Release Party for Yesterday’s Monsters

Hi, Dear Readers! My new book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole is out from UC Press and I am inviting you to celebrate!

When: Wednesday, March 11

Where: Manny’s, Valencia & 16th

What:

In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.

Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Book reading, signing, parole reform, food, drink!

RSVP HERE!

Nonexistent Reentry in CA: When People Are Duped Into Thinking It’s All Their Fault

The opening chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish compares two penal scenes: the drawing and quartering of a regicide and a drab scene from a discipline-heavy juvenile facility, 80 years later. These scenes are emblematic of the change Foucault sees in punishment: from centralized to decentralized, from a “festival of punishment” to drab things behind closed doors, and most importantly–from body to soul. I read this stuff for the first time about twenty years ago, and its enchantment has worn off; I’m pretty clear on the fact that the move from corporal punishment to incarceration was overall a good one. But there are some days when the “soul” element of punishment is especially hard to stomach, especially when it consists of selling justice-involved people the lie that the only cause for their miseries lies in their own action.

I was outraged, albeit not surprised, to read this distressing exposé on Mother Jones. The gist of it is that our enthusiasm for early releases has not been matched by an enthusiasm to actually help people get on their feet after they are released. It opens with a typical–and horrendous–story:

After 15 long years behind bars, Terah Lawyer needed to show the parole board she had somewhere lined up to live. She landed a spot in a facility on Treasure Island and was so grateful to be out that at first she didn’t mind being forced to spend dozens of hours a week in treatment classes for a substance abuse problem she didn’t have, and in fact, as a drug and alcohol counselor, was certified to teach about. But quickly, the program’s strict schedule and tough restrictions, like lockdowns on holidays and limited free time, got in the way of adjusting to real life. Before she left prison, she’d worked hard to secure a job with the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, but her facility’s rules forced her to delay her start date three months, and she lost the opportunity. Most painfully, the program’s structure made it hard to visit with her parents, who lived a couple hours north in Sacramento.  

Once she was finally able to start working, she’d leave the house at 7 a.m., work a full day, and get back in time for the hour-and-a-half class at night. “I was required to still bring in 21 hours of treatment classes in order for me to get my weekend passes to go home, to go shopping, to go out with family or friends, to do things that are considered freedom,” she explains. “It was really difficult being able to hold down a full-time job, which is thankfully now giving me an income, and also meet the program’s requirements of classes that I didn’t even need in the first place.”

Lawyer’s experience reminded me of participant observations I did at the Peer Reentry Navigation Network (PRNN), a group of former lifers now making a life for themselves on the outside that meets monthly in San Francisco, run jointly by an activist who is formerly incarcerated and by a parole officer. The day I was there, everyone talked about housing. In Yesterday’s Monsters I described the conversation:

After a round of advice and information about housing and smartphone tutorials, Cara, a young woman, steps to the front of the room to facilitate an activity. She distributes blank pages and invites attendees to draw a picture frame on the page. She then asks us to write or draw a picture of what success means to us. We work in silence, occasionally sneaking a peek at our neighbors’ work and smiling at them. Cara then invites the audience to share. “Being able to provide for my family.” “Having a job, a stable place to live.” “Finding someone to love and someone who loves me.” One woman shares, “I want two dogs and a Mercedes.” Cara laughs. The woman jokingly adds, “What? You wanted us to define success. Well, that’s what success means to me.”

Then Cara gives us the “bad news”: If you are not actively working to direct your life toward those goals, then perhaps you don’t really want them. For example, she says, if you want to save enough money for a down payment on a house but you end up buying shoes and flashy outfits, then maybe you are not really that driven to be a homeowner. You must pursue your goals with real ferocity, she says.

For many of the people in the room, homeownership in aggressively gentrified San Francisco is a pipe dream. Since the rise of the tech industry, housing in the city has become prohibitively expensive, both for owners and for renters. Even so-called low-income housing requires a considerable income, as well as jumping through multiple bureaucratic hoops. Joe acknowledges these difficulties but encourages attendees to overcome them. “If you want to apply,” he says, “I will help you. We’ll work on your applications together.” It might take sixty applications, he says, but eventually one will succeed. 

My ambivalence grows. On one hand, I admire the spirit of enterprise, mutual aid, and community strength in the room. I recognize the importance of self-focused success and of belief in free agency. On the other, I’m sure that my fellow attendees have learned all too well in the course of their lives that, despite their best efforts, the reentry deck is heavily stacked against them. I recall Alessandro de Giorgi’s recently released subjects who attributed their immense difficulties and abject poverty to their own failings rather than to the systemic difficulties that stood in their way.

