Book Review: Prison Profiteers, Edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright

Many books and articles decrying mass imprisonment use the term “prison industrial complex”, and many of us know that it refers to the financial aspects of incarcerating a population of immense scale. Many of us also know about the for profit business of private prisons and its many ills. But few are privy to the nitty gritty aspects of the prison industry.

The edited collection Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration fills this gap with a distressing collection of snapshots of the prison industry. Herivel and Wright did an excellent job of picking authors with intimate knowledge of the crevices of the financial machine behind mass incarceration, and the essays illuminate aspects that, even to those of us who study prisons, often remain unseen.

The essays in the first part of the book, The Political Economy of Prisons, provide a general background to prison finance, explicating (in Kevin Pranis’ essay) the mechanism of bond finance and the collaboration between banks and local governments that leads to opaque, disturbing financial deals that remain hidden from, and thus uncriticized by, the public. Jennifer Gonnerman’s discussion of “million dollar blocks,” that is, neighborhood blocks the incarceration of whose residents costs the nation untold amounts of money, calls for a different distribution of funds – to invest them in the neighborhoods that yield prison population in the first place, rather than in the distant prison. The distance between prisons and the communities of origin of inmates is illuminated in Gary Hunter and Peter Wagner’s discussion of the impact of prisons on the census, and the detrimental effect that a a large population of non-voting, non-deciding citizens has on the democratic process and on local government funding. Clayton Mosher et al provide data that refutes the assumption that cities that agree to build prisons in their midst fare better economically. And Paul Wright discusses the harm of glorifying prisons in popular culture.

The second part of the book, The Private Prison Industry, discusses a better known part of the problem – private prison companies. But the essays do a great job at exposing the mechanisms through which these companies make money and lobby for punitive legislation and policy. Having just read in the paper that a university stadium in Florida is destined to bear the name of a private prison company, GEO, these essays are even more poignant. Ian Urbina’s essay on the prevalence of prison labor, and the multiple ways in which it destroys the larger labor market, is particularly notable.

The third part of the book, Making Out Like Bandits, is a series of ground-level exposes on different aspects of the for-profit industry: The deceitful marketing techniques of tasers (by Anne-Marie Cusac), the horrific abuse and neglectful safety measures taken by private prison transportation companies (by Alex Friedmann, the exorbitant prices of telephone calls and their detrimental ostracizing impact on inmates and their families (by Steven Jackson), the proliferation of high-tech gear and workshops for prison staff (by Jennifer Gonnerman), and the horrors of privatized prisons for youth (by Tara Herivel). But the most devastating essays are by Will Hylton and Paul von Zielbauer, which dissect the private health care providers. Here in CA, the standards exposed in Plata and Coleman might lead one to think that no one can provide worst health care than the states. These essays offer sobering evidence to the contrary, and the multiple examples of medical neglect and indifference are truly heartbreaking.

The collection does not offer high-level analysis of the meaning of the incarceration industry. For that, one must turn to the many big-picture works already out and available. Instead, it provides much-needed foci on the many aspects in which privatization permeates every possible aspect of incarceration. The essays are full of examples and written in an easy-to-read journalistic style. I highly recommend educating yourself not only about your tax money’s role in this, but about the many businesses that benefit from this somber enterprise.

Book Review: Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

So many great books have come out in the 21st century examining the genesis of mass incarceration; we’ve discussed many of them here. While many of these books look at trends nationwide, or even in the industrialized West, it is no coincidence that they tend to focus on California. Not only does California have the largest prison population (in absolute numbers; we are not leading the gloomy per-capita parade), but it has pioneered many of the punitive legislation and policies later adopted by other states.

Which is partly why Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag provides a necessary local context to much of the conversation. Gilmore, a geographer, focuses on somewhat less analyzed aspects of mass incarceration in the Golden State: The economic and geographic conditions that have yielded massive prison construction.

