Pubdate: Thu, 14 Nov 2002
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, The (US)
Copyright: 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Contact:  http://chronicle.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/84
Author: Sasha Abramsky

CRIME AS AMERICA'S POP CULTURE

As I write, the panic over the Washington-area sniper appears to have ended 
with the arrest of a truly bizarre father-stepson combination, but, until 
it was over, the saga held us agog for the better part of a month.

Like the exploits of Jack the Ripper in the darkened East End streets of 
late-Victorian London, the almost-daily attacks filled us with terror, kept 
us glued to the news outlets of our day, and, during the weeks of 
uncertainty and rumor, dramatically changed people's daily routines.

Yet, crazy and horrifying as the events were -- from the killings to the 
ways communities and individuals reacted to the bloody spree -- they fit 
into a long lineage of sensational, sense-defying crimes and all-engrossing 
but ultimately short-lived societal reactions.

The fact that the cable-news channels were running virtually nonstop 
coverage, and that the tabloid papers, in particular, delighted in relating 
every last little salacious detail of the shootings, would have been 
instantly understandable to a newspaper editor a century ago, or to a 
gossip-mongering balladeer or pamphleteer from 200 or even 300 years past. 
After all, a sniper loose in the environs of a capital city is, undeniably, 
high drama.

What the editors of old might have found more surprising was the 
surrounding cultural landscape out of which the sniper case emerged to 
pre-eminence. For, today, much of American pop culture is saturated not 
just in the exploits of the truly exceptional crime or criminal, the 
flamboyant, scarlet doings of the real McCoy, but also in the mundane, 
routine, even clerical, behavior of run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, cops, 
judges, and prison wardens.

As TV viewers, we have spent a generation addicted to shows ranging from 
Miami Vice to LA Law to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

It is a change that, I would argue, occurred within the last 
quarter-century. And it is a change that has had enormous impact on the way 
that we, as a society, view, fear, and respond to crime.

For the past five or six years, much of my reporting has been on issues 
relating to crime and punishment, and, more specifically, on how changes in 
the criminal-justice system have been permeating our entire society, 
creating a culture imbued with many of the same excesses and fears that 
germinate behind our prison walls.

Nowadays, magazines and newspapers routinely run articles exploring the 
wider implications for society of America's bloated prison system.

But when I began, it was, or at least it appeared to me to be (call it the 
hubris of a young writer), something cutting edge, an arena in which 
astonishing societal transformations were being effected, but one on which 
relatively few journalists were focusing their attention. Crime reporting, 
the police beat, those had always attracted journalists by the thousands; 
but exploring the vaguer contours of a society marinated in the subtleties 
of criminal justice -- detailing the cultural shifts that have both 
permitted the growth of a more coercive criminal-justice structure, and, in 
turn, have grown out of it -- that was a rugged route well off the beaten path.

In the years from Richard Nixon's presidency to George W. Bush's, the 
number of Americans incarcerated in prisons and jails around the country 
has approximately quintupled. During the latter part of the 1980s and the 
early part of the 1990s, those increases in incarceration could be somewhat 
directly tallied to soaring crime rates, and, more pointedly, to startling 
increases in violent crime.

Strategically, criminologists like James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, 
of "broken windows" fame -- their theory that, when a neighborhood visibly 
began to deteriorate, it served as a magnet for criminals to further 
degrade the area; conversely, that preventing a neighborhood from declining 
in the first place would later pay dividends in reduced crime -- had been 
declaring since the mid-1970s that, if criminals had a higher level of 
certainty of receiving jail and prison sentences, imprisonment could come 
to serve as a realistic deterrent.

In his 1975 book Thinking About Crime, Wilson wrote that "punishment is not 
an unworthy objective for the criminal-justice system of a free and liberal 
society to pursue. The evidence supports (though cannot conclusively prove) 
the view that deterrence and incapacitation work, and new crime-control 
techniques ought to be tried in a frankly experimental manner." Later, in 
Crime and Human Nature (1985), written with Richard J. Herrnstein, he upped 
the ante still more, arguing in favor of altering "permanently and for 
large numbers of people the expected disutility of crime." In the Reagan 
era, in particular, Wilson's views were increasingly embraced by the 
political establishment.

In such a context, with crime rates rising and public confidence in the 
social compact waning, expanding the reach of the prison system and using 
incarceration as a form of social engineering, as a glue to reconnect 
frayed community fibers, made a degree of sense, though one that was always 
open to being contested.

Wilson, the University of Minnesota Law School's Michael H. Tonry told me 
in an interview several years ago, "has always been perfectly willing not 
to be too concerned by the humane implications" of his policy proposals.

Other scholars I have more recently interviewed, like Carnegie Mellon 
University's Alfred Blumstein, have also argued that Wilson's anticrime 
prescriptions, while deeply deductive, have been shown to be somewhat 
oversimplistic.

