Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Welcome, all, to a discussion revolving around Governing through Crime: How
the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of
Fear
  

    
We are please to welcome Jonathan Simon, the Chair of UC Berkeley's
interdisciplinary program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the
School of Law. His first book, Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social
Control of the Underclass, 1890 to 1990  (1993), charted the rise of mass
imprisonment policies in the 1980s.  In Governing through Crime: How the War
on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear
(2007), Simon argues that this penal logic has now colonized much of how
Americans in all walks of life are governed (and govern themselves).

Leading the conversation is the Well's own Doug Masson, a 35 year old lawyer
in Lafayette, Indiana. He and his wife Amy have a 3.5 year old boy named
Cole and a 2 year old girl named Harper. Doug was born and raised in
Richmond, Indiana, studied history and political science at Miami University
in Oxford, Ohio and then went to law school at Indiana University in
Bloomington. He worked as an attorney for the Legislative Services Agency, a
non-partisan arm of the Indiana General Assembly that assists in researching
and drafting legislation and maintaining the Indiana Code and now works with
a small law firm in Lafayette, mainly practicing civil litigation. His
interest in the General Assembly has led to "Masson's Blog: A Citizen's
Guide to Indiana" which primarily focuses on the state legislature. Doug's
private practice also has some small relation to Professor Simon's work in
that he represents the Sheriff's Department and frequently defends it
against suits brought by inmates of the county jail for a variety of
complaints.

Thanks for joining us, fellows.
  

    
Thanks for the book Jonathan. This is something of an eye opener for me. As
a child of the 70s, this galloping criminalization is easy to take for
granted.

As I understand the general proposition of your book, in the 60s, there
were a number of problems government officials could have viewed as
needing solved. "Solving" crime (as opposed to health care or
environmental problems, for example) was, as a structural matter, one of
the easier things for governments to address. Government was already set
up to do this. However, the War on Crime has also enhanced government
power, gets politicians elected, and allows social control beyond simply
protecting citizens from one another. Perceived risk from crime has risen
faster than the actual risk. Democracy has suffered as a result.

First, correct me where I've gotten it wrong. Second, please explain how 
Americans have come to be such pansies. I thought Ben Franklin had warned 
us about sacrificing liberty for the illusion of safety.
  

    
Thanks Doug.  Understanding our history and how we got a present where
people think its normal to live in gated communities and drive
militarized SUVs to the mall (not to mention keeping 2.2 million of
their fellows locked up in prisons and jails), has been one of my main
motivations in writing the book.  But getting the right historical
frame has proved trickier than I first thought.  

One can see elements of governing through crime from the very earliest
moments of the white settlement of North America.  Unlike Europe,
where criminal justice was associated with the power of the King,
American criminal justice has always been associated with the self
defense of the community (all too often on racial lines) against
various others (Indians and slaves as well as roving bandits).  That is
one reason it has always been hard to draw a clear line between
criminal law enforcement and various kinds of private vigilante
activity.

At various times in our history, crime control has emerged as a
particularly salient way to reorganize government more broadly.  A good
example is the way the post-Reconstruction southern states used their
criminal codes to strip freed Blacks of their new legal rights and put
them back to work as prisoners on some of the same plantations they had
worked as slaves.  Some observers, most notably my colleague here at
Berkeley Loic Wacquant, have argued that our contemporary war on crime
is another such effort to reorganize racial domination in the aftermath
of the civil rights movement and the break up of Jim Crow.

In the book I develop a somewhat different historical frame for
interpreting the present.  Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal beginning
almost exactly 75 years ago this month (it was in his acceptance speech
in Chicago on July 2nd, 1932 that he spoke of a New Deal for
Americans), helped develop a template for American governance that
dominated our political and social life for nearly fifty years (until
Reagan helped define government as more the problem then the solution).
 This template was anchored in the experience of the economic
cataclysm of the Great Depression and harnessed a wide variety of
government and private efforts to restart and maintain the industrial
economy.  Over time this model of governing was applied to many other
issue from international relations (the Atlantic Charter and later the
Marshall Plan was a "New Deal for the World" as historian Elizabeth
Borgwardt puts it in her terrific book of that title, to criminal
justice, where scientifically guided rehabilitation became the dominant
approach to punishment in the 1950s and 1960s.  

Both parties and liberals as well as conservatives operated within the
broad swatch of New Deal governance (Nixon was probably our last New
Deal type president) and it came to dominate many state governments as
well as the federal government.

