Little Frankensteins

Since the passage of proposition 21 in 2000, California’s youth offender population has been shrinking. Prop 21 was a tough on crime law passed which enabled juveniles as young as 14 years old to be tried and convicted as adults, and sent to adult prison. Since its passage, most violent juvenile crimes have been prosecuted under prop 21, and many youth now fill California’s adult prisons---many with absurdly long sentences, including life sentences.

The gutting of the California youth prison system has been spun as a success by the Division of Juvenile Justice. But the real story is that prop 21 has effectively reduced the role of the juvenile system to that of serving only those juveniles convicted of lesser crimes—like property crimes. The whole top-tier of juvenile criminals have now, for all intents and purposes, become adult offenders.

This has created a curious new juvenile prison environment---ironically, one characterized by increased violence, chaotic living environments, and the birth of a brand new youthful offender prison mentality.

My time in the system has coincided with this transition from the old youthful offender mentality to the new, leaner and meaner version. When I entered the system in 2003, the average age for youthful offenders in the older institutions (housing offenders between the ages of 18-24) was 21 or 22 years old. This majority set the tone for the older institutions, which was for the most part ordered and relatively mature. These older guys exerted a controlling influence over the younger guys, and kept them from running amok---which was the status quo in the younger institutions (housing offenders under the age of 18).

But as these older offenders went home, and as the new generation of younger offenders with less time moved into the majority, the environment became increasingly chaotic. Before, while the population still affiliated along race lines and gang membership was standard, there existed a chain of command that enabled conflict to follow ordered channels and manifest itself in predictable patterns (staff would work with the older offenders to address conflict, many times preventing prison riots). In this environment, non-affiliated people like myself could do their time with much less worry—could go to college and school without fearing random outbursts of violence, and count on a consistently stable living environment.

But as these older guys became a minority in the system, they could no longer exert the kind of control necessary to restrain the younger, more violence-prone generation. This younger generation began to exert its majority influence, and lacking the maturity and organization of the older more seasoned offenders, chaos began to become the defining characteristic of youth prisons. Racial tension, once checked by older, more rational offenders, began to spill out in chaotic spurts. Riots occurred at random, staff assaults increased, and the youth prisons became extremely violent---much worse because of their chaotic nature.

Now the transition from the old to the new is pretty much complete. And living in this brave new world is everyday becoming more and more impossible. Utterly random acts of racial violence are the norm, and one cannot exit their room without feeling in some degree of peril. It’s nothing like the streets of Baghdad, where such random acts of violence are usually fatal; but the stress that such constant fear produces has taken its toll on many of us---and the worst affected has been the non-affiliated offenders (like myself), who absolutely deplore the racial divisions, the violence, the gangs, etc. We’ve become easy prey in this new environment where it no longer matters whether you simply want to get your education, complete your Parole Board orders and get on with your life. Now, just the color of your skin can mark you as a target.

It has truly become the jungle.

The prison authorities have tried to reign in the chaos by segregating the units, school, and prison work positions by race, and staggering institutional movement so that offenders have only minimal contact with one another if they are of a different race. It has become commonplace to hear the staff on the other end of the phone ask when I move out from my living unit to work “What race is your ward?”

This segregation has only exacerbated things. Now tension builds up to a critical mass in multiple areas all at once---and when it erupts the prison descends into a kind of chaos I never thought was possible.

State of Emergency...

One issue that can be raised by the Governor's declaration of a state of emergency in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation this month (see the L.A. Times article on 10/5/06) is the problem facing the Department's parole services.

Why is the system fixating on out-of-state transfers as an answer to overcrowding, when the overwhelming number of parole violations that send criminal offenders back to prison are of a technical nature? If the majority of criminal offenders are not breaking the law to be returned to prison, then why not restructure parole to deal with technical parole violators with various community corrections sanctions regimes, including community service, electronic monitoring, drug treatment, restitution and fines, and intensive supervision?

The short answer is that the old solution—early release based upon a fixed formula, e.g. 85%, 50%, etc.---has failed. Incorporating parole into the structure of criminal sentencing across the board, without any consideration of parole readiness, spells massive parole failure. Parole, as a transitional supervision and support mechanism, only works on a discretionary basis. But as can be observed in the Juvenile System, it all depends on who is given these discretionary powers. The Youth Offender Parole Board (YOPB), comprised of political appointees, have no experience in correctional treatment, and cannot properly evaluate parole readiness because they are outsiders to the juvenile rehabilitative process. In this situation, YOPB parole discretion has become a tool to be held over the heads of offenders in order to coerce them into complying with institutional treatment. But since YOPB cannot evaluate treatment progress, and DJJ treatment is a mixture of incompetence and failure, it is clear that discretionary parole has its shortcomings as well, especially when tied to a flawed institutional structure.

Sad but true, only a restructuring of the parole system around a discretionary model that focuses on parole revocation prevention through services designed to support returning offenders will be able to permanently reduce the prison population in the only really viable way possible—through actually reintegrating offenders back into society.

