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Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist
Critical Issues in Crime and Society Raymond J. Michalowski and Luis A. Fernandez, Series Editors Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that w ill be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students. For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.
Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist Working the Marg ins of L aw, Powe r, and Justice
G r e g g Ba r a k
Rutg e r s Unive r sity P re s s New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data Names: Barak, Gregg, author. Title: Chronicles of a radical criminologist: working the margins of law, power, and justice / Gregg Barak. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019040813 | ISBN 9781978814127 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814134 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978814141 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814158 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814165 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Barak, Gregg. | Criminologists—United States—Biography. | Critical criminology—United States. Classification: LCC HV6023.B36 A3 2020 | DDC 364.92 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.g ov/2 019040813 A British Cataloging-in-P ublication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2020 by Gregg Barak All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.r utgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America
Conte nt s
Foreword by Raymond J. Michalowski Introduction
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1
Pa r t I Ac a de m ic F r e e d om
1 2
Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology Life as a Young Criminologist
13 44
Pa r t I I Ac a de m ic Ac t i v i s m
3 Doing Public Criminology 4 Doing Newsmaking Criminology 5 Doing Multidisciplinary Criminology
81 109 142
Pa r t I I I Ac a de m ic P r a x i s
6 7
Globalizing Criminology
177 193
Appendix Acknowledgments Notes Index
225 245 249 255
Integrating Criminology
v
Foreword
Raymond J. Michalowski
At the 1991 American Society of Criminology (ASC) meeting in San Fran-
cisco, a group of self-identified critical criminologists gathered in a hotel room occupied by former ASC president Bill Chambliss. They had come together for the third annual social of the ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology. They talked, played m usic, sang songs, and famously received a noise complaint—from the h otel next door. The import ant point h ere, though, is that the group fit into a hotel sleeping room—remember that. When the Division on Critical Criminology gathered to socialize in 1991, it was relatively new. Its origins reached back only to 1988, when Bill Chambliss was the ASC president and I was the program org an izer for the ASC annual meeting. One of our goals for the conference was to schedule a meeting time for radical, critical, and feminist criminologists to come together to discuss whether or not to request the creation of an ASC division that would better reflect the concerns of criminologists working at or beyond the margins of what w ere then (and in many ways still remain) the dominant criminological frameworks. The meeting was cochaired by Bob Bohm and Susan Caringella- MacDonald. Under their leadership, two import ant t hings transpired. One, the group reached an agreement to request division status. The other, in many ways more consequential, decision was to name it the Division on Critical Criminology. Names matter. They are the constitutive building blocks of reality. Naming, however, never takes place in a vacuum. Names are always an expression of antecedent understandings, agreements, and tensions. In this case, the selection of the word “critical” to give this dissident branch of criminology a formal identity reflected both exogenous and endogenous forces. The key exogenous force was a widely held belief that the ASC leadership would never approve a division named “radical criminology,” even though this school of thought, in all likelihood, characterized the majority of t hose vii
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in the room. The problem with the term “radical criminology” was twofold. First, it originated at, and remained closely associated with, the Berkeley School of Criminology. It was t here that a core of left-of-center criminologists in the 1960s created a center for radical inquiry into questions of crime and social justice, a center that became increasingly attractive to many students at the University of California, Berkeley, including Gregg Barak. In the academy, however, it is often the case that nothing fails like success. The growing attractiveness of radical criminology at Berkeley inspired the hostility of more centrist criminologists and administrators. They moved successfully to reorg an ize the Berkeley School of Criminology in ways that would effectively eliminate what they saw as a threatening growth of radical theorizing, pedagogy, and practice at that school. The second reason many anticipated that the proposed Division of Radical Criminology was a nonstarter was rooted in the epistemological tension between radical and orthodox criminology in the wider discipline. As a school of thought, radical criminology challenged the most basic assumption on which mid-t wentieth century criminological orthodoxy was based: that laws and institutions for enforcing them are, in the final instance, an expression of societal consensus. In 1979, the American Society of Criminology published a special edition of its journal, Criminology, devoted exclusively to radical criminology. While bookended by two somewhat sympathetic treatments of radical criminology as window dressing, the core of the edition consisted of articles that were written by high profile criminologists excoriating radical criminology as “an infantile disorder” (Klockars 1979, 477), mere “sentimentality” (Toby 1979, 516), or some other insult to the value-free model of twentieth-century social science. While anti- orthodox versions of criminology, particularly feminist and race theory, had gained a bit more legitimacy by the late 1980s, many of t hose debating the selection of a division name were aware that much of the leadership of the ASC remained hostile to the idea of any criminology that called itself “radical.” The endogenous factor affecting name choice was the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives in the room at the time. Many there, myself included, researched, wrote, and engaged in praxis closely linked to radical criminology, with its roots in Marxian political economics, ideals of and theories about racial and gender equality, direct community action, and strong socialist leanings. O thers w ere focused more closely on questions of gender, feminist theory, and the strugg le against heteronormativity. Still others fell into a heterogeneous third group characterized by a liberal-left model of criminal justice reformism. In view of this diversity, the group chose a big-tent solution by adopting the adjective “critical,” even though, I would argue, the term had little
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represent at ion in any part icu l ar school of thought within criminology at the time. It would not be u ntil the 1990s that critical theory as represented by the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thinkers, and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies would become part of critical criminology—in a big way—w ith the emergence of cultural criminology. This theoretical development has made the term “critical criminology,” perhaps, more apt in the present than in its origins. In hindsight, the decision to use the name “Division on Critical Criminology” was probably a good one. It enabled those criminologists whose work “centered around a critique of domination” to find collaborators, develop networks and build friendships within the larger, more anomic discipline of criminology (Michalowski 1996). Remember that h otel room? In 2018, an academic generation a fter the founding of the Division on Critical Criminology, critical criminologists overflowed a meeting room in the Marriot Marquis H otel in Atlanta where the newly renamed Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice held its social. Critical criminology had gone from filling a sleeping room to filling a large meeting room. As Gregg Barak details in here, what had been a small group of radical criminologists centered around the Berkeley School of Criminology grew into a visible and v iable wing of criminology overall, containing many more variants than the small group who started the ball rolling at Berkeley and the somewhat larger group who came together to give the movement an organ izational identity in 1988. In recent years, critical criminology has grown to the point that meetings are held with scholars and activists who are specifically identified with radical and critical inquiry and social justice praxis. Though not formally titled as such, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist is a memoir—in this case, the narrative of a life in criminology. As Gilmour (1997) tells us, “Every memoir reflects not only the individual, but also the social, not only the personal but also the communal, not only the local but also the universal.” In this way, the story told in Chronicles is not simply about its author but also about the evolution of criminology’s dissident wing from its origins to the present. As memoir, the book also stands in contradiction to the popular image of personhood b ecause it does not rely on a “fully unified concept of the self ” (Ng 2008, 34). Rather, like all memoirs, Chronicles asks us to engage with “the complexities of understanding the constantly shifting self, situated in changing contexts.” Here we meet multiple iterations of Gregg Barak as he engages with the academy, strugg les for social justice, and incorporates changes in criminological theory at different times and in different social contexts. Chronicles brings to the t able a story of repression, rejection, survival, and growth—not just the story of one radical criminologist but also the story of how these dynamics shaped the wider
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critique of dominant ideas about who criminals are, why they are this way, and what should be done about them. Gregg Barak is uniquely situated to tell this tale. He was present at the birth of radical criminology in Berkeley, and he remains an active radical criminologist today. His suitability to tell this tale is not based on mere longevity. Few criminologists have devoted a half-century to integrating the multiple theoretical strands of radical and critical criminology with one another, as well as integrating these theoretical understandings with community-based strugg les for social justice. It is a task that calls for someone to shutt le, on the one hand, between divergent theories about social life and on the other hand, between the often far too distant worlds of academic scholarship and community organization. Gregg Barak is one of t hose few. Between his early years as an undergraduate in the Berkeley School of Criminology during the heady and troubled late 1960s and his current professorship at Eastern Michigan University, Gregg Barak built a complex reservoir of experience. Among his many roles, he has been an expatriate professor in Europe, a criminal justice policy planner and program developer, a pol itical candidate, an administrator in both private and public institutions of higher learning, a public action researcher, a social movement activist, a book editor, a mass media commentator, and a mentor to younger scholars and activists. This diversity of experience gives him a lens, both broad and sharp, through which to observe the evolution of radical and critical criminology. He uses that lens here to illuminate the surface and subterranean forces in the academy and in the wider society that have brought the criminology of h uman liberation to its present place of theoretical diversity and organ izational quasi solidarity. Of the many themes covered in Chronicles, one that, in my mind, links them together is Gregg Barak’s lifelong commitment to integration, and I mean that in many senses of that word. As an activist he frequently engaged in strugg les to challenge the inequalities imposed on people of color, particularly by the justice system. That is, he sought to integrate everyone into an equal justice that had been largely reserved for whites. As a faculty member and administrator in a historically black college he took integration in a different direction, becoming the learner more than the learned. As a thinker and writer Gregg Barak has been relentless in his efforts to integrate the many different theoretical strands of critical criminology that have emerged since the 1970s into coherent, unified frameworks for advancing radical inquiry into the practices of justice. The search for integration told here is not just the story of one criminologist. It is the story of how critical criminologists might build a shared intellectual movement that can confront growing trends toward hyperindividualism, heteronormativity, elite impunity, nationalism, white supremacy,
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and ultimately fascism, without losing the specific foci that makes one type of critical (or radical) criminology different from another. What Chronicles has to tell us about this challenge makes it a valuable book for anyone interested in what criminology, particularly its critical versions, has to offer the world today. R e f e re nc e s Denton-Borhaug, Kelly, and Daniel Jasper. 2014. “Memoir as Contemplative Practice for Peace and Justice.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 5, no. 2: 114–130, http://l ibjournal.u ncg.edu/ijcp/a rticle/v iewFile/525/658. Gilmour, Peter. 1997. The Wisdom of Memoir: Reading and Writing Life’s Sacred Texts. Winona, MN: St. Mary’s Press. Klockars, Carl B. 1979. “The Contemporary Crises of Marxist Criminology.” Criminology 16, no. 4: 477–515. Michalowski, Raymond. 1996. “Critical Criminology and the Critique of Domination: The Story of an Intellectual Movement.” Critical Criminology 7, no. 1: 9–16. Ng, M. N. 2008. “Mapping the Diasporic Self.” Canadian Lite rature 196: 34–45. Toby, Jackson. 1979. “The New Criminology Is the Old Sentimentality.” Criminology 16, no. 4: 516–526.
Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist
Introduction
Dating as far back as the seventeenth century, the study of criminality and its control could be characterized by two types of Western criminology. Over three centuries, the pedagogues and philosophers from the global North who expressed their views about criminal beh avior were modernist criminologists who practiced e ither classical or positivist criminology. This playing field of modern criminology came u nder criticism in the 1960s from postmodernist scholars who for a decade or more were known interchangeably as “new,” “radical,” or “critical” criminologists. As the established vocabularies of criminology were confronted by critiques of domination and repression, the spheres of modern and postmodern criminologies started to grow. By the early 1990s, the field of criminological inquiry and praxis had become home to several coexisting traditional and alternative criminologies. More recently, the crossbreeding of older and newer ways of thinking about crime and justice has become a thriving enterprise. In 2019, a nonexhaustive listing of the different types of criminologies included the following: African Criminology Anarchist Criminology Appreciative Criminology Asian Criminology Biological Criminology Chaos Criminology Chinese Criminology Classical Criminology Conflict Criminology Conservation Criminology Constitutive Criminology Convict Criminology Critical Criminology Cultural Criminology
Developmental Criminology Environmental Criminology European Criminology Experimental Criminology Feminist Criminology Functionalist Criminology Global Criminology Gothic Criminology Green Criminology Humanistic Criminology Indigenous Criminology Integrative Criminology International Criminology Life-course Criminology 1
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Marxist Criminology Narrative Criminology Neurocriminology Newsmaking Criminology Peacemaking Criminology Positivist Criminology Postcolonial Criminology Postmodern Criminology
Psychosocial Criminology Public Criminology Queer Criminology Radical Criminology Realist Criminology Rural Criminology Southern Criminology Visual Criminology
Founded in 1939, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) remained an academic association without any divisions or specialized sections for forty-t wo years. The Division of International Criminology was the first to form in 1981, followed by the Division on W omen and Crime in 1982 and the Division on Critical Criminology in 1990, which changed its name twenty-five years later to the Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. Before the turn of the twenty-fi rst century, two other divisions were formed, the Division on P eople of Color and Crime in 1996 and the Division on Corrections and Sentencing in 1999. One decade would pass before the next Division of Experimental Criminology was formed in 2009, followed by the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology and the Division of Victimology in 2012, the Division of Policing in 2014, the Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes in 2015, the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime in 2016, and the Division of Biopsychosocial Criminology and the Division of Communities and Place in 2017. In 2018 the Division of Rural Criminology was established, bringing the total number of divisions to fourteen. Moreover, the executive director of the ASC, Chris Eskridge, has informed me that other divisions are in development, including the Division of African Criminology, the Division of Chinese Criminology, the Division on Cybercrime, and the Division on Innocence and Wrongful Convictions. I imagine that the Division of Southern Criminology cannot be far behind. Inquiring minds might have some questions: Why the crisis of confidence in modernism and a distrust of g rand theories and ideologies, especially in the social sciences? What accounts for these disciplinary trends in the development of postcrisis criminology? What explains the rupture with or departure from the modern practices of criminology? What forces have been driving criminologists and other social scientists to search for alternative ways of practicing their disciplinary trades? Although history is complicated and nonlinear, internationally two phenomena emerged with the turn of the twenty-fi rst century that rearranged much more than the playing fields of criminology. One of t hese was ontological: the arrival of globalism as a material reality. The other was
Introduction
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epistemological: the adoption of postmodernism as a philosophical reality. Together, these forces brought forth the Age of Enlightenment 2.0, which perhaps was best captured in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Closer to the home of criminology, there was the 1967 article by Howard S. Becker in Social Problems, “Whose Side Are We On?” His article went viral long before t here was an Internet. The article obliterated the myth of value-free, neutral, and objective social science. Less than a decade later, Alvin W. Gouldner argued in his classic treatise, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), that sociology should turn away from seeking to produce objective knowledge in favor of understanding the subjective nature of sociology and of knowledge. Gouldner also wanted sociologists to pay closer attention to how both sociology and knowledge are historical products. Before I continue with my overview of criminological development, I want to be clear about what I am not saying. First, I am not suggesting that criminologists no longer believe research can be conducted from an impersonal or an objective stance. Quite the contrary: in order to be down with scientific neutrality, the majority of criminologists have doubled down on the ethos of value-free objectivity. Most of these social scientists focus almost exclusively on “what is,” avoiding the topic of “what ought to be,” because policy discussions are viewed as inseparable from questions of value. In this type of labor, criminologists often use large data sets and employ sophisticated mathematical models that increasingly make these social scientists’ work irrelevant to law and public policy. Second, I am not implying that criminologists are restricted to practicing one kind of criminology to the exclusion of other kinds or that we may play in only one type of criminological sandbox. Most criminologists play in two or more of the available sandboxes, much as they often teach in two or more areas of the discipline. Over the course of five decades I have played in as many as twelve sandboxes. I have spent the vast majority of my time playing in critical, feminist, global, integrative, Marxist, newsmaking, and peacemaking sandboxes. Fin ally, while I find the proliferation of criminologies interesting, I prefer disciplinary cohesion to disciplinary fragmentation. For that reason, I do not necessarily equate the creation of more criminologies with an improved criminology. Back to our story: By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, scholars throughout the academy were coming to appreciate Kuhn’s thesis that the facts and the truths found by the scientists were inextricably connected to the paradigms and vocabularies that the scientists were using. Almost overnight, social scientists were finding conventional ways of doing and thinking about their research as narrow, parochial, and of l imited value. Scholars were thus searching for other models of h uman interaction that
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ere usually less akin to mathem atics and physics and more in tune with w literature and the arts. As a consequence, rather than continuing to proffer new, value-f ree theories or refine the older impartial ones, a large minority of criminologists exited for newer, if not necessarily greener, criminological pastures. Many of t hese criminologists entered the postmodern arena where they began d oing critical criminology and telling a variety of crime and justice stories from the perspectives of value-laden consciousness. T hose social and cultural narratives brought forth more nuanced approaches to probing and dissecting the numerous terrains of law, crime, and justice. Many of these fresher approaches or newer specializations remain obscure and unfamiliar to conventional and critical criminologists alike. I suspect that, u ntil criminological propagation slows down or freezes, as the para meters of our discipline expand most criminologists w ill continue to lose familiarity with—let alone command over—t he var iet ies of criminology. Regarding the propagation of criminologies and the numerous categories of criminology identified so far, allow me to reframe the discussion by summarizing differences in the prevailing views on crime and criminality from the global West and North. Over most of its history, the field of criminology has been the object of two contradictory approaches to thinking about crime and criminality: consensus and conflict. Each of t hese perspectives reflects a combination of beliefs about individual character and social structure, the distribution of power throughout society, and the workings of the law in social action. It is hoped that this conceptual overview w ill assist readers, as they get further into the book, to make sense out of the differences in criminological practice. Pragmatically, this conceptualization reduces the unwieldy taxonomy of forty-four criminologies into a more manageable dichotomy of mainstream and alternative criminologies. The former criminologies typically ascribe to the consensus viewpoints of law and order while the latter criminologies typically ascribe to the conflict viewpoints of law and order. Consensus-oriented criminologists utilize a legalistic definition of crime. They argue that society consists of individuals who are functionally in a state of equilibrium and who possess a broad set of shared values and norms. The consensus views stem from the ideas of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason. These include the concept of a social contract and the principles of equality and the rule of law. Following the utilitarian insights of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, crime becomes behavior that a society as a whole has formed a consensus about and wishes to prohibit by means of criminal laws. The roots of criminalizing felonious actions and even misdemeanors are to be found in strongly held emotional feelings and states of collective consciousness. Criminologists who agree with the consensus view of crime generally limit their investigations of harmful and injurious behavior
Introduction
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to what the criminal law prohibits. T hese criminologists are also more likely to practice one or more of the criminologies derived from the modern spheres of positivist and classical criminology. Conflict-oriented criminologists utilize a social definition of crime. They argue that in addition to equilibrium and consensus, modern societ ies are characterized by Hobbesian divisions and conflicts based on multiple identities of culture, status, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and gender. All of t hese differences are inseparable from the material relations of the means of production as well as the distributions of social capital and private property. These conflict views stem from nineteenth-century Hegelian and Marxian ideas about the influences of privileged interests over universal interests. Accordingly, like most laws, the criminal laws are hierarchal and reflect the w ill of powerful p eople and org an ized interests that are able to control the substantive content of the law as well as its procedural administration. Criminologists who agree with the conflict view of crime generally do not limit their investigations to individual violators of an arbitrary or subjective criminal law. In addition, these criminologists query harmful or injurious lawful be h av iors committed not only by individuals but also by orga nizational, corporate, and state institutions. Conflict criminologists not only expand their queries beyond the prohibitions of the criminal law but also are more likely to practice one or more of the criminologies derived from the spheres of postmodern criminology. As incorporated within this criminological memoir, crime refers to any acts, omissions, and processes that cause individual harms or social injuries. These acts, omissions, and processes need not be prohibited by the criminal law, or even unlawful for that m atter, but in most instances they are. This definition of crime also assumes that the perpetrators of these acts, omissions, and processes are aware of or should have foreseen the consequences of their be h av ior. Influenced by radical, insurgent, critical, anarchistic, humanistic, and feminist criminologies, this nonlegalistic definition and this dialectical view of crime alter not only our perceptions of the reality of crime but also our understanding of social harm and social injustice. Fin ally, in resonance with Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic’s Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism (1996), my definition of crime adopts an affirmative postmodernist perspective that necessitates the reframing of the social discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. In The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills argues that the classic task of the social analyst is to grasp the relationship between biography and history. I echo Mills when I contend that the task of the criminological autoethnographer is to grasp one’s own engagement and that of other criminologists in relation to the development of criminology as a whole. In different words, the academic metanarrative that holds this book together
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cannot be detached from the analyses of other research, practice, and scholarship that criminologists are producing. Let me also say that I believe t here are other criminological autoethnographies waiting to be written. As for the past, I am aware of only one other example that qualifies as belonging to the genre of autoethnography: Adventures in Criminology (1999) by Sir Leon Radzinowicz. His work spans seventy years. His story begins in Italy and primarily encompasses comparing crime and legal systems in the United Kingdom and Europe. Although our geog raphical reference points are not the same, Radzinowicz and I do share some thirty years of overlapping social history. We also share in common an affinity for historical and comparable approaches to understanding crime and justice. Of course, as would be the case also with t hose as yet unwritten memoirs, the personal life experiences informing any two autoethnographies are vastly different. As criminology is part of the behavioral and social sciences, criminological memoirs are so rare in part because the academic canon of writing for our disciplines, unlike the humanities or law, denigrates first-person conscious narratives of storytelling. The absence of autoethnography in our discipline also has to do with the reluctance of book publishers to disseminate this form of knowledge production. I have written this memoir for at least three reasons: first, as an attempt to alter the insular view of what academic book publishers view as constituting criminological knowledge; second, to encourage baby boomer criminologists to write more autoethnographies; third, to provide lessons that I hope w ill be useful for other criminologists, especially those at the beginning of their life’s work. On a personal level, I have written this memoir as a way of making it easier for me to step away from the fast-paced treadmill of crime and social justice that has occupied my past half-century. Like any memoir, this one has been written selectively and with the benefit of twenty-t wenty hindsight. While some of the stories I share are exotic, most of them are rather mundane. As this book is much more a criminological memoir than a personal memoir, the reader should regard the author as a prototype of criminological interest rather than a person of criminological interest. Warning: Autoethnographies by design are aesthetic and evocative. They seek to incorporate conventional techniques of storytelling, such as character, scene, or plot development that engage readers. Autoethnographic reporting may also consist of chronological or fragmented stories of progression. When telling these crime and justice stories, I may also, for example, alter my authorial point of view by moving back and forth between first-person narratives when I am part of the interaction, second-person accounts when I want to bring readers into a scene, and third-person descriptions when I am establishing context or distance, sharing information about comparative findings, or presenting points of view other than my own. Hence, the autoethnographic
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approach to the study of criminology challenges the traditional canons of the social and behavioral sciences. It does so primarily b ecause autoethnographies treat the examination of crime, punishment, and justice as a socially conscious and political act. Often viewed as a journalistic or literary liability, the authorial mobility of the memoir, if not anathema to third-person objectivity and normative social science, is an affront to the customary dissemination of criminological knowledge. A fter all, the genre of memoir has no obligatory footnotes or references to cite. Nevertheless, within the body of the text I w ill continue to selectively identify works that inform my accounts, as I have done in this introduction. H ere and there, I have also succumbed to convention and included full citations of articles from peer-reviewed journals. A Preview of Fi fty Year s of Criminolog i cal Wor k Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist has three related parts: “Academic Freedom,” “Academic Activism,” and “Academic Praxis.” Chapter 1, “Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology,” spans my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at Berkeley, 1967–1973. While portraying the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and beyond, I also describe the multidisciplinary nature of my undergraduate and graduate studies at Berkeley. Much of this chronicle revolves around the strugg le between the old and new criminology in general and the rise and demise of radical criminology in part icu lar. Finally, I elaborate on the killing of the Berkeley School of Criminology and the denial of new admissions in 1976. Chapter 2, “Life as a Young Criminologist,” spans the years 1974–1979. Though the chapter discusses my first academic appointment in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and my third academic appointment in Europe, the primary focus is on my second academic appointment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), including my criminological practice on and off campus in relation to some contradictions of the dictum “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.” Much of this chronicle provides a thorough review and analysis of my firing and subsequent lawsuit against UNLV. This legal case resulted in my leaving the university with a large sum of money in my pocket. I also received the classic nonapology apology by UNLV that appeared above the folds of the front pages of the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Chapter 3, “Doing Public Criminology,” spans the years 1980–1985. The chapter begins briefly by revisiting my year of transition a fter Europe, when I did contracted research in Portland, Oregon, and subsequently collected unemployment and hung out in San Francisco prior to beginning my fourth academic appointment and my first appointment as a middle-level administrator in Aurora, Illinois. This chapter also shines a light on the
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rapid ascension of criminal justice education in the United States and my rationale for seeking out managerial posts as a means of obtaining academic security. I then explore the reciprocal relations among managing, disseminating, and producing criminological knowledge. The remainder of the Aurora chronicle covers my forays into spreading criminological knowledge both on and off of campus. T hese forms of public criminology included r unning for political office, addressing the social problems of homelessness and gangs, and sheltering women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. Chapter 4, “Doing Newsmaking Criminology,” spans my years in Alabama, 1985–1991. While the focus of chapter 3 was on local politics, activism, and issues of crime control and social justice, the focus of chapter 4 is on state and national politics in relation to the same basic kinds of crime and justice issues. A fter describing the post–civil rights era and the cultural adjustment to living in the heart of Dixie, the chapter turns to a discussion of the paradigmatic crisis in criminology as I saw it in 1986. As one type of applied response to this criminological crisis, I share from a three-part series that I wrote in real time about the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s investigation into Montgomery’s police-community tensions for the Montgomery Advertiser. I expound on these and other newsmaking experiences of mine that occurred across the state of Alabama. Next, the chapter describes and explains why I developed the first and only master’s of criminology degree at a historically black college or university (HBCU) in the shadow of the longest desegregation higher education lawsuit in U.S. history. The chapter ends by revealing that my community-based activism in Illinois and Alabama became the primary source material for much of my scholarly production in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter 5, “Doing Multidisciplinary Criminology,” captures most of my university and scholarly activities during the 1990s. A fter the family relocated to southeast Michigan, I became an administrative head r unning the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology at Eastern Michigan University. The chapter contrasts this administrative post with my two previous ones and discusses the changing nature of higher education in general before pivoting to the topic of the politics of academic hiring. Then, I share a bit about the how or why I came to chair a university-w ide task force on interdisciplinarity. I also discuss the activities of the task force and the strategy used by the provost and myself to establish an independent School of Integrative Studies. This chronicle culminates with a synopsis of three of my multidisciplinary anthologies from that period: Var ieties of Criminology: Readings from a Dynamic Discipline; Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology; and Representing O. J.: Murder, Criminal Justice, and Mass Culture.
Introduction
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Chapter 6, “Integrating Criminology,” focuses on the late 1990s and the 2000s, when much of my scholarly time was consumed by engaging in various forms of integration. The chapter further explores some of the integrative issues raised in the previous chapter and applied specifically to the fields of criminology and criminal justice. This chronicle offers a fairly broad overview of the differing integrative approaches to crime, justice, and violence by way of my four integrative textbooks: Integrating Criminologies; Criminology: An Integrated Approach; Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America; and Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding. The chapter concludes with a revised and expanded version of my reciprocal-interactive theory of violence and nonviolence. Chapter 7, “Globalizing Criminology,” chronicles in some detail my most productive scholarly period. It spans the late 1990s to the time of this writing. It travels with me to cities in the United Kingdom, Finland, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere. The chapter also re-enters much of my global work that has been accomplished in collaboration with publishing houses and other criminologists. T hese activities involve the writing and circulating of books, edited collections, and twenty-plus titles from my edited book series. I also discuss my recent cofounding of the Sage Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime. I revisit edited books from this period, including Crime and Crime Control: A Global View; Violence, Conflict, and World Order: Critical Conversations on State-Sanctioned Justice; Battleground: Criminal Justice—A Two- Volume Encyclopedia; and The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful. At the end of Chronicles and in relation to where the field of criminology has been and where it needs to go, especially in relation to the crimes of the powerful, I have pieced together substantive excerpts from seven criminologists who have written about my two most recent award-w inning books: Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding and Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It.1
C hapte r 1
Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology
In 1967, I transferred to the University of California (UC), Berkeley, a fter spending my freshman year at UC Santa Barbara. Like so many other young people at the time, I wanted to attend a politically dynamic university where the tuition was free for residents of the state. During the celebrated summer of love I moved from southern California to Berkeley’s south side. The Bay Area counterculture was capturing the imaginations of tens of thousands of baby boomers from all over the country who were journeying to the Golden State. One of the signature songs of the period was “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which rose to the number four spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending July 1, 1967. The song sold more than seven million records worldwide. This anthem of love and peace can be juxtaposed with two popular antiwar anthems of the period. One, penned by Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound),” was first recorded by the Buffalo Springfield and released in early 1967: “Young p eople speaking their minds. Getting so much resis tance from behind. It’s time we stop. Hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look—what’s going down?” The song was actually inspired by counterculture- era clashes in November 1966 between the police and young p eople on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California. T hese skirmishes were over the passage and the enforcement of local ordinances, including a 10 p.m. curfew, designed to stop the loitering and gathering of underage m usic fans outside such clubs as Pandora’s Box and the Whisky a Go Go. The other song, “Ohio,” was written by Neil Young, an erstwhile friend and bandmate of Stills in Buffalo Springfield and later in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. In reaction to the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, this song begins and ends with the same verse: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. W e’re fin ally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio.” In the m iddle of the song this stanza is sung twice: “Gotta get down to it. Soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago. What if you 13
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knew her and found her dead on the ground. How can you run when you know?” Back in the peaceful summer of 1967, thousands of free-spirited people from all over the country were flocking to the Haight-A shbury District of San Francisco—and from there to the beautiful grounds of Golden Gate Park for the free concerts put on by such legendary bands as Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. Those of us locals present for t hese “love-i ns” on the lawn w ere all decked out in our tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottoms with beads around our necks and flowers in our hair. The wonderful aroma of reefer was everywhere; a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of weed was selling for only ninety dollars. As a nineteen-year-old who had been raised in affluent West Los Angeles, where indulgence and consumption were the norm, I very much found the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll to my liking. In fact, a l ittle more than a year l ater at the beginning of my jun ior year, I was selected by Joel Fort, MD, and Timothy Leary to be one of six teaching assistants (TAs) for a course they w ere co-instructing, The Psychedelic Experience. My role as a TA was to attend two hours of lecture per week; lead a one-hour group discussion on the assigned readings and lectures; and org an ize several weekend field trips to places such as Big Sur, Half Moon Bay, and Point Reyes National Seashore. T hese outdoor excursions w ere for the express purpose of experimenting with such drugs as mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD. More than two hundred students enrolled in this course for credit. However, many of them were disappointed that Leary—who was living at the time in Laguna Beach, some four hundred miles south of Berkeley—m ade the commute up north to lecture only three times during the ten-week duration of the course. Another course in UC’s reconstituted university that quarter was Racism in America. That course, which enrolled more than three hundred students, was co-instructed by Troy Duster and Eldridge Cleaver. The former was the first tenured African American sociologist at Berkeley; the latter was a convicted felon, Black Panther Party higher-up, and best- selling author of Soul on Ice (1965). As history records, Cleaver did not finish out his fall quarter of teaching. He had become a fugitive from the law for having co-led Panther members in an armed assault on the Oakland Police Department in the spring of 1968, shortly a fter the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. While on the run, Cleaver’s first stop included Havana, Cuba, where he lived briefly in the lap of luxury u ntil Fidel Castro discovered that the CIA was in hot pursuit. Castro facilitated Cleaver’s relocation to Algiers. About one year later, Leary, who was then a fugitive from the law himself for marijuana possession, would also end up in Algiers u nder less friendly conditions than those enjoyed by Cleaver. Leary fought his conviction all
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the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was unconstitutional and overturned his conviction. When I was not doing mind-expanding psychedelics, I was taking courses in criminology and showing up regularly. I was also showing up regularly to all of the major rallies, demonstrations, and protests on or off campus. These political actions or mass assemblies, mostly of students, were often in response to some outrageous action taken by the military or law enforcement. For example, the National Student Strike commenced on May 5, 1970, to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four Kent State students the day before. On the day of the killings, UC Berkeley had come out in f avor of the strike. The faculty had held an emergency meeting of the Academic Senate and passed a resolution calling for a university-w ide cessation of classes. L ater that afternoon, the Criminology Student Association voted unanimously to back the general strike and asked the Berkeley School of Criminology to suspend classes. The criminology faculty responded by voting fifteen to two in favor of the strike. Many of our criminology classes actually met off campus, where discussions revolved around neocolon ialism at home and imperialism abroad. There were also lessons focusing on the war crimes in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, including Africa and Latin America. As the student strike began, the university was also closed by an executive order issued from the state capital. A few days later Governor Ronald Reagan rescinded his own order; UC Chancellor Roger Heyns then immediately canceled classes for the duration of the spring quarter, which other w ise would have ended on June 15. Professors w ere instructed to assign their students the grades they had earned up through May 4, or about one month into the third quarter. So the strike lasted far longer than any of us had imagined and was free of any violence. Other well-k nown mass protests from this period that became violent included protests during Stop the Draft Week, October 16–21, 1967; the Third World Liberation Front Student Strike, January 1969; and actions around P eople’s Park, May 1969. A half-century later, images from these incidents have never fully vanished from the edges of my memory. Among the most indelible of these images are those associated with an epic conflagration over an unused piece of UC property, a two-block rectangular area a few blocks south of the university, half a block east of Telegraph Avenue, and bounded by Haste Street to the north, Dwight Way to the south, and Bowditch Street to the east—t he site of P eople’s Park. Following Nixon’s election in 1968, bombing in North Vietnam and Cambodia was stepped up. With tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area already well schooled in anti–Vietnam war mobilizations and rallies, tension between demonstrators and the police was increasing and would soon escalate
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into more state violence. On April 20, 1969, as one community response to the war crimes taking place in Southeast Asia, Berkeley residents and a handful of homeless transients came together and started to create a “free speech park garden” in what would become P eople’s Park. Over the course of several weeks, thousands of p eople had come with sod and plants. In no time a park had been created out of a vacant dirt lot. A fter the community had spent nearly a month holding antiwar demonstrations and growing vegetable gardens t here, UC Berkeley, with the help of Governor Reagan, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), took back our park and their property by erecting a seven-foot-h igh chain link fence around the perimeter. Subsequently, the fence was ripped open and brought down in places so as to reliberate the park. On the morning of May 15, workers from the university, with police protection, w ere busy mending the broken fence. By noon, some five thousand students and community people had gathered in front of the steps leading to Sproul Hall. A fter a short rally, we left campus and marched southward to protest the latest state incursion at the park. En route, at the corner of Telegraph and Haste, a few protesters had turned on a fire hydrant. In anticipation of such a stunt, agents of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office came equipped with a wrench to shut off the hydrant. As they did, they were pelted by objects thrown by a small group of people. Those actors could have been demonstrators, or they could have been agents provocateurs; one rarely knew for sure. Back then, you have to understand, we also had undercover agents sitting in our classrooms. In any case, the pelting provided a justification for the sheriffs to return to their parked vehicles one block away and retrieve their shotguns. Armed with tear gas and billy clubs as well, the police proceeded to break up the march before we could reach the park. Though none of the protestors fired any shots that day, the police fired shotguns loaded with rock salt, bird shot, and buckshot into the crowd. When it was over, more than one hundred p eople had been shot. One demonstrator was blinded, and a stray bullet had killed another person watching from the roof of a building on Telegraph. On the law enforcement side, one officer came close to death when he had to be pulled from a burning police car. Edwin Meese III, the Alameda County district attorney, urged Governor Reagan overnight to declare a state of emergency in direct opposition to the Berkeley City Council’s wishes. The governor agreed, and for the next two weeks, some 2,700 National Guard members and thousands of police occupied People’s Park and the city of Berkeley. In certain areas, only residents with proof of local identification w ere allowed to move around Berkeley a fter dark. Regarding the warfare against student demonstrators, one of my most vivid memories of overreaction by law enforcement was at the memorial serv ice held May 20, 1969, on the lower Sproul Plaza to honor
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James Rector, the student who had been killed five days e arlier while observing the activities surrounding People’s Park. Sent to break up this peaceful gathering was a National Guard helicopter, which was caught in an iconic photo flying past the Berkeley Campanile and indiscriminately spraying tear gas across the campus below. L ater the same day, three hundred faculty members, including Nobel laureates, signed a petition pledging not to teach while the city was u nder military occupation.1 Shortly thereafter, the university paved over the park and turned it into an off-campus parking lot in a town where student parking has always been at a high premium, especially because only faculty and staff are allowed to park their cars on campus. Nevertheless, students and other people doing business with the university had decided informally to boycott this off-campus parking site. Eventually, People’s Park was resurrected. Since then, on the last Sunday in April, the City of Berkeley has been celebrating the anniversary of People’s Park with live music and plenty of food. However, in summer 2019, chancellor Carol T. Christ announced that with “extensive public comment” the university was planning to develop housing for 600 to 1000 students as well as supportive housing for 100 to 125 p eople. In the fall quarter of my sophomore year (1967–1968) I was initiated into the politics of street fighting and criminology. During the third week of October, while participating in Stop the Draft Week, I engaged in my first mass action to resist state authority. I was one of some four thousand protesters who surrounded the Oakland Army Induction Center at 4:30 a.m. in an effort to prevent draftees from leaving their trains and entering the induction facilit y. A fter refusing to move and having prevented the draftees from getting off the train as planned, we experienced the brute force of law enforcement as two hundred Alameda County sheriff deputies and Oakland police officers moved to physically break up the protesting crowd. According to Charles R. Gain, Oakland’s chief of police, the officers used a wedge tactic as the “only thing” that could effectively remove the thousands of protestors. This tactical approach triggered clashes between the two sides. By 8 a.m., the demonstration had escalated into a violent and bloody riot. Were it not for a parking meter interposed between a baton-swinging deputy sheriff and myself, I would certainly have been struck as I found myself in fast retreat from the rushing agents of law and order. As for criminology, without a declared major, I was taking a juvenile delinquency course taught by a new assistant professor, Herman Schwendinger. I spent the entire course lapping up whatever he had to share. In this regard, Schwendinger was not at all unique, as I found nearly all of my Berkeley professors to be well worth the time of trying to understand them, whatever their politics, ideologies, or specialties. Nevertheless, in relation to the history
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of ideas I have rarely met anyone who knows as much as Schwendinger. For that reason, he was the most intimidating professor with whom I would later become friends—but not u ntil nine years later, when we were both living in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the one undergraduate course that I took from Herman, he repeatedly used examples from research for his UC Los Angeles (UCLA) doctoral dissertation in sociology, supervised by Donald Cressey. As a m atter of chance or coincidence, Herman’s fieldwork on adolescent and delinquent beh avior covered the geog raphical territory of my youth. In fact, Herman had gathered his data from many of my crosstown cohorts during the time I was attending Palms Jun ior High School, 1960–1962. By carrying out his own style of ethnographic investigation on both delinquent and non- delinquent youth in adjacent and overlapping West Los Angeles communities of poverty and affluence, Schwendinger was able to successfully capture much of the sociological zeitgeist or subcultural atmosphere of the environment that I had navigated growing up as a teenager. Case in point: his research adopted the slang names (i.e., “surfers,” “greasers,” “jocks,” “socialites”) that my friends and I used to identify various cliques of people and to describe one another as we went about our daily lives. Two decades later, Herman and Julia Schwendinger would memorialize our argot in Adolescent Subcultures and Delinquency (1985), which among other things helped to explain the rise of delinquency in middle-class families across the United States. In short, as Schwendinger lectured I could easily return to our adolescent lives and to the “badasses” and “hoods” moving about southwest Los Angeles. I also admired Herman’s dynamic style of lecturing—the passion and enthusiasm—a nd his desire to convey ideas about crime, justice, and society. When I was listening to him speak in my very first criminology class, the idea of becoming a college instructor first occurred to me as an alternative to becoming a lawyer. With a host of anxieties and insecurities, I began to wonder whether I had what it takes to pull off the professor thing. To me, on the outside looking in, academia certainly seemed like a g reat life: “You mean they pay you to read, to talk, and to write about whatever you feel like?” Although I was told that the answer to that question was, “Not exactly,” I liked the autonomy of working when and where you chose to and the idea of being accountable to other p eople only for about fifteen hours per week. While I was a full-t ime undergraduate student and making prog ress to graduate in four years, I had my draft deferment to keep me out of the military. As graduation approached and before the first national lottery for ranking potential draftees took place on December 1, 1969, I was thinking that I might have to leave the country in order to avoid the draft. Fortunately,
Coming of Age at Berkeley
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my birthdate, June 29, received a very high number, 353 out of 365, which immediately exempted me from involuntary military serv ice. Had I been susceptible to the draft, the choice between attending law school or criminology graduate school in the United States and going to Canada to study criminology would have been made for me. In fact, less than one year previously, in the winter of 1969, I had placed my draft card with more than two thousand others into a collection box provided by the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). The cards were all mailed to President Nixon in protest of the military draft and the Vietnam War, as a way for the law school to invite the government to charge all of us, ideally as a class, for violating the relevant draft laws. Members of the law faculty w ere prepared to present our legal defense. Rather than prosecuting us, however, the government simply notified our draft boards, and within six weeks we were all mailed new draft cards to replace the ones we had apparently all lost. A Multidi sc i p l i nary Sc hool am i d th e Old and the N ew C ri m i nolog y By the early 1960s the Berkeley School of Criminology had already expanded its original mission, dating back to the early 1950s, as a professional school primarily focused on managerial and technocratic approaches to crime control and criminal justice. The school, while not abandoning its older mission, was increasingly focused on a newer mission, the study of the etiology of crime and its prevention. Students at this time could acquire bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degrees in either criminalistics or criminology. While I was a student, from the fall 1967 u ntil the end of 1973, the school employed more than thirty faculty members, who worked either full time as professors or as full-and part-time lecturers, teaching upper division and graduate level courses. There were only a handful of tenured faculty in the school, as well as a small number of faculty tenured elsewhere at UC Berkeley. Most of the faculty members were contingent workers without tenure or a tenure-t rack position. The faculty represented multiple fields of study besides criminology, including sociology, psychology, history, law, criminalistics, police science, corrections, medicine, criminal investigation, psychiatry, and social work. In fact, the diversity of faculty specialties, the multidisciplinary course offerings, and the school’s expanded mission w ere the three rationales used for changing its terminal degree from a doctorate to a PhD in criminology in 1972. A number of undergraduate criminology instructors made lasting impressions on me and informed my earliest thinking about crime and criminals in relation to law, power, and justice. One of t hose instructors was Richard Korn, a high-profile psychoanalyst and criminologist from whom I took one and one-third courses as an undergraduate. The full course was
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Issues in Community Justice. The class met one even ing a week, with a dif ferent guest from the community invited to speak each week. One even ing that person was an African American member of the Ku Klux Klan. The partial course, Psychodrama, ended a fter one month because classes w ere curtailed in the 1970 spring quarter. I took this course not only because of my early interests in m ental illness and total institutions but also b ecause Korn was well known for practicing psychodrama b ehind bars. He used t hose techniques with groups of inmates as well as with groups of politicians whom he was able to lure to prison settings for his famous weekend sleepovers—Korn’s way of educating politicos about some of the realities of institutional life in the United States. One of Korn’s early classroom exercises was to have us students act out different scenarios between captors and captives, a forty-five-m inute variation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I replicated this exercise some four years later, when I began teaching corrections courses in 1974. In addition to Korn and Schwendinger, other undergraduate instructors left their marks and provided me with a broad foundation in criminology. They included Bernard Diamond, MD, who taught the history and psychol ogy of abnormal behavior as well as the psychiatry of law; Caleb Foote, who taught the history of substantive criminal law; Arthur Sherry, who taught procedural criminal law; Joel Goldfarb, who taught the history of criminal and juvenile law; David Fogel, who taught courses on penal issues and correctional reform; Tony Platt, who taught courses on juvenile justice and social control; Gordon E. Misner, who taught courses on law enforcement and police organization; Robert M. Fisher, who taught law and criminology; and Vonnie Gurgin, who taught research methods and epistemology. I believed then, and have no reason to disagree with myself now, that the faculty at the school represented a range of political perspectives and included conservatives, liberals, moderates, progressives, and radical leftists. When I began my studies there were three card-carrying radicals, and by the time I started the doctoral program in the fall of 1971 t here was a fourth. Among these radicals was the first and only Asian American tenured in the social sciences at Berkeley, Paul Takagi. Takagi had completed his PhD in sociology from Stanford University. The two other radicals hired a fter Schwendinger were Tony Platt and Barry Krisberg. Platt was a barrister from Oxford University before coming to Berkeley to earn his master’s and then his doctorate in criminology in 1966. A fter a postdoctorate at the University of Chicago to complete the research for his classic work, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969), Platt returned to the school as an assistant professor in the fall of 1968. Barry Krisberg, whose mentor was Marvin Wolfgang, joined the faculty in the fall of 1971 a fter completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. T hese radical professors had
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sympathizers, allies, supporters, and graduate students lining up to work with them as well. All and all, these radicals had a disproportionate influence over the students in the school and across the wider university. Allow me to fill in just a few more details of the radical scene: First, there were other scholars and transient faculty passing through the school who w ere also engaged in or open to developing a new paradigm for understanding the causes, characteristics, and control of crime. These included such persons as Richard Korn, Elliott Currie, and Aviva Menkes, a radical social psychologist. At the other end of Haviland Hall there was the School of Social Welfare, with its share of backers, most notably Lloyd Street, a black social work professor who had previously worked at Cornell University. In addition, a number of visiting professors w ere e ither sympathetic to radical causes or fellow travelers, including Marie Bertrand, a feminist from the University of Montreal; John Davis, an African American educator from UCLA; John Irwin, the ex-felon and penal reformer from San Francisco State University; Alphonso Pinkney, a black sociologist from Hunter College; and David Du Bois, editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper and the son of W.E.B. Du Bois. Other distinguished visiting scholars included Menachem Amir and Stan Cohen from Israel as well as Richard Quinney from Brown University. Second, a slew of radical graduate students had entered the school since Platt and Schwendinger took over the admission of graduate students in 1968. With only ten students admitted into the graduate program out of a couple hundred applicants every year, the composition of students began to quickly change a fter successive years of consciously admitting more women than men and increasing the number of people of color. For example, when I entered the graduate program in the fall of 1970, there were six white females, one black female, and two other white males beside me. Most import ant, the radical professors and their allies w ere increasingly constituting thesis and dissertation committees. Thus, the mainstream faculty members were finding themselves with fewer graduate students to take u nder their criminological wings. Naturally, the content of theses and dissertations began to reflect a movement at the school and elsewhere away from the older administrative criminology with its dominant models of the sociology of deviancy and labeling perspectives on social control and toward the newer studies in historical revisionism and the political economies of crime and crime control. In a few words, the focus of inquiry turned away from deviant persons and toward deviant institutions. For example, there were studies of prison hospitals and other total institutions. T here w ere histories of policing, penal policies, the public defender system, the reformatory movements, the origins of criminology, and the eugenics movement. There were analyses of the forms of racism, the anatomy of race riots, and
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the sexist nature of criminological theories. T here w ere examinations of the politics of anti-homosexual and antiabortion laws, and so on. Third, because of the Reagan purges of radical voices from the usual suspect departments on campus, these radical criminologists would also garner a following of students who otherw ise would have had nothing to do with the School of Criminology. For example, when Krisberg, Platt, and Takagi team-taught a reorg an ized version of the 300-level introduction to criminology for majors into a 100-level course for nonmajors, the course grew in size from 125 to 750 students. The wider student audience was looking for radical analyses formerly taught elsewhere at the university. The content of the new course consisted of both radical and traditional materials. During the quarter, lectures and discussions w ere included on the definition of crime—m aking the case for a h uman rights definition of crime over a legalistic definition—a nd on the role of ideology in research, theory, and practice. The course expounded on the institutional and structural crimes of capitalism, imperialism, worker exploitation, racism, and sexism as well as crimes committed by the state, including war and genocide. As I have noted, the popularity of the new course was enhanced by the removal of radicals throughout the University of California system. This removal had begun shortly a fter the election of Governor Reagan in the fall of 1966. T hese “firings” w ere accomplished by way of the nonrenewal of temporary contracts with radicals and denial of tenure to t hose who w ere in tenure-track appointments. Previously, students who had been looking for politically relevant or Marxist-oriented courses would seek these from the Departments of Sociology, Political Science, History, and Philosophy, and elsewhere. As soon as the word got out about the new radical criminology course, students from across campus were showing up to listen to radical criminologists from what had been known on campus as a “cop shop.” This reorg an ized course fulfilled the needs of many students whose options had been narrowed, if not eliminated, by educational hacks working indirectly for the Reagan administration. Only a short time later, however, they came not only for the radicals but also for the Berkeley School of Criminology. G raduate Studi e s at the B e r ke ley S chool of Cri m i nolog y In the fall of 1970 I entered the master’s program. Even though I had studied criminology at Berkeley for three years as an undergraduate, I was not free from the anxieties and insecurities that accompany young postgraduate students, especially at highly competitive institutions. By the time I had finished my master’s degree and been admitted into the doctoral program, I had found my criminological voice, so to speak; but I still had doubts about my ability to jump through all of the hoops involved to complete the
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degree. I always had a backup plan: should I not survive the doctoral program, I could return to West Los Angeles, where I would attend one of several law schools enabling me to become some sort of litigator. Fortunately, I did not have to resort to the backup plan b ecause of my mentor Tony Platt. Whenever I needed it, Tony provided me with the necessary psychological support and survival tips; on one occasion, he simply refused to allow me to drop out. Tony also adroitly handled the university bureaucracies and orchestrated the completion of my master’s and doctorate in only thirty-n ine months. When I began the master’s program, there w ere no guarantees that one would be admitted into the doctoral program. Back then, two types of master’s degrees were awarded. One was a terminal master’s degree that meant that one could not advance to doctoral study. The other master’s degree came with an admission into the doctoral program. By the way, during my entire graduate studies I do not recall ever taking a written examination of any kind. With a few exceptions, my student prog ress and course evaluations were all based on twenty-to twenty-five-page term papers. Nor did I take a comprehensive written exam for either my master’s or my doctorate. With respect to the master’s degree in criminology at the school, thirty-six quarter hours were required plus an oral discussion centering on what we had learned about the field of and how our studies fit into a f uture of more study or work. We also had the option of writing and defending a traditional thesis or submitting four term papers to our master’s committees for their approval. Tony Platt chaired my master’s committee. The other committee members were Paul Takagi and the dean of the school, Sheldon Messinger. While completing the course requirements in three quarters, and on the advice of Platt and Takagi, I submitted four term papers for committee approval, saving probably six months in the process by not writing a thesis. A fter completing an additional twenty-four hours of selective courses, the prerequisite for advancing to the candidacy for the doctor of philosophy, we were expected to put together our oral examination and dissertation committees. John Davis chaired my oral exam defense committee of five members. The committee would “cross-examine” arguments before rather than after a candidate had written the dissertation based on a prospectus that summarized the research. In addition, a doctoral candidate was expected to demonstrate competency in theory, methods, and two areas of specialization. Platt chaired my dissertation committee, and with two other members was charged with approving the completion of my degree. Each of these committees was required to have one faculty member from outside the school. Only Platt and Krisberg w ere members of both committees. Politically, the exercise of putting these committees together is always important in the facilitation of successful outcomes. Additionally, b ecause
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of the growing schism or tension between the mainstream and radical faculty members, we gradu ate students w ere drawn into choosing sides between the old and the new. Mixing committees with faculty representing both sides of the ideological divide allegedly increased our risk of failure. Not mixing the committees also meant we did not have to please two masters, who might have competing views about the value of our research and scholarship. My master’s committee had consisted of two radicals, including the chair, and one liberal. However, a fter consuming both radical and mainstream ideas for some four and a half years, the time had come for me to make a commitment to one side or the other. Before putting together my two committees, I had a couple of discussions with Dean Messinger at his initiation. The first time I was in his office when he suggested that I build my committees around himself and Jerome Skolnick. I had been assuming all along that I would build my committees around Platt and Takagi. So I told Messinger that I would have to think about it. A week later I was over at the school and Shelly asked me whether I had a few minutes to talk; he wanted to know w hether I had decided about the committees. I told him that I had decided to go with Tony and Paul b ecause I had worked for them over the years and they were already on board with my dissertation topic. Not content to take no for an answer, Shelly pointed out that he and Skolnick had much better contacts than Tony or Paul did for getting me that plum first job. In the end, however, my turning them down was not much of a surprise to Messinger or Skolnick, as they were becoming accustomed to the brush-off from the growing number of radical graduate students. As an aside, I have always thought that, on a subconscious level, the bruising of their and others’ mainstream egos played a role in their ultimately siding with the powers that be to close the Berkeley School of Criminology. For the record, I knew Messinger and Skolnick fairly well. I had taken one graduate seminar from Messinger on prison social organization. The course was excellent, and I found Shelly to be very knowledgeable and a good seminar facilitator; I learned a lot about penology, corrections, and organ izational beh avior. The paper I wrote for him, however, was not among the four I submitted to my master’s committee, of which Shelly was the third member; he had given the paper a lower grade than A b ecause I had not provided a traditional literature review. Rather, leaning on the work of sociologist Edward A. Ross, I had come up with my own formal and informal model of social control. Shelly thought this was a premature venture on my part, and he told me so. He might have been correct, but I had been doing literature reviews for more than four years; I wanted for a change to say something for myself rather than reporting on what o thers
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ere saying. As for Skolnick, I had been his reader for his Police and Sociw ety course. On two occasions when he needed to be absent, he had encouraged me to take over his classes so that he would not have to cancel them. Jerry had also once with a stroke of a pen exempted me from having to take a required graduate course. The course was on statistics and taught by the instructor from whom I had taken the exact same course as an undergraduate. In any case, we briefly had a reciprocal working relationship. In comparison, I had taken one undergraduate course and one graduate course from Tony Platt. More important, I had been both his research and his teaching assistant. As for Paul Takagi, I had been his assistant one summer for an introduction to criminology course. I especially liked Paul’s demeanor; he always presented himself as very laid-back. I had also taken an outstanding graduate seminar on the history of discrimination from him. Bottom line: regardless of the better job connections, there never was any real decision to be made about whether I would form my committees around traditionally liberal or radically new criminologists. I would worry about that first job when my doctorate was coming to fruition. My committee for the orals consisted of Platt, Krisberg, Takagi, and a visiting assistant professor, John Davis, who served as the chair. Davis was the first and last African American to chair an orals committee at the school. My outside committee member was David Matza from sociology. Matza had already authored his two classic works that challenged both positivism and determinism: Delinquency and Drift (1964) and Becoming Deviant (1969). Platt chaired my dissertation committee; Barry Krisberg was my inside member, and my outside member was Robert Blauner, an associate professor of sociology. Back then, he was known for two books, Alienation and Freedom (1967) and Racial Oppression in America (1972). Once we doctoral candidates had completed our research and were prepared to defend our dissertation proposals and areas of competency, we had to submit a statement summarizing our research questions, arguments, and findings to our committee. We also had to provide our committees with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all of our resources. When we successfully passed this hurdle we had acquired the status of ABD (or “all but the dissertation”). In early May 1973 at 9 a.m., I had my oral defense in a small conference room deep within the bowels of Haviland Hall. On the morning of the defense, Tony Platt and I first met for breakfast at one of the usual eating establishments on the north side of campus. We then left around 8:45 and walked over to Haviland. On the way Tony started joking around by asking me some hypot hetical questions. My mind seemed to go blank, and I stumbled to say much of anything in response. Tony smiled and said something like, “Don’t worry, you’ll do just fine.” That was before I understood that
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passing the orals to obtain the status of ABD was mostly a ritualistic exercise that had been decided more or less before the student entered the room to begin the defense. In fact, after the defense was over and I had been asked to step out of the room so the committee could make up its mind, I was sitting in an adjacent alcove when Lloyd Street happened to walk by. He congratulated me on passing my orals. A bit perplexed I told Lloyd that I was waiting for the committee’s decision any moment. Lloyd responded with an “Oops, forget I said anything,” and “I’ll congratulate you the next time I see you—bye.” About eighty minutes earlier John Davis had begun my defense by going over the protocol. This was also Krisberg’s first oral defense as a faculty member. When John was finished, Platt then provided background to the committee about my research and how I had arrived at the topic. R eally he was talking to Matza, as the other committee members (except for Davis) were quite familiar with my research. Tony went over how I had been assisting him and a co-researcher, Randy Pollock, while they were finishing up their two-year study of prosecutors and public defenders in the East Bay. They had not been able to find any history about the origins of the public defender offices, so they put me to work on it. What we w ere aware of was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright. We had also read the best-selling book Gideon’s Trumpet (1964), written by New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, a two-t ime winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Tony went on to inform Matza that, contrary to the popular Gideon narrative, I had found a very different history about indigents’ rights to counsel, and my revisionist account challenged the validity of the Gideon’s Trumpet subtitle: How One Man, a Poor Prisoner, Took His Case to the Supreme Court and Changed the Law of the United States. I should note that u ntil the morning of my defense I had never met Matza, a famous theorist. I had read his two books and I was also familiar with his e arlier work with Gresham Sykes on prisonization and the techniques of neutralization. I revisited Matza’s work in preparation for what I imagined the theory portion of the defense would be about. When Platt finished talking, Matza took over the room for about the next twenty minutes. Holding a copy of my prospectus folded vertically in half in one hand, Matza began, “Let me see if I follow your argument?” He then talked for what was probably five minutes although it seemed longer. He accurately recapped my analysis and then asked, “Is that correct?” I responded, “Yes, that’s it.” Matza looked around the room for confirmation, and the other committee members shook their heads affirmatively. Matza then said, “Works for me.” With my tension immediately reduced. I asked, “Is that all there is?” Matza responded, “Not quite.” Everyone chuckled a bit. Matza
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then had some comments and a series of questions for me. When Matza and I finished our exchange, we all spent the next thirty minutes or so talking about two t hings. First, we discussed the specific arguments for and against the creation of the public defender system in relation to the larger system of criminal justice. Then, our talk dovetailed into a very interesting conversation on the rise of monopoly capitalism, the Progressive era, and changing systems of social control at the turn of the twentieth century. About seventy minutes into the defense I was asking myself, “When are we going to move on to demonstrating my areas of competence?” Krisberg had been wondering the same thing and wanted to explore some methodological questions with me. When Barry tried to ask me his first question, the o thers shut him down and told him that we really did not need to go there. I thought that was strange, but I was relieved to know that I really was not there to talk generally about theory or methods or to discuss my two areas of specialization. A c ouple of hours later I was enjoying my lunch and reflecting on my successful defense. I was also thinking about all of the time I had wasted preparing for the competencies portion of the orals only to learn that the orals w ere really all about the dissertation. And then I recalled my strange exchange in the alcove with Lloyd Street. That is when I understood why at least around Berkeley the orals w ere referred to as a rite of passage. It was subsequently confirmed to me that with rare exceptions doctoral candidates were usually informally not allowed to proceed to their defenses u ntil their dissertation chair was of the opinion that they were worthy of status of ABD. At the time of my defense I did not know that seven months later I would be leaving Berkeley and moving across the country to Edinboro, Pennsylvania, for my first academic appointment. I had been planning on landing my first job in fall 1974 based on completing my dissertation in time for graduation in June 1974. So I was not yet on the job market. Nor had I given any thought to the possibility of a midyear soft-money position becoming available from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. However, when the realization began to sink in that I would finish e arlier than I had anticipated, I checked out the job book over at the school. I discovered that Edinboro State College, which became Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s, was looking for someone to begin January 15, 1974. I applied and within a couple of weeks learned that the job was mine subject to a face-to-f ace interview with an administrator who worked for the University of California Press. That seemed like a strange way to interview for a job—never even seeing the campus before I arrived to work t here. However, that person knew an administrator at Edinboro who knew Ernest Woods, the director of the criminal justice program.
