Archive for the ‘police’ Category
super-punishment in the usa, and other dismal stuff
ok this graph is from just over a decade ago, but things haven’t changed much
I’ve written, I think, that I’ve decided to give the USA a rest, after the latest federal election there, for the sake of my sanity if nothing else. And I have to say I feel better for having made that decision. I live far from that country after all, and nothing much that happens there is going to affect me directly. But one of the books I’m currently reading, Humankind: a hopeful history, by Rutger Bregman, a ridiculously young Dutch author (writing as a quintessentially ageless old man) and, I would say, sociologist, has prompted me to reflect on the issue of crime and punishment, not just from a US perspective, but from the starting point of the ‘broken windows’ thesis that originated in that broken country.
Put most simply, the broken windows concept suggests that if you don’t do something about a broken window in a building, pretty soon you’ll get more of them until the building’s a right mess. That’s to say, you need to bring the original breaker to justice, even if it was accidental. And here’s the Wikipedia definition:
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes, such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking and fare evasion, help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
The first thing to note about this ‘theory’ is that it would obviously appeal to micro-managing types and blame merchants everywhere. It would encourage the police to harass loiterers and ‘suspicious-looking characters’ wherever they find them, and has even created a system where the police are given brownie points for numbers of arrests. And surprise, surprise, the theory was developed in the US, with its private prisons, high incarceration rates, death penalties and super-long prison sentences – and Bregman effectively counters the crime policies based on this theory with the approach in Scandinavian and other European countries, with their much lower crime and incarceration rates.
One obvious point to be made is that a broken window isn’t a crime, ipso facto, and it could have any one of a multiplicity of causes, as could a crime. So to look at these matters from a punitive perspective, right off the bat, might just be counter-productive. I won’t go into the ‘no free will’ argument again here, but to look at people’s circumstances from a more humane perspective would be of assistance, to put it mildly. When you come across a rabid, vicious dog who seems prevented from tearing your throat out only by a strong mesh fence, it seems reasonable to assume that she wasn’t brought up in a happy, playful, loving environment among other pets and humans. And you wouldn’t expect that dog’s behaviour to be improved by spending the rest of her days in solitary confinement in a black hole.
But of course the broken windows approach isn’t about improving that dog’s behaviour, or that of a ‘criminal’. It’s about improving the environment by removing these nasties from it. And the more ‘improved’ you want your environment to be, the more rules you will need to create, the more violations you will have to find, to make it so. That might just require more trained and toughened people to enforce the rules. A police state, no less.
Okay, so the USA is a diverse country and it would be unwise to generalise. Nevertheless, let me make some general points. The USA has the lowest minimum wage of any developed country, while Australia, where I live, has one of the highest (it’s true that individual US states can offer higher wages, but many of them don’t). It also has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democratic nation, by a long way. Could these two factoids be connected?
There are also other negative indices. The USA has, by far, the highest wealth inequality of any OECD country. It has the highest rate of executions of any democracy. It is also the only country in the OECD that doesn’t have universal healthcare, though its average expenditure on healthcare is higher that that of other OECD countries – with poorer outcomes. That’s according to The Commonwealth Fund, which, in its 2023 analysis, referenced below, made these points:
- The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.
- The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.
- Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population.
Much of this has to do, I suspect, with the USA’s championing of ‘the individual’. Spin-offs of that ideology include extreme selfishness, which helps explain the rich-poor divide, an ‘I can do whatever I want’ mentality, which helps explain obesity, and ‘I alone can fix it’ thinking, which results in not seeking medical help, with lack of demand leading to lack of supply.
And it seems to me that most United Staters don’t recognise these problems, I think largely due to insularity and jingoism. To give a personal anecdote about the jingoism, I used to leave comments on some US political videos, and I had a a thought of referring to the people of the US as ‘United Staters’, because it occurred to me, reasonably enough, that ‘America’ referred to a double continent and surrounding islands, with a population of over a billion. It was Wikipedia, in fact, that suggested United Staters as a perhaps more accurate term of reference. But on my first (and, I think only) comment using the term, I was hit by a response so abusive that it was very soon wiped, presumably by site monitors. Other times, in commenting on some scientific issue, I would receive a response laden with US jingoism, which had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Surely nobody of any other nationality does this! It’s quite creepy.
