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Posted on 2-6-09 Prisons Of Shame
By Alan Marston, 1 June 2009
Angela Davis was unjustly imprisoned in the USA in the early 1970s then
later released after a massive campaign and ever since has been outspoken
about the repressive role of prisons in the USA (and by implication
throughout the world).
Angela Davis was and is a very inspirational person, she was on my mind
when finally after 30 years of thinking about it I decided a couple of
months ago to apply to be a volunteer in Auckland Prison and learned that
breaking out of prison may well be no more difficult than breaking in.
For what it's worth below are some of my thoughts viz NZ Corrections in
terms of its attitude to itself, to insiders and to outsiders like myself.
Below that is a book review that I feel the Minister Of Corrections down
to prisons guards would do well to read.
Experience #1, attitude to volunteers.
Not being a member of another institution (specifically a church) I
resorted to the method of choice of individuals these days, the web. Yes,
there is a website
but the fact is Prison Fellowship New Zealand is most prominent in the
work of over 3000 approved prison volunteers who visit prisoners to
contribute to their rehabilitation and reintegration and PFNZ is a
christian organisation. It is estimated that of the volunteers going in to
prisons (where NZ is a world leader in terms of numbers of
volunteers/prisoner) about 86% are church based. I found that my being
outside the church frame generated astonishment followed by suspicion as
to my motives. It appears that the old axiom holds that institutions
relate well to other institutions and only poorly if at all to
individuals, which is not good enough in light of the fact that NZ society
is famous for its high level of volunteer work which has a pivotal role in
establishing and maintaining the health, education, rehabilitation and
other sectors of this country where making a quick profit is impossible.
Experience #2, process control.
I can understand and accept that a check would have to be made on me as to
whether I had `a record'. But having to go through the process twice could
be interpreted generously as incompetence or not so generously as a
barrier against lone volunteers, or paranoia on my part, as I know there
exists a pretty fat folder or two on my political history, the criminal
history folder is empty, or should be. Either way having to submit to two
lots of forms and copy of ID was an inauspicious start but an accurate
pointer as it turned out.
Experience #3, the interview.
After about 6 weeks from initial contact I received a phone call from the
Ministry of Corrections. I've been around the roundabout often enough to
know when I'm not wanted. And I was not wanted. Paranoia again on my part?
No. The signals were unambiguous: no religious affiliation, cross, no
prior history, cross, no english as a second language certificate, cross,
not prepared to just go away, cross. There was a spark of interest when I
mentioned life-after-prison skills and how to survive in business
whereupon the response was, prepare and send me a course plan for 6x1hr
sessions... goodbye.
Experience #4, the report.
Prepared the report, but only in outline as I was of the opinion that
Corrections needed to give me some information too. Specifically what the
level of understanding and need was and what preparation I could be given
before entering on the course. Probably such requests did not help me
endear myself with the department.
Experience #5, the brush-off.
One and a half days after receiving the report (cf. the 6 weeks to get the
phone call) I receive an email (see below) which I felt was saying we
know what prisoners want/need, without asking them, and it's not you.
They/we'll never want you and don't bother us again with your requests to
help. Rejection is never easy but has its instructive side. After a week
or two of deliberation I'm writing all this by way of trying to dig out
something positive from the whole experience.
---------------------------- Original Message ------------------------
Subject: RE: Volunteer project, Auckland Prison, A Marston
From: "(ACRPPP)"
Date: Tue, May 19, 2009 12:46 pm
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Alan, I have passed on the information you sent me regarding your
Heads for Survival course that you suggested but find after speaking to
the Programme Manager at Auckland Prison there is no need for this kind
of course as there would not be enough interest from the prisoners.
Thank you for your enquiry anyway.
Regards, MMM
------------------------ End Message ---------------------------------
Judge for yourself. Anyway, I'm still willing and I believe able to
contribute something useful in the prison system, if asked (:
...................................
America's Prisons: Is There Hope?
By Helen Epstein, nybooks.com
Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One
Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All by Sunny Schwartz, with David
Boodell
Scribner, 204 pp.
