Criminal Justice: August 2009 Archives

Over the past few years, the phenomenon of youth gangs has spawned its own field of criminology—part social science, part political spectacle. Police have been declaring war on gangs for decades, officials have deployed social workers, teachers and "gang specialists" in the fight; think tanks have churned out reams of research on the sociology of gang violence... and yet gangs continue to proliferate and thrive.

Sarah Garland, in an article in the American Prospect (an excerpt of her book Gangs in Garden City), parses the roots of the gang boom, focusing on the burgeoning Latino community in Hempstead, Long Island. The story of Jessica begins with a stereotypical pathology:

Until middle school, Jessica had lived in a house that neighbors dubbed the "crack house" for its often drug-addled residents and visitors. Her uncles were members of Mara Salvatrucha, a gang originally formed in Los Angeles by refugees of Central America's civil wars, and Jessica's living room was one of their main hangouts.

Courtesy of Sum of Change, here's our own Rinku Sen (executive director of the Applied Research Center, publisher of ColorLines, author of The Accidental American) at Netroots Nation 2009.

Speaking on the "Stepping it up: Creating Powerful Multiracial Alliances with Progressive Bloggers" panel, Rinku takes on the questions — why are race-related social justice issues so often forfeited by the predominantly white liberal blogosphere? And how is policy affected when the discourse is dominated by uncontested racism? Rinku outlines how we fall into the trap of staying within the established racist frames, and how this has led to policies that punish people of color disproportionately and leave them vulnerable to injustice and exploitation.

Yesterday, we posted Rinku's appearance on "Myth of Post-Racial America." Be sure to check out all of Sum of Change's video from Netroots Nation at their site.

The New York Post—that paragon of journalistic excellence—ran an editorial today blasting the latest piece of pork to come out of Albany. Under the headline “Your Tax Dollars At Waste,” the paper took aim at a State Senate earmark for a cause any self-respecting law-and-order legislator would reject: an organization devoted to studying how race influences society.

The Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, housed at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, aims to foster research on racial disparities in criminal justice and other policy arenas. Its most ambitious, and common-sensical, aspect is its leadership. Diverging from the insular think tank world, the research on racial impacts will actually be directed by some of the most impacted people:

The Center is the first and only public policy, research, training, advocacy and academic center, housed in the largest university system in the United States, conceived, designed and developed by formerly incarcerated professionals. It was established as an inter-disciplinary forum for scholars, policy makers, legal practitioners, law enforcement, civil society leaders, clergy and previously incarcerated professionals seeking to influence and impact urban contemporary criminal, economic and social justice issues.

The Center is dedicated to creating new paradigms for solving community development related criminal justice challenges in communities of color. It seeks to produce research that reveals the contradictions and confrontations within and among the various disciplines comprising the study of urban affairs and criminal justice and to develop new “community specific” models for academic inquiry and public policy.

The explosion of violence at the California Institution for Men in Chino was an almost too-perfect snapshot of the crisis engulfing California's prisons. By Sunday morning, hours of rioting had left dozens hospitalized and much of the facility in charred shambles.

The incident came just days after a federal court opinion condemning the intense overcrowding of the state's prisons, which critics say has decimated the health of inmates and created a breeding ground for violence and future criminality.

The unrest reportedly began with a fight between Black and Latino inmates and erupted into destructive brawling across the prison. The incident apparently reflected a pattern of roiling racial antagonism among Blacks, Latinos and whites in the tightly packed facility. ("All races had injuries,” Corrections Department spokesperson Lt. Mark Hargrove told the New York Times. “But there are a greater number of injuries among Hispanic and black inmates.")

A New York Times article reports that more and more courts are ordering mentally ill youth to jail as community mental health programs are facing bigger cuts and thinning resources.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

Some judges say they'll get the help they need in prison. However several lawsuits and federal civil rights investigations in Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and Texas say these prisons neglect and abuse incarcerated youth, a majority of which are youth of color, with mental illnesses, sometimes body slamming them and breaking their bones. While across the country, many of them are over prescribed with drugs sometimes just to help them sleep. But there seems to be little other recourse for some families.

From the article:

According to a Government Accountability Office report, in 2001, families relinquished custody of 9,000 children to juvenile justice systems so they could receive mental health services.

Donald has been in and out of mental health programs since he attacked a schoolteacher at age 5. As he grew older, he became more violent until he was eventually committed to the Department of Youth Services.

“I’ve begged D.Y.S. to get him into a mental facility where they’re trained to deal with people like him,” said his grandmother, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma of having a grandson who is mentally ill. “I don’t think a lockup situation is where he should be, although I don’t think he should be on the street either.”

I'm not an expert on prisons or a psychiatrist, but a prison system that thinks about mental illness as a crime is most definitely not any path towards mental health and personal healing.

The power of racial bias has long loomed over the death penalty, yet has seldom been directly confronted in the courts. But in North Carolina, a race analysis of capital punishment is now being written into law.

The passage of the Racial Justice Act by North Carolina lawmakers on Thursday won't rescue innocents from execution or redress centuries of discrimination in criminal justice. Instead, the bill offers people sentenced to death a more modest, but nonetheless vital, legal tool: the ability to challenge their conviction by looking at trends of racial disparities in death sentences. A defendant could be granted relief “upon the ground that racial considerations played a significant part in the decision to seek or impose a death sentence.” In a state where Blacks are vastly over-represented on Death Row, it would be up to the government to prove racism did not steer the sentencing decision.

Conservatives argued the law would distort the judicial process by relying too heavily on statistical trends. Republican State Senator Phil Berger told the Winston-Salem Journal, “What this does is it places the determination of a significant part of first-degree murder cases into the hands of statisticians, regardless of what the facts are.”

Capping several years of litigation, a federal court on Tuesday ordered California to reduce its prison population by 43,000 inmates within two years, giving the state 45 days to produce a plan to comply with constitutional standards.

The ruling reaffirmed evidence that overcrowding in California's prisons—gymnasiums serving as makeshift living quarters and grossly inadequate medical care—has left prisoners in conditions that breed illness as well as psychological and social instability. The panel of judges noted the heightened risk of suicide and violence among inmates.

Faced with massive budget problems, the state has been trying to work out a plan to cut its prison population. The effort has been hobbled by conservative fear-mongering about ex-cons overrunning their neighborhoods after early release.

Sometimes, it just feels good to punish someone.

That emotional impetus has colored our criminal justice system, and some of the clearest examples are laws that enhance penalties for crimes deemed especially heinous. But the eye-for-an-eye mentality can also aggravate endemic inequalities in the legal system. So how should activists work within an unjust legal infrastructure to deal with injustice perpetrated against their communities?

On Alternet, Liliana Segura explores the politics of hate crimes laws and reaches conclusions that put many human rights advocates on a moral precipice.

First, hate crimes laws don't seem to have a significant deterrent effect, challenging the notion that cracking down on perpetrators makes targeted groups safer in the future. Second, they're often wielded as a political talisman by officials who don't dare take on other, structural and cultural factors that drive hate and its violent manifestations. And third, generally speaking, critics have argued that criminalizing the motivations behind illegal activity doesn't do much to make the world a happier or less violent place.