For complex reasons arising both from its internal contradictions
(especially around race) and its external economic environment
(especially the growth of what we now call globalization), the New Deal
model was in crisis by the 1960s.  Much of the politics of that era
constituted a series of efforts to recast or replace this model. 
Issues like hardened poverty in the midst of affluence, and the rising
environmental costs of industrial society, as well as violent crime,
offered potentially productive policy arenas for politicians seeking to
develop a post-New Deal approach to governing.

In the book I argue crime won, not because it was most important or
pressing of these problems in any objective sense but because it turned
out to raise the fewest obstacles to a broad initiative in a
constitutional system generally prone to producing gridlock.  Of course
crime was emerging as a very real concern to many Americans, but so
was the environment, so was poverty, so was the unfinished business of
racial reconstruction.  

In the end it may not be  too important why crime turned out to be the
winning horse (luck may have had a lot to do with it), because once
politics (at the federal and state levels) began to roll down the track
of crime control as pathway to reconstructing government, it turned
out to be an incredibly productive direction as it opened endless
opportunities for politicians at every level of government to act on
and in the name of crime control.  Much of what the book attempts to do
is to chart and describe the rather amazing panoplies of legal and
institutional rules that this revolution in American government  has
produced.

As to whether Americans are more cowardly then in the past I would
agree that in important ways we cannot be the land of the free, without
also being the home of the brave.  But I don't think we govern through
crime because we are more afraid then we used to be, I think we are
more afraid because we govern through crime.  The crucial questions are
generally not ones of personal courage but of responsible governance
toward those you have in your charge.  

In my chapter on the family I talk about how parents have come to
create a virtual "gated childhood" for kids that is making them both
obese and neurotic, but I don't think its  because parents are more
cowardly than they were a generation or two ago.  Rather, law and
politics have directed their normal sense of responsibility toward a
kind of hazard that is inherently limitless and intolerable.  Notice
that parents are also a lot more cautious about where they let their
kids ride in cars (my brother and I used to fight over the ledge above
the back seat during long high-way trips), or what they wear when
riding a bike, but it hasn't led parents to flip  out and confine their
kids the way crime fear has.
  

    
Do you have any sense that governing through crime has lost some of its
potential post 9/11? The reason I ask is that after 9/11, it seemed to me I
started hearing a lot less about the War on (Some) Drugs. And, from my
perspective as someone born in 1971, the War on Drugs seemed to gain a lot
of steam once the Commies stopped being so scary (about the time Gorbachev
took over, I guess.)

I suppose leaders have been governing populations through fear of The Other
for as long as there have been in-groups and out-groups.

Uh, speaking of insufficiently confined children - mine, ages 3.5 and 2,
require some attention. More later. (And I apologize for the disjointed
composition. That's what I get for doing this at home.)
  

    
And if criminalization has lost some of its political steam, what would be
the reasons? To some extent, the easy availability of a more potent Other
would be one explanation -- e.g. "terrorists." (I put that in scare quotes,
not because I doubt the existence of those who use terror as a tactic, but
because it's quite an amorphous term, not very helpful in identifying the
people we should be scared of.) Another reason might be that politicians are
starting to look at least slightly ridiculous.

Here in Indiana, one of our esteemed Congressmen, Mark Souder (R IN-03) is
responsible for legislation that denies student aid for applicants who have
been convicted on a drug charge. (See here:
"http://www.slate.com/id/2139803/";). As of 2005, 1 in 200 Hoosier applicants
had been denied financial aid because of the provision. While efforts to 
get rid of the provision have been unsuccessful, my sense is that Souder 
isn't getting a lot of credit for being such a hardcore drug warrior. It's 
not hurting him a great deal either - he's in a district that's heavily 
stacked in favor of the Republicans. Possibly my sense that the drug war 
has lost its potency is based on wishful thinking.

The idea that governing through crime expanded in the wake of the Civil 
Rights era has slightly but significantly altered my recollection of the 
War on (Some) Drugs in the 80s. Before, I immediately thought of Nancy 
Reagan and "Just Say No". Now, it ties in more deeply with the Reagan era 
-- going all the way back to Reagan's "state's rights" speech at 
Philadelphia, Mississippi; the scene of the 1964 murder of civil rights 
workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. 
  

    
Three strands here that are both important, 9/11, the future of the
war on drugs (put a fork in it!), and complex interweaving of tough on
crime and racial intolerance politics.  I'll try to say a bit about the
first and then come back for the others.

