As teenagers in Parkland, Florida, dressed for the funerals of their friends – the latest victims of a mass shooting in the U.S. – weary outrage poured forth on social media and in op-eds across the country. Once again, survivors, victims’ families and critics of U.S. gun laws demanded action to address the never-ending cycle of mass shootings and routine violence ravaging American … Continue reading »
crime
The immigrant-crime connection
Killing at the hands of an illegal alien spurs furious debate about closing borders and deporting the undocumented. It is the year before a presidential election and candidates denounce undocumented immigrants as the conveyors of Mexican violence into our country. When Robert J. Sampson, Harvard sociologist and criminologist, wrote about this news, he was not … Continue reading »
A summer classic: Moral panic over a pier shooting
It is a reminder of how hard the past is to leave behind (especially when your leading politicians belong to it). By now the whole nation knows the basic facts: Francisco Sanchez, a 45- or 52-year-old Mexican national, shot and killed Kathryn Steinle, 32-year-old resident of a nearby suburb, in a chance encounter along San Francisco’s … Continue reading »
If black lives matter, end the War on Crime
From the perspective of tens of thousands of protesters around the nation this week, the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. and Eric Garner in Staten Island reflected an unfathomable decision by white police officers to kill unarmed black men engaged in trivial criminal (if any) behavior. To thousands of police officers (and their families), … Continue reading »
Mass incarceration, mass deportation: Twin legacies of governing through crime
One afflicts mostly American citizens, disproportionately those of African American and Latino backgrounds from areas of concentrated poverty, but also many white and middle class citizens who fall into the hands of police and prosecutors. The other afflicts exclusively non-citizens living in the U.S. without federal authorization or in violation of the terms of their … Continue reading »
‘Justice’ in the murder years: More tales from the Brooklyn crypt
The New York Times continues its on going series of investigatory features on wrongful convictions or likely wrongful convictions produced by Brooklyn’s law enforcement and court system in the 1980s and early 1990s with a gripping and sad story by Frances Robles on two Brooklyn teenagers (now 30 and 31) convicted of killing a corrections … Continue reading »
Dallas 1963 and the culture of fear
Today Americans in many large cities are experiencing levels of homicide last experienced in the mid-1950s. This is the result of a crime decline across the country that began in the early 1990s, when homicide levels were twice has high (or higher). When you look at homicides on a graph, this steep decline marks the … Continue reading »
Lessons from the ‘sordid decades’: Miscarriages of justice in NY’s ‘War on Crime’ in the ’80s and ’90s
Any reader of the paper of record will be impressed with the series of impressive features dealing with various aspects of county level justice in the five boroughs that make up New York City. While not all of them have cast their gaze backwards (for instance the superb recent series on delay in the Bronx County courts). … Continue reading »
How not to govern through crime: Insights on bullying
In her New York Times op-ed on bullying (and I presume her book), journalist Emily Bazelon provides a powerful critique of why not to govern through crime and more importantly, some keen insights on alternative ways to govern a problem that has some crime like properties, but other features as well (read it here). Bullying … Continue reading »
Gated nightmares
It has all the feel of a Twilight Zone episode, only in a setting that is unmistakably contemporary. The nightmare is framed by this setting, a house in a gated community. It could be a very posh house, like the one where Oscar Pistorious lived and admits he shot to death his girlfriend, the model … Continue reading »
The NY Times’ flawed series on New Jersey’s halfway houses
I’ve finished reading New York Times reporter Sam Dolnick’s important investigative report on New Jersey’s burgeoning system of half way houses, Unlocked — and I’m still more impressed with the power of traditional media ways of representing crime and criminal justice than I am with the power of its investigating or reporting. On the later … Continue reading »
The iron cage: Why it’s so hard to escape mass incarceration
For more than three decades state and local officials, egged on by the mass media and interested public employee unions, stoked the growth of prison systems in almost every state by greatly expanding the range of people considered eligible to go to prison. Plenty of local ne’er do wells that county prosecutors and judges would … Continue reading »
Egypt’s election and the rise of crime
As Egyptians went to the polls Wednesday in an historic first ever free presidential election, David Kirkpatrick reports in the New York Times that prominently on their minds is the rise of crime since the fall of the dictatorship (read the story here). On the eve of the vote to choose Egypt’s first president since … Continue reading »
Occupy’s prison protest: It’s not yesterday any more
Getting people around my age, late boomers who grew up in the “fear years” of the 1970s, to rethink their assumptions about prisons, crime and criminal justice is hard; and it keeps us locked into mass incarceration. Consider SF Chron Columnist Chip Johnson’s broadside at the Occupy Movement in the Bay Area’s demonstration at San … Continue reading »
Governing the Occupy Movement through crime
In many cities, including most prominently Oakland and New York, tent encampments on public spaces by the Occupy Wall Street movement have been cleared in early morning raids by police (read about the Oakland situation here). This time, at least, police violence seems to have been minimal. But what is regrettable is the use by … Continue reading »
Attica, forty years on
On the editorial pages of the NYTimes, historian Heather Thompson reminds us all of how profoundly the Attica prison uprising and its violent suppression, 40 years ago, shaped our penal imagination and prepared the grounds for what we now call “mass incarceration.”(read it here) The prisoners who took nine correctional officers hostage and gained control … Continue reading »
Thawing of prison isolation policy a positive sign
A recent hearing in Sacramento of the Assembly Public Safety Committee was another remarkable sign that California’s once frozen penal policies are beginning to thaw and change. Isolation of “high risk” prisoners, in a lock-down environment designed to promote security to the exclusion of all other penal objectives has been a pillar of California’s prison … Continue reading »
Punished: The culture of control as seen from Oakland
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by UC Santa Barbara sociologist Victor Rios should be on your summer reading list if you are interested in how the culture of control works. Rios closely studied a group of 40 Oakland youths of color as they navigated the terrain of poverty in a city … Continue reading »
Governing through crime wave strikes UK
Rates of crime reported to the police in the UK appear stable, maintaining a long term downward trend of over a decade. The politics of crime however is very much on the rise in England and and from where I write in Edinburgh (ironically, Northern Ireland, where sectarian rioting took place this week, crime policy … Continue reading »
City crime, country crime
A recent report announced that the huge financial company UBS will be moving back from a suburb of New York into Manhattan, “because it has come to realize it is more difficult to recruit talented people in their 20s to work in the suburbs.” What a (literal) turnaround! For about a generation, roughly from the 1970s … Continue reading »