By clicking here, you may SUBMIT your own comment, and/or you may READ the other comments made by public contributors.

Criminal Justice and Human Rights in the New Century

Go to "Drug Abuse" - a separate thread in this conference

Item 1 - 31-AUG-2001 15:03 Elliott Currie

WELCOME

1:1) 01-SEP-2001 02:48 Richard Farson

I want to welcome all of you to this much anticipated policy forum, Criminal Justice and Human Rights in the New Century, led by Dr. Elliott Currie, the distinguished Berkeley criminologist.  We are, indeed, fortunate to have him as our moderator.  I first ran across his writing some months ago, and was immediately certain that he would be the one to lead our discussion of this most timely, yet timeless, subject.  A Lecturer in Legal Studies at Berkeley (there is no longer a department of criminology there) and Senior Research Scientist at the Public Health Institute, Berkeley, he is, this year, a Visiting Professor, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University.  We look forward to his taking us on an interesting journey through some of the most poorly understood but hotly debated, and overwhelmingly important subject matter that we could be discussing.  So, welcome, Elliott.  We are yours.

1:2) 01-SEP-2001 02:51 Elliott Currie

Thanks for that introduction, Richard.  I'm delighted to be here and very much looking forward to our discussion.

I'd like to focus the discussion on the question of how we can build a criminal justice system for the new century that both protects us from serious crime and embodies a real commitment to human rights.  There is surely some tension, inevitably, between those two goals.  But, I'm convinced that we can do a much better job of balancing them than we are doing now.

Indeed, as we begin the new millennium, the state of criminal justice in America is hardly one we can be proud of.  The news isn't all bad; crime is down from its peaks of a few years ago, and that has meant a real improvement in the quality of life in some places.  But, we still suffer levels of violent crime that are far higher than those of every other advanced society and more closely resemble some of the most volatile parts of the developing world.  And this is true despite a thirty-year experiment in "getting tough" on crime.  The number of Americans behind bars has jumped sevenfold since the early 1970s, giving us the world's highest rate of imprisonment (we passed Russia in this respect not long ago), and we put our citizens to death with a frequency matched only by handful of authoritarian countries.  But, our homicide death rate, especially among the young, towers above that of every other industrial nation.

We have created a justice system that stands out as an anomaly in the developed world; and we have done so without thinking much about the consequences.  But, those consequences are profound, and they ripple out across every realm of American life.  The vast sums we've spent on warehousing offenders in a swollen prison system have been siphoned away from more constructive public purposes, notably education, child welfare, and health care.  Our stunning levels of incarceration have devastated whole communities and spawned what some have called a "prison generation" among young people of color (twenty-eight percent of black men in America will, at current rates, spend time in a state or federal prison).  As women have become the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, we have created a looming crisis of parentless children of inmates, the effects of which will be felt for years to come.  Internationally, the United States is increasingly seen as a serial violator of human rights because of the conditions in our jails and prisons and our sweeping use of the death penalty--especially on the young and the mentally retarded.

Can we change all this?  I think we can, and I think some encouraging stirrings of change are already evident in America, which I hope we will talk about a little down the road.  But, the obstacles are formidable.  There are plenty of Americans who are perfectly satisfied with the thrust of our recent criminal justice policies and, if anything, would like to see us do more of the same: build more prisons, lengthen sentences, send more children to adult courts, loosen what remains of restraints on the police, and execute more people, more quickly.  Even among people who are troubled about the growing harshness of justice in America, it's often assumed that this is a necessary trade-off: a price we must pay if we want to keep from being overrun by crime.  Is that true?  That is one of the questions I hope we will grapple with in the next few weeks.  What do you think?

1:3) 01-SEP-2001 16:28 Douglass Carmichael

This is such an important topic.  The existing situation makes many of us sick.  I have to remember with Newton who said, on seeing a condemned man pass through the street in a cart, "there but for the grace of God go I."

It's clear that the current system, rationalized in terms of bad behavior and threat to public peace, is really part of the system of distributing poverty and unemployment, and taking people off the voter roles.  It's a way of reducing competition for your child's future jobs.

We are starting to see the first cohort T-shirts "Class of 1999, Vacaville Prison".  What's negative will, just by numbers, turn positive in the culture of exclusion we currently practice.

What are the causes of crime?  So obvious that upstream investment beats downstream cost of consequences.

"There are bad people and good people and technology can protect the good from the bad.  Hey, and there are lots of markets here."

I'd compare it to a near criminal intent conversation which I was side bar to in New York a few years ago.  Three execs talking, "If you pay any of your employees more then 36k a year you are an idiot.  You should replace them with a kid, a person over seas, or a machine."

And we have the fact that I think the largest contributor to the lobbying for mandatory sentencing was the building industry.

There is a wonderful book by Jospeh Taintor called “The Collapse of Complex Societies”.  He argues that societies collapse because of overspending on infrastructure.  "Justice" is part of that cost, and it’s a double cost.  People don't go to jail for watching TV.  You need to be active and putting that amount of talent in jail is just socially self-defeating.

For me, personally, there is also the simple injustice of hurting another human being, and our unwillingness to face up to the obvious fact that their failure is our failure, pure and simple.

What to do?  First, we can't solve the problem if it is narrowly defined "what to do with criminals".  It must go larger - to the gestalt of the whole society.

When the press tells us that, "American worker productivity rose last month", that does not mean that each worker is not producing more.  It means that the same amount is being produced by fewer workers, because the others were fired.  And the whole system, now with increasing good information, forces us to take costs out everywhere, especially people costs.  Does this create the conditions of crime?  You bet.  And increasing crime and incarceration (you have to take the two together) is always an indication of revolutionary potential - and not a ‘nice’ revolution.

I have the awkward feeling that "the market has already discounted this”.  I mean that people have already included it in their calculations.  I think many people voted for Bush because they felt he would be more likely to call out the National Guard in a property emergency (echoes of the New York labor riots in the 1800's and the National Guard - I've forgotten the specific.).

It's the logic behind gated communities, Montana and Nantucket.