America's prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in
this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our
incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the
world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen
percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and
should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under
eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to
use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on
drug-related charges.[1] Of those, most have no history of violence or
drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.[2]
Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20
percent of inmates. These "monster factories," as the lawyer and author
Sunny Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in
society and may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released
from US jails and prisons end up back inside within three years. Some
studies suggest that the experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and
humiliating that it actually makes men, in particular, harder and meaner,
so that the crimes they commit the next time around are even worse than
what got them incarcerated in the first place.[3]
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is currently sponsoring a bill that would
create a commission to review America's entire criminal justice system and
make recommendations for reform. If the bill passes, its commissioners
should bear in mind a small experiment that took place in the San
Francisco County Jail in San Bruno, California, some years ago. This
project, the subject of Sunny Schwartz's brief, absorbing memoir Dreams
from the Monster Factory, is important not just because it dramatically
reduced recidivism, but also because it could help break the tired
stalemate between liberals and conservatives over punishment versus
rehabilitation. In addition, Schwartz's book is revealing about the
criminal mind and its thought processes, and thus contains valuable
lessons for those at risk of incarceration, and for those close to them.
Schwartz, now in her fifties, began working in the San Francisco county
jails in 1980 as a student intern. She volunteered to spend two days a
week writing reports on prisoners' complaints about sentencing or jail
conditions and forwarding them through the seemingly impenetrable
bureaucracy of the California state justice system. After graduating from
law school, Schwartz worked briefly for an AIDS service organization and
then, in 1990, at the request of her old boss Sheriff Michael Hennessey,
she returned to County Jail 7 in San Bruno to launch a new set of programs
designed to help inmates make the transition back into society after their
release.
The inmates at San Bruno were typical of prison and jail populations
across America. Over half were black, although blacks make up only 6
percent of San Francisco's population. Approximately 75 percent were high
school dropouts, and most had reading skills below the seventh-grade
level; 65 percent had been relegated to special education programs before
dropping out of school, and 90 percent had never held a legal job. Eighty
percent reported that they had been physically or sexually abused as
children, and 80 percent had committed at least one act of violence. In
jail, these inmates spent their days watching television (Jerry Springer,
slasher movies, cartoons), working out, getting into fights with one
another, being strip-searched by the deputy sheriffs, and composing
elaborate complaints to the authorities.
Some 70 percent of inmates released from San Bruno ended up back in jail
within three years, a slightly higher failure rate than the national
average. Schwartz's job was to develop programs to change this. Her first
move was to open a jail-based high school with classes in reading,
writing, math, and other subjects, as well as "life skills"—meaning how to
get and hold on to a job. In many respects the school she set up was a
success. Inmates appreciated having something to do during the day, and
many earned degrees that would greatly increase their prospects for
employment upon release. But this had only a modest effect on their
violent tendencies. During off-hours, they continued to pick fights with
one another. Overhearing inmates yelling into the phones, the guards
assumed that this aggressive behavior would continue after they were
released. "We taught him to read," one of them joked. "Let's put up a sign
telling him to stop beating his wife."
Schwartz began to wonder whether classroom instruction alone would convey
the skills the inmates needed to remain in society once they got there.
Although the jail contained both men and women, the men worried her far
more. Some were so aggressive and violent that they frightened even a
seasoned criminal lawyer like her. Some men even frightened themselves.
One who was about to be released begged Schwartz to keep him inside
because he feared that he would be unable to restrain himself from
assaulting a neighbor's five-year-old daughter. She knew that some men,
perhaps including this one, were beyond rehabilitation, but she also knew
instinctively—and correctly, it turned out—that most could change if they
were given the chance, but they would need powerful emotional assistance
to do it. What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.
Shortly after she began work at San Bruno, Schwartz attended a conference
in Minnesota where she heard for the first time about "restorative
justice." Contemporary justice in the United States is largely based on
the idea of retribution, and relies primarily on punishment. Restorative
justice, as Schwartz explains it, is based on the concept prevalent in
more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far
as possible, the harm they have caused others. In order to do this,
offenders must first confront what they have done, and then make amends to
their families, their communities, and, if possible, their victims as
well. Schwartz writes that she very soon came to believe that restorative
justice could be a means of transforming these men from chronic offenders
into productive members of their communities.
