Symposium: After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and a New Reconstruction

Symposium: After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and a New Reconstruction

Symposium: After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and a New Reconstruction

Agenda

We need to also support people of color, poor people, the people who are most impacted by crime. We really have got to support those people in using their voices to talk about their needs. We can’t always be up here, being the voice for them, and we have to then empower and expect and really challenge ourselves to make sure we’re also empowering those people that we’re supposedly helping, because I don’t know how well we can help them if they’re not present.

-Kamala Harris
District Attorney,
City and County of San Francisco
Honorable Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Memorial Lecture

After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy and A New Reconstruction

The last three decades have witnessed a merciless war on crime which has increased our imprisoned population five-fold and has had a devastating impact on many communities of color. Because of the staggering cost of incarcerating such a large portion of our population, even those who are supportive of a tough on crime stance have begun to see this war as unsupportable. However, because the war on crime has fundamentally transformed our society, simply scaling it back will not solve the societal problems it has created. Its impact has not been confined to those people swept up by the increased rates and longer terms of incarceration, nor even to their families and communities. It has instead transformed the very concept of policing and the place of crime in electoral politics. Schools, public health, and social welfare now overlap with the criminal justice system, reflecting the spreading logic of crime control. Perhaps most detrimental is the way this war has changed our society’s core conceptions of community and race. It is these issues the conference sought to address.

As the war on crime perhaps draws to an official close, it is time to consider the tasks reconstruction must tackle. To do so requires first a critical assessment of how this war has remade our society, and then creative solutions about how government, foundations, communities, and activists should respond. The Conference jump started these conversations by pulling together a disparate, interdisciplinary group of scholars as well as policy professionals and community activists, many with years of experience working on these issues but some new to the problem. Participants were encouraged to take a holistic approach, focusing not on the specifics of particular doctrines or studies, but on the overarching social consequences of the war on crime, and on potential strategies for reconstruction.

To read the complete transcripts:

The immediate goal is to spark a fresh conversation about the war on crime and its consequences; the long-term aspiration is to develop a clear understanding of how we got here, and of where we should go now.

Consequently, we have compiled a short, and admittedly incomplete list, of the suggestions the panelists offered to affect positive change.

Post War Reconstruction Strategies:

• Educate the public on crime and the fear of crime.
• Educate the public of the misconception that more police on the streets and building more prisons has curtailed violent crimes.
• Create coalitions around more effective reentry policies and social services for former inmates.
• Support Affirmative Litigation which protects the rights of under served communities
• Support the Public Health Model of Crime
• Be “Smart on Crime”
• Work with community organizations to ensure that the people most affected by “crime prevention” policies are included in the implementation of the policies
• Visualized a third way of looking at our society, one which is neither a “welfare state” nor a “warfare state”, but rather works to put the government on the side of the people who are trying to solve problems and who are affected by the problems

Click here for PANELIST PROFILES

The media and government and business, in my judgment, are about institutions grappling with public opinion, and if you want to change media coverage and crime and violence, you have to change public media coverage of crime and violence, you have to change public opinion and not think the media will lead…but the public opinion has to come first, and shift to new ways of thinking about crime, violence and pathology always starts at the margins. Changes in public opinion starts at the margins. It’s not the business of the media to cover the margins.

It starts at the margins among people who are marginal, and their pain, their tragedy, their outcry, their demonstrations, whatever it is eventually sparks a response in the mainstream. They go from the margin to the mainstream. That’s when the media can clarify things and should clarify things. At this point, when they’re in the mainstream, they’re on their way to becoming a political majority. It’s all happened without the media. Now the politicians either choose to try to stop them or co-opt them or stand on their side. In that area, I think critical journalism has a role to play.

–Tom Hayden
Covering Crime and Punishment
Return to Highlights

A fear of winding up profoundly alone and a loss from, as Charles Jones said to me in Oakland years ago, when I asked what the worst think was to be called in school, and people said, “ho,” “faggot,” “fat.” But Charles said, “It’s when you’ve been in school three months and the teacher doesn’t know your name.” A sense of a culture of “alones,” without the relational tissue to give you a sense of belonging, where you leave your mark by driving over the person until he’s dead or killing him or leaving your teeth marks in his corpse.

-Sandy Close
Executive Director New California Media
Covering Crime and Punishment
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In fact, the remarkable way in which we have young people who are on the far edge of the culture, where the energies of the culture are moving, these young people, when you begin to get to know them, when they become part of your everyday life, you begin to understand what it is the culture that leads to violence, that they have no other way to leave a mark.

-Sandy Close
Executive Director New California Media
Covering Crime and Punishment
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In Youth Authority there is one 37-cent stamp a month given out to indigent inmates to write home, and they become alone, and they are anxious to reach out. And if we can establish ongoing communication, we can understand more how these young people, these young people who are at the far end of the continuum, who aren’t growing up to become us but who we are growing up to become as a culture will tell us so much about ourselves.