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Historical R evi si oni sm at th e Be r ke ley S ch ool of Cri m i nolog y In the years running up to the elimination of the Berkeley School of Criminology, many of the doctoral dissertations, mine included, were grounded in historical revisionism. We were reinterpreting traditional views of the history of crime and crime control. We were re-examining the causes and effects, decisions and reasons, and evidence associated with developments in law, punishment, and justice. Collectively, we were contending with the mostly ahistorical accounts of social science inquiry before the late 1960s. Individually, we w ere each filling in different pieces of the stories of crime and crime control. Studies of crime and delinquency had been examining legal regulators and legal violators. Many criminologists had moved their analyses beyond the law on the books to the law in action. T here had been few historical examinations of the material relations that had come together to shape the labeling processes of criminalization, however. Scholars of crime and crime control had not yet developed analyses to explain the patterned outcomes of e ither the workings of criminal and civil laws or the administration of criminal justice beyond rational-legal models of due process and social control. L egal scholars and criminologists alike had shown little interest in the changing arrangements or composition of crime, punishment, and law enforcement over time. In less than four years Berkeley graduate students had begun working the historical ground of crime and crime control. Articles, theses, and a number of dissertations specifically addressed the origins of the modern systems of criminal and juvenile justice, historical developments in punishment and social control, and the social construction of crime and delinquency in relation to changes in substantive and procedural law. Some of those dissertations included those authored by Elliott Currie (1973) on the reformatory movement; Lynn Osborne (1973) on anti-homosexual laws; Drew Humphries (1973) on antiabortion laws; Ronald L. Boostrom (1974) on the emergence of American criminology; Michael Rustigan (1974) on the origins of the metropolitan police in England and the United States; Gregg Barak (1974) on the origins and development of the public defender; Julia Schwendinger (1975) on the history of the rape victim and her treatment by the criminal justice system; and V irginia Engquist-Grabiner (1976) on the repressive police tactics used against militant members of the women’s suffrage movement. Most of t hese revisionist histories were drawing on the work of Platt and the Schwendingers. In particu lar, we were informed by Platt’s liberal critique of juvenile justice reform and the invention of delinquency laid out in The Child Savers (1969) and the radical critique available in the prepublished draft chapters of the Schwendingers’ The Sociologists of
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the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology, 1883–1922 (1974). At the macro or structural level, these dissertations were investigating the changing arrangements of crime and punishment in relation to the changing political economies of capitalism. At the meso or institutional level, the dissertations were examining the changing relations between the formal and informal styles of administering the criminal law. In this context, my revisionist history of criminal defense work for the poor provided alternative interpretations for the emergence and development of the public defender system, the institutionalization of plea bargaining, the rationalization of assembly-line justice, and the normalizing of the roles played by the legal and judicial functionaries in accommodating these changes in adversarial and bureaucratic justice. Contrary to liberal explanations, the movement to establish a public defender on behalf of indigents accused of a felony did not derive from Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963. Rather, the public defender could be traced back to a larger regulative movement of social control at the turn of the twentieth century that occurred both inside and outside of the administration of criminal justice. Disse rtati on, Arti c le, and B ook The titles of my doctoral dissertation (1974), my first published article in Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology (1975), and my first book (1980) reflect the evolution of my analysis of the emergence and early development of the public defender system (PDS) in the United States. The full titles are “In Defense of the Poor: On the Origins of the Public Defender System in the United States (1900–1920),” “In Defense of the Rich: The Emergence of the Public Defender,” and In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform (1980). I had assumed when I started my research on public defenders that the institutionalization of the PDS was a legal reform having everything to do with representing indigent defendants accused of felonies. I had learned, however, before finishing my research, that the reasons behind the creation of public defenders were more complex than the rights of indigents to criminal representation. Besides defending the poor, the establishment of public defender offices had to do with resolving overlapping and conflicting orga n izational, legal, and professional interests among three groups of adjudicators: prosecutors, judges, and t hose who specialize in criminal defense work. The issues and concerns, some petty and some not, took some twenty-five years to resolve before public defender laws w ere enacted in Oregon and California, a half c entury before Gideon became constitutional law. Back in the late 1880s when the movement for public defenders first began, one key issue involved w hether all criminal defendants, rich and poor,
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would have to be represented by public defenders. For more than two decades, the inability to resolve the very thorny issue of whether or not to socialize the criminal bar prevented the passage of laws to establish public defender offices. When agreement was reached in the second decade of the twentieth century that there would still be private criminal attorneys for hire, laws were fin ally enacted in Portland, Oregon, in 1913 and in Los Angeles in 1914. The passage of these public defender laws provided for all types of beneficiaries. T here was an elevating or professionalizing of the practice of criminal defense work for the poor whether performed by public or private defenders. More generally, as officers of the court, all members of the locally affected bars w ere released from their obligatory roles of providing periodic pro bono criminal defense work for the poor. In urban areas with heavy court dockets, carrying out this obligation might have meant losing three or four days of paid work each month. The establishment of a PDS benefited the interests of the criminal court, as public defenders expedited the assembly-line system of plea-bargained justice over the more inefficient and expensive system of adversarial or due process justice. In short, the PDS increased plea bargaining, reduced judicial time, and saved taxpayer dollars. When I published “In Defense of the Rich” less than a year later, I was no longer thinking about public defenders serving the interests of the poor. I was more focused on the ways in which the PDS served the interests of the affluent. For example, the establishment of a due process system for the poor not only helped to legitimize the administration of criminal justice for all, but it did so more efficiently and economically than its predecessor, the assigned counsel system (ACS). By the time I had completed the book a few years later I was thinking that the correct interpretation was that the early development of the PDS had served the interests of multiple groups of people, including indigent defendants, prosecutors, judges, private attorneys, public defense attorneys, and court administrators. Accordingly, the title of the book became In Defense of Whom? Liberal analyses of the reasons for the expansion of the PDS between the early 1960s and 1970s w ere associated with (1) the triumph of due process over crime control as represented by the decisions of state supreme courts and the U.S Supreme Court concerning the right to counsel; (2) the continuing growth of state bureaucracies, along with the increasing size of the civil labor force; (3) sustained efforts to centralize and rationalize the administration of criminal justice; and (4) the rising number of criminal cases and the disproportionate number of poor p eople unable to afford private counsel. Rarely critical of the adjudicative process, let alone the larger legal order, liberal analyses typically viewed the etiology of the public defender system as the expansion of individual rights over the rights of the state. Following
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The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968) by Herbert L. Packer, these liberal analyses made a twofold argument. First, because the due process model asserts limits on the nature of official power and on the modes of exercising power, its validating authority is judicial and requires an appeal to the law of the U.S. Constitution. Hence, the due process model is viewed as basically a negative model, holding the state accountable or in check pursuant to the rule of law. Second, b ecause the crime control model emphasizes the existence and exercise of official power at nearly e very turn possible, its validating authority is legislative, not judicial, and it represents an affirmative model for the exercise of state control. In the final scheme of t hings, liberal analyses view the administration of crime control and the emergence of the public defender system as a compromise between the demands of “bureaucratic due process,” on the one hand, and the demands of the constitutional guarantee of a “right to counsel,” on the other hand. In turn, the uncritical analysis of the administration of criminal justice in general and of the plea-bargaining system in particu lar reveals a false dichotomy between “adversarial” and “bureaucratic” justice. The social realities of t hese allegedly contradictory relations in adjudicating criminal guilt or innocence, as exemplified by Arthur Rosett and Donald Cressey in Justice by Consent: Plea Bargains in the American Courthouse (1976), are not at odds with each other. On the contrary, t hese two models or styles of administering criminal justice are actually complementary: the former provides the ideal process of equal protection u nder the rule of law for all, and the latter provides the real process of plea-bargained justice for all. Thus, in my review of Justice by Consent for the American Journal of Sociology, I critiqued Rosett and Cressey for ignoring the fundamentally coercive nature of the plea-bargaining institution in the United States. That is to say, U.S. courts have always rewarded factually but not necessarily legally guilty defendants for their cooperation with prosecutors. Conversely, the criminal courts have always punished those defendants more severely when they refuse to waive their full due process rights to an adjudicated trial and refuse to accept a negotiated settlement with the prosecutor. Like my critique of plea-bargaining and my explanation for the origins of the public defender, my revisionist analysis also demonstrated that the development of these alternatives to adversarial justice did not derive from the triumph of due process and the judicially established laws of the 1960s. During the nineteenth c entury, with its laissez-faire approach, the assigned counsel system worked more or less effectively in rural, if not metropolitan, areas of the United States. In fact, as far back as the early 1800s, where crowded court dockets existed, both private attorneys and state prosecutors involved in the pro bono ACS began thinking about ways to institutionalize plea bargaining as an alternative to time-consuming trials for indigents
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accused of felonies. By the late nineteenth century the ACS was increasingly being viewed as a burden to both the legal profession and the adversarial system of due process. Accordingly, court administrators, judges, and members of the criminal bar w ere making the case for a PDS to replace the ACS. Legislation was eventually passed on the affirmative argument that the PDS would be more efficient and less expensive than the ACS. The number of trials would decrease and the number of plea bargains would increase b ecause of the less adversarial and more cooperative nature of criminal represent at ion for those who could not afford private legal counsel of their own. In proper historical context, Gideon certainly helped to further guarantee the right to some type of legal representation for those accused of a felony. I suspect the decision may have also buttressed the development of public defender officers, but I have not tried to confirm that suspicion. On the other hand, like the Supreme Court sanctioning the constitutionality of plea bargains, the provision of a public defender also serves to affirm and expand the power of state intervention over the adjudication of criminally marginalized defendants. As part of a regulatory movement consistent with the modernization and bureaucratization of the criminal justice system, the PDS helped to rationalize and routinize plea bargaining as an institutional alternative to the dilatory and relatively more expensive adversarial trials of the nineteenth century. Then again, in terms of equity or fairness, the PDS does little to ameliorate the differential treatment between the rich and the poor in relation to substantive and procedural criminal law. Nevertheless, recognizing the variability in the quality of work done by public defender offices across this nation, I still feel compelled to defend both the public defender system and public defenders, for two reasons. First, the criticism leveled at public defenders is excessive and perhaps best captured by an article in the Yale Review of Law and Social Action: “Did You Have a L awyer When You 2 Went to Court? No, I Had a Public Defender.” Second, the represent at ion of those members of the criminal bar in private practice who make up the contemporary court-appointed or assigned counsel systems in the United States are generally not as well connected to the administrative bureaucracies. As I continue to advise p eople to this very day, “Unless you can afford to hire the best local criminal attorneys, then public defenders are your best alternative.” The Rise and D e m i se of Radical Cri m i nolog y Radical criminology at Berkeley was influenced by and owed its revolutionary sensibilities to t hose people in the m iddle of the twentieth century who w ere challenging or resisting in one way or the other the antidemocratic
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and exclusionary politics of the United States. Org an ized l abor, poor p eople, inner city black and brown people, the American Indian Movement, second-wave feminism, and t hose opposed to policies of imperialism abroad were all engaging in wide-r anging social actions. T hese strugg les for justice can be traced back to the political and social protests that started with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended with the winding down of the Vietnam War in 1975. Radical criminology included aligning criminological practice with grassroots community groups; movements for social and political equality; and efforts to pursue civil, human, and prisoner rights. Accordingly, radical criminologists w ere networking with activists from the ghettos and barrios of urban America, the state prisons and m ental hospitals, and locally based groups that w ere seeking to change the systems of criminal justice and mental health. Throughout the state of California, for example, t here were efforts to reform indeterminate sentencing practices. In the Bay Area, there were successful efforts to establish the nation’s first rape crisis and domestic violence center as well as an unsuccessful referendum for community control of the police. The rise of a radical criminology was not only about aligning itself with the various political strugg les for social justice beyond the ivory tower. The movement to radically transform criminology was also part of those internal strugg les being waged throughout academia. These strugg les were about freedom of inquiry, the composition of the faculty and student body, the creation of space for ethnic and w omen’s studies, the diversification of curriculum offerings, and a change of culture in higher education. In terms of the social construction of crime and justice, radical criminologists w ere distancing themselves from parochialism, state-dominated discourse, and legalistic definitions of harm. Radical criminologists w ere also cozying up to cosmopolitanism and to ideas from scholars outside the global north. As already indicated, radical criminologists were providing what many students, including those with privileged white backgrounds, w ere looking for. In an environment of rising black, brown, and yellow power, an essay initially published in 1967 by the Los Angeles F ree Press, an underg round newspaper, well captured students’ animus and antipathy as the promise of the e arlier Free Speech Movement went unfulfilled. “The Student as Nigger,” Jerry Farber’s critique of higher education in the United States, was so embraced on college campuses that it was reprinted more than five hundred times before Contact Books in 1969 and Pocket Books in 1970 each published the essay in book form. A professor of education, Farber had constructed an analogy between the status and alienation of African Americans and the status and alienation of students in mass society. In his illustration, Farber described the conditions of California State University at Los Angeles, where he taught. He argued that a “master-slave” relationship, inhibiting
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students’ intellectual motivation, existed in most U.S. educational settings. And yet, Farber argued that students were yearning to break free of these smothering conditions and w ere desirous of alternative teaching and learning arrangements. The tenets and the zeitgeist of a radical criminology filled the need and resonated with many students as one of t hose alternatives for student liberation and for dealing collectively with the problems of crime and justice in the United States. Turning to the demise of radical criminology at Berkeley, the only book-length treatment was written by Herman and Julia Schwendinger: Who Killed the Berkeley School? Struggles over Radical Criminology (2014). Like the Schwendingers’ autopsy, mine is not based on some kind of secondh and postmortem explanation, such as in the 2015 article published by Johann Koehler in Criminology: “Development and Fracture of a Discipline: Legacies of the School of Criminology at Berkeley.” Allow me to cut to the chase by identifying two groups of p eople who were instrumental in the elimination of the Berkeley School of Criminology. The first group included powerful Republican politicos and the higher education administrators of the University of California system. This elite group consisted of Governor Ronald Reagan; UC Chancellor Albert H. Bowker; Reagan’s chief of staff and liaison to the Advisory Council of the School of Criminology, Edwin Meese III; and the chair of the Committee to Evaluate the Berkeley School, political scientist Allan P. Sindler, the person who issued the report recommending that the school be closed down. The second group of people consisted of complicit administrators and faculty. Most of these turncoats had reversed their earlier support for the actions taken by radical criminologists and for the efforts to save the school from what became a death sentence; t hese individuals had tenured positions and w ere secure if the school was abolished. Over time, the tenured faculty, with the exception of Takagi, all acquiesced to the wishes or demands of the first group of power holders. I have always believed that if these professors had not capitulated to Sindler’s report, criminology, if not radical criminology, might well have survived the political assault on academic freedom. The accomplices to this “crime” include a lineup of venerated academics: Sheldon Messinger, Bernard Diamond, and Jerome Skolnick from the School of Criminology; Dean Sanford Kadish and Professor Caleb Foote from the School of Law; and Philip Selznick, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society. A fter a period of some nine years, these academics sided with the outside politicos to justify the unprecedented demolition of what was certainly a leading forum for criminological study. You need not rely on my evaluation. T here is also the Wolfgang Committee Report, dated December 17, 1971, otherw ise known officially as the Report of the Visiting Committee on the School of Criminology to the Chancellor of the University of California
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at Berkeley. Marvin Wolfgang chaired the committee, which included three other renowned criminologists—Donald Riddle, Richard Myren, and James Short—whom the dean of graduate studies at Berkeley had appointed to the committee to evaluate the school. The committee found the school to be “healthier than ever before.” In the evaluation, the committee praised the curriculum, the trends in faculty research, and the student internship programs. Fin ally, based on the committee recommendation, the next year the PhD replaced the doctorate as the terminal degree in criminology. Eighteen months later, the politically infused Sindler report, dated June 15, 1973, provided reasoning for terminating the school in spite of the glowing evaluation by Wolfgang and com pany. The rationalization was that three radical criminologists, out of more than two dozen criminologists, w ere undermining the quality of education and alienating members of the law enforcement community. The victims of the crime of killing the school included existing and f uture students, untenured faculty, and working staff, as well as local communities, systems of criminal justice, and the larger academy of criminology. Launched in 1967, and carried out extensively from 1973 u ntil its final victory in 1976, the killing of the Berkeley School of Criminology by Governor Reagan and his administration represented a frontal assault on academic freedom and domestic dissent. T hose radical criminologists targeted by the University of California system had consistently acted within the bounda ries of their First Amendment rights and the democratic processes of the rule of law. For their acts of free speech and inquiry, they would be falsely charged with and found guilty of adulterating the mission of the school. Not surprisingly, the victims of this academic crisis became the scapegoats for their own deaths. In this case, the usual suspects were a handful of radical criminologists and their student supporters. Together, they were assigned blame and held accountable for a radical theory and practice viewed as some kind of ideological threat beyond the criminological hegemony of the pre-r adical Berkeley School of Criminology. Aligned with and supportive of t hese radical faculty over the long haul were (1) a diverse cadre of faculty sprinkled across the campus and beyond; (2) an expanding group of radical graduate students; and (3) a growing interest in the subject m atter of law, crime, and justice from a radical perspective across the Berkeley campus. T hese radical criminologists and their sympathizers had been working with grassroots activists and engaging in innovative community-based practices. These criminologists were producing social analyses of the institutions of criminal justice in the context of the broader relations of inequality, injustice, exploitation, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In turn, they w ere working to resist t hese crimes against humanity and to change the systems of social control that reproduced them.
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For better or worse, depending on one’s political ideology, administrative criminology was being outed for actively participating in the social and political oppression linked to the institutions of criminal justice and to the harms and injuries that these institutions routinely helped produce. At the same time, the popularity of the changing pedagogical content caused drops both in enrollments in mainstream courses and in the number of nonradical thesis and doctoral committees. Hence, when push from above came to shove, even the liberal criminologists who had previously supported their radical colleagues began slowly turning against them. Ultimately, these mainstream criminologists became complicit with the external sanctioning and political elimination of the school. I believe that, for some of t hese faculty members, closing the school was preferable to their growing sense of irrelevancy as a number of students had come to see t hese faculty members as part of the criminological problem. The rest of this section and the next describe the historical backdrop of political and social conflict for this prima facie case against the p eople who killed the Berkeley School of Criminology. The evidence includes private and public conversations between representatives of both the school and the Reagan administration. T hese exchanges revolve around mostly the legitimacy of police-student interactions and community control of the police. While not the sole reasons for the actions taken by the governing bodies of higher education in California to do away with the school, I continue to believe that without those exchanges, criminology might still be thriving at Berkeley. Before proceeding, keep in mind that controlling the official or popular narratives around condoning or condemning the use and abuse of police force in the United States has always been a highly contested and volatile issue. An early catalyst for closing the school came about when both liberal and radical criminologists publicly expressed their consternation over what many people viewed as police overreaction and brutal suppression of demonstrators at Stop the Draft Week. In a Wall Street Journal story dated October 20, 1967, “Blue Power and the Control of Mobs,” a physician at the scene described the episode as an out-a nd-out massacre; a police officer at the scene was quoted saying that the demonstrators “weren’t allowed enough time to get away.” The Oakland Chief of Police stated that the use of force was the only means available for dispersing the intransigent crowd, even though the day before the police had accomplished the same task by resorting to nonviolent mass arrests. Governor Reagan also chimed in: “The police action—swift and effective—was in the finest tradition of California’s law enforcement agencies.” Similarly, an editorial in the Oakland Tribune opined, “Force w ill be used without hesitation in order to maintain law and order and to allow Federal officials to carry out their duties.”
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Ronald A. Buel and Richard Stone, the authors of the Wall Street Journal article, sought the thoughts of some local police professionals, such as Joseph Lohman and Gordon Misner. Since 1961, Lohman had been the dean of the Berkeley School of Criminology. Before that he was sheriff of Cook County and the state treasurer of Illinois when Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic governor, 1949–1953. Misner had been an employee of the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, north and across the San Francisco Bay from the Berkeley School of Criminology, where he had earned both his master’s and doctorate degrees in criminology. At the time, Misner was on leave from San Jose State and a visiting professor at the school. One year later, Misner joined the faculty as a regular member. Neither Lohman nor Misner had actually witnessed the bloody event, but they offered their points of view. Lohman was reported to say that he felt that the police should have used the same nonviolent tactics that w ere employed during the Free Speech Movement sit-ins in 1964. As noted, the police did use those very same tactics the day before without any carnage. Misner also thought the police tactics employed on that day w ere unnecessary and that the situation could have been defused by simply moving the Induction Center to the Oakland Army base, if only temporarily. These tactical criticisms w ere rather tame compared to those of a letter to the editor condemning the police brutality in the university newspaper, the Daily Californian, on October 19, 1967. Berkeley School of Criminology faculty members, including Professors Gordon Misner, Richard Korn, and Bernard Diamond, as well as the only card-carrying radical criminologist among this group, Professor Herman Schwendinger, signed that letter. David Fogel, a doctoral student at the time, as well as several faculty members from the School of Social Welfare, signed it, too. Speaking as both teachers and citizens, this letter talked about a lot of t hings, including “vengeance, brutality and terror.” The takeaway: “The right to engage in law violation to prevent crime is a contradiction—one cannot stop crime by committing it. If this is done, crime merely becomes the exclusive province of the police and a society of law and justice is destroyed from within, by its own protectors.”3 In a livid response to this critique, Don Fach, president of the California Peace Officers Research Association, fired off a written complaint dated November 24, 1967, to Dean Lohman informing him that he was sharing this letter with the appropriate California law enforcement agencies; Governor Ronald Reagan; the Board of Regents of the University of California; the International Association of Chiefs of Police; and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. Fach claimed that the Oakland police had conducted themselves very professionally and that the criminology faculty had confused “necessary force with brutality.” He went on to say that the outrageous public statements by members of the school undermined police attempts to block “government
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by mob rule” and belied “the professional dedication” of the school “to the basic tenets of law enforcement.”4 These and other public and private exchanges between the politicos and the school would occur just about every time there was friction or worse between student demonstrators and the police. One very revealing exchange involved Dean Leslie T. Wilkins, who had been promoted from associate dean when Lohman died without warning in April 1968. A fter Black Power protests had been escalating off campus and by the time of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) Strike in 1969, the UC Berkeley brass were demanding that Dean Wilkins cooperate with the administration by policing and informing on those faculty members who supported student protest activities. During the strike, in which some two thousand students participated, Schwendinger happened to be in the dean’s office when Wilkins received a phone call from a sen ior administrator wanting the names of faculty refusing to teach in their assigned classrooms. Rather than cross the picket lines, several faculty members w ere holding their classes off campus. Wilkins was so bothered ethically by the position he found himself in that he shouted to the caller, “I am not a policeman!” and slammed the phone down. In the aftermath of this student strike, Wilkins announced his retirement during a faculty meeting of the school on February 24, 1969. In explaining his decision, Wilkins stated: I have just informed Chancellor Heyns that I wish to be relieved of making the kind of decisions that seem to be required of deans during this crisis, and that I am resigning from the University at the end of the spring quarter. I trust the faculty and see my role as supporting them rather than spying on them, as seems required now. My decision to resign was based . . . on a cumulative series of political and personal pressures, the former have recently been brought to bear on the University and on the School. I feel the position of Dean in this School is a political one and I am not able to cope with such a setting.5 In the fall of 1969 Wilkins became the dean of the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York, Albany. The St raw That B roke the Bac k of th e Criminolog i cal Sc h ool In 1964–1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a set of domestic policies whose goal was to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in the United States. Among the policy initiatives, legislation, and programs was LEEP (Law Enforcement Education Program) in 1969, established in response to just one of many recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission), formed in
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1967. President Johnson appointed the commission’s eleven members on July 28 to investigate the causes of the Detroit riots (as they were occurring) and preceding racial rebellions in Chicago, Newark, and Watts. Published in February 1968, the Kerner Report became an instant best seller and sold more than two million copies in paperback. The takeaway: “Our nation is moving toward two societ ies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”6 The identified problem was white racism, which had created black ghettoes all across the United States. Unilaterally, the blame was placed on white people and white institutions, especially law enforcement. Nationwide efforts to reform local police practices through, for example, police-citizen review boards, affirmative action plans, and community relations bureaus had failed to make a material difference in reducing police- community conflict. At the same time, both liberal and radical criminologists at the Berkeley School of Criminology were looking for alternatives. One of those was the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) idea of community control of the police (CCP). This idea might seem outlandish to those unfamiliar with the history of the positive accomplishments of the BPP. For example, before the National School Lunch Program, and long before the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, there was the BPP’s Free Breakfast for C hildren Program. This was only one of some sixty community- based social programs that Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale initiated from Oakland, California. T hese community-based social services spread quickly to BPP chapters across the nation while the U.S. government was still engaging in benign neglect. The Black Panthers’ idea of CCP, like the idea for the c hildren’s breakfast program, was grounded in grassroots efforts and a vision to improve local conditions and to empower inner city communities. In response to the idea of community control of the police, liberals like Misner and Skolnick took a pass. Radicals like Platt and Takagi began to work with the Panthers and black U.S. Congressman Ronald Dellums, whose district represented the cities of Oakland and Berkeley. Together, they designed a plan to decentralize the control of the Berkeley Police Department (BPD) and to relocate some of its power into the hands of elected neighborhood councils. Not surprisingly, the BPD was opposed to the idea, as w ere most Berkeley city officials. In fact, both of t hese interest groups became hysterical a fter fifteen thousand residents signed a legal petition to successfully place the ill-fated CCP Amendment on the electoral ballot of April 1971. Misusing public funds to hold pol itical meetings all over the city, the Berkeley police worked tirelessly to agitate against the amendment. Ninety officers signed a petition calling for a “crackdown” on radicals. The city manager threatened to resign should the proposed amendment pass. The city attorney labeled the amendment unconstitutional even though the state constitution gave citizens the right to change city charters through referendums.
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During the run-up to the election, the ultraconservative Berkeley Daily Gazette published articles warning that if the radicals succeeded and the amendment passed, the very fabric of life in Berkeley would be destroyed. Running scared, the business and political elites of the city formed the One Berkeley Community (OBC), an organization created for the express purpose of defeating community control of the police. Days before the election, OBC sponsored a political advertisement in the April 5 edition of the Daily Californian. What appeared in the newspaper was a printed version, all in capital letters, of a teleg ram signed by O. W. Wilson, the founding and emeritus dean of the Berkeley School of Criminology. Back in the day, Wilson had been a law enforcement leader serving as chief of the Fullerton, California, and Wichita, Kansas, police departments before becoming the superintendent of police for the Chicago Police Department from 1960 u ntil he retired and moved to San Diego in 1967. The retired chief had also authored books on law enforcement. When the teleg ram appeared in print, Wilson had not been heard from in public for nearly five years. His brief remarks repudiated community control of the police and read as follows: THE CHARTER PROPOSAL FOR ‘COMMUNITY CONTROL OF THE POLICE’ COULD DESTROY THE BERKELEY POLICE DEPARTMENT, A FINE AND FAIR ORGANIZATION OF MEN AND WOMEN REPRESENTING CITIZENS OF AN AMERICAN COMMUNITY. PROPONENTS OF THE ILL- CONCEIVED MEASURE INCLUDE SEVERAL NON- T ENURE MEMBERS OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY WHO ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO SPEAK FOR THEIR COLLEAGUES NOR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. I URGE MY ACADEMIC ASSOCIATES AND FELLOW CALIFORNIANS TO VOTE NO TO DECISIVELY DEFEAT CHARTER AMENDMENT ONE IN THE APRIL ELECTIONS.7 Before concluding this chronicle of the termination of the Berkeley School of Criminology, I need to provide a few illuminating public exchanges between the radical criminologists and the defenders of the “law and order” status quo. First, seven months before the election, in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Platt had supported the amendment, writing that the initiative “is aimed at making government more representative and democratic. The police are an import ant and powerful institution; they are supposed to be ‘public servants.’ ” He added that the CCP plan “seeks to restore popular and civilian governing of the police,” is “supported in theory by a considerable body of criminological lit er a t ure urging civilian
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controls of the police,” and is “a thoughtful proposal, based on careful study and consultation with community groups.”8 Two days later the newspaper responded in an editorial with disbelief that “a criminologist, of all p eople, would advocate for what amounts to ghettoization of the police and the abandonment of the many pioneering programs for better race relations for which Berkeley has taken pride.” 9 Though hotly debated within the school, the Criminology Students Association (CSA) became the first student organ i zation on campus to endorse the measure on January 14, 1971. The CSA passed a resolution recognizing “the urgent need for new alternatives to the present institutional structures of law enforcement, and the need for the development of more responsive community oriented programs.”10 By early March the faculty from the school, including Menachem Amir, Nathan Adler, Vonnie Gurgin, Richard Korn, Tony Platt, Herman Schwendinger, and Paul Takagi, released a public statement asking the citizens to vote for the amendment: As criminologists at the University of California and citizens who work in Berkeley concerned about creating a police department which respects and acts upon democratic principles of government, we urge your support of this amendment. . . . For citizens, it w ill provide participation in the governance of an import ant pubic institution, fair and independent grievance procedures, and more efficient protection of the public from serious crimes. For the police, it w ill mean community respect and support as well as a truly professional role that emphasizes a commitment to legality. And, fin ally it w ill help to transform policing from a quasi-m ilitary role of repression to one which encourages equal protection u nder the law and conflict resolution. Community control offers an opportunity to minimize police illegality and to fully protect constitutional rights of f ree speech, assembly and political expression.11 A few days later, on March 7, 1971, Takagi was the only tenured faculty member among those who had signed the e arlier statement to provide further commentary, as he wanted to clarify his endorsement. Takagi identified himself as the associate dean of the Berkeley School of Criminology, a former deputy probation officer in Alameda County, a former state parole officer in Los Angeles, and a former correctional classification officer in San Quentin Prison. What Takagi had left out about his formative experiences was that as a teenager he had been forcefully relocated and incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 as part of the internment of Japanese Americans. In his statement, “Technocrats vs. Public Servants,” Takagi argued: The social problems in this community are so serious that I feel the Charter amendment addresses itself to the question of w hether bureaucratic
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elites and technocrats and pol itical officials who, for the most part, serve special economic and political interest groups should continue to govern the affairs of the people in the community. Should we have that kind of government, or should the p eople in the community begin to play a larger role in determining how the agencies should meet the needs of the p eople? Takagi then explained: The genius of this proposal is that it does recognize that conflicts exist within a community. Instead of trying to deal with these conflicts on the basis of threat of penalty or coercion, it begins to recognize that differences do exist and that conflicts do emerge, and rather than attempting to bludgeon people into conformity, it provides for an opportunity to explore the source of these conflicts and then to begin to attack the problem.12 Despite all the efforts to pass the amendment, the liberal voters of Berkeley opted for the status quo and rejected by almost two to one this cutting-edge proposal for police-community conflict resolution. Platt, who served unknowingly as the newsmaking criminologist in this strugg le for community control of the police, and his colleague Schwendinger then became the most conspicuous victims of the repression of free academic expression. Though recommended unanimously for tenure by the appropriate university committees, UC Chancellor Roger Heyns denied Platt tenure on the grounds of “immaturity” and “unethical” behavior. Heyns was referring to the two times on the same day in the aftermath of P eople’s Park that Platt had been falsely arrested and charged with breaking the law. The first time was in the afternoon, when he tried to issue a complaint of police brutality to the campus police; the second time was in the even ing, when he was arrested by the BPD as he tried to retrieve his car to go home. In the afternoon, he was charged with “interfering with an officer,” and that night he was charged with committing “malicious mischief to [his own] automobile.” In both instances, the police beat Platt up. At the municipal trial for t hese crimes, the judge dismissed both charges against Platt and a police document substantiating his mistreatment was shared with the public. For the record, Platt wasted no time and joined the faculty of the School of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento. Schwendinger came up for tenure one year a fter Platt did. Schwendinger was also denied tenure based on the absurd evaluation of the school’s tenure committee claiming that the quality of his research was inadequate and that he had failed to make any substantive contributions to the field. Herman spent the next academic year, 1976–1977, in Las Vegas, where his wife, Julia,
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was teaching as a tenure-track assistant professor of criminal justice. As part of the “unholy three,” tenured professor Takagi would also be sanctioned for his political misbehavior. Since he had tenure and could not be severed from the university without cause, Takagi was left stranded for more than two years before he became a member of the Asian Studies Program. U ntil then, he continued to receive a paycheck and retained his old office in Haviland. However, he was without any type of assignment or duties to perform, unlike the other tenured professors who were immediately absorbed into other units on campus when the school was winding down. The closing act—the last direct mass action by students trying to keep the school open—occurred on June 4–5, 1974. T hese nonviolent protests were representative of the criminological radicals, who had always operated according to standard practices of civil disobedience but not necessarily university rules governing the conduct of demonstrations. As the headline in the June 6, 1974, issue of the Daily Californian read, “100 Riot Policemen Disperse Peaceful Haviland Hall Sit-In.” On the even ing of June 4, students pushed campus police aside to gain entrance to the school and staged an all- night protest. The next morning police amassed in front of Haviland, directing their shotguns and gas grenade launchers at a crowd of about a thousand demonstrators gathered outside of the building, and commanded the students inside to leave. The protestors immediately complied, as they knew that the police w ere not bluffing. A fter all, during one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. history, the police had launched plenty of tear gas canisters not only outside on campus but into buildings as well.
