Archive: Sep 2005

The seattle times has been following the case of michael mullen, who confessed to killing two registered sex offenders in bellingham, washington. i wrote about the murders last month, suggesting that public availability of specific addresses and offense details might be a net loss to public safety. mullen wrote a letter to reporter mike carter at the times, which (after some hand-wringing) it decided to publish online in mullen’s original hand:

“[s]hould we post the letter itself online? Most who had read it said yes. Here’s why: Reading the handwritten letter was a different experience from reading the story. It was methodical. The penmanship doesn’t change. Mullen thought out the message just as he said he had thought out the crime. If you are concerned, scared or just fascinated, you want to understand what he had to say. … “Certainly no one in his right mind would agree with vigilante Justice,” Carter said, “but people are very frustrated about how society deals with sexual predators.” He added, “the overarching sentiment (from readers) has been one of people agreeing with Mullen’s sentiments, if not his methods.”

is there a real danger that publicizing mullen’s motivations will lead people to agree with his sentiments or inspire other vigilantes? as “p.s. punk” predicted in a comment to my earlier post, mullen spins a tale of righteous slaughter and wishes to make himself a martyr. he claims that he went to “interview” the three former sex offenders living at the house, checked their IDs to confirm identification, and let one of them go after he “showed remorse or guilt.” he claims that the two he killed “blammed [sic] their victims — they showed NO remorse.”

such statements show how easily a vigilante assumes the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. i’m most interested in how his comments reveal the dark side of community notification. here’s what the confessed killer said on the subject:

“the State of Washington, like many states now lists sexual deviants on the Net. And on most of these sites it shares with us what sexual crimes these men have been caught for, and most are so sick you wonder how they can be free … In closing, we cannot tell the public so-and-so is ‘likely’ going to hurt another child, and here is his address then expect us to sit back and wait to see what child is next”

mullen clearly blames the victims for their deaths, but he also implicates institutions that make the information public (i’m sure he’ll be pointing other fingers elsewhere as we get closer to his trial). i’m working on a project now coding the information provided by each state on sex offenders and other felons. reading through the individual case records that some states post, one cannot help but see them as “sick” monsters. one sees a bad picture, a horrific description of a crime, and an address. even if the acts are decades old, there is typically little countervailing information that would help us understand their current circumstances or the extent to which they pose a threat to public safety today.

kai erikson noted in the 1960s that deviant forms of conduct seem to derive nourishment from the very agencies devised to inhibit them. can efforts to inhibit inJustice have similarly perverse unintended consequences? a new paper by harvard law professor william stuntz makes the provocative claim that the vigorous pursuit of constitutional rights is partly to blame for mass incarceration. the abstract:

The politics of crime is widely seen as punitive, racist, and inattentive to the interests of criminal suspects and defendants. Constitutional law is widely seen as a (partial) remedy for those ills. But the cure may be causing the disease. At the margin, constitutional law pushes legislative attention – and budget dollars – away from policing and criminal adjudication and toward punishment. The law also widens the gap between the cost of investigating and prosecuting poor defendants and the cost of pursuing rich ones. Overcriminalization, overpunishment, discriminatory policing and prosecution, overfunding of prison construction and underfunding of everything else – these familiar political problems are more the consequences of constitutional regulation than justifications for it.

stultz’s basic argument is that constitutional law creates political “taxes” and “subsidies” that make some kinds of crime control cheap and others more costly. for example, the supreme court aggressively regulates policing and trial procedure, but generally leaves the substantive criminal code and sentencing to the politicians — where they go hog wild expanding the number of laws and raising sentence length. he also argues that prison budgets get a “constitutional subsidy” whereas local police and courts must ante up a “constitutional tax.” here’s a taste of the argument:

