Most people that rely on the mainstream media might not know it but there was an enormous amount of research dating back at least to the sixties that showed how to do a much better job reducing crime by addressing the root causes of crime.
The mainstream media hasn't been reporting it, but that research never ended and some people at the grassroots level learned from it; and even while the political establishment at the national level, and in many States, at the State level, were pushing get tough on crime policies that don't work, they continued addressing the root causes in some areas far better than others; and they've provided additional evidence about what works better.
Countries in Europe have also handled crime reduction very differently than in the United States and there is very little reporting in the mainstream media bout what they do differently and how it works but they have far lower violent crime and incarceration rates, and there is good reason to believe that the policies used in Europe and some areas in the United States are responsible for this.
Why is it so hard for many people to look at the areas with the lowest crime or other social problems and try to figure out what they might be doing right?
Would the vast majority of the public see how obvious it can be that this could help reduce many of our problems, whether it's crime, health care pollution or many other issues, if we had a media that actually reported on it?
I went into this more in a series of previous articles starting with Ignored evidence linking corporal punishment, poverty and crime grows and including Politicians increase crime; Grass roots efforts reduce crime; Politicians steal the credit which cites and experiment in Richmond, California to reduce crime that has what many people would consider shock value, that partly involves "Paying People Not to Kill" according to some articles. This is only part of the experiment that would be considered shocking to many people and it may not be the most important part but it has clearly had a lot of success for one reason or another.
Their murder rates have plummeted from a high of 45.9 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.1 in 2014 which is still much higher than average but it has demonstrated that even in some of the worst abandoned inner cities community activism can make an enormous difference. Most other crime in Richmond has also gone down dramatically except theft which is stable and rape which has risen.
Boston is now conducting a similar experiment, as indicated below and Marie Gottschalk also points out how the United States has done things very different from Europe and that there are some differences within the country in the following excerpts from her book "Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics," including the "root causes approach," which means finding the causes of crime and preventing them, which should be an incredibly obvious and non-controversial way of reducing crime:
The U. S. approach to its returning citizens stands in striking contrast to how prisoners and ex-offenders are treated in other Western countries. The U.S. parole system “seems to be designed to catch a person doing something wrong, rather than provide the services to prevent an offense.” Western European countries “primarily use parole and probation services as a way of ensuring that the person is receiving appropriate services and treatment to help ensure reintegration into the community.” In Finland, for example, only about one in five people on parole has a supervision or surveillance component to their release. All released prisoners in Finland have access to services regardless of whether or not a parole officer is supervising them closely. In the United States, about 200,000 people are released from prison each year without supervision (either because it is the conclusion of their sentence or because they are under some kind of mandatory release). They are generally left largely on their own to integrate back into society without housing, employment, or other assistance. In Germany and France, punishment law and penal practices are expressly designed to avoid creating “any sense of status differentiation between prisoners and the general population. On the contrary, practices in both countries are supposed to dramatize the facts that inmates are just like everybody else.” Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.96-9
In launching his war on crime, Johnson linked it to the war on poverty. He stressed the need to address “root causes” of crime. So did several presidential commissions appointed in the 1960s to examine the causes of the crime wave and the numerous disturbances that gripped U.S. cities at the time, most notably the Watts riots of 1965. But the root causes approach – which called for addressing these problems by investing more in education, health, welfare, and social and economic programs, not just law enforcement – lost out in public debates for a number of reasons. ... Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.146-7
The focus on the prisons that Texas did not build has deflected attention away from the fact that Texas has been energetically disinvesting from the very items proven to reduce crime and improve the quality of life in the disadvantaged communities that hurt most by crime and by get-tough policies. These include high quality schools, good health care, and social services. It also has deflected attention from the fact that the budget crisis in Texas was not an act of nature but rather a crisis that was politically engineered by some of the very people who are being hailed as leaders in penal reform today.