If it's already taken into account as a wave that we can't control, the American vision is dead; it's now them against us.  What can change it?  Conversations like this can.

End of soapbox.

1:4) 01-SEP-2001 17:08 Richard Farson

There is lots of food for thought in these opening comments by Elliott and Douglass, searching for the larger reasons for the disturbing crime picture in the US.

One aspect of it that has always interested me is that no matter how we protest, and how we insist on harsh policing (perhaps WHY we insist on harsh treatment), we seem to have a national love affair with crime.  We don't want it to happen to us, of course, but it very seldom does.  Even though we are one of the most violent nations in the world, the vast majority of Americans have never even witnessed a violent act--a shooting, stabbing, beating, rape, let alone been the victims.  (Obviously there are pockets of violence in our society where everyone witnesses it often.)  But we are reminded, just today, that Sioux City, Iowa averages only two murders a year.  Our experience with violent crime is largely vicarious, via television.  There is a lot of it to experience there, and we love watching it.  I'm told that the average high school senior has witnessed 240,000 acts of violence on TV - 40,000 of them murders.

More than that, we are fascinated by criminals.  We love repentant ex-offenders and enjoy hearing their stories.  Frank Sinatra seemed all the more sexually appealing because of his gangland connections.  Gangsters seem to have little difficulty getting girlfriends.  Whatcha think, Elliott?  Does a manageable amount of crime serve us Americans in some psychological way?  If we could press a button and eliminate crime, would Americans press it?  We know that members of the prison industry wouldn't, as Douglass points out, but would the average person?

1:5) 01-SEP-2001 21:19 Raymond Alden

Thank you, Elliott, for being here.  This is a subject that should provoke interesting ideas!

You mention the potential for tension between the ideas of protecting the public on the one hand and human rights on the other.  I suggest that this tension is nothing compared to that which exists between both of them and the public's perception of "deserved" punishment.  The idea of "Let the punishment fit the crime" is more fun in the Mikado than it is in our system of justice.

Douglass brings up the relevancy of our economic system.  Sooner or later, we'll have to take that into account, too, and better sooner than later.  The late Louis Kelso had thoughts about that worth exploring.

“If we could press a button and eliminate crime, would Americans press it?” (See 1:4)

That is a very interesting question, Dick.  I hope that will open up a whole line of questioning.  (Are we really going to try to deal with Criminal Justice in just ONE conference?)

With respect to our practice of sentencing, I have the feeling that the people fit the picture painted by some philosopher -- Santayana maybe? -- who spoke of "Having lost sight of the objective, they redouble their efforts".

1:6) 02-SEP-2001 22:09 Barry McCaffrey

Elliott, I'll be very interested in your thinking about this issue in the coming weeks...2 million prisoners at Fed-State-Local levels...$35 Billion per year...4000 + places of incarceration...many of our local jails and some State prisons are factories of despair and injustice and incredible danger.  Probably some 85% of those behind bars, according to CASA at Colombia, have a serious alcohol or drug abuse problem...few receive in prison treatment (7%)...very, very few have follow on adequate supervision (drug testing) or treatment.

The situation is a disaster...exacerbated by mandatory minimum sentencing and totally inadequate funding of the parole-probation system.

It is important that the discussion not lose sight of the reality that the prison system is jammed with the failures of our family system, our education system, our youth mentoring system...these folks are bad news and known to be a threat to their local community.  They end up arrested, charged, tried, and jailed in general after multiple offenses.  These local jails are the end of the line for society's failures...the option is not in my view whether to lock them up...or be angry at them for the harm they do...the question is...what do we do to create conditions where more of them have better structure, better education, better nutrition, better EXAMPLE from adults, and someone with authority who also acts like they care about them?

Tough...Boys and Girls Clubs, the WMCA Youth Program, DARE, Big Brother Big Sister, ...these are the heroes I see dealing with the challenges at community level.

1:7) 02-SEP-2001 23:45 John Craven

Sorry, I do not have time for this significant seminar, as I am actively developing environmentally sustainable habitats for coastal desert communities.  They make ideal prisons for rational and benign individuals currently incarcerated a la the settlement of Australia - but that is extraneous.  My only recommendation is to find some actions that are really doable without educating a non-educable public.

My recommendation is that we legalize marijuana and make it a substance that is mutatis mutandi identical with tobacco.  We can then release all of those imprisoned for marijuana, and at the same time we can get the new marijuana/tobacco industry to fund rehabilitation centers for those who have been incarcerated.

This will require a concentrated advertising effort to convince the public of the truism that tobacco and marijuana, in moderation, is, in fact, a healthy form of tranquilization.  (The new adds on the package say that if you stop smoking now that you will prevent long term damage.  Yes, indeed.  Forty pack years of cigarettes are fatal - twenty pack years are in the noise for tobacco related illness.  When the cigarette companies get this point across, and they are now working on it, they can sell a pack a day for twenty years before anyone heeds the warning.  So, let's legalize marijuana, making it tobacco, and let’s regulate tobacco so that it has minor effect of the health of the population.  (Oh, by the way, the major deleterious effect of cigarette smoke is the positive ions which can be eliminated by a small radioactive substance that puts out alpha radiation.  (Oh Horrors -radioactive? Not as bad as the sun)

1:8) 03-SEP-2001 19:17 Richard Farson

Elliott, you want to focus on the balancing of human rights with protection of the public.  I'm sure your idea that these two are in tension derives from the fact that totalitarian societies often have far less crime than do democracies.  There are, however, societies that enjoy considerable freedom and human rights but little violent crime.  Isn't that the case in Japan and Britain, for example?  Is it possible that in some cases rights and protections are not in opposition, but in harmony?  Perhaps the extension of human rights can sometimes actually reduce the amount of crime.  I once wrote a book advocating full constitutional protection for children, extending them the complete rights of citizenship, arguing that they should be treated as persons under the law.  I believe that if children were given the rights that adults enjoy they might be less the victims of crimes, and less likely to commit them.  Are freedom and crime inextricably linked?

