They Were Going To Set The Wire In Oakland, But It Was Too Dangerous

Watching The Wire, I don’t think think “wow, Baltimore is super awful” but instead, “wow, that’s a lot like Oakland.” We all remember in Season One when Clay Davis’ driver is caught driving away from the Towers with $30,000 in cash, and how Davis intervenes with Burrell to make Daniels’ investigation into Barksdale and Davis go away. Well, basically the exact same thing just went down in Oakland.

Recently, a wave of homicides and restaurant robberies have struck Oakland. In response, the police arrested 56 members of the infamous Acorn gang who were connected to the crime wave. One of the gangbangers caught up in the police sweep was 27 year old William Lovan, the “nephew” of City Administrator’s Deborah Edgerly. Edgerly intervened, ordering the cops on the scene to tell her why the car was being towed and then, according to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Chip Johnson, “she vowed to contact Oakland Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan and Tucker when the officers refused to tell her, police say. She then promised an internal affairs investigation into the whole matter.” She wasn’t very effective at bailing out her nephew, Lovan has now been charged with murder and armed robbery, while Edgerly has been forced to resign.

But it gets worse, not only was Lovan a gangbanger receiving protecting from a high ranking city official, he was also a repairman for the parking division, and was one of “several people” in the Edgerly family who was employed by the city. And, shockingly, these relations got special treatment when applying for city jobs:

Edgerly has requested - and received - concessions in the past from the Police Department, most notably a change in the city’s physical training requirements to help her daughter’s efforts to become a police officer.

Erin Breckenridge, her daughter, who still works as a civilian employee in the department, was provided with an unprecedented four opportunities to pass the academy training’s physical skills test.

Of course, Edgerly is likely to replaced by another corrupt hack, or an ineffective boob in the mold of Dellums, but still, it’s nice to see someone in Oakland facing accountability. It would nice if this happened a bit more.

The Death Penalty

My almost-unconditional opposition to the death penalty is based on a few simple facts and axioms.  The first is that the government needs a very good reason to kill defenseless people.  This isn’t to say that government killing is always wrong, in fact, in many cases, the government really ought to kill people.  You don’t have to be a blood thirsty Hobbesian to say that there are definitely situations where the government should be a violent actor.   So, why should we execute criminals?  Some say that it is simply a matter of justice - that people who kill have voided their claim to life and protection of the laws.  This argument is terribly insufficient, however.  For one, a very small proportion of murders are charged as capital crimes and most importantly, the purpose of the justice system is not to institute Italian-mob style tick-for-tack killings.  If someone’s father, the son doesn’t get to charge the defendant with a crime, the state does.  And the state need not seek revenge, because, as an agent, it can’t really be offended against.  So it comes down to deterrence.  And my own reading of the evidence on deterrence, especially Justin Wolfer’s meta-analysis, has pretty well convinced me that the deterrent effect is minimal, if it exists it all.  So basically we’re killing for no reason.

The other fact of the justice system that cements my opposition to the death penalty in nearly ever imaginable case is the extreme rarity of escape.  Seeing that we’ve managed to actually neutralize murderers (though there is the problem of killings in prisons), the death penalty is especially pointless.  It’s easy to imagine how sensible the quick, effective application of death would be if murderers escaped from prison and went on to kill regularly, but seeing how that doesn’t happen very much (arguably killing innocent people is more likely than for people to escape and kill again), it’s not really something to be concerned with.

Oh yeah, and the racial and class disparities in how its applied sure don’ help.  If you’re wondering what prompted this discussion, it was this op-ed by an innocent prisoner who was sentenced to life without parole.  Had the circumstances been slightly different, he could very well had been killed.  And that should have been treated as the rough equivalent of murder.

Needle Exchange

One of the worst aspects of current American politics is that posturing as being “tough on crime” is oftentimes viewed as more important than actually reducing crime rates. Thus Giuliani, who along with Bill Bratton instituted very effective policies, is viewed as “tough on crime” while Bloomberg, who has overseen a continued reduction in crime, has no reputation as a crime fighter. Much (but not all) of Rudy’s reputation stems from the fact that he was a total asshole, specifically towards minority communities, which is seen by many as a necessary attribute if you want be considered a crime fighter.