In Texas and many other states, the political debate has centered on what is to be cut and on how to maneuver within a tight budget climate. The conversation ... Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.111-3
In launching his war on crime, Johnson linked it to the war on poverty. He stressed the need to address “root causes” of crime. So did several presidential commissions appointed in the 1960s to examine the causes of the crime wave and the numerous disturbances that gripped U.S. cities at the time, most notably the Watts riots of 1965. But the root causes approach – which called for addressing these problems by investing more in education, health, welfare, and social and economic programs, not just law enforcement – lost out in public debates for a number of reasons. ... Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.146-7
The focus on the prisons that Texas did not build has deflected attention away from the fact that Texas has been energetically disinvesting from the very items proven to reduce crime and improve the quality of life in the disadvantaged communities that hurt most by crime and by get-tough policies. These include high quality schools, good health care, and social services. It also has deflected attention from the fact that the budget crisis in Texas was not an act of nature but rather a crisis that was politically engineered by some of the very people who are being hailed as leaders in penal reform today.
In Texas and many other states, the political debate has centered on what is to be cut and on how to maneuver within a tight budget climate. The conversation ... Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.111-3
Europe, which provides much more services for former inmates and also provides better health care, child care and education has a much lower murder and incarceration rate than the United states according List of countries by intentional homicide rate Murder Rates Nationally and By State at DPIC and Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries. Almost all other developed countries including Europe, Australia, Canada, Greenland, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea have much lower murder rates and all have much lower incarceration rates than the United States.
The mainstream media provides almost no coverage of the best research on crime reduction; instead providing only one solution in a high profile manner, punishment as a deterrent, with very little discussion about how improved education child care or rehabilitation efforts that have been abandoned since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations attempted to address these issues. Since then both Republicans and Democrats have been promoting get tough on crime policies, including the death penalty, which don't reduce reduce crime nearly as much as addressing the root causes of crime.
Gottschalk claims that the incarceration rates can be cut dramatically without relying solely on reducing the root causes of crime which may take a long time; however it should be clear that the root causes also need to be reduced as well if we hope to reduce violence not just the incarceration rates.
I’m sure Gottschalk recognizes this but focuses on the incarceration rate since, with enough political pressure it should be possible to reduce that faster while it will take more time to improve child care and education along with other programs that reduce the root causes of crime in some areas, where they haven’t gotten started yet.
In the seventies when we were at the height of the cold war one of the reasons that we were taught that made us so much better than the USSR was that they incarcerated an outrageous percentage of their people in Gulags with outrageous human rights conditions. Now the country with the highest incarceration rates in by far the United States and there are growing reports about outrageous abuses in our prisons as bad as what was going on in the USSR.
This does little or nothing to reduce crime; and even does the opposite, since people held in prison where they're kept in a violent environment may become more violent, not less, now that most rehabilitation efforts have been eliminated and replaced with "get tough on crime policies."
What the media rarely ever mentions is that a large segment of our society never has a first chance to to get a decent education and have reasonable economic opportunities that leave them desperate and inevitably lead to more crime. A large part of the reason for this is relentless efforts to cut many of the programs that improve the quality of life like the ones that Gottschalk reports that Texas is cutting. Texas isn't actually among the most violent states according to their murder rates; however other Southern states which are also following the same policies are much higher and they also have higher incarceration rates. Also, since Texas is so diverse, their violent crime rates fluctuate more than small states; some of the cities with the lowest murder rates, including Austin are much more progressive, by most accounts than the rest of Texas; and El Paso, which has a high immigrant population, also has a low murder rate. Contrary to the propaganda repeated over and over again immigrants and Hispanics aren't more violent than Caucasians at all.
As I have pointed out in previous articles the ones with the lowest murder rates are the ones that have been doing a better job addressing the root causes of crime in the long run. the ones with the highest murder rates are the ones that use the strictest get tough on crime policies including the death penalty. Only one of the states with the ten highest murder rates doesn't have the death penalty and six of the ones with the lowest don't; most of the states that don't have the death penalty are in the lower half, when it comes to murder rates.
There should be no doubt that social programs to reduce violence including teaching about how corporal punishment leads to escalating violence including child abuse bullying, domestic violence and murder. There should also be no doubt that when they ship all the jobs overseas and cut the resources for abandoned inner cities that they also contribute to major problems with crime.
Poor people without political connection are subject to the harshest punishments; while white collar criminals with political connections that cause all the poverty that leads to higher crime are almost never held accountable.
Although the vast majority of the national media isn't reporting it, there are a small number of local efforts to restore rehabilitation efforts like the following program in Boston:
For former gang members, making education pay By Cristela Guerra 05/19/2017 (Article Reposted under the fair use clause for educational purposes of copyright laws for additional details see Copyright Post-Script below.)