1:9) 03-SEP-2001 23:07 Barry McCaffrey

John, you wish to discuss actions that are doable without educating the ignorant public?  Legalizing pot may be a tough sell.  Many of us would think that would be bad policy...some 2/3 of the public outright oppose this no matter how cutely the question is worded.  Dr David Smith, the Founder of the Haight-Asbury Free Clinic, believes that pot is a disaster for many young people...so does Dr Mitch Rosenthal, Founder of the Phoenix House (biggest non-profit drug treatment chain in the nation).

Lots of us agree that incarceration for simple possession of pot...particularly for first offense or young people is also bad policy.  The facts indicate that few people in the US are actually arrested, tried, and jailed for simple possession...in the Federal system...the average prosecution was for over 200KG's.

The problem of poly-drug abuse is not its illegality.  It’s the destructive impact it has on families, the work place, and adolescent development.  The secondary impact of violence and corruption is also severe.  There is little reason to think that legalizing these substances would reduce abuse...the greater the exposure rate to young people, the greater the adult chronic addiction.

We don't agree on this issue.

1:10) 03-SEP-2001 23:37 Richard Farson

Barry, you don't have to sell me on the possible harmful effects of pot.  I've seen them.  But where I get derailed on current policy is in the crime picture.  Smart people can disagree about whether or not legalization or decriminalization will actually reduce the abuse of these substances, but surely it would reduce associated crime, reduce the prison population, and reduce the harmful effects of incarceration, which are undoubtedly worse than the effects of pot, would it not?

1:11) 04-SEP-2001 02:48 Elliott Currie

Wow!  A lot of thoughtful and intriguing responses already, despite it being the Labor Day weekend--that's encouraging!

I'd like to jump into several of the conversations we've begun here.  First, I want to affirm Douglass Carmichael's point about the connection between the criminal justice system and the economy.  There is, indeed, a sense in which the policy of mass incarceration (which, by the way, everyone thus far seems to agree has been a bust) is "a way of reducing competition for your child's future jobs”.  There is now a small but intriguing body of research on how the prison boom has affected our unemployment rate, for example--some of the most intriguing is the work of the sociologist Bruce Western and his colleagues at Princeton.  Among other things, the research shows that the prison boom is one key reason why our jobless rate, on the surface, looks pretty good by comparison with that of many European countries.  We get to subtract a couple of million people from the labor force, and so they're not counted as unemployed.  Needless to say, this has pretty profound implications for how we think about the success of our economy in recent years in general.

Richard Farson raises the important issue of our "love affair" with crime--the sense that we may "need" our criminals in very fundamental ways.  There's a long tradition of thinking about this, mostly in sociology--I'd strongly recommend, in this regard, the classic book by the Yale sociologist Kai Erikson called ‘Wayward Puritans’, which discusses the role of "deviant behavior" in helping societies gain some sense of coherence and solidarity by excluding other folks.  Certainly, in the post-Willie Horton age, it's hard to deny that this cultural phenomenon plays a big role in our crime policy.

I agree with Richard that many people's experience with crime, at least serious crime, is vicarious.  But I'd caution against taking that point too far.  We really do have a violent crime problem in America, and one that distinguishes us from most other advanced industrial countries--though some are doing their best to catch up.  I'm struck by this often when I visit other countries; I remember, for example, walking late at night across much of inner-city Vancouver without worrying at all about getting attacked by someone, which is something that would never happen in a big American city.  Figuring out what this tells us about the causes of crime (and the remedies) is critically important if we want to get beyond the frustrating situation that Raymond Alden describes, of redoubling failed efforts.

And speaking of failed efforts, I think Barry McCaffrey's line about many of our jails and prisons being "factories of despair and injustice and incredible danger" is both powerful and all too true.  I'd push it one step further, to argue that they are increasingly 'factories' of crime in themselves--an old idea (Jeremy Bentham described prisons as "schools in which wickedness is taught") that is more and more relevant today as we cram more and more of those 'failures' behind bars but do less and less to help them have a reasonable chance of succeeding once they get out.  Which results in several hundred thousand mostly unprepared, mostly angry people being released to very inhospitable streets every year.  A recipe for disaster, indeed.

One bright spot in all this, in my view (though I tend to be incurably and perhaps irrationally optimistic about these matters) is that there are stirrings of change, at least with respect to the provision of drug treatment to prisoners.  In California, for example, we've significantly upped the percentage of inmates getting treatment.  Of course, we were starting from such a low base that almost any funding would have made a big improvement, and we still have treatment for only a fraction of those who could benefit from it.  But at least there is some evidence that legislators now "get it" about the folly of not treating folks when we have the chance.

One small quibble with Barry's strong discussion--my own sense is that recent research has cast considerable doubt on whether the DARE program really works; can we still think of that as a heroic program, or do we need to come up with something better?

I was going to ask for Barry's comments on John Craven's proposal that we legalize marijuana, but got them without asking.  Let me, for now, just add a couple of comments to an emerging discussion that I expect we'll return to from time to time.  One is that I have less confidence than Richard Farson does that legalization would necessarily reduce drug-related crime that much.  That's partly because a lot of the crime that's associated with drugs isn't really caused by the prohibition of drugs.  There's a great deal of research, for example, that suggests that a lot of the people who wind up dealing drugs, or using them heavily, were doing crime well before they got involved with drugs.  And a lot of them would probably still be doing crime even if their drugs were legal.  That's not to say there's no connection between the criminalization of drug use and crime--only that the connections are probably more complicated than many people on different sides of the legalization debate assume.

Well, this response is getting to be longer than I intended when I started--that's a tribute to the fact that there's a lot of meat to chew on in the comments so far.  I want to come back to some issues I've left out, including Richard's challenging question about the tension between crime control and human rights.  But let me mull that one over for a while and give others the floor.

1:12) 04-SEP-2001 14:09 John Craven

You guys have missed my point. Pot is indeed deleterious.