C hapte r 2
Life as a Young Criminologist
When I began earning my undergraduate and graduate degrees in criminology, four accredited institutions in the United States offered terminal degrees in criminology or criminal justice. T hese included two schools of criminology, one at the University of California, Berkeley and the other at Florida State University as well as two schools of criminal justice, one at the State University of New York at Albany, and the other at Michigan State University. In 1970, Sam Houston State University became the third institution of higher education to offer the PhD in criminal justice and in 1973 awarded its first two doctorates. For perspective, as part of the City University of New York, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice introduced its PhD in 1980. The number of programs and departments offering degrees from associate to doctoral, however, was about to greatly change. Buttressed by the findings and recommendations of The Challenge of Crime in a F ree Society: A Report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967), a concerted effort had begun to both jump-start the study of crime and crime control and to professionalize the criminal justice system. Through the U.S. Department of Justice and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the newly created Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) would start subsidizing education in criminal justice and criminology by providing (1) grants to in-service criminal justice personnel and loans to pre-service criminal justice or criminology students that they could pay off by working in the criminal justice field or in higher education (as I did, along with several of my cohorts); and (2) soft-money positions in higher education with the intent that these would be converted into regular positions. My appointment at Edinboro was one of t hose soft-money positions. Because of the financial assistance, universities were soon offering programs in the administration of criminal justice. T here w ere significantly fewer academic programs in criminology than in criminal justice, especially at the undergraduate level. In due course, many of the allied areas of theory and practice would be linked by technological developments and by new curricula. T oday, the fields of both crime and justice are more specialized than 44
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ever and are increasingly connected by academic units that refer to themselves as either departments of criminal justice and criminology or as departments of criminology and criminal justice. Back before the rise of independently formed departments, however, programs in criminal justice were housed in departments of sociology and social work and to a much lesser extent in political science departments, as well as in some schools of management and education; there w ere also some independent professional programs in police science or law enforcement as well some in correctional science. Most of these programs were soon absorbed into departments of criminal justice. In the past and less often today, departments of sociology offer at least one or more courses in criminology, deviance, or juvenile delinquency. Many of the older degreed programs from the 1970s and 1980s broke away from their host academic units to become their own departments. Many other majors and minors would remain a part of or would become part of an amalgamated unit offering several degrees, such as the sociology, anthropology, and criminology department at Eastern Michigan University, where I have worked since 1991. Today t here are a few thousand programs devoted to the study of crime and justice broadly defined and some three dozen doctoral programs. With the availability of only four terminal degrees when I was a student, and armed with the understanding that this educational reality was about to change, I entered the Berkeley graduate program knowing that I was g oing to “double down”—prepare myself for both fields, criminology and criminal justice—as a way of maximizing my employment opportunities. Aside from course electives, for example, and in the context of taking my oral examination and advancing to the status of ABD, I carved out a specialization in the “social inequality of crime” and in the “sociology of criminal justice.” The former was to demonstrate my competency in criminology and the latter was to demonstrate my competency in criminal justice. The blending of t hose two specializations helped to shape the nature of the co-authored Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in Amer ica (2001), now in its fifth edition. Over the years a sizable chunk of my research and scholarly productivity has revolved around these subject areas. Moreover, most all of my academic appointments have been situated within some kind of cross-d isciplinary setting. In programs and departments whose intent has often been, among other things, to house not only the study of crime and criminals, but also the study of criminal justice, these are usually looking for criminologists who are conversant with the developing policies of both crime prevention (criminology) and crime control (criminal justice). In January 1974 I moved to the Borough of Edinboro, located some twenty miles southeast of Erie, Pennsylvania. Edinboro was a small college
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of some six thousand students situated near scenic Lake Edinboro, a small freshwater lake enjoyed by ice fishers or skaters in the winter and by sailors and swimmers in the summer. This was where my life as an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice would begin. Because of the severe shortages of terminally degreed persons in our rapidly developing disciplines, universities utilized LEEP grants to infuse their classrooms with seasoned veterans from the criminal justice system, mostly in law enforcement and corrections. It was only a m atter of time before those with newly minted doctorates would replace t hese former criminal justice pract it ioners or relegate them to adjunct or part-t ime teaching positions. In January 1975, one year a fter my federally supported appointment as a temporary assistant professor had begun, Edinboro State College converted this position into a tenure-track job with an ongoing allocation from the state government in Harrisburg. I was also credited with one year of probationary ser v ice toward tenure. Less than three months l ater, however, I would resign from Edinboro to accept an offer from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV). By late May, Charlotte Pagni, my girlfriend from Grove City, Pennsylvania, and I w ere preparing to move across country to the Mojave Desert. In the fall I became a faculty member in the undergraduate criminal justice program (before it became its own department offering a master’s degree and eventually a PhD) and in the graduate sociology program, which was then offering a master’s degree and later developed its PhD. In January 1978, Charlotte and I, now married for almost two years, moved to Europe, where we lived for eighteen months. During this time I had a tri-fold appointment as a lecturer in criminology, law enforcement, and sociology, teaching for the University of Maryland in its European Division (UMED). I taught mostly on NATO bases located in the Federal Republic of Germany. One noteworthy exception was in the winter of 1979, when my teaching assignment brought us to Sicily. While there, I worked in Catania, at one end of the island, which was second in size to the largest city, Palermo, at the other end. We rented a place in a small fishing village five miles east of Catania at the foot of Mount Etna with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean from our balcony. Phi lo sophy of Pe dag og y With one exception, the courses that I taught during my first three appointments were all at the undergraduate level. They included Criminology, Corrections, and the Criminal Justice System at Edinboro. At UNLV, courses included Introduction to Criminal Justice; Punishment and Social Structure; Class, Race, and Crime; and a graduate seminar, Criminal Justice Policy Issues. At UMED, I taught Introduction to Law Enforcement
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and Criminal Justice, Social Problems, Deviant Beh avior, and Corrections. With the exception of the graduate students with whom I worked at UNLV, I was on my own when I taught my classes. In contrast to the practice during my days as an undergraduate and graduate student at Berkeley, where professors gave lectures and teaching assistants led discussions, I found myself in the situation of having to do both. Thus, as a way to facilitate classroom dialogue and to cover the assigned readings, I began allocating around 70 percent of classroom time for lectures and 30 percent for discussion. To this day, even when I have a teaching assistant in an undergraduate course, I have always found this division to be a productive one for my students as well as for myself. I should mention that my students have always been encouraged to interrupt my lectures with any relevant comments or questions that they may have. This practice has been as much for them as for me. For them, when something clicks in their minds, they can act on it rather than wait u ntil later to bring it up. As for myself, I have always believed that I am at my strongest as an instructor when I am responding extemporaneously rather than speaking from prepared texts. During discussion time, no m atter how large or small the enrollments are, I have always incorporated a modified version of the Socratic method of instruction, a format where my next question for the class comes from the last response of a student to the previous question posed by a student or myself rather than from a predetermined set of queries for the students. I should also reveal that most of my long- winded and often detailed lectures of yesteryear have reluctantly been replaced by PowerPoint presentations. Dialectically, I still prefer textual lectures to PowerPoint slides because the contents of a lecture are so much more detailed than a present at ion. On the other hand, I also understand that while looking at the slides is more alluring, friendly, and perhaps less demanding than following lectures, the slides are also more conducive to my spontaneous soliloquies. As a postdoctoral, full-time, neophyte assistant professor, I used many of my favorite books from my Berkeley days of study. Concerning the adoption of specific titles, I should emphasize that back before the number of criminal justice majors in the United States or anywhere e lse began to take off in the 1980s, few criminal justice textbooks had been written. However, criminology textbooks date as far back as the nineteenth c entury in Europe and the early twentieth century in the United States. So there were more than a few well-developed criminology textbooks, written mostly by sociologists, to choose from. As a graduate student I had read many of these based on recommendations from my instructors. As an undergraduate, however, I recall only a few of the same textbooks being circulated. The most popular textbook was the 1967 edition of Criminology and Penology,
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co-authored by faculty member Richard Korn and Lloyd W. McCorkle. McCorkle had been the commissioner of New Jersey’s corrections system from 1963 to 1971. Afterward, he was a professor at John Jay u ntil his death in 1984. Another textbook assigned by Takagi for undergraduates when I was his teaching assistant was Criminology: Crime and Criminal Justice (1970) by Stanley D. Eitzen. Over the decades I have found my way to using some of the shorter 300-to 400-page textbooks, but primarily for introductory level courses. With the exception of my first appointment, I have always avoided the larger 500-to 600-page textbooks, as I find these too onerous to cover in fifteen weeks. On the other hand, I have always found these mammoth texts to make useful reference sources. While at Edinboro I used John Kaplan’s Criminal Justice (1972). At the time, more than one hundred universities had adopted his book. In fact, Kaplan greatly influenced the development of my lectures for teaching introduction to criminal justice courses. A set of lectures he gave at Stanford University Law School had been recorded, edited, and shared in book format with those instructors who were adopting his textbook. When I constructed my initial set of lectures on law enforcement, the courts, and corrections in order to teach the whole system of criminal justice, I essentially outlined his lectures and presented them. Though modified over time, his lectures on the intricacies of procedural and substantive criminal law as well as constitutional law shaped much of my instruction on the administration of criminal justice. I did not depart from those Kaplan-derived lectures u ntil the fall of 1996, when I returned to full-time faculty status a fter sixteen consecutive years as a middle-level administrator. With respect to my first two appointments—if not my third, as the books assigned for my overseas courses w ere selected and ordered by an unknown person in College Park, Maryland—the required books for the courses I taught w ere the books that had impressed me the most. For example, at Edinboro the first time I taught criminology I assigned the 1973 edition of Criminal Behavioral Systems: A Typology by Marshall B. Clinard and Richard Quinney as well as Our Criminal Society: The Social and L egal Sources of Crime in America (1967) by Edwin M. Schur. And the first time I taught corrections, I used four best-selling paperbacks: Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961) by sociologist Erving Goffman; Soledad B rother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) written by the inmate leader to his lawyer and prison rights activist Fay Stender; and two novels that w ere each made into award-w inning films, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey and A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess.
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When I arrived at UNLV, there was only one course in common with what I had taught at Edinboro—the introduction to criminal justice. I would develop a variation of the corrections course that I had previously taught at Edinboro, entitled Punishment and Social Structure. I also decided for pedagogical reasons to replace Kaplan’s textbook with two very different kinds of texts: Criminal Justice (1967), a series of essays written by Abraham S. Blumberg, and The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police (1975), a radical history of policing written collectively by Tony Platt and several other San Francisco Bay Area criminologists. In the graduate seminar on criminal justice policy issues I used The Criminologist: Crime and the Criminal (1974) by Charles Reasons and a book of readings, Criminal Justice in America: A Critical Understanding (1974), edited by Richard Quinney. One of the new courses that I developed and taught was Class, Race, and Crime, for which I used Critique of L egal Order: Crime Control in Capitalist Society (1974), also by Quinney, and Crime and Privilege: Towards a New Criminology (1975) by Barry Krisberg. As a prelude of things to come in this chapter, when I lectured about law enforcement, for example, I incorporated material from such mainstream works as Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society (1969) by Jerome Skolnick and Var ieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities (1968) by James Q. Wilson. By presenting both cutting-edge and classic analyses side by side, I was able to articulate well the comparative assumptions and arguments of the different criminologists or justicians. What the newer or critical analyses shared in common was the debunking of theories based on Parsonian models of functionalism, normative consensus, and the rule of law and order. These perspectives had dominated the criminological focus since before the end of World War II up u ntil the later 1960s. In contrast, the newer models of criminology and criminal justice were grounded in assumptions of structural and normative conflict as well as asymmetrical relations of law, power, and justice. The roots of these newer criminologies emanated from the nineteenth-century ideas of Karl Marx and Max Weber rather than from the nineteenth-century ideas of Emile Durkheim and Herbert Spencer that had informed the mainstream criminologies. These critical or radical forms of criminology resurrected the ideas of early twentieth-century conflict criminologists, such as Willem Bonger, George Vold, and Thorsten Sellin. Each of those theorists had assumed the co-existence of a ruling class or a power elite within pluralistic societies. Along with other dominant social groups and political interests, the ruling class or power elite is viewed as playing essential roles in the social construction of crimes; the political identification of criminals; the prioritization of criminal justice policies;
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and the legitimation of the apparatus of order maintenance and crime control. As a criminologist who came of age at the multidisciplinary Berkeley School of Criminology during the emergence of radical criminology, I have always appreciated the value of examining the full range of assumptions, ideas, beliefs, or theories presented by all criminological persuasions. In the aggregate, the various criminologies either reinforce or challenge the prevailing political and ideological orders as they promote or resist public and private policies of legal and social change. Whatever those relations might be for t hose criminologies identified in the introduction to this book, I have always tried to share an array of ideas and beliefs about h uman nature, society, and crime drawn from competing or differing perspectives on law, power, and justice. Nowadays, though many in the social and behavioral sciences understand that our standpoints, perspectives, or ontological preferences constitute an ideology of one kind or another, most proceed with their work as though this was not the case. Stated differently, though the assumptions of functionalism and positivism were first thoroughly critiqued and deconstructed in the 1960s, not much has changed in the prevailing practices of criminology. Back then as well as today, the positivistic and classical approaches to criminology remain dominant. Criminology is still heavily influenced by and dependent on studying individual criminals and controlling the crimes of the powerless as contrasted with studying organ izational criminals and controlling the crimes of the powerful. Similarly, although critical and feminist— if not radical—criminologies have grown their number of adherents over the past thirty years, their claims are still mostly marginal to the hegemonic claims of classical or positivist criminologies. Dialectically, proponents of mainstream criminologies are often unfamiliar with critical ideas as they have found positivist social science more rewarding and a safer academic path to pursue. Then again, many mainstream criminologists have found critical or feminist—if not radical—criminologists less threatening than they once did. And still, other mainstreamers remain skeptical of critical criminologies for one reason or the other. As for the cynical or pessimistic mainstreamers, they continue to dismiss these unorthodox criminologies as utopian, neo-Marxist or socialist, not unlike the social and political ideologues in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). Academic R e p re ssi on of R adi cal C riminology Com e s to L as Vegas What did it mean in the mid-1970s to be labeled as a radical criminologist? Then as today, whether this was a good or bad epithet almost always
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depended on the labelers’ upbringing, political orientation, and identification with either order or change. As for self-identifying radical criminologists from Berkeley or elsewhere, we have always believed that the key to resolving the crime problem involves structural change. More specifically, radical criminologists believe that we still need to devote much more attention than we do to the institutionalized crimes of oppression and repression. This belief does not mean that we have ever abandoned the study of the crimes and harms perpetrated by the powerless, as realist criminologists from the United Kingdom and elsewhere were arguing back in the early 1980s. On the contrary, in the United States, radical criminologists have always been fundamentally about two things. First, radical criminologists are trying to explain the etiology of the interpersonal, institutional, and structural relationships among the injuries caused by the powerf ul and t hose caused by the powerless. Second, radical criminologists are trying to develop policies and strategies to prevent the harms and victimization caused across both of these domains of criminality. To this day, the all-important crimes of capital and of h uman exploitation, if not the crimes of institutionalized injustice, remain marginalized and understudied by both mainstream and critical criminologists. With respect to my UNLV faculty participation in what generally falls u nder the academic evaluation rubric of serv ice to the department, the college, the university, the community, and the discipline, I was engaged for two calendar years in the following activities: ■ During 1976 and 1977 I was an advisor to Poor P eople Pulling Together, Inc., on justice related issues and the black community of North Las Vegas. ■ During 1976 I was an advisor to the Victim-Witness Program for the Office of the Clark County District Attorney. ■ During 1976 and 1977 I established the criminal justice internship in the sociology department and supervised student placements with the Southern Nevada Prison, the Nevada State Office of Probation and Parole, the Clark County Office of the Court Administrator, and Las Vegas hotel security with more than fifteen students enrolled per semester a fter the first year. ■ I was the host and local arrangements person for the annual meeting of the Western Society of Criminology held at the Sahara H otel, February 16–18, 1977. With respect to my participation in what generally falls u nder the evaluation rubric of teaching and advising, I need to underscore that no faculty member ever observed me in the classroom and no students ever evaluated
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me. So I can only reference my relevant work on curriculum development and program expansion: ■ The BA in criminal justice was less than two years old when I arrived; it had previously been a program in law enforcement, and most of the courses w ere about policing. As chair of the Criminal Justice Curriculum Committee I expanded the offerings by adding five new courses that were approved by the department: Introduction to Corrections: Punishment and Social Structure; Criminal Justice Social Policy; Class, Race, and Crime; and Criminal Law, L awyers, and the Courts. ■ In less than two years, the new criminal justice program had tripled the number of majors from around 50 to 150 students, and I was advising more than 50 students a semester when the average for the other faculty members was 15. With respect to what generally falls u nder the evaluation rubric of research and scholarship, my record included: ■ Two papers presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology and the Western Society of Criminology on the subjects of criminal lawyers and community-based corrections. ■ The publication of “In Defense of the Rich: The Emergence of the Public Defender” in Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology.1 ■ The publication of a book review of Arthur Rosett and Donald R. Cressey’s Justice by Consent: Plea Bargains in the American Courthouse that appeared in the American Journal of Sociology.2 ■ Two book contracts, one with Anderson Publishing for a reworked version of my doctoral dissertation and the other with Allyn and Bacon for a textbook, coauthored with Lynn T. Osborne, that was tentatively titled Crime and Social Justice: An Introduction to the New Criminology. One year before I joined the UNLV sociology department, Lynn Osborne, with a fresh doctorate in criminology from Berkeley, had been appointed as an assistant professor of sociology to teach courses in criminology, deviance, and women’s studies. One year after I became a faculty member in the sociology graduate program and the criminal justice undergraduate program, both h oused in the department of sociology, Julia Schwendinger, with her new doctorate in hand from Berkeley, arrived as an assistant professor of criminal justice. Having been denied tenure at Berkeley and without a university appointment, Herman Schwendinger moved to Las Vegas with Julia. UNLV provided Herman with his own office, library
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privileges, and the prospect of future employment. We w ere four self- identifying radical criminologists from Berkeley who in less than two years’ time had relocated to Las Vegas. The Schwendingers had come to academia a fter e arlier careers in social work. They w ere a generation older than Lynn and me. With the winding down of the Berkeley School of Criminology nearly complete, we had a distinct possibility of becoming another epicenter of radical criminology in the United States, especially because UNLV would soon become a full-fledged university and enrollments were about to take off, growing from 10,000 to 25,000 by the turn of the c entury. The closing down of the Berkeley School of Criminology next door in California was a story well known in higher education administration circles. More specifically, some local law enforcement leaders and others with political and economic power, including James L. Buchanan, the chairman of the board of regents, in collaboration with UNLV administrators and seven capitulating faculty, would soon render moot any pipe dream that Julia, Lynn, Herman, and I might have briefly shared about becoming more than a cluster of radical criminologists. Getting Fi re d On December 1, 1976, in clear violation of the Nevada system of higher education code, the university bylaws, and the bylaws of the sociology department, I received a letter from the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences informing me that my contract would not be renewed for the 1977–1978 academic year. Shortly thereafter Herman and Julia met with department chair Fred Preston to advocate on my behalf and to see w hether anything could be done to reverse the nonrenewal decision. During the course of the exchange, Herman and Julia let it be known that they could see no legitimate reason for my termination. In turn, the chair told Julia in no uncertain terms, “If you do not like the way things work around here, then you can tender your resignation anytime you like.” By the end of spring semester 1977, Julia had resigned and was moving to New York. A few weeks e arlier Herman had accepted a faculty appointment back in their native state. He was to begin another tenure-t rack position as an associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz in the fall. As it turned out, the first hired and the last of the four Berkeley radical criminologists left standing was Lynn. She received tenure; however, thirty-t wo years later, the winner of multiple teacher of the year awards from UNLV retired from that institution as an assistant professor. By the fall of 1977, I was collecting unemployment insurance and in the m iddle of a federal lawsuit against the university for its wrongful termination of my tenure-track contract, in the hope of extending the property
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rights of tenure-track professors. Starting in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court had heard several cases pertaining to the property claims of probationary public employees. At the time of my lawsuit, legal dicta in the cases of Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564 (1972), and Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593 (1972), afforded wrongfully terminated plaintiffs the opportunity to argue on behalf of their property right expectations as untenured professors. Beginning with Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U.S. 134 (1974), other sets of factual situations raising similar types of constitutional questions were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. By the 1980s, the Roth-Perry doctrine denying tenure-track professors property expectations would become settled law. That doctrine closed off any f uture lawsuits on behalf of the property rights of untenured professors. Some three weeks before the chair of the department first advised me of my nonrenewal, an officer from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) had tipped me off about my impending firing. I also knew the underlying reasoning for the external political interference into my second-year review process. The w hole sordid academic affair had to do with some hotel and law enforcement p eople thinking that this radical criminologist had been surreptitiously investigating the workings of the illegally org an ized sex trade in the Las Vegas gaming industry. The proximate cause for my firing occurred one even ing in October 1976 when I disclosed a piece of legislation at a public forum that had not yet been released to the press or the residents of Clark County for their consumption. This event occurred while I was u nder surveillance by Sheriff Ralph Lamb. Even with all of the procedural irregularities, the university’s botched cover-ups, and the outside political intervention involved in the nonrenewal, my lawyers and I did not believe that I would retain my job, certainly not in the short run. In the long run, we figured that a final resolution in my favor would depend on a decision by the United States Supreme Court. Moreover, this long shot could happen only a fter a federal appellate court had ruled on the question of property rights of untenured professors. That appellate ruling could not happen u nless the verdict of the district court was appealed. Worse yet, the court denied the motions we had filed for temporary and permanent injunctions to allow me to continue working at UNLV pending the outcome of the case, followed by oral arguments in August 1977. Judge Roger T. Foley of the U.S. District Court for the Nevada District rendered his written opinion almost two months later in October 1977. Judge Foley, on the one hand, rejected my property claims and, on the other hand, supported my liberty claims. At the time of the denial, my legal team believed that Judge Foley had to have knowingly erred in his analysis of the law regarding the property rights of tenure-track professors. The
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legal team also believed that the judge had knowingly gone out of his way to write a fifteen-page opinion that recognized that the university had indeed v iolated my constitutional rights to liberty. Procedurally, Foley’s opinion granted us the right to take our case to trial in federal court. Specifically, it opened up the legal door to discovery and to the power of deposing my adversaries. The ruling also allowed us to pursue damages for my liberty claims and, most important, to argue on behalf of the more meaningful property rights of untenured professors. Fin ally, his decision against my property claims confirmed our viewpoint that a successful lawsuit would entail several more years of expensive litigation to test the constitutionality of my substantive due process claims and to challenge the prevailing meaning of the property expectations of tenure-t rack professors. In August 1978, one month before the trial was scheduled to begin, UNLV and I reached a settlement. Significantly, the judge’s ruling had sanctioned the deposing of our defendants, which yielded additional evidence that the university had conspired to violate my fundamental rights to due process. Skillfully, the judge had engineered his decision to provide incentives for each side to settle the case. The evidence from the June 1978 depositions revealed other nefarious beh avior by my adversaries, so settling the lawsuit became the most prudent course of action for UNLV. As for my decision to settle, despite all of the negative facts b ehind my nonrenewal coming to light and playing out before a jury as well as the possibility of extending property rights for tenure-track professors, both financial and practical factors dictated that I resolve the case and move on with my life. Had Judge Foley granted our injunctions to remain in the classroom during the lawsuits that might have made a difference. In any case, when Charlotte and I moved to Europe in January 1978 to work for the University of Mary land, we had already moved on. We had sold our home, and Charlotte had resigned from her m iddle school teaching position. We were back in Las Vegas during the summer of 1978 only because of the depositions and ongoing litigation. Pointedly, my two lead attorneys from Paul, Hastings, Josnosky, and Walker, a powerful law firm from Los Angeles that represented mostly wealthy p eople and large corporations, had informed me that our modified pro bono arrangement would be coming to an end after the depositions were concluded. B ecause t hese law offices typically represented the interests of capital and not labor, they could no longer continue to represent the other side without billing me for their serv ices. Similarly, the $15,000 I had received from the American Federation of Teachers to help with my expenses through the preliminary hearing had all but dried up as well, and we heard from Washington, D.C., that no more money would be forthcoming. Fin ally, in order for my liberty claims to have any standing, I would have had to
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remain without gainful employment. Hence, I settled the case for a sum of $45,000 and a tepid apology that appeared above the fold on the front pages of the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review Journal. At the time, this amount of money was almost triple my annual base salary of $15,431 for 1976–1977 but a mere fraction of what the costs to the university could have been had a jury awarded me punitive damages for my pain and suffering. The settlement may be interpreted as a partial victory for me and for many students and some faculty who had worked on behalf of my case. We invited twenty-t wo people to a celebratory dinner at an upscale restaurant off the Las Vegas strip shortly before Charlotte and I returned to Europe. However, I would submit that the settlement was more of a victory for UNLV, as my adversaries never had to face the consequences for their unethical, dishonest, and repressive behavior. Some of the key defendants in my wrongful termination suit might have experienced a fair amount of negative publicity and, in some instances, extensive shaming from students for the better part of two years. However, I never thought that these p eople were fully outed for their cowardly and dastardly deeds. Nor did I think that the public really ever knew the back story of why these individuals acted as they did. I felt as though the reasons for their misdeeds toward me on behalf of others disappeared with the settlement before the misdeeds ever became public. What is more, the university administration and faculty who w ere complicit with my firing had accomplished the goal of shutting down a budding mecca of radical criminology. My adversaries for the most part were neither invested nor engaged with the litigation outside of the depositions. The payment of $45,000 meant absolutely nothing to these defendants because u nder the doctrine of respondeat superior the employer is liable for acts of employees performed within the scope of their employment. The defendants did not have to personally pay for any of their legal fees or for any of my losses. On the other hand, had we gone to trial on the merits and the jury awarded me punitive damages, then these defendants might have ended up being collectively liable for several hundred thousand dollars in damages, as they would not have been covered by e ither the doctrine of respondeat superior or by UNLV’s liability insurance. Certainly, for my adversaries, g oing to trial meant risking the w hole story coming out in public, much to their chagrin. For example, we had learned from deposing the defendants that the alleged vote against my renewal had been fraudulent. Preston had failed to disclose at our dismissal meeting that he had altered the vote tallies with the help of the former department chair, Ronald Smith. The two of them had privately pressured two untenured professors, Andrea Fontana and James Frey, to tear up their ballots and to change their votes from affirmative to negative. In other words, without any student votes as called for, the original
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tally, instead of two votes for and six against me, was four votes for and four against—unless the other faculty members also changed their votes, as I have suspected. A fter all, they had all voted in favor of me only six months before, with three months of summer in between. We never discovered any evidence to support such a claim, however; all we knew for sure was that the two affirmative votes cast by untenured professors Lynn Osborne and Julia Schwendinger had not been tampered with. Detai ling My Pol itic al and L e gal Case against the U nive r sity In conformity with the university bylaws, decisions regarding retention for the third year of a tenure-t rack position were to occur during the second year of employment in the month of October. At the time of my nonrenewal, the bylaws of the sociology department read, “All personnel decisions of promotion, tenure, retention, and sabbatical leave are voted on by departmental faculty and elected student representatives.” Prior to the vote, at an announced departmental meeting, the personnel committee, with a two-to-one ratio of faculty to student members, is charged with evaluating all candidates according to their “professional activity and serv ice to the community,” “serv ice to the department,” “collegiality,” and “scholarly activity.” Remarkably, at the time there was no mention of teaching effectiveness. The personnel committee then writes up an assessment about how the faculty member has performed and provides a recommendation for or against an action. Next, this written evaluation is presented by the department chair to the candidate for an opportunity to respond in writing to any of the content contained in the personnel committee’s evaluation. In the case of disagreement, both statements are forwarded to the department faculty and the student representatives for a vote. To circumvent any of these procedural steps of reappointment and retention may be a violation of the Nevada system of higher education code. October of my second year came and went without the department chair sharing a personnel committee evaluation of my perform ance as called for prior to any vote taken by the department. Prior to a phone conversation on October 21 with one of Las Vegas’s finest, which tipped me off that the university had decided to get rid of me, I had not given the m atter of my third-year retention much thought. I was thinking that this would be a mere formality as I had received a unanimous vote for retention in the spring of 1976 for my second academic year, 1976–1977. At that time, a letter of recommendation from the sociology chair, Preston, to the College of Arts and Sciences dean, Marvin Loflin, began by saying that I had been “quite successful” during my time at the university. Preston had written that I “related well to the wide range of students that enroll in the criminal
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justice classes” and I had “assumed an active role within the Department.” He then highlighted some of my scholarly work and a “book contract with a major publisher” that showed “evidence of much promise.” His last sentence included the phrase “we are all very pleased that he has joined our staff.” In addition, at the end of my first year as a reward for a job well done and as an incentive for me to remain at UNLV, Preston assigned me a gradu ate assistant from the sociology department for the 1976–1977 academic year. He also reduced my normal teaching load from three courses per semester to two courses per semester because of my time spent developing an internship program and expanding the criminal justice curriculum. In recognition of my active scholarly agenda in contrast to that of the two nonterminal criminal justice faculty members, Preston was also talking about my coming up for early tenure and promotion. Moreover, for additional compensation he had arranged for me to teach a third course as an “overload” one even ing a week at the Nellis Air Force Base. Until the late-n ight phone call from Officer Michael McLaughlin of the LVMPD, I had been thinking falsely that all was copacetic with my academic life. Following the heads-up, I decided that I had better study the university bylaws quickly, starting with those of the sociology department. I discovered that both the sociology department and the College of Arts and Sciences had not been following their own rules. And, therefore, UNLV was not in compliance with the Nevada system of higher education code. For example, concerning my first-and second-year reviews, I was not shown any personnel committee evaluations and recommendations before any departmental vote was taken. Nor had there been any participation by student representatives as called for. About two weeks before Thanksgiving, Preston and I met to discuss my second-year evaluation. As I had been forewarned of my eminent firing, I was more or less prepared for what might be coming at our meeting. Preston advised me that I had been rated very poorly by the department and would not be reappointed for the 1977–1978 academic year. He maintained that I had received a faculty vote of two for and six against retention. He suggested, however, that if I immediately resigned, effective at the end of the 1976–1977 academic year, then I could avoid the stigma of not being reappointed and that he would write me a strong letter of recommendation. I thought to myself, you must be crazy if you think I am going to resign without seeing any written reasons for my termination. I asked Preston why had I not seen the personnel committee’s evaluation before the faculty voted on it. I further asked him when he was planning to share in writing the reasons for my nonrenewal. With a sheepish grin on his face, Preston told me that he did not have access to the personnel committee’s recommendation,
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as my file was in the dean’s office. I then stood up and turned to leave his office while telling him that when he had access to my files and was prepared to share the written reasons for my non-reappointment to let me know. At our meeting, I had not mentioned anything about the absence of student representatives. Now that I had been officially told that I was losing my job, I wasted no time informing those students taking courses from me. I told them that I was not g oing to be rehired for the next year and that the university was refusing to give me any reasons. A few days later, Julia, Lynn, Herman and I got together and were on the phone with my brother Ron, a law partner of Paul, Hastings, Josnosky & Walker. This was before I retained him and an associate in the firm. At the time, my b rother specialized in tax and real estate law, so he found Donald D. Daucher, a constitutional lawyer, to work the case with us. As the adage goes, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.” When my older b rother agreed to take my case he told me an interesting variation of that popular adage—one I suspect that he may have made up especially for his kid brother—which went something like this: “Smart clients retain the best attorneys that they can afford or can acquire pro bono. Then they read the law for themselves to make sure that their lawyers are getting it right.” Read the law I did. In fact, along the litigation pathway I also wrote two of my own motions. Since all our documents, motions, and so forth were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in Las Vegas, I would receive phone calls periodically from my b rother telling me we needed to file a motion. I would then relay this information to my local attorney, J. Douglas Deaner, who provided my two California attorneys with standing in Nevada. On a couple of occasions, rather than waiting for Deaner to get around to writing and filing the motion—a nd to save myself some money—I wrote the motions myself. Then I would swing by Doug’s office to have it typed up on their stationery and signed by him before I would then swing by the court to file it. At least to the point of actually going to trial, b rother Ron and Daucher did not bill me for most of their legal time. However, I had to retain Deaner locally and ultimately a fourth attorney, a childhood friend who had grown up a few houses away, Samuel Wilner, to help me negotiate the settlement. Sam had literally just passed the California bar and was starting to practice in a small legal firm in Beverly Hills. These attorneys were billing me for their serv ices. From the onset we mounted a joint political-legal strategy to save my job. Years later, I maintain that our partial victory against UNLV was a product of both the student reaction to my firing and to our side winning the narrative in the court of public opinion. Our success with the public was aided by the university’s incompetency. For one example, the vice president
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for academic affairs, Arthur C. Gentile, was “tripped up” talking live with reporter Sarah Edwards from KLAS-T V, a CBS affiliate, about how UNLV would not fire faculty members “whether they were liberals or conservatives or somewhere in the m iddle.” Edwards queried back: “Okay, but what about radicals, would you fire someone because he was a radical like Barak?” Gentile looked somewhat confused and he just repeated what he had already stated. Edwards rejoined, “Yes, but Barak is neither a liberal nor a conservative, he’s a radical.” Then she asked him, “Was Barak’s contract not renewed because he’s a radical?” Gentile responded by saying, “I am not sure. No, he wasn’t.” Edwards, fresh out of the UCLA School of Journalism and sounding more like a prosecutor than a reporter, went in for the kill and asked, “You’re not sure or he w asn’t, which one is it?” Gentile responded, “I don’t know.” We also had a bit of luck when two students who I did not know came forward in the m iddle of the 1977 winter semester with incriminating information. They both signed affidavits about their conversations with a couple of key persons. One was the personnel director at UNLV and the other was the chairman of the board of regents. I personally never met either one of these men. In the case of the first affidavit, a female student came to my office hours with some information that she thought might be of use to me. At the reception for a bar mitzvah the weekend before in Beverly Hills, she had met a fellow Nevadan who turned out to be the personnel director. As they w ere talking, the student asked him why the university was getting rid of Barak. Without hesitation he responded, “Because Barak’s a socialist.” In the case of James Buchanan, an older woman who was married to a law partner of his came up to me a fter class with some choice evidence. She had gone to discuss the m atter of my retention with Buchanan in their law offices. Initially, he feigned ignorance about my situation. She went on to tell him that she was taking a class from me. And that he needed to look into the m atter because as far as she was concerned the university was making a terrible m istake. At that point, Buchanan reached into his desk and pulled out a copy of The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. Waving the book around, he stated, “So long as I am the chairman of the Regents at UNLV, this shit is not going to be taught at my university.” She then tried to defend me, explaining that I presented all sides of an issue. Buchanan replied, “Bullshit.” He then broke into a diatribe about me, talking about how I was “fucking the students’ minds and bodies.” For the record, attorney Buchanan was the last of ten defendants scheduled for depositions over the course of two full days in the Las Vegas offices of Deaner and Deaner. He was the only no-show, for he knew precisely why we were deposing him.