Inside his 8- by 8-foot cell, Alex Diaz looked at his daughter’s pictures every day.
On the prison walls, she remained 5 years old. Outside, she grew taller, older.
He spent the first eight years of his daughter’s life incarcerated. His daughter was his blood, his kin, but his gang had been his other family.
Her photos kept him looking toward the future. That, and the encouraging phone calls of a longtime friend he had grown up with, Francisco Depina. They’d both belonged to gangs as teenagers.
The streets were their second homes. Neither expected a second chance.
This fall, Diaz will be paid to study at a community college, while also receiving social and emotional support. It’s part of an initiative called Boston Uncornered, started by the education nonprofit College Bound Dorchester. Diaz, who is 30 years old, is one of 40 former gang members being compensated to resume their education.
“Everyone out there has a genius in them, they’re smart,” said Depina, a college readiness adviser with College Bound Dorchester. “They have a potential to do a lot of things, but just like me, people have shut doors in their face so many times that they sat there and believed that. But that is not true.”
The goal of Boston Uncornered is to engage with 900 former gang members, convicted felons, and high school dropouts, and to eventually enroll 250 in college over three years.
The program pays participants $400 a week, to focus on school, tutoring, and work-based learning as an alternative to making money on the streets, officials say.
The project will cost close to $18 million over three years. Program officials have already raised $4.8 million through private and public grants and donations. Boston Uncornered will work with researchers from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University to evaluate the program.
“We see gang members and gang-involved youth as the means to community change,” said Mark Culliton, CEO of College Bound Dorchester. “Not as a problem, not as somebody to save, but as agents of change.”
This is the hope: that former gang members, who can be powerful figures in their communities, will use their leadership qualities to motivate and inspire others to change their lives.
On the street, Diaz was “Ace.” He dropped out of high school in ninth grade and committed a series of misdemeanors and felonies, including possession of a firearm, armed robbery, and kidnapping. Tattooed on Diaz’s forearms are headstones bearing the names of family members who died while he was behind bars. He got out in 2013.
“It ain’t worth it,” Diaz said. “It really ain’t. It ain’t worth it. I didn’t just mess up my life, I also messed up the people that I love’s life because I wasn’t around for them, I couldn’t support them, or I couldn’t even be there when they needed me.”
It took time to get used to the outside world, Diaz said. He found himself still wearing flip-flops in the shower, still sitting so he could see everything around him at all times.
The scariest moment was seeing his daughter, Diaz said.
“My actually seeing her, holding her. It kind of made me feel like the man I should’ve been when I first had her,” Diaz said. “Instead of still acting a fool and running the streets.”
He apologized, promised to be there for her, and to make no mistakes. She told him I love you.
Diaz’s exam for a high school equivalency degree is in a week. He’s planning to study automotive technology at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, so he can work in his father’s automotive garage.
Antonio Franklin, 31, got out of prison last year, after serving 10 years for assaulting a police officer. Behind bars, he wrote poetry to free his thoughts. Now, freedom is being able to spend time with his family and attending Bunker Hill Community College in the fall. He plans to study sociology. He dreams of being a motivational speaker for kids and is expecting his first child. He wishes someone would’ve given him this advice:
“There’s other things in life than this little box you’re trying to put yourself into,” Franklin said. “Life is about going places, seeing things. If you want to keep yourself stuck in that one place, you’re going to miss out on everything.”
It took Depina years to realize his potential. He didn’t know the word “goal” as a young man. The only goal he knew was achieved while running down the soccer field, not striving in life.
A teacher once told him he was going to end up dead or in jail. He never forgot that.
Depina, who’s 32, was kicked out of a school, out of a vocational training program, and his family’s home. His neighbors called him a bad influence. Now, they say “good morning” as he leaves for work.
He wants to be a better man for his 3-year-old son.
Depina’s job at College Bound is to check on students, appearing with them if they have a day in court, helping them focus on school. He and Diaz made a promise they would enroll in Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology together. He’s going to study computer engineering.
“This is not a job for me. This is personal,” Depina said. “Because I get to walk in my neighborhood and talk to young men living the lifestyle that I left behind. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy because it wasn’t easy for me, but you just have to keep trying, not giving up.” Original article
 |
| Alex Diaz, 30, of Dorchester worked during a math class at College Bound Dorchester. |
Inside his 8- by 8-foot cell, Alex Diaz looked at his daughter’s pictures every day.