This is all just a long introduction to a very hopeful story in the Politico reporting that Hillary Clinton now supports federal funding for needle exchange. What makes this signifigant is that “In 1998, the Clinton administration signed a federal law that banned D.C. from using any local tax revenue to fund a needle exchange program. D.C. is the only city in the country to face such a ban, and as a result.. reaches only a third of the estimated 9,700 intravenous drug users in the city.” Why would Clinton pass such an absurd law? Even if he thought needle exchanges were a bad idea, passing the law that only affected DC would not reduce needle exchange programs significantly. It’s only purpose would be to communicate that “Clinton hates drugs too and is tough on crime.” The pattern was repeated with the Defense of Marriage Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act — two pieces of legislation which served no purpose other than to differentiate Clinton from the left wing the party. They are, incidentally, on their merits bad pieces of legislation that no Democratic administration would support in a vacuum.

That Hillary is committed, at least in the primary, to reversing this dreadful policy is a sign of hope.  It’s one of the more perverse aspects of our political scene that to appear “centrist” or “tough on crime” Clinton had to punish HIV-infected Washingtonians.   Hopefully, those days are over.

Arson and Inevitability

It looks like the cops have a suspect for who set off one of the wildfires in Southern California:

Officials blamed a wildfire that consumed more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes last week on a boy playing with matches, and said they would ask a prosecutor to consider the case.

The boy, whose name and age were not released, admitted to sparking the fire on Oct. 21, Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Diane Hecht said Tuesday. Ferocious winds helped it quickly spread.

It seems weird to prosecute someone for playing with matches and starting a fire, in this case. There was going to be a fire anyway - the area is full of dry brush, there aren’t that many buildings, and there hadn’t been rain in nearly a year. To go after the poor kid who may have started the fire because of playing with matches seems besides the point. The reason there are wildfires, isn’t because of arsonists, but because of the underlying ecological conditions. There was a high probability of a large fire in that area — it doesn’t really matter if it was a kid playing with matches, a motorcycle accident, a inadvertently left on pilot light. THe point is that cracking down on “arson” isn’t going to prevent wildfires in an area so prone to them

Racism and Criminal Justice

Stuart Taylor’s National Journal column makes some very trenchant points about race and sentencing.  It is indeed ironic - or sad - that the story that captures the national attention and sets the agenda for a discussion about race and criminal justice is Jena.  What happened in Jena was shameful, but hardly symbolic of the larger issues surrounding our justice policy.  Even assuming the worst, that District Attorney Reed Walters is indeed a horrible racist, Jena isn’t instructive.  Even if we had no racist prosecutors and everyone applied the law and sentencing guidelines as written, there would still be large, unjustifiable inequities in our criminal justice system:

Rather, the heart of the racial injustice in our penal system is the grossly excessive punishment of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, disproportionately black offenders whose long prison terms ruin countless lives and turn many who could have become productive citizens into career criminals.

The Supreme Court heard two cases on October 2 that focus on a relatively small piece of this problem: how much discretion federal district judges have to depart from federal sentencing guidelines that provide savagely severe prison terms for small-time drug offenders, among others. The most savage penalties of all are for people — overwhelmingly, black people — caught with fairly small amounts of crack cocaine.

But the justices, hemmed in by wrongheaded mandatory sentencing laws, are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, no matter how they rule. Nothing that the Court will ever do could make much of a dent in the overly punitive regime that has sent the number of prisoners in this country soaring to 2.2 million, more than in any other nation. This represents more than a sixfold increase in the number of incarcerated Americans since 1970, when it was 330,000. More than 40 percent of these prisoners are black. And according to a recent study by the nonprofit Sentencing Project, 500,000 of the 2.2 million are locked up for drug crimes, and a majority of the convicted drug prisoners have no history of violence or high-level drug-selling.

Of course, many in the civil rights community have been protesting these policies for a while, and deserve credit.  But when you say that the sentencing guidelines, moves towards increased punitiveness, the crack-cocaine disparity and all of that are “racist” most people take that to mean “explicit prejudice and desire to disempower/oppress black people on account of their race.”  Since the guidelines and rules have possible non racist justifications, and still are awful when applied “fairly,” the framing of them as racist is difficult — especially when the Congressional Black Caucus supported the original legislation setting up the disparity in 1986.