There is something maddening about people being led to be convinced that their own flaws are the only thing standing between them and their dreams, but that very message is what the so-called prison rehabilitation apparatus, and particularly the parole hearing process, tries to sell people on a regular basis. When my colleague Alessandro de Giorgi interviewed formerly incarcerated people who faced acute misery at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (no home; no job; no food), he was struck by how much they attributed their poverty, squalor, and dire need to their own flaws. He explains:

Today, whatever minimal services are available to former prisoners are provided mostly through the non-profit, faith-based, semi-private sector, what Jennifer Wolch (1990, 201) has aptly defined as an emergent shadow state: a “para-state apparatus with collective service responsibilities previously shouldered by the public sector, administered outside traditional democratic politics, but yet controlled in both formal and informal ways by the state.” In this framework, highly individualistic and market-friendly solutions are systematically proposed as the only answers to a broad range of structural obstacles faced by formerly incarcerated people: At every turn in their trajectories through the carceral state, from arrest to reentry, criminalized people are taught that success or failure is entirely dependent upon their own efforts.

But here’s the really depressing bit:

Despite the weight of the structural circumstances they face, the participants to this research appear to have internalized the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility that is constantly inculcated in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and reentry programs (see also Gowan & Whetstone 2012; Miller 2014; Werth 2012, 2016). They wholeheartedly embrace the dominant rhetoric of free choice, as well as hegemonic definitions of social deservingness and undeservingness. 

In other words, de Giorgi’s subjects themselves believe that the ills that they face when they reenter are their own fault, because they don’t deserve better, and do not seem to see any institutional problem here (when he presented this piece at our Carceral Studies Workgroup, he astutely observed that people do have racial critiques a-la-Michelle Alexander, but not an understanding of class.)

In Yesterday’s Monsters I saw this propaganda apparatus at work: people who see their crimes in a broader social context are chastised for “minimizing.” Here’s an example from the book, in which Patricia Krenwinkel, in the 1980s, tries to frame her crime in the context of the sixties:

It came up about ’65. It was the beginning of the marches. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement. It was the beginning of all the movements of the late sixties, which eventually involved entering the war. . . . I found that I couldn’t seem to find my bearings in this world at that time. . . . I couldn’t seem to find where there was any, on my own—seem to find any reinforcement for doing anything other than kind of letting myself go with the time of what at that time was tune-in and drop-out, as Timothy Leary so put it. I mean, it’s hard to say. There were so many components. I was a child of the sixties. And there definitely is something to be said about the sixties. It was an incredible time in the period of our history. It’s something that I look back on and I see, because there’s thousands of people out there that were not much different than myself.

The prosecutor, Stephen Kay, responds with an astounding lack of empathy and contextual comprehension:

I feel that it’s kind of hard for me to accept Miss Krenwinkel’s statement that she was a child of the sixties, and there were thousands of others like her out there in the sixties. I myself went to law school at Berkeley during the time of Mario Savio and could observe some of these children of the sixties. And they characterized themselves as flower children. Their slogan was “make love, not war.” They weren’t into murdering people.

Pretty much any reasonable criminologist you’ll meet will tell you that crime is a combination of personal and environmental factors (including what gets defined as crime.) How much of each gets poured into the mix varies across crimes; this is why talking about both drug use and violent assaults as “crime” can be confusing. But you’d have to be extremely naive to assume that crime doesn’t have an ontological existence (some abolitionists in the 1970s advanced this view), just as you’d have to be pretty obtuse and cruel to assume that crime is entirely a function of personal pathology. If it were, why are poor people overrepresented in the criminal justice apparatus?

A lot of the highfalutin’ critical criminology from the last few years uses the term “neoliberalism” to mean a hypercapitalist, highly privatized environment in which people are expected to take responsibility for themselves, with no welfarist contribution from the state. Kicking people out of prison to fend for themselves without any veritable programming designed to put them on their feet–and with an astonishing paucity of solid vocational training behind bars in preparation for life outside–is a manifestation of this neoliberal ideology, and what’s more–this mentality is successful and pervasive because it dupes not only the professionals who administer it, but also the people who are subjected to it. 

People with Felony Records Approved to Serve on Juries in CA

KTVU reports:

The California Legislature approved “The Right to a Jury of Your Peers,” allowing people with a prior felony conviction to serve on juries in California for the first time. 

Current California law excludes from jury service people who may have had a graffiti conviction when they were 18 or a marijuana conviction from high school.  

Under SB 310, those with a felony record would be eligible to serve on a jury, unless the person is on parole or probation, or a registered sex offender for a felony conviction.