Between 1992 and 2001, however, crime rates -- as measured by the Bureau of 
Justice Statistics' surveys on crime victimization in the United States and 
the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Uniform Crime Report" -- fell. While 
recently released FBI data show that violent crime rose slightly last year, 
that increase, of approximately 2 percent, is minuscule compared with the 
drops in crime registered during the previous decade.

Yet, throughout that decade, the population living behind bars continued to 
soar; today, close to two-million people live lives as prisoners in America.

In 1999, the British Home Office conducted a study estimating that the 
United States now plays host to close to one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

According to the Sentencing Project, based in Washington, about 12 percent 
of African-American men in their 20's are in jail or prison in America, 
and, in some Southern states, close to 1 percent of the total population (a 
figure that includes children and the elderly) are now imprisoned.

The only countries that have an incarceration rate (the number of 
imprisoned people per 100,000 in the population) even approaching that of 
the United States are Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. Apartheid-era South 
Africa had a lower incarceration rate than the United States has today.

Britain's and Canada's incarceration rates are about a fifth of America's; 
Germany's is under a fifth; and Japan's is far lower still.

At the same time, for those who have argued that swift, certain punishment 
could serve to break America's love affair with narcotics, incarceration as 
a frontline tool in the "war on drugs" seems to have failed miserably.

For, while most types of crime have declined since 1992, drug use remains 
stubbornly constant.

Yet there are now over a quarter-million people in state prisons serving 
sentences for drug offenses -- nearly doubling since 1990 and up a 
staggering twelvefold since 1983. Fully 61 percent of federal-prison 
inmates are now serving sentences for drug crimes.

Study after study has shown that Latino and African-American people are 
grossly overrepresented among drug prisoners.

Were more white people, especially more middle-class white people, caught 
up in the prison system as a result of their drug use, I believe that, as a 
society, we would have both engaged in a more serious debate about the war 
on drugs and that we would have generated more critical cultural responses 
to the ways we rely on law enforcement to manage many of our most 
intractable social problems.

Thus the country, and the sections of its population most likely to be 
caught up in the criminal-justice system, are faced with two peculiar sets 
of facts: generally falling overall crime rates coupled with stubbornly 
high levels of incarceration, and ever larger numbers of people imprisoned 
for drug crimes coupled with no sign of a decline in the country's appetite 
for drugs.

Culturally, we have come to terms with these facts, have come to 
rationalize or, worse, not even to notice, our abnormally high 
incarceration rates.

Over the years, I have become fascinated by this phenomenon, by what might 
be seen as a disjunct between our national perceptions of crime, criminals, 
and victimhood, and the more complex, often less sensational, realities.

I have written many articles on the topic, and, in my book, Hard Time 
Blues, I explore the cultural and political trends that sustain mass 
incarceration; and, within that broader saga, what I regard as the reductio 
ad absurdum of current criminal-justice trends (think of California's 
embrace of a catch-all Three Strikes and You're Out law that fails to 
create moral and consequential distinctions between a repeat offender who 
steals produce from a supermarket and a repeat offender who rapes or kills 
a young child, imposing a similar punishment of 25-years-to-life on each).

The main character I focus on in my book was a 50-something heroin addict 
from East Los Angeles, Billy Ochoa, who has spent his adult life drifting 
in and out of prison for relatively low-end, nonviolent crimes committed to 
finance his drug habit, and who received a 326-year sentence in 1996, under 
the three-strikes law, for 13 counts of welfare fraud (25 years for each 
count, plus one additional year for having been convicted of a similar 
crime a few years previously). Ochoa is thus slated to spend the rest of 
his life in a supermaximum-security prison for crimes that netted him 
$2,100 in welfare funds.

I counterbalance Ochoa's sordid, seedy, but -- more to the point -- 
pathetic life and career with that of former California Gov. Pete Wilson, 
who, to great electoral effect, made tough-on-crime rhetoric a central 
focus of his political campaigns, both for U.S. senator and California 
governor.

One can make a cogent argument that Wilson would probably have lost his 
1994 re-election bid had he not become one of the most vociferous 
supporters of three-strikes legislation in the wake of the killing of 
12-year-old Polly Klaas in the small northern California town of Petaluma.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that very legitimate debates over appropriate 
punishments for different crimes, over models and methods of 
rehabilitation, and over the value of criminal-justice sanctions as 
deterrents at some point gradually got subsumed beneath a rather demagogic 
rhetoric that labeled all opinions that ran counter to majority sentiment 
as illegitimately "liberal" on crime and punishment. Further, as that 
rhetoric heated up from the mid-1980s on, majority sentiment shifted toward 
extremely conservative positions that only a few years earlier would have 
been dismissed by the political and bureaucratic agencies responsible for 
putting into effect criminal-justice policies as being detrimental to the 
long-term well-being of society.