On the prison walls, she remained 5 years old. Outside, she grew taller, older.
He spent the first eight years of his daughter’s life incarcerated. His daughter was his blood, his kin, but his gang had been his other family.
Her photos kept him looking toward the future. That, and the encouraging phone calls of a longtime friend he had grown up with, Francisco Depina. They’d both belonged to gangs as teenagers.
The streets were their second homes. Neither expected a second chance.
This fall, Diaz will be paid to study at a community college, while also receiving social and emotional support. It’s part of an initiative called Boston Uncornered, started by the education nonprofit College Bound Dorchester. Diaz, who is 30 years old, is one of 40 former gang members being compensated to resume their education.
“Everyone out there has a genius in them, they’re smart,” said Depina, a college readiness adviser with College Bound Dorchester. “They have a potential to do a lot of things, but just like me, people have shut doors in their face so many times that they sat there and believed that. But that is not true.”
The goal of Boston Uncornered is to engage with 900 former gang members, convicted felons, and high school dropouts, and to eventually enroll 250 in college over three years.
The program pays participants $400 a week, to focus on school, tutoring, and work-based learning as an alternative to making money on the streets, officials say.
The project will cost close to $18 million over three years. Program officials have already raised $4.8 million through private and public grants and donations. Boston Uncornered will work with researchers from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University to evaluate the program.
“We see gang members and gang-involved youth as the means to community change,” said Mark Culliton, CEO of College Bound Dorchester. “Not as a problem, not as somebody to save, but as agents of change.”
This is the hope: that former gang members, who can be powerful figures in their communities, will use their leadership qualities to motivate and inspire others to change their lives.
On the street, Diaz was “Ace.” He dropped out of high school in ninth grade and committed a series of misdemeanors and felonies, including possession of a firearm, armed robbery, and kidnapping. Tattooed on Diaz’s forearms are headstones bearing the names of family members who died while he was behind bars. He got out in 2013.
“It ain’t worth it,” Diaz said. “It really ain’t. It ain’t worth it. I didn’t just mess up my life, I also messed up the people that I love’s life because I wasn’t around for them, I couldn’t support them, or I couldn’t even be there when they needed me.”
It took time to get used to the outside world, Diaz said. He found himself still wearing flip-flops in the shower, still sitting so he could see everything around him at all times.
The scariest moment was seeing his daughter, Diaz said.
“My actually seeing her, holding her. It kind of made me feel like the man I should’ve been when I first had her,” Diaz said. “Instead of still acting a fool and running the streets.”
 |
| Francisco Depina posed for a portrait at College Bound Dorchester. |
He apologized, promised to be there for her, and to make no mistakes. She told him I love you.
Diaz’s exam for a high school equivalency degree is in a week. He’s planning to study automotive technology at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, so he can work in his father’s automotive garage.
Antonio Franklin, 31, got out of prison last year, after serving 10 years for assaulting a police officer. Behind bars, he wrote poetry to free his thoughts. Now, freedom is being able to spend time with his family and attending Bunker Hill Community College in the fall. He plans to study sociology. He dreams of being a motivational speaker for kids and is expecting his first child. He wishes someone would’ve given him this advice:
“There’s other things in life than this little box you’re trying to put yourself into,” Franklin said. “Life is about going places, seeing things. If you want to keep yourself stuck in that one place, you’re going to miss out on everything.”
It took Depina years to realize his potential. He didn’t know the word “goal” as a young man. The only goal he knew was achieved while running down the soccer field, not striving in life.
A teacher once told him he was going to end up dead or in jail. He never forgot that.
Depina, who’s 32, was kicked out of a school, out of a vocational training program, and his family’s home. His neighbors called him a bad influence. Now, they say “good morning” as he leaves for work.
He wants to be a better man for his 3-year-old son.
Depina’s job at College Bound is to check on students, appearing with them if they have a day in court, helping them focus on school. He and Diaz made a promise they would enroll in Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology together. He’s going to study computer engineering.