Anyway, returning to the USA’s adoption of the ‘broken windows’ paradigm, there has been blow-back, and some states are recognising the effectiveness of very different approaches, particularly in Europe. In Humankind, a revelatory work about the power of positive community, Bregman describes a couple of prisons in Norway, maximum-security Halden, and Bastoy, an island-based facility, and it’s worth quoting:
The inmates of Halden prison each have a room of their own. With underfloor heating. A flatscreen TV. A private bathroom. There are kitchens where the inmates can cook, with porcelain plates and stainless steel knives. Halden also has a library, a climbing wall and a fully equipped music studio, where the inmates can record their own records. Albums are issued under their own label, called – no joke – Criminal Records. To date, three of the inmates have been contestants on Norwegian Idol, and the first musical is in the works.
On the island [of Bastoy, a ‘softer prison’], there’s all kinds of things to do. There’s a cinema, a tanning bed, and two ski slopes. Several of the inmates got together and formed a group called the Bastoy Blues Band, which actually scored a spot opening for legendary Texas rockers ZZ Top. The island also has a church, a grocery store and a library.
Rutger Bregman, Human kind, pp 328-9
The island prisoners do engage in community work, ploughing and planting, chopping wood and making furniture, using such lethal tools as chainsaws. The prison guards, a high proportion of whom are women, are trained in ‘dynamic security’, designed to prepare inmates for a return to the ‘normal life’ that the prison itself seeks to emulate. The effectiveness of such a system is proven by Norway’s recidivism rate, the lowest in the world. ‘In the US, 60% of inmates are back in the slammer after two years, compared to 20% in Norway [and 16% in Bastoy]’, writes Bregman.
Wikipedia cites the World Prison Brief’s incarceration data, which tells us that the USA’s per capita incarceration rate is ten times that of Norway – and three times that of Australia (where the incarceration rate has long been a matter of concern).
So why does the USA, which so indefatigably touts itself as the world’s greatest democracy, and then some, have such a shocking record in this field? It seems to be connected to its obsession with individualism, and associated praise and blame. ‘Self-made’ individuals are idolised, while the ‘left behind’ are blamed for their plight. No doubt that’s overly simplistic, but it contains more than a grain of truth, methinks. Thankfully there are smart United Staters, such as Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, who have exposed the mythology of free will for what it is, for those willing to listen.
So let me end this post on a slightly more upbeat note. Bregman, always looking for silver linings, describes the impact of a visit to those Norwegian prisons by North Dakota’s top prison officials in 2015. North Dakota is a conservative, sparsely populated state with an incarceration rate many times greater than that of Norway. The state’s head of the Department of Corrections was brought to tears by the experience, and came to the stark realisation that the broken windows strategy was fatally flawed, and that ‘the implementation of humanity’ was key. Since then, prison officials from six other US states have visited Norway – and things are beginning to change (that’s as of 2020, when Bregman’s book was published). It’s a small beginning, but figures on incarceration rates, dating to as recently as 2024, make it clear that implementing humanity within the USA’s legal and correctional system has a long way to go.
References
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history, 2020
Global Inequality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
the battle for justice part 3 – is there any way to clear your name?
A prosecution should not proceed if there is no reasonable prospect of a conviction being secured. This basic criterion is the cornerstone of the uniform prosecution policy adopted in Australia.
from ‘The decision to prosecute’, in ‘Statement of prosecution policy and guidelines’, Director of Public Prosecutions, South Australia, October 2014
shit, please don’t tell me the other 24
I’ve argued that it’s pretty well impossible to clear your name, once you’re arrested and charged with a serious crime, due to the nolle prosequi conundrum. And if the charge has to do with a child, you’re unlikely to get work which may involve children, even if no evidence whatsoever has been presented against you, as in my case. But surely there must be some way to clear your name. It can’t be all doom and gloom. Can it?
- Approach the former plaintiff
A number of people who know about the case have asked me – what about the boy who accused you? He’s a young man now, maybe he regrets it all and has changed his tune. If he could be prevailed upon to admit it was all a lie..?
To be honest, I have no inclination whatsoever to go looking for him, and it would probably look bad if I did. And if he changed his story after encountering me, or someone acting in my name, how reliable would his new story be? So I’m very reluctant to go down that path, though it might be a last resort.
