Texas Tough

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, on Democracy Now takes aim at the underappreciated importance of racism in launching the drug war and constructing the world’s largest penal system. While the Obama presidency, for many, represents the triumphant culmination of the civil rights movement, in criminal justice race relations have reached their nadir. Says Michelle, this is less a golden age of tolerance and equal opportunity than another round of America’s recurring racial nightmares. See the video here and her TomDispatch post here.

On the wider significance of Shamu the Serial Killer in CounterPunch .

…Though a handful of voices have called for Tilikum to be put down — one of them, a blogger for the right-wing American Family Association, cited Exodus 21:29 on punishing beasts by stoning them to death — for the most part, calls for reprisals have been minimal. Rather, the majority of observers — animal ethicists, marine biologists, and the mediatized masses alike — have highlighted the cruelty of spending one’s lifetime in a cramped pen and suggested that in light of its incarceration, the cetacean’s actions were “only natural.” “I’m sure it was a high stress situation,” speculated one biologist, underscoring the impact of Tilikum’s capture as a young calf, decades in confinement, and sexual subjection as a lucrative and prolific stud animal. (Of Tilikum’s 17 offspring, at least one of them, Ky, has attempted a similar attack on its trainer in a San Antonio SeaWorld.) Venturing the notion that the orca was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, another marine researcher lamented, “He’s been trying to communicate, and nobody’s been listening.” …More.

Prisons in America are too crowded, too harsh, too isolated, and provide too little treatment and education. But mostly they are too big. With 2.4 million Americans living behind bars (and with 5 million more on probation or parole), the most important step we can take to reform the country’s out-of-control criminal justice system is to shrink it. Sentencing reform and alternatives to incarceration are vital steps, but improving the quality of legal representation at trial—and, more importantly, before trial—could play an even larger role. That’s why Eric Holder’s announcement that the Department of Justice is ramping up a new program to improve the quality of indigent legal defense is so important. Some 80 percent of criminal defendants can’t afford to pay for their own attorney. Give those defendants a fighting chance, and we could end up with a truly adversarial legal system that will produce not just inmates but justice. From NPR: Justice Dept. To Launch Indigent Defense Program : NPR.

Interview in the March 2010 issue of Texas Monthly, with an emphasis on racial politics, crime rates, and prison building in Texas and the wider South.

…Isn’t it a good thing that 2.4 million criminals are off America’s streets?Yes, criminologists call this the incapacitation effect. It works better than deterrence and has been more politically fashionable than rehabilitation. But incapacitation has serious limitations. First, it works only while inmates are actually behind bars. Second, there are moral and practical problems in justifying penalties based on what inmates might do rather than what they actually did; in practice, incapacitation becomes a kind of preventive detention. Third, caring for potential criminals in cages is just about the most expensive crime prevention program imaginable. …More

From the March 1, 2010 issue: Although the American prison system is based (somewhat) on the principle of rehabilitation, it still retains, Perkinson says, powerful elements of one of its original influences: retribution. By way of explanation, he examines the country’s “harshest, largest penal system,” that of Texas, the state that “reigns supreme in the punishment business.” (In one city, Huntsville, almost half its population is in prison and another fifth works in jobs related to keeping them there.) Perkinson explores the history of the state and its penal system, showing how retribution, at least as much as rehabilitation, played a key role in the system’s evolution; and, by extension, he sheds light on the evolution of penal systems across the country. The American penal system, he argues, is very much a product of its southern influences (and, as a sure-to-be controversial corollary to that, the racial imbalance of its prisoners is a kind of backlash against the civil rights movement). A fascinating and often deeply troubling book.

–David Pitt

With tax revenues drying up, the hangover from America’s 30-year prison binge is finally taking hold. Mandatory minimums, three strikes, truth in sentencing, zero tolerance—these slogans helped politicians win elections, but they also created punitive entitlement programs that locked governments into massive longterm expenditures, often with negligible benefits to public safety. As this New York Times editorial points out, a number of cash-strapped states are, at long last, looking to their prison bureaucracies for savings, not simply, one hopes, by slashing programming, but by designing evidence-based early-release procedures that can shrink the prison population and mitigate the collateral damage of mass imprisonment without serious crime risk.

John Irwin, a most lucid critic of American criminal justice in both its rehabilitative and warehousing incarnations, had a pronounced influence on my own work. His writing on the internal cultural dynamics of California’s liberal penology of the 1950s and 1960s advanced the humanitarian skepticism of path-breakers like Donald Clemmer and Gresham Sykes and brilliantly combined sociology and autobiography. My heart goes out to Katy and her family who will miss him more than we will.

All charges against Skip Gates have been dropped. In the scheme of the country’s prison colossus, this is a tiny case, but in this post, one of Gates’ former students mines it for significance. Also see this David Chapelle skit, which may contextualize the incident best.

A great deal of politically charged chatter will break out in response to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates outside his home on Thursday. It’s impossible to know what precisely went down: Is conventional racial profiling at work here or did Gates go ballistic after a long flight with no pillows or food service? Still, it’s instructive to read the documents associated with the case that have gone public so far. First, there is the unusually detailed police report that presents a menacing portrait of Gates the Terrible badgering  a doe-eyed police officer and virtually forcing the arrest. (Even in this one-sided version, it’s notable that the officer admits he acted only when scolded in front of fellow officers, only when his honor before peers came into question). This represents only the first word, of course, but it’s worth remembering that in most criminal cases (especially those involving low-income defendants), the police report represents the first and last word. Every day, such incident reports undergrid plea bargaining negotiations between prosectuors and court-appointed counsel; in some cases, defense counsel doesn’t even have full access to the reports. Imagine what a fix Gates would be in in such conventional circumstances. As it happens, the professor is more-than-capably represented by his friend and colleague Charles Ogletree, who has already released a counter-narrative of the altercation with a very different emphasis. As the case develops, pause for a moment to think what this country’s criminal justice system would be like (and look like) if all criminal defendants were capably represented by counsel. Sadly, Gideon’s trumpet scarcely sounds in most court rooms, and our prison cells thus continue to fill up with nary a protest.

In the postwar period under Gov. Earl Warren, California built the most rehabilitation-oriented penal system in the country. Despite its many flaws, it represented a progressive counterweight to the hardline control model in Texas. Since the 1970s, however, all that has changed. In response to the rise of the right and reaction against the prison branch of the civil rights movement, California politicians launched and relaunched wars on crime with ever greater ferocity. Because of Prop. 13, there was no way to pay the bills, and because of the state’s highly effective guard union, the bills are whoppers, $10 billion a year. Combine that with a severe economic downturn, and Cali has a first-class human-made disaster on its hands: California Budget Held Captive By State Prisons : NPR.