“This is not a job for me. This is personal,” Depina said. “Because I get to walk in my neighborhood and talk to young men living the lifestyle that I left behind. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy because it wasn’t easy for me, but you just have to keep trying, not giving up.” Original article
This program has a lot in common with the one in Richmond, California; however it focuses more on education and providing more opportunities if the former gang members stay out of trouble than “paying them not to kill each other,” as some people referred to the program in Richmond. This should be far less controversial, however many conservatives will inevitably consider it “coddling” gang members.
However if the programs that conservatives promote routinely fail to work that should raise doubts about their effectiveness.
This program still claims that they’re getting a “second chance” without questioning whether many of them ever had a first chance. Many of these former gang members almost certainly were raised in areas that had a lot of violence and very low quality schools. These are the schools that Jonathan Kozol wrote about in “Death At An Early Age” where he taught back in the sixties.
His efforts to expose use of corporal punishment in schools helped bring that to an end and inevitably led to longer term reductions in violence, since this has been proven to lead to escalating violence, since it teaches children to respond to their problems with violence.
Unfortunately the vast majority of research presented by the traditional media presents the police as the primary and often sole solution to stop murder, as the following article indicates, where the police chief admits that he doesn’t “know how you stop that,” referring to a murder that he couldn’t have anticipated. They only briefly mention that “poverty and a lack of opportunities,” are part of the problem without giving the local leaders that want to address this more opportunity to make their point.
Boston’s homicides up slightly, shootings down 12/31/2016
In mid-June, Andrew Flonory was shot and killed in Mattapan. Two months later, Ailton Goncalves was shot in the head while hanging out with friends in Uphams Corner. On a morning last month, Anthony Toombs was killed while sitting in a car in Roxbury.
All three killings were gang-related, police and prosecutors have said.
There have been 46 killings in Boston so far in 2016, six more than in 2015. Though the number of homicides is lower than in many other major cities, gang-related homicides remain a troubling portion of the killings in Boston. Police say they continue to focus resources on the most violent parts of the city, but some crimes, officials say, are nearly impossible to prevent.
“We can’t be everywhere, every day,” said Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans. “A shooting at 4 a.m. behind Heath Street . . . I don’t know how you stop that.” .....
Community leaders who work with at-risk youth say poverty and a lack of opportunities are among the root causes of violence in the city’s neighborhoods. Original article
In mid-June, Andrew Flonory was shot and killed in Mattapan. Two months later, Ailton Goncalves was shot in the head while hanging out with friends in Uphams Corner. On a morning last month, Anthony Toombs was killed while sitting in a car in Roxbury.
All three killings were gang-related, police and prosecutors have said.
There have been 46 killings in Boston so far in 2016, six more than in 2015. Though the number of homicides is lower than in many other major cities, gang-related homicides remain a troubling portion of the killings in Boston. Police say they continue to focus resources on the most violent parts of the city, but some crimes, officials say, are nearly impossible to prevent.
“We can’t be everywhere, every day,” said Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans. “A shooting at 4 a.m. behind Heath Street . . . I don’t know how you stop that.” .....
Community leaders who work with at-risk youth say poverty and a lack of opportunities are among the root causes of violence in the city’s neighborhoods. Original article
Regrettably there is little or no effort by most police departments or media outlets to recognize the long term contributing causes of violence; however when they first introduced what they call community policing in the nineties in the Boston area that wasn’t supposed to be the way it was handled.
When I first read about it they reported that police would often show up to domestic calls with a social worker, as well as police officers, that were trained for different purposes. Presumably the social worker would have helped try to provide counseling that police weren’t trained to provide.
If they did a better job counseling people on how to resolve their disputes they would be much less likely to escalate to a point where the police needed to be called. Additional resources put into schools or day care centers could also cut down dramatically on the long term contributing causes of violence.
Unfortunately a growing amount of the special interests with political clout is far more concerned with profiting off of crime or preserving job security for themselves than they are with reducing crime.
Gottschalk also writes about how private prisons are lobbying to increase incarceration rates or prevent efforts to reduce them and prison guard unions are also lobbying to do the same thing although they often prefer to avoid privatization and surprisingly many politicians are complying. This escalated under the Clinton administration with the draconian crime bill that led to large increases in incarceration.
And as the following excerpt shows some of the biggest corporations are trying to take advantage of an exception in the thirteenth amendment to allow slave labor for inmates:
The goal of turning prisons into moneymaking machines or at least ensuring that they pay their own way isn’t that far-fetched. The United States has a long history of exploiting inmate labor to make prisons and penal farms highly productive and lucrative. ….
