Public Criminology

I spent part of my evening in a juvenile correctional facility last night with a group of smart, articulate young women serving time for a variety of offenses and literally growing up while behind bars.  I spend quite a bit of my time teaching and volunteering in prisons and juvenile facilities, and I always enjoy talking with incarcerated young people.  While most have made some very serious mistakes, I very often come away impressed with their thoughtfulness and their resilience.

What particularly struck me last night was when several of the girls spoke about their dreams and fantasies about flying.  In doing so, they evoked – and perfectly quoted – the line from Forrest Gump, where young Jenny is praying to God to help her escape her father’s house and his abuse: “Dear God, make me a bird so that I can fly far, far, far away from here…Dear God, make me a bird so that I can fly far, far, far away from here….”

I’d seen the movie years ago, but that line never held the same resonance for me.  Lucky me.  I was fortunate enough to grow up cared for and loved, and as a child I never had to worry about protecting myself or getting out of the way of harm.  I wonder how many incarcerated youth can say the same?  How many children have their innocence destroyed and are never able to find a legal escape?

I think part of the reason these issues of youth, pain, and longing are lingering in my mind is because one of my favorite songs at the moment is “Take Me Away” which shares some of the sentiment of the girls’ discussion and Jenny’s prayer.  Some of the lyrics (written by Scott Alan):

Let me climb to the top
Of the highest mountain peak
Let me scream at the top of my lungs
Until I can no longer speak

Can’t remember the last time
I said live and let things be
And it’s just been way too long
Since I felt alive and free

So I’ll sail away
Until I reach the sea
So I’ll soar the sky
Until I feel the breeze

I am ready to return
To the place I last felt stillness
To return to the heart
I had when I was five

Where the only thing that mattered
Was making colors I can paint with
I’m much too young
To let my life hang out to dry

So I’ll sail away
Until I reach the sea
And I’ll soar the sky
Until I feel the breeze

If you have not heard this song, do yourself a favor and take 4 minutes to listen to Hadley Fraser sing it – his performance is absolutely brilliant:

“Take Me Away”

I asked my Juvenile Delinquency students to write short essays reflecting on the labels that had been applied to them as they were growing up.  As I read the essays, I took note of the words they used to explain how other people saw and described them, and I created the word cloud above (worditout.com) .

It should come as no surprise that senior level college students were generally viewed as “good kids” – they are the success stories of their junior high and high schools.  The phrase “good kid” came up repeatedly, as did variations such as “good girl”, “goody-two-shoes”, “teacher’s pet”, etc.  A number of students described themselves as “athletes” or “jocks”, and a few students felt like “outcasts” or “outsiders”.  Several felt like their teachers and other adults viewed them as “troublemakers” which often brought more scrutiny and limited their conventional opportunities.  Most problematic were the labels “slut”, “retarded”, and “whore” – all characterizations which are hurtful just to write, let alone be weighed down by.

For the second half of their essay, I asked the students to imagine what their lives would have been like if they had been processed through the juvenile justice system and formally labeled delinquent (or, conversely, to imagine the opposite for those who lived the experience of formal labeling).  It is a good chance for them to look back on their lives and think about their statuses, relationships and opportunities.  And it reminds us all of the power of labels.  Please, choose your words wisely.

Inspired by the Occupy movement, my Fall 2011 Inside-Out students started a tumblr site – We are the 1 in 100 – representing the 1 out of every 100 American citizens who are behind bars.  Each of the students – both inside (from the Oregon State Penitentiary) and outside (from Oregon State University) – wrote a statement or fact of their own choosing.  Not quite all of those pieces have made it online yet, but little by little we are working to grow this site into a place where the voices of those inside and those who care about people inside can be represented.

We made the site open submission and we invite each of you who has been affected in some way by prisons and incarceration to submit a statement, fact, or feeling of your own.  Friends of public criminology, please share widely.

And, thanks Chris, for posting about our time on the “Think Out Loud” radio show on Oregon Public Broadcasting.  We had a great time practicing the art of public criminology and sharing our experiences over the airwaves.  Here is a photo of our Inside-Out students, alumni, and friends and the very helpful “Think Out Loud” crew.  Please do listen to the podcast of the show if you get a chance!

I’m teaching something like my 10th Inside-Out class in the Oregon State Penitentiary, and I am inspired anew by my students’ compassion and commitment to learning with and from each other.  Even more impressive, they are already taking the learning outside of the classroom and passing their knowledge on as widely as possible.  This quarter we are focused on issues concerning crime, prisons, communities, and prevention.  We are only three weeks into the quarter; we have shared just three classes within the prison.

I am writing this post to share an informative editorial written by Molly, one of the current outside students, and published in Oregon State University’s student newspaper, The Daily Barometer.  Molly does a great job of discussing difficult issues surrounding incarceration, punishment and communities clearly and convincingly.  Molly is a columnist for the paper, so I may be sharing more of her work throughout the quarter as the class continues.