Earl Warren and his colleagues did little to expand due process and even less to guarantee “the equal protection of the laws.” Instead, they used the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to ratchet up regulation of state and local criminal processes. That choice had three perverse consequences. First, it made the constitutional law of criminal Justice primarily about criminal procedure. Second, it focused the law’s attention on trial procedure, not on the discretionary processes that actually dispose of most cases.196 Third, the Warren Court’s Bill of Rights-based regulation used constitutional law to protect majoritarian values, not countermajoritarian ones (pp. 47-48).

well, then! stuntz makes clear that he is no proponent of business-as-usual mass incarceration, but he makes a fascinating counter-intuitive proposition: could gideon’s trumpet, earl warren, and the aclu have actually increased the levels and inequalities of punishment in the past generation? or is this simply piling on — another game of “pin the blame upon the liberal?” [realizing, of course, that civil libertarians come in conservative flavors as well]. i’m skeptical of stuntz’s claims, but intrigued by the causal chain he hypothesizes.

kai erikson noted in the 1960s that deviant forms of conduct seem to derive nourishment from the very agencies devised to inhibit them. can efforts to inhibit inJustice have similarly perverse unintended consequences? a new paper by harvard law professor william stuntz makes the provocative claim that the vigorous pursuit of constitutional rights is partly to blame for mass incarceration. the abstract:

The politics of crime is widely seen as punitive, racist, and inattentive to the interests of criminal suspects and defendants. Constitutional law is widely seen as a (partial) remedy for those ills. But the cure may be causing the disease. At the margin, constitutional law pushes legislative attention – and budget dollars – away from policing and criminal adjudication and toward punishment. The law also widens the gap between the cost of investigating and prosecuting poor defendants and the cost of pursuing rich ones. Overcriminalization, overpunishment, discriminatory policing and prosecution, overfunding of prison construction and underfunding of everything else – these familiar political problems are more the consequences of constitutional regulation than justifications for it.

stultz’s basic argument is that constitutional law creates political “taxes” and “subsidies” that make some kinds of crime control cheap and others more costly. for example, the supreme court aggressively regulates policing and trial procedure, but generally leaves the substantive criminal code and sentencing to the politicians — where they go hog wild expanding the number of laws and raising sentence length. he also argues that prison budgets get a “constitutional subsidy” whereas local police and courts must ante up a “constitutional tax.” here’s a taste of the argument:

Earl Warren and his colleagues did little to expand due process and even less to guarantee “the equal protection of the laws.” Instead, they used the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to ratchet up regulation of state and local criminal processes. That choice had three perverse consequences. First, it made the constitutional law of criminal Justice primarily about criminal procedure. Second, it focused the law’s attention on trial procedure, not on the discretionary processes that actually dispose of most cases.196 Third, the Warren Court’s Bill of Rights-based regulation used constitutional law to protect majoritarian values, not countermajoritarian ones (pp. 47-48).

well, then! stuntz makes clear that he is no proponent of business-as-usual mass incarceration, but he makes a fascinating counter-intuitive proposition: could gideon’s trumpet, earl warren, and the aclu have actually increased the levels and inequalities of punishment in the past generation? or is this simply piling on — another game of “pin the blame upon the liberal?” [realizing, of course, that civil libertarians come in conservative flavors as well]. i’m skeptical of stuntz’s claims, but intrigued by the causal chain he hypothesizes.

The american civil liberties union and talkleft reports on a civil suit that begins today in federal district court. In Johnson v. Wathen, inmate Roderick Johnson seeks damages against texas prison officials, alleging that they ignored his pleas for help and did little to protect him from repeated rape and sexual abuse. According to the ACLU:

Beginning in September 2000, Roderick Johnson was housed at the James A. Allred Unit in Iowa Park, Texas where prison gangs bought and sold him as a sexual slave, raping, abusing, and degrading him nearly every day for 18 months. Johnson filed numerous complaints with prison officials and appeared before the unit’s classification committee seven separate times asking to be transferred to safekeeping, protective custody, or another prison, but each time they refused…Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a “dirty tramp,” and one said, “There’s no reason why Black punks can’t fight if they don’t want to fuck.”

