Public Criminology

My colleague Josh Page offers a thoughtful commentary on California’s prison system in Zocalo Public Square today. Quote:

Prison officers understandably worry that downsizing the correctional system will put them out of work. Thanks largely to their effective union, these officers have solid, middle-class jobs with good pay, good benefits, and good retirement packages. California officers make between $45,000 and $73,000 a year before overtime and other incentives. As the manufacturing sector declines, “prison officer” is one of the few remaining occupations providing upward social mobility for people who lack advanced degrees. This is especially true in the rural areas in which many prisons are located. Officers and their families, then, are justified in thinking that major reforms might close one of the few remaining paths they have into the middle class. Policymakers must make good faith efforts to protect these workers as they reshape the correctional system…The CCPOA would be much more likely to support reform measures if it could protect its members’ jobs along the way, or at least be persuaded that its worst-case fears are unfounded.

For more, check out, The Toughest Beat, Josh’s new book with Oxford.

I like gear that comes with a story. And “these alligator boots were seized in a cocaine bust” is a story worthy of Quentin Tarantino, if not the Coen brothers. See, the proprietor of St. Paul’s El Primo Western Wear was evidently stashing cocaine in the boot boxes, so the store’s inventory was placed into storage. Now you and I can bid for the fine snap-button shirts, boots, belts, and stetson hats at auction.

via Mara Gottfried at The Pioneer Press:

A large amount of Western wear seized from a St. Paul store by police is now up for auction. The owner of the store, El Primo Western Wear, was sent to federal prison after he was convicted in a 2008 drug case. He had stored cocaine among cowboy-boot boxes in the basement of the store at 176 Cesar Chavez St., according to a search warrant affidavit.

The merchandise seized included 881 pairs of boots, 579 hats and 1,111 pairs of jeans. It had been in storage until the advisory board of the now-defunct Metro Gang Strike Force authorized the sale of the inventory at auction last month. Hines Auction Service is holding the online auction now. The first one closes Dec. 20 and the second Dec. 23. There will be more auctions, but they haven’t been scheduled yet, the Ellsworth, Wis., company said today. The auctions are listed at http://bit.ly/g2lf80 and http://bit.ly/hBHJ9N. Proceeds from the auction will be used to pay Metro Gang Strike Force legal fees, settlements, storage fees and other costs, an attorney has said.

Property seizures by law enforcement agencies are controversial to say the least, as forfeitures of cars and other big-ticket items have increased directly with budget cuts in some jurisdictions. For their part, Minnesota’s Metro Gang Strike Force has transitioned from beleaguered to defunct, finally shutting down in 2009. By most accounts, the MGSF was overzealous about seizing property and not nearly zealous enough about recordkeeping — hence, an auction to help defray their own legal fees.

Now that’s a story worthy of the Coen brothers.

[update: Jessica Lussenhop offers further details on both the bust and the goods in City Pages.]

Arlo Guthrie, whose Alice’s Restaurant is dished up like cranberry sauce each Thanksgiving, finally made the Macy’s parade this year. The protracted protest anthem tells the story of Mr. Guthrie’s 1965 littering arrest, as detailed in this uncredited and unsourced account:

The lyrics tell the tale of how this trivial criminal event emerges as a major issue at the draft induction center, with Mr. Guthrie ultimately asking, “you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug?” So, while there was plenty of humor and good fun in the song, it packed a real punch.

The story is well-told and still engages audiences, but the status politics of garbage dumping have changed a lot in forty-five years. When it comes to dumping busloads of garbage down hillsides, contemporary hippie kids might sympathize more with Officer Obie’s strict environmental protection than with their smiling sixties-era counterparts.

As I recall from my own freshman year, the film version was considerably sadder, slower, and uglier than the song. But I still like the following clip and could imagine using it for a class exercise on changing environmental norms:

Yahoo News reported on a study by media-research company Experian Simmons today. I couldn’t find any methodological details about the study and cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it presented the listing below, purporting to show how political partisanship is linked to preferences for various television programs.

Not surprisingly, Glenn Beck ranks high among Republican viewers and low among Democrats, with Keith Olbermann’s Countdown showing the opposite pattern. Yet some of the other patterns are more intriguing, with critically acclaimed cable-only shows like Mad Men garnering far higher ratings among Democrats, and highly-rated network programs generally doing better among Republicans. [I can only guess about the precise metric here, but it looks as though scores are standardized such that an average rating would be scored at 100.]