-Sandy Close
Executive Director New California Media
Covering Crime and Punishment
Return to Highlights

It is very important, I think, for people like us, who are perhaps critical thinking, who are aware of and may be well experience in things that are unfair, that are sensitive to issues of oppression, that are aware of that law enforcement has not, at least always been, in the history of our communities, our friends. It is important for those of us who have a level of sensitivity to the poor, the disenfranchised, the people of color, immigrants, children, seniors, people who have been victimized – it is important for us to also be at the table when decisions are being made affecting those populations instead of just on the outside of the door, as defense attorneys and public defenders always, fighting to get the good offer, fighting to say the charge should be dismissed, fighting to say the charges never should have been filed. Instead, why not approach it from the inside as well, looking at the system that ultimately, if done well, was designed to protect all of the people and be there where we can use our perspective and combine it with the immense power that a prosecutor has to do those things in the name of justice?

-Kamala Harris
District Attorney,
City and County of San Francisco
Olmos Lecture
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Let’s also talk about creating a campaign around reducing not the crime but the fear of crime…Let’s talk about that. If we, as a goal, decide that we want more people to just stop being afraid, because they’re perhaps afraid of much more than they have reason to be afraid of, perhaps we can start to change the discussion about what we need to do about fear because we won’t have so many people worried about the bogeyman.

-Kamala Harris
District Attorney,
City and County of San Francisco
Olmos Lecture
Return to Highlights

Focus on reentry can remove this conversation and put it in the wrong place. If you don’t like all those people coming back to your neighborhood from prison, don’t send them there in the first place. Those numbers will go down.

-Todd Clear
Community and the War on Crime
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They used to think the choice was tough or soft, and if you’re given that choice, nobody wants to be soft. But I think people really do basically believe that that’s not the choice anymore. It’s tough or smart, and smart is starting to get some traction, and politicians don’t want to get near smart, because smart is complex, and you don’t want to get near complex.

-Father Gregory Boyle
Breakout Session
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I think the issue of voting and political enfranchisement might actually be a place to organized some coalitions across lines, because frankly it offends what some of us might think as simplistic kind of black-and-white, good-and-bad notions that people who are players in the criminal justice system feel, who strongly believe in this ethic of “do the crime, do the time, and then you’re renewed; then you have your opportunity back; then you’re like everybody else…” And then the question is, “Well, why don’t they?” But formal restrictions like criminal disenfranchisement offend that ethic, and so many prosecutors, many policemen and correctional people are opposed to it.

-Jessie Allen
Politics and the War on Crime
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We’ve got to be able to say: we are the custodians of real community safety strategy, and you sir, are a profiteer. You, sir, Mr. Professional Incarcerator, Mr. Right Wing Cheerleader for your professional incarcerating friends, are actually complicit in a self-dealing bureaucracy. You want to talk bloated governmental bureaucracies? Don’t talk about the welfare system. Talk to me about the prison system. The prison system is a self-defeating, bloated government bureaucracy, this monopoly on public-safety dollars, that the worse it performs, the more money it gets… The worse it performs, the less safe my community is, as a result of this operation, the more money it gets. That is a self-dealing bureaucracy. That is a monopoly. With predictable results.

-Van Jones
Executive Director,
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Post War Reconstruction Strategies
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It’s conceivable that we can say: We want a third way out…That we don’t actually want to defend some of the precious programs of the glorified New Deal and the Great Society as they were, and we don’t want the sort of warfare state either. There’s a third way out. There’s a vision of the U.S. Government, American Government, capitalist government as potential partner to those of us who are trying to solve problems in our communities rationally and effectively and efficiently. Why is that important? It’s important because there’s a crisis of imagination of the progressive end of the ledger, and if we can’t imagine a new role for the U.S. Government or for the government in general, then we’re left defending the old role, which has basically been discredited..

So is there a way for us to talk about not left versus right, not nanny state versus Robocop state, but getting the government on the side of the people who are tying to solve the problems, who need a partner to solve those problems well? Is that a rhetorical strategy that can then let us talk to ordinary people about the results that we want (safe, healthy communities, et cetera) and the strategies get there (public-private community partnerships) that doesn’t put on the side of frankly discredited ideas of government largesse, which actually never had?

-Van Jones
Executive Director,
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Post War Reconstruction Strategies
Return to Highlights

What I want to argue is that the present success of the right, the domination of the incarcerators outright and incarceration and punitive logics outright requires of us new rhetorics, some of which are clever and…take the bad guy’s arguments and kind of use it against them, shamelessly, some of it honest, hopeful, aspirational. Requires new strategies, not just crisis response and identity based but politically based and vision driven.

-Van Jones
Executive Director,
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Post War Reconstruction Strategies
Return to Highlights