I had written about half the book on September 11, 2001 (don't ask why
it took some many  years to get the other half done).  After the first
day of nausea and fear that more planes might fall out of the sky, and
sorrow for my friends in New York (ok I don't know to many people at
the Pentagon but I felt for them to), as I started thinking about the
implications, I wondered if the book would itself become irrelevant (or
at least a strictly historical study).  It seemed possible that in the
face of the terror attacks, much of the matrix like web of crime fear
enhancing policies and practices might be exposed as suddenly absurd
and damaging.  Perhaps squeegee men and Washington Sq. pot  dealers
weren't the people most threatening New York City.  Perhaps our very
obsession with crime centered risk had caused us to miss greater
threats among us.  After all the 19 who murdered our brothers and
sisters that day didn't look like the usual criminal suspects, they
weren't from broken families, didn't use drugs, celebrate gangsters, or
fail in school.  May be preventively locking up hundreds of thousands
of people who met that crime profile for non-violent crimes wasn't
keeping America safer.

If those insights had become common sense on September 12th I probably
would have turned back to my many other (and more academically
respectable) interests.  Sadly for me as a citizen and parent (if not
author) almost the very opposite happened.  In the terrible glow of the
fire balls, Americans seemed to recognize their remarkably locked down
society, as if for the first time, and embrace it as a necessary
response to the threat of terror. 

Its true that the war on crime (and drugs) would now disappear below
the fold of the morning newspaper, to be replaced by the war on terror.
 But take a look at that war, from top to bottom it has reflected the
script of the war on crime.  Our enemies are evil doers who can only be
killed or incapacitated.  In the name of victims we have to adopt laws
without reading or debating them, that give the executive boundless
power to go after those evil doers.  We  must build prisons to
incarcerate as many of the enemy types as possible (don't worry to much
about what they actually did).  We must rely on professional
informants to discover or perhaps produce the low skilled terrorist
cells the FBI has "caught."  We must secure Iraq by putting more US
soldiers on the streets to fix the "broken windows" of Baghdad.  I
could go on..

Actually I think this is a disastrous way to fight terrorists.  If we
are in for a long struggle with militant Political Islam, we need to
push this war on crime recipe for disaster out of the way and begin a
new and more effective way to fight them (hint: it will look a lot more
like fighting cancer, well targeted efforts to eliminate existing
cells combined with broad political efforts to prevent further
"mutations."

more later
  

    
Whether the war on crime is winding down rather than just morphing
into a war on terror is an important question.  There are signs of real
fatigue with its logic, including less support for harsh penalties,
more support for alternatives, rehabilitation, etc..  Most importantly,
growing public alarm about other risks (I want to return this
substitute risks theory Doug raised, cold war for crime war in a
moment) like global warming, obesity, health insurance (just watch the
reform plus entertainment documentary genre for examples).  On the
other hand there is plenty of evidence that the governing through crime
fear is potent and just seeking other targets.  The latest one is sex
offenders.  States are passing insanely harsh rules about sex offenders
that often ban them from living almost any where (and certainly not
near treatment and control institutions).  Some of these imagined
Hannibal Lecters are teenagers that had sex with someone below the age
of consent (and often of the wrong race, or gender).  Moreover, law
makers keep enacting laws and policies that keep us tuned into crime
fears.  The Amber Alert law of a few years ago means that our smart
highway signs sometimes flash ominous words about child  abduction (or
even murder, which I saw flashing from giant smart sign recently on I
80 here in the East Bay).  After Virginia Tech, many universities are
offering students to receive email updates any time there is a crime or
other emergency on campus.  Keep in mind, some of these measures may
make some sense, but collectively they constitute a kind of
political-neural network designed to keep crime risk on your brain,
regardless of your own first hand experience of the world (thats why
for years respondents have been telling surveyors that they think crime
is going up even though they mostly feel safe in their own
neighborhoods).

So on balance, I'm afraid that governing through crime is likely to
remain a very influential framework for our lives and institutions for
a long time unless we take some concerted effort to replace it.

The cold war example Doug brought up is a good one.  Cold war politics
did not drive American politics in every election cycle between 1947
and 1989, but it was constant influence on culture, science, and
institutional life.  The war on crime has worked much the same way. 
We've had spike's of interest like 1968, 1988 (the Dukakis/Bush
election), 1994 (when the Republican congressional surge happened
around the crime bill), but lots of other cycles where it remains in
the background.