After providing a dense and detailed introduction to the California political economy, Gilmore moves on to provide the central thesis of the book: California’s prison boom is a “prison fix” to a problem of fourfold surplus: Capital, land, labor, and state capacity. Her discussion of the mechanism behind prison finance, done through bonds to avoid accountability to taxpayers, shows how supply and demand has worked to create a prison boom that empowered the California Department of Corrections and rendered its construction activities immune to public critique.

1982 is a key year for Gilmore’s narrative. That year, the legislature approved facilities in Riverside, LA, and San Diego, as well as $495,000,000 in general obligation bonds to build new prisons, with the express goal to enhance public safety. In the same year, the legislature also reorganized CDC in a way that exempted its bidding and budgeting practices from the competitive process and instead allowed to assign work to outside consultants, to guarantee that construction occur quickly.

While prisons were initially funded by general obligation bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the state, underwriters and legislators had to deal with “politically contradictory limit to taxpayers’ willingness to use their own money to defend against their own fears”. Their solution was to use lease revenue bonds, usually issued by the Public Works Board for college and university facilities, as well as for veterans and farmers. LRBs carried more risk, as they were only backed by a moral obligation rather than a fiscally binding one, but the expense was offset by the fact that LRBs did not have to be placed before the voters in general elections, and could therefore be quickly organized and issued so prisons could be built close to the time they were bid on, to avoid cost hikes. As a result, in less than a decade, the state debt for prison construction expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion, an increase from 3.8% to 16.6% of total state debt.

In the next section, Gilmore examines the economic, demographic and geographic push for partnerships between CDC and various central valley towns who wanted to revitalize their economy through the labor and land improvement that would result. As her case study, she looks at Corcoran, an agrarian town with a diverse population suffering a serious economic downturn, in part because of ten years of weather calamities. Most Corcoran residents were hopeful that a prison would put their real property to work and generate employment; their visit to Susanville impressed them with the potential of a prison to revitalized the city. Despite vocal objection, the prison was built, but the town’s hopes were crushed. Employment and opportunities for locals did not improve, confirming general research that shows that, over time, prison towns compare unfavorably with depressed rural places that do not acquire prisons.

The last part of Gilmore’s book looks at anti-prison activism originated by mothers. While it is an interesting account, it delves too much into the personal and would be better as a piece on its own, as it is rather disjointed from the grand narratives and analysis that precedes it.

I’m not sure I am entirely on board with Gilmore’s interpretation of Marxist surplus theory, and I think it does not fare well in providing a full explanation of mass incarceration. But as a piece of the puzzle, the book offers an informative and important explanation of prison construction, one which is sorely needed as the mechanics of prison finance are cleverly hidden from state voters and taxpayers. Her tale of Corcoran is told from the perspective of someone who is not only well informed, but who cares deeply about these towns and their crushed hopes. It is certainly helpful to me as I try to understand and explain what happened after 2007 (when the book was published) and how the financial crisis impacted these developments.

The New Correctional Discourse of Scarcity: Executive Summary

This morning I gave a talk about my upcoming book at the Western Society of Criminology Annual Meeting. Here is the gist of my comments.