Here’s the text of SB 310, which suggests that there’s now an overlap between voting and serving on juries–with the exception of registered sex offenders.

CA Bar Hangs Red Scarlet Letters on Its Members

I just saw this absolutely horrible story on the Mercury news. It’s ridiculously headlined, “Is Your Lawyer a Crook?” And goes on to tell us:

What do you call up to 10 percent of lawyers in California? 

Convicted criminals. 

And that’s no rotten-lawyer joke. 

That’s the eye-popping new estimate by the agency that licenses them.
Of California’s 190,000 active attorneys, as many as 19,000 may have unreported criminal activity, from DUIs to more serious offenses, according to the State Bar of California. 

For the first time in California, all active lawyers will have to submit to having their fingerprints live-scanned or taken the old-fashioned way rby April 30 of next year under the plan the state Supreme Court is expected to approve in the coming weeks. The prints will be fed into the state Department of Justice’s database, and previous convictions will be reported to the Bar — as well as all future arrests. 

“If you have an attorney convicted, let’s say of fraud, you would want to know it,” said Leah T. Wilson, the Bar’s executive director, adding that the proposal evolved as Bar starts to “pay more attention to our public protection mission.”

Gosh, it’s almost as if Leah T. Wilson doesn’t really believe that the California criminal justice system is tasked with… what’s the word? Rehabilitation.

I speak from experience. As a law professor in California I teach hundreds of people every year. Given the high percentage of Californians that we incarcerate, inevitably some of my students have criminal records and have spent some time behind bar. As a consequence, they face an uphill battle with their moral character application, a component of their application to the bar. The application requires complete honesty, about expunged records as well as live ones, and undergoes an extreme degree of scrutiny, which people sometimes have to explain in letters and in hearings at the bar court. I’ve now testified in two bar trials and written four letters of recommendations on behalf of people with criminal records who want to be admitted or readmitted to the bar.

The bias, stigma, and ignorance–not just of the public, but of the bar itself–is breathtaking. At the bar trials in which I testified, I experienced what could only be described as a mediocre community theatre production of a morality tale. Grown people, who have matured and learned from their mistakes, have to recite their contrition. Parole and gubernatorial decisions to release people after decades of introspection and remorse are doubted and ridiculed. Skeletons are dragged out of closets to haunt people for mistakes they did as juveniles.

Honestly, after undergoing the tribulations of punishment in California, sometimes the wringer of repeated parole hearings (and gubernatorial reversals,) and on top of that, the moral character ordeal at the bar, anyone left standing is bound to be so much more thoughtful, reflective, and humble, than various so-called “moral characters” without a criminal record. Anyone with a substance abuse problem would have had time to sort it out and would be so much more mature about it than some so-called “moral character” who is still drinking or snorting, but whose record is squeaky clean. I would so much prefer to have someone from the former category as my lawyer than someone from the latter. But the general public, who is woefully misinformed by articles such as this one about who is a “crook” and who isn’t, would not necessarily make that choice, and that is a horrible injury to do to someone, not to mention a horrible privacy violation.

This also raises the issue of the elitism of the profession. We disproportionately incarcerate folks of fewer means and darker skins. As a consequence, our population of lawyers with criminal records is likely to include a disproportionate percentage of people who came to the profession from humble backgrounds. If we also put additional barriers on their gainful employment in the way of revealing their personal and private histories to potential clients, we are just deepening that elitism.

The problem, of course, is not only with this atrocious decision of the CA bar to injure its own members; it is with the kind of journalistic reporting that makes this into salacious gossip material. Who the hell uses the word “crook” as a euphemism for a criminal record, like something out of a Damon Runyon short story? And who the hell uses lawyer jokes to talk about people who have gone through so much to redeem themselves and find a professional future?

Does rehabilitation actually mean anything to the bar, when it decides to admit folks back to its ranks and then backstabs them by reducing their employment prospects? This is not a move that “protects the public.” This is elitism, bigotry, and ignorance.

From “Nothing Works” to “Something Works”

This morning, the Guardian is covering a great vocational program in Southern California called Manifest Works, “an immersive workforce development and job placement organization; we turn real-world experience into learning opportunities for those impacted by foster care, homelessness, and incarceration.” From the Guardian story:

One of the most common entry points into the entertainment industry is as a production assistant, or PA. The PA might get coffee, run electrical cords, or break down the set; the job’s chameleonic nature makes it a behind-the-scenes linchpin. Manifest Works, a not-for-profit based in Los Angeles, ties the hustle of a PA job to its training program for people affected by incarceration, homelessness and foster care. Some participants had been out of prison as little as three months.