Alcohol is very physiologically devastating, but we do not have large numbers of people in jail for the manufacture distribution and sale of this regulated substance.  We do have a significant number of DUI inmates but that may be okay.

Coffee is physiologically devastating if you are addicted.  But we do not have large numbers of people in jail for the production distribution and sale of this basically unregulated substance and nobody is in jail for driving under the influence of coffee.

Tobacco is physiologically devastating if you smoke continuously for long periods of time.  It is not so bad if you stop for intervals which gives your body time to clean itself up.  But we do not have large numbers of people in jail for driving under the influence of tobacco.

Sugar is physiologically devastating.  We are becoming a nation of fat diabetics with a tremendous cost to our health system.  But we do not have large numbers of people in jail for driving under the influence of sugar.

Crystal meth is permanently devastating creating dangerous paranoids that should be institutionalized for the rest of their life.  We do not have a sufficient number of the people who manufacture crystal meth apprehended and institutionalized.

So, why don't we put pot in the same class as coffee, sugar, alcohol, tobacco? (and oxygen - a very toxic substance) (oh yes chocolate as consumed by some Mormons – deadly deadly deadly)

1:13) 04-SEP-2001 15:50 Douglass Carmichael

I agree with John.  And we could add Prozac and Ritalin.  2 million prescriptions of Ritalin a month?

But to me, the real casualty is the culture of danger and repressions and heavy measures not backed by reasonable argument.  The current drug policy undermines a culture of law, respect and reasonableness.  It undermines the apparent ability of adults to act sane and responsible. It undermines respect for a ruling class that punishes unevenly and without regard to the stresses of lower class life.

For example:

“Connecticut State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is chairman of the Connecticut House judiciary committee, found out that 9 out of 10 people in jail and prison in Connecticut for drug offenses are black or Hispanic, but that half of those arrested on drug charges are white.  Part of the problem, he said, is a Connecticut law that established a mandatory sentence for selling or possessing drugs within two thirds of a mile of a school, day care center or public housing project.  The result, Mr. Lawlor said, is that 90 percent of cities like Hartford or New Haven are within these areas, and so poor and minority people who, unlike whites, live in public housing projects in these areas end up in prison for any drug charge.  This is a clear case of how the law indirectly discriminates against the lower income people.”

1:14) 04-SEP-2001 15:55 Douglass Carmichael

I cited earlier Taintor's Collapse of Complex Societies.

The unwillingness to keep justice systems current and fair is a response to the logarithmically escalating real (unmet) cost of maintaining the principles of fair and quick judgment by peers.  This is a symptom of system collapse.

1:15) 04-SEP-2001 23:41 Raymond Alden

A year or two ago, I read somewhere about a prison -- I think it was in Minnesota or Wisconsin -- that was managed wisely.  Prisoners were taught, treated, kept busy in productive ways, etc.  The return rate for defective output was remarkably small.

Is this a case of our knowing what to do, but simply not doing it?

A Secretary of Education said a while back, just before a national conference, "Everything we need to know about improving our schools is already known -- by somebody, somewhere."  (That's not an exact quote.)

This is puzzling, indeed.  Simple arithmetic about the cost of prevention vs. the cost of cure should convince any thinking person that we are betting our money on the wrong horses.

1:16) 05-SEP-2001 00:25 Barry McCaffrey

Elliott, The DARE program has taken some strong criticism...I've read the dissenting viewpoints and think they are mostly ideological.  The course has been revised three times...the numbers look good to us...the program is immensely popular and expanding.  Some folks do not like the notion of police officers teaching this material. Older groups, 10th-12th grade, probably do better with other approaches.

1:17) 05-SEP-2001 17:08 Elliott Currie

Thanks, all, for your comments.  I think it's interesting that a lot of our discussion thus far has zeroed in on drug policy--interesting, though not terribly surprising, since drugs have driven so much of our criminal justice policy generally in recent years, and since so many Americans (clearly including US) feel very strongly, one way or another, about drugs.  A couple of remarks on the issues you've raised:

John Craven and Douglass Carmichael continue to stress the destructive impact of some anti-drug policies.  The Connecticut piece Douglass offered is especially troubling, and does strongly illustrate the uneven impact of drug enforcement across different social strata.

But let me be the devil's advocate for a moment on this.  A lot of people I know--including a great many cops--would say something like this: "Well, sure, most of our drug enforcement is concentrated in low income communities, and especially low income minority communities.  But that's where the biggest problem is, and that's where the law-abiding citizens are most worried and angry about drugs and drug dealing.  Sure, middle class kids deal cocaine too, but mostly indoors and in ways that don't threaten the whole social fabric of their neighborhoods.  In the inner city, drugs translate into pervasive violence and the virtual terrorization of whole communities.  Drug dealing near schools IS a very real problem in the inner city, because dealers target vulnerable kids and ruin their lives and futures, and those kids are also exposed to horrific levels of violence.  The laws are designed not to discriminate against these communities, but to protect them.  In fact, it would be highly discriminatory if we FAILED to take strong action against street dealing in these places, and just let these neighborhoods go down the tubes".

Comments?

Let me just add, along these lines, that we now have some important social experiments underway in changing the thrust of our drug policies.  Both Arizona and now California have passed laws mandating treatment rather than prison for low-level drug possession offenders.  California's Proposition 36, passed last year, and now being seriously implemented across the state, marks a major experiment in reorienting our enforcement policy towards minor drug offenders (it doesn't alter the way we deal with serious drug dealers).  Is this the sort of saner drug policy that John and Douglass would like to see?  Barry, what do you think about the California and Arizona initiatives?  (Barry, as an aside, I'll be very interested to see what hard empirical research tells us down the road about the effectiveness of the revised DARE program).