At the same time that legislators have been pushing back against UNICOR, they have been pushing hard to liberate the private sector to enter the inmate labor market in a big way. With the decline of organized labor and the onset of the neo-liberal era in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the hard fought restrictions on the sale of prison made good and the use of prison labor have been eroding. …..
A who’s who of corporate America – including Wal-Mart, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, and Starbucks – discovered the potential windfall of a captive labor force as their subcontractors began to harness penal labor. .....
As with many penal innovations in the age of mass incarceration, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying organization, has been a key player in liberating the private sector to employ penal labor and expand privatization of corrections. .....
At one point, it contracted out female chain gangs to Martori Farms, one of Wal-Mart’s leading suppliers. The women worked for fifty cents an hour, far below the prevailing wage, in blistering heat without proper water, breaks, or protection from the sun. Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.58-63)
One cannot talk about crime in the streets today without talking about crime in the suites. Over the past four decades, the public obsession with getting tougher on street crime coincided with the retreat of the state in regulating corporate malfeasance — everything from hedge funds to credit default swaps to workplace safety. Keeping the focus on street crime was a convenient strategy to shift public attention and resources from crime in the suites to crime in the streets. (Marie Gottschalk "Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics" 2015 p.280-1)
Conservatives Against Incarceration? Marie Gottschalk Fiscal conservatives were never going to bring down the carceral state. A broader fight against social inequality is needed. 12/23/2016
At the same time that legislators have been pushing back against UNICOR, they have been pushing hard to liberate the private sector to enter the inmate labor market in a big way. With the decline of organized labor and the onset of the neo-liberal era in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the hard fought restrictions on the sale of prison made good and the use of prison labor have been eroding. …..
A who’s who of corporate America – including Wal-Mart, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, and Starbucks – discovered the potential windfall of a captive labor force as their subcontractors began to harness penal labor. .....
As with many penal innovations in the age of mass incarceration, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying organization, has been a key player in liberating the private sector to employ penal labor and expand privatization of corrections. .....
At one point, it contracted out female chain gangs to Martori Farms, one of Wal-Mart’s leading suppliers. The women worked for fifty cents an hour, far below the prevailing wage, in blistering heat without proper water, breaks, or protection from the sun. Gottschalk "Caught" 2015 p.58-63)
One cannot talk about crime in the streets today without talking about crime in the suites. Over the past four decades, the public obsession with getting tougher on street crime coincided with the retreat of the state in regulating corporate malfeasance — everything from hedge funds to credit default swaps to workplace safety. Keeping the focus on street crime was a convenient strategy to shift public attention and resources from crime in the suites to crime in the streets. (Marie Gottschalk "Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics" 2015 p.280-1)
Conservatives Against Incarceration? Marie Gottschalk Fiscal conservatives were never going to bring down the carceral state. A broader fight against social inequality is needed. 12/23/2016
Many corporations are more concerned with finding a way to increase their profits instead of reducing crime and they’re have an enormous amount of success lobbying the government to put these priorities ahead of the best interest of the vast majority of the public, especially in more authoritarian parts of the country, including the South where they’re more susceptible to “get tough on crime” policies that allow for a return of slavery.
When a growing portion of the political or economic system has a financial incentive to find more people guilty of crimes instead of trying to find out the most effective way of preventing them that should be a major concern to everyone.
Another major issue which both Marie Gottschalk and Michelle Alexander should have covered more on was the war on Drugs and how the Kerry Committee Report and follow up research by Gary Webb exposed how the CIA was looking the other way while drug runners were bringing in cocaine to the United States to finance the Contra War in the eighties.
This should not be considered wild conspiracy theory since it came largely from a congressional investigation, although it received very little media attention. Congresswoman Maxine Waters also investigated it and wrote the forward for Gary Webb’s book confirming large portions of it, including many of his sources which were government documents, in addition to the Kerry Report. Nor should we assume that it has ended since additional researchers including Alfred McCoy and Robert Parry have disclosed additional drug running since then.
It is too much to go into in this article but it shows that a large portion if not all of the increased incarceration was a result of blatant entrapment by our own government.
