Prison Riot in California
It seems there was an eleven hour prison riot in California that led to hundreds of injuries. This sort of thing is why courts are ordering California to start releasing prisoners in order to curtail severe overcrowding. Unfortunately, when you do this you’re going to wind up with more crime.
The good news is that there are things one can do to reduce crime other than lock more and more and more people up. Smart things. Things that are detailed in Mark Kleiman’s excellent forthcoming book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment. I’ll be saying more about this book when you can really read it in stores. But the key overall analytic point is that the extent of the punishing going on in the United States is a sign of how poor a job we do at controlling crime. If we were better at supervising people and credibly communicating to them excellent odds that they’d be caught and punished—even if the punishments were not so severe—then we’d have many fewer people committing crimes and thus less punishing going on.
25 Responses to “Prison Riot in California”
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August 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Not necessarily.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Punishment is important, but the substance of criminal law is also important. Our criminal codes are also by turns antiquated and bloated beyond recognition by outrage-of-the-week crimes. Most states, and the federal government, are in serious need of recodification.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
You could reduce the CA prison population by deporting the illegals that are now locked up and costing the CA taxpayers 62k per year.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
That’s 62k per illegal – another hideous waste of taxpayer dollars. Then the assholes in Sacremento can’t figure out why CA taxpayers don’t want their taxes raised.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
If we were better at supervising people and credibly communicating to them excellent odds that they’d be caught and punished
Are you sure that’s what you mean to say? It sounds like you’re talking about my preschooler.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Best example of “more punishment” not being the answer: China.
In China, they freaking execute people for things like official corruption, and putting poison in food, etc. Yet they’ve got such lousy regulatory infrastructure–the inspections, the rules, the honest bureaucratic nit-pickers who randomly show up and demand you open the factories and the books–since they don’t have that stuff, it doesn’t matter if every once in a while they execute somebody.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Maybe privatizing the prison system should be reconsidered.
I’m sure the case of crooked judges filling prison beds for bucks isn’t isolated to the PA juvenile justice system.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
This is a common argument that frothing-mouth right-wingers trot out. However, deporting all the illegal aliens in California prisons would cost a substantial amount in and of itself, money the state doesn’t have. And enforcing immigration laws is a federal responsibility, not a state one.
Are you willing to vote for a ballot measure that would raise taxes to fund a State-level deportation program? No, then STFU!
August 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
More preventative private security (allow communities to own the streets they live on), elimination of non-victim crimes (drugs), and a focus on restitution of victims rather than reeducation of criminals would all drastically improve our justice system.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Isn’t this just saying “if we were better at catching criminals, then there would be less crime”? Stated differently, isn’t the fact that we cannot credibly catch and punish most criminals the root cause and the real problem?
Obviously if we were able to catch criminals at a higher rate, the incentive to commit crimes would be reduced. But we can’t and thats the problem. Do you increase the number of officers? Security cameras? Etc.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
That’s 62k per illegal
It’s charming how the right uses the term “illegal” as a noun only when referring to people whose immigration status is not legal. Never mind that everybody locked up in California is an “illegal” in the sense that they’ve been convicted of something illegal (or awaiting trial). But the right reserves a special ire for those who’ve violated one particular section of the law.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
When it’s his own book he wants us to buy it. When it’s Kleiman’s, we’re supposed to read it in the store.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Ahh, diversity!
August 10th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Most criminals are deported at the end of their sentence. One reason is, that deporting them earlier might result in them crossing back into this country illegally again.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Obviously if we were able to catch criminals at a higher rate, the incentive to commit crimes would be reduced.
Because criminals are the most rational people in the world, who always perform a thoroughly reasoned cost-benefit analysis of their crimes before committing them.
Wait, what?
You can’t reduce crime if you don’t understand it. We need to focus on the psychology of criminals and what contributes to the decision to commit a crime. (Although it probably is true that the perceived chance of getting caught is much more important than the expected punishment if caught – in other words, longer sentences do precisely squat.)
Personally, I bet the most useful thing we could do is put more police on the streets. Police can deter crimes just by showing up – and that’s an effect that works, not an elaborate pseudoeconomic “analysis” based on rational actor models of crime (!).
August 10th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Chris,
At the margins, rational choice doesn’t do much at all in traditional criminal law. (I imagine it is more effective in white collar crimes where the participants are more likely to engage in extended cost benefit analysis, such as in antitrust or securities violations.) But most people tend to think that the perceived chance of getting caught is part of criminal decision making.
I wasn’t talking about a a fully reasoned cost-benefit analysis. Yglesias said we would do better preventing crime if we could credibly communicate an ability to catch a high number of criminals.
That is terribly conclusory. It’s almost like saying we should reduce crime by reducing crime.
I also think you will find that the pyschology of criminality is every bit as flaky as the pseudo economic analysis you dismiss.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Do you know what actually has cut crime in the real world over the last several decades? Locking up lots and lots of criminals.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Used to do that way back in the 80’s. Did it quite frequently. Those kids came back as the Mara Salvatrucha 13: bigger, badder, and trained for maximum mayhem.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Then, of course, you could also segregate some of the prison populations by race in order to cut down on interracial conflict. Sadly this seemingly commonsensical practice was deemed unconstitutional.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Some quick points:
Assuming none crossed back into CA and offended again, how much money would this save? Numbers please.