One more point about risk substitution.  Although I find it handy
myself as a shorthand, I think it is a mistake to treat risk too
functionally as if America just always needs an enemy (Indians, freed
slaves, anarchists, communists, criminals) and who it is just moves
around depending on external changes.  This treats the need for an
enemy as if it was independent of the political formations that
generate the enemies, but I view the two as deeply intertwined. 
Moreover, by addressing problems in a robust way, like FDR  did during
the New Deal, the society can become altogether less focused on enemies
period.

Finally, a further thought on race.  Yes the war on crime has been
wonderful for supporters of white supremacy who needed a new way to
justify keeping Blacks out of neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. 
Dixie-crats and their wooers in the Republican party, did play this
card quite effectively (see Katherine Beckett's brilliant book, Making
Crime Pay).  But to treat governing through crime as simple strategy of
white supremacy, is to miss how deeply it grips people (like most of
the white people reading this post, and many people of color as well)
who belong firmly to the anti-racist camp in American politics, and yet
have been led by policies and practices to prioritize crime risk in
ways that perpetuate racial division and disadvantage.
  

    
I had a couple of real life run-ins with governing through crime today that
I thought I'd share.

1. I got a call from a reporter seeking comment in my capacity as county
attorney. Apparently the prosecutor and the sheriff have been sued due to
their attempts to enforce a law passed by the General Assembly prohibiting
certain types of sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school.
There is apparently some dispute in interpretation as to whether this law 
applies to those convicted of sex offenses before the law was passed. I 
haven't seen the lawsuit, so I couldn't comment intelligibly. The 
prosecutor and the sheriff are professionals who don't really have an axe 
to grind on this topic, they're just enforcing the law as best they can. 
And, to be candid, I'm fairly mercenary in my law practice. I'm there to 
represent their interests, so I'll put aside my personal thoughts to 
do my job as effectively as possible. I realize this is how the machinery 
of governing through crime clanks along, grinding people up in its treads.

2. In a county council meeting today, the sheriff was reporting on long 
term budget projections having to do with the jail. About 5 or 6 years 
ago, we had to build an expansion onto the jail. We have the 5th largest 
county jail in Indiana. At the moment, we have enough capacity to 
subsidize some of the county's operational costs by housing some of the 
State's prisoners. The question came up as to when the sheriff thought we 
might need more capacity. He thought it would happen, but hopefully not 
for quite some time. Apparently our county courts are making a greater 
effort to be "problem solving" courts -- meaning they're trying new 
programs for nonviolent offenders, focusing on increased monitoring in 
lieu of having the individuals in physical custody at the jail. This has 
kept the county jail population down, allowing for more State prisoners to 
be held in the county jail, resulting in more revenue to the county. I'm 
not sure if it's positive, negative, or neutral to have what amounts to a 
profit motive to seek alternatives to custody for nonviolent offenders.
  

    

(Note: offsite readers with questions or comments may send them to
 <inkwell@well.com> to have them added to this thread. Please put "Jonathan
Simon" in the subject line. Thanks!)
  

    

Putting the legality of residency restrictions for former offenders aside
for just a minute, one might suppose that this type of legislation is the
current pinnacle of victim-class constituency politics.  The whole community
is "victimized" by the presence of a former offender -- cast him out!  If he
isn't over the county line by sundown, lynch him! (Or rather, throw his ass
behind bars, so we can be "safe" again.)

It fits one of Simon's observations, the rise of victimhood as a class to be
protected, to a T.  The cool thing about victim politics (from the
politician's POV) is that ANYBODY can be a victim now. The politician who
can bring more into the victim fold (usually through mere fearmongering) is
likelier to gather more votes for himself.
  

    
Victims are an artifical constituency?
  

    
Let me ramble a bit about each example which Doug described before
picking up the strand on victims.

On 1:
As far as I can tell law enforcement hates these new sex offender
laws.  For one thing, some of them, California for instance, mandate
GPS enforcement of existing prohibitions on offenders being within a
certain distance of a presumably vulnerable target.  While funding
insufficiency will probably delay it for years, someday police and
sheriff's deputies may have have to respond to these "alerts" much as
they do 9-1-1 calls now (and be disciplined and sued when they do not
respond in ways that can be retroactively justified).  That could be a
nightmare.  

Moreover, there is little confidence that these potentially incredibly
expensive laws will do anything to reduce the already relatively low
odds of an offense by a stranger sex crime recidivist (since the
overwhelming majority of such crimes occur between an offender and
victim who know each other).  After all, not "living" within 1,000 feet
of a school does not guarantee you will not go there.