There are more exciting projects in the works, including: a plan to visit our state representatives to talk about prisons and mandatory minimum sentencing, participation in a campus diversity summit representing the voices of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students, and negotiations about a possible discussion of the class and the issues on public radio.

This is an extremely motivated group of students and they are already providing an important service as public criminologists.  It will be fun to see just how much we can accomplish this quarter.  Stay tuned.

I read this story in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago; it has stayed on my mind even through the busy first weeks of classes in our fall quarter.  Thomas Haynesworth was mistakenly identified by a rape victim as her assailant, and – with no criminal history whatsoever – was arrested at age 18.  He was tried for committing four related rapes and assaults in the neighborhood.  He was convicted for three of those attacks and sentenced to 84 years in prison.  84 years.  Let’s just call it life.

Fast forward 27 years.  DNA evidence has now proved decisively that Haynesworth did NOT commit the rapes in two of the cases for which he was tried.  DNA in the other cases is not available.  With help from the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Innocence Project of New York, Haynesworth was released from prison on his 46th birthday.  He is, however, classified as a paroled sex offender and subject to the accompanying regulations – public registries, restricted movement, monitored telephone and email accounts.  Haynesworth is now fighting for exoneration.  While he is physically free of prison, a dark cloud still hangs over his name and his life.

It’s extraordinary enough to think of an innocent man serving 27 years in prison: imagine entering prison as a teenager and spending all of your twenties, all of your thirties, and half of your forties in a cage – the healthiest, most dynamic years of his life were stolen from him.  And the punishment continues with his classification as a sex offender and the public fear and revulsion that is attached to such labels.

Where the story gets even more interesting, in my opinion, is with the actions of the attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli.  Last year, local prosecutors came to Cuccinelli and told him they thought Haynesworth was innocent.  Cuccinelli conducted his own investigation into the 27-year old case and became convinced that the wrong man was in prison.  He then set out to make it right.

As the New York Times reports:

Now Mr. Haynesworth, 46, is asking for full exoneration on all of the rape convictions, although DNA from the other two cases is not available. But the circumstantial evidence supporting Mr. Haynesworth’s claims of innocence is so powerful that along with his own lawyers, the prosecutors from both jurisdictions where the rapes occurred support his efforts, as well as the attorney general for the commonwealth, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli…

Mr. Cuccinelli said in an interview that he and his staff reviewed the evidence in the Haynesworth case in great detail. “It was a complex decision,” he said, “but it wasn’t a hard decision.” The thought of the wrongful conviction haunted him. “It’s hard to describe how painful it is to me that somebody would suffer what he has.”

Cuccinelli has a reputation as a conservative figure, so his support for Haynesworth is perhaps even more surprising.  He argued in a Virginia appeals court that Haynesworth’s name should be cleared, and he went a significant step further by hiring Haynesworth to work in his office.  As reported in the Washington Post:  “Cuccinelli said he knew it would be tough for Haynesworth to get a job as a convicted felon. So the month after Haynesworth left prison, he put him on the state payroll.”

I’m really impressed with Cuccinelli’s actions in this case; he is a great example of “walking the talk” – truly examining the evidence and acting on what he believes is right.  Arguing for Haynesworth’s exoneration is already quite extraordinary; hiring Haynesworth to work in his office takes it to a whole new level.  Kudos, Mr. Cuccinelli.

I spent the last several days in Washington, DC attending the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching and spending some time with best friend and fellow criminologist Charis Kubrin.  I took the Metro from Reagan National Airport, and I was struck by these signs:

These posters, sponsored by the NAACP and carrying the tagline: “Let’s build a better America together,” were plastered on virtually all available surfaces.  I found it a particularly powerful campaign, and I hope politicians – as well as voters – take the Metro to the airport and get the message.

How to incite public panic: the Oregonian newspaper offers an example in an article entitled “Oregon Court Ruling Could Shave Years from Killers’ Sentences”. The first lines read:

Thirty killers in Oregon could get out of prison up to a decade early following a court ruling that parole officials haven’t followed the law.

The pool of killers eligible for such release could be up to 250 over the next 15 years, state authorities said.

The convicts are serving life terms for aggravated murder with minimum 30-year sentences. The state Supreme Court recently declared those convicts are eligible for freedom after 20 years.

The article goes on to detail the graphic nature of the crimes of several men in question, naming names while reminding the public that each of those men is a convicted killer and may soon be living amongst them.  At the point, the fear apparently takes over for the vast majority of people who took the time to comment on the newspaper’s website.  A careful reading of the article, however, makes clear that the only real change in the law is  that a relatively small percentage of individuals whom the Parole board has deemed “rehabilitatable” after spending more than 20 years in prison will have a chance to go before the Board again this summer with the possibility of release by the end of the year.  Nothing is guaranteed.  Convicted killers will not be flooding the streets.