The first step, persuading the San Bruno inmates to face up to their own
violent behavior, would be the most difficult. What is particularly
striking about violent men is how remorseless they often seem, as if they
were devoid of feeling. Schwartz shows how their experience under the
justice system only reinforces this sense of detachment. During their
trials, defense lawyers coached them to deny or minimize their crimes. In
jail, they spent their days complaining about the conditions, their
sentences, the behavior of the deputies and other inmates, and society at
large. At no time were the men ever required to assess their own behavior
or acknowledge the pain they had caused.
Schwartz was familiar with various kinds of "anger management" classes,
most of which simply taught violent men to suppress their rage or walk
away from situations that might provoke it. She wanted something
different, a program that would help the men examine and ultimately
"rewire" their own emotions. She decided to experiment with Manalive, a
community-based program for men who had committed domestic violence that
had been created years earlier by Hamish Sinclair, a San Francisco–based
educator and community organizer. Manalive soon became the foundation for
all of Schwartz's other programs, which collectively came to be called the
Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or RSVP.
In November 2008, I visited the San Bruno jail and sat in on an RSVP
session. A group counselor and about fifteen inmates sat on plastic chairs
in a semicircle, while a white twenty-eight-year-old bank robber named Don
described a fight he had been involved in eight years earlier. While the
other prisoners looked on and asked questions, two inmates analyzed his
story, writing down every incident of violence—physical, sexual, and
emotional—that Don reported, from selling drugs at the party, to cheating
on his girlfriend, to yelling at the girl he cheated with, to slugging a
fellow party-goer with a beer bottle and then kicking him as he fell. The
session took two hours, and by the end the entire blackboard was filled
with details, not only about whom Don had hurt and how, but about the ways
in which, in telling the story, Don had attempted to minimize what he had
done or blame others for his actions.
"I left out a lot of stuff," Don told me when I talked to him afterward.
Although some inmates volunteer for RSVP, most, like Don, had never
thought of themselves as violent before they were assigned to the program
by the jail administration.
"I knew I had a problem with drugs," he told me, "so I didn't mind being
in drug rehab. But violent? Me? No way." After sitting through a few
mandatory RSVP sessions and watching other men describe their own violent
acts, however, Don told me he began to realize something about himself
that he had never known before. He saw how badly he had hurt other people,
not only the men he had punched and beaten up over the years but also his
own family, who became so terrified of his angry rages that they all but
avoided him. When he entered RSVP, he had been in jail for ten months and
had barely heard from his parents, and had not spoken to his sister at
all. Thirteen weeks later, he was speaking to his parents once a week and
to his sister once a day.
While RSVP does not involve direct restitution to victims, it reinforces
prisoners' sense of responsibility by inviting speakers who have been
victims of unrelated violence to address the inmates. RSVP also encourages
restitution to society at large by linking up post-release RSVP
"graduates" with youth violence prevention groups and campaigns such as
the San Francisco Giants' "strike out violence day."
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York
University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP and found that it
sharply reduced recidivism rates. The longer the men stayed in the
program, the better it seemed to work. Among those who took the full
sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later,
compared to a control group of men who had not been through the
program.[4]
Schwartz deals only in passing with the factors that led to America's
staggering incarceration rate in the first place. When I first arrived at
the San Bruno jail, I was taken to a surveillance booth with glass panels
on the floor from which it was possible to see an entire open-plan block,
or dorm, at once. It was midday, and men in orange sweatsuits were
standing around in groups. Some were eating lunch, others were playing
ping-pong or watching TV. It was no surprise that most of the men were
black. Nationally, one black man in nine between the ages of twenty and
thirty-four is incarcerated, a rate six times higher than for whites in
the same age group. Some 65 percent of black high school dropouts spend
part of their lives behind bars.[5] The growth in America's incarceration
rate, in other words, is owing largely to the soaring incarceration of
black men. This deeply troubling trend is powerful testimony, if we needed
any, to the depth of America's racial problems.