Note that law enforcement, correctional officers, sometimes even
prosecutors, do find themselves opposed to efforts at escalating fear
and governing more through crime; either out of rational self interest
or deep understanding of the futility of the policy based on their own
experience.  For example, the Correctional Officers union in
California, often viewed as supporting endless growth in imprisonment,
has recently joined prisoner plaintiffs in asking federal judges to set
actual caps on population in the state's shockingly overcrowded
prisons.

This is one of the flaws of the more conspiratorial version of the
Prison Industrial Complex argument.  While it is true that particular
industries, work forces, and interest groups, have found ways to
benefit from the increased fear of crime in our society, the larger
structure of action created by governing through crime often goes well
beyond their interests to create perverse effects.  Those of us who
want to move America away from governing through crime need to identify
these “fractures” and develop ways of exploiting them.

Lets also talk about the nature of these fears that are mobilized
about sex offenders and particularly with respect to children as
victims. I have a daughter of ten years and a son of seven.  I can't
read newspaper stories about kids getting hurt without thinking of
them.  The fact that the objective risk of a stranger sexual assault on
a child is very small does not necessarily matter if the resulting
harm is terribly alarming.  Sometimes are worst fears do come to pass. 
For example, right here in Berkeley a year or so ago, an apparently
deranged and disheveled person walked onto a popular soccer field and
attempted to grab and carry off one of the seven or eight year old
players.  He was quickly subdued by the parents on hand, but its just
the kind of event that people fear the most.  

Rather than dismissing these fears as irrational, we need to examine
how they become intertwined with our own choices and the ambivalences
we feel about them.  The recent movie Little Children did a great job
of capturing the vague but persistent fear of pedophiles that seems to
hang over suburbs and other "nice" neighborhoods in America.  Set as
the background to a plot about adultery, it also highlights how many
other things we could do to protect our kids from existential risk that
are actually in our own power to abate, like not engaging in
extramarital affairs, or choosing to work (and consume) less, in order
that we might be more physically present in the lives of our children. 
Does fretting on those "monsters" out there make it easier to ignore
our own moral and ethical choices?

We also need to consider how we might collectively act to address
these fears rather than look to the law enforcement “tooth fairy” to
make them disappear.  I was cheered by the fact that parents on the
soccer field subdued the deranged stranger.  If we must face
existential risk, let us choose to do it together in a pro-active
positive forms that encourage our larger sense of trust and
effectiveness, soccer leagues are just one example.  Indeed, the
Political Scientist Robert Putnam, in his famous study of Italian
governance, found that communities with lots of civic organizations
relied much less heavily on formal law enforcement to impose order and
security.

More brief on 2.

I know Doug is probably limited in what he can say about the Jail he
consults for, but jails are a fascinating microcosm of the whole
governing through crime pattern.  The more we seek to address social
problems like mental illness and homelessness, through criminalization,
the more the jail becomes the be all form of government, especially
for the poorest communities and the most marginal residents.  If you
are interested in learning more about them, read John Irwin’s classic,
The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society.

Today, many jails function as defacto asylums, housing and may be
treating the mentally ill.  Mary Beth Pfeiffer’s new book, Crazy in
America, profiles six mentally ill people who died needlessly in police
or jail custody.

The rise of the crime victim as idealized citizen is one of the
defining features of governing through crime.  It helps us to
understand that this American version is really a variation (a
perversion in my view) of democracy rather than an innately
authoritarian agenda (even though its consequences may be
authoritarian).  So when the Chinese execute somebody like they did the
other day, they speak about protecting the people but only as a
secondary theme to the main event, which is the state reasserting its
authority.  As my colleague Frank Zimring argues in his 2003 book, The
Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, the death penalty in
America is increasingly a kind of civilized lynching, done in the name
and sometimes quite precisely at the behest of, the victims.

Of course, crime victims are real, and there is a real truth to the
potential of all of us to become victims (directly or indirectly).  The
problem is when this vision of the needs of the people crowds out all
other visions.  An example is that when workers or members of
discriminated against minorities want to seek rights, they increasingly
have to do so by fitting their situation into the crime victim box. 
We can honor victims of hate crime but not integrate our schools.  We
can demand protection for workers from sexual harassment but not
provide them unions.

