September 10, 2007

New book highlights prisoner reentry obstacles

Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
by Devah Pager, Princeton University sociologist

From my Amazon review:

If this depressing book cannot convince people that racism is alive and well in America today, I don't know what could. Dr. Pager reports on an empirical research project in which teams of well-put-together white and black college students went job-hunting in and around Milwaukee, with one member of each team "marked" as an ex-convict. What she found is astonishing. Black job applicants WITHOUT drug convictions fared no better than white ex-cons WITH convictions; with "two strikes" against them, black men with a (bogus) drug conviction had slim odds of getting a call-back from a prospective employer. This problem was especially pronounced in the suburbs, which are gaining an increasing proportion of jobs despite the fact that many job-seekers remain in the cities. Dr. Pager includes informative and well-written chapters on the state of mass incarceration in the United States today, as well as the massive and growing problem of prisoner reentry. With more than 600,000 people pouring out of prisons each year, Dr. Pager's book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the public policy aspects of the reentry problem. This is yet another excellent entry into the recent crop of books cataloging the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. (See my Amazon list "Prison World" for more.)

September 9, 2007

Appellate court: Parolee cannot be forced into 12-Step treatment

In what could be a blow to the 12-Step Movement's stranglehold over substance abuse treatment, an appellate court has ruled that a parolee cannot be ordered into a treatment program that uses the model.

At least eight other federal and state courts have issued similar opinions in the past, holding that coerced treatment in a religion-based program is unconstitutional. On Friday, the Ninth District Court of Appeals reiterated that precedent.

The case involved a Buddhist, Ricky Inouye of Hawaii, who had objected to religiously oriented drug treatment while in prison on a drug case. Over his objection, his parole agent ordered him to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings after a urinalysis tested positive for drugs. He has since died, but Friday's ruling allows his son to continue Inouye's civil lawsuit against his parole agent. The opinion held that Narcotics Anonymous has pronounced religious overtones, including references to God, a "higher power," and prayer.

For decades, most treatment programs have unquestioningly followed the Alcoholics Anonymous model. With more than half a million people pouring out of U.S. prisons each year, the bulk of them drug offenders, the treatment industry is an enormous cash cow.

From a social science perspective, the court's position is good news. The 12-Step philosophy flies in the face of much empirical data on substance abuse and recovery patterns, yet its dominance makes it hard for more scientifically based, cognitive-behavioral treatments to gain a foothold in the marketplace.

The 12-Step model fits with the medical model dominant in modern culture. It describes certain people as "alcoholics" suffering from an incurable, progressive "disease." Its treatment approach, therefore, proscribes lifelong abstinence.

"The essence of the AA approach resembles revivalistic Protestantism, with elements of ritual prayer, public confession and surrender of will to a 'higher power,' and dogmatic religiosity reinforces the defensive barrier against innovation," says critic C. Gary Pettigrew, Ph.D., also a forensic psychologist.

In the past half century, since the American Medical Association endorsed the AA model, much scientific work has debunked both the disease theory and the superior efficacy of 12-step treatment. However, this knowledge has been largely suppressed by religious, political, and industry forces. Many "therapists" and "counselors" in 12-Step programs are "recovering" alcohol and drug abusers, and many clinicians are not aware of the critical research base in this area.

Not all of the resistance to more secular, empirically based treatment is innocent in motive. Herbert Fingarette, a critic of the industry, points out that the concept of certain defective people as innately prone toward "alcoholism" benefits the alcohol industry by blaming individuals for the collateral damage of its products. In addition, the treatment industry benefits financially by hiring less educated, non-professional "therapists" at low salaries and by receiving third-party insurance payments for treating a "disease."

Friday's court ruling in Inouye v. Kemna echoes earlier rulings out of the Seventh and Second U.S. Courts of Appeal, which probation and parole officers have ignored in continuing to force parolees and probationers to attend AA/NA meetings as conditions of their release. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit commented that this area of case law is "uncommonly well-settled." (Previous cases include Kerr v. Farrey, 95 F.3d 472, 7th Circuit, 1996, and Warner v. Orange County Dept. of Probation, 115 F.3d 1068, 2nd Circuit, 1997, respectively; see Inouye v. Kemna for a listing of related court decisions.)