What Senator Webb is doing on prison reform is admirable, and since he has a lot of natural credibility when it comes to “tough” issues like crime, he is one of the best figures — in conjunction with maybe a Brownback type — to push forward some sort of reform that involves eliminating the crack-powder disparity, reducing overall punitiveness in the prison system, scrapping mandatory minimums, while at the same time putting more cops on the street to allay people’s fears of a resurgent crime wave.  Of course, liberals like myself have been dreaming of such a moment for a long time and it is still unlikely that Democrats will ever get over their pathetic fear of being “soft on crime.”

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Brad Plumer has a good post examining disparities in what the Justice Department chooses to prosecute:

Russell Mokhiber, the editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, has a few comparisons he wants to share with the class.

The FBI estimates that burglary and robbery—street crimes—costs the nation $3.8 billion a year.

[In contrast,] health care fraud costs Americans $100 billion $400 billion a year. And then you have your lesser frauds: auto repair fraud, $40 billion a year, securities fraud, $15 billion a year—and on down the list. …

But which set of criminals end up filling our prisons? Do tell. Here’s one more comparison:

The FBI estimates that 16,000 Americans are murdered every year.

Compare this to the 56,000 Americans who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestos… These deaths are often the result of criminal recklessness. Yet, they are rarely prosecuted as homicides or as criminal violations of federal laws.

Though I think crime policy could use a lot of statistical rigor and prioritization, Brad misses some key reasons why crimes like burglary and murder are considered more serious than those that might be “objectively” more costly. With burglary, the actual act, while not costly, can have broad ripple effects for its victims. I’ve known people whose purses were stolen in the parking lot of a supermarket and suffered very little monetary loss (credit cards were canceled and they didn’t have a ton of cash on them). But, they don’t go to that supermarket anymore. That type of effect can’t easily be calculated in dollars and cents. There’s also the fear that an actual mugging can bring — again, low monetary loss but high emotional losses. If robbery is common, or perceived to be commonplace, people fear to go outside, don’t engage their communities and can become cloistered in their homes. People consider robbery to be more serious that more abstract forms of theft — like health care or auto fraud. What would you consider to be worse — if a mugger assaulted you and stole your wallet/purse in one of your favorite public places (monetary loss - $300) or if a mechanic defrauded you and overcharged you by 1500 dollars. Would you consider the mechanic to be five times worse than the mugger? Same goes for unscrupulous stock brokers or analysts.

Brad also mentions what kills more people each year — corporate malfeseance like absestos-caused mesothelioma or murder. According to Brad, 56,000 people die each year from “occupational diseases” like mesothelioma or black lung, as opposed to 16,000 from murder. It’s easy to see why murder is prioritized. Murder is scary, murders in one’s neighborhood can affect the every day life of hundreds, if not thousands of people in profound ways for long times that a 70 year old man dying of mesothelioma does not. Murderers also strike us as more evil, more morally repugnant individuals than do corporate VPs who ignore the dangers of asbestos. Whether this is legitimate moral reasoning or not is up to question, but it’s certainly how people feel. One can also make the argument that these murders are actually worse, or at least not merely 2/7s as bad as “occupational diseases” — in pure calculative terms.

According (pdf) to the CDC’s report on Work Related Lung Disease and my supplemental back of the envelope calculations - the total lost life expectancy from work related diseases Brad talks about - pneumoconiosis, abestosis, malignant mesothelioma, Byssinosis, Silicosis and Hypersensitivity pneumonitis per year (averaging the total from 1993-2002) is 190,477 years lost. According to a 1997 DoJ report(pdf) , the median age of a murder victim is 29. If Brad’s number of 16000 murders per year is correct and the overall life expectancy for Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, is 77.9 years, that means that every year, murder results in a total life expectancy lost of 782,400 years. That’s a differential of 591,923 years, with the years lost due to murder being a bit more than four times larger than the years lost to work related lung diseases.