Victims are not artificial, but the sense that there is a victim's
rights movement needs to be probed much more than the media typically
does.  Often correctional officers unions and prosecutors have played
key roles in organizing and advising such "movements" and they tend to
exclude lots of victims who don't fit the profile (especially people of
color). 
  

    
Your description of honoring victims as having opportunity costs triggered
thoughts of Jared Diamond's description of Rapa Nui in his book "Collapse."
The way he tells it, the islanders wasted their resources building their
stone monuments, ultimately deforesting and depopulating the island. (My
understanding is that Diamond's analysis has been challenged.) But, the
point remains, that if your society is squandering its resources in
unproductive ways, the results can be disastrous.

The second thing that occurred to me is that the risk of a molester hurting
your child resembles Pascal's Wager. Regardless of whether the evidence
supports the existence of God, the downside if one guesses wrong is too
horrific to contemplate. Similarly, no matter how unlikely a molester is to
attack your child, the downside if it happens is too horrible to contemplate
rationally.

(A more rationally accessible downside to failing to take extraordinary
measures to protect one's child is condemnation from other membes of society
who feel the need to be judgmental about your choices.)
  

    
Your second thought strikes to the heart of why violent crime (of
which child sexual abuse is along with homicide itself, perhaps the
most feared) has such power to rework our expectations of how we should
be governed (and govern those we are responsible for, like kids). 
Some risks come to seem intolerable and precisely as you suggest, to
ignore them is to court social disgrace as well as personal  guilt.  

But which ones?

Some of my earlier work was on work and car accidents in the early
20th century.  Thousands of people died each year in industries like
steel making and railroad yard labor back in the 1900s.  By the late
1920s the automobile was slaughtering tens of thousands of mostly
pedestrians.  In both cases, many observers found this outrageous and
criminal, but in time we have come to accept as moral and honorable
both work place and high way deaths.  New governance systems like
workers compensation and liability insurance helped "tame" the
disastrous side of these casualties in the eyes of the public.  The
benefits (dubious as they may now seem) of cheap industrial products
and fast personal transportation, made these deaths more acceptable as
part of the social contract.

Perhaps one of the reasons violent crime has come to seem such a
problem for government is that so many of the the terms of the mid-20th
century social contract, security of employment, insurance, social
security and corporate pensions, etc., seem to have come undone and the
middle class finds itself facing many kinds of risk with far less
protection from big government, big labor, or big business.  

Diamond's model of collapse might be analogized to the micro level as
well.  The contemporary middle class family, compelled to send both
parents into the labor force to sustain mid-century consumption
patterns, finds itself paying an increasingly unsustainable cost to
honor a largely inapt commitment to securing their kids through a
segregation in communities that require long automobile commutes and
24/7 lock down control.  

BTW since we do this for our kids the costs to us will never seem a
sufficient reason to stop.  Its only when we recognize the harm this
kind of regime is doing to our kids that we will begin to really
question this commitment.  They are clearly becoming more obese as
their potential for free range exercise is grotesquely limited (in
practically all sectors of society).  I am no psychologist, and welcome
the views of those who are or have insights into this, but I fear they
are becoming more neurotic from the being so often indoors or in
managed outdoor activities so much of the time. 
  

    

There's a fine example of governing through crime in today's WashPost metro
section:

19 Face U.S. Firearms Charges
Anti-Gang Task Force, Local Police Helped Build Cases

By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2007; B03



Nineteen people from Prince George's County have been charged with federal
firearms violations, Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said
yesterday.

Fifteen of the defendants were indicted or charged directly by federal
prosecutors in the past three days, Rosenstein said. The other four were
charged within the past two weeks.

The suspects are charged with a variety of gun crimes, including unlawful
possession of a firearm, unlawfully selling firearms, being a felon in
possession of a firearm and being a felon in possession of ammunition,
federal prosecutors said. One defendant is also charged with possession with
intent to distribute crack cocaine, authorities said.

[ . . . ]

Defendants who are convicted of a federal gun crime, without an accompanying
crime of violence, are more likely to receive longer prison sentences than
those charged and convicted of similar crimes in state court, Rosenstein
noted. Many defendants convicted of similar illegal gun possession crimes in
state court receive probation or a few days in jail.

"The reality is that too many criminals who are charged in state court with
illegal gun possession end up with very light sentences," Rosenstein said.

