So you have a suburban readership. Today you started an article series that takes that fact and uses it for good. Shows your readers some serious institutional inequity in their own counties, and for good measure, tells us and our new mayor that Philadelphia has some lessons here too.
I was pretty mean about your dumb columns, like the one about the woman who moved to the suburbs and was finally happy, and the insultingly thin coverage of violent crime and the neighborhoods and people it affects.
You're not all bad after all.
Love,
Jennifer
The article, "Suburban Cops, Tough Tactics", takes a long hard look at the penchant for area cops to take on zero-tolerance policies that they enforce mainly in heavily-black areas. Pottstown, Darby, and Coatesville all have or had arrest rates for minor, nuisance-type crimes that way outpace the averages for other cities across the nation.
The laws they use to make the arrests are mostly vague, almost certainly unconsitutional anti-loitering ordinances. And the police doing the arrests are overwhelmingly white.
The Inquirer convened local and national experts to review the laws and arrests. There are revealing and useful graphs here. There is a lot of rich information that I sincerely hope leads to political and legal pressure and policy change.
But the Inquirer also turns the heat on Philadelphia. This article is the first measured look by a local media outlet at the sort of easy criminology-speak rhetoric that got bandied about during the mayoral primary and is invoked in columns all the time. It takes aim at those who claim the "broken windows" theory is some self-evident truth.
What the article has given us a window into is the effect of zero-tolerance, broken-windows-theory influenced policing. Well, the effect: a ton of low-level drug and other nonviolent arrests, and bad or very inconclusive numbers on the more serious crimes that the theory says should be dropping. Broken windows fixes the broken windows, and arrests a bunch of people who really shouldn't be in the system in the process.
(It's not that there is no truth to the theory. Broken windows are signs of deeper decay. But that decay cannot be reversed just through ramped-up policing tactics. It evidences real social breakdown that needs rehab grants for the decayed houses with the broken windows, among a host of other interventions.)
Granted, the suburbs are a cautionary tale. Most generously, the polices examined here seem clumsily applied. More realistically, there is direct and submerged racism at work. Well designed policing programs in the city, including a policy not to prosecute low-level drug possession charges that are the product of stop and frisk, will help. But the Inquirer raises some serious questions about how we go about cracking down on violent crime under the new mayoral administration, and to its great credit, it asks those questions directly to the mayor and to us.
West Allis, WIS
% blacks arrested: 14%
% black population: 1% (actually, the 2000 census had it at 1.34%)
Unbelievable. If I did my math right, it means that it would average out to one out of every two black residents being arrested.
Does anyone know the racial breakdown of the Philly police force?
Jennifer,
while surfing around iafter reading the article you linked, I found this:
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2007...
I don't remember much discussion of "risk-based" sentencing on YPP. Have you, in your travels, come across information on this strategy?
Speaking extemporaneously
after a wedding, so a bunch of grains of salt and all that,
but the only knowledge of risk-based sentencing that I have comes from one Times article where a professor of mine was quoted. (I think this is it.) It's pretty controversial, and borderline legal, since it bases punishment on statistical risk predictors which can be read as punishing based on who you are and not what you did.
BUT
we absolutely have to look at the city prison population, and strip out those who are there because they can't afford bail (an unconscionable number) and the low-level non-violent drug offenses so that there can be greater focus of resources at the imprisonment and probation phases on those who pose serious risks (to safety, of recidivism). This is long-needed and basically court-mandated at this point, and hopefully the various parties (the prisons, the courts) will work out responsibility for the changes in who we imprison soon.
Risk Based Sentencing
I have two questions and a larger worry about this idea.
First, are the predictive models any good? The last time I taught a criminology course, about fifteen years ago, the capacity of social scientists to predict who will commit crimes was just awful. In fact our capacity to predict most anything in social science is pretty terrible. That's why the say prediction is hard, especially about the future.
Second, is risk based sentencing just? It seems to me that we should be punishing people on the basis of the crimes they commit--the one they are charged with and, perhaps also the propensity they have show for criminal behavior based on their past actions--not on some predictive model that takes into account who they are and where they have come from. (Predictive models are going to show, for example, that people from poor communities and blacks are more likely to commit crimes in the future.) That is, I think, the only just reason for punishing someone and justice also demands that everyone be treated alike. It is reasonable to adjust the length of sentences for a particular crime on the basis of the deterrent effect of the sentence on average but not ont the basis of our estimate of the effect of the sentence on an individual.
I find the whole idea of risk based sentencing troubling because it undermines the notion that we are individuals who choose our destiny and can make choices that confound where we have come from and what we have done with our lives to this point. That understanding of who we are is part of the basis for our claim to have rights and, also, part of the basis on which we hold each other responsible for what we do. If we call that way of thinking about human beings into question, we undermine some of the individual and communal practices that ground the liberal (in the broad sense) way of life. Indeed, I would argue that we have gone too far in undermining that image of human beings by offering individuals social or biological excuses for their actions.
The only good argument I have ever heard for the existence of God is that some people turn their lives around in ways that are hard to make sense of without attributing it to God's grace. It's not an argument that I find entirely persuasive as theology but it does point to what I think is best called a spirtual aspect of human life and experience that can't be capture with statistical equations. To give up that way of thinking about ourselves would be very dangerous.
Nutter's ear
Don't know if you clicked through or not, but the writer of that excerpt was Lawrence Sherman. Sherman, apparently, was also a proponent of Ramsey.