What accounts for the high rate of incarceration in the US, particularly
of black males? Opinions vary, but for drug crimes in particular, part of
the problem has to do with excessive surveillance of young black men by
the police and other authorities. White youths may carry and use drugs
just as often as blacks, but they seldom get caught, and if they do, they
may be more likely to get off with a warning. In one recent study, 60 to
75 percent of black teenagers in Baltimore and Chicago said they were
routinely harassed by the police. "Everywhere we go, we going to get
stopped," said one Chicago youth. Once he was approached by detectives as
he and a friend were leaving the church they regularly attended:
They was like, "Do y'all got guns?" or something. "We heard shooting
on the next block, y'all match the description. Where y'all just come
from?" We like, "We just come out the church, y'all done seen it." You
know just, they stopping us for no reason.[6]
While police surveillance and harassment may explain the racial
discrepancy in drug-related crime, it probably explains little of the same
discrepancy in violent crime. When it comes to homicide, which is the most
accurately measured crime of all, the data are clear: blacks are seven
times more likely to be offenders and six times more likely to be victims
than whites. This cannot be explained by discrimination in arrests and
sentencing alone.
What would explain it? A controversial 1992 report by the US National
Research Council proposed that some people might be genetically
predisposed to violence; it recommended more research into identifying
violence- inducing brain chemicals, and the development of drugs to alter
behavior. Although the report did not claim that these factors were more
common in blacks, the racial implications were clear, and the report was
widely criticized.[7]
What should have been clear to the research council is that wide
fluctuations in murder rates occur much more rapidly than changes in the
human genome, which may take thousands of years. Today, homicide is more
common in America than in Western Europe, but historians estimate that in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, murder rates in London, Amsterdam,
and Stockholm were just as high as they were in New York at the peak of
the US crime wave in 1990.[8] Until the 1960s, murder rates were generally
lower in Africa than Europe,[9] so a race-specific "violence gene," if one
existed,[10] is unlikely to have come from Africa. The finding that RSVP
worked as well as it did with blacks and whites alike shows that many
violent men can change, and thus that their violent tendencies are not
hard-wired.
Most experts maintain that the relationship between race and violence has
to do with social conditions such as poverty and unemployment. For
example, unemployed people are more likely to engage in crime, and some
experts warn that the current economic crisis might already be
contributing to an increase in domestic violence and to the recent spate
of suicidal shooting sprees.[11] However, the connection between crime and
fluctuations in the labor market over longer periods of time is not clear.
While most studies suggest that rising unemployment leads to an increase
in property crimes, it seems to have a much smaller effect on violent
crime.[12] A few highly publicized tragedies notwithstanding, most violent
crimes may be committed by a group of people who would be unemployed in
any labor market.[13]
What most studies do find, however, is that violent crime is strongly
associated with the activity of illegal drug markets, which tend to thrive
in black neighborhoods.[14] A 1988 study of homicide in New York found
that 40 percent were associated with drug trade–related disputes, mostly
among black men.[15] So while whites and blacks may use drugs with equal
frequency, blacks are more likely to be involved in the highly lucrative
and dangerous business of packaging, distributing, and marketing them. The
drug trade is violent because when disputes arise over prices, turf, or
customers, there are no peaceful means of resolving them. Adversaries
battle out such conflicts with weapons instead of lawyers. It is probably
no coincidence that murder rates doubled during Prohibition in the 1920s,
and fell sharply with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933. Similarly,
murder rates doubled again during the "crack epidemic" in the 1970s and
1980s, when the drug trade became more lucrative and competitive, and more
dangerous.[16]
This makes the growing activity of drug cartels from Mexico and other
countries particularly threatening.[17] But as the Obama administration
acknowledges, it does not help simply to blame the foreign drug
traffickers alone. What can American policymakers do to get the drug trade
out of black neighborhoods? Policing is important, but severe crackdowns
could, like Prohibition, make matters worse.