***
The New York Times proclaims the end of mass incarceration; prison population in the US is declining for the first time in 37 years; Milton Friedman and Pat Robertson are advocating for marijuana reform; several states abolish the death penalty and others are closing prisons, importing and exporting inmates, and reducing their usage of solitary confinement.
What is going on? Is mass incarceration, indeed, coming to an end? Have we come to care more about the human rights of suspects, defendants, and inmates? Have we rejected the war on drugs?
This talk, based on my book in progress with UC Press, argues that these changes are the function of a new discourse of corrections, fueled by the financial crisis. As I argue in the book, the severe crisis, affecting especially local governments, generates new ways of conceptualizing criminal justice problems, new alliances between conservatives and progressives, new policies and practices of incarceration, and new ways of imagining the offender.
Many wonderful books have come out recently that tell the story of mass incarceration, offering political and cultural explanations both on the micro and macro levels. In adding my own narrative of what happened before, and especially AFTER the 2007 crisis, I do not wish to supplant political and cultural analyses with historical materialism. Rather, I argue that the expenditures on criminal justice tell a story of policymaking sincerity and of the limits of criminal justice project as a sound fiscal investment. That is, that a historical-materialist approach complements our understandings of politics and culture. To understand the extent of this, we need to go back in time to the first federally-initiated grand project of crime control.
Prohibition, initially the successful product of an effective narrow coalition, was repealed largely because of its economic consequences: a combination of poorly-funded law enforcement and the senselessness of giving up on considerable tax revenue in a lean economic period.  This poor experience impacted the federal laissez-faire approach to criminal justice in the postwar years. This trend began to be reversed by the Warren Court’s clamoring for federalization of rights. Ironically, the Nixon election, often described as capitalizing on high crime rates and protesting the Warren Court’s project of incorporation, put in place an administration that was equally eager to federalize criminal justice, but with a very different agenda in mind. The 1968 Omnibus Act’s primary effect was fueling federal money into law enforcement, with the aim to make police officers more effective in the streets. At that point, money had not yet been fueled into prison construction upfront; arguably, money was never fueled, wholesale, into prison construction at the federal level. Rather, this front-end federal investment led to an increased number of arrests, requiring room to house inmates. The trend of punitivizing local law by fueling federal money persists to this day.
The big project of managing the product of these policing tactics – prison building– was left to be financed at the local level, and mostly through bonds. The bond mechanism does to prison construction what the Nixon funding structure did to prison existence: It pushes it out of sight. Rather than an open tax requiring voter information and approval, the specific types of bonds used for prison construction act as a hidden tax, or rather, a tax on future generations. The hidden aspect of prison finance is particularly true with regard to private prison construction and operation.
And then, the financial crisis happened. While its epicenter was the banking industry, it has had profound impact on the fiscal health of local governments. Since the late seventies, most local governments have come to rely on a tax base that is increasingly income- and sales-based, rather than property-based. The former, compared to the latter, is much more sensitive to fluctuations in the market. Shaking the tax base, and dealing in various localities with the inability to pay for pensions, meant that local budgets became depleted.
To bring things back into the correctional realm, it’s important to remember that corrections constitute at least 7% of all expenditures in state budgets, exceeding, in some states, the expenditures on higher education. States and local governments—that is, the locations where the vast majority of law enforcement, criminal justice and corrections occur—have therefore had to face a reality so far hidden from the eye by the bond mechanism and the illusion of a war on crime: The need to do with less.
**
This need to save on corrections has yielded a discourse that I refer to as Humonetarianism: A scaling-back of the punitive project on account of its fiscal consequences. In the book, I identify four main features of Humonetarianism: New Discourse, New Allies, New Practices, and New Perceptions of Offenders. I want to shortly discuss each in turn.
The new discourse of correctional scarcity tends to be shallow and to focus on short term. Cost had always been part of the criminal conversation, but it had never been a centerpiece of policymaking and advocacy. A good example of this discourse is the new rhetoric of death penalty, whose successes and gains are significant. Since the financial crisis, five states – New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, and Connecticut – have abolished the death penalty. Many more states have placed moratoria upon its use and executions slowed down considerably. In California, Prop 34, which failed to pass in the 2012, nevertheless closed the gap between supporters and opponents of the death penalty to a mere 6%. An analysis of these campaigns shows the extent to which abolition advocates moved away from arguments on human rights and deterrence, put racial discrimination arguments on the back burner, and focused their campaigns on costs. Similarly, conversations about legalization of drugs have emphasized the waste involved in pursuing low level nonviolent offenders, and the successful propositions in Washington and Colorado have relied on the persuasive power of drugs as a source of revenue, much like their predecessors, the prohibition repeal advocates.