To get a better sense for the story the data might tell, I arrayed the shows and ratings from left to right by the ratio of Democratic to Republican scores. In this figure, it is easy to spot the “purple middle” represented by programs such as Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars, and The Mentalist.

I wouldn’t draw any inferences from the bivariate association shown in the chart. It would be fun (or at least “fun” in the classroom exercise sense of the word) to ask a social statistics or methodology class to identify potential confounders and sources of spuriousness here — at minimum, I suspect that age, gender, race, and urban residence would be associated with both viewing habits and partisanship. That is, it might be the case that the Mad Men or 30 Rock crowd is not so much Democrat as young, urban, and female.

As a criminologist, I’m fascinated by portrayals of the criminal justice system — specifically, the extent to which they adopt a “crime control” or “due process” model of law enforcement. I’d guess that Democrats would be more likely to favor crime dramas that nod to “due process” concerns (e.g., Law & Order), but I’ve never seen a study documenting such preferences. Most shows, in fact, lean heavily toward crime control portrayals, with rogue officers routinely taking all manner of head-busting liberties with suspects.

For example, I recently caught an episode of the new Hawaii Five-O and was surprised to see the heroic detectives toss a witness (a witness!) into a shark tank, just to loosen his tongue a bit. Despite Five-O’s silly portrayal of police work, stilted dialogue, and cheesy acting, I’d still rate it highly — that theme song remains irresistable.

Josh Beckman sends word that Charlie DeTar and friends have developed a prison blogging platform, with support from MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. The description:

Between the Bars is a weblog platform for prisoners, through which the 1% of America which is behind bars can tell their stories. Since prisoners are routinely denied access to the Internet, we enable them to blog by scanning letters. We aim to provide a positive outlet for creativity, a tool to assist in the maintenance of social safety nets, an opportunity to forge connections between prisoners and non-prisoners, and a means to promote non-criminal identities and personal expression. We hope to improve prisoner’s lives, and help to reduce recidivism.

It felt good to see how they used one of our civic reintegration articles, since this sort of public criminology and civic reintegration project goes way beyond anything we might have envisioned.  Amazing stuff. I even like the project title, which brings to mind still another interpretation of an especially evocative Elliott Smith lyric.

Marc Jenkins gave a terrific lecture titled “How the Immune System Remembers Infections” this week. As a sociological criminologist, I’ve long been fascinated by immunology and its connection to the social organicism of Spencer, Durkheim and others. The immune system wondrously learns to quickly recognize and neutralize pathogens in the body, even as the pathogens quickly evolve and adapt to overcome the immune system. He used this trunk monkey* video to introduce immune functioning (body=car; pathogen=thief):

By analogy, some argue that communities exercise social control in the same way. One hears such analogies when people describe how a social group is brought down by a nefarious “virus” or “cancer.”  For example, when the Patriots traded Randy Moss to the Vikings, a commentator was asked whether Patriots Coach Bill Belichek considered him a “cancer” in the locker room (“more like a polyp,” was the clever response). Such social organicism can be carried way too far, of course, perhaps even to genocide.

More positively, I’d compare immune response to the sort of rapidly mobilizing and self-sustaining resistance that a good school might develop in response to, say, a sudden rash of fights breaking out at the Friday night football games. The destructive behavior can either take root or it can be brought under control pretty quickly, once the fans in the bleachers learn to recognize and take the collective responsibility to stop it.

Professor Jenkins closed with another video, and I couldn’t help but identify with the host’s completely ineffectual efforts to ward off the pathogen in this one. Reminds me to boost the ol’ immune system before winter hits….

* No, that doesn’t look like an actual ”monkey” to me either, but ”trunk monkey” makes for a clever name.

In a few weeks, California voters will consider Proposition 19 — The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. This measure (1) legalizes various marijuana-related activities, (2) allows local governments to regulate these activities, (3) permits local governments to impose and collect marijuana-related fees and taxes, and (4) authorizes various criminal and civil penalties. As the national Gallup data indicate below, support for marijuana legalization has risen dramatically over the past quarter century, to the point where such ballot referenda now have a strong chance of passage in states like California.

I’ve gotten a few calls on the subject and wish I knew more about it. At this point, I defer to my California colleagues because I simply do not feel sufficiently informed or qualified to render an opinion as either an expert or a private citizen on this issue. But I do know this: should Proposition 19 pass, it would likely portend a Very Big Change in past practices and policies with respect to marijuana. Some excellent researchers at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center (Beau Kilmer, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Robert J. MacCoun, Peter H. Reuter) have made heroic efforts to model the likely effects of such a Very Big Change, based on estimates of current and future consumption, likely price changes, taxes levied and evaded, and nonprice effects (such as a change in stigma), but they acknowledge that we are in uncharted waters. Their best guess? 