2. Approach the DPP
More promising, perhaps, would be to go to the DPP. Why did they abandon the case? My guess has always been that the boy’s story was full of contradictions and kept changing, but it’s also possible that, under pressure, he admitted it was all made up. Way back then. As one of my quotes on nolle prosequi, from my previous post, states: Normally the DPP doesn’t give a reason for such a decision. I’m in the process of requesting all the court documents from the case, and maybe a reason for the decision will appear there, but again I’m very doubtful. And approaching the DPP for a reason now would surely be like trying to get blood out of a stone. Still, such a request might be worth a try.
3. Take it up with the ombudsman/human rights commission
Assuming my appeal fails – and it probably will – the DCSI website kindly suggests that I could take the matter up with these other organisations. The obvious problem with this is that it would be a long-term process, and I’m 61 years old, poor, and desperate to be reinstated in the job I love now. So, yes, I do feel it’s a human rights issue, and I would like to take it up, regardless, with the HRC, though I can hardly imagine it being a priority for them. It’s not a serious option for my immediate situation.
4. Appeal to consistency of character
This is the one that screams at me (and at others) as my best defence. We’ve all heard of criminal profiling, where the police or criminologists seek to predict future offending and victims based on past behaviour, but I have no criminal profile. When I was accused by this boy I was forty-nine years old, with no history, and never any accusations, of violence or sexual abuse of any kind. I’d fostered two young boys before this lad, and I fostered another three after him, with no complaints. I’m proud of what I did as a foster carer, and I’m particularly proud of my work as a teacher in recent years, with mostly young adults but a sprinkling of under eighteens in each class – scores of them overall. And never a hint of a complaint. On the contrary…
And this is what really hurts. When the police arrested me for rape, they had never so much as seen me before. They knew nothing about me, they wouldn’t know me from a bar of soap. They arrested me purely due to the seriousness of the allegation. When the DPP took up the case, passing it from lawyer to lawyer for about a year, none of them knew me from a bar of soap. I was no more than a name. Similarly, when the DCSI began screening me 11 years later, they didn’t know me from a bar of soap. I was just one of the presumably thousands of individuals they had to screen. And they didn’t investigate me, in the way the Dunedin Study studied particular individuals longitudinally – profiling them, essentially. They investigated documents. The documents of the police and the DPP. The documents relating to that one, isolated allegation. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
So an appeal to consistency of character won’t work when character isn’t being looked at at any point down the line. The DCSI appears to look at documents, not at character. The DPP also looks at documents, police documents, and the police don’t seem to look at anything much. The DCSI has stated that an adverse finding isn’t binding. Employers can make up their own minds. But it’s no surprise that employers, especially large-scale impersonal employers, given the current state of moral concern or panic over sexual abuse, will have a policy of accepting the DCSI finding. Thus in this case, they’ll rely on DCSI documents, which rely on court documents, which rely on police documents, which rely on, in this case, nothing much. I think they call this ‘procedural fairness’. Let’s not let our human, personal biases get in the way of effective decision-making.
The Dunedin longitudinal study, and every other study of its kind, give strong scientific credibility to the insight that the best guide to future behaviour is past behaviour. My life-time record of civilised, tolerant, non-violent and caring behaviour, however, was never taken into account by the police when they asked me to sit down at the Port Adelaide police station, not knowing me from a bar of soap, and promptly charged me with rape. And everything that I suffered over the next year, and everything that the DCSI is putting me through now, results from that event.
I had a chat with my semi-former boss today (I’ve been sort of suspended from work pending the outcome of my appeal). I told her I held little hope of my appeal being successful, because ‘I had nothing more to declare but my innocence’. I didn’t actually say that, just thought of it now, but that was the gist of it. But interestingly I feel more confident now as I go through the processes. That’s the usual way when you’re under this kind of cloud, your thoughts oscillate, often extremely, from pessimism to optimism and back again.
My hope, ridiculous as it is, is that when organisations like DCSI have their noses rubbed into the basic injustice of taking the most extreme, conservative view of nolle prosequi, thus destroying the careers of good people, they will see reason. And they might also be persuaded of the obvious truth that everyone else is taking the most extreme, conservative view of their findings.
I’ll no doubt survive, deprived of my vocation. I’ll go into retirement earlier, I’ll be more pressed for funds. I’ll most certainly miss my students, more than anything. But I won’t give up the fight. I don’t want any of these people to feel complacently that they’re making this world safer for children and young people. In this case, they’re most definitely not. And it’s not good enough to shrug and think that some collateral damage is necessary when you’re doing the ‘right thing’. It isn’t.