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Student and community support was much more than I could have hoped for. Within days of my first discussion with the sociology chair and before I had seen anything official in writing from the university about my termination, the first letters of support began appearing in the Yell, the campus newspaper, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Over the course of twenty- two months, more than fifty items appeared. There was also coverage of the legal case in the Las Vegas Sun. In addition to the letters to the editors and the nightly local news on TV, more than a dozen bylined and editorial stories were scattered throughout the coverage. Two fundraisers w ere held and a “Defend Academic Freedom” fund was established, which raised a little over $3,300. I also had a total of $15,000 for legal costs allocated separately from the local (Reno) and national (D.C.) offices of the American Federation of Teachers. The first letter in the Review-Journal, dated November 17, 1976, began: “Something must be said of an educational system that views ideas and concepts contrary to t hose held by an elite class as being cancerous and in need of surgical removal. Most surgery is performed after the consent of the patient is obtained, however, in the case of Gregg Barak the students w ere not informed u ntil a fter the surgery was completed. Prognosis: Terminal.” A letter from the Yell dated November 19, 1976, read: “The university has done it again! Over the past year, t here has been a crackdown on the professors at UNLV. The administration has taken upon itself the right to fire non- conforming professors, such as Doctors Simich and Kravitz in the Political Science Department and most recently Doctor Gregg Barak of the Sociology department.” The letter continued, “It seems that the professors who have been fired hold conflicting views with t hose conservative ones shared by the administration, and are therefore viewed as a threat.” Another early letter to the editor written by two students appeared on November 24, 1976, in the Yell: “On Monday, November 15, it was brought to our attention that Dr. Barak of the Sociology department had been fired. As of yet, the Sociology department has not disclosed the reasons why Dr. Barak was not g oing to be reinstated, and it appears doubtful that such a disclosure w ill be made.” Like several letter writers, this one wonders about pressure from outside forces: “It is rumored that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, acting in opposition to Dr. Barak’s radical ideology, has asked the Sociology department to deny his reinstatement.” Other letters speculated about pressure from the Office of the Clark County District Attorney concerning my known views on the lack of criminal prosecution of org an ized and gaming crimes in Nevada. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, sociology chair Preston and I would have our final conversation about my termination. Preston and I lived near
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one another, and on a whim I decided to have an impromptu conversation with Fred and appeal to his “better angels.” As Vegas luck would have it, he was out front working on his desert rock garden, so I did not have to knock on the door. I pulled over, parked the car, and got out. I asked Fred whether we could talk without giving him a chance to decline. I began by asking him why this was happening to me. Once again Fred tried to talk to me about my poor evaluation and I interrupted him: “We both know that’s bullshit.” I then broke into a litany of the procedural irregularities, and he interrupted me before I could finish. Without mentioning anybody by name Fred confirmed what I already knew; and in so many words he stated, “Gregg, you’re a criminologist, this is Las Vegas, and if anyone should understand how t hings operate around here, you should. I do not know the particulars but evidently you have been barking up the wrong criminological tree.” He continued that he had no choice but to cooperate with my nonretention— all of which he would cavalierly deny if ever asked. Preston pointed out that I was r eally naive to think that I had any chance of filing, let alone, winning a case against the university here in Las Vegas. Before I got into my car to drive home to share the news with Charlotte, informing her that Fred just corroborated what we already knew and apparently he thinks that he is prepared to perjure himself, Fred also warned me that, should I fight to retain my job, “t hings would only get worse” for me. In so many words, I responded that we w ill just have to see about that. That was the last time Fred Preston and I ever spoke. I am not sure whether t hings necessarily got worse for me during the last six months of my employment at UNLV. I do know, however, that the heat was turned up. In the spring of 1977, we found ourselves accused by the w ater department of not paying our last bill from a rental property we had moved out of some twelve months earlier. Char and I also had our joint taxes audited for the first and only time in forty-three years of marriage. During this period, we also received several mysterious and ominous late-n ight or early-morning phone calls from an individual letting us know that we were being watched and that we should just move away. I do recall one conversation, however, when I was told that this was the new Las Vegas, and I did not have to worry about ending up buried in the desert somewhere. Over the phone, the university’s retained attorney told boldfaced lies about what I had e ither not done or was prepared to do, as an attempt to undermine my credibility— with, mind you, my own b rother. The week a fter Thanksgiving I received a letter of termination dated December 1, 1976, from Marvin D. Loflin, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, with copies of same to the vice president for academic affairs and to the chair of the sociology department. The letter contained two sentences. The first one read: “This is to notify you that the 1976–77 academic
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year w ill be your terminal year in the Department of Sociology of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.” The second sentence was a simple, “Thank you for your serv ice to the department and the college.” On the same day as my dated letter of termination, two letters to the editor and the first of several editorial commentaries appeared in the Yell. From the letter by a sociology major: “I think that this case should come to the attention of the students as another example of just how l ittle we have to say about anything that goes on at UNLV. . . . Shouldn’t at least the students who are majoring in a certain subject have some voice within their department as to what professors they must listen to?” What the students were unaware of at the time but w ere quick to learn about, and to act on, was that they did actually have a voice. As I have already mentioned, according to the department bylaws, students had the authority, unheard of in academia as far as I know, to elect voting representatives on m atters of departmental retention, tenure, and promotion. In sociology the students could elect a total of seven or eleven representatives depending on which of the two sets of departmental bylaws at the time were being disregarded. When the time came for my reconsideration hearing in May 1977, sitting around the table were seven elected student representatives and eight faculty members all ready to cast their votes up or down. Use of the number seven rather than eleven was determined based on the department presenting a memorandum of understanding that had reduced the number of student representatives from eleven to seven. The other letter was signed by all of the students in my Sociology 540 graduate seminar. They wrote how my “teaching style and communicative skills are creative and thought provoking” and that my “classroom lectures stimulate intellectual discourse.” They discussed the relevancy of my radical policy positions and how these w ere necessary for free inquiry and a well- rounded education. They went on to say how I “presented multiple perspectives” and how my “presentation skill invites and encourages student interaction in a seminar situation—something which is not often achieved in other graduate seminars.” By way of their conclusion, they wrote, “Dr. Barak offers a unique expertise in an area that no other faculty member currently possesses and which is imperative for those graduate students interested in criminal justice and criminology as their special concern.” In the same issue of the Yell was an account from Focal Point, a column by George Stamos, Jr., who without my knowledge had dropped into my Introduction to Criminal Justice course with some eighty students: “I found Barak’s class quite provocative. He deals forcefully with issues of police brutality, formations of police states, ghetto problems with police relations, and other related topics.” He happened to be there on a day when we w ere
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discussing law enforcement from coast to coast. Stamos also noted that one of the two books I had required for the course was The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, “a radically-oriented study of the police in our society.” He also pointed out, the “book was dedicated to the ‘heroic people of Vietnam and other oppressed p eople.’ ” He continued, “This is not your average stale textbook by any stretch of the imagination.” He also mentioned that I was not afraid to talk about the truth of police-community relations. Stamos explained that “Barak is an example of the ‘new breed’ of urban sociologists and criminologists that schools such as Berkeley produced during the sixties.” T oward the end of his piece, he noted, “Although it is very hard to judge an instructor’s overall perfor mance from one class session, I was impressed with Barak’s forthright manner and his grasp of the material. The power of the material held my attention. And, from what I could see of his students, their attention was held fast as well.” The columnist finished: “Barak may be creating some campus controversy as a result of his impending termination, but perhaps a frank discussion on academic freedom would be a refreshing change, if not a vital ingredient in improving our educational environment.” On December 15, 1976, Officer Michael McLaughlin’s “Open Letter to the Students and Faculty at UNLV” appeared in the Yell. His letter was as much for his bosses as for the university community. McLaughlin began by pointing out that he had been associated with me for two semesters and, like other writers of letters in support, he addressed my “excellent teaching abilities.” He ended his letter by saying that he was “hard-pressed to understand why” my “contract has not been renewed” and he urges “the Administration to reconsider their position.” McLaughlin concluded his letter: “As a member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, I have found Dr. Barak’s knowledge of the criminal justice system to be unique and extremely accurate. I feel that since I have been associated with Dr. Barak, he has had a positive influence on my academic development, as well as on my role as a policeman.” In my response to Dean Loflin dated December 3, I requested that the university provide me with a written statement of the reasons for my termination. On December 22, I received a letter from Associate Professor and Chairman Frederick W. Preston informing me, “This letter is in response to your request for reasons . . .” Of course, I should not have had to request reasons for my termination. According to the Nevada system of higher education code I had been entitled to those reasons at least six weeks before receiving my official letter of termination from the dean, not afterward. The letter identified the “reasons” for my nonrenewal as follows: “Your reappointment failed” because “your perform ance in the areas of (1) professional activity and serv ice to the community, (2) serv ice to the Department,
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(3) collegiality, and (4) scholarly activity was insufficient in quality and/or quantity.” Of course, that letter did not in substance constitute a fair, sufficient, and useful written statement of the reasons for the decision not to reappoint me within the purpose and meaning of Section 4.2.3 of the system code. Actual reasons as called for have to explain how I had insufficiently satisfied t hose criteria compared with the other faculty members. At no time a fter sending this letter did the university ever provide me with a meaningful statement of the reasons for my termination. The letter also made good on Preston’s threat that things would get worse for me by claiming that “you do not have a reputation for stability among your colleagues.” Even if that otherw ise libelous claim were true, it was not one of the evaluative criteria for faculty retention. And while the university never provided any evidence for this claim and did not repeat it publicly, Preston stated on March 21, 1977, on KLAS-T V, that Barak had been “involved in unethical dealings involving the community.” Again, the university never provided any evidence for this slanderous claim. Without any substance behind their reasons for my dismissal, which smacked of a cover-up, UNLV had now enhanced my deprivation of liberty claim. As the saying more or less goes, “It’s not the a ctual corruption sometimes but the cover-up of the corruption that gets p eople in trouble.” Sure enough, Judge Foley acknowledged in his opinion that my rights to liberty had been v iolated, and he allowed us to proceed to trial. As I already shared, I settled for triple my annual salary. If a jury had found defamation and awarded punitive damages, however, I might have been awarded several hundred thousand dollars. I would like to share in its entirety one letter that appeared in the Yell in December 1976 and in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in February 1977. I believe this letter also sheds some light on what some p eople in southern Nevada may have found objectionable about me. I am referring to my community- based alliances with marginal populations in Las Vegas. This letter was from the staff and authored by the chairwoman of Poor P eople Pulling Together, Inc. (PPPT), Ms. Erma L. O’Neal: It has come to the attention of Poor P eople Pulling Together that Dr. Gregg Barak for 1977–78 has not been renewed by the Department of Sociology at UNLV. We are, furthermore, aware of Dr. Barak’s pre sent strugg le to reverse this decision and of his desire to be retained for the next academic year. In Professor Barak’s behalf, this letter urges his retention and expresses the support of the Las Vegas black community. Dr. Barak is one of the few professors at UNLV who relates well with Third World communities. He brings to the classroom and the Las Vegas community a rich and deep understanding of the cultural experiences of
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black, brown, and Native Americans. Dr. Barak’s analyses and teachings integrate the respective histories of nonwhite and white persons in the United States. Professor Barak looks at contemporary social problems from multiple perspectives, one of which includes the perspective of Third World people, something that is rarely taught at UNLV. We know and respect Professor Barak for his strong commitment to “nonviolent” social change and social justice. Dr. Barak is not only an advocate for “civil rights,” “equal rights,” and “women’s rights,” but also, and more importantly, for basic human rights and fundamental decency. We need more professors like Dr. Barak, not less! In closing, we would like to express firm support from minority communities for Dr. Gregg Barak’s retention. To lose the serv ices of Professor Barak in this community is to lose the support of a person who not only understands, but who can also identify with the problems and needs of poor folk generally, and blacks specifically, especially as t hese are related to crime, law enforcement, and criminal justice. Formed in response to the U.S. Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts in the 1960s, PPPT was an incorporated, not-for-profit, community-based serv ice organization that among other things worked toward ending housing discrimination in the United States. When Las Vegas legalized gambling in 1931, the city also passed ordinances prohibiting blacks from living in the city proper as was common throughout the nation. The legacies of segregated housing in Clark County have never fully disappeared. Before dissolving as an organization early in the twenty-fi rst c entury, PPPT had specialized in housing and civil rights for some fifty years with offices in both North Las Vegas and the city of Henderson. When I was in Las Vegas, the clientele of PPPT w ere poor and primarily black and Hispanic persons. They lived in the segregated and impoverished areas of West and North Las Vegas as well as in similar areas of Henderson, located some forty miles southeast of Las Vegas. Politically, PPPT had a good working relationship with the Democratic Party and a poor working relationship with the Republican Party. My role was to assist and advise the organi zation on m atters pertaining to crime and law enforcement. In this capacity, I helped PPPT org an ize a public forum on criminal justice and punishment in Nevada. The forum garnered news coverage and the interest of local law enforcement and corrections personnel. Student reaction to my nonretention was palpable and took me by surprise. A fter all, I was no longer living in one of the protest capitals. This was Las Vegas, a world away from the F ree Speech Movement and other student movements to resist discrimination. UNLV was a new university without much history of any kind. During the 1950s, the University of Nevada,
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Reno, offered extension courses in Las Vegas. An independent Nevada Southern College operated in the 1960s as a forerunner to UNLV that was established in 1969. By 1975, the campus was ripe for the development of an identity beyond that of basketball. While Jerry Tarkanian and his Running Rebels were putting UNLV on the higher education map, the students had also been witnessing several cases of what they thought of as an unfair assault on nonconforming faculty members without their student input. In a way, my nonretention became a rallying cry at the university for academic freedom. In addition to the two faculty members from political science, other faculty members from such departments as communications and physical education had also been identified as victims of difference and academic repression. Before the winter break, the Student Action Coa lition (SAC) became an officially recognized campus organization. According to article I of the constitution of SAC, dated December 1976, the organization’s purpose was “to promote student participation in the administrative activities which involve the question of academic freedom, particularly in the cases of faculty evaluation, retention, and dismissal.” In order to confront what SAC labeled as “administrative indifference,” the group came “together, formed and org an ized a base for legitimate political strugg le” for the purposes of making sure that the university and departmental policies and procedures for faculty evaluation not only w ere consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment but also w ere being followed as written. SAC was primarily engaged in educating the student community by investigating cases of dismissal that might have involved academic repression. The new organi zation also published a collectively written column in the Yell, “SAC Speaks.” In the first issue of the student newspaper published a fter the winter break on January 26, SAC reported that through interviews, research, and discussion, they had uncovered, “in the case of Dr. Barak’s termination numerous ‘due pro cess’ or ‘equal protection’ violations committed by this University,” including the denial of student votes as called for in the departmental bylaws. SAC stated further that its legal committee had begun extensive research and preparation for a class action lawsuit on behalf of the Consolidated Students of UNLV. SAC would not be the only group on campus to ponder the possibility of filing a lawsuit against the university. In early February, members of SAC who were also sociology and criminal justice majors brought a petition of more than six hundred signatures supporting my retention to the attention of Preston and former department chair Smith. The students were rebuffed and told to keep their signatures as they were of no relevance to my termination—to which the students replied, “Yes, we are, only the department has not been following its own bylaws and allowing for elected student
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representatives to vote.” Smith replied, “Well, there have not been any elected student representatives around here for several years, so instead we have been appointing one graduate student annually for input.” Shortly thereafter, with the cooperation of the sociology department, the students org an ized and held a two-d ay student election on March 21–22, 1977. The seven student representatives were elected as follows: two graduate students from sociology, two undergraduates from criminal justice, and three undergraduates from sociology. The newly elected representatives called for a departmental meeting on April 6 to introduce themselves to the faculty and to discuss my termination. At that meeting, which I decided not to attend, the students wanted to hear from the faculty about the reasons for their votes. The only faculty members who spoke up at the meeting were Lynn Osborne and Julia Schwendinger. They talked at g reat length explaining why they had voted for my retention. The six faculty members who had voted not to renew my contract were conspicuously silent. The meeting was adjourned, to the disappointment of students—but not of our legal team, as a favorable record of my perform ance had been established without any contradiction. Before we could file a federal lawsuit, however, I would first have to exhaust the university’s internal remedies and submit a formal request for reconsideration. On April 12, 1977, I submitted my thirty-n ine-page request, plus exhibits A–Q, to each of the faculty members and elected student representatives of the sociology department as well as to the dean of the college, the vice president for academic affairs, and the university president. What the departmental organizing and wider student support on campus had accomplished was to provide enough public pressure that the administration had little choice but to grant me a hearing to revisit a decision administrators knew they could never legitimately defend. They w ere also in a bind. To have refused me the reconsideration would have provided further evidence of their denial of my due process. Such a denial would have provided our side with immediate access to the federal district court. The hearing for reconsideration occurred on May 2, 1977. I was present with attorney Daucher and our retained court stenographer to create an official transcript of the meeting. What happened at the hearing was a repeat perform ance of what had occurred when the newly elected students convened their meeting with the departmental faculty. Once again, the room was filled with conspicuous silence from those faculty members who would later be named as co- defendants in our lawsuit. At no time did any of my adversarial colleagues offer a single reason for their nonsupport of my reappointment. Nor did they provide any evidence pertaining to their allegations of “instability” or to the charges of “unethical activities” that Preston made on local TV. This
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outcome was precisely what Daucher and I were hoping for. Of the seven student reps, one remained silent and abstained from voting at the end of the reconsideration. He was the gradu ate assistant to the former chair, Smith. On the other hand, the other six students, along with Julia and Lynn, did their best to make an affirmative case for overturning the decision to not reappoint me. Following the one-sided affirmative discussion, ballots were passed out for a blind vote to overturn the decision not to retain me. Six students voted in f avor of my reappointment, as did Schwendinger and Osborne. The seven other faculty members, including a ringer who had not even participated in the original decision, voted against my reappointment. On its face I had received eight votes to overturn, seven not to overturn, and one abstention. Unfortunately, the bylaws had been written so that each student vote was counted as only half a vote. A story appeared by columnist Darla Anderson ten days later in the May 12 edition of the Yell, “Sociology Representatives May File Class Action Suit,” raising the question of the constitutionality of department bylaws that allowed a student vote to count only as one-h alf rather than as one full vote like votes of faculty members. Anderson’s column also pointed out that those faculty who had voted negatively, when questioned by her for the story, had “no comment.” My Declaration on July 15, 1977, in Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction (Civil No. LV-77–98, RDF), submitted to the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, repeated the same basic reasons, arguments, and documentation as our request for reconsideration did. In addition, we provided as an exhibit the transmitted record of the reconsideration hearing and the results of the vote to retain or overturn the decision not to renew my tenure track contract. T here w ere a few other minor differences as well. For example, the exhibits for reconsideration had only local letters of support mostly from students and some criminal justice agencies that I worked with, such as the director of the Victim-Witness Program for the district attorney’s office, as well as from Poor People Pulling Together (PPPT). There was also the letter from Officer McLaughlin of the police department. To t hose letters we added three more letters of external support from criminologists William Chambliss, Charles Reasons, and Richard Quinney. If and when the time came, they w ere prepared to testify as expert witnesses on behalf of the quality of my scholarship. Together, the request and the motion had factually demonstrated the procedural violations committed by the university. They also made the affirmative case that I had more than satisfied the criteria for reappointment. Procedurally, we believed that the department, the college, and the university had violated some of my constitutional rights. Daucher wrote, “It appears that the political views, beliefs or opinions of Dr. Barak influenced
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and motivated the decision not to reappoint him. Therefore, the decision is in violation of Dr. Barak’s First Amendment rights.” We also claimed that the protections of the Fifth and F ourteenth Amendments, and my rights to property and liberty, had been denied without due process of law. 3 With respect to property, we argued that based on recent court decisions, “reasonable expectations” should be accorded to tenure-t rack professors as well as tenured professors. With respect to liberty, we cited a recent court decision that a teacher’s liberty is affected when the underlying decision not to retain contains reasons that are apt to affect the reputation, standing, or character of the teacher in the involved community. Hence, the accusations by UNLV of my reputation for “instability” and the university’s public assertions of “concrete evidence” that Dr. Barak had “engaged in unethical activities involving the community” without any evidence was proof of a liberty violation. As for my affirmative case for retention, I believe that the reader has seen that there was no justification for my nonrenewal. Osborne had written a letter of support to the Yell and she spoke on my behalf at the meeting called by the students as well as at the reconsideration. In addition, Lynn also wrote a second letter dated April 4, 1977, that was used as an exhibit for both the Request for Reconsideration and the Motion for Preliminary Injunction: As a colleague of Dr. Gregg L. Barak’s for two years and as a friend of his for six years prior, I would like to respond briefly to the allegation referring to his “instability.” In all the years that I have known him and, particularly, in the past two, Gregg has been an extremely productive scholar. . . . He has always shown himself to be dedicated, responsible and reliable in his academic activities as well as in his personal relationships. A fter collaborating with Gregg for some time on an introductory criminology textbook, I can only say that working with him has been—and continues to be—a rewarding experience based on a reciprocity that I have rarely achieved with other co-workers. I have also been greatly impressed with Gregg’s ability to accept as well as to offer criticism, unlike many academicians whose egos flounder unsteadily in the face of anything less than total enthusiastic support for their work and ideas. On top of being steadily productive and consistently responsible—as well as responsive—to his colleagues, Gregg has also shown a g reat deal of responsibility in both his class preps—w riting well integrated, comprehensive lectures and he delivers them with a sense of concern not only for the material but for the students as well. His ability to teach ideas and to share his enthusiasm for t hose ideas with the class has made
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him, in a relatively short period of time, one of the most popular and respected professors in the department. Students have repeatedly indicated that Gregg is unsparing in giving them his time outside the classroom and that his encouragement has been a major plus in an otherw ise alienating academic environment. In view of Gregg’s productivity, his reliability and dependability, and his unceasing concern for and interest in his field and his students, I am hard put to understand the meaning or the justification for the charge of “instability.” In sum, with respect to the four categories allegedly used to evaluate my second-year perform ance, I was never given any reasons for how my perform ance was “insufficient in quality and/or quantity,” nor was any evidence ever provided by UNLV to support its claims about my “instability” or “unethical activities.” The question remains: Why was I fired? I believe that the answer had to do with my radical discourse, if not practice, as already discussed. T here was also the belief that I had been or was investigating the relationship between the illegal sex industry and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Fin ally, there was a public forum disclosure of mine about a marijuana reform bill that was quietly on its way to becoming law in Clark County. O n the Cont radi c ti ons of C ri m e and Crime C ont rol i n Las Vegas On October 21, 1976, as part of a public educational series sponsored by the Nevada Arts Council, I participated in a one-on-one conversation with Wesley A. Pomeroy, the Berkeley chief of police. Our subjects for the eve ning included police-citizen interaction, styles of local policing, and the community control of policing referendum. Held in the auditorium of the Clark County Library, the program began at 7:30 p.m.; our exchange lasted about an hour, followed by forty-five minutes of Q and A. A fter talking with some p eople I arrived home around 10:00 p.m. Charlotte told me that I had a phone message from a graduate student and to call him back ton ight regardless of the hour. That was strange b ecause the student was a police officer and he had never called me before. A little before 11:00 p.m. I returned the call to Officer McLaughlin, who at the time was taking my graduate seminar. Our exchange lasted about five minutes. Mike told me that I was going to be fired. I asked him why and how did he know? He informed me that at 9:35 p.m., the undersheriff for Clark County had personally paid him a visit at a neighbor’s home where he was having dinner. At the request of Sheriff Ralph Lamb, the undersheriff had been sent to the forum to “check me out” because
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there was concern that I had eyes and ears everywhere and that I had been snooping around in places where law enforcement had a working relationship with org an ized illegal prostitution. I immediately told Mike that made no sense and that I had no idea what they were referring to. He then mentioned that they were concerned that I had publicly discussed the proposed bill on marijuana. The undersheriff had visited him less than two hours before because they wanted to know w hether or not Mike had been my source. In any case, Mike told me to trust him and that I needed to prepare for losing my job. A fter our phone conversation, it was perplexing to me that the LVMPD thought I might be investigating org an ized crime on the Las Vegas strip. I also did not understand why my discussing the marijuana legislation during the Q and A was a concern of theirs, especially since I did not take a position on the proposed legislation that even ing. As I would learn from a follow-up conversation with Mike, my position regarding the bill was irrelevant. The police department’s concern was that I knew about a piece of legislation that had not been revealed to the public yet and that I had disclosed that information. Looking back, it had never occurred to me that I or anybody else should avoid talking about a proposed bill to the public Here is what transpired and accounted for me making those ill-fated remarks: Just prior to the forum I had come straight from teaching my weekly graduate seminar, 4:00 to 6:30 p.m. Mike gave a forty-five-m inute report as part of a course requirement. During his presentation, he talked about the type of arrest and prosecutorial data that he had collected and analyzed that was being used to support a proposed bill to reduce simple possession of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor. Mike had mentioned that the legislation had not yet been shared with the public. So when I responded to a questioner from the audience and used what I had learned from Mike’s present at ion it never dawned on me that I should not discuss a proposed piece of legislation, whether the public was or was not aware of it. I discussed what would likely result if the proposed legislation became law, because the legal changes w ere representative of a classic discretionary predicament of overpolicing versus underpolicing. I explained why the prosecution for marijuana possession would likely increase when the crime was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor. And how the downgrading of the seriousness of the offense to a misdemeanor might be more of a deterrent, since very few people w ere being charged and prosecuted for felony possession. Not long a fter my phone conversation with Mike, I began to realize that I did have eyes and ears everywhere. Internship students of mine w ere sprinkled through a growing number of criminal justice agencies. Additionally, many of my students worked on the Las Vegas strip. Most of them
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ere employed in hotel and food serv ices rather than in gaming or alcohol, w because they were not yet twenty-one. T hese students had been gradually sharing information and educating me about how things worked in the hotel and gaming industry. Moreover, I had several students doing internships with hotel security. I would meet regularly with these and other interns to discuss their placements, experiences, and so on. With respect to one of those hotel security interns I had had a series of conversations about the illegal sex industry that I had completely forgotten about. During the summer of 1976, this intern was working with the security unit in the Sands H otel. Inadvertently, he may have turned out to be my Achilles’ heel in this w hole sordid affair. We had several exchanges about how the laws prohibiting prostitution on the strip were selectively enforced— used against individual freelancers but not against t hose trading in sex work on behalf of the hotels. One day, the student came to my office to inform me that he had been pulled aside and questioned by one of the higher-ups in hotel security. Specifically, he was asked about why he was asking so many questions. The student explained that he had been following up on discussions that he had been having with me. I immediately realized that I should have informed him that he needed to be discreet about acquiring such information. I stopped asking him any more questions. When he had begun his internship in h otel security the workings of illegal prostitution and the gaming industry had not yet been something that I had given thought to. In other words, my queries for the student were simply spontaneous ones and not part of any research or investigation that I might have been engaging in. A fter his summer internship was over, I more or less had forgotten all about t hose conversations and the concerns of hotel security u ntil a fter my phone conversation with Officer Mike. Neither during the time I lived in Las Vegas nor any time afterward have I ever contemplated studying org an ized crime of any kind. I had learned pretty much what most p eople living in Las Vegas knew in 1976: the closing down of the brothels in the 1950s had never ended the cooperative relations between local law enforcement and org an ized prostitution. I also knew better than to engage in a public conversation about the mob-controlled sex industry in Sin City. Years later, Oscar Goodman wrote about the bounty of taxable revenue that could be generated in Las Vegas should the city legalize the multibillion-dollar sex industry in his best-selling autobiography, Being Oscar: From Mob L awyer to Mayor of Las Vegas (2013). During his twelve years as mayor, 1999–2011, Goodman advocated on behalf of the legalization of prostitution. In any case, I suspect at the time of my firing that there might have been a mistaken concern by the Clark County Office of the Sheriff that I might be inclined to shine a criminological light on these crimes of org a nized crime and corrupt law enforcement.
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Teaching and Trave l i ng i n Eur ope To make good on my claims to liberty I had to at least show that I had been looking for employment—even if I could not necessarily demonstrate that my lack of reemployment was caused by actions of my adversaries. Accordingly, my motions for injunctive relief provided a list of twenty-five positions that I had applied for since the beginning of 1977 without getting any offers, including ombudsman for the Nevada Prison System, a job I was interviewed for. Most of my applications had been for positions in academia but also in the fields of criminal and juvenile justice. Previously, while a graduate student, I had worked in Oakland, California, as a youth counselor in two group homes and as an administrative assistant for a residential halfway house that used to be an integral part of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. I was not really looking to secure work, although the ombudsman position looked very interesting. Professional employment pretty much of any kind would have undermined my liberty claims. It would also have most likely reduced an award for punitive damages, assuming that the case had gone to a jury trial. Back in those days, the University of Maryland was always hiring p eople with PhDs to teach in their European and Far Eastern Divisions, especially in the popular areas of law enforcement and criminology. As soon as I learned that I was not g oing to be back to work at UNLV for the fall 1977 semester, I immediately applied for an appointment as an annual lecturer with Maryland’s European Division. T hese positions offered no tenure-like security, as they are temporary for a maximum of thirty-six months, during which one is typically relocating e very ten weeks to a new geog raphical location. In this way, I could be gainfully employed and still make a liberty claim. Although I would be teaching for the University of Maryland in its Eu ro pean Division (UMED), my contract was actually with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). As a PhD I was hired as a GS-12, and I had the same benefits and privileges on NATO bases as military officers did. This was of value to me b ecause one condition of working for the DOD as a civilian was that I was subject to a full security check. This meant that investigators would be talking with my neighbors and former employers like UNLV. Thus, I would learn about whether or not my adversaries were disseminating negative information that might prevent me from receiving a security clearance, such as having engaged in any unethical or unstable beh avior. Apparently, UNLV had given me a clean bill of health. Four months later we w ere moving to the Federal Republic of West Germany, where I began teaching in January 1978 for UMED. This was the first time that e ither Charlotte or I had traveled outside of North America. So we viewed our European excursion as an opportunity to live abroad and travel as much as possible before resettling back in the United States.
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My lecturing assignments would relocate us geog raphically every ten weeks to teach two courses for eight-week sessions that would meet two days a week for three hours of instruction. I typically taught on Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday, which meant that there was plenty of time for hanging out and for sightseeing without any real time constraints. Between sessions t here were about ten days or so for relocating and traveling to the next assignment. A very nice perk was that the DOD picked up our moving expenses between assignments. We found places to live through a network of migrating faculty who would pass on their rentals to each other, rather than living on the military bases that w ere available for our use as well. I can divide those teaching excursions into winter–spring 1978, when I worked in Stuttgart and then in Munich; fall–w inter 1978, when I taught in Nuremberg, and we lived above a pretzel factory a few blocks away from old walled city; and winter-spring 1979, when I worked in Sicily and then in Heidelberg, where we lived within walking distance of the c astle with the same name. Looking back, much of this experience had less to do with criminological pursuits, teaching aside, and much more with trying to absorb Western European culture. Since the m iddle 1990s I have been back to Europe eight times, with all my visits for reasons related to criminology. My lack of criminological focus during the e arlier period was a product of always being isolated from other criminologists. When I encountered other lecturers where I was assigned to teach, they were generally from other disciplines. I do not think that I ever encountered another criminologist who was working for Maryland when I was. In any case, my students were mostly U.S. military personnel or civilians working abroad as well as their college-a ge offspring. There were also native Germans or Italians married to one of t hose Americans. The latter persons, usually the better students, w ere acquiring academic credits toward a U.S. degree in preparation for moving stateside with their spouses. All in all, this composition of students made for an inter esting mix and was useful for cross-cultural or comparative discussions of law, deviance, and social control. While working and living abroad, most every day was enjoyable. Many of those days w ere quite memorable, but three extended excursions stand out in my memory. The first one was in late September and early October a fter we had returned to Germany from just having settled the lawsuit. We were flush with money and had several weeks before the next teaching session was to begin. Charlotte and I spent the time travelling in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. We met up with Annika Snare from Sweden, whom I knew because she and I had been students at Berkeley in the same graduate cohort. A fter receiving her degree, she returned home and shortly thereafter became a faculty member at the University of Oslo. During our visit
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Annika took us to meet her colleague Nils Christie, the well-k nown Norwegian criminologist. We all spent a wonderful day and even ing with Nils and his wife Vigdis, both at their home and nearby at the city plaza. The second excursion took us to Egypt for two weeks during the holiday season. The highlights of this adventure include but were not limited to bribing our way onto an overbooked plane from Aswan to Cairo with another couple whom we had met on the train ride that took us from Cairo to Luxor and on to Aswan; making the acquaintance of a camel driver-g uide at the pyramids who allowed me to borrow one of his camels and full-out gallop across the desert sands; and observing President Anwar Sadat on his sixtieth birthday, December 25, 1978, being driven through the streets of downtown Cairo. The place was swarming with thousands of soldiers lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and five deep on both sides of the street throughout the entire parade route of several miles. Two years l ater, traveling on the exact same parade route and guarded by soldiers in the same way, Sadat was assassinated. The third excursion was on our circuitous route back from Sicily to Heidelberg by way of Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. This trip happened one month a fter I injured my lower back playing racquetball at the U.S. Naval Air Force Base in Sigonella, ending my competitive days on the six- walled court (though I would continue to play socially, one-on-one, and rotating one on two players, once or twice a week u ntil hip replacement surgery in 2003). One of the exchanges that made this trip memorable was a conversation that Charlotte and I had with one woman working at the Bulgaria Consulate who wanted to know why we wanted to visit Bulgaria. With a heavy accent that has stuck with us both all of these years, she said, “You want to go to Bulgaria? Why would you want to come to Bulgaria? Americans are not interested in Bulgaria.” She went on to inform us that fewer than ten thousand U.S. citizens visited her country annually. We told her that we were not like many Americans. She smiled, stamped our passports, and wished us well. I recall encountering some gypsies traveling the countryside by horse and wagon but they waved us off as we got too close. We had an enjoyable time staying overnight at the H otel Sofia, the only four-star hotel in the capital city, with a funky smell that I can still conjure up a fter all these years. The highlight of our visit to the former Yugoslavia was hanging out for two days with a group of Palestinian college students in Belgrade who w ere there studying socialism. The students approached Charlotte and me when they overheard us talking in Eng lish, which they preferred speaking to Serbo-Croatian. We returned to the United States and the West Coast in the early summer of 1979. Charlotte had decided that she had traveled enough. She had also shot and developed enough black-a nd-white photos of p eople, places,
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and objects to last a lifetime. She had applied to and had been accepted into the master’s program in film studies at San Francisco State University, beginning in fall 1979. Following Charlotte’s lead, I resigned from Mary land and managed over the summer to gain admission into the Lewis and Clark School of Law in Portland, Oregon. At the time, we figured that the money from the lawsuit was enough to support us both for a couple years of studying. However, this game plan was short-lived for one of us. A fter six weeks of law school, I dropped out and took a six-month consulting position with the Office of Justice Planning and Evaluation in Portland. I carried out a study of the serv ices available in Multnomah County for youth development and delinquency prevention. I submitted a final report and prepared a Youth Policy Statement for the City of Portland. In the spring of 1980, I rejoined Charlotte in San Francisco and collected unemployment insurance before moving in the fall 1980 to Aurora, Illinois. Nine months later, a fter completing her master’s program, Charlotte rejoined me in Aurora, where she found work for a second time as a m iddle school art teacher in the District of Kane County.
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In spring 1979 I was flown from Frankfurt to University Park, courtesy of Pennsylvania State University (PSU). Back in March, while I was lecturing in Sicily, PSU had left several messages for me with the Heidelberg administrative offices of UMED. Penn State was inviting me to campus to interview for a tenure-track position as assistant professor of community justice. I did not learn about this opportunity u ntil April when I returned to Germany to teach my last two courses in Europe. During the car r ide from the airport to campus I was informed that the previous two interviewees for the position w ere no longer v iable candidates. The job was mine to lose. Lose it I did, in a very stupid way; my egocentric recklessness would cost me this employment opportunity. I refer to the job talk I gave one Thursday afternoon to the administration of justice faculty—a talk that I knew well in advance I should not make. Yet I had rationalized my way into making the presentation b ecause I needed to tell the full story to a sympathetic audience that I could be working with. With only a few days’ notice before departing for PSU, Charlotte and I had discussed the job talk that I had decided to give on academic freedom and doing community justice in Las Vegas. Naturally, Charlotte let me know that this was worse than a bad idea. Char warned correctly that talking about my lawsuit would only provide Penn State with a very good reason not to hire me. Unless somebody else brought up the litigation, she nixed any discussion whatsoever about my termination at UNLV. Our story should be that we left Nevada for Europe b ecause we were young and not ready to settle down, especially in the Mojave Desert; we decided to move abroad to live in Europe and do some extensive traveling when the opportunity came. The safe job talk alternative I took a pass on was a present at ion about the use of therapeutic communities for hard-core delinquent youth and the residential program that I had designed for Tucson and that the state of Arizona had agreed to fund back in 1973 for $240,000 annually. My difficulty was that I was still pissed off and very much consumed with ill feeling over my political firing. I was especially angry that the whole wretched affair had sabotaged my plans for early tenure and promotion. In 81
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that state of mind I had convinced myself to be as candid about radical theory and practice as I could be. I thought it was better for PSU to know where I was coming from before the university agreed to hire me rather than afterward. I was g oing to forewarn employers as a prophylactic against any future academic repression. Problem was, this type of protection also prevented future employment. In any case, having witnessed my Berkeley mentors punished for using their academic freedom and now having experienced that punishment for myself in Las Vegas, I was still very sensitive, cynical, and overly defensive about university administrations and their inability to treat politically marginalized professors fairly. Foolishly I was thinking that administrators might want to distance themselves from their counterparts at UNLV and identify with me as the victim who fought back against academic repression. As a victim of employment discrimination, as someone who had been v iolated and abused, it was not easy to “move on” and to “let it go.” Emotionally, this is probably true of most personal violations, including those that involve one’s integrity, identity, and beliefs. In any case, at the time t here were the comforting lyrics from the popul ar 1977 song by George Benson, “The Greatest Love of All”: “If I fail, if I succeed. At least I lived as I believe. No m atter what they take from me. They c an’t take away my dignity.” Ah, the power of m usic to capture our emotions. The faculty listened attentively to my job talk as I told them my story of academic repression and community justice. We had an engaging discussion, I thought. As I recall, I was asked mostly about the procedural violations and the arguments surrounding the property right expectations of untenured faculty members. Our post-presentation exchange went past the allotted time of the interviewing itinerary. As for the PSU administration’s secondh and reaction, I might as well have appeared naked for the job interview. The fallout from my presentation had ended my viability as a candidate for this position. At breakfast the next morning, Cyril D. Robinson, a full professor, a practicing attorney, and a radical criminologist, explained to me that the search to fill the position was officially coming to an end for that year. Robinson also related that, regardless of my wayward job talk, the faculty thought I was the right type of criminologist for a position in community justice. My long flight back to Germany was not pleasant knowing that I had blown an opportunity to join a first-rate institution with a doctoral program. I also knew that I would have to face Charlotte’s “What did I tell you?” I had also been thinking at the same time as this interview about leaving academia, if only temporarily, to pursue a law degree. As I noted, that idea did not last very long as I dropped out of law school after six weeks. I lacked the necessary motivation to stay the law school course for the next several years. Given the alternative of returning to my true calling
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versus what I had found to be the tedious exercise of studying law, I aborted my short trial of being a formal student of the law. In order to make it easier for me to drop out of law school, I had hustled a six-month gig working for Portland’s Office of Justice and Planning Evaluation to conduct a research project on the juvenile justice system and the delivery of delinquency prevention serv ices in Multnomah County. This employment provided me with official stationery and the title of research consultant to use while applying for my fourth faculty position and first entry- level administrative position. By the time I had completed my research, written the final report, and submitted my recommendations, I had satisfied another short-term goal of accumulating enough earned income to qualify to collect six months of unemployment insurance. In April, I went to San Francisco to rejoin Charlotte, who was in the second semester of her two-year master’s program in film studies. From then u ntil I left for Aurora, Illinois, toward the end of summer 1980, I received biweekly checks from the state of California. Charlotte was living in an in-law apartment beneath a large two-story home, located a few short blocks from the famous Cliff House bar and restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where humpback w hales are seasonally observed passing by. A fter the Penn State interview u ntil the late 1990s, I was self-identifying as a critical rather than a radical criminologist. This identification reflected, in part, the parallel rise in the popularity of critical criminology and the marginalizing of radical criminology as well as, in part, the reality that nearly two decades had passed since graduate school and Platt, Takagi, and Krisberg were no longer writing my letters of recommendation. In addition, the Berkeley label of radical criminologist had faded into history. Of course, by the publication of Integrating Criminologies (1998), I was as secure academically as I needed to be. By then I was also self-identifying as an integrative criminologist. As was true for every other criminologist, mainstream or alternative, by that time there were more criminologies with which to engage and more perspectives with which to align one’s work. The labels seemed less rigid or more flexible than they once did. By the publication of Theft of a Nation (2012), I had already reconstituted my old labels as a radical or Marxist criminologist. Regardless of the criminological labels that I used to self-identify (i.e., feminist, newsmaking, global) and to express the types of criminology I practiced, my fundamental view of things has not changed for more than forty years. I still view the structural reduction of crime, harm, and victimization, whether committed by the powerf ul or the powerless, as dependent on a resolution of the inherent contradictions of capitalist reproduction, which entails transitions into mixed economies of globally sustainable social capital. Lastly, while the streams of other knowledge that I produce and disseminate generally reflect
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nontraditional ways of explaining and practicing crime and justice, I have certainly never abandoned the use of scientific methods nor the use of mainstream theories when they are useful for pursuing radically desired outcomes like social justice. In the m iddle of my c areer I interviewed for several faculty and administrative positions at institutions offering doctorates in criminology and criminal justice. Only one of those interviews resulted in a faculty offer, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which I declined. However, in 1993 I became an outside faculty member serving on my first doctoral committee. I have participated this way several times. T hese opportunities have stemmed from students reaching out to me on such diverse topics as homelessness and U.S. culture (Corey Dolgon, University of Michigan); prison privatization (Donna Selman, Western Michigan University); evidentiary law and forensic science (Donald Shelton, University of Nevada, Reno); white collar crime in the nightlife economy (Kenneth Sebastian Leon, American University); and police officer perceptions of organ izational justice and body cameras (Carolyn Naoroz, Virginia Commonwealth University). From my point of view, while I missed out not having worked in a department that awarded doctorates, I was nonetheless able to work with a handful of doctoral students. Unfortunately, the percentage of radical or critical criminologists in doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice is still small, making it very difficult to reproduce radical or critical criminologists. By the time I decided to return to academia a fter my brief hiatus, I had come up with what I regarded as an alternative plan for obtaining the benefits of a scholarly life of relative privilege and security. In the world of rapidly developing criminal justice programs, I would go a fter middle-level management. By the second de cade of the twenty- fi rst century, well- qualified candidates to fill available faculty and administrative positions in criminal justice and criminology are not in as short supply as they once were. Compared with many academic disciplines, however—e specially the humanities, in which t here are big surpluses of talented people for the number of available tenure-track positions—the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice occupy a rare university niche where there are still not enough qualified persons to satisfy market demand. In the early 1980s, when there was a more significant shortage of PhDs in criminology or criminal justice and a burgeoning of criminal justice programs, capable candidates willing to assume the duties of a program director or department chair w ere scarce. As a result, criminologists or justicians with the skill sets to do m iddle management were then and still are more mobile than faculty members not so inclined or willing. The key to this academic pathway has always been the ability to land the all-important first administrative post.
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Thus, to reenter academia, I was pursuing both faculty and entry-level management positions. I was imagining that the diversity of my faculty experiences coupled with my Berkeley credentials would be more important than my lack of formal administrative experience—especially at what I like to call ordinary, as opposed to elite or flagship, institutions of higher education. This is not to say that I lacked any involvement with the tasks that accompany entry-level middle-management positions. I did have some experience developing curriculum and had also established a criminal justice internship program. I could emphasize and build on these activities. More important, I believed correctly that prospective administrators and faculties would view me as a generalist rather than a narrow specialist. As a broad-gauged scholar and pedagogue who dabbled in a lot of t hings and who had already held three academic positions in the overlapping fields of sociology, criminal justice, criminology, and law enforcement, I could reasonably expect to land some kind of administrative position. The chapters in the m iddle part of this book revolve around three very different environments of higher education where I had successive managerial experiences from 1980 to 1996. Two of these, one in Illinois and the other in Alabama, were at campuses where teaching and serv ice were more valued than research and scholarship. This was not true of the third institution, in Michigan, which had transitioned away from being a teachers college in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The expectations at the campuses that put teaching and community first, as well as their town-a nd-gown relationships, afforded me opportunities to disseminate knowledge without pressure to produce knowledge. These institutions, typically, did not have in place the same types of requirements for job security or incentives for scholarly activities as at the elite and flagship institutions or even at most comprehensive universities. In Illinois, my scholarly productivity was limited to three essays, published in Crime and Social Justice, reviewing high-profile anthologies and one prominent book: Punishment and Penal Discipline: Essays on the Prison and the Prisoners’ Movement; Corrections: An Issues Approach; Crime and Public Policy; and Confronting Crime: An American Challenge.1 Not to overgeneralize, but at these ordinary colleges and universities there is often a cultural mentality that we are living in a world of overspecialization where disciplines produce knowledge for peer-reviewed journals of questionable value beyond academic esotery. While I get the point, I have always disagreed with this type of anti-intellectual skepticism. I have also had no problem defending such esoteric research and scholarship for at least a couple of reasons. First, we often do not know the value of knowledge in the long term. Second, I do not believe that all knowledge has to have some kind of impact on society. In other words, I believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge or for the benefit of one’s disciplinary peers.
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At t hese town-a nd-gown institutions, t here is often a related ethos with which I do not necessarily disagree: the belief that the more immediate impact on p eople may be, not from the knowledge produced in research laboratories or in faculty offices, but from what springs forth when knowledge is disseminated in the classroom and through other public platforms. At least in the beginning of my teaching, I certainly ascribed to the pedagogical importance of trying, one classroom at a time, to shape the worldviews of students on their way to becoming criminal justice professionals and citizens of the f uture body politic. Similarly, I have always placed a high value on community involvement, serv ice education, and applying one’s discipline in everyday practice. T hese opportunities allow for a give and take, with academicians learning from the residents of a community while helping the community to recognize and mobilize residents’ own knowledge and power. Regarding instruction and curriculum development on campus, I have always thought that the introduction of new courses or programs was one way to influence what was being discussed and disseminated as criminological knowledge. For example, as a director and chair at a small private college transitioning to a medium-size university in the city of Aurora, I developed a program into a department. Next, as chair of a department offering a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, I created the first master’s of criminology program in Alabama and for that m atter at any historically black college or university in the country. With respect to off-campus activities and in an effort to connect scholarly knowledge with m atters of public policy and social justice, I was usually engaging in the overlapping endeavors of public and newsmaking criminology. In Aurora, I was able to network, in myriad ways, with human serv ice providers, local politicians, civic groups, and community-based activists around issues of housing, hunger, domestic violence, homelessness, gang violence, and youth development. In Montgomery, I networked with an even wider circle of politicized groups around the issues of human rights and law enforcement, black-on-black crime, prisoners’ rights, victims’ rights, and delinquency prevention. During my activist period, however, I never lost sight of the reciprocity between applied practice and theoretical knowledge. For example, as a personal and pedagogical mantra, the epigram “Theory without practice leads to cynicism, and practice without theory leads to idealism” has always served to help keep me focused on the interchange between the two. Manag ing and P roduc i ng K nowle dge More than a c entury ago the modern university was established as the most appropriate site for the social construction of knowledge management and production. The management of knowledge is the way knowledge is
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applied, disseminated, and marketed or circulated. The production of knowledge comprises those unique sets of rules for methodological engagement and scholarly activity that operate almost exclusively within the university. In addition to its distinct institutional location and academic practices, the accoutrements of the modern university include its research centers and institutes, its journals and publishing h ouses, its lecture halls and laboratories, its degrees and honors, and its oratory and experts. Based on its power to monopolize the distinction between what is and what is not considered knowledge, the modern university became the place where educated and ethically directed individuals of the privileged classes w ere socialized into the ways of the world. The educated graduates of the modern university were expected to acquire not only a holistic appreciation of human nature and societal problems but also a technical understanding of a chosen trade, field, or profession. Historically, the interdependent relationship between managing and producing knowledge replicated the emphases of the loci and foci of universities. When he worked as both a priest and head administrator at Catholic University in Dublin from 1854 to 1858, John Henry Newman penned The Idea of the University. This book continues to have currency, as the University of Notre Dame Press republished it in 2016. In his treatise, Cardinal Newman defined the university as a place for teaching universal knowledge. Newman also regarded teaching and the circulation of knowledge as more important than the advancement of knowledge or what we now call the production of knowledge. In Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive L abor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory (2009), the Edu-factory Collective was quick to point out that Newman’s collegial model, rather than representing a modern version of the university, actually represented a premodern version. In their critique, the contributors to this anthology contended that the contemporary postmodern version of the global university does a better job at technical training than at ethical training. The Collective also explained that, in an age of digitalization, the postmodern university had lost its earlier quasi-autonomous position in relation to the management and the production of knowledge. In the context of the emergence of the global university, consider Samuel P. Huntington’s hypothesis, from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (2004), that cultural and religious identities are the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War era. W hether one agrees or disagrees with Huntington, historically we have not yet lived in a world with universal norms and practices. For example, the emphasis placed on collective versus individual values is a fundamental difference between the Eastern and Western conceptions of humanity. Asian ethical regimes stress
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the centrality of collective values in shaping cultural and national identities. Non-A sian ethical regimes stress the centrality of individual values in shaping cultural and national identities. Thus, when the universally assumed notions of the nation-state and the modern citizen that originate in the West meet the East, these social and political constructs are modified and even in the East are altered by regionalism according to diverse geog raphi cal locations of reception. The reverse process of modification of norms and practices, from East to West, is occurring as well but, to date, in a less hegemonic fashion. Historically, the centrality of collective versus individual values is also a function of w hether or not economies are embedded or disembedded in communities of social life, as Karl Polanyi argued in The G reat Transformation (1944).2 Similarly, universalizable systems like capitalism or socialism do not necessarily produce uniform planetary social conditions any more than they produce uniform worldviews. Instead, these systems historically reproduce a multitude of unstable constellations of elements situated in a dynamic state of flux and accommodation. In other words, the interplay between organic sites like communities, nations, or universities and global capital does not routinely result in the exchange or transmission of neutral technologies, let alone ideas. Additionally, the governing formations at part icu lar sites of interaction represent the configurations of the social, political, and economic mobilizations of strategic power operating throughout any given society. Hence, t here are no one-size-fits-a ll approaches e ither to politics and ethics or to the issues of crime and justice. On the other hand, the management and the production of criminological knowledge, like most academic knowledge, represents co-existing and interdependent intellectual, if not necessarily scientific, constructions of what constitutes knowledge among competing paradigms of knowledge. Over time, the ascendancy of e ither one of these forms of manufacturing knowledge over the other has ebbed and flowed, as their working modus operandi has changed in relation to the prevailing ideologies and technologies. Presently, I would agree with the Edu-factory Collective that the knowledge mana gers as well as the knowledge producers working in our postmodern universities are less autonomous today than they w ere back in the loftier days of the modern university, before the globalization of capital had unmoored the university from its territorial roots. Concomitantly, that was before t here was an Amazon.com and before only a handful of multinational publishing houses were left to compete with Amazon for control of the circulation of knowledge. That was also before scholarly presses started to constrain their acquisitions of knowledge, as the corporatization of the university increasingly requires that these entities in order to survive must compete in the same for-profit academic marketplaces. Finally, that was before university mana gers
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and producers of knowledge became the objects and subjects of both algorithms and Google searches. During the disciplinary rises of criminology and criminal justice, from 1975 to 1995, the mana gers of knowledge and the producers of knowledge were in closer proximity and often engaged in both activities. The same people w ere more likely to be producing and managing knowledge. Over time, the mana gers of knowledge were involved less and less in the production of knowledge. Back then, criminologists or justicians who w ere interested and inclined to develop and manage new programs and departments had curriculum waiting to be born without the numerous possibilities for circulating that knowledge that exist today. A fter those pioneering days of program and curriculum development and with the subsequent advent of digitalization, the Internet, and the information age, a schism has been growing between the producers and managers of knowledge. Inside and outside of the academy, much of the overlap between these two formerly indivisible functions relating to knowledge has been virtually eliminated. In the contemporary world, where knowledge is power, knowledge management occupies the command position and rules from its virtual mega-domains. The Edu-factory Collective has gone so far as to argue that knowledge management is not only in the business of redefining what knowledge production is, but that knowledge management even aspires to become knowledge itself. In a not too distant past, before knowledge started to be globalized, the production of knowledge was far more dependent on the geog raphical loci and differential foci of the modern universities whose social thought ascribed to various types of elite parochialism. With the obvious exceptions of anthropology and archeology, the archetype of knowledge was not to be produced away from the university or at the sites of the living and the dead. Dialectically, perhaps, scholarly producers of contemporary knowledge may have also experienced a global liberation of sorts. In contrast with the predigital modern university, at the postmodern university, workers are able to establish alternative virtual sites for producing global knowledge that transcend individual nations and campuses alike. S preading Cri m i nolog i cal Knowle dge on and off the Aurora Col le g e Cam p u s Prior to my job interview with the president of Aurora College (AC), now Aurora University (AU), I had picked up some useful information from those I had interviewed with prior to my meeting with President Stone. First, there was no tenure-track system, which has never been unusual among private colleges and universities. AC started with a one-year probationary contract, followed by two three-year contracts and then subsequent
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five-year contracts. I was thinking that not having a tenure track could be a deal breaker. At the same time, I did not regard Aurora as anything more than a pit stop to establish some managerial experience. Second, I learned that the president was working to transform AC into AU. When I walked into his office, I was pleased to see that the man sitting behind the mahogany desk looked even younger than I did. Alan J. Stone was three years my sen ior with a boyish face and had been appointed president at the age of thirty-t hree. Those I met with earlier in the day, including the chair of sociology to whom I would initially report, had already conveyed to the president that they were in favor of his making me an offer. Stone viewed my Berkeley credentials and forthcoming book as enhancing the reputation of the faculty and the status of the institution. As for myself, I was impressed with his PhD in the history of education from the University of Chicago and the way he had parlayed this degree and his adept fundraising abilities into a college presidency at a very young age. I was also impressed that during the Freedom Summer of 1964 he was registering black voters in the South. The two of us easily connected that afternoon. Although we did not typically socialize beyond the college, we did play a regular weekly match of racquetball. One semester we co-instructed a special topics seminar on the 1960s, open to honor students, which met in Stone’s living room across the street from campus. A fter about forty-five minutes of talking and getting to know one another, Stone was ready to get down to business. He wanted to know three things: First, was I someone who could develop the curriculum and establish a department of criminal justice? Second, was I still interested in the position? Third, did I have any other job offers? I responded yes to the first question. I answered yes to the second question. However, I expressed my concern about the lack of any type of tenure system. I answered yes to the third question, telling him that I had one tenure-t rack offer. What I did not disclose was that the other position was for an assistant professor of sociology at a comprehensive state university in the Midwest. I did not let him know that I would only have accepted that position if I had no other option. The appointment at AC would be as an associate professor and director of the criminal justice program. Thinking that our conversation was about to come to an end, Stone caught me by surprise and made me an offer on the spot. The teaching and administrative load, the benefits, and the salary (15 percent more than the public university) were all to my liking. I thanked him for his offer and told him that I would get back to him by the m iddle of the next week with a decision. Once again, the president caught me off guard by saying something like, “I think I know a way to remove your anxiety about the one-year probationary contract.”