Williams spoke softly and deliberately, rocking back and forth in his crisp white sneakers. He applied to the program after an alum recommended him. He was doing security before that. “Not what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “This is giving me an opportunity to pursue something closer to what I wanted for myself.”

He still wasn’t sure what on-set role he’d like most. “Everybody wants to be the director,” he said, knowingly.

California, as the country’s most populous state, has one of its highest prison populations, and the highest population of people on probation or parole. It is also home to the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry.

A 2017 study in the Economic Journal evaluated the career trajectories of 1.7 million people released from California prisons between 1993 and 2008, and concluded that, while employment curbs recidivism among the released, the quality of opportunities may be more important than the quantity available.

Sixty-three people have completed the Manifest Works program since it began in fall 2014. Many have established steady freelance careers doing production work. No alum has gone back to prison.

What do they mean by “quality of opportunities?” The study referred to in the Guardian story is by Kevin Schnepel, an economist from the University of Sydney and you can find it here. The abstract reads:

I estimate the impact of employment opportunities on recidivism among 1.7 million offenders released from a California prison between 1993 and 2008. The institutional structure of the California criminal justice system as well as location, skill, and industry-specific job accession data provide a unique framework for identifying a causal effect of job availability on criminal behaviour. I find that increases in construction and manufacturing opportunities at the time of release are associated with significant reductions in recidivism. Other types of opportunities, including those characterised by lower wages that are typically accessible to individuals with criminal records, do not influence recidivism.

This kind of careful study is exactly what we need to counter the despair of the “nothing works” legacy. Because of the dramatic cuts to rehabilitation and vocational programs, which I discuss in Cheap on Crime, opportunities in California prisons really vary. San Quentin benefits from its proximity to the Bay Area, which guarantees an influx of volunteers–but are they programs they offer really effective? More importantly, why are opportunities in construction and manufacturing more important in curbing recidivism than opportunities in other fields, such as service?

A few things come to mind: construction and manufacturing are opportunities that structure one’s day in addition to providing an income. It’s easier to stay the course when you have to be somewhere and perform a job that shows tangible improvement (i.e., putting together a kitchen or producing X gadgets.) They are also jobs that, in the right setting, can provide camaraderie, and have fairly strong unions. But who knows if this is true? To understand why some job opportunities are more effective, we’d need to interview formerly incarcerated folks who are employed in these jobs and ask them about their day and their thoughts about this.

In any case, it’s important for prisons to follow up on studies such as Schnepel’s and on the success of programs such as Manifest Works. Resources are limited, and they need to be invested where they’d yield real results.

Reform and Unintended Consequences: The Case of Ban the Box

In early February, Malcolm Feeley won the President’s Award from Western Society of Criminology. It was a real treat to be able to recognize and reward, if only modestly, all he has been and done for me over the years with a mentorship award, and even more of a treat to hear him give a breakfast keynote titled The Failures of the Adversarial Process. In his talk, Malcolm revisited some of his arguments from Court Reform on Trial, and made the sobering observation that, where criminal justice reform is concerned, failure is the norm; it is the occasional success that should surprise us. Malcolm ascribes this to the structural/organizational context in which the reforms happen, and to the underpinnings of racism and hypercapitalism; according to him, the criminal process is in a constant state of market failure, and it’s only outside innovators that have to bail us out once in a while (seems like this is what this new PAC is trying to do.)

I was thinking about Malcolm’s wise words today, when I was invited to an event to support Ban the Box. As my regular readers probably recall, I’d been fighting for Ban the Box for a long time, until finding out in 2015, to my dismay, that it has had disastrous unintended consequences.

I was speaking at a conference in Sacramento when I ran into the good folks from the Urban Institute, whom no one would suspect of being cryptofascist double agents, and talked to them about this. When they mentioned the findings of this study I was beside myself with disillusionment and shock. Essentially, what they found is that, when criminal record information is unavailable to progressive employers, they tend to discriminate against young men of color–possibly because they see race as a proxy for criminal history (which, in itself, is sometimes used as a proxy for race. Sick, sad world.) In their words:

Research on ban the box has shown that it increases callback rates for people with criminal records (Agan and Starr 2016). Agan and Starr (2016) find that ban-the-box policies “effectively eliminate” the effect of having a criminal record on receiving a callback. Case studies from specific cities support these results, showing that hiring rates for people with criminal records increased after ban the box was implemented (Atkinson and Lockwood 2014; Berracasa et al. 2016). Additionally, ban the box as a social movement has drawn attention to the plight of people with criminal records and has increased awareness of the challenges they face beyond employment.