The suit alleges denial of equal protection based on race and sexual orientation and that administrators could have protected Johnson without compromising “legitimate correctional needs.” Although the latter issue might seem paradoxical (how could stopping rape compromise security or legitimate penological objectives?), it is a common defense in prisoners’ rights cases. The ACLU shows numerous pages of Johnson’s handwritten complaints to officials, such as:

The extent of sexual abuse and rape in prisons is often debated by criminologists and reliable data on the subject have historically been hard to find. In the past five years, however, prison rape has received increasing attention and documentation, with a 2005 bureau of Justice statistics study, 2001 and 2003 human rights watch reports, and the prison rape elimination act of 2003. A call for accountability from prison officials seems like a basic step, but complaints from inmates such as Johnson have historically been dismissed as self-serving (the prisoner is “working the system”) or exaggerated (“prison is supposed to be hard”) and still fall on deaf ears in some prison systems. The Johnson complaint cites Farmer v. Brennen, a 1994 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that “prison officials violate prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right not to be sexually assaulted when, with conscious disregard of a substantial risk that a prisoner will be raped, they fail to take reasonable measures to abate that risk.”

It isn’t just prison officials, either. People who would never joke about rape outside prisons casually laugh off the idea of prison rape (e.g., when a white-collar offender is sentenced). Either they minimize the harm (as was the case with “marital rape” and “date rape” until recently) or they see inmates as “other” — so dehumanized that they do not suffer the way the rest of us would. The stigma of a criminal record is part of the reason for such “deliberate indifference” on the part of officials and the public, but an inmate’s race, gender, and sexual orientation also appear to play a role in the societal reaction to complaints.

The american civil liberties union and talkleft reports on a civil suit that begins today in federal district court. In Johnson v. Wathen, inmate Roderick Johnson seeks damages against texas prison officials, alleging that they ignored his pleas for help and did little to protect him from repeated rape and sexual abuse. According to the ACLU:

Beginning in September 2000, Roderick Johnson was housed at the James A. Allred Unit in Iowa Park, Texas where prison gangs bought and sold him as a sexual slave, raping, abusing, and degrading him nearly every day for 18 months. Johnson filed numerous complaints with prison officials and appeared before the unit’s classification committee seven separate times asking to be transferred to safekeeping, protective custody, or another prison, but each time they refused…Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a “dirty tramp,” and one said, “There’s no reason why Black punks can’t fight if they don’t want to fuck.”

The suit alleges denial of equal protection based on race and sexual orientation and that administrators could have protected Johnson without compromising “legitimate correctional needs.” Although the latter issue might seem paradoxical (how could stopping rape compromise security or legitimate penological objectives?), it is a common defense in prisoners’ rights cases. The ACLU shows numerous pages of Johnson’s handwritten complaints to officials, such as:

The extent of sexual abuse and rape in prisons is often debated by criminologists and reliable data on the subject have historically been hard to find. In the past five years, however, prison rape has received increasing attention and documentation, with a 2005 bureau of Justice statistics study, 2001 and 2003 human rights watch reports, and the prison rape elimination act of 2003. A call for accountability from prison officials seems like a basic step, but complaints from inmates such as Johnson have historically been dismissed as self-serving (the prisoner is “working the system”) or exaggerated (“prison is supposed to be hard”) and still fall on deaf ears in some prison systems. The Johnson complaint cites Farmer v. Brennen, a 1994 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court found that “prison officials violate prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right not to be sexually assaulted when, with conscious disregard of a substantial risk that a prisoner will be raped, they fail to take reasonable measures to abate that risk.”