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In about twelve minutes’ time we creatively navigated the terms of two contracts: a one-year probationary contract, 1980–1981, and a three-year contract, 1981–1984. T hese double or back-to-back contracts guaranteed me four years of financial security. The subsequent three-year contract was not known to anyone other than Charlotte, Stone, and myself. In other words, the one-year probationary contract for the 1980–1981 school year was filed with the records of the college; the three-year contract was not filed with the college. Without this backup contract I probably would have accepted the position anyway because it gave me an entrée into m iddle management. A fter my probationary year, I received my official three-year contract filed with the college. Alan and I shredded our copies of the other three-year agreement. Long before AC became AU, it had been Mendota College, founded in 1893 as Mendota Seminary in Mendota, Illinois, with a focus on education and training rooted in the Advent Christian Church. Before World War I, Mendota College moved to the nearby town of Aurora when funds were raised to construct a new college; at that time, the institution changed its name to Aurora College. In 1971, AC separated from the church, and one semester before I changed jobs and relocated to Montgomery in the summer of 1985, Aurora College changed its name to Aurora University. AU describes itself as a private nonprofit liberal arts college. However, beginning in the late 1970s, the college turned to professional programs in education, business, criminal justice, social work, sports management, and athletic training. Today, AU offers degrees on campus and online in more than forty areas of study to approximately 5,500 students, enrolled in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs. When I began working at AC in the fall of 1980 as an associate professor and director of the criminal justice program leading to a minor at Aurora College, there was also a Criminal Justice Management Certificate offered through the School of Business. Two years later, I was chairing a department of criminal justice with a fully developed bachelor’s degree. A year later, the business school had developed its own unrelated criminal justice management track with its master of business administration degree. In 2011, AU introduced its master of science degree in criminal justice with two concentrations, one in leadership management and the other in community justice. As I had a joint appointment in sociology and criminal justice while I worked at Aurora, I can make a few observations about the current major requirements of each bachelor’s degree. First, there has been significant curriculum development in both programs. Second, I am particularly impressed by the global and local approach used to frame the study of society in the Chicago area and by such sociology course offerings as Latino cultural
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studies, social inequalities and ethnicities, h uman rights and responsibilities, politics of intimate relations, and politics of global health and medicine. Third, the required curriculum in criminal justice is a cookie-cutter bachelor degree found across the country. What is different from how things were when I left in 1985 is that the selected course offerings have grown in a diversity of areas. T hese areas are also found in most U.S. criminal justice departments, including international crime and justice, homeland security, forensic science, cybercrime, and terrorism. I would recommend that criminal justice majors be encouraged to take some selected offerings in sociology to enhance their programs of study. When I worked at Aurora College the environment was very different from what I had been accustomed to as either a student or a faculty member. When I arrived on campus there were some 1,950 students and about one hundred full-time faculty members. Compared to the other institutions I had experienced, AC was quite informal and not very bureaucratic—more like a close-k nit association of people with mutual interests. There was also l ittle space for anonymity, which I actually prefer to having to make conversation with every other person you run into. As for the buildings, grounds, and other facilities, they were less conspicuous than my Alexander Hamilton High School campus in West Los Angeles with twice the number of enrolled students. Culturally, the students were more affluent than students I had taught in Edinboro, Las Vegas, or Europe. I recall several international students from Saudi Arabia taking courses in business and criminal justice. T here w ere Latinos on campus but no African-A merican students that I can recall. The proportions of male and female students w ere about half and half. I recall a few faculty of color, and I hired S. George Vincentnathan, who came from India for doctoral studies at Berkeley while I was a student t here. He remained at AU for a number of years before joining the criminal justice faculty at the University of Texas–Pan American (now a campus of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) in the early 2000s. Working in a small environment I found myself on college-w ide committees from the very first semester, conversing with faculty members from all disciplines without any territorial claims or conflicts. At Aurora I also had easy access to three relevant deans—a rts and sciences, business, and nursing— and to the college president. By contrast, at Alabama State University and Eastern Michigan University I experienced both curriculum competition and program territoriality. Recurring examples included several attempts to introduce courses from our criminal justice curricula to satisfy basic general education requirements in the social and behavioral science areas. These were always rebuffed on the grounds that these courses w ere professional rather than academic. Not u ntil the early 2000s did this situation begin to change. Two decades later, however, brick and mortar universities across the United States have been experiencing rapid enrollment declines, a course not
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expected to reverse before 2026. Like the recent contraction and concentration of commercial and investment banking, the world of U.S. higher education is now entering a period of contraction and concentration of unknown duration. The current crisis in higher education has reinvigorated curriculum and program competition as departments fight to reinvent themselves as a means of surviving the academic chopping blocks of university austerity, privatization, and prohibitive student debt and indentured servitude. Disseminating Knowledge on Campus During my appointments as director and then as chair at Aurora I expanded the criminal justice curriculum offerings from eighteen to thirty- six hours. The courses offered w ere becoming typical of bachelor of science or bachelor of arts programs in criminal justice, including introductions to criminal justice, law enforcement, adjudication, and corrections, plus a course on substantive and procedural criminal law, criminology, methods and statistics, a sen ior seminar on criminal justice issues, and the internship course. T here w ere three other rather unique selected course offerings that I developed and introduced between 1982 and 1984. Apparently those courses did not survive as part of the Aurora University sociology or criminal justice curriculum. T hese courses were Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault; History of Crime Control; and Law, Power, and Justice. The first of t hese courses came about a fter the dean of the college of nursing had learned from her students that I had been discussing domestic vio lence and sexual assault in both of my criminology and criminal justice courses. The nursing dean approached me to develop a course to benefit students in nursing as well as criminal justice. I developed and taught this cross- listed course providing fifteen seats for students from each program. When I later went to Alabama State University (ASU) and to Eastern Michigan University (EMU), I introduced essentially the same course as a graduate seminar. Both institutions lacked any courses devoted to the topic of violence. In higher education in the United States, the lack of courses on violence has always been the normative state of affairs and a pet peeve of mine. The contemporary department of sociology at AU does offer a course on the politics of intimate relations. Though both the politics of intimate relations and examinations of patriarchal societies are central to unpacking domestic violence, sexual assaults, and the cultural responses to these primarily androcentric crimes, such courses are not substitutes for courses devoted exclusively to gender-based abuse or violence against w omen, or a general survey course on violence. Comparatively, both the AU undergraduate and graduate programs in criminal justice offer select courses on vio lence and social control, which are also standard fare for many criminal justice programs across the nation; courses devoted to terrorism and degrees in homeland security are fairly common today.
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In stark contrast, the far more common problem of masculinity and gendered violence beyond peer-reviewed journals, for example, has failed to engage the dissemination of scholarly knowledge in courses, certificates, or degree offerings. At the same time, the mechanisms and problems of gender, masculinity, and violence play a critical role in the production of both terrorism and counterterrorism. T here are a few noteworthy exceptions to the absence of violence studies at U.S. institutions of higher education. First, the Begun Center on Violence Prevention Research and Education, housed in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, applies, produces, and disseminates knowledge of vio lence beyond peer-reviewed journals and academic curriculum. Second, the University of Colorado Denver offers two graduate certificates, one in gender- based violence studies and the other in interpersonal violence and health care; a master of criminal justice degree and a master of public policy degree, both with a concentration in gender-based violence; and a PhD in public affairs that emphasizes the study of gender-based violence. My rationale for the history of crime control was that I saw the history of criminal justice as essential to a fuller understanding of crime and social control. I assigned Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (1980) by Samuel Walker and my revisionist history, In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform (1980). I would include this course too as part of the master’s curriculum in criminology at ASU. However, I never sought to introduce this course either as an undergraduate or graduate course at EMU—although pedagogically I pretty much teach everything through historical lenses. I also introduced Law, Power, and Justice as a special topics course for which I developed my own course pack by reproducing copies of essays, articles, book chapters, and so forth for each of the three topic areas. Unfortunately, many years ago my only copy was falling apart and I pitched that collection of readings. I no longer can remember any of the content in some four hundred pages of single-spaced text; I do recall that the front and back covers w ere pale green card stock and that the mimeographed copies w ere three-hole punched and held together with a thingamajig. My rationale for developing this course was my belief that one cannot understand the workings of law or of justice without also understanding the workings of power. One special learning moment of mine while on campus was on the topic of forfeiture laws in relation to the war on drugs. This occurred while I was teaching a criminal justice policy course as part of the graduate certificate in criminal justice management. This learning experience reveals how the circulation of knowledge can become reciprocal when professional students in the field know more than the instructor does about a part icu lar subject—one of the many reasons I have always enjoyed having in-service
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professionals take my courses. Besides bringing their real-world experiences, t hese criminal justice pract it ioners usually validate the realities I wish to share with aspiring practitioners. During my last semester at what had become Aurora University, in spring 1985, I taught this policy seminar, one of six required three-credit courses for the management certificate, to nine students. All were members of police departments in the Fox River Valley, ranging from departments of a c ouple dozen officers in the smaller southern towns like Batavia and Oswego, to departments of more than fifty officers in larger northern cities like Elgin and St. Charles. T hese students broke down as follows: one patrol officer only six months on the job, one detective, two sergeants, and five chiefs. Needless to say, I learned a g reat deal from this group of police professionals. Significantly, I learned that only the rookie, and none of the other, higher-r anking officers or the chiefs, thought that law enforcement would ever win the war on drugs. Moreover, they maintained that the drug war was wasting scarce resources and taking up a lot of time that could be better spent elsewhere. In fact, they had all been in f avor of decriminalization u ntil the U.S. Congress expanded its nineteenth-century asset forfeiture laws. First, there was the forfeiture of all money used in, or acquired from, the illegal drug trade in 1978. Next, there was the authorization of the forfeiture of real property like cars and houses in 1985. When the second of these changes in the law was made, t hese police officials were now willing to engage in that unwinnable war on drugs because of the revenue streams they produced for local law enforcement. Disseminating Knowledge off Campus Back in the 1980s my criminological activism was about interacting with as many local stakeholders in a community as I reasonably could. My objectives included (1) resisting harm and reducing the victimization of people; and (2) struggling locally for social justice on behalf of marginal or oppressed p eople. Of course, information technology, social media, and digital communication have transformed twenty- fi rst- century “community” organizing. Currently, whether one is struggling locally or globally, dimensions for mobilizing and connecting people if only in cyberspace are now subject to impersonal and organic networks or platforms rather than face-to-f ace gatherings or meetings. For me, doing public criminology had its roots in the 1960s back when Marshall McLuhan’s medium was becoming the message and I was first learning about the importance of struggling over the popul ar narratives surrounding the war in Southeast Asia. During the rise and fall of the Berkeley School of Criminology, I learned about the importance of engaging with the mediated narratives surrounding issues of law and order. Building on
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my earlier days of observing t hose media wars in Berkeley and in my strug gle for academic justice in Las Vegas, I began using the media in Aurora. I did so initially when I ran for alderman and later as a means of resisting conventional narratives and popular myths about crime and justice. Eventually I would do so as means of trying to construct alternative narratives. Another part of my public criminological practice came from incorporating two rather unorthodox and compatible philosophies of social change that I had adopted while working in Portland, Oregon. One was the idea of “bureaucratic insurgency,” a concept introduced to me by a public policy wonk from the University of Southern California. I attended a two-d ay workshop that he conducted on behalf of the mayor. Bureaucratic insurgency is change that comes from those working within and between governmental agencies. It also requires bringing networks of professionals working inside public entities together with networks of grassroots activists from outside t hese entities in order to combine influence and power. Bureaucratic insurgency was consistent with a political idea that I had been kicking around since the mid-1970s. I had been referring to this practice as “radical pragmatism.” Radical pragmatism is social action located between reformist reformism, which supports the status quo, and structural reformism, which seeks to change the status quo. Tactically, radically pragmatic reformism uses counterintuitive means, relying on associations of people who may disagree over part icu lar issues and long-term objectives but who also share common points of concern on some issues. Together, t hese people can help to facilitate short-term, gradualist goals that do not reinforce the status quo and are also consistent with long-term structural objectives. Accordingly, when I was invited to serve on the governmental operations committee of the Aurora Chamber of Commerce, I accepted. I did so as a means of sitting around the t able with t hose local power holders who w ere not exactly my political and economic friends. However, some folks at that t able become valuable allies in getting the chamber of commerce to support community-based strugg les that I cared about. My initial forays into the greater Fox River Valley of northern Illinois occurred by developing criminal justice internship placements for Aurora College majors. My understanding of Aurora and its social problems, however, was much affected by a chance encounter when I was pulled over for exceeding the speed limit by one of Aurora’s finest. Coincidentally, at the time, Officer David Camic was an unenrolled student with nine hours left to complete a degree in political science with a minor in criminal justice. When he learned that I was on my way home from teaching a class on criminal justice, we exchanged pleasantries and I was given a warning rather than a ticket. Camic also left me with his card in case I should ever want to
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do a ride-a long with him. A few weeks later, I took Camic up on his offer. Over some two years, I spent many hours with Officer Dave on Friday night swing shifts patrolling the streets of Aurora. I learned much about police work as we patrolled the depressed areas of downtown as well as the east side of the Fox River, where Charlotte and I lived in housing built between the two world wars. During many even ings, we responded to multiple domestic violence calls and far fewer barroom altercations. Besides eating our meals at Officer Camic’s favorite restaurants for tips only, Dave became my entrée into the Aurora version of what Joseph Wambaugh wrote about in The Choirboys. I learned much about police culture from these after- hour gatherings. Not long a fter I left Aurora, Dave became a criminal defense attorney. We still keep in touch a fter all t hese years. During the summer of 1982 I became a member of the Criminal Justice Board of the Council for Safer Communities, a planning body of the Safer Foundation of Chicago. Safer is currently one of the nation’s largest not- for-profit providers of serv ices designed exclusively for people with criminal records, serving annually some 5,800 individuals in and beyond the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Safer was founded in 1972 by two former Catholic priests, Raymond “Bernie” Curran and Gus Wilhelmy, building on and transforming a DARE (Direct Action for Rehabilitation and Employment of Ex-offenders) project that they co-d irected. DARE was about helping individuals released from the Cook County Jail find work. By 1973, with several business executives on its board of directors, Safer had expanded its former staff of a half dozen to more than twenty and was serving two thousand ex-offenders with an annual budget of $300,000. In the fall of 1982, my f uture campaign mana ger had arranged for me to test the political waters as an invited guest speaker for the unit meeting of the Aurora League of Women Voters. The topic for the meeting’s discussion was alternatives to incarceration. Following the announcement of my candidacy for City Council in December, I did my first interview on a local radio talk show, WFXW’s Up Close. The host and I spent most of our time discussing crime and punishment. During my run for political office I put my criminology out there front and center. A fter I lost the runoff election in the winter of 1983, I started receiving invites to join various legal and governmental bodies as well as the boards of several not-for-profit community groups. For example, first I became a member of the Citizens Advisory Board to the Fox Valley Correctional Center, a work release and halfway facility affiliated with the Illinois Department of Corrections. L ater that year I became a member of the advisory council for Prairie State L egal Ser vices. I also became a member of the board of directors of the Aurora Area Interfaith Food Pantry. One year later I would become the president of the Food Pantry. Similarly, a fter serving for one year as a member of the board
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of directors of Mutual Ground, a shelter for abused women and their children, I became vice president of the board. My social and political networking activities also widened in 1984. As I have noted, I became a member of the government affairs committee of the Greater Aurora Chamber of Commerce. Similarly, I became a founding member of the Aurora Township Youth Commission, established for tackling the growing gang problem on the east side of Aurora. I had introduced the idea of a youth commission as part of my political platform for elective office. I was also a founding board member of Hesed House, Inc., which in 1984 secured a fixed location from the city in the former incinerator building. Hesed House is a 501(c)(3) organi zation doing business as Public Action to Deliver Shelter, Inc. Hesed House is a temporary shelter and provider of serv ices for the homeless. It is the second largest shelter of its kind in Illinois today, providing food, shelter, on-site counseling, and a job skills training program for about 175 individuals e very night. During this postelection period, I was also doing a lot of guest speaking before civic groups on a wide range of criminological topics. For example, I was the keynote speaker at the annual Law Observance Day org an ized by the Optimist Club of Aurora. Other speaking engagements included those with juveniles in a local detention facility, with members of the Aurora Clergy Association, and with sen iors belonging to the Golden Kiwanis Club of Aurora. Before the latter group of octogenarians I gave a talk on elderly abuse that was very well received. While I was spreading my criminological narratives to t hese groups, I was also building a base of pol itic al supporters beyond the third ward for an alderman-at-large race that I was considering for 1985. In t hose predigital 1980s, during probably my most active period as a public criminologist, my modus operandi for social action and knowledge dissemination involved the related practices of bureaucratic insurgency, radical pragmatism, and eventually newsmaking criminology. A few years later in a 1988 Justice Quarterly article I introduced the concept of newsmaking criminology, which I initially defined as involving those processes by which criminologists use mass communications for the purposes of interpreting, informing, and altering the images of crime, criminals, justice, punishment, and victimization. Not long afterward I was also stressing the importance of demystifying popular narratives and challenging the distorted images of crime and crime control found in mass-mediated news and entertainment. As one way of d oing newsmaking criminology, running for political office can provide opportunities for dialoguing with conventional narratives on crime, victimization, and social control. Newsmaking criminologists may also help to shape or demystify popular narratives of crime and punishment from behind the scenes and out of public view, as I have on
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several occasions with editors and reporters—some working on lengthy feature stories. This type of newsmaking comes from deliberately nurturing relationships with journalists for the purposes of developing our mutual interest in the production of well-crafted stories on crime and justice. I have also worked backstage or anonymously as a newsmaking criminologist, in the role of special advisor to Attorney General Don Siegelman of Alabama. Siegelman and I had developed a relationship when he was secretary of state prior to becoming the attorney general. From 1987 to 1990, I was a member of the Task Force on Victims’ Rights that he established as well. In this capacity, I was able to influence press releases from his office on m atters of victims’ rights. During this period, the attorney general and I privately shared a victims’ rights position that he did not wish to publicly disclose. While we favored compensating and empowering crime victims, we also viewed the victims’ right movement as overly zealous with respect to infringing on the rights of offenders. For example, we did not think that sentencing decisions or hearings for prisoner releases should be subject to victims’ testimony. So Siegelman and I were subtly pushing back against some policies and practices advocated by victims’ rights activists. unning f or Aurora City C ounc i l R From the turn of the last century to the early 1970s, Aurora had been the economic center of the Fox River Valley, a manufacturing powerhouse and the longtime home to the roundhouse for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. In the early 1970s, the railroad shops closed, and many factories either relocated or went out of business. During this period of Rust B elt decline, when the population was around eighty thousand and the citizenry was 90 percent white, the Latino community on the southeast side was starting to grow. Meanwhile, further to the east, serious expansion was occurring along Eola Road and Route 59. Beginning with the g rand opening of the Fox Valley Mall in 1975 and followed a few years later by construction of the Fox Valley Villages, newer commercial development would eventually become a financial windfall for the city. Initially, however, this development was all but eliminating downtown retail businesses. By the time I arrived in 1980, few industrial areas w ere still operating at their former capacities. Caterpillar and Barber-Greene were laying off workers, and the unemployment rate had climbed to 16 percent. Local home mortgage rates had risen to 12 percent. Street gangs were forming, and crime rates were rising. Today, Aurora is a culturally diverse city with a population of more than 220,000. In April 2017, the city elected its first black mayor, Richard Irvin, an attorney and at the time one of the city’s two aldermen-at-large. I do not recall exactly how I decided to run for a seat on the Aurora City Council as the alderman for the third ward. I do remember discussing
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the m atter with Charlotte, who was b ehind the idea, and at least two other people. One was an Aurora College student, Fidel Moreno; in fact, I think he might have been the one who put the idea in my head. In any case, Fidel was immediately supportive and became a campaign worker in charge of a few other student workers. I also do not recall how I met my campaign manager Joan Little—only that our first meeting occurred a few weeks before I announced my candidacy. I do recall that she had recently managed the candidacy of a w oman who became the Illinois state senator from Naperville, a neighboring, smaller, affluent city closer to Chicago. Our politics w ere very compatible; we also lived within walking distance from each other. As a political junkie, Joan liked the idea of taking on an incumbent politician as well as the local power structure. In an allegedly nonpartisan race, the idea of r unning the campaign of an unknown carpetbagger appealed to her as well. Joan knew the Auroran political scene and the third ward like the proverbial back of her hand. She immediately informed me that t here would be three other persons in our aldermanic race: incumbent alderman Eugene Doebert; the former alderman whom Doebert had defeated to become alderman, Ken Hinterlong; and Jerry Galligar, a longtime resident of the third ward with a background in neighborhood affairs. In order to avoid a runoff election between the two top vote-getters, one candidate had to receive at least 50 percent of the vote. Joan assured me that, with three well-k nown candidates in the race, nobody was very likely to receive more than 40 percent. Joan also thought that, as a wild card who was a generation younger than the other candidates and a criminology professor to boot, I would appeal especially to those voters in the ward without any skin in the game. In short, she thought that I could slip into a runoff election with incumbent Doebert as the three locals divided votes among them. Joan turned out to be spot on with her pre-election analysis. Joan had maintained that if we could deliver a textbook ground game that consisted of knocking on every door to get out the vote, we had a chance of making it into a runoff election. Joan had predicted that incumbent Doebert would finish first in the primary, which he did, with some 250 votes more than I had. Hinterlong was not far behind me, and Galligar was not far b ehind him. All in all, the primary had been a fairly close four- person race, as Joan had predicted. She also figured that we could pick up enough of the Hinterlong and Galligar voters to narrowly defeat Doebert. On runoff night, with more than two thousand votes tallied from eleven of twelve precincts, I was leading Doebert by two votes. As campaign workers, family members—including Char, my m other, and my niece—a nd our next door neighbors gathered around listening to the updates on the radio after each precinct’s tallying, we all knew based on Joan’s system of counting
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the votes that I was heavily favored to win the twelfth precinct. And that was the only precinct left to count. At party central, we were all anticipating that victory was only moments away. Dirty politics w ere at play, however, and not all of the votes cast in the twelfth precinct w ere tallied that even ing. Officially, I lost to Doebert by fifty-t wo votes. Knowing Illinois political history and its notorious corrupt practices in both overcounting and undercounting votes, our campaign attorney was supposed to be downtown overseeing the voting tabulations. Instead, he was at our home with the other campaign supporters. When the final tallies were announced and I had lost, most everyone affiliated with the campaign was quite disappointed, especially my mother the politico, who had flown in from California for the election. Joan was quite sure that something crooked had occurred, because based on her figuring she had us winning the twelfth precinct by more than one hundred votes. We also had the telltale sign of twice as many Barak yard signs in the twelfth precinct as Doebert signs. Though stunned by the loss, I was momentarily also relieved not to have the responsibility of actually d oing the job. For some obvious reasons, we did not challenge the vote. First, since our attorney had not shown up to observe the counting process, we had no evidence of any election fraud. Second, Doebert lived in the twelfth precinct, so his winning there by fifty-t wo votes certainly seemed reasonable. Third, we were legally entitled to a recount only if we had lost by less than 1 percent of the vote; we had lost by nearly 2 percent. Thus, we concluded that we would most likely be spinning our pol itical wheels. We also did not want to come off as a poor losers and alienate f uture voters should I run again for political office. Once more, we had no proof that anything crooked had occurred—just idle speculation. Some sixteen months later, however, I received confirmation of political corruption during the counting of votes at City Hall. While grocery shopping one after noon I bumped into Ms. Betty Perry, an African American administrative assistant who had worked for the former mayor of Aurora, Jack Hill. As a former candidate for City Council and a regular attendee of City Council meetings, I knew her and she knew me through small talk from time to time. During our chance exchange, Perry told me that the Democratic Party had stolen the election from me by discarding more than half the ballots from the twelfth precinct. The next day I called Joan, who had relocated to Portland, Oregon, to let her know that the election had been stolen as she had suspected. In retrospect, both our primary and runoff elections were textbook get out the vote campaigns because we are talking about a single ward with some four thousand residential units. Before the primary on February 22 and again before the runoff on April 5, our campaign had been able to
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canvass all twelve precincts, knocking on the doors of all registered voters, providing information about my candidacy to those who answered the door, and leaving literature behind for those who did not. We had enough campaign workers that were willing collectively to divide up the precincts to make the necessary first and third passes through the ward for both races. In between the first and third passes I made the critical solo pass as the candidate knocking on all of those same doors. In the primary and the runoff elections alike, I walked, knocked, and talked three hours a day for twenty- one days each time. Winter 1983 was very cold, and virtually e very day I endured subzero temperatures with chilling winds blowing off of Lake Michigan. The scripts or talking points varied with each pass. In addition, the second and third passes were also about collecting small financial donations, counting our votes, and acquiring phone numbers for getting the voters out to the polls on election day. In the last week before the runoff election, the race was considered so close that Doebert took to knocking on doors himself, something he had not done previously. It is import ant to underscore that the city of Aurora has always taken its aldermanic elections seriously. Yet, at least back then, aldermanic candidates did not take part in formal political debates. Rather, they attended political “get to know the candidate” even ings. At those meetings, org a nized by the League of Women Voters, candidates were given about five minutes, before an audience of maybe fifty or seventy-five p eople, to make an opening statement, answer audience questions, and move aside before the next candidate did the same. T here was no exchange or interaction between the candidates. Typically, candidates for single-ward positions on the City Council did not employ campaign mana gers. Alderman-at-large races w ere quite different from ordinary ward races, because winners of the at-large races in Aurora w ere often the people most likely to become mayor in the f uture. Technically, t hese aldermanic races w ere nonpartisan or unaffiliated party contests. Informally, most candidates were connected with one of the two major political parties. Hence, those folks living in the ward who paid attention to local politics knew that Doebert and Hinterlong w ere Republicans and that Gallagher was a Democrat. Because the race was officially nonpartisan and I did not have a voting history in Illinois, I campaigned as an independent. When pressed by constituents at their doorways or inside of their homes, I could, as the saying goes, play both sides down the m iddle. Retaining my indepen dent status throughout the race would turn out to be the political m istake that cost me the election and brought the two parties together to steal the election from me. In other words, I could have won the election more or less easily had I accepted the backing of the Democratic Party. Two weeks a fter the primary I met with two local Democratic politicos, Nancy Weiss
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and Ronald Trustman, from the third ward, at their invitation a fter the dinner hour at Trustman’s home. They understood why I had been r unning as an independent candidate in a nonpartisan race; that was fine with them. Over some cheese and crackers and a glass of wine, t hese pol itical operatives wanted to inform me that should I agree to align myself with the party a fter the election, then they could deliver me a victory. Foolishly, I declined their offer because I did not want to be obligated and I thought I could win without their assistance. As you have already read, I could have won the election had all the votes been counted. Joan and I had discussed a potential offer by the Dems before I sat down with Weiss and Trustman. Joan knew that t here was nothing to lose by cutting a deal for their support. Yet she did not push back when I told her that I was going to decline their assistance, because she too was figuring that we could win anyway. Looking back, it had never occurred to me at the time that Nancy and Ron would lend a hand to my Republican opponent. Moreover, nobody had mentioned to me that Mayor Hill (1977–1985), a lifelong Democrat and former six-term state legislator, would join forces with my two Republican opponents to defeat me. At the last possible moment. when Doebert was going down in defeat, the mayor and his cronies deep-sixed enough of the twelfth precinct votes to snatch victory out from me. Naively, I had not imagined that Illinois corrupt politics would reach down into the third ward Aurora City Council race. As for the actual race, my three opponents had lived in the third ward for more than 150 years combined. When I tossed my hat in the ring I had been a resident there for a little more than two years. I was clearly an outsider in a neighborhood-based aldermanic race. Compared to our campaign, my opponents were more laid-back campaigners. To generate their votes they relied mostly on name recognition, f amily, friends, and longevity in the neighborhood. In addition to our ground game, we w ere doing our utmost to work with my criminological credentials. We w ere also working hard during the race to shape the political discussion of issues. Each week we hand-delivered a press release to the offices of the Beacon- News, Aurora’s afternoon daily. T hese releases w ere usually submitted early Tuesday morning as we were hoping for a Wednesday or Thursday news placement. Probably fewer than half of these resulted in full-blown news stories. However, several succeeded in doing so. T hese all helped to spread our political message and to raise my political profile. By contrast, my three opponents did not issue a single press release between them u ntil one week before the runoff election, when losing candidate Hinterlong issued a press release endorsing his longtime rival, Eugene Doebert. Up u ntil then, my opponents received their only news coverage of the campaign when a reporter d oing a story based on one of our press releases queried the other
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candidates for their reactions. The first press release of ours to score a hit resulted in a story on January 7, 1983, that the Beacon-News entitled “Barak Proposal: Put Aurora in Workfare.” The opening paragraph of the article, by Robert Hallwachs and Roald Hasse, began: “Gregg Barak, an aldermanic candidate in Aurora’s 3rd Ward, has called on city government to take part in the Workfare program, in which recipients of township general assistance work off their aid. Barak’s comments have drawn the general support of the three other candidates for the aldermanic post, including incumbent Eugene Doebert.” Our press release framed the discussion, as the two political reporters provided five consecutive paragraphs either paraphrasing our release or quoting me directly. For example, “If our city government is attempting to deliver h uman ser vices with greater financial responsibility, then why has the Workfare alternative been largely ignored?” Or, “The city could be providing Workfare recipients with dignity of employment while improving city serv ices at no additional costs.” And, “Barak suggested Workfare labor could be used on such projects as neighborhood crime watches, victim crisis centers, street and sewer maintenance, sen ior citizen serv ices, housing renovation, and youth development centers.” The one time I responded to my opponents, rather than vice versa, was when my outsider status as a West Coast carpetbagger was reinforced in a Beacon-News story driven by a press release from Hinterlong several weeks after he had finished in third place. He had told me privately a fter his primary defeat, when I asked him for his endorsement, that he was going to stay out of the runoff and not endorse anyone. Less than one week before the April 5th election, on March 30 1983, however, political reporter Roald Hasse wrote an article in the Beacon-News titled “Hinterlong Claims Barak ‘Radicalism.’ ” Hinterlong had been third ward alderman from 1979 to 1981, when he defeated Doebert, who had held the seat from 1977 to 1979. In turn, Doebert ran again and defeated Hinterlong in his bid for reelection in 1981. And in 1983 Hinterlong lost again to Doebert and to me in the primary race. Now he was endorsing his recurrent opponent. Hinterlong was quoted in the story as saying, “What the 3rd Ward d oesn’t need is a radical from the University of California at Berkeley, who is only conducting a social experiment at our expense.” I responded that his charges were absurd and that there was nothing in my background to suggest that I was a radical. I was quoted as asking, “If I was a wild-eyed radical from Berkeley, how is it that the U.S. Department of Defense gave me a high security clearance in order that I could work on NATO bases so that I could teach law enforcement courses to members of the military police and the criminal investigation division?” Among other things, Hinterlong accused me of producing campaign literature that posed many questions without providing any solutions. Actually,
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the one part icu lar piece of literat ure that he was referring to was a pictorial, easy-to-consume small folded informational brochure, with six four-inch- square areas for text, three on each side. By design there was not much room for a whole lot of content in any of these areas. As Joan maintained, less is usually more in campaign material since few people, if any, read all the literat ure they are presented with during a political campaign. In one of those text areas were three substantive questions addressing the most serious local problems, which w ere certainly noncontroversial: “Are you upset about the deterioration of Aurora’s downtown? Are you worried about Aurora’s high unemployment? Are you concerned about domestic violence and street crime?” T hese were followed by two rhetorical questions designed to elicit affirmative responses as well: “Are you tired of business as usual at City Hall? Are you ready for ‘A Fresh Perspective for Aurora’?” In another text area w ere five bullet points about what I believed the third ward deserved:
Proper maintenance of streets and sewers; Safer neighborhoods, less crime, more security; ■ Progressive delivery of community serv ices; ■ Creative planning and development; ■ An alderman who listens, understands, and acts. ■ ■
Pretty tame stuff and typical of many city council races. A fter all, calling for the “progressive delivery of community serv ices” or for “creative planning and development” are not exactly coded phrases for radicalism. When folded up, t here was a headshot of me on the front and a map of the third ward on the back. One of the two remaining inside areas had a short biography of Barak the candidate. The last area had what was not exactly a pithy quote with my signature underneath, which read: “If we Aurorans are to secure our future in these hard economic times, the city government and business and community organi zations must work together on long-r ange policy initiatives that focus on preventing as well as solving our local problems.” Hinterlong also accused me of unethically using students from my classes as campaign workers. The story quotes me as saying, “I d on’t have one student working on the campaign who is enrolled in any of my classes. I’m not saying that there are not students from the college working on my campaign”; however, the “solid backbone of the campaign has been the constituents here in the ward.” What had brought the student workers to the attention of our political opponents was a flyer that the students w ere distributing door-to-door in Doebert’s home precinct. One day while canvassing, Moreno had discovered a lawn jockey in the incumbent’s front yard. He took a photo of the house and the jockey in a way that captured a
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plaque identifying the house as belonging to the Doeberts. The students then made a flyer with the photo and distributed it in Doebert’s precinct, the twelfth, where the largest percentage of blacks and Latinos lived in our ward. As a result, all the Barak yard signs appeared, and we knew the precinct was ours. The lawn jockey quickly became a source of political conversation in the third ward race. However, there was no coverage in the news, and I was distancing myself from the students’ decision to do the flyer without first discussing it with Joan and me. In that same March 30 Beacon-News story, I had the opportunity to do some political spinning of my own. Without identifying who took the poll, I claimed that Doebert was trailing me by 10 percentage points and suggested that was probably why he needed the backing from his longtime opponent Hinterlong. Doebert responded that he was “not aware of the poll that Barak was referring to” and as far as he knew he was “doing well with the voters.” Thinking back I must have been either referencing an informal poll taken by Joan or else simply slinging some bull. I also referenced a meeting between Mayor Hill and Hinterlong that our campaign had learned about. I raised the question whether some kind of deal had been made between the Democrats and the Republicans. Hinterlong admitted that he had met with the mayor; however, he denied that any type of deal had been made between the two parties. Two days before the runoff elections, on April 3, 1983, in the Sunday edition of the Beacon-News, Hasse wrapped up the analyses of the races in an article titled, “Upcoming Election Serves as Political Weather Vane.” In reference to our race, he noted that the third ward “contest had sparked interest recently when defeated primary candidate Kenneth Hinterlong said he would back Doebert” and had “charged that Barak was injecting radicalism into the campaign.” The article stated that Doebert had run his campaign on the issue of serv ices to the ward and that Barak had “stressed a number of positions in his campaign, including the use of the township workfare program in the city and the need for the creation by ordinance of a formal Youth Commission.” The article also mentioned “Barak has won the endorsement of the Fox Valley CAP Council of the United Auto Workers.” Two years later, I was thinking bigger and considering a run for alderman-at-large. I decided a fter collecting the necessary signatures to run that the timing was not right, especially a fter a young banker and townie had announced his candidacy. If he was in, I was out. If he was not in, then I was in. He won the election over one other candidate in a landslide with some 66 percent of the vote. Politically, I could not have afforded two defeats in a row, so I sat out the race thinking that I could not beat the well- connected banker. Six months later, we w ere moving to Alabama.
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h i ldre n She lte ring Wom e n and The i r C from Dome sti c Vi ol e nc e In 1978, Mutual Ground (MG) opened its first shelter in the third ward on the top floor of a property rented from the First Presbyterian Church. As the national and local economies w ere hurting badly, funding for the shelter was precarious, and the incidences of domestic violence and sexual assault were rising. By 1980, MG, a not-for-profit social serv ice agency, was operating with a $30,000 deficit. Things had already turned around by the time I joined the MG board in 1983. We w ere barely balancing the budget each month. Those of us on the board were looking for some kind of financial security for the shelter. In order to acquire equity, for example, we wanted to purchase a house rather than continuing to rent. In 1984 Mutual Ground bought a two-story h ouse on North Lake Street that could serve fourteen women and their children. The shelter was located in the economically affluent fifth ward on the northwest side of Aurora. Years later, Mutual Ground would sell that property and purchase a larger facility, also on the west side, located at West Park Avenue and Oak Street. Today, MG is the second largest shelter in Illinois for abused w omen and their children. Here is the back story of the purchase of the first home on North Lake Street. As we all know, real estate purchases are about three things: location, location, and location. As vice president of the board, I was charged with finding a h ouse to purchase for the shelter. Long story short: two available homes were suitable for our needs. One was on the southeast side of Aurora in my very own third ward. Less than a mile from our home, the property was located on a busy four-way corner lot; t here was also no backyard of any kind. The other h ouse on North Lake Street was in a desirable neighborhood and had a huge enclosed backyard that could be used by children, m others, and staff. While the two houses could each accommodate the same number of persons, the residential environments were very different. The long-term investment value of the west-side property compared with the east-side property was a no-brainer, too. There were, however, two related obstacles to MG’s purchase of the west-side house: one was the reaction by residents there, “not in my backyard” (NIMBY); and the other was a need for a zoning variance in order to shelter so many people in a large single-family dwelling. A fter I shared the options with the board, except for the MG president, Anne Baumann, the members felt that we should go for the variance and try to purchase the house across a busy street just west of the Fox River. Baumann had been elected alderwoman of the fifth ward in 1983. Her initial position was that a variance would be unlikely to pass, as there would be plenty of neighbors opposing a shelter where violent abusers could seek access to their victims.
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Baumann’s grown d aughter was also a member of the board. She had also been a rape victim herself, not once but twice. A strong advocate for rape victims, she pushed back against her mother, who quickly acquiesced. Once the board members w ere in agreement, we approached the Aurora planning and development commission for the granting of a variance before we could be placed on the City Council agenda for a vote. Meanwhile, we were busy organizing an informal coa lition of religious and civic leaders. The commission, without any opposition, agreed to the variance, because the property was on a busy boulevard set back off the street with plenty of space between the homes. There w ere only eight aldermen on the City Council back then, unlike the current council, which has twelve. Thus, without the mayor’s vote in the case of a tie, we needed five affirmative votes for the variance to pass. Before the meeting, we knew that we had three votes guaranteed. In addition to Baumann’s vote, we also had the votes of councilwoman Betty Barr (second ward) and councilman Chet Albright (sixth ward). These two council members were lifelong Democrats who had become allies of mine a fter I had finished second in the primary. Thus, picking up at least two out of the remaining five votes did not seem unlikely. No m atter—we w ere not taking any chances. When that City Council meeting commenced, more than three hundred people were in the audience. This was an unheard of number for such meetings, normally attended by no more than a c ouple of dozen people who did not have business before the council. As it turned out, the only people signed up to speak were in favor of the zoning variance. All eight aldermen voted aye when the question was called. The city of Aurora also provided a financial grant to help with the 20 percent down payment. The balance came from a very successful fundr aising drive.
C hapte r 4
Doing Newsmaking Criminology
My life as a public criminologist turned away from local politics and to statewide and national politics when I accepted my next position, at Alabama State University. By the fall of 1985, Charlotte and I had relocated to the Deep South, and I was a white criminologist at a historically black university that dated back to Reconstruction. I became part of a larger network of civic organizations, civil rights groups, and political parties that intersected across the racially divided legacies of the New South. T hese socially, legally, and politically engaged southerners were addressing concerns about human dignity, equal protection u nder the law, and justice. My unorthodox move to an HBCU in the postsegregated world of higher education also came with the academic guarantees I coveted. I was a tenured full professor and chair of a medium-size department of criminal justice. The economic security, the geopolitics of Alabama, and newsmaking criminology enabled my academic activism to be of political serv ice to black and white Alabamians. What was most gratifying about this relocation to the New South 2.0 was that I could actually be myself. In fact, to be a criminologist from Berkeley, radical or otherw ise, in the capital of Alabama was not a social stigma. Quite the contrary, being from Berkeley was as good a calling card as one could have for those people with progressive politics in the South. Even in nonprogressive and conservative Alabama circles, standing came with a Berkeley pedigree, especially one dating back to the 1960s. My pol itical activism and newsmaking criminology w ere both inseparable from the contemporary crisis in criminology. To best capture how I viewed this crisis I would like to share in some detail from a paper that I presented at the 1986 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology on October 30, 1986 in Atlanta for the panel session “Class, Crisis, and the Marxist Paradigm of Crime.” My paper was entitled “Inside the Paradigmatic Crisis of Criminology: Struggling to Get It On with Praxis.” Regarding the crisis in theory, my analysis of what needed to be done was twofold. First, I posited that without reconciling Durkheim’s organic solidarity and Marx’s capitalist mode of production, the field of criminology would remain a hodgepodge of eclectic 109
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and relativistic ideas. A few years later in 1989, Frank Pearce delivered his first edition of the Radical Durkheim, where he served up a book-length synthesis of the work of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber.1 His work exemplified the kind of theoretical reconciliation that I thought appropriate for criminologists of dissimilar persuasions to pursue. Second, I argued that, without some kind of theoretical consensus among the disparate criminologies, the media and politicos would continue to expropriate for mass consumption a narrative about crime and justice like the hegemonic one of law and order. During this period, some social and behavioral scientists were calling for biopsychosocial models of human interaction. Other critics, like myself, were calling for overdeterminist models of human behav ior. My conceptual model, borrowed from Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills,2 was grounded in the dynamic interplay between the changing individual organism (“character”) and the changing political economy (“social structure”). Such a model, I argued, was not only consistent with a Marxist paradigm of the reproduction of crime but also able to incorporate class and nonclass aspects of crime and crime control. This model was also responsive to the critique of the one-d imensionality of criminality and to the dilemma of agency versus structure. Over the years, much of my scholarly productivity has been animated by the dialectics of t hese social realities. In the paper I encouraged criminologists to join in the mediated strug gles around the relations of class, race, and gender inequality. I viewed this practice as a means of resisting the expropriation of both the discipline of criminology and the lives of ordinary people by the influences of the power ful. In other words, I was trying to come up with ways to distribute criminological narratives that challenged and demystified the mass-mediated and conventionally constructed accounts of crime and crime control. The prob lem, as I diagnosed it, was that the habitually reproduced narratives of crime and victimization always depict the primary dangers, harms, and injuries posed to society as emanating from powerless offenders rather than from powerful offenders. In presenting my critique of the homogenization of news coverage of crime and justice that served only to reify and reproduce the status quo in the United States, I relied on Frankfurt School philoso phers Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse as well as the editors of The Nation magazine. I began with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry from their 1947 book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, as excerpted from Marcuse, which maintained that the total effect of the culture industry has been against enlightenment and in support of mass deception. The root of the problem, they argued, lies within the developing technical domination of nature, which increasingly fetters consciousness and impedes individuals from judging and deciding m atters for themselves. Borrowing next from
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Marcuse’s One-D imensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964), I claimed that his fears of a mass media characterized by a “paralysis of criticism” and a “society without opposition” would soon come to pass, if they had not already arrived. 3 In this regard, I quoted from an editorial published October 1986, in the oldest continuously published news magazine in the United States, The Nation: What are amazing in this country are the speed and the enthusiasm with which the national media adopt official values and promote the consensus almost before the authorities put it forth. W hether the issue is terrorism, drugs, the Statue of Liberty, Nicaragua, Libya or the Philippines, t here is an urgent imperative to spout the line. It is almost impossible to find a significant, principled dissent in the mainstream press and on the networks at anywhere near the quality and quantity that was common during the time of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Dialectically, however, I also maintained that technological developments in media production could provide openings for critics and dissidents to strugg le on behalf of alternative narratives and unconventional modes of analyzing crime and justice. In the third and final section of the paper, “Praxis within the Culture of Domination,” I reported on my experiences engaging with both public and newsmaking criminologies. I began the section as follows: Since r unning for city council in Aurora, Illinois, in 1983, as an inde pendent, I have been making a conscious effort to cultivate the local media whenever possible. Radio, TV, print, it makes no difference to me. What I have discovered is that within the monolithic structure of the media community are individuals very much like you and I. Media people, the same as us and even more so, are bored by the tedium and one-d imensionality of their business. In short, media p eople know all too well that there is not enough news, especially interesting news to go around, and they are most definitely in the market for newsmaking criminologists. I underscored my discovery by cultivating relationships with news directors, publishers, and editors as well as with talk show hosts; these relationships facilitated opportunities to do criminology both onstage and backstage. In a reciprocal way, journalists and criminologists became sources of information and understanding for one another with respect to something we both cared about—t he represent at ion of crime and justice. On several occasions, we helped one another to make news stories on topics related to crime and justice, sometimes jointly and sometimes separately. I pointed out that over the previous three years, two in Illinois and one in Alabama, I had
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been able to permeate the news with unconventional ideas about crime and punishment, the elderly and crime, youth development and crime, sexual assault and wife battering, jail suicides, black-on-black crime, and police- community relations. My paper then posed this question: Does this type of social praxis or political strugg le make any kind of real difference in the lives of ordinary working and nonworking p eople or in reducing the victimization of those individuals subject to the crimes of the powerless as well as the powerf ul? In responding affirmatively, I referenced some modest examples, including the creation of the Aurora Township Youth Commission with a salaried coordinator and two street workers; the granting of a special use permit by the city of Aurora as well as the allocation of capital funds for the purchase of a shelter for abused women and children; the refurbishing of the former Aurora incinerator complex into Hesed House’s temporary shelter facility for homeless p eople; and, fin ally, the allocation of money to conduct a feasibility study for implementing a police foot patrol in the downtown area of the city of Montgomery. Besides the direct benefits that resulted from these reformist, rather than structural, changes for victims of domestic and street crimes, indirect benefits also accrued from demonstrating that ordinary p eople can strugg le against the interests of the powerful and, sometimes, defeat and move past the status quo. While some might argue that these types of reforms are counterproductive because they forestall social revolution or structural transformation, my radical-pragmatic viewpoint sees t hese types of reforms within the prevailing systems as beneficial to the most oppressed members of society and as empowering— even at times exhilarating— for people engaged in the strugg le for social justice. Just as import ant, t hese efforts are politicizing exercises that raise the class, ethnic, and gender consciousness of ordinary p eople. This type of consciousness-raising is both a facilitator of and a precondition for nonviolent structural or revolutionary change. G etting Our B eari ng s i n th e H eart of D i xi e In the summer of 1985 Charlotte and I moved to the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, with its colorful history as the place where the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was written and where Jefferson Davis took his presidential oath of office. Montgomery was founded in 1819 and immediately became a transportation hub for Alabama’s plantation economy. There were steamboats traveling south to Mobile, trains r unning northeast and southwest, and stagecoaches traveling east. Located 165 miles north of the Gulf Shores and on high bluffs overlooking the Alabama River, the city was named the state capital in 1846.