But recent research has concluded that ban the box also reduces the likelihood that employers call back or hire young black and Latino men (Agan and Starr 2016; Doleac and Hansen 2016). These findings suggest that when information about a person’s criminal history is not present, employers may make hiring decisions based on their perception of the likelihood that the applicant has a criminal history. Racism, harmful stereotypes, and disparities in contact with the justice system may heavily skew perceptions against young men of color.

Several other studies have found similar outcomes. So, I’m no longer on the Ban the Box bandwagon. But what should we do instead? The Urban Institute team runs us through some options and their pros and cons:

My grim conclusion, inspired by Malcolm’s talk, is that as long as we have the nexus race-crime so embedded in the conversation (read Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book to figure out where this came from) nothing we try to devise to avoid discrimination will get rid of it entirely.

The Courage to Reach Out: Why Addressing Violent Criminals Is Better for All of Us

The classic approach toward violent crime that scares us has been to ratchet up sentencing. But draconian sentences do not function well as deterrents of crime. General deterrence is a function of three factors: the severity of the sentence, the certainty of getting caught, and the speed at which justice is administered. The Achilles’ heel of this trifecta is the certainty factor. It is often very difficult to get witnesses to come forward and testify against perpetrators of violent crime, and this is partly why a third of U.S. homicides remain unsolved. Often, the police and prosecution has some notion of the perpetrator’s identity, but not enough evidence to bring charges against him or her. Even the most aggressive prosecution or the most severe sentences won’t result in getting the person off the street, and certainly not of making us safer (though they will, and do, result in clogging our prisons.) And of course, the goal is not (or should not be) putting people behind bars for incarceration’s sake. We all benefit so much more if we prevent homicides from happening in the first place.

Which is why the City of Sacramento is ready to try something new. Following the example of the City of Richmond, Sacramento is investing in a new initiative, known as Advance Peace.

Advance Peace focuses specifically on gun violence, and on the evidence-backed premise that, typically, a small number of perpetrators are responsible for a considerable percentage of the gun violence in a city. This is true for both Richmond and Sacramento: in the latter, the police estimate that there are fifty easily identified people who commit most gun crimes in the city–even though there isn’t necessarily evidence against them that would stick in court. The program consists of personalized, early intervention with these particular individuals, providing them with mentoring and opportunity, and diverting them away from gun violence. In the program’s words:

Advance Peace interrupts gun violence in American urban neighborhoods by providing transformational opportunities to young men involved in lethal firearm offenses and placing them in a high-touch, personalized fellowship.

By working with and supporting a targeted group of individuals at the core of gun hostilities, Advance Peace bridges the gap between anti-violence programming and a hard-to-reach population at the center of violence in urban areas, thus breaking the cycle of gun hostilities and altering the trajectory of these men’s lives.

Advance Peace works with both public and community-based stakeholders to establish responsive community-driven strategies that achieve high-impact outcomes for those caught in the cycle of urban gun violence.

The Richmond program, which has been in place since 2010, has been a success. Between 2010 and 2016, homicides in Richmond fell 60% (77% according to NPR, but there’s been a little uptick in 2017). This is more than twice–and almost thrice–the decline that other cities have seen. In addition, out of the 84 fellows who started the program in 2010, 94% are alive, 83% have had no gun injuries or hospitalization, and 77% have not been suspected of any gun activity. This is remarkable given the program’s focus specifically on people who were active participants in the gun violence scene in the city.

Sacramento is hoping to see the same benefits, but the program is not without its detractors. As usual, the objection is not scientific but moral/political: the program involves stipends to the perpetrators, and “rewarding bad boys” is a controversial move when the money could be used to reward “good boys.”

Municipalities always operate in an environment of limited resources. Giving money to suspected gun criminals takes it away from education, infrastructure, and health care, which feels understandably unfair. But when allocating money, “what’s fair” should not be the only, or perhaps even the dominant consideration. Where would the money spent on this program make us safer?

To answer this, we need to widen our perspective to understand a debate raging in the last few years about the causes of incarceration. The story we have told ourselves for decades–I’m guilty of this as well–places the blame for mass incarceration on the racialized war on drugs. According to this story, popularized by Michelle Alexander to the point that it’s difficult to argue with laypeople about it, Nixon and Reagan targeted people of color, incarcerating them for nonviolent offenses for unconscionably long periods of time, leading to the explosion of prison population and especially to its racial distribution.