It isn’t just prison officials, either. People who would never joke about rape outside prisons casually laugh off the idea of prison rape (e.g., when a white-collar offender is sentenced). Either they minimize the harm (as was the case with “marital rape” and “date rape” until recently) or they see inmates as “other” — so dehumanized that they do not suffer the way the rest of us would. The stigma of a criminal record is part of the reason for such “deliberate indifference” on the part of officials and the public, but an inmate’s race, gender, and sexual orientation also appear to play a role in the societal reaction to complaints.

This week’s troubletown cartoon is not alone in its race- and class-based critique of the administration’s response to hurricane katrina. Nevertheless, troubletown’s Lloyd Dangle may be the first to link hurricane non-response to a racially motivated purge of felon voting.* Just a couple weeks ago I was complaining about race and class being ignored in coverage of the hurricane. Today people are using katrina as a node to connect the dots between diverse manifestations of power on one side and distributive inJustice on the other. Mr. Dangle (is that a cool name, or what?) points here to the actions of the privileged rather than the powerless. Disenfranchisement is the last dot connected, but an important one when it comes to political inequality. In addition to a website of “politics, fun, and satirical humor” with its own superstore, Dangle also maintains a troubletown (“yeah we’ve got a @*%$+#”) blog.

*thanks for the heads-up, dad.

This week’s troubletown cartoon is not alone in its race- and class-based critique of the administration’s response to hurricane katrina. Nevertheless, troubletown’s Lloyd Dangle may be the first to link hurricane non-response to a racially motivated purge of felon voting.* Just a couple weeks ago I was complaining about race and class being ignored in coverage of the hurricane. Today people are using katrina as a node to connect the dots between diverse manifestations of power on one side and distributive inJustice on the other. Mr. Dangle (is that a cool name, or what?) points here to the actions of the privileged rather than the powerless. Disenfranchisement is the last dot connected, but an important one when it comes to political inequality. In addition to a website of “politics, fun, and satirical humor” with its own superstore, Dangle also maintains a troubletown (“yeah we’ve got a @*%$+#”) blog.

*thanks for the heads-up, dad.

Until this spring, former felons in Nebraska were permanently disenfranchised unless they received a formal pardon. Now, people who have completed their felony sentences are eligible to vote after a two-year waiting period. According to the York News-Times (which sort of sounds like another paper, doesn’t it?), the League of Women Voters and the Nebraska Voting Rights Coalition are trying to register these newly-enfranchised ex-felons.

Getting the word out is a real problem. Even in Minnesota, where ex-felons can vote, I found that few of those I interviewed knew whether or when they’d become eligible. A Minneapolis man on probation told me how he went to the polls with his family and tried to vote, but was turned away as ineligible. If there’s even a chance of this happening in view of one’s friends and neighbors, who would even try? In some states, one must also pay off all outstanding financial obligations to the state (e.g., fines, court fees) before regaining eligibility, adding a further disincentive.

Jeff and I have some proposals for improving information and access for newly eligible voters exiting the Justice system, but special efforts are required to reach those released years ago. That said, names of releasees are publicly available by cohort and there’s little to stop an organization from obtaining a list of names and birthdates, looking up current addresses or phone numbers with peoplesearch engines, and doing some direct outreach.

Until this spring, former felons in Nebraska were permanently disenfranchised unless they received a formal pardon. Now, people who have completed their felony sentences are eligible to vote after a two-year waiting period. According to the York News-Times (which sort of sounds like another paper, doesn’t it?), the League of Women Voters and the Nebraska Voting Rights Coalition are trying to register these newly-enfranchised ex-felons.

Getting the word out is a real problem. Even in Minnesota, where ex-felons can vote, I found that few of those I interviewed knew whether or when they’d become eligible. A Minneapolis man on probation told me how he went to the polls with his family and tried to vote, but was turned away as ineligible. If there’s even a chance of this happening in view of one’s friends and neighbors, who would even try? In some states, one must also pay off all outstanding financial obligations to the state (e.g., fines, court fees) before regaining eligibility, adding a further disincentive.