Policymakers could start by improving schools in black neighborhoods,
which suffer severely from underinvestment, overcrowding, class
disruption, and high dropout rates. This endangers us all, and should be
addressed, because the likelihood of incarceration falls with increasing
education, especially for black men. According to one estimate, 23 percent
of the discrepancy in black/white incarceration rates could be eliminated
if blacks stayed in school as long as whites, and that was in 1980, before
the thirty-year surge in black incarceration got underway. An even greater
effect was seen with violent crime, such as murder and assault. According
to the authors of this study, a one percent increase in the graduation
rate could save $1.4 billion that would otherwise be spent keeping these
men behind bars.[18]
A high school diploma itself seems to help keep black men out of trouble.
The likelihood of incarceration drops fourfold among black high school
graduates compared to those who make it only to tenth or eleventh
grade.[19] It is unlikely that there is anything special about the
twelfth-grade curriculum that would explain this. However, graduation may
indicate a relatively positive attitude toward society and toward oneself
that is more important for keeping black youths out of trouble than any
skill or knowledge acquired in school. Some studies suggest, remarkably,
that a diploma may matter more than one's income, or even whether one has
a job at all.[20] Prison education programs that allow inmates to earn
college degrees have also been associated with a drop in recidivism.[21]
Thus the decision of former New York governor George Pataki to end these
programs in the mid-1990s may well have had consequences for public
safety.
Education may help keep black kids out of trouble, but as Schwartz found,
for those already involved in crime, helping them gain self-esteem through
education is not always sufficient to get them out of it. Drug dealing and
gangs provide more than a livelihood to otherwise poorly educated and
difficult-to-employ young men. They also provide an alternative society in
which their courage, toughness, and entrepreneurship are valued. More
importantly, they are a way out of the shame of being poor, jobless, and
unable to support a family.[22] It is this very sense of shame that a
growing number of psychiatrists maintain is at the root of violent
behavior.[23]
During the 1980s, James Gilligan, the psychiatrist who evaluated RSVP, was
in charge of mental health services in the Massachusetts prisons, where he
conducted thousands of therapeutic consultations with homicidal inmates.
He soon came to realize that they were especially likely to harm or kill
someone when they felt insulted or humiliated. What these men seemed to
fear most were feelings of weakness and shame—the shame of being seen as
inadequate or contemptible—and they struck back violently against anyone
who set off those feelings, whether it was a sarcastic, unfaithful
girlfriend or a rival drug dealer attempting to impinge on their turf.
Many killers told Gilligan that the fear they saw in the eyes of their
victims made them feel powerful and respected, reinforcing a "tough"
self-image and seeming to justify aggressive reactions to any sign of
disrespect, however minor or unintended.[24] A sense of honor was
essential in this outlaw world and Gilligan wondered whether this was not
precisely because these men had so much to be ashamed of. Like the San
Bruno inmates, most of his homicidal patients had experienced humiliating
abuse as children and failures in school or in getting jobs. Gilligan
theorized that these painful life experiences led them not only to be
especially sensitive to individual instances of disrespect, but to build
entire subcultures based upon the promotion of masculine honor, however
hollow and boastful, as a fortress against shame.
As an undergraduate in the 1950s, Gilligan was fascinated by the work of
anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict who classified cultures as being
preoccupied predominantly with, on the one hand, notions of honor and
shame or, on the other, notions of pride and guilt. While guilt and shame
have much in common, Benedict argued that they have different implications
for culture and behavior. Guilt, the sense that you have done something
wrong and should feel bad about it whether others know it or not, tends to
lead to private turmoil. But shame implies awareness of the contempt of
others, and therefore has potentially greater implications for
relationships. Pride, like guilt, is an internal feeling of
accomplishment, whereas a sense of honor, like shame, depends on the
attitudes of others toward oneself.
When Gilligan began working as a prison psychiatrist years later, he
recalled Benedict's ideas. "When I first walked into a prison," he told me
recently, "I realized I was in the midst of an honor culture." Since the
1960s, other prominent experts on behavior, including Thomas Scheff, John
Braithwaite, and Helen Lewis, have also characterized shame as a "master
regulator" of the emotions, and a key to understanding violent
behavior.[25] When Scheff looked back at ten years of taped therapy
sessions with his patients, he claims he never saw an explosion of anger
that was not preceded by an incident that evoked a fleeting expression of
shame.