Harm Reduction Therapy is one of the promising alternative approaches that these court decisions - if anyone ever heeds them - could assist. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, this treatment method addresses the complex social, occupational, psychological, and emotional factors that may contribute to an individual's drug and alcohol problems.

And, by the way, the second national Harm Reduction Therapy Conference will be November 2-4 in Philadelphia.

Photo credit: Johnny Wood (Creative Commons license); vodka ad at trendy Union Square in San Francisco. Alcohol manufacturers spend more than $1 billion each year advertising their products and hide behind the "disease" concept of alcoholism to deny responsibility for the carnage their products produce.

September 7, 2007

Craig exonerated; new Apple technology to revolutionize senatorial trysts

Posted with the permission of cartoonist Don Asmussen, San Francisco Chronicle.

Special issue on racial profiling and the law

The August 2007 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice focuses on racial profiling in the criminal justice system. The abstracts are free; you must either pay or have a subscription to read the articles in their entirety.

The contents include:

  • Profiles of Injustice: The Theory and Practice of Racial Profiling - Zina T. McGee
  • Racial Profiling and the Courts: An Empirical Analysis of Federal Litigation, 1991 to 2006 - Shaun L. Gabbidon, Lakiesha N. Marzette, and Steven A. Peterson
  • Police Discourse on Racial Profiling - Karen S. Glover
  • Racial Profiling and Postmodern Society: Police Responsiveness, Image Maintenance, and the Left Flank of Police Legitimacy - Kirk Miller
  • Legislative and Court Decisions That Promulgated Racial Profiling: A Sociohistorical Perspective - Larry D. Stokes
  • Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling - Kelly Welch
Thanks to the always informative Psychology and Crime News blog for alerting me to this important volume.

September 6, 2007

Universal DNA databases looming

Racial and ethical implications debated

DNA databases are great, aren't they? In the last few years, we've heard many a case of an innocent person, languishing in prison, being exonerated by newly discovered DNA evidence. Or, we hear of DNA solving a heinous crime, perhaps even a serial murder. (We see it even more often on TV crime dramas like CSI, but that’s a story for another day.)

DNA databases work best when they contain a lot of genetic data. So, why wait until people are arrested, or even convicted of a crime? Why not swab every single person at birth, before they grow up to commit a crime?

This is not far-fetched. Such a universal database is already underway in Portugal. And now, it's being debated in England, the country that started national DNA databanking a dozen years ago. British officials already have more than 4 million samples (7% of the population, the largest proportion of any nation), and a prominent judge this week proposed cataloging everyone, even visitors to the country.

Paradoxically, proponents of universal DNA banking cite concerns of justice and fairness. The current system amounts to racial and ethnic profiling, they say. Minorities make up far more than their share of those arrested. And even when they are subsequently proven innocent or released without charges, their genetic profiles remain. In England, more than three-fourths of young black men are in the database, compared with only about one in five young white men.

When the databases first caught on in the United States, the laws contained safeguards intended to prevent this. In many states, DNA was only collected upon conviction, and only for very limited types of crimes, typically murder and rape.

But politicians, always looking to boost their tough-on-crime credentials, have expanded DNA banking to an ever-increasing array of offenses. Most recently, laws are following the British trend of collecting DNA from people who are arrested but not convicted. The U.S. Justice Department may now collect DNA from everyone they detain, a policy that will hit immigration violators hardest.

Civil libertarians are up in arms. The expanded laws are creating near-universal DNA databases for black men, they say. As criminologist Simon Cole points out, "Some demographic sectors of American society, such as poor, black, inner-city males, have shockingly low probabilities of getting through adolescence without having at least one run-in with the police. If such encounters trigger inclusion in a DNA database, the database becomes discriminatory."

Opponents also point to the possibility of wrongful incrimination. Reports of errors at DNA laboratories are becoming more common. And the possibility that DNA evidence could be planted is ever more likely. In addition, DNA contains sensitive personal information that could be exploited.