The conversation about drug legalization and de-prioritizing drug law enforcement reveals the second aspect of this discourse: Its ability to generate new allies. The 2012 presidential election, and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 presidential election, were notable for the complete lack of any criminal justice discourse, and especially the absence of drugs. The Obama administration, despite its controversial commitment to bipartisanism, did not fear alienating centrists and moderates by explicitly making marijuana enforcement a low priority. Leading conservative voices are calling for an end to the war on drugs, citing fiscal responsibility and the possibility of revenue as a powerful incentive. Among such names we count Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, free market economist Milton Friedman, and religious figures such as Pat Robertson.
The impact of humonetarianism has gone beyond rhetoric and legislation, and has generated the third feature of this discourse: Innovative practices in the field. California’s criminal justice realignment, consisting of a refunneling of low-level offenders out of state prison and into county jails—was initiated as a budgetary savings mechanism, correcting decades of economic disincentives and ending what Frank Zimring referred to as the “correctional free lunch.” Many states are closing or repurposing their prisons, which yields a less savory aspect of humonetarianism: Deals with other states to house their surplus prison population and thus make a profit on closed institution. But many states, like California and Hawaii, are now questioning the economic value of shipping their inmates out of state, and coming up with structures to keep them at home. Even institutions that cannot be repurposed, such as supermax prisons, seem to be saving considerable amounts of money through reduction projects. Moreover, the financial crisis creates an increased reliance on community corrections. Expenditures on programs have been cut; the shallowness of the conversation in some localities does not allow for a long-term assessments of the savings promised by recidivism reduction. But there is an increasing reliance on GPS monitoring.
Fourth and finally, humonetarianism has made salient some features and traits of the offender population. For decades, a policy of selective incapacitation has made us examine inmates through the lens of their level of risk; the financial crisis has come to make us see them in terms of cost. The recent modest success in scaling back Three Strikes in California was based on the increased salience of long-term Three Strikers as old and infirm inmates, whose lengthy incarceration drives up the costs of health care, already contested in California. And in many states, the introduction of geriatric parole and medical parole are a somber indication of how little Americans expect of their government: Not broad national healthcare for themselves, but less state-financed free healthcare for their inmates.
** 
There are limits to the power of humonetarianism to transform the criminal justice apparatus. The for-profit aspect of our incarceration project arguably leads to particularly ferocious activities by private prison providers, who in this market of dearth try to offer an alternative to decreasing incarceration. This is not only an exploitation of the punitive state for profit, but sometimes generating more punitiveness by lobbying for punitive laws, as well as seeking new and emerging populations of potential inmates, such as undocumented immigrants.
It is also business as usual in many plantation-like institutions that have always relied on a “tough-‘n’-cheap” financial logic. The rhetoric of self sufficiency has a strong hold on many prisons and jails in the rural south, and it has not abated, but rather been strengthened, in the current crisis.
The dearth of rehabilitation programs, and their declining number in these lean years, is another reminder of a limitation of this discourse: It is mostly focused on emergency, short-term savings. Because humonetarianism is not accompanied, in any serious way, by a true change in perception of human rights, the idea of thinking about reentry and recidivism reduction as a long-term cost-saving mechanism has not been as successful as it could, perhaps, be. Recidivism studies are, by nature, difficult to do, and moreover, they take time, which cannot be translated to proven political gains in a short election cycle. The theoretical possibility to frame these as a deeper form of savings has not, so far, yielded much success in the correctional arena.
There are also big questions about the extent to which humonetarian arguments have any traction with regard to particularly violent or reviled offenders. Sex offender policies come to mind immediately. The last California elections showed that old-school punitivism, masquerading as victim rights discourse, is still a powerful incentive to voters in creating more post-incarceration sanctions on sex offenders.  The strong rhetorical pull of decades can, apparently, withstand any argument about financial waste, as it has withstood the evidence of low recidivism rates.
Given these challenges, can humonetarianism be successful and enduring, and for how long? Its main advantage is the broad appeal of the financial argument. A possible counterargument is that, by focusing on costs, we arguably pay an intangible price of cheapening public discourse and taking human rights arguments off the table. I am less concerned about this issue. Americans have always expressed their values and measured their priorities by their willingness to pay taxes. A vote of confidence in lowering the price tag on corrections is also an expression of preferences for road construction, education, health care, and other services, and a statement that the mass incarceration project has lost its appeal as a national priority.
What remains to be seen is whether cost-centered reforms will stand when the economy improves. And in that department, while it would be unwise to offer accurate predictions, my crystal ball offers this: Some things might come back, some things might not come back, and some things might come back in different forms. For example, I expect that, once a critical mass of states abolishes the death penalty on fiscal grounds, it will not come back. I expect that a recriminalization of marijuana, once it is perceived as any other product in the market, is not feasible. Will we find other wars and panics? Probably, and those will have to be addressed through other-than-cost arguments if they occur at a time of economic plenty.
While the lasting power of cost-driven changes in policy remains to be seen, a sincere and thoughtful appeal to the public’s sense of fiscal responsibility, accompanied by an effort to reframe the cost conversation as a long-term concern, are one of the major steps we must take to end mass incarceration, so that we do not, to quote Rahm Emmanuel, let a serious crisis go to waste.