In the meantime, of the approximately 170,000 inmates in the adult system at the present, many are parole violators that have not committed new crimes. In the juvenile system, nearly half of all commitments in 2005 were for parole violations. Re-releasing these people to the community would not be rewarding criminal offenders by early release. It would simply be releasing those offenders who have already served their sentence handed down for their commitment offense, but who are now taking up badly needed space because they failed to report to parole, turned in a positive drug test, failed to go to their treatment group, or could not find a place of residence. This hardly raises to the level of releasing early dangerous criminals who have yet to serve their time for crimes against society.

The devils advocate objects: hey, why can't these guys accomplish simple parole conditions? This exhibits a trend of irresponsibility that seems to be the underlying reason why criminal offenders can't be trusted and ought to be returned to prison.

I would reply: Parole conditions as they presently exist are ineffective and unnecessary. Parole conditions should be designed to prevent the recommission of crime, but also ought to be realistic about the limitations of criminal offenders, and establish conditions that seek to benefit and support parolees, rather than simply monitor and control them. If parole was responsive to the needs of returning offenders, its resources could be directed at ways to keep offenders out of jail, rather than on methods designed to send offenders back to jail for the slightest misstep. If parole services do not support offenders and make it their mission to keep them out of jail, then why have parole services at all? Why are we wasting our time and money?

Social Exclusion

The significance of contemporary spaces of social exclusion to the face of modern de-territorialized Muslims in their many contemporary cultural expressions and locales, as outlined in Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam, got me thinking recently. My thoughts were further focused by Mike Davis' recent book Planet Slums, wherein he outlines with his signature starkness how spaces of social exclusion—from Baghdad to Los Angeles—have become one of the most formative elelments in the political, social and cultural landscape of the contemporary world.

Spaces of social exclusion are not new phenomena. The powerless, the have-nots, the marginalized, the Third World, the urban underclass, and the modern inmate all provide testimony to the multiple forms of social exclusion zones. Their histories, in fact, run deep and wide.

Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish on the origins of the modern prison and its representation of the carceral nature of modern social structures, is an excellent example of an historical-philosophical excavation of modern forms of social exclusion, and in particular, of the way in which power/knowledge operates in the complex process of exclusion built into the institutions of the modern world.

I, of course, live in one of the most recognizable of these social exclusion sites—the modern prison.

As a lover of most things moderate, I have had a very hard time coming to terms with this very radical, though disturbingly accurate, representation of the social ecology of the modern world. I find it problematic to approach the subject along the lines of a Foucault or a Davis—Apocalypticism and nihilistic pessimism have never really appealed to my sunny humanistic tendencies. But I have come to learn to listen to jeremiads when their prophesies amount to real depictions of social phenomena.

The incomprehensible nature of the criminal is one of those perennial mysteries that seem to have plagued humanity from time immemorial. And yet, I have a hard time believing that any of the great sociologists and criminologists of the past and present have ever really taken a hard look at durance vile, the last of the great colonies, the subaltern within, the final resting place of the convicted.

Sure, they've identified its ecological profile and primary fauna—the poor urban-underclass minority. But they don't seem to really understand what they are looking at.

This profile should be a deeply disturbing fact. Crime has become a function of poverty and ethnicity (primarily Latino and African-American). The deep contradiction between the idea of criminality as antisocial conduct, and the reality of the criminal as a poor ethnic minority, ought to outrage us. Poor ethnic minorities are not congenitally predisposed to criminality—even the thought is abhorrent. But if crime is primarily a function of socioeconomic status, then is not the fact that the U.S. has the largest criminal class in the world an indictment of the most advanced, prosperous society on earth?

And how can a nation so concerned with the health of its economy, especially with respect to job-growth, continue to bear such an extremely wasteful, ineffective, economically unprofitable system for administering justice and controlling antisocial behavior?

With the nation focused domestically on the health of the economy vis-a-vis Mexican and Latin American immigration—the link between immigration, the socio-economic profile of the California inmate, and the health of the California economy is not being understood. The hidden costs of bad immigration policy is wrapped up in the cost of incarcerating poor ethnic minorities from overwhelmingly immigrant communities, especially in California. Disenfranchising immigrants from American society creates the conditions for urban-underclass criminality...not in first generation immigrants to be sure, but in their children.

Closing the border, building a wall and criminalizing and evicting illegal immigrants is definitely the wrong answer to this problem. Seeing the link between bad immigration policy and criminality focuses attention on the real issue, and points to a potentially viable solution—increased enfranchisement and economic assimilation can mean socio-economic opportunity for immigrant children—which is the surest way to prevent poverty related crime, and provide real incentives to buy into society and play by the rules.

The same solution can be applied to the oldest unassimilated immigrant group in America—the African American community. Indeed, the history of African American's in America since reconstruction is a case study in the wrong way to deal with immigrants (in this case, forcibly appropriated immigrants), and the consequences of a deeply flawed socio-economic assimilation strategy of exclusion and control.

The key to controlling criminality in America is a good immigration policy focused on socio-economic integration. A well adjusted immigrant family, whether first generation or fifth, addresses urban-underclass crime at its root, where socio-economic disenfranchisement breeds an antisocial response.