On a different, but related, note, Raymond Alden's point about the relative costs of prevention versus cure (actually, too often when it comes to crime we invest in NEITHER prevention nor cure) hits my own greatest frustration with our current approach to crime.  In answer to your question, yes: this is indeed a case of knowing what to do but not doing it.  To be sure, there are some things we need to know more about than we now do (how to work with serious violent offenders to fix what ails them is one example).  But we certainly know how to do a great deal more than we are now doing (Barry has already pointed to the stunning lack of drug treatment behind bars; that's a huge example of something we know how to do but aren't doing nearly enough of).  But there are other examples: intensive intervention with young offenders to keep them from going farther down the road to serious crime, and out of prison; intensive preschool help for at-risk kids; serious efforts to prevent child abuse, which for my money is the single most important immediate cause of violent crime.

The disconnect between what criminologists (and plenty of others) know and what legislators do--or what the public votes for--is, I think, one of the most troubling gaps in public policy today.  Question: how do we bridge it?  How do those of us who study these things do a better job of getting the message out?  Or is that the real problem?

1:18) 05-SEP-2001 20:29 Richard Farson

I think that getting the word out is the problem, at least to some extent.  That's what, with luck, we will be able to do with this forum.

I have never heard a politician say that he or she has just conferred with a group of criminologists, and intends to press for legislation based on what they have been learning.  They do that some with other scientists, but never with criminologists.  Don't feel bad, Elliott.  They don't consult psychologists either.

1:19) 05-SEP-2001 21:07 Richard Farson

Watching crime shows on TV, one might get the idea that the public, the police, the courts and the penal system work together to apprehend criminals and incarcerate them for the ultimate safety of the public.  As far as I can tell, that is a completely, and dangerously, erroneous picture.  Here's the way it looks to me:

Most crimes are not even reported, including serious ones.  One out of ten or twelve rapes is reported.  Many beatings are not reported.  Wives who sometimes initiate serious domestic violence tend not to be reported because the husbands are embarrassed to have been beaten up by their wives.  Some murders are not reported.

Of those reported, the vast majority is never solved.  Only one out of 150 burglaries leads to an arrest.  By and large the police never even try to solve them.  I'm told that only one in four murders leads to a murder conviction.  Detective work of the sort we associate with Sherlock Holmes or crime labs on TV accounts for almost no solutions of crimes.  Detectives are almost totally dependent upon informants, and indeed have to keep a criminal network of them supported in order to catch others.

Of those crimes that lead to an arrest, less than half lead to conviction, and of those convicted, less than half are actually incarcerated.

Of those incarcerated, most will serve only a few years, and be released.  I believe the average time served for serious crime is about three years, and until recently when mandated sentences, "three strikes" laws, and such were enacted, the average life sentence was only about seven years, as I recall.

I can only conclude that what this means is that the vast majority of criminals, even some of the most dangerous ones, are at large, among us all the time.  So much for the myth of public safety.

Add to that the fact that even among prisoners and prison guards, only about 10 or 15 percent of the current prison population is considered in any way dangerous to society.  We also have the fascinating paradox that when police go on strike, crime is reduced.

So my question is, how much more dangerous would it be if we just dismantled the whole system--disarmed police, emptied the prisons, etc.???  Might we even be safer?  Just asking.  Don't get mad.

1:20) 05-SEP-2001 21:44 Barry McCaffrey

Dick, the evidence is fairly clear that the legalization of pot would increase use substantially among young people, eye surgeons, etc.  About 5% of the population is now ‘past month users’.  Might go up to 10%...similar to abuse rates for alcohol, which is the most devastating chronic rate of all.  The total impact is harmful to a number of social and medical concerns.  A significant percentage of adolescents (perhaps 15%) end up with serious substance abuse challenges...lots of other side effects are of concern...cancer, drugged driving accidents, dependence and loss of motivation, etc.  NIDA has funded solid research by Colombia, U Michigan, UCLA, U Penn Medical College...worth examining the evidence.

Agreed...few of us believe in criminal prosecution for simple possession...re-read my answer.  However, the facts are fairly clear...our drug court system (now more than 800 drug courts nation-wide) and treatment in general work more effectively when there is a penalty to coerce treatment.  In addition, the facts are that very, very few people in the US are ever arrested, prosecuted and jailed for simple possession or for a first offense...this is the refrain from the legalization proponents...it also is largely BS.

Many of us believe high social disapproval of pot use lowers exposure and is good for society.  It is legitimate to have a different view...but about 2/3 consistently support keeping pot as a schedule I drug.

1:21) 05-SEP-2001 22:10 Barry McCaffrey

John, you have been such a brilliant scientist...your comments do not reflect the thoughtful nature I know you possess.  Heroin, methamphetamine, and poly drug abuse in general IS NOT FUNNY...it’s not actually like sugar, coffee, and oxygen.  You may wish to visit one of the drug/alcohol treatment centers in your community...sheer misery for those involved directly and their families and fellow employees.  NIDA now has an excellent grasp of the chemistry of addiction and brain function.  I'll try to get a decent explanation on this net from Dr. Alan Leshner, who is a brilliant scientist in the neurochemistry of the brain.  These dependant, chronically addicted people are sick, dangerous to themselves and others, and a heartbreak to their mothers and Dads.  They end up dead from murder, malnutrition, AIDS, STD's and TB.  They almost always have severe associated mental health problems...they end up squandering their human potential...alienated from their families, unemployed, they chemically cannot feel affection or love the way they did before they altered the chemistry of the reward pathway of the brain.  They are really, really in despair at their situation and desperate to end the chaos of their life.  Fortunately, they respond to science based drug treatment at better rates than current cancer treatment.

Your comments are from my experience insensitive to the suffering of more than 5 million Americans who are chronic addicts to illegal drugs - and 10+ million abusing alcohol.  There are lots of us who are also very bright and serious who believe we can make a difference.  The tone of your comments seems to imply you don't give any respect to a different viewpoint.

By the way...the Cuban Cigars are a concern...the only drug you cannot get a lab rat to self-administer is tobacco smoke...they simply aren't that stupid.

1:22) 06-SEP-2001 02:37 Richard Farson

Barry, I never minimize the harmful effects of the substances you mention.  I just have all along felt that we should not criminalize their use.  Given the terrible effects of alcohol, which leads to many more deaths than pot, and destroys many more relationships, would you think it wise to criminalize it?  Again?