Selections from the Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy chaired by Senator John F. Kerry
Gary Webb “Dark Alliance”
Program offers ex-cons way out 05/19/2017
Building a Prison-to-School Pipeline Formerly incarcerated undergrads started a group on campus to offer mentoring, support, and advocacy to other onetime inmates. 12/12/2016
Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin 04/19/2016
Copyright Post-Script: In a functioning democracy the public needs to have access to the educational material they need to make informed decisions about policies that affect them, which is presumably part of the reason they made the fair use clause of copyright laws in the first place. Regrettably these laws have been leaning more towards corporations that control far more of the media than they ever had before.
The mainstream media is now controlled by six oligarchies. These six oligarchies now control over ninety percent of the media that is available nationwide and they were initially required to provide a public service in return for their favorable treatment from the government.
Since the first requirement that any political candidate need to win higher office beyond the local level, is name recognition these six oligarchies can and do use their control of the media to provide an enormous advantage to candidates they favor and that collect an enormous amount of money from multinational corporations. This means that in addition to controlling the vast majority of propaganda given to the public these oligarchies can ensure that only candidates they cover are considered viable, which is a major reason for many of the draconian policies that favor the rich come from politicians that pretend to be progressive during campaigns.
To put it bluntly they rig elections by rigging the media coverage and intellectual property laws that give them consolidated control of the media and restrict the ability of many others to spread information as fast help them do this.
Many of us were taught that this was exactly what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
Copyright laws and other intellectual property laws are making it far more difficult to distribute the most credible research to the public. These oligarchies get a large portion of their funding through advertising revenue which comes from other oligarchies that control almost all of the economic system, and these advertising expenses are passed on to consumers as part of the cost of business, yet the media isn’t accountable to the public that indirectly finances them much if at all.
The vast majority of the public isn’t even aware of a large amount of the policy discussions that are only circulated in academic institutions. This is a major part of the reason why they’ve been able to escalate the epidemic levels of incarceration and cut back on the services that would prevent it. Many of the best researchers that truly want to implement policies that benefit the public almost certainly object to using intellectual property laws to slow down or prevent easy access to the public to important discussion that impacts them; however they’re presumably overruled by those with the most political clout.
Instead of reporting on the causes of crime they media repeats the same conservative propaganda over and over again even though it is the least reliable research and has proven to fail.
One small example of the limited excerpts that is taking place in the academic world is the following excerpt reviewing Gottschalk’s book from an employee of Minnesota Department of Corrections:
So readers should not be surprised when she makes no reference to personal pathologies of offenders, such as poor parenting, antisocial activities, etc. Her focus is societal pathologies. ....
However, her recommendations to deal with the crisis of the carceral state are far less profound than her scathing critique, and they are largely a regurgitation of other scholars in the field. ....
Roger Baburam is corrections program director at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.
Copyright of Corrections Today is the property of American Correctional Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
However, her recommendations to deal with the crisis of the carceral state are far less profound than her scathing critique, and they are largely a regurgitation of other scholars in the field. ....
Roger Baburam is corrections program director at the Minnesota Department of Corrections.
Copyright of Corrections Today is the property of American Correctional Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
This review is relatively trivial, but it is just a sample of an enormous amount of work that is restricted to the vast majority of the public, thanks to intellectual property laws, whether it is proprietary information or work protected by copyright that can only be circulated with permission.
Many of these non-fiction studies are being used to develop public policy but the vast majority of the public doesn’t have access to it all. In a democratic society this is unacceptable.
His claim that she “makes no reference to personal pathologies of offenders, such as poor parenting, antisocial activities,” isn’t quite true, but it isn’t her primary focus; and she does recommend that we invest more in the programs that help solve these problems, which many get tough on crime advocates don’t do.
His claim that “largely a regurgitation of other scholars in the field,” may also be partly true; however who are all these other “scholars in the field,” and why aren’t the media covering them? Allowing a fraction of one percent to control the vast majority of propaganda used for political purposes contradicts the clear intent of the First Amendment!
In a functioning democracy using copyright or intellectual property laws to deprive the majority of the public of the information they need to participate in the decision making process is entirely unacceptable.
Gottschalk even cites one example in her books where a private prison claimed that details around the death of an inmate were trade secrets so they shouldn’t have to disclose it. No reasonable person would seriously believe that trade secrecy laws should be used to cover up the circumstances of a death that could potentially be a murder or a result of excessive use of force. The fact that they even tried it should be outrageous and it should get an enormous amount of attention.