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With only nine thousand inhabitants, Montgomery was not exactly a lively metropolis when the town of mostly rich people and domestic servants found themselves home to the short-lived first capital of the Confederacy in February 1861. By July of that year, the congressman from the seven seceded states had been chased away to Richmond, Virginia, by mosquitoes and humidity. Afterward, the city never lost its allure as a bustling destination full of officials, politicians, and reporters. Nearly a century later, the political ambience of the capital was bolstered when the city emerged as one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement and the home of the young pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. The city was also the beneficiary of the very successful Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956. South of downtown lies Alabama State University (ASU). Founded in 1867, two years a fter the Civil War ended, as the Lincoln Normal School at Marion, ASU became the first state-supported teachers college for blacks in the United States. Today, ASU is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Districts. U ntil the 1960s and before legalized integration, ASU would remain the only public or private university in Montgomery. When Charlotte and I w ere both teaching at ASU, the breakdown of faculty was approximately one-third black, one-third white, and one-third other. We were truly a heterogeneous institution of faculty members like few other institutions of higher education in the United States. For the past several decades the student population at ASU has hovered around five thousand. Presently, the university offers forty- seven degree programs, including thirty-one bachelor’s degree programs, eleven master’s degree programs, two education specialist programs, and three doctorate programs. During our residency in the heart of Dixie, the population of Montgomery was around 186,000. These residents were a mixture of old and new southerners, with some two-t hirds of the residents having been born in Alabama and about one-third having relocated to Alabama from a western or northern state. This mixture added to the complicated politics of Alabama, which was beginning its transformation away from being a solid Dixiecrat state and t oward becoming solidly Republican. I joined the Perry Street YMCA shortly a fter moving to Alabama b ecause ASU had no racquetball courts of its own; the downtown branch was only minutes away from work and the place where serious racquetballers came to play. At the time of my membership, the downtown Y was still predominantly white with very few black members. My exposure to white politicos and others who often worked at the state capitol came from sharing a common steam room twice weekly. In that sweatiest of arenas, I learned a g reat deal about Alabama politics from ongoing, meandering conversations with two high-r anking Democrats, Jim
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Folsom, Jr. and Don Siegelman. I was a year older than Folsom and two years younger than Siegelman. Both men would become governors of Alabama a fter I left the state. I knew Folsom while he was the lieutenant governor and Siegelman while he was secretary of state and attorney general. As noted in the previous chapter, I was a member of Attorney General Siegelman’s Task Force on Victims’ Rights and his adviser on related m atters. As the lieutenant governor, Folsom automatically assumed the governorship on April 22, 1993, when the first Republican governor to hold the office since 1870, Guy Hunt, was forced to resign following his conviction for state ethics law violations. One year later, Folsom lost a squeaker of an election to the former popular Democratic governor Fob James, who had switched his party affiliation and would become only the second Republican since Reconstruction to serve as governor of Alabama. Siegelman served as governor from 1999 to 2003 and was the last Democrat to be elected to the highest office in the state. In 2006, Siegelman was convicted on federal felony corruption charges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld key bribery, conspiracy, and obstruction counts against Siegelman in 2009 and also denied his request for a new trial. In October 2015, more than one hundred former attorneys general and other governmental officials from both major political parties signed a document petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, contending that it was marred by prosecutorial misconduct. In 2017, a fter serving five years at the Oakdale federal prison in Louisiana, Siegelman was released and is on parole today. He immediately asked President Trump for a pardon and is writing a book about his innocence and corrupt conviction. Shortly after we arrived in Alabama, there w ere two statewide black political organizations in friendly competition. The Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) had been around since 1960 and claimed to be the nation’s oldest continuous grassroots black political organization. As a section of the Alabama Democratic Party, the ADC was an all-black organ ization, choosing to improve the way of life for all Alabamians through pol itical action and organizing. The Alabama New South Coa lit ion (ANSC), formed in January 1986, has never restricted its membership to blacks or limited its work to electoral politics. The organization sees itself as working inside and outside the political arena to solve social and economic problems. In late 1985, the ADC failed to endorse Jesse Jackson in his second bid for the presidency; the ANSC held its inaugural convention early the next year and currently has forty statewide chapters. Long before these pol itical organ izations came into existence, a number of socially active black groups and associations that transcended Alabama had a presence t here. T hese included various chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership
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Conference. Rounding out these political and social alliances were the legally oriented chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other civil and prisoner rights groups. With the exception of the Urban League, I had some kind of affiliation or working relationship with each of these other organizations. There was also a natur al affinity among old southern progressive demo crats and relocated northern democrats. This helped to facilitate political networking and social activism among whites and blacks. During this “post”–civil rights era, many southerners had not yet moved on from the old customs and ways of segregation. The ingrained beliefs and practices of discrimination w ere still very much a part of the cultural milieu and the wider strugg le for social justice. Our first experience with these contradictions was when Charlotte and I were looking for a place to live not far from Alabama State University. We had become absentee landlords, waiting two and one-h alf years for our Aurora home to sell in a depressed market; we would end up leasing a home in a well-to-do neighborhood on the southeast periphery of the Cloverdale Historic District, some three miles away from ASU. Before we signed the lease, the owner of the house, a w idow, and her real estate agent needed to conduct a visual skin test. When we called about the rental, we were told that a f amily had already looked at the property and were still making up their mind. We were encouraged to come look at the place. To say the least, the home and surroundings w ere beautiful, with three bedrooms, two baths, a sunroom, a dining room, living room, a den, two fireplaces, beautifully landscaped grounds, a lovely patio area, a large fenced-in backyard for our two dogs, a greenhouse, and a covered area for two cars. I know what you are thinking; however, remember what Marx purportedly stated on the m atter: “Nothing is too good for the working class.” Seriously though, I do not recall the amount of rent we paid, but even compared with the depressed Midwest the rental was a steal. Charlotte and I could not imagine why anybody would not have immediately grabbed this beautiful home on the very winding and scenic Woodley Road. When we were preparing to leave, the owner asked us what we thought about the h ouse. We told her and the real estate agent that we were ready to lease the house if the people before us did not. The owner and the agent both smiled and informed us that nobody else had actually looked at the property yet; we were the first prospective tenants to respond to the advertisement. They quickly explained that they had used that story of the other tenants ahead of us because a black professor from ASU would have been unacceptable. The owner quickly explained that she was not prejudiced and neither w ere any of her neighbors; however, they would have had all kinds of fits if she had rented her home to blacks in this all-white
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neighborhood. For the record, one would have been hard-pressed to find an integrated neighborhood in Montgomery, as they w ere virtually all de facto segregated and e ither all white or all black. A fter only one year as a white northern transplant working at a highly politicized HBCU I became a conduit of sorts for channeling black perspectives on crime and justice. My coming to serve this function was in part a result of my public and newsmaking criminology and in part a reflection of the political reality that the high-r anking officers of ASU and I shared very compatible ideological and social agendas. In short, my type of criminology and my politics were very much appreciated by the powers that be at the university. Thus, my relationship with President Leon Howard was a very cordial one. Our interactions usually occurred at university- sponsored events or at special presidential roundtables called to address some issue of general concern to ASU. On these occasions the president and I would always find the time to swap pleasantries. Our brief exchanges would usually end with Howard looking me directly in the eyes and telling me to keep up the good work. The vice president and provost for academic affairs was Roosevelt Steptoe. He and I had a different type of relationship. Whenever we were privately together, and that was always in his office, we always enjoyed our intellectual tête-à-têtes. From the time I first interviewed with Steptoe and virtually every time I went to his office, we would share a long-w inded conversation about one contemporary issue or another. As for the dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, Robert Thompson, and the dean of the graduate school, Kirk Wood, they were the only two sen ior white administrators on the campus. Thompson was my campus confidant and point person for managing the criminal justice department and navigating the university. Bob always took pleasure in explaining the customs and traditions of this historical institution to me. I had no interaction with Dean Wood u ntil 1988, when I began to develop the graduate master’s program in criminology. Before sharing the story b ehind the development of the first master’s of criminology at any HBCU, I would like to use some extensive excerpts from a series of articles that I wrote for the Montgomery Advertiser in the late summer and early fall of 1986. The series revolved around the politics surrounding the investigation by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission into the racial tensions between the Montgomery Police Department and the African American community. Those three essays launched my c areer as a newsmaking criminologist, resulting in appearances early the next year on Alabama Public Telev ision, among other things. More important, shortly a fter the third article was published, I was invited to give the keynote address at the first annual luncheon of the Alabama New South Coa lit ion.
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O n the Em e rg e nc e of Newsmaking Cri m i nolog y While in Alabama I began developing my skills as a newsmaking criminologist by writing dozens of opinion essays, columns, and reviews. T hese appeared mostly in newspapers but also in magazines like Southern Changes and the Montgomery Magazine. As I mentioned, I also made a c ouple of statewide appearances on Alabama Public Telev ision’s For the Record, a program about public issues with a discussion format. Usually, two or three guests with different perspectives would have a thirty-m inute exchange led by a moderator with a series of comments and questions. Tracy Larcom, an African American male, hosted the program at the time, following the nightly news hour on PBS. The first time I was invited, the program was devoted to black-on-black crime. The other two guests for the even ing w ere the thirty-t wo-year old white chief of the Montgomery Police Department and a black civil rights female attorney. The next time I was invited, I reluctantly agreed to go head-to-head with Governor Guy Hunt’s drug czar. The substance of the newsmaking series was based on my assessment of the second set of public hearings held before the Alabama Advisory Committee (AAC) and included my evaluation of the committee’s final report, findings, and recommendations to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. A standard headshot from the days of my Aurora political campaign accompanied each of the columns, which appeared in 1986 between late July and early October in the Montgomery Advertiser. Each of these articles also contained different bits of biographical information about me. From the first article: “The writer is the chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Alabama State University.” The second one was preceded at the top with the following message: “Police- community relations are a topic u nder review in Montgomery by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. This report by the chairman of the criminal justice department at Alabama State University explores false perceptions on both sides.” Beneath the second essay: “The writer has a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal, Crime and Social Justice.” And beneath the third article: “The writer heads the Department of Criminal Justice at Alabama State University and is the author of In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform.” The second set of public hearings on police-community relations in Montgomery was held July 18, 1986, at the Sheraton Riverfront Hotel. In the first article, dated July 25, 1986, and titled by the newspaper as “Police Relations Perplexing,” I acknowledged what “everyone in the packed conference room knew all too well, the relationship between the police and the black community in Montgomery has been marked by a history of mutual
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distrust and suspicion.” I underscored how “racial tensions in the South had been aggravated by the Reagan administration’s policies which have had a chilling effect on the strugg les for civil and h uman rights.” I wrote that “as most informed people know, u nder the leadership of chairman Clarence Pendleton, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission has at best become a perfunctory organization, especially when it comes to m atters of affirmative action.” I also pointed out that when Pendleton, who had been scheduled to speak at the hearings, showed up more than one hour late and was invited by the chair of the Alabama Advisory Committee to address the audience of more than two hundred p eople, he had declined to do so. Instead, Pendleton simply joined the audience as another anonymous onlooker. I reminded readers that the first set of public hearings, conducted three years e arlier, had never resulted in any official report from the Civil Rights Commission as called for; hence, the need to hold a second set of hearings. I noted that “the AAC members had recently met with and interviewed the principals involved in this civil rights strugg le, and . . . they had submitted and received tentative approval of their final report on July 11, 1986,” one week before the second set of public hearings was scheduled to convene. I queried whether the final forthcoming report to be issued in mid-September was coming from those earlier private meetings or from the five hours of recent public testimony. I raised the possibility of a political whitewashing and suggested “like many rituals, this public hearing might have more to do with legitimating the status quo than with coming up with any v iable changes in police- community policy.” I took the opportunity to provide a short history of police-community conflict in the broadest sense. I addressed the full range of complaints or grievances by citizens, including “verbal and physical assaults between the police and striking workers, between the police and the homeless, between the police and prohibited vigilantes, as well as between the police and the traditional ‘dangerous classes,’ including sexual, racial, political, and other minorities.” I explained how the attitudes and the perceptions expressed by t hose who had testified as well as the realities that they described, “reflected deep-seated ideas or prejudices generated as least as far back as the early 19th century, when the institution of policing was born for the expressed purposes of controlling slaves.” Two groups of people with disparate viewpoints testified: first, local representatives from business, government, and law enforcement; second, three civil rights attorneys from Montgomery. While the first group was allotted close to four hours to present their testimony, the second group had only forty-five minutes. The first group included “the mayor, the chief of police and his administrators, followed by the president of the city council and some members of
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the business community.” They spoke about “what had already been accomplished in police community relations, claiming that relative peace and harmony had come to Montgomery over the course of the past three years, but they also recognized that there was still room for improvement.” Only the remarks of black city councilman Mark Gilmore “challenged this point of view.” I suggested that perhaps the councilman should have been testifying with t hose whom I identified as the “advocates of change.” With comparatively limited time for giving testimony, attorneys Vanzetta Penn McPherson (black), Julian McPhillips (white), and Donald Watkins (black) presented a strikingly different picture. They claimed “that serious problems still existed between different segments of the community and the police, that little or no significant prog ress had occurred since the AAC held its first hearing back in September 1983, and that the need persisted for procedural changes in the practices of the police department.” I then suggested how the public hearings might have been different had others without any vested interests been invited to testify. I identified two groups of p eople—experts on police-community conflict as well as ordinary citizens from the community—who might have altered or reinforced the competitive narratives. Regarding the second group, I pointed out that dozens of p eople from the community had mistakenly shown up to the public hearings when they were not scheduled to speak, thinking that they were going to be able to offer testimony. I did acknowledge that all but five of those citizens had been denied an opportunity to speak b ecause of time constraints. T hose who did speak were allocated three minutes each. Fin ally, I ended the first article by identifying those “activities from such cities as Newark and Flint, where tensions, fears, and animosities between police departments and black communities have actually been reduced.” The Montgomery Advertiser titled the second article, dated September 9, 1986, “Minorities, Police Views Distorted.” My objective in this article was to reframe Montgomery’s police-citizen conflict problem and to help reshape the conversation of what needs to be done. I played down the role of police- community relations units and played up the need to involve other police units and operations. I wanted readers to appreciate that the tensions and mutual hostility between the police and marginal communities had more to do with field operations, administrative directives, and employment practices than with police-community relations. I brought in findings from a report by the California Attorney General’s Office on police-community relations as well as from Gallup and Harris opinion polls about minority and nonminority perceptions of police misconduct. I shared some observations from the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement pertaining to the practices of field interrogation and police harassment, as well as the greater
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tendency of police to stop, question, and frisk minorities. For further context, I also reported from the cities of Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York on upward trends in citizen complaints about police misbehavior. I pointed out the overprediction of police misconduct by powerless minority communities. I also pointed out that black communities had correctly perceived that police-community relations (PCR) units were “not central to the police mission” and that t hese units could be more accurately depicted as the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement had labeled them: “public relations puff ” and a “deliberate con game.” Similarly, I revealed why police misperceive the amount of hostility or negativity that minority communities hold for police; and, at the same time, why the police w ere correct that cooperation from marginalized members of society is often difficult, if not impossible, to come by. About two-thirds of the way through the piece I asked the fundamental question, “Why do police-community relations units continue to exist if they do not really reduce the hostility, the tension, or the conflict?” I explained that the maintenance of PCR units in the 1980s was a function of bureaucratic inertia and was directly “related to the reasons that brought them into existence in the first place. During their emergence in the 1960s, the image projected by establishing t hese units was more impor tant than the substance of the unit’s program.” I added that currently “t hese units permit a department to say that it is d oing something about the prob lem. Conversely, abolishing a police-community relations unit opens the department up to criticisms that it is abandoning its commitment to improving police- community relations.” I maintained that this contradiction “establishes a catch-22 policy that in effect perpetuates the relatively ineffec tive measures of PCR.” I reiterated that the reduction in police-community conflict has l ittle, if anything, to do with expanding police-community relations units. I pointed out that such policies could actually be counterproductive b ecause, in a zero-sum way, expanding PCR units takes away scarce and needed resources from other police operations. I then opined, “when the Alabama Advisory Commission makes its recommendations in its final report to be released later in the month . . . it would undoubtedly call for amplifying the work of the PCR unit without mentioning anything about its basic police operations or altering any of its current polices.” Fin ally, I wrote that t hose other areas of police beh avior “can be subject to modification, but only through the power of elected and appointed officials working in cooperation with both community activists and law enforcement personnel.” In the concluding article, dated October 2, 1986, which the Montgomery Advertiser titled “Montgomery May Be Model,” I attempted to do several different things. Before I review these, allow me to put the proverbial cart
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before the h orse and quote from the last paragraph in the final section of the article, with the heading “The AAC’s Study and Montgomery PCR: A Summation”: As a community, we should recognize that there is no pride lost in acknowledging and realistically addressing a problem. On the contrary, it would be a shame if we pretend that our police-community relations were the best they could be. By working together intelligently, we have the collective capacity to substantially improve our relations in police- community conflict, and to provide an exemplary model for other cities in the U.S. to emulate. In the introduction to this essay, I let the readers know that “for the past four months I have been examining the practices of the Montgomery Police Department in comparison with other departments that I have known” and that I had been specifically trying to get a sense of “the perceptions of t hose practices as these are viewed by the city’s black and white communities.” Not only had I conducted close to one hundred informal interviews of ordinary citizens and members of civic, church, and political groups, but I had also talked with police, attorneys, judges, and correctional officials for their takes as well on the police-community conflict in the greater metropolitan area. The body of the article covered an evaluation of the findings, a critique of the report, and suggested alternatives to the AAC’s recommendations under three headings: “The Report,” “The Fundamental Flaw,” and “Beyond Police Community Relations Bureaus.” With respect to the report itself, I began by saying that the Alabama Advisory Committee had “released a highly substantive and informative 89-page report which, on the whole, quite reasonably and fairly captures the work of the police-community relations unit and its activities.” Next, I pointed out that while I agreed with most of the committee’s recommendations, their impact on police-community conflict in Montgomery would be negligible. I reasserted what I had already implied in my two previous articles: that the “key to improving police-community conflict in this city and elsewhere, rests with the development of proactive policing and community intervention, rather than with better public relations or human relations seminars.” In the second section, “The Fundamental Flaw,” I let the readers know that I was a member of One Montgomery. OM was a high-profile biracial social organization, which, among other activities, met downtown once a month for breakfast and ethnic fellowship. I then went on to quote from the report: “The idea that One Montgomery or any other tangential, biracial organi zation could seriously ‘assess the situation in the community and take the initiative’ in altering police-community beh avior was simply naive and
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not very realistic.” I then critiqued the recommendation that Montgomery should copy what Birmingham police had accomplished u nder the leadership of Richard Arrington, Jr., the city’s first black mayor. While t here w ere obvious similarities in police-community conflict from one city to the next, one size does not necessarily fit all; in other words, “what might work in Birmingham or Atlanta does not necessarily apply to Mobile and Selma. As far as Montgomery goes,” I commented, “the idea of copying Birmingham had been suggested back in May 1983 a fter the first public hearing by the likes of County Commissioner John Knight and Mayor Emory Folmar.” Nevertheless, over the preceding three years none of the Birmingham police practices had been a dopted by the MPD. In the third section, “Beyond Police Community Relations Bureaus,” I underscored that while the Montgomery Police Department’s Police Community Relations Bureau (PCRB) attempted to run four significant programs (e.g., courtroom intervention, family disputes, special serv ices, and warrant clerk investigation requests), it did so with inadequate resources and relatively few officers. I wrote, however, that I was “not suggesting a larger commitment in dollars or staffing nor . . . advocating for an expanded role of the PCRB as called for by the Advisory Committee’s report. On the contrary, I [was] recommending [among other things] that the Montgomery Police Department incorporate these serv ices into the day-to-d ay activities of patrol, through an improved and more efficient utilization of people. . . .” I was also calling for “the development of a foot patrol in the downtown area and for the formation of a Police-Civilian Review Board,” which I stated was “consistent with the spirit of Montgomery’s Police Community Relations Bureau.” A couple of weeks a fter the third article appeared on October 2, I was working in my office on a Thursday afternoon when Renee Brown, the department secretary, cracked open the internal door between our offices and said, “J. L. Chestnut is on the phone for you.” I suspect that most folks reading these chronicles have never heard of the first African American lawyer to practice law in Selma. Chestnut was also the attorney for Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s. Shortly a fter the Alabama Democratic Conference refused in late 1985 to endorse Jesse Jackson’s run for the presidency in 1988, Mayor Arrington and Chestnut cofounded the Alabama New South Coa lit ion. Arrington became the president of the organization and Chestnut became the secretary-t reasurer. For many years, attorney Chestnut was also a syndicated columnist throughout the Black Belt and beyond. In 1992, Oxford University Press published the autobiography Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr. The book, coauthored with Julia Cass of the Philadelphia Inquirer, chronicles Chestnut’s involvement in the voting rights movement, the infamous Bloody Sunday
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on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the ensuing march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. I picked up the receiver, pushed the button with the red blinking line, and said, “This is Gregg Barak.” A fter we exchanged greetings, Chestnut turned to why he had called me: “The Alabama New South Coa lit ion has a problem, Professor Barak. Mayor Arrington and I think that you might be able to fix it.” He was inviting me to give the keynote address for the fifty- dollar-a-plate fall luncheon of the ANSC only ten days away b ecause the scheduled speaker had to unexpectedly withdraw. I asked Chestnut, “What would you like me to talk about?” He responded, “What about something on crime and criminal justice as it relates to both blacks and whites?” “Yes, I think I could do that. How many minutes w ill I have to speak?” “About twenty or so,” he said. “That’s not much time, but okay.” He then asked me, “How long w ill it take to write?” “Well, that should not be a problem as I have more than a week to do so.” Chestnut responded, “No, you don’t have that much time because I have to read your text, and if necessary, we may have to do some rewriting.” Accordingly, I agreed to meet with Chestnut in his Montgomery office the following Tuesday even ing. This was four days before the ANSC luncheon. On the Monday before our meeting I received a message from Provost Steptoe: “Dr. Joe Reed would prefer that you withdraw from making the keynote address before the ANSC this Saturday.” I immediately called Chestnut’s office and left a message for him to call me. Reed was chairman of the ASU Board of Trustees, head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, a member of the Alabama House of Representatives from Montgomery, and for many years considered to be the most powerful Democrat, black or white, in the state of Alabama. Reed was often referred to as “Doctor” because he had received the honorific degree for his outstanding work organizing black and white K–12 teachers in Alabama. Chestnut returned my call about an hour later. I told him about the message from Dr. Reed. Chestnut said something along the lines of “No problem; he did not tell you not to do it—only that he preferred for you not to do it.” I thought to myself, “spoken like a true attorney.” Chestnut then said something like, “Relax, Gregg, Joe is just playing with me through you.” “How can you be sure?” “Well, I c an’t, but if I am wrong and he fires you or something worse [ jokingly], then we’ll sue his ass and I w ill represent you pro bono.” I was thinking to myself, “been there, done that.” He quickly appeased me: “Seriously, Gregg, you have nothing to worry about, you can trust me. See you tomorrow night?” “I’ll be t here.” The next night, it took Chestnut only about six or seven minutes to read my keynote address. A fter the first few minutes, I knew my remarks were acceptable because as
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he read he kept nodding his head in accord. When he finished reading, Chestnut handed the pages back to me and said, “This w ill work just fine.” Inquiring minds might find it intere sting to learn that I was pinch- hitting for none other than the legendary Harold Eugene Ford, Sr. Just days before Chestnut called me out of the blue, it had been leaked from a g rand jury investigation that U.S. attorneys were preparing to criminally indict the young, charismatic congressman, the first African American to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Congress. Two months later, Congressman Ford was charged with bribery, banking violations, and other fraud. Ford was facing up to ninety-five months in prison if he was convicted of these crimes. While the litigation of Ford’s case dragged on for seven years, the rising star was relieved of his congressional committee assignments, including his position as chair of the House’s all-powerful Ways and Means Committee. During his suspension and pending the legal outcome of two t rials, the popular Ford was reelected three more times to office. A fter the first trial ended in a hung jury and the second trial in 1993 acquitted him, the congressman was reinstated to his previous committees. A few years later, Ford, Sr., retired from Congress, passing the political baton off to his son, Harold Ford, Jr. A fter serving several terms as congressman, Ford, Jr., would lose his bid to become the first black U.S. senator from Tennessee. Looking back a fter all these years, I remember several things about the luncheon, which was held at the Birmingham-Hyatt Hotel. First, I was sitting at the elevated head t able of this pol itical gathering, flanked by attorney Chestnut on my left and by Mayor Arrington on my right. They were each flanked on their left and right sides, respectively, by two more black politicos, bringing the total number of persons on the stage, counting myself, to seven. Second, looking out at an audience of about 120 black p eople and eighty white p eople sitting separately around some twenty-five t ables spread out across the room, I recall wondering, How did I ever get from West Los Angeles to Birmingham, Alabama? Third, I w ill always remember the uneven standing ovation that I received at the end of my address; the black audience immediately rose and started to applaud, while the white audience gradually stood and did the same. The most memorable exchange that I had that day was during a conversation with the person sitting at the head t able to Mayor Arrington’s immediate right. As most everyone present that day was exiting the hotel, I was still hanging around talking with people when I noticed that Shirley Chisholm was sitting by herself at one of the round t ables. I walked over to the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York as well as the first black candidate to run for the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States in 1972, and I asked w hether I could join her. Chisholm and I ended up
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talking one-on-one for about three-quarters of an hour before she was fin ally met by some people and escorted away. Chisholm was very warm and friendly, and it was truly awesome having the opportunity to connect with her at the luncheon. Somewhere in the m iddle of our conversation, I also recall Ms. Chisholm giving me a backhanded compliment. Agreeing with my arguments, she said, “Gregg, you know what the problem with your analysis is, don’t you?” As I looked puzzled and before I could respond, she smiled and said, “There a ren’t enough white people that think like you do, and u ntil t here are, it w ill be a very long time before we have a whole lot of racial change.” What follows is my present at ion in its entirety. D e m y s t i f y i ng C r i m e a n d C r i m e C o n t ro l i n t h e N e w S ou t h , O c t ob e r 25, 19 8 6
According to FBI figures for 1985, Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Montgomery all registered increases in their crime rates that exceeded the national average of four p ercent. The city of Montgomery recorded the highest increase of 10 percent. The Montgomery mayor and chair of the Alabama Republican Party, Emory Folmar, said, “if you look behind the numbers, you’ll see that the persistent problem is black- on-black crime” [audience murmurs]. The implications of his statement heard not only in the New South, but throughout the United States, are that if blacks would only stop murdering and raping each other, then the problem of crime would go away [louder audience murmurs]. The problem with Folmar’s analysis and that of so many other politicians and media commentators, including t hose from the law and order right, the neoconservative centrists, some of the democratic liberal left, and far too many members of the black m iddle class, is that their “investigations” never actually look b ehind the official numbers of crime in general or of the incidences of black-on-black crime in particu lar, to the world of crime and crime control in relation to the undergirding social and economic arrangements. T here are at least three important misunderstandings associated with t hese kinds of emissive oversights. First, those who reduce the crime problem to the officially recorded crimes against the person or the state, fail to comprehend other dangers, some against and some protected by the law in the New South and elsewhere that pose even greater harm or injury to the well-being of the majority of Americans, black or white, than those crimes represented by the FBI tallies. Second, these types of blame the victim/perpetrator analyses of crime and crime control tend to focus on individual causation to the exclusion of social or economic causation. Third, when the policies and practices designed to deter or prevent these types of crime
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fail to succeed, they have, unfortunately, reproduced a doubling-down effect on the law and order measures of getting tougher on crime. In fact, we are presently experiencing a counterproductive cycle that is almost two decades old dating back to when Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968. While the verdict on our failing criminal justice system is already in, the question still remains: How long before both the Republicans and Democrats reverse their mutually destructive policies of crime and crime control? Making sense out of all forms of crime, injury, and harm, including those prohibited by the law, those ignored or unenforced by the law, and those protected by the law, as well as the relation between these require that we go beyond the individual offenders or law enforcers to examine the social, political, and economic relations of a neighborhood, a community, a state, a region of the country, or even the global world. The relationships, for example, between crime and privilege, crime and inequality, crime and gender, crime and race, crime and poverty, as well as other factors, comprise the floodplains of criminalization and social control. And, if we are really serious about turning- the-tides of those floodplains, then we have to overcome all forms of crime and strugg le on behalf of all forms of justice. W hether assaults or victimizations are occurring in the streets or in the suites, and whether these offenses involve physical or psychological harm, sexual harassment or child abuse, environmental or industrial pollution, consumer fraud or financial deception, one must look not only at the individual perpetrators and victims, but also at the pol itical and economic arrangements that shape the material realities of our social milieus, and at t hose public policies and private practices that facilitate or impede the development of social justice for all. Much of the distortion or mystification about crime and crime control has to do with the way both criminals and crime-fighters are represented in the news and in the entertainment industry. As most of us are too well aware, on the nightly local news, “if it bleeds, it leads.” As the Washington Post has reported, “crimes on telev ision are almost 12 times as likely to be violent as those committed in the real world.” Even when the media or politicians are not focusing their attention on the crimes of the powerless or on the crimes of marginality, their focus is generally misplaced and not grounded in resisting or combatting the real world dangers that confront most all of us. The most obvious example is the “war on drugs.” This war gives a pass to the pharm aceut ical, tobacco, and alcoholic producers that harm, and account, for far many more deaths and injuries each year than the outlawed controlled substances do, including such drugs as heroin or cocaine.
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Moreover, even when the mass media and telev ision in part icu lar recognize that m iddle class and affluent people also violate the law, in fact, more frequently than the underclasses do, those representative crimes are typically off their mark. Instead of focusing on the “class specific” crimes, for example, of m iddle class persons carrying out crimes in the workplace, or of affluent offenders in their executive suites colluding to price-fi x the cost of baby formula, these non-m arginal offenders are portrayed as engaging in the very same types of index offenses as ordinary, non-white-collar and corporate, offenders. Collectively, t hese distorted images of criminals manufacture a shared impression or consensus about crime and crime control that present the dangers of crime as emanating from only the powerless and not from the powerf ul. As a consequence of these one-d imensional mass media projections, blacks and whites are both falling victim to the underlying myth that black-on-black crime trumps all other forms of crime, and that these crimes committed by marginal blacks should be policed accordingly. Again, this mediated image of the dangers of black-on-black homicides works, for example, because of all the other legal killings that are not counted, accounted for, or even recognized. Paraphrasing the Rev. Joseph Lowry, to discuss black-on-black homicide without discussing homicides more generally, is to provide a partial picture of the story at best or “ just another form of racism” at worst. In other words, are t here not other forms of external harm and victimization of blacks, including homicide and other assaultive acts short of death, that pose equal or more serious threats to the survival, unity, and well-being of the black community? As one example, let’s take homicides of civilians by the police. The Police Foundation in Washington, D.C. informs us that more than 1/3 of the killings of blacks and whites by the police have been unrelated to any type of crime. Across the country, we are also informed by the foundation that while blacks constitute 12 percent of the population, they constitute 45 percent of t hose killed by the police. As for the state of affairs h ere in the South, former Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Atlanta University’s Criminal Justice Institute, Bernard D. Headley, has recently written that “specific incidents of police homicide involving blacks as victims can be recalled ad infinitum.” For further corroboration, I encourage you to see the latest report on police killings by the Southern Poverty Law Center. To further undermine the myths of black-on-black crime, or of poor- on-poor crime, as the most threatening dangers to working class communities, black or white, I need to reference the harms of workplace or economic victimization. In the latest edition of Jeffrey Reiman’s well
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documented book that came out in 1984, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, he reveals: “workplace injuries cause 14,200 deaths annually, and 100,000 people die each year of diseases that can be traced to coal tar, dust, asbestos, and other substances.” For another type of comparison: street crime may take a life e very 23 minutes, but a death resulting from an industrial cause occurs every four minutes. As Reiman has underscored with respect to protecting workers’ health, almost all of the occupational deaths are preventable by safety devices and/or by enforcing the existing laws, and if necessary, passing new and better regulatory laws. As for economic victimization more generally, Headley has argued “that the daily rip-offs that black and other low income groups experience at the hands of ghetto merchants, represent an even greater economic and material threat than do ‘street’ property crimes.” Within the larger economic and financial arrangements, it is import ant to appreciate that switch-a nd-bait advertising of goods and serv ices, or the coercive pressures on buyers to consume with inflated rates of interest, as well as other types of market relations like these, as David Caplowitz argues in The Poor Pay More: “these dishonest activities occur with the full connivance of major banks and other lending institutions.” In differ ent but similar ways, the larger po l iti cal and economic arrangements cannot be severed or disconnected from either crimes in the suite or crimes in the street, including the alarming rates of black- on-black crime. However, most p eople not only ignore the role of the political economy in the formation of crime, but also the heavy toil taken by occupational and corporate crimes on society, preferring culturally to focus on black-on-black crime and racist explanations for both individualized and group beh avior alike. However, if people are really serious about looking behind the numbers on black-on-black or white-on-white crimes in the street or in the home, then we need to examine especially here in the South, our higher rates of functional illiteracy, teenage pregnancy, and impoverishment, as well as our lower expenditures per capita on education, health care, and other h uman ser v ices. Allow me to conclude: Contrary to the wisdom of some of our leaders in the South and elsewhere, the problems of crime and crime control cannot be reduced to the crimes of the powerless or to black-on-black crime in particu lar. Nor w ill these crimes be prevented or resolved by simple-m inded, get-tough strategies of law and order. T hese types of crime control policies have proven themselves to be ineffective and socially bankrupt. Perhaps even worse, these policies have also helped to erode some of our constitutionally guaranteed rights to equal protection under the law. Once again, confronting the larger political economy
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of crime and crime control is what is called for. Otherw ise, the marginally poor and the perpetrators of black-on-black crime w ill continue to serve as targets to repress and as scapegoats to blame. Fin ally, as long as we remain locked in a mind-set that sees our collective security as threatened by isolated individuals unrelated to economic and cultural relations, then in all likelihood all forms of crime and punishment w ill continue to corrode the very foundations of what could otherw ise make this a truly g reat society. Maste ring Cri m i nolog y Alabama State University, Alabama A&M University (AAMU), and other HBCUs in the southern United States were losing black students at a precipitous rate when higher education was legally integrated in the 1960s. A number of historically black institutions were forced to close. As Donald Watkins, one of the plaintiff attorneys in Knight v. Alabama,4 was quoted to say in the Montgomery Advertiser during an ASU roundtable held in January 2014: “We felt that by the late 1970s and early 1980s that our backs were against the wall. . . . We’d seen the trend for 20 years.” The lawsuit “started out as a vehicle and concept to survive.” In a very real sense, t hose plaintiffs were fighting for their institutional lives and for extrication from limited and discriminatory funding. Knight v. Alabama was decided on January 31, 2007, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The case, originally filed in 1981, claimed that the State of Alabama had failed to complete the desegregation of its colleges and universities. Across the board, the lawsuit challenged higher education policies at both white and black institutions. The plaintiffs argued that many of Alabama’s higher education policies tended to perpetuate its formerly de jure segregated university system. Over the years, the case would involve two separate trials and sets of appeals. In the first trial in 1991, which lasted seven months, and in the second shorter trial in 1995, the plaintiffs sought changes in those policies that would tend to decrease the de facto segregation, or racial identifiability, of Alabama’s colleges and universities. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama held that many of the state’s policies fostered vestiges of segregation in Alabama’s colleges and universities, violating the U.S. Constitution. The district court ordered numerous changes in those policies. The court retained authority for ten years to supervise Alabama’s prog ress. In 2003, two years before the supervisory period was to end, the plaintiffs claimed that serious underfunding was occurring in both the K–12 system and the higher education system. In its 2004 decision, the district court found Alabama’s property tax system to be a vestige of discrimination and a contributor to underfunding,
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which called for further remedies. From that point forward and into the f uture, the strugg le at both ASU and AAMU has been to sustain their traditions as historically black institutions of postsegregated Alabama higher education. For our purposes, the 1988–1989 development and implementation of the master of arts and master of science degrees in criminology at ASU, as well as the change of the department name from the department of criminal justice to the department of criminology and criminal justice, w ere part of a proposed remedy for addressing two claims of the lawsuit: (1) duplication of programs at both historically white and historically black institutions resulted in racial separation; and (2) restrictive institutional missions at historically black institutions resulted in an absence of graduate programs. While still in preparation for the first trial, a brainstorming session with department chairs, deans, and other administrators was held at ASU to come up with remedies to ameliorate the various claims of segregation in Alabama higher education. When the claims pertaining to the problems of duplicating programs and restrictive graduate programs were introduced, a potential remedy popped immediately into my head. At the time of the impending first lawsuit, three programs in Montgomery offered a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice: Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM), Troy State University at Montgomery (TSUM), and ASU. Eleven graduate master’s programs in criminal justice were offered in the state of Alabama, and no criminology degrees of any kind were offered. So I suggested that, by developing a graduate master’s degree in criminology, ASU could make a stronger case than AUM and TSUM for becoming the sole institution to offer both criminal justice and criminology as a means of reducing problems of program duplication and racial separation. Without much discussion, everyone was supportive of the idea, and I was charged with establishing what turned out to be Alabama’s first and last master’s degree in criminology. I understood that it was highly unlikely that the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) would approve a twelfth master’s program in criminal justice. On the other hand, I thought correctly that a well- developed master’s program in criminology where none had existed had a good chance of being approved. A fter I responded to requests from some of the other programs offering master’s degrees to further clarify the differences between criminal justice and criminology, the ACHE body unanimously approved the program in September 1988. The departmental name change from criminal justice to criminology and criminal justice occurred in the m iddle of that fall semester. The first cohort of eight graduate students began in the 1989 winter semester. The first three paragraphs from the original program brochures read as follows:
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The department of criminology and criminal justice is offering a new and innovative graduate program leading to a Master of Arts or Master of Sciences degree in criminology, with emphases in criminalization, victimization, and crisis intervention. The masters’ degrees in criminology are comparative and multidisciplinary degrees that integrate the theories and methodologies of the full range of the social and behavioral sciences. The degree programs are designed to develop students who can apply sound analytical skills to problems of criminalization and victimization. Students in the M.A. program write a thesis and are prepared to go on to pursue their Ph.D. in criminology, public policy, urban sociology or criminal justice upon graduation. Students in the M.S. program complete a research/policy project and are prepared to find employment as policy analysts and as researchers in state and federal agencies, and in private, profit and non-profit, serv ice industries. I was working with a blank slate with respect to curriculum development and the dissemination of knowledge. The only limitations w ere my criminological imagination. Here is what I came up with (also identified in t hose brochures): CRM 501 Criminological Theory CRM 502 Problems in Juvenile Justice CRM 503 Methods of Criminological Research CRM 504 Problems in Law Enforcement CRM 505 Victimology CRM 506 Problems in Punishment and Corrections CRM 507 Justice Systems Theory CRM 508 Issues in Organ izational Crime CRM 509 Deviant Beh avior and Social Control CRM 510 Issues in Terrorism
CRM 511 Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault CRM 512 History of Crime Control CRM 514 Law, Power, and Justice CRM 515 Contemporary Criminology CRM 516 Issues in Comparative Criminology CRM 517 Administrative and Constitutional Law CRM 518 Human Resource Development CRM 519 Policy Analysis and Research Internship CRM 520 Thesis
Finally, the brochures stated that the master’s degree in criminology re quired a minimum of 36 semester hours. The master of arts degree required
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30 semester hours of credit in coursework plus 6 hours for a thesis and its successful defense. The master of science degree required 30 hours of credit in coursework, a 6-hour research or policy project, and successful completion of a comprehensive exit examination. Two of the graduates from the original cohort were David L. Spinner and James F. Anderson. Since we have kept in loose contact for almost thirty years, I reached out to them by email in October 2018 for any reflections that they might want to share about their experiences in the department while we were there together. Spinner was my graduate assistant and I was the chair of David’s MA thesis committee. A copy of his thesis, “Race, Ideology, and the War on Drugs: An Analysis of the Black Experience,” is available from the Alabama State University Library. Spinner went on to earn his PhD from the University of Maryland. He is currently an associate professor and director of the master’s in criminal justice program at Norfolk State University. David wrote me back: As far as I remember, we were relatively close. I visited your house on many occasions. You were like an older brother to me and taught me a lot. You are only one of two professors I ever had that I trusted. You were always honest in your dealings with everyone. You said what you meant and stood by it. Not many people are like that. Anderson received his BS in criminal justice and MA in criminology from ASU while I was the department chair. I was a member of his thesis committee; his thesis was entitled “An Exploratory Study to Determine Success or Failure in the Alabama Boot Camp Program.” James went on to earn his PhD at Sam Houston State University (SHSU). He became an author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and several books, including Criminological Theories: Understanding Crime in America, 2nd edition (2015). Anderson is presently a full professor and former chair of the department of criminal justice at Eastern Carolina University. Among the reflections that James shared was a “funny and embarrassing story that I w ill never forget,” a “lesson that has stayed with me all of t hese years b ecause you cared enough about my prog ress.” He was taking a gradu ate seminar on domestic violence and sexual assault from me. “To make a long story short, I attempted to salvage an undergraduate paper by reusing it in your course, and somehow you had caught me” trying to recycle it. “You evaluated the manuscript page by page and in a long reaction informed me that if I was not going to take being a graduate student seriously, then I should not waste my time.” He further claimed, “You were kind and gave me an IP [In Prog ress] and allowed me to redo the paper.” He also informed me that he “received a B in the course”; I imagine that, because I had allowed him to redo the paper, his grade was marked down in fairness to those other
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students in the course who only had one bite at the apple. Professor Anderson also shared his assessment of both the undergraduate and gradu ate programs: My time at ASU in both programs prepared me to do well in SHSU’s doctoral program. In fact, I was surprised to an extent when I discovered that my preparation for the program was better than many of the other students in my cohort. A fter attending several courses with them, I discovered that my foundation and understanding of criminal justice and criminological subject m atter was better. For example, many of the students that I entered SHSU with never finished the program. They either failed the course work, comprehensives, or did not complete the dissertation. . . . A s I reflect on things, I credit my work ethic to the mentoring that I received from you, Jerald Burns, and Christina Johns, especially the emphasis placed on contributing to the body of criminal justice and criminological knowledge, mainly through publishing scholarship. I would resign from ASU effective at the end of the winter semester 1991 to become head of the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology (SAC) at Eastern Michigan University. Christina Johns, whom I hired in 1988 to come to ASU with a half-time appointment in the new graduate criminology program and a half-time appointment in the undergraduate criminal justice program, would also leave ASU one year later and join SAC. She was one of the first of several criminologists that I brought on board while I was department head at EMU. By the time the first desegregation trial began, it was clear that neither the district court nor ACHE was going to eliminate duplication of programs among white and black institutions as a desegregation remedy. Thus, one of the rationales for developing the first graduate program in criminology at ASU, to strengthen ASU’s chances of acquiring a monopoly over the delivery of criminal justice programs in the Montgomery area, had disappeared. By 1993, the first and only program in Alabama to award master’s degrees in criminology had stopped accepting new graduate students. The name of the department would revert back to criminal justice. Eventually, by the early 2000s, the programs in sociology and geography could no longer survive on their own as majors. They were reduced to minors and combined into an amalgamated department of criminal justice and social sciences. In retrospect, the loss of the graduate program in criminology was a shame. ASU was positioned at the time not only to deliver Alabama’s only master’s program in criminology but also logically thereafter to develop the only doctoral program of criminology in Alabama or at an HBCU.