Increasingly, a hypercompetitive, fragmented media market is partially 
responsible for the shift.

It has found that the old adage "crime pays" holds true, but with a new 
twist: Focus on crime, and the audiences will come to you; focus on more 
complex, nuanced stories about poverty, homelessness, addiction, and the 
like, and the audience will head over to your competitors. Include lurid 
detail, as well as discussion of tough-on-crime measures, and you're ahead 
of the game. (Think of the way that post-arrest coverage of the sniper case 
has highlighted which jurisdictions will allow the death penalty to be 
imposed on a juvenile defendant.) Add to that the fact that local crime 
reporting is far cheaper for television to cover than are overseas news 
stories or sweeping national issues like joblessness, and the market logic 
of increasing crime coverage becomes almost irresistible.

As a result, America's population has come to believe it is besieged by 
crime -- even in regions of the country where crime rates are extremely 
low, and even during years when crime rates have been falling sharply -- 
and has been demanding ever-tougher legislative responses; which, in turn, 
has led politicians to glom onto the issue as a surefire way to gain easy 
votes.

And, of course, because complex feedback loops work in many directions 
simultaneously, the political focus on crime and punishment in turn has fed 
both the media's appetite for the issue and the public's sense of 
insecurity, of the likelihood of victimization, thus further cementing 
crime and punishment at the center of the national political discourse.

In tandem with this, a strange cultural "normalization" of prison and of 
the process of arrest and prosecution leading up to prison has been occurring.

Epitomized by the content of much rap music, by the HBO series Oz,  by Fox 
TV's Cops, or, in a more nuanced vein, by the various NBC Law & Order 
spinoffs, this has gone beyond traditional voyeuristic fascination and 
media preoccupation with crime and punishment that America arguably 
inherited from the 18th-century English, with their broadsheets touting 
public hangings and epic crimes. It has become something more qualitatively 
a part of our culture, of how we define ourselves, and of how we interact 
with our surroundings.

Use a public urinal these days, and likely as not you'll be facing a "Just 
Say No" antidrug message on the bottom of the basin. Turn on the Super 
Bowl, and you'll see government-sponsored ads telling teenagers that using 
drugs actively supports international terrorism.

Take a trip on an urban subway system, and chances are you'll see 
crime-busters posters and signs detailing awards given out to those who 
provide the police with tips against criminals.

This isn't just a populace's momentary fascination with a diverting 
spectacle -- as was the case, say, when our grandparents followed the 
exploits of Bonnie and Clyde or the desperado actions of John Dillinger, or 
when 18th-century Londoners, as detailed in Peter Ackroyd's London: The 
Biography, followed the machinations of master criminals and escape artists 
like Jack Sheppard. Nor, it seems to me, is it simply an elite's way of 
ensuring a cowering populace's sullen loyalty -- a function that, 
Foucauldians argue, instruments of torture and capital punishment, as well 
as centrally located prisons like London's Newgate (finally destroyed by a 
mob during the 1780 Gordon riots), historically fulfilled.

Instead, it's something more akin to a cultural mutation -- one that has 
altered the ways in which we define our entertainment and our perception of 
reality, one that has intertwined our emotional responses to fear and our 
emotional desire for titillation in a profoundly strange way. Perhaps the 
spectacle of the prison (no longer centrally located, but instead 
transported into remote rural counties far from the great population 
centers) has come to embody as profound a role in our culture as that of 
the gladiator-filled amphitheaters in the Roman world.

They have become places in which we place our malfeasants; but, like the 
Romans of old, we expect returns on our ever-growing investment. We expect 
the prisons and their inhabitants to, in some way, entertain us.

The end result: an American crime scene with many similarities to that of 
other industrial democracies (although with a higher number of certain 
categories of violent crimes, probably at least in part because of the 
accessibility of guns in this country), but with a far higher incarceration 
rate, fueled mainly by the imprisonment of ever-larger numbers of 
nonviolent people; and a strangely rosy-hued American cultural fascination, 
not just with larger-than-life crime figures or with supercops (as was the 
case with past cultural romances with, say, the mafia, or, inversely, the 
FBI), but also with the more-mundane mechanisms of everyday law 
enforcement, the institution and officials of the prison, and the culture 
of violence nurtured behind bars.

We have come to accept as normal incarceration rates that would have seemed 
the unlikely progeny of a dystopian fantasy a mere generation ago. And we 
have come to regard arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment as fundamental 
props of our mass culture, thus elevating one of the more unpleasant duties 
and obligations of the civil society -- the prosecution and punishment of 
those who flout its laws -- into a cultural commodity that may, ultimately, 
come to define what kind of a nation, what kind of a people, we become.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance writer and the author of Hard Time Blues
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