Trade secrecy laws being used to hide corruption aren’t limited to the private prison industry; it is wide spread in just about all industries controlled by oligarchies. Susan Linn and Juliet Schor have both written about how proprietary information laws are used to keep secret research into psychological manipulation of children to increase effectiveness of deceptive advertising; Harriet Washington has written about how proprietary information laws have been used to help keep secret unethical medical research that would outrage many people if they knew about it and many other good authors that get little or no promotional help from the mainstream media have reported on how proprietary information laws are used to hide the use of sweatshop labor and that competing companies are often making their products in the same sweat shop or that they often use slotting fees to create an interlocking oligarchy, which essentially means that it isn’t a free market at all; proprietary information laws enable many disasters that endanger lives including cuts in safety that leads to disaster like the Deep Horizon oil spill, the ignition malfunction problem that cost people their lives the Firestone tire problem where they were falling apart causing many accidents and many more safety problem.
Then when the best authors report on this they have a hard time getting any promotion for their books from the mainstream media and copyright laws prevent them from spreading the information at a much quicker pace.
There may be some justification to call for new ways to finance research, in some cases but under the current circumstances the vast majority of this research is being funded one way or another, often with help from tax payer subsidies, or through other subsidies passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for consumer goods. This includes some revenue that is being provided by various corporations that are part of the contributing causes of violence like Insurance and Gambling institutions as indicated in some of the articles listed below.
The mainstream media collects an enormous amount of advertising revenue from gambling and insurance companies as well as other corporations like Wal-Mart, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, and Starbucks that are profiting off of prison slave labor and ahs a financial incentive to minimize coverage of how they’re contributing indirectly to crime.
Fortunately it is unlikely that they would be inclined to issue cease and desist letters which is the typical first step for complaints about copyright violations since it would take too much efforts and if they did they might have to make their arguments in court and be known for trying to suppress educational information that could reduce crime and violence. Or at least if this is a low profile article, since it would only draw more attention to it, and if they debate the legitimacy of the draconian use of copyright laws to restrict access to educational material that the public needs it would increase attention to it and a growing portion of the public would realize how this is corrupting the democratic process.
They learned that this might backfire in the McLibel case when a relatively small effort to distribute leaflets in one local area turned into a major lawsuit that was reported worldwide drawing much more attention to poor labor practices by McDonalds than the leaflets did; so now they avoid lawsuits and try to minimize circulation of critical reviews, at least partly by ignoring it.
If the working class were more aware of how the educated class is using proprietary or secret information to establish political policies that affect them in a manner that enriches those at the top, which they are currently doing they would be much more likely to stand up to the current political establishment.
Many of the best researchers that are truly concerned about reducing crime realize that it is as important to distribute this material as widely as possible as it is to finance the research and that we should consider different ways to fund research.
It is often not the authors that copyright laws were initially intended to protect that are trying to enforce draconian copyright laws at all, but the copyright lawyers and publishing companies that are far more concerned about making a profit than actually providing a service.
I went into this in more detail in a couple articles about Copyright below. There are also many more about reducing the root causes of crime, including how income inequality increases crime, outsourcing, insurance gambling and many other contributing causes of violence and how to prevent them.
Marie Gottschalk "Caught: The Prison State" (additional excerpts)
Copyright Bureaucracy
Copyright violators are thought criminals
Ignored evidence linking corporal punishment, poverty and crime grows
Does lack of education increase violent crime? Religion?
How much does Income Inequality Affects Crime Rates?
States with high murder rates have larger veteran populations
Teach a soldier to kill and he just might
The tragedy of gambling politics in United States
How does gambling and gun control impact violent crime?
Politics, not technology, caused botched executions
Troy, Cameron, Gary all innocent? And executed?
Democrats do a bad job on crime; Republicans and the Media are worse!!
Politicians increase crime; Grass roots efforts reduce crime; Politicians steal the credit
Life Insurance and media companies are encouraging lots of murders
Union Busting adds to corrupt bureaucracy and incites crime
For-Profit Insurance is Government Authorized Crime Syndicate
Walmart’s “Restorative Justice” Endangers Public Without Reducing Crime
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