Last summer I blogged about the day I spent with the parole board listening to them conduct two “murder review” hearings, where they decided if the persons in question were “rehabilitatable” and might have earned the chance to one day return to the community.  I was impressed with the Parole Board members’ attention and thoughtfulness.  The case I primarily went to view was “flopped;” that individual will continue to work on his issues and will see the Parole Board in 2 more years to again plead his case.

The newspaper printed a sidebar with the names of 30 convicted killers and the dates they will see the Parole Board this summer.  It was particularly interesting to me because I know at least six of those 30 men quite well; they have been students in my college courses in the prisons and several of them are leaders in inmate clubs.  They seem to have worked hard to redeem what is left of their lives and to – perhaps against the odds – become decent men while growing up and maturing in prison.

Do they deserve another chance?  The Parole Board has already found this select group rehabilitatable, which suggests that they might.  Does justice require a minimum of 30 years in prison rather than a minimum of 20?  I’m not sure how to judge that.  How much are those extra 10 years worth, both in terms of what the citizens will pay for incarceration and what the convicted will pay as they try to rebuild lives?  How much will those extra 10 years change the odds for the “convicted killers” who are likely to reenter the community one day in the future?

I don’t know.  The Parole Board has a thankless job in any case, but sensationalistic news articles and headlines seem particularly destructive when they incite moral panic without revealing the true issues and questions behind the story.

Nice story from the sports page: high school basketball coach, Bob Hurley Sr., is likely to earn his 1,000th victory in the next week.  He is one of only three high school coaches to make it into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

But, when Hurley measures his own success, he thinks of the young men that he has worked with over the years, helping to teach them discipline, trust, and teamwork.  He can point to the college graduates and successful adults who have come out of his program at St. Anthony, a tiny Catholic high school in Jersey City, New Jersey.  As the article explains:

But his true legacy is much deeper than the lights on the scoreboard. Hurley said he would trade in those wins — every last one of them — for a chance to help more inner-city kids.

“You know what? I would give them up for one more chance with some of the kids I didn’t reach over the years,” Hurley said. “If I could have a second chance with some of those, it would be worth all the adulation.”

Hurley can certainly be proud of his victories both on and off the court.  The article provides some testimony from former players and offers this overview:

Still, even with 25 state parochial titles, the victories are a small part of what he has accomplished. Hurley, 63, has been a father figure for hundreds of inner-city teenagers over the past four decades. He has placed nearly all of them in four-year colleges, most on scholarships.

Some are doctors and businessmen now. Others are lawyers and police captains. One owns a popular restaurant in Jersey City and once held a seat on the city’s board of education.

Maybe there should be a mentoring hall of fame, as well; I think Hurley would make it in on the first ballot.

In our paper on public criminologies, Chris and I wrote about some of the perils of making your research accessible to a wide audience:

We also should acknowledge the potential costs of practicing public criminology. Making one’s work and perspective visible in the media opens the possibilities for threats and hate mail, loss of credibility, or worse from detractors. It can lead to close identification with the populations one studies; for example, attempts to discuss the low recidivism rates of sex offenders can be derailed by venomous attacks from a fearful public. (Uggen & Inderbitzin, 2010: 743)

The latest – and perhaps scariest – example of vitriolic threats and electronic hate mail is the targeted attack against sociologist Frances Fox Piven.  Based largely on a piece of work that was published 45 years ago, Glenn Beck has suggested that Frances Fox Piven is an enemy of the Constitution. Examples of the threats made against Dr. Piven can be found in this article; the author then points out:  “One thing that I think has not been adequately highlighted amid this fiasco is Piven’s own response: the professor has been calm, fearless, and articulate, providing a model of how a public intellectual should behave in such a situation.”

Officers of the American Sociological Association issued a public statement, ending with these words:

Thus, the right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents, especially in the current atmosphere of heated political mobilization. We call on Fox News and other responsible media to set the appropriate standards of accurate and honest debate.

Frances Fox Piven, herself, has been graceful under pressure, and as a true public intellectual, she is using this unwanted publicity to point attention back to the larger structural issues.  She offered this comment:

It’s hard for people to understand what’s going on in a complicated society. Democracy requires that people have some understanding of what’s going on, of what their own interests are, who their enemies are. But it’s a very complicated society. And moneyed propagandists have taken advantage of that to create a demonology in which it is the left, the Democratic left, that is the source of many of our troubles.

And, one more thing, in case you haven’t heard much about this case or followed any of the links in this post, Frances Fox Piven is 78 years old…and apparently more relevant than ever.  With her her courage and continuing efforts to educate the public, Dr. Piven offers a positive model for public sociologists/public criminologists to learn from and emulate.  It is appreciated.