of devising a study to examine the existence and extent of confirmation bias in prosecutorial and defense perception of evidence, as well as its causes.

Another big area where heuristics and biases are important is sentencing. Kahneman’s book is full of examples of flawed decision making due to chance issues. Notably, he cites a series of studies comparing judicial decision making to those of computer algorithms, finding that the computer makes less mistakes. But he also shows how judges making parole decisions tended to be more generous in terms of release immediately after eating, when their ability to access System 2, and their cognitive ease, were at their prime. This is, of course, greatly disturbing, and a factor to keep in mind when thinking of the strong judicial opposition to sentencing guidelines and any form of diminished discretion. Contrary to the bon ton in today’s analysis of the correctional crisis, it may well be that sentencing guidelines and the diminishing discretion of judges were not a fatal decision reached by overzealous punitive right-wingers and misguided left-wingers, but rather a good decision, whose adverse effects are not due to the decrease in judicial discretion, but due to the increase in prosecutorial discretion.

Another important implication of al this risk prediction and algorithms. Kahneman’s experiments strongly support favoring the quantitative tools used by various correctional systems, including CDCR, over the sort of clinical risk assessments popular in the early 20th century. The concern we have with giving machines the power to assess individuals’ risk based on stereotypes may be exaggerated, Kahneman’s work suggests. Humans may make more serious mistakes, and reliance on past predictors of recidivism or parole violations are more reliable than intuitive impressions of trust and sympathy.

An area I find particularly compelling is the study of public punitivism, and prospect theory could have a field day with what we know of this. A decent argument can be made that much of what passes for public decision making in the field of voter initiatives is System 1 work. First, the public’s reliance on “redball crimes” – shocking instances of horrifying, sensationalized crimes, that receive a lot of media attention – is a prime example of WYSIATI. Rather than engaging with statistics that expose the entire picture of crime reality, we rely on what is salient and reported, rather than with what we know to be truer. Moreover, much of the punitive legislation against sex offenders might be an example of substituting difficult questions with easy ones. Rather than thinking what sort of punishment sex offenders deserve, or how many resources to invest in punishing them, or which measures would reduce recidivism, voters may be thinking on how much they dislike sex offenders. A System 1 mechanism of “translating scales” converts the extent of dislike and revulsion to a measure of punishment, and punitive voter initiatives are born and passed as law.

There could be many more examples of possible applications, and I’m happy to entertain some of these in the comments. i just want to add a  final note on the delights of Kahneman’s book: What distinguishes this book from other popular behavioral science books, such as Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is not only its quality–Kahneman respects his readers, does not oversimplify, and happily shares the depth of his intellectual process, which places this book in a class of its own–but the moving, nostalgic tribute it makes to the working partnership and decades-long friendship between him and Tversky. As many friends who have collaborated on research projects know, the relationship between collaborators is unique and special; the curiosity and give-and-take of the work creates a strong bond. The book is a love letter to Tversky and to the two researchers’ community of students and colleagues. One can almost walk side by side with Tversky and Kahneman, listening in on their conversations and debates, witnessing the generation of ideas sparked by their easy, friendly conversations, and feeling the parental warmth of their respect and enthusiasm for the success of their intellectual children and grandchildren: professors, postdocs, and graduate students. It is a pleasure to enjoy this additional dimension on the book, made more poignant by the heartbreak over Tversky’s untimely death at 59 in 1996, six years before the Nobel prize win. And it is a reminder of how important it is to appreciate one’s scientific community, or scientific family, and its contributions to one’s intellectual and emotional life.

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Many thanks to Haim Aviram for our discussions about this post and to Robert Rubin for the recommendation.

Ajami, Part One: Between “Security Crime” and “Ordinary Crime”

As I post this, I am en route to Israel, to participate in the Israeli Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. At the conference, I plan to discuss a recent Israeli-Palestinian film, Ajami. The film examines the complex relationships between Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinian undocumented workers, in the Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa. The plot is incredibly complicated, and throws the heroes of our story into a web of drugs, violence, political turmoil, and neighborly disputes. It is the perfect film for any criminal justice scholar and practitioner who wants or needs a window into the Israeli criminal underworld.

At the talk, I plan to use scenes from Ajami to uncover and dispel two prevalent myths in Israeli criminal justice: The dichotomy between “crime” and “security” and the romanticization of restorative justice. This post will be devoted to the first of those myths.

Israeli newspapers often report of ongoing police investigations, particularly of violent crime, by pointing out whether the investigation is pursuing a “criminal angle” or a “security angle”. The assumption is that these two categories–security crime and ordinary crime–are mutually exclusive, and each requires a different model for understanding and approaching it. These models are different in our perception of them, in our discourse about them, and in the techniques and technologies we apply to them.

“Security crime” is special and takes prevalence over “ordinary crime”. When an act is labeled a “security crime”, it is placed in the context of the permanent state of emergency in Israel. It is seen not just as a threat among criminals or to the “other”, but as a direct threat to “us”, the collective Israeli social fabric. As such, it draws in the army as a primary respondent, as well as the increasingly militarized Israeli police (now governed by the Ministry for Internal Security, rather than its former name, the Ministry of Police). Investigations into security crimes bring to life the dilemma of torturing suspects, supposedly forbidden by the Supreme Court, but alive and well (albeit reduced) according to human rights organizations.