It seems that maybe it would be beneficial for us to learn more about this strategy - as given the prominant role Sherman has been playing, if Sherman favors risk-based sentencing, it may be something that Nutter wants to work to implement.
And from the article Jennifer linked:
I posted this link before
but it is really worth taking the half hour or whatever and listening to this Radio Times show.
It's a conversation with David Rudovsky and Prisons Commissioner Leon King, and it gives a really useful window into the current state of our county prison system and the conflict between the prisons and the courts over how resolve the overcrowding situation. (There recently was a historic federal court ruling in a 30-year litigation over that overcrowding.)
This worries me
The more I think about it, the more I find the whole idea of risk based sentencing morally repulsive. Unless I hear some good reasosn to support it that relieve my worries, I will do everything I can to oppose it.
There clearly are other ways to reduce prision overcrowding, which we must do, starting with not imprisoning people for minor crimes and actually following the constitution when it comes to bail.
Yeah
Marc, I'm with you. That's basically the point I was trying to make in my champagne-addled state last night.
My gut is that nothing like the Virginia model is going to actually be on the table. It is really controversial, and for good reason, and we have a ton of well-organized people who would oppose it tooth and nail. And part of my point in mentioning the ongoing discussion about how to reduce overcrowding is to suggest that THOSE reforms are already on the table and we'll be lucky if we get them dealt with. This kind of sentencing reform, even if proposed by Nutter via Sherman, seems really unlikely to make it through into judicial policy.
It is really really problematic, though. I think attention should be paid to recidivism factors at the point of devising probation and reentry programs, certainly not at sentencing.
One thing I'd say though
is that people should maybe think a little critically at how they reference and adopt Sherman's take-away findings about stop and frisk, in the context of his other positions, particularly this one.
Jennifer
you really need to stop doing that.
Haha
I need to put 'jinx' on autotext or something.
marc,
To play devil's advocate...
Do you see as a significant distinction between risk-based sentencing and focusing stop and frisk efforts in certain areas? Both are predicated upon the prediction that certain people, let's say young males, are more likely to commit a crime in the future based on broad demographic characteristics, not individual characteristics.
Yes I do
see two big differences.
First, topping and frisking someone is a very minor intrusion on their civil liberties. Putting them in jail is a major intrusion. So doing the former unfairly is much less of a concern-though still a concern-that doing the latter.
Second, I think we can do stop and frisk in ways that are reasonably fair and constitutional. And that means stopping and frisking people who are doing certain things in certain places, not on the basis of who they are (eg not on the basis that they are young black males.) Elliot Spitzer wrote a long piece about this after conduting an investigation of the NYPD. I'll see if I can find the link later.
What is maybe illuminating to me about the connection
between the two, is that Sherman's support for a Virginia-type sentencing model suggests to me a certain viewpoint about people who commit crimes that would be good to keep in mind when using his research findings on stop and frisk. That's all.
I do think that adding time to a sentence based on the personal characteristics of the defendant is uniquely awful. God, these issues bring me straight back to first year criminal law.
Sort of an aside, but on the same topic and raising many of the same issues, there was a really great and chilling New York Times series on the use of indefinite detention for people convicted of sex crimes. This is the first of the series.
This is par for the couse for the Inky
I looked @ the article, + agree that it's good to see this kind of investigative reporting. But, at the same time, this is to be expected for the Philadelphia (Suburban) Inquirer, which has, for years, seemed to regard the City as this annoying glut of people to be ignored in favor of these beautiful- and far richer + whiter- suburbs.
Ptooey. It makes me long for the Bulletin.
-Z
Inky and the Suburbs
Maybe we should go to Chris Satullo's neighborhood, tell him what he and the rest of the suburbs are doing wrong, treat them like we are 19th century missionaries and call the project "The Next Great Suburbs". If we do this we must take no responsibility nor add any money nor take on any of the problems. We just tell them how they are wrong without adding a penny to the pot.
Today's
is on strip searches.
PS who knew that the Delaware County jail was run by a private, Florida-based firm.
PPS if anyone reading is from Darby and can explain what is up with that place, that'd be cool. Start with why the former mayor was routinely assisting with strip searches.
[Edit: well, this article on Paula Brown kinda answers that and kinda just raises more questions.]
The Broken Windows Problem
The equation of "broken windows" with "zero tolerance" is troubling. As Jen alludes at the end of her post, probably the best lesson to be taken away from a "broken windows" theory of crime prevention is that you need to pay more attention to the infrastructural problems of a community, including the cosmetic ones, which create a perception of neglect, a culture of apathy, mistrust of the city and its representatives, and (ultimately) an atmosphere where crime can flourish. Police harrassment on the pretext of enforcing minor crimes isn't fixing broken windows, but breaking them.
In addition to all of the other causes (racism, crime hysteria, poorly trained cops, etc.), there's always an issue when one branch of city government tries to implement a crime prevention program without input and assistance from other public agencies. The police force is too often a broadsword, not a scalpel. You can't decide that you want to try to prevent minor lifestyle crimes and then attack minor crimes like they're major ones -- arresting people for littering without putting trash cans on the street corners.
We should be clear though -- stop-and-frisk/a crime emergency plan should not and must not be about harrassment, lifestyle crimes, or seizing people for drug offenses. It has/must have one and only one goal -- removing illegal weapons from our streets. It is/must be about stopping the homicide epidemic in its tracks. It isn't "broken windows" at all -- it's about putting out the vacant house that is on fire.