Is Realignment Obsolete? Harmful?

In recent days, realignment isn’t getting much love. A Wall Street Journal story this week blames realignment for a recent rise in property crime. Veteran readers of this blog, read the piece (or the excerpt below) and let’s find what’s fishy here.

California saw a year-over-year increase of 4.5% in property crime in the fourth quarter of 2011, immediately after the overhaul, marking the first rise since 2004, according to a report from the state attorney general this fall. In contrast, property crime, which includes burglary, auto theft and larceny, fell 2.4% in the nine months before the sentencing changes stemming from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. 

 While the attorney general doesn’t release 2012 data until late this year, localities ranging in size from Sacramento to Santa Rosa in Sonoma County saw property crimes rise last year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which hasn’t reported 2012 crime data, says property crimes fell 0.5% nationally in 2011 from a year earlier. 

. . . 

Known as realignment, the changes are “causing more of these people to be out in society rather than locked up,” said Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Michael Lazzarini, and that could be a “pretty good reason” for the rise in property crimes. “Not only is it continued workload for the investigators, but it’s also a quality-of-life issue for the citizens,” he said. 

Santa Rosa saw property crime rise 5% last year through November to 3,568 crimes, while violent crimes declined 7% to 585 crimes. Sgt. Lazzarini, the head of the property-crimes-investigation team, said detectives have been stretched thin since the new state law, which he neither supported nor opposed. He said he has struggled to decide which crimes to investigate. 

There aren’t enough data yet to back up Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch on a statewide basis. Gil Duran, a spokesman for Mr. Brown, said it is impossible to make claims about the reason for the crime increase with limited data. “Any respectable criminologist will tell you that [they] don’t determine overall trends in a year or two,” he said in an email. “Attempts to tie any increases to realignment are purely political.”

Here’s what’s odd here, from a (respectable?) criminologist:

We’re given data on crime in California and on crime in Santa Rosa. What we are not given is a county-by-country breakdown. I’m not just saying this just to take pleasure in countering Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch (since when does the Wall Street Journal write stories based on police officers’ hunches, anyway?) Every single report on realignment implementation shows that different counties have been dealing with sentencing reform in different ways. The crime rise might not be a result of people being “out of jail”. It might be the result of releasing people after their sentences without any appropriate probation mechanisms to help them find jobs. Or it might be that the recession is hitting some counties worse than others. I want Sgt. Lazzarini to show me that property crime in San Francisco and Alameda is going up (because, supposedly, these counties “let people out”) and down in Los Angeles, Riverside, and Orange (where there is an orgy of county jail building). Now that’ll be special, and even then, correlation is not causation.