1:23) 06-SEP-2001 13:30 Douglass Carmichael

First, "and especially low income minority communities. But that's where the biggest problem is, and that's where the law-abiding citizens are most worried and angry about drugs and drug dealing."  But why is the problem there, and for whom?  Why do middle class people care about what goes on (as they perceive it) in poor communities?  What do people in poor communities want (now there is a great approach)?

In other words, the damage done to 15% by drugs may be less bad than the damage done to the legal and justice systems in a society that no longer believes that law is fair.

Second, we need to balance the truly horrible effects of drugs with the truly horrible effects of criminalization.

Barry, I take it that your tone towards John is also part of the discussion, and worth noting.  I see it as an attempt to narrow the range of the discussion.  My own sense is that the solution to the drug problem probably lies way outside the normal boundaries of the discussion.  And may point to a much larger problem of which the current situation is just a hint.

For example, in a techno-centered society, how do we regulate and explore our increasing ability to deal with altered mental states?  Drugs affect the capacity for reason, but anti-depressants make us emotionally stupid and take away dreams and lead to increased impotence.  So, we can take Prozac and Viagra and alcohol and stay on the job and in the relationship.  And this is just the beginning of legal medication.

1:24) 06-SEP-2001 13:52 Douglass Carmichael

Correction from an earlier post from NYT August 19:

www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/health/children/19RITA.html

"Last year, doctors wrote almost 20 million monthly prescriptions for the stimulants (Ritalin and look alikes)."

1:25) 06-SEP-2001 20:00 Raymond Alden

Dick says: "I have never heard a politician say that he or she has just conferred with a group of criminologists, and intends to press for legislation based on what they have been learning."

That will continue to be the case until newspaper publishers and editors are brought into the act.  When what the criminologists say gets editorial attention, then the politicians will start to be responsive.  They live and die on the basis of what the public is reading and hearing.

1:27) 07-SEP-2001 11:58 Douglass Carmichael

This morning's Village Voice:

“Dissident Scientists Question the Ban on Ecstasy - The People's Prozac”

by Carla Spartos

Consider the two dosing lines for America's young people—the one outside the club and the one in the school nurse's office.  At the door to raves, kids stand with Ecstasy pills on their tongues, waiting for the weekly surge of empathy and good feeling that comes from the combination of hallucinogen and amphetamine.  For this rush, which was legal before 1985, they risk jail terms and the loss of student aid.

But every day outside the nurse's office, roughly 2 million kids line up for their daily dose of stimulant, very likely Adderall, a prescription amphetamine that is quickly replacing Ritalin as the drug of choice for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  For this high, which is said to help learning, teachers and parents lend encouragement.

1:28) 07-SEP-2001 14:10 Walter Anderson

Interesting -- and I think appropriate -- that so much of this discussion is about drug issues.  The simple fact, as I believe should be obvious, is that the world is up to its ass in mind-altering chemicals, that if anything more are on the way, that there is no such thing as being "drug-free" (I'm having my second cup of coffee at the moment) and that we all have an enormous task of social learning about which are harmful to whom, under what circumstances, which are beneficial, who gets to decide, who decides who decides.

1:29) 07-SEP-2001 14:18 Richard Farson

Elliott, I put my conclusion that most criminals are at large into this conference because I would like to know what trade offs you are talking about when you indicate that to have protection we may need to sacrifice human rights.  As I see it, we have very little actual protection now (although I would be the first to complain if when I picked up the phone to call the police, no one answered).  Much of what we call protection is counter-productive (prisons, policing).  So what, beyond giving up the debatable 2nd amendment right to bear arms (which would doubtless reduce homicides and suicides), what rights are vulnerable?  Due process?  Free speech?  Protection from search and seizure?  Would losing these rights actually make any difference to our ultimate safety?  What really happens in a place like China or Japan (or as you say, Vancouver, which by the way is now 60% Chinese) where one can walk the streets in safety, and return to find your wallet or camera where you left it?

1:30) 07-SEP-2001 14:55 Douglass Carmichael

I found myself dreaming about this last night.  Seems that we are actually building a fairly comprehensive "system" of thought here.  In the dream, the issue was "isn't hurting someone always a projection from powerful personal dynamics, to which violence is the cleansing?  And that we hurt someone, doesn't that arouse in us a feeling that something is wrong?”  I am still with Socrates: no one does evil on purpose; it's the best course of action from their perspective, with their humanity on the line in their situation.  Part of what I think we learned from Wilson and Versailles has to be: don't put people in bad situations, or they will react badly.

Part of the drug/poverty scene is, I think, a part of the larger issue of how a society distributes its poverty (not wealth, which is easier, because saying "you win" does not require the justification that "you lose" does.)

1:31) 07-SEP-2001 16:32 Elliott Currie

Well, now!  Once again, a lot to grapple with here.  I want to pick up several threads that have emerged in the discussion, and, with any luck at all, weave at least a couple of them together.

First, on the drug issue.  We are still, so to speak, on drugs--not surprising, as Walter Anderson points out, since we are up to our whatevers in drugs of one kind or another most of the time (nice to hear you again, Walt).

Before I get serious about this, I can't resist a small anecdote; once, I was giving a talk about drugs at a big conference that had lots of law enforcement types in attendance.  The fellow who introduced me pointed out that I had just published a book on drug policy (true) and that I had worked in drug treatment on the 'front lines' myself (also true) and that I was currently studying kids who were seriously into the drug culture (also true).  He summed this up by saying "indeed, it appears that Dr. Currie has spent the better part of the last ten years on drugs".

(I ain't saying anything about the truth of THAT...)

Let me first jump into the debate that's emerged between Barry on the one hand and John, Douglass, and perhaps Richard on the other.  My suspicion is that beneath the surface disagreement there may be more common ground on this issue than meets the eye.  It's true that Barry emphasizes more the harms that drugs themselves do, while others emphasize the harms that the drug war does (Douglass makes this quite explicit in his comment about the damage done to the justice system and society by the drug war being more significant than the impact of drugs on some, probably relatively small, percentage of people).