Jeff and I have some proposals for improving information and access for newly eligible voters exiting the Justice system, but special efforts are required to reach those released years ago. That said, names of releasees are publicly available by cohort and there’s little to stop an organization from obtaining a list of names and birthdates, looking up current addresses or phone numbers with peoplesearch engines, and doing some direct outreach.

My undergraduate students complete notecards the first day of class telling me about their hometowns, interests, work experiences, goals, and a description to help identify them. This year, one student wrote “I look like a pot dealer” in the description section because he had been approached twice by people looking to buy marijuana. Just to be absolutely clear, the student was not, nor had he ever been, a pot dealer. So what does a stereotypical pot dealer look like? My personal little thought bubble calls to mind somebody who looks like this and sounds like this but I’m sure there are other models.

Is this a common experience? It brought to mind my first days at college, when two instructors asked me for drugs (one of them calling me at home). Just to be absolutely clear, I was not, nor have I ever been, a pot dealer. I was really spooked both times. My reaction was probably a “lite” version of what women feel when solicited for prostitution when pushing a stroller on their way to the grocery store — fear, anger, then confusion (what could you possibly have been thinking?). Today, drug convictions can make one permanently ineligible for student financial aid in addition to serious jail or prison time. Of course, marijuana is common on campus (the prevalence rate was 76% in one of my recent upper division classes) and it wasn’t as though they asked me to be a hit man. Still, the incidents told me I was sending the wrong signals — I wanted an “A” and a letter of recommendation, not a mandatory minimum sentence. I never discussed drugs and certainly didn’t carry any signs of substance use other than bloodshot eyes from studying too late and concert t-shirts. At 18, I could have been arrested for impersonating a musician but never a drug dealer. At the time, I was trying to make friends and present myself as a bright-eyed, creative, and hardworking young hipster — I talked excitedly and goofed around in class, visiting every TA and prof in their office hours.

In retrospect, they probably didn’t approach me (or my student) because we gave off “dealer vibes” or showed signs of drug use. Instead, they probably just thought we’d be safe to ask. That is, the instructors figured I was “cool” and they could trust me not to report them as potheads to their departments or university administration. Plus, they didn’t ask whether I could sell them pot, but instead asked whether I knew where to get some. So it’s a network thing: instructors sized me up as nonconforming and trustworthy, and thought that my social networks might include people (or people who knew people) who might be in the business. Crudely put,

P(asked) = f(style cues, interpersonal trust, perceived networks)

Bruce Jacobs has some fascinating work on the “perceptual shorthand” and cues used by street dealers and undercover officers. Here’s a partial abstract from a 1996 piece on undercover high school officers (e.g., Johnny Depp in Jump Street) in Soc. Quarterly (37: 391-412):

…Officers must move from new student to peer to drug purchaser without any informant assistance and with severe time constraints. Three specific techniques are used to trigger this process: class clowning, retreatism, and troublemaking. Each is a variation on the single theme of rebellion…these techniques generate interpersonal familiarity from a distance by creating reputations that drug dealers identify with and vest legitimacy in. Reputation substitutes for introductions informants could otherwise give, establishes a pretransaction comfort zone, and lays the interpersonal groundwork officers need before they can solicit drugs. Officers’ behavior is conceptualized through the notion of a cognitive bridge, a hybrid of interactionist and microstructural principles. …

Now that’s interesting. In my early college days, I was inadvertently sending the same signals that undercover narcotics officers use to gain trust — establishing a comfort zone by clowning in a mildly rebellious way and hanging out with instructors. I still try to lay an “interpersonal groundwork” with people, but fortunately (in the drug-free workplace of today) nobody asks me to help them score weed. If they did, I’d panic — I wouldn’t even tell them about students who look like pot dealers. The last time I was approached as anything other than a professor was last year, when a Nashville boot salesman asked “are you an entertainer, son?” Now that’s what I was after all along. Too bad he probably asks it of all the tourists and conventioneers…