The isolation of security crime above all crime, and the approach that it is somehow special and merits special governing techniques, is a feature of the general, ethnicity-based “divide and conquer” taxonomy Israel applies to its residents and their problems. Among some examples of these approach, we can think of the un-Arabizing of Israeli Druze citizens (some of whom serve in the army as military judges and attorneys); the un-Palestinizing of Israeli Arab citizens; and the supposedly impermeable boundaries between race, religion, and degrees of religiousness.

There are several problems with this rhetoric. The first is that it is false. The Israeli crime map, masterfully exposed and illuminated in Ajami, shows that the distinction between security crime and “ordinary” crime is false. Crime occurs across all categories, and the complex motivations behind the crime cannot be reduced to a national/profit-based dichotomy. In fact, the supposedly impermeable boundaries in society constitute optimal conditions for crime to occur: The Israeli car theft industry flourished due to these boundaries, as seventy percent of all stolen cars in Israel found their way to chop shops in the Palestinian authority. Ironically, what reduced much of this activity was a non-security, specified policing unit dedicated specifically to car theft, and unpreoccupied with the security/crime dichotomy.

Another problem with this dichotomy is that it allows the Israeli public to keep criminal activity compartmentalized and labeled, without making the connections between different types of marginalization. That the occupation creates undocumented labor markets plagued by illness and poverty, which in itself gives rise to “regular crime”, is conveniently hidden from the overt discussion of “security crime”. Moreover, while “security crime”, such as the kidnapping of a soldier, serves a Durkheimian function of galvanizing and uniting us, “ordinary crime”, especially in the context of organized crime or drugs, creates a sense of alienation and indifference. Not only is this harmful to law enforcement efforts, it is harmful to our national psyche. This approach of alienation reminds me of a phenomenon that Darnell Hawkins discusses in the context of African American crime: While crimes perpetrated by Black offenders against White victims are seen as threatening, crimes within the Black community are treated with relative leniency and indifference.

Some of the implications of this dichotomy can be seen in the realm of criminal courtroom practices and sentencing. Research consistently confirms that Arab defendants are treated worse by the Israeli law enforcement system, starting with arrest rates and ending with sentencing. Is this mere ethnic discrimination? Or does it stem from the suspicion that any crime involving an Arab or Palestinian defendant has some security overtones that require attention and special severity?

But one of the most harmful effects of the dichotomy is related to Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime. In the book, Simon argues that one of the perversities of modern society is seeing everything through a lens of crime and victimization. Citizens come to see themselves primarily as potential victims, which affects our modes of living, our choice of vehicles, our recourse to situational crime prevention, and our demonization of cities, urban youth, and the poor. Simon makes the suggestion to shift from models of “war on crime” to “wars” on something else, such as cancer or natural disasters. My critique of Simon’s argument builds on the Israeli experience. As opposed to the U.S. experience, in which crime is a metaphor for anything else, in Israel war in itself is the metaphor, for crime among other things. While the boundaries between “security crime” and “ordinary crime” remain in place, the prestige, urgency and importance of security-related concerns creates a warped social universe in which, to gain priority for one’s issue, the issue needs to be framed in terms of national security. And so, the police becomes increasingly militarized, in discourse as well as in approaches and technologies; and we launch war against environmental pollution, obesity, and other harms that are analogized to the security survival threat. This survivalist approach creates a culture of fear that magnifies, and sometimes exceeds, its counterpart in the United States.

More on this in our next post.

Expanding Operation Boo: Thoughts on the Place of Sex Offenders in a Financially-Strapped System

Today’s news from CDCR are provoking a sigh and a head shake, as we’ve already discussed, ad nauseam, the ridiculous love affair the parole authorities have with Operation Boo here and here. Doesn’t the Division of Adult Operations grow tired of this festival of spook? Is no one critical of the fact that there have been ZERO recorded incidents of molestation during trick-or-treating?

My only comment for this year’s gloomy shaming ritual is this: Sex offenders are the only population who I believe will not benefit from the cost argument. Their lobbying power is, well, nil, and the fact that these baseless operations go on year after year are an indication that the public wants to continue believing that they are all, uniformly, monsters to be monitored and controlled in the face of no evidence whatsoever. We can turn around several important punitive trend, but it’ll be a long time before we reassess the devastation our excessive policies toward a population with extremely low recidivism rates has wreaked on released inmates and their families.

Pelican Bay Hunger Strike, Day 2: Parole, Snitch, or Die

Yesterday’s panel on the Pelican Bay hunger strike featured, among other speakers, the impressive and insightful Keramet Reiter, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley whose dissertation examines the history and development of the supermax. Reiter’s piece Parole, Snitch, or Die, is a concise history and thorough analysis of California’s supermax prisons and their discontents. It makes for an excellent read and I can’t recommend it enough. Using a combination of quantitative data and interviews with CDCR officials, Reiter lays out the process against which the inmates are protesting: the little-studied process of paroling through “snitching” and debriefing.