Police hunches are not unimportant. Police hunches in individualized, specific situations, can and do save lives. But hunches have no place when generalizing from data, and people who can’t read data carefully should not drive policymaking.

So, apparently Governor Brown also doesn’t buy Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch. But he has his own beef with realignment. Here’s what Governor Brown said to the federal court this week, as reported by the L.A. Times:

“At some point, the job’s done,” Brown said at a Capitol news conference before catching a plane for Los Angeles, where he repeated the message. “We spent billions of dollars” complying with the court orders, the governor said. “It is now time to return control of our prison system to California.” 

 . . . 

The population now hovers around 119,000 — about 50% more than state facilities were designed to hold. Some prisons are at 180% of their intended capacity. 

The federal courts set a June 2013 deadline to reduce that total to 137.5%. The state says it now expects to exceed the cap by 9,000 inmates. On Tuesday, Brown argued those numbers were meaningless in light of improved inmate healthcare. He further called the design capacity of the state’s prisons “an arbitrary number.” 

But former state prisons chief Jeanne Woodward disputed the governor’s assertion and said she worried that without federal intervention, the governor and Legislature would find it easier to cut funding for improvements such as new healthcare facilities. 

“Without court oversight, resources tend to get taken away,” said Woodward, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law.

This is the most recent attempt by the state to avoid complying with the Plata mandate. Of course the design capacity is an “arbitrary number”; all numbers are arbitrary. What makes this number magical is that it didn’t pop out from the sky; it was decided by the court after hearing expert testimony about proper medical care and quality of life.

And here’s another reason why this is interesting. As you may recall, the government’s solution to depopulation as a response to the Plata order was to combine it with a savings measure. Plans to move inmates from state prisons to jail were in place back in the Schwarzenegger days, before Plata. Now, suddenly we’re being told that further depopulation would not save money; it would actually waste money.

I don’t think that realignment is the best thing since sliced bread, and I think in some cases jail conditions could be worse than prison conditions. But I do think that, done thoughtfully and thoroughly (like what these folks did), it is a step in the right direction. The state’s resistance to the plan as a whole seems misguided. What the state should do instead is guide the counties, with proper fiscal incentives, to do realignment as it should be done.

————–
Christoffer Lee, David Takacs and Aatish Salvi sent me links. The grumpy commentary is mine and mine alone.

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?

Criminal Justice in CA Mapped: 2009-2010

The California Sentencing Institute, an initiative of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, has a new interactive map tool distinguishing all of California’s counties based on incarceration rates, felony admissions, mental health rates, arrest rates, poverty rates, and numerous other important statistics, for 2009 and 2010. I strongly advise checking it out; they have tabs for adults and for juveniles, and they have filters by offense. It’s very useful information, even though I very much hope they plan to extend it to 2011, 2012 and beyond so we can see the effects of realignment. Here’s just one to whet your appetite – state prison population per 100,000 adults, broken down by county:

Book Review: Last Call by Daniel Okrent

I’m very much looking forward to my seminar today, in which we’ll be discussing Daniel Okrent‘s recent book Last Call, a detailed, vivid, darkly humorous and politically insightful analysis of the rise and fall of Prohibition. I can’t recommend it enough, and very much hope my students enjoyed it as much as I did.

