EVERY LITTLE THING HELPS, EVEN STATISTICS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXZgSnKfN5U

This video is a quick way to catch up with the content of a book I just read, “The City That Became Safe.” (Thanks to the terrifically valuable Interlibrary Loan system in Montana and the willingness of the Valier librarian, Kathy Brandvold, to use it.) Franklin Zimring was one of the professors for whom I typed in 1981-82 at the U of Chicago Law School. Another for whom I have the same enormous respect was Norval Morris, who worked closely with Zimring. They probably had as much to do with my growth in those years and since as did the Divinity School faculty. Both of them worked to understand the marginal, the discarded, the misunderstood people whom the law often grinds down into the chaff of injustice. One importance of major universities is that such men are in proximity so that they can form friendships and conduct conversations that most of us never overhear.

This book is not a pop law book but rather a part of a major conversation in this country about prisons/crime/allocation of resources and so on. Another voice is in “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1p6vtVlmB

Here’s a quote:

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Zimring’s book is not directly about the nature of incarceration but a statistical study of the massive decline in crime rate statistics across the US in the past decades and, more than that, the VERY steep decline in crime in New York City. The idea is to figure out what made crimes decrease in some kind of orderly and analytical way instead of the uninformed gut reaction of most people.

Gropnick mostly leads with another book by William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published. It’s not just that we have a grotesquely large number of people in prison, it’s not just that the cost of doing that is a huge burden nor that the population is mostly people of color, nor that it’s ineffective, nor that the bulge is probably due to the panicky criminalization of drugs, esp. marijuana. It’s also that the system of hard time constant lockdown in solitary concrete cells makes people literally insane: they lose the ability to hold their identities together. This is a different kind of torture than the Honduras practice of packing men into cells so tightly that they feel lucky to be pressed up against the bars where they might get a little air. And it is different from the more endurable prisons in the US, dorm-style with basketball courts, where older men teach the newcomers how to do a lot of things we’d rather they didn’t do.

That’s all very colorful and exciting to see acted out in TV shows that turn into popular series on DVD, like “The Wire.” But what really counts is steady, determined, gathering of facts and what they imply. Zimring notes that young male minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, are most likely to be the perpetrators of crimes, but also that the victims are largely in the same demographic. Most of these guys do not leave the ghetto in order to prowl for old ladies, or even men in tassel loafers. A finding that “stop-and-frisk” laws have a real impact on crime rates of minorities-on-minorities is not going to please defenders of minorities, but Zimring defines it as a necessary “tax” that the category must contribute to law and order.

This book would endorse the point of view that a high proportion of crime is opportunistic and that whatever drives down the opportunities -- which would be a lot of little things -- can have impact. This is not different from the opinion of Mike Burgwin, my old boss at Multnomah County Animal Control, where I was before the U of Chicago. His view of crime (and he had been a beat cop) was based on the idea of a continuum with safety at one end and crime at the other. Both ends were pre-existing, but the idea was to do anything that would push the conditions at the safety end towards those at the crime end. The problem is to figure out what changes will do that and the way to know is to keep statistics. Try something, see what happens. (I was the graph-maker.) A few percent here and a few percent there -- pretty soon you have real change.

So Zimring lays out possible causes for the major improvement in New York City. It was the time of Comstat, a program of daily statistic keeping and the constant re-delegation of forces to address hot spots and find patterns, and also the time of the “broken window” policy, which proposes that small disorders lead to big disorders.

The truly revolutionary proposition that Zimring puts forward is that we need to get rid of the idea that some people are inherently evil, no-hopers who can be dumped into those concrete prison hoppers that we would define as torture if a foreign country confined our soldiers like that. Certainly there are some people, sociopaths, that should be locked up for our protection. But when prison officials sat down with a list of their solitary hard-time people and looked at each case one by one, they found that 80% were hard to justify as deserving of such treatment. In a time when marijuana appears to be less dangerous than alcohol, sentences are radically skewed. The possible ways to diminish crime are scattered among legislature, courts, parole and social workers, police, media, incarceration practices, international agreements and probably some as-yet undiscovered contexts.

Zimring’s bottom line: “Finding as we have that the operating forces that produce epidemic level serious crime in the city are relatively superficial, that they are not essential elements of urban life, provides a decisive response to one of the deepest fears generated in the last third of the twentieth century. We now know that life-threatening crime is not an incurable urban disease in the United States.”

Now what I want to know is who is keeping statistics for reservations?