While, initially, at inception the idea behind the supermax was to handle prison violence by removing gang leaders from general population, this design has gone wrong. There is no evidence of a decline in violence as a result of using supermax incarceration and/or SHU units. Moreover, the isolation was never intended to become indefinite. However, Reiter’s data suggests that “many supermax terms are indefinite, providing few ways out, and. . . the average term is longer than eighteen months at Pelican Bay.” While the maximum lengths of stay in the SHU have declined between 2005 and 2007, the average length has steadily increased.

From its inception, Pelican Bay raised concerns that it would be excessively used. Today, inmates with gang ties are indefinitely assigned to the SHU units. The definition of gang membership is loose and vague, and therefore “the validation process is rather discretionary; any documentation of potentially illegal group activity could lead to gang validation.” Disciplinary offenses, leading to definite terms at the SHU, can range from attempted murder to spitting on an officer.

Has lockup at the SHU reduced violence? Not necessarily, as the data suggests. In fact, comparing levels of violence in Pelican Bay and Corcoran with that of other high-security institutions without supermax units suggests that “the supermax units might actually be aggravating problems with violence.”

There’s a lot more in the piece and I recommend reading it in its entirety. We will continue reporting on the supermax, solitary confinement, and the strike, for the weeks to come.

BART Riots and Police Brutality: More on the Othering of Crime

As I write this post, BART is finally opening its downtown stations, after shutting them down in an effort to curb protests against police violence. What has been referred to in the media as “civil unrest” is yielding broad coverage, not least because of BART’s decision to cut down cellular phone service within its premises. Now that’s what some would call grounds for “civil unrest”.

But back to the topic of protest. So, the stations have been shut down, and it is rush hour. The Chronicle reports:

BART police closed the Civic Center station after at least one protester blocked a door of a Dublin-Pleasanton train for two minutes as others chanted “No justice, no peace.” The train continued east, and a dispersal order was soon issued.


“Once we got to a situation where the BART platform was unsafe, we cleared the station,” said BART Deputy Police Chief Daniel Hartwig, referring to the first closure. “We cannot jeopardize the safety of the patrons or the employees here.”


Some transit riders were infuriated. Jennifer Cohn, an attorney who works downtown, arrived at the Civic Center station at about 6 p.m. with her two sons, ages 3 and 4, after picking them up from day care. She was trying to get home to the Glen Park neighborhood.


With the station closed, she tried to catch a cab, but they seemed to be avoiding the area.


“This is an outrage. We just want to get home,” Cohn said. “I don’t really see why they should be shutting down the stations. If they have an issue with BART, they should go to BART headquarters.”

No, Ms. Cohn; what’s outrageous is that the police shoot innocent people. This “issue” is a prime example of people standing up to police abuse. And there are good reasons for all rush hour commuters to join them, rather than complain. We posted here before about the scathing review of BART police practices in the aftermath of Oscar Grant’s tragic death.

Now, why would Ms. Cohn and other riders be indifferent to this important issue? Could they possibly think that the abuses of force, unfettered discretion, and lack of professionalism at BART are good things? In all likelihood, they have not been paying much attention to the news. Or maybe, like Costelloe, Chiricos and Gertz’s survey subjects, they think that, at the receiving end of police abuse, are only people who deserve such abuse. Thuggish people. Scary people. Gang-y people. People who don’t look or behave like them.

Because, as we all know, if you don’t finish the vegetables off your plate, a cop will come get you. But if you do, no harm will befall you.

I heartily wish to all those perturbed rush-hour BART passengers, that they will never be shot in the back when handcuffed by an officer who was, assuming the best of scenarios, untrained in distinguishing between his gun and his taser (gentle reader, you can assume other scenarios if you prefer.) And that, if by any chance or bad luck, they are ever mistaken by an overzealous cop with poor vision for one of those “other” “bad” people, that others will be willing to stand up for them and raise their voice in protest. Even if it means that a few good, law-abiding citizens get home for dinner fifteen minutes late.

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Many thanks to Kathryn Nettles and Tom Oster for the conversation that inspired this post.

In the Aftermath of Plata: Wrong Releases and Declining Crime

Two big stories, coming in the heels of Brown v. Plata, present a spectrum of issues that should have us occupied in the next few years as California struggles to find its way out of mass incarceration.

The first story appeared in the Los Angeles Times on the very next morning. Apparently, due to a computer error, hundreds of parolees were wrongfully released. The timing of this story is rather peculiar; it coincides not only with the decision, but also with the budget cuts to CDCR and to parole departments in particular. Apropos parole, a proposal for medical parole has begun making the rounds in the legislature.

The second story, featured in yesterday’s Chron, is about the decline in violent crime in California, which, in accordance with the national trend, has fallen to a 44-year low. As many experts have demonstrated, this decline has very little to do with incarceration, and is the outcome of various longitudinal developments unrelated to the administration of justice.