In Last Call, Okrent provides an informed history of the emergence of Prohibition. Contrary to some popular notions, according to which the temperance movement was largely a religious movement, prohibition was the result of a narrow coalition between a variety of social and political groups with conflicting political interests, all of which were served in this way or another by a ban on alcohol consumption. The most important and surprising of these allies was the movement for women’s suffrage; in fact, many of the important heroines of the suffragette movement joined the cause so that a vote could be cast against alcohol. Alcohol consumption was directly related to gender issues, as the United States had been, for years, awash with drink, and saloon culture was tied to domestic violence, squandering of the family budget, and prostitution. But there were other interesting allies as well. Racism found a home in the temperance movement, as well; just as with the criminalization of drugs, some concerns about alcohol were dressed as the fear of the hypersexualized black, violent man, while other concerns arose in the context of Irish Catholics. And, as with various criminalizing “wars” of later times, the deeply-felt effects of World War I, before, during and after the war, played into the debate, fueling an antipathy toward Germanism, which manifested itself as antipathy toward German distillers and brewers.

The delicate dance between taxing and criminalizing vices, which we spend so much time reflecting on in the context of narcotics, was very present in the Prohibition debate. In fact, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment was facilitated by a prior revival of the alcohol excise tax. As with the Harrison narcotics act, any form of ceding ground of individual freedoms and making them subject to federal regulation later allowed greater curtailment of these rights, resulting in one of the two only constitutional amendments forbidding people from doing something (the other one is slave ownership.)

We all know, of course, that prohibition failed, and that it had something to do with lax enforcement and with an underworld economy of booze; but Okrent’s book provides enormous insight into how lax enforcement was. Not only was manpower limited and the ability to follow up the powerful underworld economy therefore limited, but the government actually created rather wide exceptions to prohibition. The book’s delving into the world of “medical alcohol” will remind many Californian readers of the medical marijuana regime.

Was prohibition a success or a failure? We tend to regard it as a failure. But I think that, given the immense obstacles in the way of criminalizing a so-called victimless crime, nation-wide, the coalition for prohibition was an astonishingly successful enterprise. That, for a moment in time, racists and progressive working unions, suffragettes and anti-immigrant activists, managed to put their differences aside and lobby for a change in law, is nothing short of astonishing, and very hard to imagine in today’s partisan, polarized political world. In some ways, it makes it more interesting to watch the upcoming elections in November, to see whether Prop 34’s proponents will be successful in their efforts to get together former correctional staff, law enforcement officials, victim organizations and inmate rights groups to support the replacement of the death penalty with life without parole.

As a coda, enjoy this witty interview of Okrent on The Daily Show.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Daniel Okrent
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Breivik Sentenced to 21 Years: Norwegian Justice

This piece of news will be astonishing to American readers: Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in a gun and bomb massacre last year, many of them children, was sentenced to 21 years. Al Jazeera reports:

 

 Guilt has never been a question in the trial as Breivik described in chilling detail how he hunted down his victims, some as young as 14, with a shot to the body then one or more bullets to the head. 

 The killings shook this nation of five million people which had prided itself as a safe haven from much of the world’s troubles, raising questions about the prevalence of far right views as immigration rises. 

The trial and a commission of investigation into the country’s worst violence since World War II have kept Breivik on the front pages for the past 13 months and survivors said the verdict would finally bring some closure. 

 “It has been a tough year … but I don’t want to be Utoeya-Nicoline for the rest of my life,” said Nicoline Bjerge Schie, a survivor of the shooting. 

 Dressed in a black suit with a tie and still sporting the under-chin beard familiar from the 10 weeks of hearings that ended in June, Breivik smirked when he entered the courtroom and gave his now familiar, far-right salute when his handcuffs were removed. He smiled again as the judge read out the verdict.

Updated: Under Norwegian law, the maximum penalty for homicide is 21 years and for crimes against humanity, 30 years. At the end of that sentence, people who still present a risk can be held for additional time, in increments of five years, as preventive detention.

It’s worth remembering that Norwegian prisons are very different from North American ones; they are well-furnished, moderately populated and safe. How you feel about European justice sentencing a mass murderer the way some American courts sentence people for possession with intent to sell tells you a lot about where you stand on the correctional continuum.

——
Props to Chad Goerzen for the link.