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Manag ing and P roduc i ng C ri m i nolog ical Knowle dge, 19 8 6 – 19 91 During my tenure at ASU, I became very busy both managing and producing criminological knowledge. In addition to developing and implementing a graduate program in criminology, there was the dissemination and circulation of knowledge of crime and justice on and off campus. Some of this management of knowledge was combined with newsmaking criminology. For example, on the even ing of November 12, 1986, the Montgomery National Issues Forum Chapter and the Department of Criminal Justice presented, as part of the National Issues Forum Series, “Crime: What We Fear, What Can Be Done” in ASU’s Tullibody Fine Arts Center. Earlier that same afternoon of November 12, the Montgomery Advertiser published an op-ed piece of mine that the newspaper titled, “Crime Forum Seeks Public Input.” T here w ere also associated press releases about the forum in advance as well. I began the thousand-word essay, “Since its formation five years ago, the Domestic Policy Association ‘has been based on the conviction that citizens can engage in productive discussion about public issues and that elected leaders are interested in the outcome. The goal of t hese national, nonpartisan forums is to stimulate and sustain a special kind of conversation; a genuinely useful debate that moves beyond the airing of grievances to mutually acceptable responses to common problems.’ ” I also pointed out that in the previous year, “46 states and some 200 convening institutions org an ized community forums as part of the National Issues Forum’s effort to educate the public and to influence public policy, and it is anticipated that these numbers w ill continue to grow as they have since 1981.” I noted that one of the three topics selected as part of the series for 1986–1987 was crime and that I had agreed to act as the moderator. When the program began that even ing, t here were nearly three hundred people in the Tullibody auditorium. The forum began with a welcoming from Dr. Carl H. Marbury, the director of academic planning for the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. It also ended with a few closing remarks from Marbury. As the moderator, I gave an opening statement on the problem, incorporating talking points of the National Issues Forum and localizing the issues to the Montgomery situation. I introduced the four speakers and explained the format for the even ing, which included short opening statements by each panelist and time for them to respond to one another. We heard from Ms. Cathy Ansheles, director of the Alabama Prison Project, a not-for-profit advocacy group that worked with both female and male incarcerated persons; Mr. Joe Carlton, the executive director of the Alabama District Attorneys Association; Mrs. Vanzetta Penn McPherson, a civil rights attorney; and Dr. Robert Stone, ASU associate
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professor of h uman services and social development. Their presentations lasted seventy-five minutes; a fter a break, we reconvened at 9 p.m. for audience comments and questions that lasted nearly one hour. I participated in many programs of this kind on and off of campus, often with mediated coverage leading up to, during, or after these events, typically including short interviews I did that appeared on the local TV news. I also spoke before many community organizations, testified before governmental bodies, and once was on the receiving end of testimony from civic groups and individual citizens as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. Here is a general chronology of my engagement in various political and social events: ■ April 24, 1986: Moderator for the debate “Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama New South Coa lit ion,” ASU, Thelma Glass Auditorium ■ May 14, 1986: Respondent/discussant, “Black-on-Black Crime Symposium,” ASU, Thelma Glass Auditorium ■ August 5, 1986: Guest speaker, “Police-Community Relations,” men’s breakfast forum of the Metropolitan United Methodist Church ■ September 14, 1986: Guest speaker, “Police-Community Relations,” breakfast meeting of One Montgomery ■ October 5, 1986: Guest speaker on behalf of Church Women United and the Southern Poverty Law Center, at the Monthly Speakers Forum, Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women ■ October 19, 1986: Witness participant for the moot trial of the State of Alabama v. Frank McCool, part of the project “Jury Serv ice: A Lost Art of Citizenship,” sponsored by the Social and Political Action Committee of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church ■ October 25, 1986: Keynote speaker at the Alabama New South Coa lit ion fall luncheon, Birmingham ■ November 5, 1986: Opening and closing remarks for workshop “The Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency,” ASU, Thelma Glass Auditorium ■ November 12, 1986: Moderator for the Domestic Policy Association’s “National Issues Forum on Crime: What We Fear, What Can Be Done,” ASU, Tullibody Fine Arts Center ■ June 5, 1987: Committee member to listen and question recorded testimonies from statewide advocates and representatives of Alabama’s poor, at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery; sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s “Poor P eoples’ Campaign: Putting Poverty on the National Agenda”
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■ September 12, 1987: Panelist at both the workshop on race and the workshop on criminal justice, “Conference on Confronting Racism in America,” sponsored by the Mayor of Birmingham’s Commission on the Status of W omen, Birmingham-Hyatt Hotel, Birmingham, Alabama ■ October 9–11, 1987: Delegate from the second congressional district of Alabama to the First Biennial Convention of the National Rainbow Coa lit ion, Raleigh, North Carolina ■ October 22–23, 1987: One of six Alabamians invited to participate in the workshop “Legislative Strategies for Alternatives to Incarceration,” sponsored by the Southern Coa lition on Jails and Prisons, Nashville, Tennessee ■ November 19, 1987: Testified by invitation before the Prison Review Task Force Public Hearing, Jefferson County Criminal Justice Center, Birmingham, Alabama ■ April 12, 1989: Invited speaker on Media, Crime, and Social Justice: Illegal Drugs, Black on Black Crime, and Homelessness in Amer ica, University of Alabama’s 4th Annual Justice Colloquial Series, Tuscaloosa, Alabama ■ December 9, 1989: Panelist on “Being Informed is a Solution to Child Abuse, Drug Addiction, and Black on Black Crime,” Crime Awareness Seminar, sponsored by St. Jude’s High School, Montgomery ■ December 17, 1989: Workshop leader for “Youth Leaders Focused on Crime,” 21st Century Leadership Conference, sponsored by Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama ■ January 19–23, 1990: Guest lecturer at the University of Carelton and Ottawa University, Ontario, Canada, where I presented the same lecture, “Governmental Deviance,” at both institutions; a lecture, “U.S. Homelessness and the Housing Crisis” at Carelton; and a lecture on “Media, Crime, and Gang Violence” at Ottawa Additionally, I wrote numerous newsmaking op- eds that appeared throughout the state of Alabama. I was not always even aware when these were published. Usually, I would be informed by the newspaper’s op-ed department; however, sometimes I would not. What follows, therefore, is a nonexhaustive sampling from 1987 and 1988 for a sense of the type of topics that I would write about: “Alternatives to Imprisonment Save Funds, Maintain Safety” Mobile Press, February 9, 1987 “Race Will Be the Hidden Agenda in the 1988 Presidential Election” Alabama Tribune, June 12, 1987
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“We Need to Acknowledge and Address Growing Poverty in Our Nation” Birmingham News, June 14, 1987 “Farm Bureau Should Trust Voters and Elected Officials” Montgomery Advertiser, November 2, 1987 “Most Rapes Never Reported” Montgomery Advertiser, October 6, 1988 “Robinson Book Tells Another Side of the Boycott Strugg le: A Review of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson’s The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (1987)” in both Montgomery Magazine, January 7–13, 1988, and Southern Changes, May/June 1988 While at ASU I began to churn out scholarship from a variety of perspectives and on a myriad of subjects. However, most of my immediate production of knowledge was based on coa lition building, field work, and community- based activism, including “Feminist Connections and the Movement against Domestic Violence: Beyond Criminal Justice Reform” ( Journal of Crime and Justice, 1986); “Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals, and Crime” ( Justice Quarterly, 1988); “The Crimes of the Homeless or the Crime of Homelessness? On the Dialectics of Criminalization, Decriminalization, and Victimization,” coauthored with Robert M. Bohm (Contemporary Crises: Law, Crime and Social Policy, 1989); and “Homelessness and the Case for Community-Based Initiatives: The Emergence of a Model Shelter as a Short Term Response to the Deepening Crisis in Housing,” a book chapter in Criminology as Peacemaking (1991), edited by Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney. There was also my second book, Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America (1991), written on behalf of the movement against homelessness and from the perspective of homeless activists. Less than one year before Gimme Shelter’s publication, I had written an obituary for Mitch Snyder, which appeared as an op-ed in the Montgomery Advertiser on July 12, 1990. As Mitch was the leading U.S. activist of the homeless movement in the United States, I had worked with him from time to time. The newspaper titled my tribute “Snyder’s Death Doesn’t Portent Demise of the Homelessness Movement.” Some of that text found its way into the preface of Gimme Shelter, which begins: During the last 15 years of his life, homeless activist Mitch Snyder— who committed suicide in July 1990—strugg led valiantly on behalf of the nation’s homeless, destitute, and powerless. T here were pray-ins, eat-ins, cage-ins, jump-ins, and yes, laugh-ins. But most of all, there
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ere Snyder’s fasts; the danger of his condition and the size of his risk w had captured the hearts and minds of the American people. T here was even a TV movie [The Mitch Snyder Story] made about his life with the homeless [starring Martin Sheen].5 These protests of Mitch’s often succeeded, as when President Ronald Reagan capitulated to Snyder’s demands to end his hunger strike and, with the stroke of a pen, “the District of Columbia had the promise of a shelter to house one thousand homeless Washingtonians, and Reagan could not be portrayed by the Democrats in the upcoming 1984 election as mean and indifferent to the plight of the homeless in his own backyard.” The second to the last paragraph of the preface reads: Although we may not have heard the last from Snyder’s legacy and its relationship to the homelessness movement, in the not-too-d istant f uture, his memory w ill disappear while the homeless situation w ill continue to become firmly entrenched in the American conscience. For the record, while Snyder may not have been a saint, he was a genuine shepherd of the poor. In the f uture the United States w ill need more activists like Mitch Snyder b ecause in the 1990s, assuming that domestic federal policy does not change its current course, the number of homeless persons in this country is going to swell considerably. For instead of addressing the underlying sources and changes in both society and the larger world that have been primarily responsible for this growth, our various governmental bodies have appeared destined simply to continue to expand another system for warehousing homeless p eople similar in purpose and design to the expanding “correctional” system for warehousing street criminals. Finally, there was the production of my edited volume and the first book- length treatment devoted to state crime, Crimes by the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality (1991).6 A companion article from the year before, “Crime, Criminology and H uman Rights: Towards an Understanding of State Criminality” was the only reprinted chapter in my first published anthology of otherw ise original contributions. This article first appeared in the Journal of Human Justice (vol. 2, no. 1, 1990), published by the department of sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Two years later, this journal evolved into Critical Criminology: An International Journal. Newsmaking f rom Montg om e ry: C lo sing Note s In June 1988, when I was turning forty, Charlotte threw me a surprise luncheon party at the one and only Japanese restaurant in Montgomery. I never saw this coming, as I simply thought I was having a meal in the m iddle of a
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workday with Char and four-month-old Maya. On that day I also received an unexpected gift, delivered to my office in a large envelope that contained two smaller envelopes. One enclosed a small card signed by Governor Guy Hunt wishing me a happy birthday and thanking me for my public serv ice on behalf of all Alabamians. A much larger envelope contained a certificate from the governor’s office that reads: Gregg L. Barak, having been deemed of meritorious character, is hereby commissioned as an Honorary Colonel in the Militia of the State of Alabama. He is, therefore, carefully and diligently to discharge the duties of the office to which he is appointed by doing and performing all manner of t hings thereunto belonging. And I do strictly charge and require all Officers and Soldiers u nder his command to be obedient to his orders and directions, from time to time, as he shall receive from me, or the future Governor of the State of Alabama, or of the General or other Superior Officers set over him, according to the laws for the regulation and government of the Alabama State Militia. At the time I thought to myself, tongue in cheek, that the commissioning was a way for the governor to thank me for my bumbling perform ance when I debated his drug czar the year before on Alabama Public Telev ision. From that dismal appearance on TV I learned at least one newsmaking lesson worth passing on: with some exceptions, newsmaking criminologists should avoid live televised debates on a divisive issue when they hold a minority viewpoint u nless they are prepared not to hedge their actual positions because of a concern that they may undermine their own credibility. Newsmaking criminologists cannot afford to be less than genuine because when we compromise our positions or try to make cases for something that we r eally do not believe in, we are not likely to be as convincing or aut hen tic. When r unning for political office, one can often dance around controversial issues and never actually take an unqualified position, but to do so as a newsmaking criminologist would more likely result in less than a top- notch or even a poor perform ance. For example, when I was going head-to-head with the drug czar I was avoiding the affirmative cases for both legalization and decriminalization that I favored. I did so because polling had told me that only a small minority of the public believed in these approaches to harm reduction. The vast majority of the consuming audience rejected t hose policy alternatives. So I thought that to be true to myself would undermine the criminological capital that I had been working hard to accrue throughout the state of A labama. Instead of walking the walk or even talking the talk about those policies that could do less public harm, I stammered on about the ineffect ive ness of a war on drugs that never could be won. Immediately following the
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program, as I reflected on what I did not say, I realized that I had misjudged a critical newsmaking opportunity to reframe the discussion. Even assuming that I was unable to convince folks to change their minds, I would have come across as a far more effective communicator than I did when talking about a position I did not believe in. And from the perspectives of those in the business of producing this type of news programming, effective communication is often more important than the content of what is articulated. Back then, the most prominent person making the affirmative case for decriminalization or legalization of drugs was the 1976 Nobel Laureate in economics, Milton Friedman. I recall driving over to the studio that eve ning not prepared to join forces with the free-m arket economist, although radical pragmatism called for me to do precisely that. Driving home afterward, I understood that the economically conservative Friedman was precisely the person with whom I should have aligned myself that even ing. With an anchor to lean on who was against the war on drugs and in f avor of decriminalization like Friedman, I would have avoided sounding like an extremist. W hether or not I would have changed anybody’s position, I would have been able to provide an alternative narrative. I certainly would have come across better as a newsmaking criminologist. As you might be able to discern, that embarrassing perform ance of mine still haunts me a fter all t hese years. Some other newsmaking of a different type worth mentioning from my Alabamian days was the hiring of Katheryn Russell-Brown to her first faculty position at ASU. For three years, Katheryn taught undergraduate courses in criminal law, constitutional law, and the law of prisoners’ rights. Katheryn joined our faculty a fter she had completed a one-year fellowship at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her fellowship at the SPLC followed her graduation from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. I convinced Katheryn that if she was not interested in practicing law and wanted a career in the social sciences, then she needed her PhD. At the time, Charles Wellford, the chair of criminology at the University of Maryland, and I w ere in contact about my sending him any potentially strong doctoral students. Katheryn and David Spinner w ere two students I sent his way. One other bit of newsmaking: on February 22, 1988, Charlotte give birth to Maya Pagni Barak. A few months earlier our Aurora home sold, and with the baby girl about to arrive we were looking to buy our third home. At the time, when we were looking for a place in Montgomery, my in-laws were visiting from Pennsylvania. One afternoon, my father-in-law and I w ere driving around and exploring the foothills of the southernmost end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Located some forty minutes northeast of downtown Montgomery and at an altitude five hundred feet higher than
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the Alabama River, we stumbled across a home for sale. It was nestled in the side of a hill with zero visibility from the roadside where our mailbox was or from any of our closest neighbors. We bought that home and moved to Blue Ridge, an unincorporated area of Wetumpka whose population was five thousand at the time. The land had formerly been part of a large estate owned by the f amily that owned Busch Beer. They sold their home and property to developers in the 1960s. Living in mountainous woods with deer, snakes, and all kinds of wildlife as well as a stream r unning along the southwest end of our property, Char and I had become reclusive commuters. Although we were living in an incredibly beautiful and peaceful environment, we were already thinking about the day when Maya would be old enough to attend public school, ideally somewhere above the Mason-Dixie line. Char and I very much enjoyed our time living and working in the New South. With all its prejudices and backwardness, however, Alabama was not exactly the place where we wanted to bring up our d aughter. In the summer of 1991 we moved north to Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is located thirty- five miles west of Detroit in the city of Ypsilanti, adjacent to and east of Ann Arbor. For close to three decades I have worked at EMU, which for several years has been classified as an R3 research university in the Carneg ie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, with more than 150 graduate programs, including certificates, master’s degrees, and a limited number of doctoral degrees in education, nursing, psychology, and technology. Presently, t here are also more than two hundred undergraduate majors and minors. Back in the winter of 1991, I accepted a position as a tenured full professor of criminology and criminal justice as well as a twelve-month annual appointment as head of the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology (SAC). Unlike department chairs, heads are not org aniz a tiona lly a part of the faculty but instead are a part of the administration, as established by the contractual arrangements between EMU and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Within and beyond the colleges, heads belong to their own organ izational bodies, such as Academic Department Administrators for the College of Arts and Sciences (ADACAS). Almost 100 percent of faculty grievances are filed against their department heads, as part of the front line. Regarding faculty grievances filed against SAC departmental heads for not abiding by the rules of contractual evaluation or input or for treating someone unfairly, I took pride in the fact that during the 1980s and 1990s I was the only department head out of five not to have been grieved. Less than two years a fter moving to Michigan, we w ere living on the southeast side of Ann Arbor in the same home where Charlotte and I still live. The h ouse is located only a few miles from downtown. Maya and I were also driving to and from campus together, as she was finishing the first of two years of preschool at EMU. Charlotte was at the University of Michigan working on her doctorate in American culture and was a gradu ate assistant in film studies. She completed her degree while also acquiring a graduate certificate in w omen and gender studies with a social science emphasis. A fter finishing her program, Charlotte continued teaching in the 142
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Eng lish department and the Sweetland Center for Writing u ntil she accepted a visiting assistant professor of communications position at Oakland University. Following that temporary position, Charlotte settled in as a part- time lecturer at EMU, teaching courses on gender, multiculturalism, and violence. A fter finishing Ann Arbor Community High School in 2006, Maya moved out. She and a girlfriend lived close by for several years before Maya moved to Washington, D.C., to study at American University. Prior to leaving the Wolverine State, she had received her bachelor’s in social anthropology from the University of Michigan and her master’s in criminology and criminal justice from EMU. Believe it or not, without any objections from any of my colleagues—nobody ever said word one about it to me—M aya took two seminars, in theories of crime and global criminology, from Dad. When those two seminars met one even ing a week, Maya would come by and drop off her dog. Once again, she and I w ere driving to and from EMU together—only now we would be discussing the readings for the week on the way over to class, and on the way home Maya would critique the course and the old man in a daughterly way. A fter earning her PhD in justice, law, and criminology, Maya returned to Michigan in fall 2016 to become an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. Maya and her husband, Josh Gardner, a film exhibitor and bartender, live in Oak Park and have a baby d aughter, Yves. While I was department head of SAC, from 1991 to 1996, there were on average 650 undergraduates majoring in criminology and criminal justice, 75 in sociology, and 50 in anthropology. During the same period, t here were about 25 students in the master’s of sociology program and 35 in the master’s of criminology and criminal justice program. By fall 2017, the numbers of undergraduate majors w ere remaining fairly stable, with 544 majors in criminology, 66 in anthropology, and 82 in sociology. In fall 2014, the total number of graduate criminology and sociology students was 51, and in fall 2017, that number was only 42. Our declining numbers of current graduate students are spread out between a cultural museum interdisciplinary studies certificate, a master’s in criminology and criminal justice, a master’s in sociology, and a master’s in schools, society, and violence. If the present graduate trends persist I believe that the f uture of t hese programs w ill not justify their existence. Meanwhile, efforts are currently underway by several faculty members to reconstitute our graduate programs. I am concerned that these programs w ill become some sort of hybrid or worse yet online degrees, as that seems to be the f uture of higher education. Presently, overall student production hours are strong as SAC continues to benefit from a large number of nonmajors taking courses from our three programs to satisfy various requirements for their graduation.
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For a little more context, the number of full-time tenure-track or tenured positions, including the department head, w ere twenty-three in winter 2019 distributed as nine criminologists, eight sociologists, and six anthropologists. There are also two full-time lecturers in criminology and criminal justice and one in sociology, plus some twelve to fifteen part-time lecturers across the three SAC disciplines. Unionized faculties like the EMU faculty may have been able to resist the trends to contingent faculties in the past; I believe without any data in hand that resist ance is less effective today. Let us return to EMU some thirty years ago, before I arrived on campus in the winter 1991 to interview for the position of SAC department head. Three years e arlier, Stuart Henry and I had become long-d istance colleagues. We first met in 1988 as a result of my serving on the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Program Committee during the presidency of William Chambliss. I was in charge of organi zing papers on the topics of crimes committed against the state and crimes committed by the state. Stuart authored one of the papers submitted on the second topic. His paper, “The Informal Economy: A Crime of Omission by the State,” became one of ten that I selected, pulled together, and edited as chapters for Crimes by the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality, published in 1991 by SUNY Press. Henry had joined the SAC faculty in 1987 as an associate professor of criminology. While Crimes by the Capitalist State was coming together, Stuart and two other full-time SAC criminologists, Werner Einstadter and Joseph Rankin, w ere revamping the undergraduate program in criminology and criminal justice. They wanted to establish a new curriculum that would require students to major (thirty-six hours) in criminology and criminal justice and to declare a concentration (fifteen hours) in one of four applied areas of practice: law enforcement, corrections, criminal justice management, and legal studies. Stuart sought feedback and letters of support from external evaluators to accompany the proposal as it wound its way through the vari ous sanctioning bodies of the university. The process began with the committee of the w hole of SAC, then went on to the approval committee of the College of Arts and Sciences, followed by the approval committees from the other four colleges, and fin ally the office of the provost and vice president. I was one of three external evaluators who submitted an affirmative letter of recommendation for the proposed new curriculum. By late summer 1990, SAC was advertising in the Chronicle of Higher Education for a permanent department head to replace Werner Einstadter, who was serving one year as the interim department head in 1990–1991. I contacted Stuart to inquire about the position. He immediately advised me against applying for the job, as it would be a pain in the proverbial backside.
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Aside from what I knew about the department from the criminology and criminal justice proposal, Stuart had informed me that the department was a very political place to work. T here was tension between the three faculties, especially when competing for faculty lines or departmental resources. I also learned that the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Barry Fish, to whom I would be reporting, had abruptly removed the former permanent department head, a highly esteemed sociologist, toward the end of his second year, a fter the two of them had an intense exchange in front of the entire SAC faculty. W hether acknowledged or not, academic territory always seems to come with its share of politics. The politics of competing agendas are only a m atter of degree. Back then, I believed the only way to escape from departmental or university politics, from the hierarchies and inequalities of higher education, and from the ideological divisions within the social or behavioral sciences was to leave academia. However, by the end of the 1980s, the idea of leaving academia for something e lse no longer entertained me. With the security of tenure and m iddle life I was essentially here to stay u ntil time got the better of me or I eventually retired. Meanwhile, I was still in the market for at least one more administrative post somewhere away from the Deep South with as many of the cultural and educational amenities as possible. Washtenaw County in southeast Michigan, home to the University of Michigan as well as the cosmopolitan community of Ann Arbor and its neighboring community of Ypsilanti, with its rich and colorful history, as well as EMU, checked off all the boxes we were looking for and one that we were not looking for—cold and snowy winters. Acquiring A dm i ni st rative Capital and Re f lecting on the E x pe ri e nc e Despite Stuart’s warnings, I told him that I was going to apply for the SAC department head position at EMU. Stuart had done his due diligence and was off the ethical hook, since he had warned me of what I would be getting myself into if I took the job. Ultimately, Stuart became a conduit for me not only for the headship position but also for many scholarly pursuits in the 1990s and well beyond. In 1998 Stuart moved on to five successive administrative posts and was at San Diego State University looking forward to retirement in summer 2019. During his illustrious career as a critical and postmodern criminologist, whether as a faculty member or an administrator, Stuart has always been a highly productive scholar. At the time of this writing, he had been the author or editor of twenty-n ine books. He had also informed me when we last talked by phone that he had just turned down another book project for the first time and that he was OK with that.
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Stuart and I crossed paths at just the right historical moment in our criminological c areers. In many ways, Stuart was a facilitator, and we w ere also collaborators in different kinds of ways. For eight years, at one of the local restaurants on West Cross Street, we consumed a lot of meals together and savored lengthy discussions about departmental politics, scholarly ideas, and whatever projects we were both into. As I have acknowledged in several books, including Var ieties of Criminology, “I especially want to thank Stuart Henry for our dangling theoretical conversation, his intellectual and scholarly agenda, and his never-ending energy. Whatever intellectual endeavor I picked up, Stuart was always right there with the necessary feedback to nurture my criminological curiosity.” In part, this was b ecause Stuart and I played in many of the same criminological sandboxes. In part, it was b ecause he had an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge of any kind. Six months a fter Stuart and I had first talked about the merits and demerits of the SAC job as well as the prospects for acquiring EMU social capital, I was flying on a plane in February from a mild sixty-five degrees in nonwintry Alabama to the subzero cold, snowy metropolitan area of southeast Michigan. As the sun was going down on a Wednesday afternoon, Stuart arrived at the Detroit Metro Airport to pick me up. He then drove us west for twenty minutes where he would show me around parts of Ypsilanti and then further west to Ann Arbor to give me a panoramic view of the local topography. At dinner and before dropping me back in Ypsilanti at the Marriott, a resort-style hotel overlooking 135 acres of expansive golf greens nestled around the shores of Ford Lake, Stuart had thoroughly briefed me about my upcoming two days of interviews. He explained precisely how I should present myself to individual faculty members and to the three department constituencies. Stuart also stressed the importance of the rights of the faculty to remain unionized and subject to a collective bargaining contract. I further learned that the other finalists were both sociologists who were seeking to extricate themselves from the same state as I was. One was from the University of Alabama, and the other from Auburn University— not that our common geog raphical locations were of any consequence to anyone but ourselves. What did m atter was that their tenured line in the department would be as sociologists and mine would be as a criminologist. If e ither one of them w ere appointed, then sometime in the likely future, either one of them would have added to the highly disproportionate number of sociologists in the department. This imbalance was something that both the criminologists and anthropologists could agree on and wanted to avoid if they could. At the time, the department had thirteen full-t ime sociologists and only three anthropologists and three criminologists. I also discovered that Stuart and other faculty members had been lobbying and organi zing affirmative votes for my candidacy before I arrived on
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campus. As I w ill discuss in the next section, lobbying is only one type of activity, unadvertised factor, or critical issue among a slew that commonly manifest amidst national searches for faculty and administrators. As I have noted, what was critical when I interviewed was that two of the three SAC constituencies w ere in the market for a nonsociologist to become the next department head. Since I was the only nonsociologist in the r unning, then assuming everything else was more or less even between us candidates, I would have a leg up. If the anthropologists could not add to the number of their f uture faculty members, then it was preferable that criminology rather than sociology added a faculty member. I think it is worth mentioning that the last time a sociologist from outside of EMU was hired as a department head in SAC was 1988. On the four occasions since then when heads have been appointed from the outside, two were criminologists, including myself, and two were anthropologists, including our current head, Julian Murchison. Subject only to my blowing the interview, the anthropologists and criminologists had agreed to vote as a unified block for me as their first choice—a ssuming that a fter meeting me and hearing about my other managerial experiences, they w ere still convinced that I was capable of d oing the job and looking out for their interests. For the record, criminologist Einstadter was also a fellow alumnus from the Berkeley School of Criminology. As the interim head, Einstadter was no longer a member of the faculty and could not cast a vote regarding the collective recommendation by the faculty. However, he was not restricted to simply conveying the vote of the SAC faculty to the dean of the college. He could write a separate recommendation of his own to pass along to the dean of the college, who officially makes the offer. This would not be necessary, however. A fter all, I had 6 votes and only had to obtain 4 of the remaining first choice votes cast by the thirteen sociologists to exceed the minimum of 10 out of 19 votes or more than the 50 percent required to make a hiring recommendation. As it turned out, I received all but one of the faculty first-place votes cast. The one that got away was cast by a sociologist who was also a collaborating researcher with one of the other candidates for the position. Three years later the two of them would coauthor a chapter in my Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime. One year a fter I joined EMU, that same candidate, Steven Stack, became the chair of sociology and criminal justice at Wayne State University in Detroit. During the Q and A a fter one of my two job talk presentations, the presence of Stuart might have enhanced my perform ance, although I r eally do not think his beh avior made any real difference in the hiring outcome. Following my philosophy of management talk, Stuart was able to communicate to me in real time without the knowledge of the other faculty members
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present. T hose who have heard this story before, like Donna Selman or Paul Leighton, think that I should share this story with you, as does Stuart. We were in what was the computer laboratory for the SAC department. The room doubled for our faculty meetings, job talks, and other occasions when our faculty lounge was not a better venue. Picture a makeshift conference t able that consisted of pushing eight t ables together that could accommodate three persons each with four of these tables on each side, end to end. At the front or head end of this makeshift conference t able I am standing in front of a half podium on the table before me. The faculty members are sitting around the rectangular conference table and facing forward toward me with their backs to Stuart, who is sitting b ehind all of them opposite me at the far end of the table. Now picture Stuart Henry impersonating an orchestra leader with his arms, hands, and headshakes delivering directional signals as I respond to comments and questions posed by the rest of the faculty. With simply a head nod, up and down or side to side, Stuart was able to let me know whether a yes or a no response was called for. In the greater scheme of things, I never had any anxiety about what to say to faculty members regarding my management philosophy, as this is simply a m atter of common sense. Any value added by Stuart’s orchestrating my responses might have come from his hand signals signaling me to modulate or amplify my responses or veering me away from something I was saying. This exercise had occurred extemporaneously. I had no heads-up—no pun intended— that Stuart was g oing to give me real-t ime feedback, and neither did he. I had given my research presentation the day before, and Stuart had naturally floated me the expected softball question so I could hit my response out of the academic ballpark. When we talked l ater about what had occurred at my management talk, Stuart told me that the idea came to him as he was entering the room; he saw the vacant space at the end of the t able and simply pulled over a chair from the side of the room and sat down. Back in t hose days, SAC would gather up copies of the faculty CVs and ship them by overnight delivery to the finalists coming to campus for interviews—we are talking some three hundred pages of resumes. I had done my homework, learning something about each of the faculty members and their scholarly interests. When I had my one-on-one conversations with the faculty in their offices, I knew enough to engage each of them about their work. Academics are like most p eople and tend to like being given a chance to talk about themselves. However, when candidates talk about themselves in relation to a specific faculty member for the purposes of making a connection, there is a risk of backfire. Some academics have been known to vote against a candidate in their same area as they may feel threatened by
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the newcomer. In this particu lar hiring situation, my primary mission was to convince the anthropologists and the criminologists that I would do whatever I could within my power as department head to increase their full-time faculty representation in SAC. A fter I served as department head for five years, the distribution of faculty was heading in a balanced direction. By the fall of 1996, when I became a full-t ime faculty member, there were six rather than three criminologists and four rather than three anthropologists. Midway through the first decade of this century, the faculty representation between the three programs leveled off to its current status. By this time, the three faculties seemed less polarized, as many w ere teaching in two of the three areas. In terms of addressing the inequities within the department that favored sociology over anthropology and criminology, I immediately began to make changes. Some of t hese changes were cosmetic and o thers w ere more substantive. For example, I addressed some branding issues by changing the signage on the main floor of our building, Pray-Harrold, which displays the names and locations of the departments. I wanted t hese to read as the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology, rather than as the Department of Sociology. In a large structure, with four three-hundred-seat lecture halls and numerous smaller classrooms typically accommodating up to fifty students and more than 150 faculty offices attached to eight departments, many students and faculty moving in and out of the building w ere unaware that EMU had a program in criminology and criminal justice— despite the program having close to seven hundred majors. Keep in mind that the department had changed its name from the sociology department to SAC more than two years before I had arrived on campus. This had caught my attention when I visited the campus and I asked the criminologists and the anthropologists about the absence of their names on the signage. They were either unaware or unconcerned of what the signs displayed. I also ordered new stationery and envelopes to reflect the name change at a time when stationery was one of the best forms of advertising in academia. With the help of the anthropologists and criminologists, because this required a departmental vote, I was able to introduce a new and separate “CRM” prefix for course numbers. Until my headship, all criminology and criminal justice courses were using “SOCL” prefixes. The new “CRM” prefix brought the program and major to the attention of p eople looking at the catalog of courses at a time before course catalogs w ere available online. The prefix also allowed for differentiating the student production hours used to acquire new lines to hire more criminologists. Lastly, in addition to accepting terminal degrees in sociology, anthropology, and criminology, I was able to convince the SAC faculty, again by a department vote, to recognize
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potential faculty members with a PhD in criminal justice, Although we were awarding BS and MA degrees in criminology and criminal justice, we had not yet recognized the terminal status of a PhD in criminal justice. In contrast to my former academic institutions, EMU has been a very different place to work. The university is much larger, more bureaucratic, and far more cumbersome to navigate. During my time at EMU, the student enrollment has hovered around 22,500—more than double the number of students at any of my previous institutions. To some degree, the differences also have to do with the fact that EMU is affiliated with the American Association of University Professors. Accordingly, both the administration and the faculty are subject to a binding collective bargaining agreement that for 2015–2019 was 148 pages long. Compared with my e arlier appointments, especially in the context of the two middle- level management posts in Aurora and in Montgomery, the one in Ypsilanti was quite territorial. This defensiveness about turf occurs across and within the five colleges—and even occurs within some of those departments with multiple programs, as I can testify, having served two years in the early 2000s as a grievance officer. Within SAC today, the politics are much less contentious than in the not too distant past. Rankin followed me as an inside candidate and was recommended with only one vote more than the required 50 percent at that time. There were even two occasions during the first decade of this century when that threshold could not be reached by our divided faculty to make an affirmative recommendation for hiring our next department head. A fter failing to achieve 51 percent on the first occasion, the department raised the bar to 60 percent before failing to achieve that higher bar on the second occasion. In the latter case, one of the most prominent persons in the fields of masculinities, gender studies, and criminality could muster only some 55 percent. Unfortunately, a c ouple of faculty members from the same area of study felt threatened by the candidate. They did what was necessary to prevent his hiring by denying him the one additional vote that he needed. It was very unfortunate for SAC and rather pathetic having to listen to the most threatened ego in the room actually misrepresent the candidate’s work. For pol itical reasons, however, t hose of us who knew differently did not call out our colleague for her deliberate misrepresent at ion of an ongoing project of the candidate. Each time we failed to agree on either an outside or an inside candidate, another department head, once from economics and once from music, took over the management of our department. T hese SAC overseers w ere working administrative overloads as they also had to manage their home departments. Those four years effectively became rudderless ones as the two outside overseers had no real interest in doing more than perfunctorily managing
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the department. During the same decade, Jay Weinstein, who had been fired years ago by one dean before I became his permanent replacement, was resurrected as interim head and then as head by a different dean. This dean, now also retired, would oversee the removal of another SAC department head a fter a grievance by an untenured assistant professor was resolved against that short-term head. For the record, on two other occasions, internal sociologists served temporarily as heads of the department. The most significant changes about campus life since I returned to being a full-time faculty member in fall 1996 may be attributed to the transformations brought about by the corporate university, the Internet, and the digital revolution. One of the first signs of corporatization at EMU was the centralization of faculty payrolls at the end of the 1990s. Among other things, centralization reduced the anxiety levels and the time that department heads spent balancing million-dollar payrolls across the fall- winter semesters as well as two well-attended spring-summer sessions. With this financial centralization came a loss of departmental autonomy and a surrendering of power to college deans. As a related social reality I also believe that some of the lessened conflict in our department as a whole may have to do with our being able to have less face-to-face interaction than in the pre-Internet world of dialogue. I also sense that t here has been a weakening of social bonding and a diminished attachment by faculty members to contemporary universities. According to an article by Cal Newport in the March 8, 2019, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?,” instant communication and a constant onslaught of e-m ail are consuming 30 percent, or eighteen of sixty hours, of work put in by the average faculty member today. On the other hand, t hese technological changes have allowed faculties to access libraries and laboratories outside their universities for conducting their research or scholarship. Either way, a type of isolation is occurring among faculty and between faculty and students. For example, by the end of the 1990s, faculty members were increasingly less likely to hang out in their offices or in their departmental lounges. They w ere also less likely to bring their lunches to work or to take breaks as they once did with their colleagues for food or beverage at the beginning, the m iddle, or the end of the day. Most faculty nowadays work from home when not coming to the university to teach classes, to hold office hours, or to attend committee meetings. Similarly, the development of online curriculum and degrees has further reduced the amount of time faculties spend physically with students, whether in the classroom or in office hours. At EMU, t hese virtual offerings have all but eliminated face-to-f ace as opposed to online summer instruction. To me, there does not seem to be the same
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quality of camaraderie or interpersonal interaction that previously characterized academic environments. Furthermore, over the past three decades the ratio of part-t ime to full- time faculty members at EMU and nationally has increased on average from about 33 percent of the teaching load to more than 50 percent presently. Accordingly, university investment in full-t ime faculty members across the United States has declined, while university exploitation of contingent faculty has grown. The ratio of administrators to full-time faculty has also increased as part of the corporatization of the university. Of course, the consequences of advancements in technology and related pedagogical developments cannot be separated from the rise of the global university. Nor can t hese changes be separated from the power of digitized media and socialized networks that transcend the bricks and mortar of central campuses. All of these developments further erode the interconnectedness of faculties, students, and their universities. O n the Politi c s of Acade m i c Hi ri ng As I have already noted, those who first meet candidates for their job interviews may provide them with useful information. For most of the faculty searches in SAC over the years, I have taken notice of the faculty member picking up the candidate from the airport; usually, although not always, that colleague is interested in the candidate’s viability. Faculty escorts may be neutral or indifferent, but generally they are not. In other words, ideological concerns or interest politics of one kind or the other are usually at play during the searching and hiring processes. I do not mean to imply cynically or skeptically that the process is unfair, only that it is subject to a diversity of interests beyond the particu lar search itself. Just as in acquiring most desirable jobs for which there is a pool full of qualified persons, it never hurts a candidate to have some assistance from t hose with an interest in having the candidate be hired. For example, when it comes to hiring sen ior administrators, search committees are often predisposed to the type of candidates that they are looking to place at the helms as deans, provosts, and presidents. At the department level, in relation to hiring an outside chair or head or bringing on board a faculty member as a tenure-track assistant professor, the same type of predispositions are occurring. This understanding of the hiring pro cess and the evolution of equal opportunity laws have compelled colleges and universities to protect their legal liabilities by establishing elaborate procedures for making sure that their hiring processes are deemed fair and do not violate the due process rights of any candidate. Nevertheless, I have participated in t hese processes dozens of times, as the person overseeing the searching, as one of the members of a search committee, or as a vote-casting
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faculty person. Despite the claims from many that rubrics or other weighting systems have removed subjectivity and biases from hiring, the plain truth is that subjectivity is still a big factor in most searches. Anyone who has served on search committees, w hether for administrators or faculty members, has likely observed applicants receiving vastly different scores from committee members who are evaluating the same CVs, letters of recommendation, scholarly work, job-related experiences, and so forth. I have also observed the same kinds of differences, although less frequently, when faculty members are being evaluated for tenure and promotion. In any case, adhering to equitable hiring, tenure, and promotion practices makes for good defenses against lawsuits based on employment decisions. Over the sixteen years in which I oversaw hiring searches, 1980–1996, my personal preferences and those of others involved were usually known, and t hose hired generally reflected our collective preferences. T hose preferences w ere also spelled out in the job advertisements for the positions. Those descriptions are often the subject of much quibbling by faculty over the exact wording. Back in those days when I chaired or headed a department, we were always searching for p eople of color and w omen b ecause of their extreme underrepresent at ion in our fields; when I chaired the department at ASU, for example, our criminal justice faculty never had more than one full-t ime person of color. Only once among a dozen departmental hires that I oversaw did a white male receive the first offer; that exception involved a person who had been teaching part-time for us at the time. Typically, the first offers went to white women, who generally accepted. Let me turn to another less common preference, bias, or example of the politics of hiring in higher education. U nless one has been around academia for a long time or observed the search process up close—a nd even then— one may not have experienced or noticed “pal hires” when they occur. From time to time, when a president is assuming the key leadership position at a new institution, he or she brings past working associates into such subordinate positions as vice president or dean. Sometimes the searches for and hiring of these administrators occur simultaneously with the hiring of the new president or within the next year following the hire. Of course, these hires happen primarily when there are anticipated openings or a search already in prog ress to which the background of the president’s pal corresponds. At EMU, for example, this was the case when Samuel A. Kirkpatrick became president and Paul Schollaert became the provost and vice president for academic affairs in 2001. One year later, Linda Pritchard became the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Both Schollaert and Pritchard had worked as administrators for Kirkpatrick while he was president of the University of Texas at San Antonio. In the world of affirmative action, higher education, and equal employment
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opportunity law, these types of hires are more than chance occurrences. They take a lot of skill and coordination with the internal search committees and other administrators in the hiring process to pull off. As an aside, when these presidents retire or move on, their pal hires typically seem to exit stage left at about the same time or shortly thereafter. This was the case when Kirkpatrick resigned in 2004 u nder intense political pressure b ecause of cost overruns and an investigation by the state of Michigan into the construction of a six-m illion-dollar University House, which the president did not live in but used to conduct university fundr aising. As part of the Kirkpatrick team, Schollaert’s term as provost ended concurrently and Pritchard’s term as dean the following year. Though Kirkpatrick left town, both Schollaert and Pritchard would each serve out their academic c areers as faculty members at EMU before retiring. With respect to my job searches as a white male in the age when women and p eople of color w ere in higher demand, I would like to share a hiring preference story that missed its academic mark. In March 1996, I had accepted an invitation from California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) to interview for the position of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. On a Wednesday morning flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, eight-year-old Maya and I were on our way to West Los Angeles for a long weekend. In the early afternoon we arrived at LAX. Waiting at the airport for Maya were my mother and sister-in-law, Barbie. The three of them left LAX headed north to my mom’s condo in Beverly Hills, not far from my sister-in-law and b rother’s home in Pacific Palisades. At the same time, a Cal State gradu ate student was driving me east to the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. I arrived at the landmark h otel a little before 4 p.m. This gave me about an hour to shower, unwind, and get dressed before an associate dean was scheduled to pick me up at 5 p.m. At 4:55 I was sitting downstairs in the oversized palatial lobby without another person in sight. A few minutes a fter five a woman came into my view. I observed her walk back and forth a couple of times before she came over and said, “Excuse me, are you Dr. Barak?” “Yes, I am.” We shook hands, exchanged hellos, and left for the restaurant to meet two others who were joining us that even ing for cocktails and dinner. I had surmised, and my suspicions the next day were confirmed, that the associate dean and my other dinner companions had been expecting to have a conversation with a black male. Without the Internet and social media, no images w ere available—only my CV, letter of application, and letters of recommendation, which made no mention of my white identity. The dean’s search committee had mistakenly assumed that a former department chair at an HBCU, who had written a number of op-ed pieces and other publications on crime and blacks as well as a forthcoming book on the O. J. Simpson trial, had to
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be African American. I always imagined that what might have settled the m atter of my racial blackness for the search committee was a book chapter of mine, “The Epidemiology of Homelessness in Black America,” which appeared in the Handbook of Black American Health: The Mosaic of Conditions, Issues, Policies and Prospects (1993), edited by Ivor L. Livingston. My last name may have misled them as well. In the United States, the surnames Barak, Baraka, and Barack are not very common, and t hose of us with t hose names may confuse people with regard to our national origins. On Thursday, when I met with the faculty from the criminal justice department where the successful candidate would hold a tenured professorship, the chair of the department was quick to raise the question of race: “Gregg, are you aware that before yesterday even ing our sen ior administrators thought you w ere black?” I nodded and told the chair that I had figured out as much when the associate dean and I first awkwardly met in the hotel lobby. Smiling, the chair explained how, when she received the notification from the dean’s search committee to set up a meeting with candidate Barak, she had wondered to herself whether the search committee might have thought that I was black. She knew this was the second year in a row that CSULA had been searching for a person of color to be their next dean of arts and sciences. Naturally, the criminal justice faculty was open to the idea of the dean of the college having a tenured home in their department, especially since they knew my work and knew that our criminological politics were more than compatible. The faculty and the department chair, to paraphrase the latter, w ere hoping against the odds that, based on my ASU credentials and because this was the second year that the university was about to fail in its search for a person of color, I might be allowed to pass. I left the criminal justice faculty and proceeded with the rest of my scheduled interviews as though there was an outside chance that I could still get the job, but I knew that there r eally was no chance. As it turned out, those of us participating in this interview pro cess were just wasting our time going through the motions. At least Maya and I had a nice weekend visiting with my family before returning to Michigan on Monday. The next year, or the third search, turned out to be a charm. CSULA did succeed in hiring its first person of color to serve as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Another story of mine worth sharing on the politics of hiring involves the two times that I applied to become the dean of the college of justice and safety at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), some six years apart, once in 1997 and again in 2003. The first time I was the unanimous choice of the faculty within the college; however, my candidacy was dismissed by the vice president for academic affairs, who preferred to hire a correctional administrator from outside of academia with acceptable but less than full faculty support. The second time I was the preferred choice of the provost
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and vice president for academic affairs, but not of the faculty, as there was an inside candidate who became the dean of the college. Shortly a fter that decision, Dean Gary Cordner would be negotiating the terms and signing off on a contract with me to become the first and last visiting distinguished professor and scholar of the College of Justice and Safety at EKU during winter 2004. Laboring in Vai n for a S c h ool of Integ rative Studi e s, 19 9 2 – 19 9 6 “Task Force Formed to Explore Interdisciplinary Studies at EMU,” was the headline of the featured story in the twice-weekly edition of the Focus EMU. The article from reporter Debra Fitzgerald provided much information, including the following: In April 1993, an EMU Deans’ Forum on Promoting Interdisciplinarity was attended by 85 faculty and administrators. As a result of that forum and a follow-up questionnaire, it was recommended that a Task Force on Interdisciplinary Studies be formed and that discussion on the topic take place. EMU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Ronald Collins established the task force in January 1994, naming Dr. Gregg Barak, head of the Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology Department, as chair. The task force has represent at ion from all five of EMU’s colleges, the University administration and the Faculty Council. “Interdisciplinary studies refers to the integration of knowledge from two or more disciplines that ideally results in some kind of synthesis of knowledge,” Barak said. “It’s an effort to show students how different disciplines perceive, org an ize and analyze problems, topics, themes and issues. The fact of the m atter is, we live in an interdisciplinary world. Life is interdisciplinary. We need to understand the linkages and relationships between bodies of knowledge.” In establishing the task force, Provost Collins said t here are a variety of reasons why interdisciplinary studies should be explored and enhanced at EMU. “In my address to the faculty at the September 16 Provost’s Faculty Dinner, I highlighted the Academic Affairs Divisional Priorities for this year and the near future. Interdisciplinary programs and courses have been given a top priority,” he said. “In today’s world, we are seeing a greater overlap of academic disciplines and a shrinking of available resources to support higher education. The need for further development of interdisciplinary courses and programming has thus taken on greater significance.” Collins added that his choice of Barak to head the task force was made in part because of Barak’s background in interdisciplinary studies. “I am
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delighted that Gregg Barak has accepted the role of chair of the task force in interdisciplinary studies, Collins said. “Dr. Barak brings to the task force a strong commitment to interdisciplinary studies and a wealth of experience in the field. I am confident that he and the task force members w ill meet the challenge and I look forward to a year with new ideas and new developments in the field of interdisciplinary studies.”1 Curious minds might be asking, How, a fter only one year at EMU, did I become the “point person” on interdisciplinarity for the provost? The shorter answer has to do with my training as a multidisciplinary student of criminology at Berkeley, as well as my previous appointments in the four disciplines of criminal justice, sociology, law enforcement, and criminology; my experiences developing new courses, curricula, and programs; and my position as head of SAC with its overlapping disciplines and interspecializations of criminology, anthropology, and sociology. T here was also my membership and affiliation with the Association of Integrative Studies (AIS). Founded in 1979, this association of academics promotes the “interchange of ideas among scholars and administrators in all of the arts and sciences on intellectual and orga n izational issues related to furthering interdisciplinarity and integration.” In 2013, AIS changed its name to the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. The longer answer has to do with Provost Collins’s monthly meetings, with attendance mandatory for all administrators. He initiated these meetings in the early 1980s, when he became provost. In 2001, his successor, Paul Schollaert, discontinued these meetings, and they never returned to the university. While there are no shortages of specious meetings at most universities, I have always believed that bringing the sen ior and middle- level administrators, especially the thirty-plus department heads, together once a month from across campus was good for both transparency and the esprit de corps. Pragmatically, I also believe such gatherings provided an aerial picture of academic affairs at EMU. T hese meetings usually began with the provost reciting a passage from a literary, philosophical, or scientific work that he could use to segue into whatever was on his agenda for that day. Mostly, Collins would reflect upon or dialogue with his selection and then solicit feedback from t hose in attendance. On some occasions, the provost handed the conversation off to someone who presumably had more knowledge on the topic than the provost did. Although he was an inorganic chemist and an expert in the field of instructional computer usage, Collins was also a postmodern Ren aissance person with a broad-g auged understanding of the organic world. His obligatory meetings occurred in McKinney Hall, a Gothic, stylized structure completed in 1931. We usually found ourselves in one of two large
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and aesthetically pleasing art deco meeting rooms. Since those meetings started at 8 a.m., Collins had the good sense to lay out a tasty continental buffet along the entire back wall. These meetings lasted around three hours and involved some one hundred people sitting around tables with coffee, juice, pastries, bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, fruit, and so on. Hospitality or bribery aside, since t hese topical exchanges were meaningful to Collins, I almost always chimed in with something to say. Not a few administrators present found Collins’s preliminaries to the business at hand to be annoying, corny, and a waste of time that they had to tolerate. Personally, I preferred those creative or intellectualizing discussions on the art of management to whatever mind-numbing financial reports, university data, and other bureaucratic m atters followed. In any case, during a fall 1992 meeting the subject was interdisciplinary studies. I learned that Provost Collins was a strong believer in interdisciplinarity for reasons both philosophical and practical. As he identified several interdisciplinary initiatives on campus and as he highlighted the activities of the recently established department of interdisciplinary technology, I learned that the five colleges as well as the continuing education arm of EMU had each been encouraging and supporting interdisciplinary initiatives within their own academic divisions. Most import ant, I learned that in 1989–1990 t here had been an interdisciplinary meeting team of seven members coordinated by one of the associate provosts. The team had met many times over the course of one academic year. They wrote a final report and recommended the creation of a campus wide center for interdisciplinary programming and curriculum development. Yet no steps had been taken to establish such a center for coordinating these activities across the university. In short, Collins was trying to resurrect the idea of some kind of unifying mechanism for interdisciplinarity at EMU. As I was listening, I started thinking that the provost was looking for something more than just a center to develop programs and curriculum. So when Collins asked for feedback and opened up the discussion, I provided several examples of interdisciplinary programs at other universities. A few days a fter that meeting, I was invited to have lunch with Provost Collins as he wanted to talk about the future of integrative studies at EMU. At our first one-on-one meeting, the provost told me that he was thinking about the possibility of forming a university task force on interdisciplinarity; if he decided to do so, was I interested in serving as the chair? Hedging my answer, I asked Collins, “Well, what w ill that entail and to what end?” He responded, “You and I w ill have to figure that out.” I obviously liked Ron’s response to my question. By then, I had already had enough of what Stuart had told me about SAC when I called to ask him about the job. Moreover,
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now into my thirteenth year of middle-level management, it no longer had much appeal or utility to me, as I was now at a university where I was content to become a full-time faculty member without having to move once again. At the time, I was still open to the possibilities of moving into a sen ior administrative position. At our second lunch together, Ron and I came up with the charges and funding for the task force. We had agreed that we needed something more than a center for interdisciplinary programming and curriculum development. We both wanted a degree-granting academic unit where faculty would be h oused, conduct interdisciplinary research, and teach their courses. I initially suggested that we develop a college of integrative studies. Ron quickly shot that idea down and explained why a new college was not politically feasible. I learned that three out of the five deans who made up his provost council would have to approve the establishment of a new college and w ere not likely to divide their pieces of the economic pie with a sixth college. So we settled on a school of integrative studies as a more realistic goal. Since I was going to be the administrator in charge of the new school should it come to fruition, I wanted to make sure that we w ere not talking about me becoming a director of the school answering to any one dean—or, worse yet, to all five deans. Ron agreed that the school would be managed by a dean who directly answered to the provost as the deans of the other five colleges did. Our development plan included a Deans Forum on Promoting Interdisciplinarity in 1993, where each of the five colleges could highlight their interdisciplinary activities. Should the forum prove successful based on a short evaluation form distributed to the attendees, we would then constitute the task force and begin working in winter 1994. As part of our mandate, we surveyed the campus, put out a call for proposals, selected pilots, provided the campus with updates, and sponsored events. Then, armed with our pilot projects, we would issue a final report recommending the establishment of a school of integrative studies. Our plan was designed to achieve as much buy in from as many university constituencies as possible. For example, October 3–6, 1996, EMU hosted the eighteenth annual conference of the AIS, held at the Marriott Golf and Conference Center in Ypsilanti. The gathering was an opportunity to showcase not only our nine integrative pilot projects but also to expose the EMU community to interdisciplinary studies beyond our campus. Before turning to my remarks at the annual meeting of the AIS, let me provide an overview of the composition of the task force and our activities. The twenty-eight members consisted of one administrator and two faculty from the five regular colleges, plus one representative from the Graduate
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School, the Office of Research Development, the Faculty Center for Instructional Excellence, the Basic Studies Committee, Continuing Education, the Provost’s Office, and the Faculty Council. A fter conducting a campus-w ide survey on interdisciplinarity and analyzing the findings, we distributed them to the university community. Then a call for interdisciplinary proposals was distributed that required faculty participation from a minimum of two departments or colleges. A task force subcommittee evaluated the twenty-one submitted proposals, and we funded the development of nine pilot projects over the course of two years. We had a rollover annual budget of $100,000. Most of these projects came to fruition a fter the task force ceased to exist near the end of 1996, such as an Urban Research Applied Center for the development of teaching and learning from the College of Education; a course, Culture and the Holocaust, taught through the disciplinary lenses of Eng lish, history, sociology, and anthropology; and a minor in political economy developed by the economics and political science departments. Some of those new interdisciplinary courses, minors, centers, or degrees still exist, such as the master’s in schools, society, and violence. By the time of the AIS annual conference, whose theme for 1996 was “Integrative Knowledges: Seeking Balance among Theories, Methods, and Practices,” our EMU pilot projects had all become part of the official program. My paper was titled “Interdisciplinary Studies and the EMU Interdisciplinarity Task Force Initiative: A Concise Overview.” For this present at ion I borrowed from the interdisciplinary advocacy script that I had been using for different task-related occasions at EMU. I talked mostly about other programs from around the country, making connections between those programs and our pilot projects. My remarks were divided into three sections and are summarized here. I began, “The modern comprehensive university needs strong academic departments and specializations. It also needs structures and mechanisms that cut across departmental and disciplinary lines.” I posed what I thought was a fundamental question facing many institutions of higher education in the 1990s: “What are the ways in which we can facilitate the integration of both specialization and interspecialization?” I then referenced Jerry G. Gaff, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the keynote address, “Overcoming Barriers: Interdisciplinary Studies in Disciplinary Institutions,” that he had presented at the annual meeting of the AIS a few years earlier, which had been reprinted in Issues in Integrative Studies (no. 12 [1994]:169–184). In that address, Gaff argued that the “higher” in higher education referred to the capacity to successfully integrate disciplinary and interdisciplinary programming. He maintained that integrative
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programing helped to sustain an environment conducive to institutional vitality and faculty renewal. I then pivoted to the difficulty of change in academic institutions, noting that, according to university folklore, “changing the curriculum, especially as related to basic studies or general education, is more difficult than moving a cemetery. But that should not be a reason for not trying to do so.” I also shared the historical idea that disciplines by the early twentieth century had ceased to be a variety of intellectual approaches that were part of a larger w hole. As disconnected bodies of knowledge, they had evolved into departments of authority or into guarded compounds of specialized and org an ized interests: “Each clan developed a technical language that set themselves apart from the other clans, and increasingly became what today we call separate ‘communities of discourse.’ ”2 I added that, from a managerial perspective, the five colleges w ere often like intellectual fiefdoms competing for their unequal shares of the academic spoils. I continued that at EMU, “it has certainly been the case that specializations rather than interspecializations as constituted by our disciplines, departments, and colleges are the hubs of intellectual development, offering not just perspectives on the world but also allocating the resources and rewards to those programs that advance the part icu lar interests of departments and colleges.” Next, I identified the all too familiar problems that disciplinary specialization and university organization can produce, including alienation, fragmentation, isolation, methodological myopia, overspecialization, and trivialization. Similarly, I underscored how our structural organization tended to downplay or ignore holistic models and broader issues of commonality between the vari ous disciplines. I also pointed out how the movement throughout the nation for “connected learning,” “enriched majors,” and “serv ice learning” were contemporary pedagogical approaches designed to overcome problems such as fragmentation and so on. I underscored that both multi-and interdisciplinary studies in the United States as well as the task force on interdisciplinarity at EMU were all part of a movement to introduce knowledge and pedagogy that tends to incorporate, transcend, and synthesize disciplinary specializations in the name of interspecializations. Finally, I shared the findings from our survey of EMU faculty and administrators on their past, present, and future interdisciplinary involvement: 1. Seventy-five percent and 51 percent, respectively, indicated that they had been or are currently involved in interdisciplinary activities. The most common activities identified involved teaching and research. Ninety-three percent of those involved in interdisciplinary activities described their experiences as either excellent or good.