By contrast, in the federal system, defendants who are convicted of gun
crimes often receive sentences of five to 20 years in prison, depending on
their history of criminal convictions.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102054.html>
  

    
Recently, at a coffee shop I frequent in Minneapolis, a woman shouted
down a man and drove him out of the shop because, apparently, he was a
convicted sex-offender. She passed around printouts from an internet
site showing the man's picture and conviction details (according to
which, he had served his sentence and gone through his parole, etc. so
had essentially paid his debt). There are no schools in the vicinity,
the man apparently is under no restrictions, yet the woman felt
justified in driving him out of the coffee shop to protect "our
children."

(Of course, what safer place for a sexual predator to be than in a
busy public area with lots of eyes? Ostracizing him would seem to
increase the danger rather than reduce it.)

I wasn't present at the incident but showed up a few minutes later. I
was somewhat taken aback by how much support the woman had, even from
people who I know to be very reasonable and committed to due process
etc. I spoke against the woman's behavior but felt I had to be very
careful how I talked and who I talked to, otherwise I might be tagged
as someone who supports sexual predators.

I guess my question is what can we do, not just specifically in such
situations, but generally to nudge things away from the culture of
fear.
  

    
That is a concern of mine, as well, Mark. 

Jonathon, great book. I've been devouring every word.  

It seems to me that "governing through crime" as a concept hits the
chord of fear in all of us.  As a mother, I do not take the safety of
my children lightly. However, as an American (and a thinking human
being) I take civil liberties and freedoms to live and choose very
seriously, as well. I don't take lightly the loss of freedoms to those
who are deemed criminal, either.  I am incensed that ours is a nation
of lock-ups rather than a nation of education and support.  

I am not fool enough to believe that there is good to be found in even
the most hardened criminal, but I am hopeful enough to believe that if
we choose to govern through mental health or education, rather than
through crime, our collective existences would improve.  

The problem I see with governing through crime is that it insists
there is a win/lose situation in every instance, rather than looking
for and working towards  win/win results.  A real life example in the
workplace is illustrated in the Workplace chapter of Jonathon's book. 
In Cody v. Cigna, the behavior of all of the parties was through a
crime lens.  Cody acted as the victim, as did Cigna, in response to her
accusations of the company.  In another galaxy, Cody could explain her
concerns to her supervisor in a non-accusatorial manner and the
supervisor would respond by admitting that  a solution to the problem
is necessary.  
  

    
Imprisonment for gun crimes has become a major way that people are
sent to prison in the US, and for long terms.  Its easy to see that
liberals and gun right conservatives have found common ground in making
the equation, "criminal" + "gun" = exile to prison.  There is usually
no need the to show the gun was or was going to be used to commit a
crime.  You go to prison for years.  Who could be against it?

Problem is that lots of people now find themselves in the first
category through participation in the drug economy even if they pose
not threat of armed violence, so the "criminal" part of the equation
creates lots of racially skewed results.  Second, once you are in that
economy, carrying a gun is part of your tool kit.  

Solution?  Hold people accountable for committing crimes with guns but
do not exile people from the community for long prison terms just for
being a felon with a weapon.  In the meantime, I'd govern guns through
stiff financial responsibility laws.  If you want to own a gun,
especially the kind that real criminals are likely to use in committing
armed crimes like robbery, you should be financially responsible for
any crimes that are in fact committed by that gun.  Strict liability,
compensate the victims.

In the meantime.  If we really want to end the sickening cycles of
youth homicide in cities like SF, Oakland, Richmond, and across
America, legalize all illegal drugs now under a robust regime of civil
governance and strip the profits from the whole lifestyle.  Gangs may
be cool as social performance, and they may survive in smaller and more
benevolent forms, but without profits they will not have the staying
power over our kids in poor communities that they now do, and which the
war on crime has just consolidated.
  

    
I don't have the slightest problem with long prison terms for
posessing a gun while doing non-gun crime.
  

    
If the gun was a non-factor in the crime, I don't understand why it ought to
be a consideration in the sentencing.

Back to the topic of perception of risk for a moment. I played golf with one
of our county judges today. He was asked whether he had been harassed 
because of his position. He said that, in the 4 years he's been on the 
bench, he's gotten one crank phone call that seemed to be judicially 
related, despite having a listed phone number. I'm coming to the 
conclusion that our society is simply not as dangerous as we've been lead 
to believe. You might end up being one of the unlucky ones to whom 
something horrible happens. But, statistically, the likelihood is that 
you'll be all right.
  

    
Right.  So if we are interested in solutions, Doug (and others like
Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine), point to one very important
direction of solution, stop acting afraid.  May be its not too late to
go back to giving kids home made candy and fruit for Halloween, to
having them ride bikes till dusk through autumn streets, or attend
public schools in cities where they will share classrooms with people
of very different economic backgrounds.  