Trust, Law Enforcement, and Power: Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was

In the last few days I have been taking breaks from editing a piece by watching old episodes of the classic TV series Mission: Impossible. The premise, for the few readers who are unfamiliar with it, is that a special team of spies receives an assignment, usually involving a foreign nation (depose a dictator, release a political prisoner, unfix the elections), which they execute using disguise, technology, and sophisticated understanding of the internal politics of their adversary. With no support from official American law enforcement or the Department of State, they operate in the shadows.

I’ve been trying to think what about this is so soothing and appealing to me, beyond the sophistication of the plan, the assumed credibility of the technology, and Lalo Schiffrin‘s excellent soundtrack, and I think I’ve got it. It evokes a feeling of nostalgia for a past that never was; a past in which good and evil are clearly delineated in the opening sequence, and in which our secret service works for the undisputed good while we all sleep soundly in our beds. A past in which power is never abused, but tempered with talent and an old-fashioned gentlemanly code. A past in which the United States is a benevolent patriarch, deftly and subtly governing its childlike counterparts. A past in which women and people of color play cameo roles in the world of secret service, and women are praised and utilized for their sexual appeal without complain or critique.

The problem is that this past never existed. In the late sixties, when this show aired on American television, the US was already angling toward a questionable and destructive elective war in Vietnam, and was already involved in fixing (not unfixing!) the elections in various foreign countries, not to mention the ones it was yet to fix. Involvement in attempted and successful assassinations of foreign politicians and dignitaries has been, since then, clearly documented. And let’s not even start discussing foreign military interventions.

 How comforting it was to live in the Mission: Impossible world, in which these developments could be either disbelieved or explained away as benevolent and necessary. Which just makes the courage of people like Daniel Ellsberg, who actually saw what was what and brought it into the realm of public consciousness, all the more impressive.

And then something very important has dawned on me. Many of us still live in that world. Much of the police brutality and correctional abuse of power that has been going on in the last four decades has occurred precisely because we still want to hold on to the belief that government agents, domestic or international, are at the forefront of keeping us safe, would never do anything unnecessary, and can always put disinterested, neutral professionalism and patriotism ahead of self interest.

In that respect, there is little difference between international and domestic security. If we’re willing to give a carte-blanche to our special agents abroad, we’ll also extend this courtesy to agents at home who present their work as “the toughest beat.”We’ll disbelieve the possibility that people might be getting shot because of their race and because of unchecked, biased assumptions, because it’s inconvenient to think so. Because if we start doubting our police force, and our correctional staff, we’ll have to stop sleeping soundly in our beds, and realize that many things – not only in far-away countries – have gone horribly awry.

MORE BREAKING NEWS: CDCR Announces $1.5 Billion Cuts By Doing the Right Things

This is shaping up to be quite a dramatic day here at CCC! CDCR has a brand new report out in which it announces plans to cut $1.5 billion out of its budget, doing things that seem eminently sensible. Here are some of the main propositions:

CDCR’s projected population for state institution is quite a dramatic decline between 2012 and 2017. Their graphs predict a gradual decrease in inmate population from the current level of approximately 139,000 to 124,000. This decline, however, will be accompanied by an increase in the total numbers (and percentage) of elderly and infirm inmates.

Some of the changes will include changing security classification, including graduated housing and privileges, as well as a step-down program and support for inmates seeking to disengage from gangs.

CDCR also plans to increase the reach of its rehabilitation programs to 70% of the inmates, as well as various re-entry hubs complete with employment training, which will be primarily available during the last six months of prison time.

By 2015-2016, all out-of-state inmates will be returned to California, thus eliminating completely our reliance on contract beds with private corporations.

Serious changes are made to the mental health bed plan and to medical and dental care.

Read the report in its entirety; the charts and floor plans are instructive and helpful.

This is truly a day of hope for change in the correctional system, and one I see as the silver lining of our fiscal crisis. The need to be fiscally prudent is finally pushing us to do the right thing by our fellow Californians.