Franklin Zimring
During my fourth year at Meadville/Lombard, 1981-82, I paid my room and board by transcribing at the U of Chicago Law School. At the time professors dictated into tape recorders and then the typing pool put them onto computers which the professors hadn’t quite mastered. These were work-station set-ups connected to a master main frame in some far away place like the basement, which was dumb since the school was built on a former swamp and buildings occasionally flooded. Somehow computers seemed to require dark and sequestered places. Or maybe people think in terms of bomb shelters.
The typing pool was a strange mix of educated older black women and free spirited unmarried white women. The bulk of the professors themselves were notoriously conservative — Scalia, for instance, who was considered to be marked for the Supreme Court, which turned out to be true. (Everyone was very nice to him.) I was supposed to be assigned to type for a half-dozen young professors who were being groomed for the big time, and two of them were female which was considered very progressive.
They were a nervous, intolerant bunch and would not stand for ANY mis-typings. Letters were still done on typewriters with lift-off correction, and the guys would hold the sheets of paper up to the light to see whether they could tell what had been lifted off. But they did like my vocabulary — I rarely misheard a word even if it were multi-syllabic and sometimes I caught mistakes.
Helen, who managed the pool with a motherly touch, wouldn’t let us sit idle and without work, so we typed for other profs as well. The thought of two men appealed to me. One was Norval Morris, a New Zealand-born, Australian-educated man who was interested in SE Asia and who concentrated on questions about legal insanity, which are heart-breaking and rarely resolvable. He was a lively writer who wanted his coffee made in a Chemex, rather exotic at the time, which he wasn’t entirely confident I could manage. This was partly because once when I was talking to him, I went to sit in a modern bat-winged chair, missed and ended on the floor. I’m sure he thought I was a proper cow, but was too polite to say such a thing.
I’ve blogged about his books, which included The Honest Politician's Guide To Crime Control (1970), his classic The Future Of Imprisonment (1974), Between Prison And Probation (1990), The Brothel Boy (1992), The Oxford History Of The Prison (1995), and Maconochie's Gentlemen (2001).
The other one was Franklin Zimring, who was from what we now recognize as the equivalent of an internal nation, Coastal California. He was in transition between professorship at law school and a return to Berkeley where he properly belonged and it was not a comfortable time for him. I felt a good deal of empathy for his predicament and he took it as personal affection for himself which he never abused. He was only three years younger than me, but far more brilliant. He and Morris worked closely together.
The Aussie and the Californian were exceptionally willing to suspend judgment, to look for the intricacies of interacting forces, to analyze and ponder before coming to conventional conclusions — if they ever did. Morris died in 2004, aged eighty. I’m honored to have known this man unafraid to think about criminals and madmen. I feel sure that what I learned from both of these professors, even if it was only from typing their manuscripts and buying their books.
I’ve blogged about his books, which included He is best known for The Honest Politician's Guide To Crime Control (1970), his classic The Future Of Imprisonment (1974), Between Prison And Probation (1990), The Brothel Boy (1992), The Oxford History Of The Prison (1995), and Maconochie's Gentlemen (2001).
The other one was Franklin Zimring, who was from what we now recognize as the equivalent of an internal nation, Coastal California. He was in transition between law school and a return to Berkeley where he properly belonged and it was not a comfortable time for him. I felt a good deal of empathy for his predicament and he took it as personal affection for himself which he never abused. He was only three years younger than me, but far more brilliant. He and Morris worked closely together.
The Aussie and the Californian were exceptionally willing to suspend judgment, to look for the intricacies of interacting forces, to analyze and ponder before coming to conventional conclusions — if they ever did. Morris died in 2004, aged eighty. I’m honored to have known this influential man unafraid to think about criminals and madmen. I feel sure that what I learned from both of these professors, even if it was only from typing their manuscripts and buying their books, has made me open to writing with Tim, risky as our subjects and styles could be, and giving the issues serious thought, not flipping them off or letting them be predictable.
Our present national agony over cops shooting citizens, too often white cops and black citizens or even children, has been addressed by Zimring in his newly released and much needed book entitled “When Police Kill”. It is evidence-based, full of statistical examples of what works and what doesn’t. There is nothing about evil racist police, but thoughtful identification of various forces that tip the scales towards shootings that equal death. Below is a link to a video in which he vigorously makes his points. His claim is that reducing the rate of death by cop shooting from 500 to 250 is possible by making sensible practical changes in procedure. The hard part is to overcome cynicism and resistance to change.
Zimring has written several books about juvenile justice and I’ve ordered another one. He generously sent me materials a few years ago when I was researching for what was not yet named “Smash Street Boys” or “Cinematheque”. Essentially, he doesn’t believe in irredeemable kids and proved statistically that early offenders do not automatically turn out to be lifetime criminals as so many believe they will. The thinking is produced by family law as much as criminal law.
There’s never been a time so in need of this kind of bulwark against injustice, overreaching law, and unwarranted force. Zimring’s mother was also a lawyer who passed the bar in 1933, another time of hardship and destruction. His father was a screenwriter whose writing name was Maurice Zimm. You’d easily recognize the movies he helped develop in the LA collaborative way. The one everyone likes to name is “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
Franklin Zimring grew up among brilliant achievers but attended public school. After 1960 Maurice Zimring relocated to Hawaii and was involved in the Peace Corps. His roots were Jewish Middle America in Iowa and his professor son did not rebel against that as far as I could see. He never got the “big head” or forgot those who suffer.
Part of Tim’s radicalization came from working in an LA hospital doing emergency room triage in a time of heavy drug use among teens. The cops brought in a young man out of his mind with belligerence. When they tried to manage him through the doors of the clinic, he took offense and began to make judo moves. A cop simply shot him dead.
When someone is shot, especially by authorities, the consequences are far more than just the loss of the victim’s life. It is broken trust, bitterness and shock for witnesses, families, and citizens. It destroys reputations for ourselves as individuals and as a nation and teaches us all to resist and evade laws. But it is an act so easy, so vulnerable to misjudgement, so impossible to provide with justice and healing, and so constantly modeled on our news and dramas, that one can become hopeless about it, fatalistic, accepting. A kind of second and multiple death, a spiritual creature from an intensely black lagoon.
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