A scene in the 2008 French film The Class (Entre les Murs), a
fictionalized but highly realistic account of a year in a multiracial
Paris secondary school, convincingly illustrates how the experience of
shame can set off violent behavior and ruin a young person's life. In what
might be seen as the movie's turning point, fifteen-year-old Sulieman, the
son of poor West African immigrants and an amiable troublemaker, learns,
along with the rest of the class, that the teacher thinks he is of
"limited" intelligence. As classroom banter continues in the background,
all expression drains from Sulieman's face. Sometime later he storms out
of the class, accidentally hitting a classmate in the face and nearly
slugging the teacher as well, an act for which he will be expelled. A grim
future for the boy, now considered by adults to be "violent" as well as
"limited," seems inevitable.
Emotions have their own logic, Gilligan reminds us, of which their
possessors are often unaware, and therapeutic techniques like Manalive may
work by helping violent men untangle their feelings of pain and anger, and
develop more positive aspects of their character. Fortunately for
policymakers such as Senator Webb, restorative justice techniques like
RSVP are one issue on which liberals and conservatives increasingly agree.
In April 2008, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which
authorizes federal funding mainly for "faith-based" initiatives such as
Charles Colson's Prison Ministries that emphasize Christian concepts of
confession and redemption and also help inmates find jobs. Although these
programs have not been evaluated as rigorously as RSVP, preliminary
results suggest that only 18 percent of those who have been through them
ended up back in jail a year after release, half the national average.
President Obama has asked Congress for more than $100 million to fund the
Second Chance Act and other similar initiatives.
RSVP is not faith-based and receives no money through the federal Second
Chance initiative. When Schwartz launched the program, she took a firm
position on the separation of church and state and told such volunteer
groups as Jehovah's Witnesses to leave the San Bruno jail. But Schwartz's
approach is consistent with conservative notions of personal
responsibility, while the more conservative faith-based programs accept
the liberal notion that lack of education and job opportunities must also
be addressed if inmates are to make a successful transition to freedom.
Perhaps surprisingly, the greatest resistance to programs like RSVP comes
from some well-intentioned but doctrinaire leftists who maintain that it
is absurd to expect people to change their behavior when they continue to
be subject to racism, unemployment, bad schools, and the long legacy of
inequality in America. The circumstances in which many African-Americans
grow up are indeed traumatic. But the idea that violent crime, drug abuse,
AIDS, and other health problems that disproportionately affect blacks
can't be addressed until these schematic leftists are satisfied that we
are all living in an age of equality is itself a form of racism, based
upon the patronizing assumption that people are powerless to bring about
personal and collective change in their own communities. Programs like
RSVP show that when people have the courage to face up to their own
violent behavior, they can overcome the most harrowing conditions, and
inspire others to do so. Indeed, helping violent men find more
constructive ways to express their masculinity could well be the fastest
route to a better future for themselves and their families.
Obviously, programs like RSVP are only part of a longer-term solution to
violence in America. Senator Webb's commission, if authorized, should also
bear in mind that shame and the toxic culture it gives rise to are being
cultivated in America's overcrowded, badly performing schools; in the
economy, which, when it grows at all, grows largely for the rich; in the
casual slights and insults that occur daily when a black person walks into
a shop or hangs out with friends on the street. They are also cultivated
in families in which parents, overwhelmed by difficulties and
disappointments, use violence to discipline their children. The monster
factory isn't just in the prisons; it is also in the starkly inequitable
world outside.
Notes
[1]Both the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the National
Institute on Drug Abuse survey of high school seniors for 1998/1999 found
higher rates of drug use among white teens than black teens.
[2]Jim Webb, "What's Wrong with Our Prisons?," Parade, March 29, 2009.
[3]M. Keith Chen and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Do Harsher Prison Conditions
Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-Based Approach," American Law and
Economics Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2007).
[4]James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence
Project: Reducing Violence in the Community Through a Jail-Based
Initiative," Journal of Public Health, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2005).
[5]"One in 100: Behind Bars in America," a report by the Pew Center on the
States, February 2008.
[6]Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Kathryn Edin, Jeffrey R. Kling, and Greg J.