A good direction for solutions is generally toward the local.  Crime
is almost always a local phenomena and its solutions lie locally. 
Governing through crime has involved a projection of some very
selective images of crime across the screen of the national
imagination. Mistrust laws and policies (like all the recent sex
offender policies) that have been circulated through a national policy
establishment.  Demand local solutions designed to abate real harms at
the lowest possible costs to all involved.

Another place to look for solutions is toward new problems.  Cancer,
terrorism, global warming, all call for a recasting of governance
toward new priorities.  There is a chance here to reappraise the role
of security based on segregation in favor of other kinds of security. 
But it could also get worst.  

Many experts believe that next quarter century will see a massive
revival of central cities as people with means seek to escape the high
costs of automobile dependency.  Rebuilding America's cities could be a
once in a multiple life times chance to create a diverse and
economically resilient kind of community.  But if fear guides the
rebuilding, we are likely to get something more like a high tech urban
gated communities with pervasive surveillance and efforts to exclude
those perceived as deviant or dangerous.
  

    
I hope central city living sees a revival.  Back in the day (when my
father was a young boy in Brooklyn), city living was safe because of
the sheer number of people paying attention.  Dad couldn't walk down
the street without a half a dozen mothers asking him where he was
going, what he was doing, and if his mother knew where he was.  No cell
phones, just neighbors. The shop keepers knew him, as did the
vagrants, the cops, well, you get the idea.

I grew up in suburbia,  and with the freedom to go just about anywhere
I chose as long as I was home by dark and called if I was going to be
late.  

I live in a very small city in a very large (and stupid) state, Lake
Worth, FL.  We do send our kids to the public school with the diverse
population. I do let my kids walk to their friends' houses nearby
(within 10 blocks).  I leave my kids in the house for 10 -15 minutes
while I run to the store or the post office.  And, if they want, I'll
let them walk or ride their bikes to school starting this fall (Graham
will be in 1st grade, Emma in 4th).  The neighbors know who my kids
are, where they belong, and how to reach me in the event they need to
do so.  

Even before I read this book, I have tried to act in a way that defied
this GTC trend. It bothers me on a visceral level.  I think one
punishment per crime is plenty.  Creating a criminal class that is
believed to be non-rehabilitative destroys our communities.  

I am disgusted by this ridiculous rule which is decidedly a GTC
phenomenon: No home baked cakes or cupcakes or cookies are allowed to
be distributed at school for parties.  The district passed this rule
because they can't be certain of the cleanliness of the kitchens in
which the baked goods would be cooked, nor the freshness of the
ingredients, nor the ingredient list (think allergic children).  So,
it's better to give them store bought crap then the really good and
healthy baked goods of the handful of parents who would choose to go
out of their way to bake for the kids.  
  

    
Yes, how about a campaign for real cupcakes in school.  In Berkeley
that wouldn't draw laughs.  While the rule that Lisa Harris writes
about may not be a "criminal law", it clearly works from the same false
promise of a risk free school zone that governing through crime has
promoted. The resulting sterilization of education is about as
nourishing for the brain as those Safeway or Publix brand cupcakes they
want you to buy. 

One evening trying to imagine a non homophobic alternative to the Boy
Scouts that I could enroll my seven year old son Avi in, I began
fantasizing about a group that would be called "Free Range Kids".  Led
in small sized (but not necessarily  neighborhood defined) groups by
parents trading off being scout leader, the FRK's would bring boys and
girls not only to the woods, but to urban neighborhoods and parks that
too many of them never see.

Growing up I remember seeing my parents interacting with all kinds  of
people in all parts of Chicago where we lived.  It gave me a sense of
confidence in the existence of a common civic life that cut across the
patch work of ethnically defined neighborhoods. In an age of gated
communities where even commercial interactions are mediated by
automated systems, what will give our kids that kind of confidence?
  

    

I love the idea of Free Range Kids!

I'm so glad to see someone paying attention to the climate of fear that's 
been created all around us and is being nurtured by those who want to keep 
us obedient.

It's particularly painful for me to observe the residual effects of the 
9/11 attacks on some of my friends in New York. Those were ballsy people 
before! They prided themselves on their fearlessness. They were intrepid 
New Yorkers. Now some of them go on and on about terrorism as if there 
were an attack on New York at least once a month.
  

    
That is such a great name.