But recently, John Pfaff has drawn our attention to the fact that the bulk of incarcerated people in America are doing time for violent crime. Adam Gopnik summarizes Pfaff’s argument as follows:

During the great wave of incarceration—generally thought to have begun around 1980, and cresting about three decades later—state prisons added something like a million inmates, with about “half that growth coming from locking up more people convicted of violence,” Pfaff calculates. Nonviolent drug offenses accounted for only around a fifth of the new incarcerations.

What’s more, many of the drug convictions were meant to be what Pfaff calls “pretextual attacks on violence.” Violent crimes that are associated with drug dealing are more difficult to prosecute than drug offenses themselves, which usually involve hard evidence rather than the testimony of witnesses. This argument sets off some suspicious-skeptical alarms, since it seems cousin to the idea that we might as well lock ’em up for drugs as for anything else, since, if we didn’t, “they” would be committing violent offenses anyway. “It is, of course, completely fair to debate the morality . . . of using drug charges to tackle underlying violence,” Pfaff observes, to his credit. He accepts that “blacks are systematically denied access to the more successful paths to economic stability,” and therefore “face systematically greater pressure to turn to other alternatives.” But he also makes a more complicated argument, following recent sociological research: it’s not that the prohibition of drugs attracts crime, which then produces violence; it’s that violence thrives among young men deprived of a faith in their own upward mobility, making drug dealing an attractive business. In plain English, young men without a way out of poverty turn to gangs, and gangs always turn to violence. Since efficient drug dealing is, by its illicit nature, likely to involve violence, those accustomed to violence are drawn to drug dealing. One sees the logic: Lucky Luciano and Al Capone weren’t ambitious street kids who chose bootlegging as a business, and were then compelled to become gangsters to pursue it, as in “Boardwalk Empire.” They were already cadet gangsters, who saw that their acquired skills lined up neatly with those demanded by bootlegging.

Pfaff’s conclusion from the data is that the responsibility for mass incarceration lies primarily with county prosecutors. The answer should, according to him, be a more parsimonious prosecutorial policy, avoiding overcharging even in violent offenses, which are, after all, not made of the same cloth. But what if instead of modifying prosecutorial policies after bad things happen we were to try and remedy the problem of lack of alternatives before the violence occurs?

This is exactly the rationale of programs like Advance Peace. By providing people who are at the very heart of violent behavior an opportunity to exit the violent world, we could provide more safety to more people, and at the same time target incarceration where it really matters.

To go down this path, we have to be courageous enough to understand that, ultimately, the city of Sacramento stands to benefit so much more from a reduction of violence–both in terms of preventing the violent incidents in the first place and in terms of reducing the costs of clogging the system with efforts to prosecute the targeted folks–than it would from the business-as-usual lock-’em-up policy. People who commit violent offenses are often caught for low-level drug offenses, and they will eventually leave prison more violent and less conducive to interventions than when they came in, and even if they are caught for homicide and placed in prison, we will all have to keep up the tab. If people do not commit crime to begin with, we all win. This may not be “fair”–to the extent that offering people opportunities that they’ve been deprived of their whole lives, pushing them to violence, is “unfair”–but it turns out to work better than the alternative.

I’m excited and happy to partner with the City of Sacramento to offer an expanded, data-rich version of this argument as a keynote speaker in their upcoming violence reduction summit. I hope to see many of you there.

November 2016 Ballot: Yes on 57

My colleagues and I at UC Hastings made a series of neutral, informational videos about the propositions on the November ballot. Here’s the one about Prop 57:

For readers of this blog, I’m also making endorsements. It should be a resounding YES on 57, and here’s why.

The first part of Prop. 57 is a no-brainer: who do you trust more with the decision to prosecute juveniles in adult court–a judge after a fitness hearing or a prosecutor? We’ve trusted prosecutors since we adopted Prop. 21 in 2000. We’re talking about thousands of cases here, but even one case of a young person unnecessarily doing time in an environment full of older people should be avoided. What we know about juveniles in adult institutions (which is not a lot, because it’s difficult to study) is disconcerting: suicide rates and vulnerability to abuse, assaults, and victimization. Moreover, when this decision is left to prosecutors, there are big differences between the different counties. Juvenile offenders should not be political pawns.

The second part requires a bit more unpacking, but also turns out to be a no-brainer. A typical felony sentence in California consists of the basic sentence for the offense plus a series of “enhancements” added in bills and voter initiatives over the years. Our determinate sentencing allow for people’s release from state prison after they complete most of their entire sentence, including the enhancements–which can sometimes double or even triple the original sentence. Most folks don’t come up for a parole hearing: California holds parole hearings only for lifers.