In come cases, law enforcement agencies are utilizing DNA technology in ways that are outside of public awareness or judicial oversight. For example, in an ominous new trend, when investigators cannot match a DNA profile to a crime scene, they may look for close matches and investigate those individuals' family members. Thus, a minor brush with the law can ripple through an entire family.

"In a society in which young black males in some neighborhoods have a one-in-three probability of ending up in state custody at some time in their lives (and an even higher chance of getting an arrest record), the racial overtones of such a practice are dramatic," criminologist Cole notes.

Would a universal database solve discriminatory practices, as proponents claim?

That is unlikely, so long as our criminal justice system continues to disproportionately target certain sectors of the population. In the end, DNA technology could just provide one more powerful tool for discriminatory enforcement.

Thanks to Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine, for his excellent overview of this topic.

See also the American Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics' web site, "DNA Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties."

Photo credit: Jovika (Creative Commons license)

Additional resources:

DNA and the Criminal Justice System: The Technology of Justice, David Lazer (MIT Press, 2004)

Rights and Liberties in the Biotech Age: Why We Need a Genetic Bill of
Rights, Sheldon Krimsky and Peter Shorrett(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005).

September 4, 2007

Senator Craig: "The breastplate of righteousness"

Much of the public debate surrounding Larry Craig's arrest centers on whether the senator is "gay." This completely misses the boat.

Back in the 1960s, a sociologist named Laud Humphreys conducted groundbreaking research into bathroom sex, or so-called "tearoom trade." He watched men engaging in sex in 19 public restrooms around St. Louis, Missouri. He surreptitiously noted their license plate numbers and later knocked on their doors in the guise of conducting an innocuous social sciences survey.

His findings, confirmed in more recent research, are that most of the men were married, religious, socially conservative, and heterosexually identified.

In other words, they were just like Senator Craig.

In fact, married men who engage in public sex are not only conservative; they often exhibit an exaggerated form of propriety. They drive late-model cars that are clean and polished, they maintain well-manicured lawns, they are impeccably groomed and dressed, and they attend church regularly. In short, they present themselves as proper, moral, and pious.

Although public sex is risky for these men, it allows them to maintain this veneer, which Humphreys labeled the "breastplate of righteousness."

As Humphreys' research demonstrated, public sex has been around a long time, and it is pervasive. Police have been stymied in their efforts to eradicate or even reduce it. In response to this longstanding dilemma, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has published an interesting manual on how to control such "illicit sexual activity in public places."

An innovative solution proposed in the manual, which only works if a community is amenable, is to tolerate some amount of public sexual behavior in clearly delineated areas, as is the practice in certain European communities.

Less effective, the manual cautions, is the decoy approach used on Craig:

"While using undercover officers to pose as interested parties in illicit same-sex public activity can lead to many arrests, such operations have not had long-term effectiveness in reducing overall activity levels. At best, they temporarily displace the activity to other locations, and the activity usually returns to prior levels once the operations have ceased. Further, given the active role that undercover officers must take to confirm suspects' intentions, the police may be vulnerable to entrapment claims. In addition, many officers are reluctant to serve as decoys because of the customary behavioral scripts they must follow. Finally, some may see the serious social consequences of the publicity following an arrest as disproportionate to the severity of the offense."
For a social science perspective on the Craig scandal and its relevance to issues of sexual identity, denial, and prejudice, see Gregory Herek's insightful blog post, "Tearooms, Labels, and Double Standards."


Photo credit: cybertoad (Creative Commons license)

Additional resources:

Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. New York: Aldine Publishing Co.


Johnson, Kelly Dedel. Illicit Sexual Activity in Public Places. 2005. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Nardi, P.M. (1995). "The Breastplate of Righteousness": Twenty-Five Years After Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Journal of Homosexuality, 30, 1-10.

Desroches, F.J. (1990). Tearoom Trade: A Research Update. Qualitative Sociology, 13, 39-61.

Dignan, J. 2004. Manhunt. Sacramento News & Review, (2004).

Frankis, J., & Flowers, P. (2005). Men who have sex with men in public sex environments: A systematic review of quantitative literature. AIDS Care, 17, 273-288.

The Wall Street Journal's online edition links to the above post.