But I don't see John or Douglass or Richard ignoring the negative impact of hard drugs, and I don't see Barry simply being a cheerleader for locking everybody up.  So my sense is that all of us would acknowledge that there are real tensions here, and difficult social choices that need to be made.

In that regard, I want to return to my query about the role of law enforcement in dealing with drug dealing in the inner city for a minute, because I think it raises some of those genuinely tough questions.  Douglass asks why the 'middle class' should care what happens with drugs in the inner city--but my point was that it's inner-city residents themselves who are most upset and up in arms about drugs in their communities and most demanding of action by cops and courts against drugs.  And that's an important reason why we get the pattern of drug law enforcement that we do.

So--don't those folks have a right to be protected against drug dealers in their front yard?  Don't they have a right to expect that the rest of us will invest in sufficient police presence to keep the dealers away from their kids?  By the same token, though, does recognizing that right mean we should support Draconian sentences for those in the community who are doing the dealing?

It seems to me, in short, that there aren't really simple answers here, and that we are faced with the need to balance different and sometimes contradictory social aims if we want to create a drug policy for this century that's halfway intelligent.  Would you all agree?

(Barry, a quibble here: I don't think it's BS to say that we put a lot of minor drug offenders behind bars.  In California, before Proposition 36, we routinely had several thousand prisoners sentenced for simple possession.  Now it's true that some of those were pled down from more serious charges, and some of them, doubtless, were serious offenders whom we just happened to snare on this charge.  But in the other direction, a significant proportion of the people we imprison for dealing--say, for "possession for sale"--are really very small fry indeed.  All of this costs our state in the nine figures every year, so it's not a minor use of our public resources).

On that issue of "balancing", let me take on Richard's question about what I mean by a "tension" between crime control and human rights--I'm glad you've persevered on that one, Richard!  I think that we could always squelch much more crime than we do, if we were sufficiently ruthless and amoral in our approach--including, notably, some of that crime which, as you point out, we never get our hands on at all because it never gets into the system.

Let me give you an example.  Suppose you were to appoint me the country's evil crime czar (not that there's anything wrong with being a czar, Barry...) and tell me I've got to cut street crime by, say, a third in the next few years, and you don't care how I'd do it, as long as I don't do anything that would be "soft" on crime.  Well, knowing what I know about who's most likely to commit street crimes, and at what ages, one of my first moves might be to preventively detain vast numbers of kids from especially high-risk populations, at least until they got to be about 30 or so.  Put 'em to work out in the boondocks somewhere and don't let them out till they've 'matured out' of crime, as some criminologists put it.

Well, I'll bet you that would cut the crime rate.  Right now we can't do it, because it violates some civil liberties (though I think some recent criminal justice initiatives--like California's 'anti-gang' Proposition 21--have some elements of this vision).  Indeed, some local and state anti-gang initiatives in California can put a kid away for a long time for just walking down the street with their cousin who some sheriff’s department says is a "gang member'.  Can you cut youth crime that way?  Some people say so.  Does it undercut fundamental human rights?  I think so.

So there's a tension.  My own view, as you've probably gathered, is that we've tilted too far in the direction of chipping away at rights in the name of crime control.  But I teach a class full of cops who all feel the opposite.

Richard, your mentioning the Second Amendment is very apropos here.  It's interesting that many people view the tension between individual liberties and state action very differently when it comes to guns than when it comes to drugs.  Many of the same folks who don't want the state messing with their drugs are quite happy to have the state messing with other peoples' guns.  Is there a bit of a contradiction here?

My own approach would be to be quite tough on guns; I don't like them and, though I tend to think the issues are more complicated than some gun control proponents do, I believe that restricting peoples' freedom to own guns would indeed help to lower the level of violent crime in America.  So, there again, yes: there's a tension between crime control and individual rights.  Forget whether or not the Second Amendment really enshrines any individual right to gun ownership (which, as Richard says, is debatable); it's a freedom that many people, including lots of my students, cherish.  Would I take some of it away in the service of reducing violence?  Yep.

A word on the issue of the gap between what criminologists know and what legislators do.  Raymond Alden suggests that legislators will pay attention to criminologists when the media gets on board and pushes the ideas that the criminologists are pushing.  I wish that were true, but I remember several situations in which, here in California, BOTH the majority of newspaper editors AND 95 percent of my colleagues agreed that some proposed anticrime legislation was dreadful and misguided--but the legislators pushed it and the voters passed it anyway.  That happened with Prop. 21, and the "three strikes" law in 1994.  My sense is that legislators will only change their ways on these issues when enough voters are educated and mobilized to press for a new direction, so that legislators are faced with changing or losing the next election.

So--how we do that best--how we educate and mobilize large numbers of ordinary folks--strikes me as the most crucial question for the future of 21st century criminal justice policy; one that I hope we'll return to in this forum, because it's a genuinely tough one to figure out.

(Richard, on the issue of politicians never sitting down with criminologists (or psychologists), I'm happy to say that the California Attorney General is in fact sitting down with a group of us this year to talk about crime policy.  I can't guarantee that this will result in huge changes or even small ones, but it's a welcome sign.  But there I go being optimistic again.)

1:32) 07-SEP-2001 17:04 Donald Straus

I perhaps shouldn't cut across forums, but I am impressed with the similar problems that you here are treating so well and the problems that are producing less heat and passion in the Democracy sessions of Forum 1.

To mention just one: there has been a lively exchange in Forum 1 about the pros and cons of urging more citizens to participate in "governance".  In Elliott's #31 just above, he says: "So--how we do that best--how we educate and mobilize large numbers of ordinary folks--strikes me as the most crucial question for the future of 21st century criminal justice policy; one that I hope we'll return to in this forum, because it's a genuinely tough one to figure out."

As our two Fora move on towards a wrap-up, perhaps we should try a cross-exchange of ideas on these two closely related questions.