If Prop. 57 passes, some version of parole hearing will be returned to the system and applied to non-lifers as well. The idea is to award nonviolent felons doing time in prison (not a big population since Realignment and Prop 47) a parole hearing after their base sentence is completed. The proposition requires that CDCR adopt regulations about rehabilitation programming and the worth of doing programs in “good credit” days that count toward early release. So, while its target population isn’t big and some of the details on how exactly these parole hearings will be held are still obscure, a few things are clear: This will not result in more incarceration, and it will award release to people whose records show them to be rehabilitated. At worst, it’ll be an ineffectual proposition (albeit not a harmful one). But if implemented correctly, it could liberate some folks from the Byzantine maze of enhancements that leads to truly ridiculous sentences.

Some voters might be wondering whether Prop. 57 violates the single subject rule. The best two readings I can recommend on this are Michael Gilbert’s 2006 paper and his excellent 2011 followup. Using an ingenious research design, Gilbert finds that our natural tendency is not to enforce this rule when proposition are more or less on the same topic. His analysis with Robert Cooter also suggests that there’s positive value in “bundling” similar issues in one proposition.

The “bundling” of juvenile and parole here is relatively benign. Remember Marsy’s Law in 2009? The one where you thought you voted to support victims and you actually voted to extend the period between parole hearings? This one’s not like that. These two issues make the system more deliberative and personalized, things of which we could use more, and if well implemented can save lives (and dollars.) So, vote yes on 57.

Film Review: Ant-Man

Future posts will definitely feature some of these interesting things, but today I want to talk about the movie I saw on the flight to DC: Marvel Comics’ Ant-Man. This is not an indie documentary for bleeding-heart progressives who can wax poetic about the prison industrial complex. It’s a mainstream movie, featuring CGI animation, superpowers, gloom, doom, and beautiful people, and as such it is remarkable, because it represents what the filmmakers think the mainstream is open to seeing and accepting onscreen. And what it shows them is a skewed and flawed, and yet refreshing, slice of incarceration and reentry in the Bay Area.
Set in San Francisco, the film’s hero, Scott Lang, starts his journey in prison—notably, not a generic, imagined institution, but an imagined version of the very real San Quentin. And it’s a very different cinematic San Quentin than the one in which Oscar Grant spends an important scene in Fruitvale Station; one that resembles Justice Scalia’s dark fantasies more than it resembles the actual prison we know. Scott’s first scene in Ant-Man sees him engage in a violent fight with another inmate. The many spectators, as well as Scott’s adversary, are large, black, muscular men. But then, the tension breaks, and it becomes obvious that Scott is on friendly terms with his adversary; we are told that this is some sort of rite of passage in honor of Scott’s impending release. Smiling, Scott says to his fellow inmates, “you have strange rituals.”
“You”, not “us”; because early on it is fairly clear that Scott is a special sort of inmate, one for which filmgoers will feel sympathy: he is a conventionally good-looking white man, armed with graduate education (a master’s degree in electric engineering), and his criminal history is that of a high-level hack for the morally allowable purpose of redistributing wealth. In short, Scott is a non-non-non if there ever was one, and we all root for him as he is released—be it because he terms out or because of Realignment.
But even with this relatively privileged starting point, Scott finds it difficult to cope outside. We see him shack up with friends, all of whom are formally incarcerated, and expressing hope of finding a suitable job soon. But his hopes are shattered: he manages to obtain an entry-level job at Baskin Robbins, where he is summarily fired by an unfeeling boss. Not for smart-mouthing a client (which he does, and which would be unthinkable to, say, an uneducated man of color competing for unskilled labor positions); for having a criminal history. Ban the Box, apparently, only gets one through the door; it doesn’t keep him there. And this is a crisis for Scott, who has to provide for, and win back the right to visit, his young daughter. His ex-wife is engaged to a cop, and both of them think of Scott as the deadbeat dad he is. We, however, know better; we’re rooting for Scott, and that’s partly because we haven’t been exposed to his ex-wife’s travails through his trial and incarceration. But we also learn a lesson: when someone is saddled with a criminal record and a history of incarceration, all the whiteness and the education in the world won’t help. It almost goes without saying that this message is deeply flawed. Race, class, and education make a big difference in reentry—as does another thing Scott has going for him, a supportive family. But it drives home the heavy penalty of incarceration and a criminal history with regard to someone with whom some middle-class moviegoers might identify.
It is this economic desperation, rather than a personality flaw, that leads Scott back into crime with his housemates—all of whom, except for him, are either men of color or immigrants with heavy accents. The film plays fast and loose with stereotypes, which is par for the course for sidekicks in a comic book. They are capable men, but they are capable in limited ways, and only as assistants to Scott, whose competence and ability are played up in the sophisticated heist they plan. The film occasionally takes pleasure in breaking these stereotypes; Luis’s unfocused chatter and confused narratives include references to his visits to a museum and enjoyment of Mark Rothko oils. But even when doing so, the Bay Area scenes that fly before our eyes as Luis describes the potential heist place him squarely within the imagined East Bay working class colorful subculture of dive bars, bikers, chicks and shady contacts. Luis has the info and the contacts, but he is not the brain of the operation.
The scenes depicting the heist planning elevate Scott and his accomplices to the coveted status of garage startup techies, and it is this subtle analogy that portrays them at their most competent and heroic. This nod to Silicon Valley reminded me of The Last Mile and other programs encouraging the involvement of folks of low income and education in the tech world upon their release. The film makes it clear, though, that reentry is not kind to any of our heroes, and if they are to make their way in the world, they must do so themselves. And so, their entrepreneurship is modeled after the “innovate first, ask questions later” model of South Bay, and sold as admirable and competent.
As viewers of the film know, the heist goes awry, and a chain of events is set in motion that sets Scott up to becoming “ant man”: a superhero capable of shrinking to the size of an ant. The adventure, villains, goals, and betrayals, are fairly predictable for the genre. What is less predictable, and surprisingly touching, is the ant metaphor, and how it connects to the incarceration and reentry theme from the movie.
Ants are eusocial insects. They are indistinguishable from each other. The inventor who employs Scott refers to them by numbers, not by names. When Scott complains, the inventor explains, “they are just numbers; do you have any idea how many ants they are?” We treat ants, apparently, the way we treat people in total institutions; we see them as a population, not as individuals deserving of life, health, and happiness. But Scott, reduced to the size of an ant, sees them as individuals, and names one of them Anthony. He learns from the inventor’s daughter how to control the ants with his mind by becoming part of the eusocial structure. Thus, the ants’ impersonality and collective organization is their great advantage. When one is struck down, ten rise in its stead (in fact, Anthony is struck in one of the final raids; Scott regrets it, but hops over and rides another ant in its stead). And together, because of their commitment to the collective wellbeing of the community, they are invincible.
It is notable that the penultimate scene in the movie marshals some of the laughable stereotypes for the beginning to marshal the ant metaphor of community and apply it to the formerly incarcerated. Luis tells a convoluted story yet again; but the bottom line of the story is that an indirect contact wants Scott to join the Avengers: “We need a guy that shrinks”. It is through this informal Bay Area network that an opportunity awaits our superhero. Because, like ants, the people who exit our prisons may look to policymakers, jailers, and employers all the same, and it might be easy to discount them—but when they look out for each other and act collectively, that is the source of their strength.