No. We in fact do catch and punish most criminals (which is not to say that we solve most crimes – not the same thing.) We just do it in such a way that it doesn’t deter crime. Read the book, or any of many related white papers available online.
You’re making the point you’re trying to refute. Seriously, if you care about this issue, read this book or other publications dealing with the same ideas. If you’re just blowing smoke, carry on I guess.
Basically, if I’m a repeat offender with a parole officer, there’s a huge range of behaviors I am prohibited from engaging in (that’s reasonable.) However, if I engage in one of those behaviors, there’s a very small chance I will be punished. If I AM punished it will be severe – maybe even many years in prison.
That’s nuts. You’re taking a person you KNOW has difficulty making competent comparisons between present gains and future costs, and presenting him with a choice that involves highly uncertain outcomes.
If we had a system that treated repeat offenders as what they are – people who have not developed adult-level impulse control – it would promise mild but more or less certain punishment to those people.
Exactly the point. Some people have not developed an adult level (not to say perfect, just standard) of impulse control. Those people need different behavioral controls than other people.
I don’t, for example, steal expensive cars when I’m short of money because I understand that a 1% chance of going to prison for three years is too much. A crack-addicted car thief can’t make this calculation. .
August 10th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
It seems to be assumed by many that the federal government will bail out California. But will the feds want to pay for the cushy retirements of the prison guards union? Meanwhile, of course California will release violent offenders into the streets. That’s just the way things are done in Sacramento. I actually think that our Governor is working hard and doing his best, but he seems overwhelmed by the state legislators, Democratic and Republican.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Releasing everyone who is only in prison for smoking pot probably wouldn’t affect the crime rate.
Making sure that poor renters have physical security would cut down on a lot of theft.
Prison riots are hellish. Peaceful people are locked in hell with sociopaths and psychopaths for breaking the rules, and that’s just wrong. Prison should only exist to incarcerate people who are dangerous. Thieves and white collar criminals should be required to pay back. Restitution makes a lot more sense than spending money to lock people up in an inherently bad social environment. It would work for non-violent sociopaths, as well.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Here are some relevant excerpts from the NYT article Matt linked to:
The 11-hour riot, at the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, broke down along racial lines, with black prison gangs fighting Latino gangs in hand-to-hand combat, the authorities said.
…
The Chino prison is trying to put into effect a 2005 Supreme Court decision that prohibits automatic and systematic racial segregation of prison inmates after more than three decades of racial separation in the corrections system.
Lieutenant Hargrove said that inmates could now opt out of segregation and that a growing number of black, Latino and white prisoners shared cells, increasing racial tensions in the prison.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
The NYT article, unfortunately, misinterprets the California policy outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2005. In reality, the California prison system only segregated cellmates during the first 60 days to determine whether the prisoners had a history of racist violence.
The dangerous lack of contact between the real world and the Justices/clerks was evident in the Supreme Court’s Johnson v. California decision.
An inmate named Garrison S. Johnson, a member of the black street gang The Crips, has long been amusing himself via the popular prison hobby of jailhouse lawyering. He sued to ban the California Department of Corrections’ policy of temporarily matching new and transferred prisoners as cellmates based on ethnicity until their propensity for racial violence can be evaluated. After 60 days, prisoners are generally allowed to pick their own cellmates.
This murderer’s nuisance suit has now been upheld by the Supreme Court. It returned the case to a lower court with instructions to impose “strict scrutiny” on California’s policy of short-term racial segregation (i.e., outlaw it).
In her majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asserted:
Yet no evidence of invidious discriminatory intent or effect was shown. California’s temporary segregation policy is not a relic of the Jim Crow past, but, like so many of that multicultural state’s innovations, a harbinger of America’s future. California began temporary segregation only a quarter of a century ago—not to harm any race but to protect prisoners from the growing interracial violence.
California’s penitentiaries are dominated by vicious ethnic gangs such as the Mexican Mafia of Southern California, La Nuestra Familia of Northern California, the Black Guerilla Family, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Nazi Low Riders. (As their part-white / part-Chicano name implies, the Nazi Low Riders are the only diversity-sensitive gang. Because of California’s shortage of violent white criminals, they admit Latinos of at least half-white ancestry.)
Indeed, there is no evidence that Plaintiff Johnson ever actually wanted a cellmate of a different race. As Justice Thomas noted in his coruscating dissent (joined by Antonin Scalia):
Thomas dissented devastatingly:
Proof of just how ignorant of prison the Justices are: Stevens, the octogenarian liberal, also derided the “stereotypes” held by officials who merely spend their every working day in prisons:
I suspect Justice Stevens and/or his 20-something clerks have been watching too many bad Hollywood movies featuring cooperative multiracial gangs, complete with black computer hackers, acrobatic Asian cat burglars, and so forth.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Prison overcrowding is hugely counterproductive to the objectives of the criminal justice system. According to the LA Times, experts have long since warned about the potential dangers of overcrowding at Chino prison. Last week that potential was realised.
We at Howard League for Penal Reform are concerned about the enormous pressures prison overcrowding exerts on prison staff. Overcrowded prisons are less likely to meet the needs of prisoners; less likely to provide prisoners with regular, purposeful work; and are less likely to be a constructive, rehabilitative experience for those imprisoned. Click on http://www.howardleague.org/overcrowding/ to find out more about the Howard League and its campaign against prison overcrowding.