(1) the pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price the consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced;
(2) consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much, because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and prices that consumers face);
(3) tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate provided by the California Board of Equalization (BOE); for example, uncertainty about the federal response to California legalization can swing estimates in either direction;
(4) previous studies find that the annual costs of enforcing marijuana laws in California range from around $200 million to nearly $1.9 billion; our estimates show that the costs are probably less than $300 million; and
(5) there is considerable uncertainty about the impact of legalizing marijuana in California on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.

So, marijuana will become significantly cheaper in California, but we cannot tell for certain whether the increase in consumption will be correspondingly large (say, to the peak marijuana levels of the late-1970s).  We also can’t say for sure how much will be collected or evaded in taxes, saved or spent on treatment and law enforcement, or how neighboring states and the federal government will respond. The RAND report is helpful in showing both the kinds of factors to be considered before casting one’s ballot and the limits of our current knowledge base.

On balance, will we be better off or worse off in a post-Prop. 19 world? At this point, responsible experts, including  the RAND team, are pointing to an unusually large gap between the change voters must consider and our knowledge about its likely impact.  Call me gutless, but under such conditions my personal preference would be for a gradual phase-in and limited pilot period before attempting to flip such a Very Big Switch in a state of 39 million people.

The FBI has released their Uniform Crime Report Crime in the United States numbers for year-end 2009 and, once again, the rate of crimes reported to police continues to fall.

I’ve just begun to explore the new report, but researchers can easily download spreadsheets to show long- and short-term trends in both population-adjusted rates and raw numbers. The chart above shows the crime decline since 1990 in murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, burglary, and larceny-theft. This chart makes it apparent how much the overall crime numbers are driven by larceny-theft — and the comparative rarity of violent crimes such as rape and murder.

But crime is dropping across each of these categories. The purple bars show the magnitude of the drop in the past 20 years, comparing 1990 rates with 2009 rates, or ((2009-1990)/1990). The green bars show the most recent change from 2008 to 2009 ((2009-2008)/2008). I’d normally compare these numbers with those from the National Crime Victimization Survey before drawing any big conclusions about crime trends. With regard to the FBI’s official crime index, however, it seems pretty clear that there has been a significant drop in crime reported to police over the past year and, for that matter, over the past twenty years.

Despite a new wave of programs and research, people still write about reentry using the stylized tropes of old James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart movies. Either the ex-prisoner is portrayed as a noble witness to this cruel world, as a predatory menace to be gunned down, or (in more sophisticated variants) as a gangster with a heart of gold.

Given these cultural reference points, it takes courage to say something real and true about the lived messiness of reentry — especially when one’s freedom or livelihood depends on telling convincing narratives of success. Josh Page tipped me off to a short piece by Jody Lewen of the Prison University Project, who describes the sort of reentry experience I see played out in my research and in everyday life.

In the latest issue of the PUP Newsletter, Dr. Lewin writes about a former client who hadn’t committed any major new crime but had nevertheless violated the conditions of his release.

Derek Meade had been an exceptional student while in the program at San Quentin, had enrolled in school immediately after paroling to continue his studies, and had also managed to find a part-time job. He had sounded great for quite a while. When he didn’t respond to one of our messages, we sent another, and he finally wrote to say that he had recently relapsed, and was close to being sent back to prison as the result of two positive drug tests. He said he hoped to send us the letter soon, with some better news.

Derek’s assumption was, of course, that his current news was “unfit” for the newsletter. It was as if he had absorbed the pressure we often feel to provide nothing but upbeat success stories and clear evidence of our “results.” And yet how many of our former students – or other people in recovery, for that matter – experience the same thing he was going through? What impact does it have on those individuals never to see their experiences reflected in publications about our programs? And equally important: how does this absence affect the public’s understanding of our work – whether in terms of the value of education for people in prison, or the role education can play in the process of recovery?

Of course, there are two layers of courage here. Unlike Mr. Meade, many clients will remain silent about their struggles and only share stories of unadulterated success or extreme hardship that justifies their actions. Unlike Dr. Lewin, many program directors will select and highlight only those narratives that celebrate the transformative power of their programs or justify a claim to greater resources. In challenging such biased and selective pictures, they give us a glimpse of what reentry is really like — and it is rarely as black and white as those old movies.

ps. If you’d like to support the Prison University Project, you can make a donation in any amount.