Duncan, "Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why
Girls Fare Better Than Boys," Working Paper #509, Industrial Relations
Section, Princeton University, March 2006.
[7]National Research Council, Understanding and Preventing Violence,
Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences, edited by Albert J. Reiss Jr., Klaus
A. Miczek, and Jeffrey A. Roth (National Academy Press, 1994). See also
Fox Butterfield, "Study Cites Role of Biological and Genetic Factors in
Violence," The New York Times, November 13, 1992.
[8]Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick
Criminologist (Knopf, 1999), p. 216; See also Franklin E. Zimring, Crime
Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (Oxford University Press,
1997).
[9]"Patterns of Murder and Suicide," African Homicide and Suicide, edited
by Paul Bohannan (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 230–266.
[10]In 2006, a variant of the MAOA gene was found to increase violent
behavior in a population of New Zealanders, but only among those who had
been abused as children—a well-known population risk factor for violence
in later life. There is no indication that the violence-inducing MAOA gene
is more common in any particular racial group. See Essi Viding and Uta
Frith, "Genes for Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain,"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, No. 103 (2006), pp.
6085–6086.
[11]"Domestic Use on Rise as Economy Sinks: Hotline Calls Up from Last
Year as Are Cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome," Associated Press, April 10,
2009.
[12]See Steven D. Levitt, "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four
Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not," Journal of Economic
Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2004); Alfred Blumstein, Frederick P.
Rivara, and Richard Rosenfeld, "The Rise and Decline of Homicide—and Why,"
Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 21 (May 2000); Bijou Yang and David
Lester, "Suicide, Homicide and Unemployment," Applied Economics Letters,
Vol. 2, No. 8 (August 1995); Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg, and David
B. Mustard, "Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the
United States: 1979–1997," The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.
84, No. 1 (February 2002); Fiona Carmichael and Robert Ward, "Male
Unemployment and Crime in England and Wales," Economics Letters, Vol. 73,
No. 1 (October 2001); Cezary A. Kapuscinski, John Braithwaite, and Bruce
Chapman, "Unemployment and Crime: Toward Resolving the Paradox," Journal
of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1998).
[13]There is some evidence that sharply increased rates of illegal
immigration into the US since 1980 contributed disproportionately to
unemployment among blacks, and this in turn correlated with increased
black incarceration. However, the effect of immigration appears to be
small, accounting for only about 10 percent of the increase in the
incarceration of black high school dropouts. See George Borjas et al.,
"Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response
of Wages, Employment and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks," National
Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12518, September 2006.
[14]Jens Ludwig and Jeffrey Kling, "Is Crime Contagious?" The Journal of
Law and Economics, Vol. 50 (August 2007), pp. 491–518.
[15]Paul J. Goldstein, "Crack and Homicide in New York City, 1988: A
Conceptually Based Event Analysis," Contemporary Drug Problems, Winter
1989, pp. 651–687.
[16]See Jeffrey Miron, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition
(Independent Institute, 2004).
[17]See Randal C. Archibold, "Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over,
Alarming US," The New York Times, March 22, 2009.
[18]Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti "The Effect of Education on Crime:
Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports," The American
Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 1 (March 2004).
[19]Lochner and Moretti, "The Effect of Education on Crime."
[20]Mark Edward Votruba and Jeffrey R. Kling, "Effects of Neighborhood
Characteristics on the Mortality of Black Male Youth: Evidence from
Gautreaux, Chicago," Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 68, No. 5 (March
2009).
[21]"Education from the Inside, Out: The Multiple Benefits of College
Programs in Prison," a report by the Correctional Association of New York,
January 2009.
[22]See Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El
Barrio (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2002).
[23]For a fascinating review of the psychology of shame, see Robert Karen,
"Shame," Atlantic Monthly, February 1992.
[24]See James Gilligan, "Shame, Guilt, and Violence," Social Research
(Winter 2003); James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National
Epidemic (Putnam, 1996); James Gilligan, Preventing Violence (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2001).
[25]See Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, Emotions and Violence:
Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington, 1991); John
Braithwaite, Crime, Shame, and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press,
1989); Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (International
Universities Press, 1971).
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