Increasingly, I think, this reborn WBSI will need to struggle with the problem of utilizing in-depth specialized wisdom with some newer, (and perhaps computer-aided) skills of integrating them with the generalized wisdom needed for wise decisions.

1:33) 07-SEP-2001 19:28 Douglass Carmichael

Simple question: Is "it's inner-city residents themselves who are most upset and up in arms about drugs in their communities and most demanding of action by cops and courts against drugs.  And that's an important reason why we get the pattern of drug law enforcement that we do."  True?

If we look at patterns of voting, inner city is much more liberal.  If you look at inner city attitudes (such as during the Simpson trial) there is overwhelming sense that the system is not fair.  I would think inner city people want safety, but not at the cost of fairness.  They want cops on the beat, not beat up kids and kids in jail.

1:34) 09-SEP-2001 16:07 Barry McCaffrey

Dick, yes, I believe Schedule I drugs should be illegal to produce, sell or use.  It helps the prevention and treatment systems to work.  Very few people in America actually go to jail for simple possession of personal use drugs.  The potential penalties do, without question, support the Drug Court System.

No, I do not believe that alcohol which is a mildly addictive drug.... which is legal and culturally accepted.... should be made illegal.  Yes, I know it is the most widely abused drug in America.  Having a similar huge number on methamphetamines would not be social balance...it would be an increased policy nightmare.

Basically, I am supportive of strong prevention programs, science based treatment for the addicted, and high levels of strong social disapproval of drug and alcohol abuse.

1:35) 10-SEP-2001 18:06 Elliott Currie

The fact that we've opened several different lines of discussion in the last few days reminds me of just how wide and encompassing a subject "criminal justice" is. Which may indeed be part of the reason why I got involved in the crime business, so to speak, in the first place: there's a lot to chew on.

Barry has opened a new thread #2 on "Thinking about drug abuse", and perhaps we can shift most of our ongoing drug discussion over there--at least for the present, though I'd like to bring it all back together before we end. Before doing that, however, let me respond to Douglass' question, about whether inner-city folks really are demanding strong action against drugs in their communities. I think the answer is yes--but that's complicated by the other reality that Douglass correctly points to, that the same people are also more likely than the rest of the population to be critical of the unfairness of the justice system. My sense is that many people in poor inner-city communities now regard the system as failing them in both directions: that is, it isdiscriminatory in the harshness with which it comes down on minority offenders, AND it fails to protect them adequately from violence and drug dealing. That's one reason why I think that achieving a sound and fair drug policy is such acomplicated isue--as Richard says, a genuine "predicament."How you manage to protect folks fromthe predatory actions of people in their midst--while at the same time avoiding the creation of a Gulag that warehouses greater and greater numbers of people, many of whom are likely to be their neighbors, cousins, children--is a tricky question, and one that I think is at the center of the crisis of American criminal justice today.

But on to two other, related, issues for the moment. Donald Strauss' jumping in from the other forum is most welcome. I'm convinced that there are a number of common themes that underlie many of the most pressing issues of our time, whether it's governance or criminal justice, or health care, or welfare/poverty, or what have you. And one of those is surely how we maximize the quality of public discussion about these and other issues--more generally, how we develop a public culture that manages to marry real expertise with broad dissemination of ideas, that raises the level of public understanding and engagement and shrinks the very unhappy gap between narrow experts anda public that's a lot less informed than most of us would like. I'm delighted that WBSI is tackling this big issue head-on, and I think we should indeed come back together toward the end of these fora and see what common themes we've managed to stir up.

Speaking of tackling things head on, I'd like to press a little on the issue of guns, which I raised a couple of days ago in response to a mention by Richard about the Second Amendment.

When you look around the world at rates of violent crime, and especially rates of homicide, it's impossible not to be struck by the startling prominence of the US among other advanced societies when it comes to gun related crime. I have before me some figures from a US Public Health Service study published in 1998 on gun deaths around the world (This is gun deaths from suicide and acidents as well as homicide). In the mid-1990s the US rate of gun deaths was about 14 per 100,000 population per year. Close behind were Brazil and Mexico with about 13 per 100,000 and Estonia with 12. Down at the other end was England with 0.41 per 100,000; South Korea at 0.12; and Japan at 0.05. That is, unless I am even more numerically challenged than I thought, the US rate of gun deaths is about 285 times that of Japan, 35 times that of England.

So it seems clear that we can't separate America's violent crime problem from the question of what to do about guns. But what to do? There are plenty of Americans who feel that regulating guns more than we now do would violate fundamental individual rights, and many of them believe those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. And most would go on to argue that more gun control wouldn't much help lower the crime rate anyway, because guns aren't the problem. Comments?

1:36) 10-SEP-2001 23:45 Douglass Carmichael

On guns, important issue. After the Bush election I realized i hardly knew anyone who voted for him, so i started reading right wing press and news groups. What has struck me is how true to certain kinds of early principles they are, like Shays’ Rebellion. These folks really believe that central government is a threat, and taking away their guns castrates them.

If we look at world gun violence, and realize that the US is the second major exporter of arms, and that outside the sanitized industrial nations, guns are very common, violence is very common, and there is no control.

The hard question is, is taking away guns brining us closer to internal peace and justice, or is it defanging potential opposition when things get really tough?

I find myself very conflicted. I think the second amendment did relate to militias and not to individual ownership, and i don't like guns and prefer to live in societies without. But we need to work much harder, us liberals, to understand the fear in much of the right, and honor the historical sources from which it, and its supposed remedies, came. [Shays, Daniel (1747–1825) US soldier, probably born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA. During the American War of Independence (1775–83) he served against the British, and was commissioned. In 1786 he led an insurrection by the farmers in W Massachusetts against the US government, which was imposing heavy taxation and mortgages. After raiding the arsenal at Springfield, MA, the insurrectionists were routed at Petersham (1787), and Shays was condemned to death, but pardoned (1788).]

1:38) 12-SEP-2001 01:20 Richard Farson

The position taken by most of our leaders is that the evil people who committed the terrorist acts will be found and brought to justice, but they also speak as if there will be swift and fierce retaliation.So