College Education Grants for Inmates Restored


Pell grants for inmates pursuing college education, which were terminated during the Clinton administration, have been renewed! The Wall Street Journal reports:

The plan, set to be unveiled Friday by the secretary of education and the attorney general, would allow potentially thousands of inmates in the U.S. to gain access to Pell grants, the main form of federal aid for low-income college students. The grants cover up to $5,775 a year in tuition, fees, books and other education-related expenses.

Prisoners received $34 million in Pell grants in 1993, according to figures the Department of Education provided to Congress at the time. But a year later, Congress prohibited state and federal prison inmates from getting Pell grants as part of broad anticrime legislation, leading to a sharp drop in the number of in-prison college programs. Supporters of the ban contended federal aid should only go to law-abiding citizens.

Between the mid-1990s and 2013, the U.S. prison population doubled to about 1.6 million inmates, many of them repeat offenders, Justice Department figures show. Members of both parties—including President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—have called for a broad examination of criminal justice, such as rewriting sentencing guidelines.

A 2013 study by the Rand Corp. found that inmates who participated in education programs, including college courses, had significantly lower odds of returning to prison than inmates who didn’t.

Some congressional Democrats have proposed lifting the ban. Meanwhile, administration officials have indicated they would use a provision of the Higher Education Act that gives the Education Department the authority to temporarily waive rules, such as the Pell-grant ban, as part of an experiment to study their effectiveness.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are expected to announce the program, which likely would last three to five years to yield data on recidivism rates, at a prison in Jessup, Md., on Friday. Key details aren’t yet clear, such as which institutions and what types of convicts would be allowed to participate.

I really like this administration’s focus on rehabilitation and return-on-investment strategies. I hope Obama will manage to accomplish as much as possible in this arena before the election in 2016.