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2. The most important benef its of interdisciplinarity involvement were enrichment of knowledge, personal development, synthesis of disciplines, and student enrichment. 3. The most critical problem was finding the time to prepare for interdisciplinary activities. 4. The major factors identified to stimulate interdisciplinary involvement were finding compatible colleagues; amenable and exciting subject areas; and departmental cooperation, time, and funding. 5. Respondents identified more than two hundred programs and courses at EMU that they would like to see expanded. They also suggested more than eighty new initiatives including such areas, issues, and constructs as world population problems, molecular toxicology, interdisciplinary PhDs and liberal studies. For t hose of you who might want to know, we distributed 766 surveys and 264 were returned, for a 34.5 percent response rate—which, given the findings from the returned surveys, suggests that most of the 65.5 percent who did not return their surveys and were not interested in participating prob ably had little or no experience with interdisciplinarity. Before moving on to the m iddle section of the paper, “Interdisciplinary Studies in Perspective,” I closed out the introduction with a quote from Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice by Julie Thompson Klein: Interdisciplinarity has been variously defined in this c entury: as a methodology, a concept, a process, a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a reflexive ideology. It has been linked with attempts to expose the dangers of fragmentation, to reestablish old connections, to explore emerging relations, and to create new subjects adequate to h andle our practical and conceptual needs. 3 To be clear and applied, I added, “Let me say that interdisciplinarity is neither a subject m atter nor a body of content. Rather, interdisciplinarity is a process for achieving an integrative synthesis; a process that typically begins with a problem, question, topic, or issue.” Lastly, I stated that “interdisciplinarity is the key not only for establishing common ground between disciplines, but also for solving problems and answering questions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by using a single method, model, or approach.” The m iddle section began, “In today’s complex and ever changing world, the scope of integrative activities is wide and diverse. It is no exaggeration to say that interdisciplinarity involves hundreds, if not thousands, of courses and programs of study, ranging in size from the organization and structure of single subjects, minors, and majors to the organization and structure of centers, institutes, schools, colleges, and whole universities.” For t hose
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latter, macro cases, I referred to four examples and elaborated on one of them b ecause of the overlap between some of that institution’s programs and our pilot projects. Those examples included the recently opened interdisciplinary campus in Monterey as part of the University of California system; the California Institute of Integral Studies, which opened its doors in San Francisco in the late 1960s offering MA and PhD degrees in business, psychology, religion, health studies, and integral studies; the new and rapidly growing campus at Arizona State University West, which was principally org an ized around interdisciplinary programs and majors in American studies, business, communication, education, engineering, integrative studies, interdisciplinary arts and perform ance, justice studies, life sciences, nursing, recreation, social and behavioral sciences, social work, and women’s studies; and Boston’s Tufts University with its new Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, established in 1992, offering programs leading to interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degrees in biology, chemistry, drama, education, Eng lish, film studies, urban studies, and environmental policy. I noted that all of these programs w ere “drawing on traditions and experiences that date back to the sixties when area studies, field majors, and student-created concentrations first appeared, having concluded that in- depth knowledge in one field usually requires knowledge in other fields as well.” I pointed out that among the most successful integrative curriculums were those associated with programs in American studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies. Philosophically, what all those integrative studies programs shared in common was the belief that majors should consist of concentrations or groups of courses that create depth and specialization without being confined to a single discipline or professional field. I also referenced our recently established major and concentration combination leading to the bachelor’s degree in criminology and criminal justice at EMU. In the third section, I introduced the philosophy, operating principles, and organ izational structure from a proposed School of Integrated Studies (SIS) that I had developed. I further shared how the SIS would educate students and prepare them to meet the local as well as the global needs of their communities through integrated approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, ser vice, and research. T hese integrated experiences, in addition to the normal courses, would also include modules, seminars, workshops, thematic sequences, programmatic institutes, and service centers. I also emphasized that the various endeavors, involving team-taught courses, field-based experiences, cohort groups, interactive technologies, mentoring, minoring, and majoring, would all revolve around attempts “to integrate theoretical assumptions with practical applications by establishing linkages between academic and nonacademic worlds.” I emphasized that teaching, research, and serv ice at the SIS would be done by faculty from all colleges and units of the university.
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I explained how formal arrangements would be made between faculty members’ home disciplinary units and the SIS as part of normal and flexible workloads. Org aniz ationa lly, in addition to housing its own bachelor’s and master’s degrees in integrative studies, I pointed out that area studies like women’s studies and African-A merican studies, then a part of the College of Arts and Sciences, would be relocated to the SIS. In due time, there would also be full-t ime interdisciplinary hiring lines or new joint appointments of 50 percent in the SIS and 50 percent in one department of any of the five other colleges. Several weeks a fter the AIS meetings, with Provost Collins’s enthusiastic support, I made a formal presentation to the five college deans for the establishment of a new School of Integrative Studies. Only the dean of the College of Health and Human Serv ices voted in favor of the proposal. Going into that meeting, Collins and I thought that our chances w ere better than fifty-fi fty that we would get the necessary three votes. However, that four deans had voted against the proposal took us by surprise. Their stated reasons were that a new School of Integrated Studies would be unnecessary, impractical, and duplicative. Their unstated reasons w ere about not wanting to share any of their faculty, students, and resources with another academic unit on campus. Several times since our task force finished its work, some interested group of faculty or administrators have tried to resurrect cross-d isciplinary studies at EMU. Nothing structural has ever materialized that e ither complements or challenges the prevailing arrangements of the disciplinary order of the arts and sciences at EMU. Twenty years later I am perfectly OK with the reality of research and teaching org an ized around the arts and sciences rather than around the more fluid axes of interdisciplinarity. Without the extensive research data shared by Jerry A. Jacobs in In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University,4 I, too, arrived at unenthusiastic conclusions about the viability of interdisciplinary programs and cross- disciplinary appointments “to consolidate knowledge into broader themes.” In fact, as Jacobs points out, many programs designed to integrate knowledge have contributed instead “to the proliferation of specialized interdisciplinary niches.” As a consequence, “academic departments in particu lar and faculty members in general” have found “their positions in university affairs weakened.” Fin ally, like Jacobs and others, I have come to believe that finding “better ways to strengthen” and to invest in “the liberal arts and sciences” is more important than “promoting interdisciplinarity as an objective.” On the other hand, I am still attracted to complex systems of interdisciplinarity theory. I continue to find value in performing integration and
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doing integrative studies. At this point in time, I happen to prefer a constructivist-realist ontology grounded in human agency and a virtual network view of social structure over the case of critical realists for an interdisciplinary epistemology, as articulated by Stuart Henry in his article “Beyond Interdisciplinary Theory: Revisiting William H. Newell’s Integrative Theory from a Critical Realistic Perspective.”5 Disseminati ng, Manag i ng, and Producing Criminolog i cal Knowle dg e In the 1990s I continued to distribute knowledge about crime and justice for public consumption, yet not as frequently as I had during the 1980s. I began to increase my scholarly productivity, however. If I could, I wanted to influence the pathways taken by those theorizing about crime and crime control as well as by those practicing criminal and social justice. There were articles, book chapters, edited collections, and a textbook with the objective of reaching wider audiences of students and their instructors. A sampling of articles from this period include “Cultural Literacy and a Multicultural Inquiry into the Study of Crime and Justice” ( Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 1991; “Media, Crime, and Justice: A Case for Constitutive Criminology” (Humanity and Society, 1993), reprinted in Cultural Criminology (1995) edited by Jeff Ferrell and Clinton R. Sanders); and “Between the Waves: Mass-Mediated Themes of Crime and Justice” (Social Justice, 1995). A sampling of book chapters include “Constitutive Criminology: An Overview of an Emerging Postmodern School,” coauthored with S. Henry and Dragan Milovanovic, in Thinking Critically About Crime (1996), edited by Brian MacLean and D. Milovanovic; “Time for an Integrated Critical Criminology” in Cutting the Edge: Current Perspectives in Radical and Critical Criminology (1998), edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross; “Constituting O. J.: Mass-Mediated Trials and Newsmaking” in Constitutive Criminology at Work (1999), edited by D. Milovanovic and S. Henry; and “An Integrative-Constitutive Theory of Crime, Law, and Social Justice,” co-authored with S. Henry, in Social Justice/Criminal Justice: The Maturation of Critical Theory in Law, Crime, and Deviance (1999), edited by Bruce Arrigo. I also continued to engage in the project of newsmaking criminology. As a university invited speaker, for example, I shared the methods and formats of newsmaking criminology with criminologists, journalists, and public audiences in such countries as Canada, Finland, and the United Kingdom. I also put together two related collections, Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology (1994) and Representing O. J.: Murder, Criminal Justice and Mass Culture (1996). During the 1995 trial of O. J. Simpson, I produced nine months of running commentary
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Tuesday and Friday mornings on 107.1 FM Kool radio in Ann Arbor. With Viacom Productions, I made a fifty-eight-m inute video entitled Prime Time Crime, for which I selected, edited, and linked together prime-time news stories on crime and punishment from across the country. I also wrote the script for the program, which was delivered by a female African American narrator. This video covered the full range of criminality, including white collar, corporate, and state crime, and was made to accompany my textbook Integrating Criminologies (1998); Allyn and Bacon distributed copies of the video to instructors who adopted the textbook. Fin ally, by the end of the decade I began posting numerous essays and articles that I would periodically update on my crime and justice studies website, greggbarak.com. Back before social media and the various online systems took over the dissemination of this kind of scholarship and research, the object of my website had been to “disseminate ideas that might decrease crime and increase justice.” For the past several years the traffic at my website has declined to a trickle from its peak days in the early 2000s, when it received a hundred thousand page views annually. In the fall of 1991 during a book signing for Gimme Shelter held at the independently owned Shaman Drum Bookstore in downtown Ann Arbor, members of a temporary housing shelter board reached out to me. I joined their board and in 1992, Avalon Housing, Inc., was established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit serv ices provider, real estate developer, and property mana ger for public and private housing for Washtenaw County, Michigan. With the exception of my involvement as a founding board member of Avalon, which is still a very vibrant and growing agency for low-income permanent housing mostly in Ann Arbor, my participation in community-based strugg les around justice-related issues were gradually receding into my past. I was now spending most of my time running SAC, navigating the university, chairing the task force, and ramping up my activities with primarily two professional associations. Within the context of enhancing my management portfolio, I was taking on projects to demonstrate my leadership capabilities for sen ior administrative posts. Beginning in the early 1990s and for a couple of decades thereafter, I served occasionally as an independent consult ant or team evaluator of undergraduate programs in criminal justice education in the states of Indiana, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. In 1990–1991, I served as one of three executive counselors on the founding board of the Division on Critical Criminology. I was also the division’s first minority liaison officer, 1990–1992. I served as program vice chair and program chair for the annual meetings of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) in 1992 and 1993. In 1993–1995, I served as deputy editor of Justice Quarterly. I also served
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as member of the Ethical Issues subcommittee of the American Society of Criminology, 1996–1998, as chair of the Division on Critical Criminology, 1997–1999, and as a member of the editorial advisory board of Criminology, 1998–2000. There was also the coediting with S. Henry and Paul Leighton of the Critical Criminologist, the official newsletter of the Division on Critical Criminology, 1997–2000. Back in those days, we produced our own hard copies and delivered them by snail mail. With the exceptions of becoming the vice chair and then program chair for the ACJS at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, in March 1993, I sought out the other opportunities for professional serv ice. Serving as program chair was the result of having developed what would become a lifelong relationship with Robert Bohm. When we first met at the annual meetings of the ACJS in Orlando, Florida, in 1986, Bohm was a tenured associate professor at Jacksonville State University ( JSU) in Alabama. Since the early 1980s he had been active in the ACJS. With some assistance and mentoring from Tom Barker, the dean of the college of criminal justice at JSU, Bohm was elected trustee-at-large in 1987, the same year that Barker was elected ACJS president. From that point forward and even a fter his recent retirement, Bohm remains active in the ACJS. During the formative years of ACJS, Bob was on every committee of significance, working to establish the first process for implementing national criminal justice policy statements, create an affirmative action policy as well as a strategic development plan, and enable the development of new sections that included securing start-up funds for a minorities and w omen section. With all of this serv ice on behalf of the ACJS, Bohm was elected second vice president in 1990, and a fter serving as first vice president (1991–1992), Bohm became the thirtieth president of the ACJS from 1992 to 1993. A fter being elected first vice president, he tagged me to be his program chair. We put our heads together and came up with the conference theme of “Class, Race, Gender, and Crime.” Among other t hings, this was an opportunity for Bob and me to infuse the ACJS program with as much critical criminology as we could muster. As part of this endeavor, and in the spirit of “what goes around comes around,” I invited J. L. Chestnut to give the keynote address for what became the ACJS’s last sit-down luncheon with five hundred attendees. Speaking with his usual oratorical skill about his experiences with police brutality, the Selma to Montgomery march, and the unfinished business of civil rights, Chestnut brought the audience to its feet for a long standing ovation. When the applause fin ally died down, Tom Barker, who was also sitting at the head table as the academy’s recipient of the Founder’s Award for that year, was so moved by Chestnut’s remarks that he asked w hether he
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could step up to the podium and say a few words. At the time Barker was one of the nation’s foremost experts on police corruption. As a novelist as well as a scholar, Barker told a short story: On the very same day as the bloody beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as a Birmingham police officer, he was also busy confronting civil rights activists on the streets. Without any mass demonstrations on that particu lar day in Birmingham, Barker related that “most of us young officers wondered why we were challenging the rights of those looking for justice.” As Tom still likes to recall, “asking why and getting no answers (besides blatant racism) led me to leave police work for academics.”6 When I arrived at Eastern Michigan University I was still concerned with infusing new offerings into the curriculum. In my second year at EMU I introduced a graduate level course, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, cross-listed with criminology, sociology, and w omen’s studies. A few years later, I introduced a new cross-listed undergraduate course with sociology and criminology, Violence and Society. The last two courses that I added to the graduate curriculum, around 2000, were Media, Crime, and Justice, and Violence and Nonviolence. Multidiscip l i nary Cri m i nolog y Three of my earliest multidisciplinary ventures included Var ieties of Criminology (1994); Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime (1994); and Representing O. J. (1996). Like most works, t hese are not without flaws. I believe that the general themes, arguments, and content of these works represent particu lar strands of criminological development. Together, they represent some of the diverse areas of criminological thought and related inquiries that were emerging during this period and that are still germane to the various theories and practices of crime and social control today. Allow me to try to capture the intent and spirit, if not the substantive content, of t hese collections. Varieties of Criminology: Readings from a Dynamic Discipline was multidisciplinary b ecause the criminologists whose writings w ere gathered in this collection employed theoretical frameworks derived from an array of disciplines, including biology, history, neuropsychiatry, po l iti cal economy, political science, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and social anthropology. This work was “optimistic” about the inclusive multidisciplinary approach to understanding crime and criminals. Looking back I find it intere sting that this book was animated by a message contradictory to the one that animated my 1986 ASC paper on the paradigmatic crisis in criminology. As I wrote in the introduction to what I referred to as criminological theory in a “postmodern” era: “Contrary to the views of those criminologists who believe that the criminological discipline is currently experiencing a crisis
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in theory and practice, and that state-sponsored administrative and instrumental approaches have taken control of criminological inquiry, the implicit argument here is that the field of criminology is undergoing a dynamic, vibrant period of development and change.” 7 Contradictions aside, my goal with this celebratory anthology of diversity was to try to capture the range of contemporary mainstream and critical criminologies. Since no other available collections had even tried to present a balanced sampling of mainstream and critical criminologies, I claimed at the time that Var ieties of Criminology offered the fullest spectrum of first- person accounts that one could find in the contemporary criminological literature. At the same time, not oblivious to what was obviously missing from the text, I acknowledged in my only endnote that “what is not represented h ere are the underdeveloped theoretical perspectives on crime, minorities, and crime control that are only now beginning to be articulated. For the most comprehensive treatment of the subject, see Coramae Richey Mann’s Unequal Justice: A Question of Color (1993).8 In my introduction, I sought to underscore similarities between mainstream and critical criminologies, with mainstream criminologies read as classical or neoclassical, functionalist, and positivist and with critical criminologies read as feminist, interactionist, Marxist, and postmodern. For example, I pointed out how these different criminologists w ere engaged in efforts to link, connect, or integrate various levels of criminological analy sis, and strugg led in different ways with character or agency variables as well as structural, cultural, and policy variables. The table of contents of Var ieties of Criminology (5.2 in the appendix to this book) reveals the range of theory and research engaged in by mainstream and critical criminologists in the early 1990s. Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology was a multidisciplinary examination because the objects of its construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction cut across the fields of communications, criminology, entertainment, epistemology, history, journalism, mediated technology, and social psy chol ogy. This collaborative project was an amplification of and a fuller examination of newsmaking criminology than my introductory 1988 article in Justice Quarterly. The book was an attempt to frame the discussions of crime and crime control in the context of media studies and the demystification of crime and justice. Accordingly, I argued that criminologists needed to go beyond the practices of public criminology by engaging in practices of producing and reconstructing “other” narratives of crime and justice for mass consumption. In other words, I contended and still believe that it is not enough for criminologists to merely bring empirically based knowledge about crime and justice to the public domain. Merely depicting crime and justice as it is
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rather than as it is alleged to be is not enough. One has to be changing the narratives. Stated differently, most self-identifying public criminologists are not d oing newsmaking criminology, while all newsmaking criminologists are doing public criminology even when they may be doing so completely out of public view. Unfortunately, even in the current age of obligatory self-branding and social media, there are still very few criminologists who practice e ither public or newsmaking criminology. Two assumptions underpinned this anthology: First, the “social construction of crime and deviance is part of the ideological and political socialization involved in the cultural legitimation of law and order—the end result being conformity and enhanced social control.” Second, the “social deconstruction and reinterpretation of crime and deviance are part of an alternative, oppositional, or replacement discourse capable of challenging the prevailing legal order and producing social change in the cultural consciousness of crime and crime control.” In the case of the second assumption, the contributors and I wanted to learn more about the practicality of criminologists trying “to substitute structural and historical analyses of criminality and victimization in place of the more traditional and ahistorical” news stories of innocent people versus bad people. For example, Cecil E. Greek, in the last section of the book, Reconstructing Crime News, posed this fundamental question in the subtitle to his chapter “Becoming a Media Criminologist: Is ‘Newsmaking Criminology’ Possible?” Based on his own experiences, Greek found newsmaking criminology “more difficult in practice than in theory.” I agreed back then and agree now that newsmaking criminology takes a lot of hard work and know-how to pull off successfully. In the final chapter, “Criminology as Replacement Discourse,” Stuart Henry elaborated on four modes or styles of doing newsmaking criminology and the impact of d oing each of these: (1) disputing data; (2) challenging journalism; (3) self-reporting; and (4) confronting media. The takeaway in terms of changing the narrative: Some forms of newsmaking criminology are easier than other forms depending on the mediated context. For example, some types of alternative discourse production—for example, creating programming about crime and justice issues, such as Ron Kramer has produced for public access telev ision in Kalamazoo or as folks can create for YouTube viewing or for podcast downloading—a re labor-i ntensive activities but are also very effective ways of mediating the social construction of crime and crime control. Preceding “Part II: Constructing Crime News” and “Part III: Reconstructing Crime News” (see the table of contents of Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime, 5.3 in the appendix), I wrote a very lengthy and sweeping overview of the issues of mediation that began, “Understanding the
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construction of newsmaking requires an examination of the conscious and unconscious processes involved in the mass dissemination of symbolic consumer goods. Commonly referred to as information or as ideas, these symbolic bites or commodities of news production and the pictures of social reality that they create are inseparable from their cultural histories.” I offered a formulaic expression of the social construction of crime in which the perception of crime equals mediations multiplied by culture and po l iti cal economy over time [PC = M × (C + PE)/T]. The model suggested that how the cultural production of crime is defined as a social problem and how victims, offenders, and agents of crime control are represented “emerges out of the social interactions between ordinary p eople, journalists, and sources of information within the structural and political-economic contexts of the active processes of news construction and crime management.” 9 In sequential order, the rest of the chapter included a general discussion of what constitutes news; a specific discussion on media reflection, cultural diversity, and crime news biases; a discussion on the arrangements of mass media, public order, and symbolic deviance; a discussion of social control, news media, and political change; a section on constructed and reconstructed crime news; a section on the dialectics of mass media; and a discussion of the need for replacement discourse. At the time, I had yet to incorporate the interaction of entertainment and news in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of crime and justice narratives. In Representing O. J.: Murder, Criminal Justice and Mass Culture, we hear from twice as many voices as we heard from in the other anthologies. T here is a bit more ethnic, gender, and class diversity in t hese voices: two black men, eleven white men, one black woman, and five white women. In addition to representatives of the disciplines of anthropology, criminal justice, criminology, criminalistics, forensic psychiatry, psychology, and sociology, there was a certified California specialist in appellate law, a retired judge, and a politi cal news commentator and editor of the Ofari Newsletter. The idea for this anthology sprung from three places: the cultural and media obsession with the O. J. Simpson double murder case, my nine-month-long radio commentary on the criminal trial twice weekly, and the overwhelming response from colleagues near and far who agreed that putting the trial of the twentieth century into sociohistorical perspective was an important academic product to pursue. A fter all, on October 3, 1995, more than 120 million Americans tuned in to learn the verdict live on telev ision. In our postmodern examination of murder, criminal justice, and mass culture in America, the title Representing O. J. was intended as a double entendre. It referred not only to the portrayals of Simpson by the prosecution, the
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defense, the media, the pundits, and public opinion but also to the way t hese portrayals w ere related to cultural images of race, gender, and class. Specifically, the book investigated the relationships between t hose images and the social-psychological group experiences that to this day shape attitudes t oward and perceptions of domestic violence, homicide, t rials, law enforcement, rules of law, juries, defendants rights, victims rights, the First Amendment, the state, and so on. Let me also state what Representing O. J. was not about. It was not about lawyering or another postmortem on the O. J. Simpson trial. Nor were we engaging in legal journalism or the cults of personality surrounding celebrity lawyers. Our book was not about F. Lee Bailey, Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, Christopher Darden, Barry Scheck, or Alan Dershowitz. None of us, not even the lawyers or the judge represented here, second-g uessed the strategies employed by the prosecution or the defense. Nor did we rate the perform ances of the attorneys or of Judge Lance Ito. As we saw t hings, that type of postmortem analysis served primarily to debase the law and to reduce it to a game of wits, although I did write in the introduction, “it is arguable whether the trial in practice was more than a game of character affirmation and assassination” of both O. J. Simpson and law enforcement. Taken in their totality, the contributions to this volume deconstructed the law and criminal justice in the United States from the vantage points of science, subjectivity, consumption, mass media, perceptions, and adjudication (see the t able of contents for Representing O. J., 5.4 in the appendix). With the exception of one of the contributors, the rest of us disagreed with the jury verdict of not guilty. Although a reexamination of the evidence on that critical m atter was not an object of our inquiry, the third part of the book did examine p eople’s views of O. J.’s guilt or innocence in relation to law enforcement and differences in class, race, and gender. I must also confess, however, that like many criminologists and noncriminologists who have heard William C. Dear, the private investigator, speak on the case or have read his book, O. J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It: The Shocking Truth about the Murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman (2013), my verdict was upended by Dear’s seventeen years of investigative work. Fin ally, I think it is worth noting that when I shared the proposal for this book with my previous publishers (Anderson, Garland, Praeger, and SUNY), they all took a pass. Their justification was that O. J. Simpson would be soon forgotten. They were dead wrong, but that was beside the point, as our book was using the trial only as a vehicle for examining law, power, and justice in relation to class, race, and gender. When I next pitched the book on the suggestion of Bob Bohm to the founder and co-owner of Harrow & Heston, Graeme Newman, he immediately understood the value
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of such a project and offered me a contract. Graeme was also a full professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York. At the end of the academic day, as someone who has engaged deeply in both multidisciplinary and integrating projects, I have found the former more enjoyable, as multidisciplinary approaches are generally more conducive to bringing different criminologies together. Many integrating proj ects, however, while exploring fewer criminologies, do so in greater detail than is usually the case for multidisciplinary projects.
Pa r t Th r e e
Academic Praxis
C hapte r 6
Integrating Criminology
I am in partial accord with Robert Agnew’s fundamental argument in his well- received Toward a Unified Criminology: Integrating Assumptions about Crime, People and Society (2011)1 that the assumptions about the nature of crime, free w ill, human nature, and society used by most mainstream criminologists to help explain why people commit crime and how crime can be controlled have been too restrictive. However, the same criticism cannot be leveled at most critical criminologists. In the same way, Agnew’s critique about the myopia of many, if not most, criminologists pertains primarily to those criminologists who restrict themselves to playing only in positivist or classical sandboxes. In short, his accusation applies unevenly to the var iet ies of criminology practiced in the world t oday. Agnew’s criticisms are pretty much spot on with regard to conventional criminologists who are still limited by what they explore, the c auses they consider, the methods of data collection they use, and the types of analyses they support. Conversely, Agnew’s criticisms have not accurately described alternative theories and practices used by many postmodern or critical criminologists as far back as the 1970s. In the spirit of a unified criminology, some of these alternative criminologists have employed assumptions inclusive of both the older and newer criminologies. For nearly a half c entury, some of these alternative criminologies have been explaining a much broader range of crimes and victimization than have conventional criminologies. T hese alternative criminologies have also been more equipped to offer a wider selection of policy alternatives to crime control and social change than have mainstream criminologists. For more than three decades in the case of integrative criminology, criminologists have attempted to synthesize or combine theories or viewpoints of crime, criminology, justice, criminality, and crime control into wide-r anging and inclusive models of behavioral social interaction and public policy formation. In my four textbooks I employed an assortment of approaches to integration that have always concentrated on the changing historical relations of theory and practice—past, present, and f uture. In two 177
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of these projects, Integrating Criminologies (1998) and Criminology: An Integrated Approach (2009), I also presented overviews of criminological integration that I had not ever personally pursued. A third book written with coauthors a dopted an intersectional approach to integration and has endured for some twenty years. First published in 2001, Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America, is scheduled for a sixth edition in 2022. A fourth textbook, Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding (2003), adopted a reciprocal approach to integration and planted the original ideas of integrating violence and nonviolence into one conceptual framework. A more fully developed and final version of my reciprocal- interactive theory of violence and nonviolence first published in The Essential Criminology Reader (2006)2 is presented h ere for the first time to close out chapter six. One other integrative project of a different kind that I w ill not review here was my volume for the International Library of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Penology, published by Dartmouth in 1998. This edited collection, Integrative Criminology, included republished articles and book chapters and was designed to present an overview of the different types of integration used to explain criminal beh avior and juvenile delinquency. From Integ rating Criminolog ie s , 19 9 8 , to Criminology: An Integ rate d Approach , 20 09 The preface to Integrating Criminologies begins: In many ways, this is a very nontraditional criminology textbook. It is truly unique and innovative in approach. Unlike criminology texts that claim one disciplinary stance, favoring either a single theoretical model or a multiparadigm orientation, Integrating Criminologies pre sents an integrative, interdisciplinary passageway to understanding crime and social control. This is also the first text of its kind to argue for a paradigmatic shift away from a fragmented and t oward integrative modes of understanding as a means of transforming both contemporary theory and practice. 3 Criminology remains more fragmented today than when I wrote this book more than twenty years ago. As I indicated in the previous chapter, however, I no longer think that integration and interdisciplinarity are prerequisites for the unification or transformation of criminological theory and practice. Similarly, I am not concerned about the propagation of criminologies ad infinitum. As for the overspecialization of criminology, I still prefer cohesion or fusion to division and separation. The second paragraph of the preface reads:
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This book employs what C. Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination” as a means of connecting personal problems and public issues. However, my objective was not to reinforce sociological ascendancy over the criminological enterprise. On the contrary, one of my purposes for writing this book includes trying to help criminology overcome its historical tendency to succumb to one or the other of the competing social and behavioral sciences. Unfortunately, this state of affairs has contributed to separate bodies of criminological knowledge. Therefore, this book is an attempt to reach out to t hose estranged bodies of knowledge. It is also an attempt to help unify them.4 I emphasized that Integrating Criminologies “departs from the traditional tenets of what constitutes a criminology textbook” by emphasizing breadth rather than depth of content. For example, I tried to balance the full-r ange of contributions from biology, psychology, sociology, law, and economics. I also treated as very significant “those bodies of knowledge that revolve around race, class, gender, media, and culture as each interacts with the other and as they all interact with crime and justice.”5 Chapter 1 introduced the reader to a multitude of definitions of crime and criminology and to integration. I argued for the use of both a legal and a social definition of crime and criminals. Chapter 2 introduced the reader to the measurement of crime, to the differences between official and unofficial rates of crime, and to the trends in U.S. rates of victimization since 1970. To expand the usual discussion of crime, I provided an overview of homicide data in the United States from the early 1900s to 1990. I also included a 1988 comparison of murder rates in sixteen developed nations. Notably, the chapter provided what I believe to be the first treatment of genocide as mass hom i cide in a criminology textbook— not only with respect to the hideous genocides that occurred in the twentieth century against Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Bosnians, Croatians, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Cambodians, Ugandans, and o thers, but also with respect to the sixty to eighty million Amerindians who perished during the sixteenth- century Car ibbean holocaust. A fter providing the typically small section on white collar crime, I included a larger section on corporate and state crime, which were rarely covered subjects in criminology textbooks of that period. Chapter 3 provided a political economy of the changing nature of punishment in relation to the development of criminology, and vice versa, since the Enlightenment period. Chapter 4 opened with a unique and rather provocative discussion of science and pseudoscience and proceeded to examine the social construction of crime and crime control vis-à-v is classical, positivist, and critical traditions. The chapter concluded by introducing a
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post-postmodern approach to the theory and practice of criminology, arguing for a synthesis of modern and postmodern criminologies. The m iddle part of the book, consisting of chapters 5–8, was devoted to theory and strove to identify the range of theoretical explanations and findings from biology, psychology, sociology, law, and economics that had stood the test of time and had contributed to our understanding of crime and its control. I was less concerned about which of these theories had been tested and replicated the most, which was and is still a typical concern of many criminology textbooks. The last part of the book, chapters 9–12, was devoted to integrative practice and was quite innovative. Chapter 9, “Integrating Criminological Theories: A Critique,” began with an overview of the differ ent meanings and approaches to integrating modernist criminology. This was followed by a discussion of causation and modernist integration. Several examples of modernist constructions of integrated theory w ere provided, such as social process–m icro models, social structure–m acro models, and micro-m acro models. The chapter concluded with a postmodern criticism of modernist integration. Chapter 10, “Integrating Criminological Knowledges: A Post-Postmodern Synthesis,” picks up where chapter 9 left off with a discussion of modernist versus postmodernist thought and the need for blending them. A fter making a case for a post-postmodern synthesis of criminological knowledge, I set out, by way of illustration, an integrative system for classifying criminological thought. At the end of the day, my criminological synthesis never caught on. As Peter Manning once told me when I was preparing to write this book, “Gregg, you’ll never be able to satisfactorily reconcile modernism and postmodernism.” Yet I still believe that a constitutive model inclusive of, even if not reconciling, both modernism and postmodernism is valuable for mapping out the worldviews of social and cultural interaction. Chapter 11, “Integrating Cultural, Media, and Gender Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Crime Production,” and chapter 12, “Integrating Crime and Social Control: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Crime Reduction,” used cross-d isciplinary narratives to explain both the production and the reduction of crime. In each of these narratives I specifically returned to the theoretical contributions from the m iddle part of the book and combined t hese with the theoretical contributions from mediated, cultural, and racial or ethnic studies to provide an integrated understanding of the reproduction of crime and crime control. As I wrote at the end of Integrating Criminologies: Following the horizontal pathways to criminological wisdom, I have argued for a plurality of disciplinary knowledges. I have also presented
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an integrative approach to the building of criminological knowledge that has attempted to balance the importance of nature, nurture, agency, and social structure. To have done anything less, at best, would have provided another incomplete understanding of crime and crime control.6 The genesis for Criminology: An Integrated Approach obviously came from my first integrative text; in fact, before I started writing Criminology I was supposed to be writing a second edition of Integrating Criminologies. By the time I got around to the task, I was no longer interested in writing the same book; I had moved on. T here is some overlap between t hese two criminology textbooks, especially in the m iddle sections that survey theories. The integrative themes or objectives of the two works, however, were very dif ferent. As I wrote in the 2009 preface, “This time out I have provided a more seamless and more flexible, and hopefully, a more practical analysis of crime and crime control that w ill reach a wider audience as I have accommodated both the causes and the relations of crime, law, and justice.” I also noted that, generally, “t hose criminologies steeped in causes promote a linear type-thinking characteristic of the logic of modernism and positivism, while t hose steeped in relations promote a reciprocal type-t hinking characteristic of the logic of postmodernism and antipositivism.” Fin ally, “one of the basic underlying theses of this textbook is that both the fields of criminology and the development of a ‘global criminology’ requires analyses of crime and crime control that incorporate insights and tools available from all the criminologies.” 7 In short, the objective of this textbook was to integrate the development of crime, criminology, and criminal justice through the analytical lens of a globally changing political economy. The overarching objective of part I was to provide an integrated perspective on the developing historical and global relations that unite criminologies and criminologists, the administration of criminal justice and criminal justice practitioners, and the patterns of crime and crime control. As I maintained in the preface, “Too often, criminology texts as well as beginning and advanced students think about crime, crime control, criminal justice, and criminology as separate and disconnected phenomena.” In an attempt to overcome that intellectual fragmentation, the text made linkages were made between the connective disciplinary elements of both deviance and social control. Much of the material covered in part II of Criminology was the same as what was covered in part II in Integrating Criminologies. As is evident from a comparison of the m iddle parts of both books in the appendix, the order of the chapters changed and the labeling of disciplinary contributions was improved—clearing up my own confusion about these related constitutive
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apparatuses. The m iddle part of this text also provided an additional introductory chapter on the changing and overarching historical conditions of criminological inquiry since the European Ren aissance. A fter critiquing the four strands of criminological thought—economics and law, biology, psychology, and sociology—based on the deficiencies and partialities of most disciplinary-based explanations of crime and crime control, and building on what I had learned from my investigations into the relations of v iolence and nonviolence in the time between these two integrative criminological projects, the final objective of chapters eleven, “Integrated Models in an Age of Globalization and Transdisciplinarity: An Eclectic Overview of Emerging Approaches,” and twelve, “Crime, Globalization, and the Cap italist World Order: Implications for Criminology and Strategies for Social Justice,” which composed part III, “Integrating Criminological Strands: Theory and Practice,” was to synthesize the ideas and concepts discussed in the first two parts of the book. A fter first examining in much detail the constitutive parts of Stuart Henry and Mark Lanier’s integrated definition of crime, “The Prism of Crime,” from their second edition of Essential Criminology (2004),8 chapter 11 provided an eclectic overview by highlighting eight promising approaches to integration derived from one book and seven peer-reviewed articles:9 1. Why Crime? An Integrated Systems Theory of Antisocial Beh avior by Matthew Robinson 2. Toward an Integration of Sociological and Public Health Perspectives in the Study of Violence by William Pridemore 3. Integrating the Study of Mythogenes and Myths by Shlomo Shoham 4. An Integrated Understanding of the Holocaust by David Friedrichs 5. Toward an Integrated Social Psychological Model of White Supremacist Beh avior by Michael Arena and Bruce Arrigo 6. Integrating Critical Race Theory and Postmodernism: Implications of Race, Class, and Gender by Christopher Schneider 7. Integrating Buddhist Philosophy and Peacemaking Criminology by John Walsh 8. Integration by Way of the Criminology of Hybrids by Sheila Brown In the concluding chapter, I provided a summation of crime and crime control at the turn of the twenty-fi rst c entury, including an assessment of security, privatization, and neoliberalism in the context of an emerging transnational dangerous class and a new global criminology. And in the context of the age of globalization, I laid out public policy strategies that made the most sense for reducing crime and increasing justice for all people worldwide. This emphasis on policy, change, and social control in relation
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to the problems in question is characteristic of the endings of my textbooks and many of my scholarly publications.
Class, Race, Ge nde r, and Crime: The Social Realitie s of Justice in Ame ric a One of the more fashionable or popular forms of integration has been that of intersectionality. Yet with respect to class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, only Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America, now in its fifth edition, has attempted to fully examine the intersectionality of t hese variables in relationship to crime, criminology, and the administration of criminal justice. Even among edited readers, only a handful of books have attempted to grapple with class, race, and gender with equal intensity. The first of those edited collections was Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology: The Intersection (1996) by Brian MacLean and Dragan Milovanovic. Most of the works on intersections, however, have examined only two of these three variables. Class usually becomes the invisible variable, taking a back seat to race and gender. Presently, economic inequality and contemporary class consciousness in the United States seem to be gaining historical traction, suggesting that criminologists may find their way back to class analyses. This state of limited intersectionality exists for several reasons, however, not the least of which is that d oing intersectional work is difficult. Part of the void in this scholarship has to do with the fact that linear approaches involving multivariate and path analyses, for example, are of l ittle value in performing integration. The most useful models are nonlinear and tend to be interactive and reciprocal in approach. Hillary Potter makes similar observations in Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime (2015).10 At the same time, Potter advances a fundamentally anti-i ntersectional approach to crime and crime control as she concludes that intersectionality should be used to center criminological analyses on black women to emphasize that they are overly victimized compared with black men or white men and w omen. While few would argue that black girls and w omen do not constitute the largest group of victims by percentage in U.S. society, Potter is s ilent about the hypervictimization of black lesbians compared to black heterosexual women. In contrast, Paul Butler, in Chokehold: Policing Black Men (2017),11 does not make the same error when he claims that black men are the most abused group of men because he recognizes that gender m atters to these men as well as to white men. Butler further appreciates the ways in which gender and sexuality are differentiated and mediated by differences of class or socioeconomic status. A fter all, the w hole point of intersectional analyses is to recognize the effects and interplay between these socially constructed
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identities and realities. The point is not to elevate any one of t hese identities or realities over the others, as these variables are always in flux relative to the blending and changing markers constituting class, race and ethnic group, and gender and sexuality. Fin ally, these socially constructed identities and realities of crime and crime control, as well as the agencies of difference between class, race, and gender, are always interacting with t hose who make, circulate, and enforce the criminal laws vis-à-v is the pol itical economies of law, power, and justice. The chapters in Class, Race, Gender, and Crime have been significantly restructured and reordered since the first edition, and continuous tweaking accompanied subsequent editions; the structure of the fifth ended up like the structure of the fourth with changes to several chapter headings and subheadings. Every new edition of course updates examples, incorporates recent data, and adds new theoretical developments while discarding older data and dated events. For example, in the 2018 edition discussions of police violence, immigration, and queer criminology w ere consciously expanded. Also, the latest edition continued the expansion of substantive content about intersectionality and how class, race, and gender shape the formation of crime control and the administration of criminal justice. Please see 6.3 in the appendix for a detailed version of its contents to provide a better sense of this integrative project.
Viol e nce and Nonviole nce: Pathways to Unde r standing , 2 0 03 My motivation for writing Violence and Nonviolence was that I wanted to bring together two inseparable bodies of knowledge between the covers of one book—something that had not been done previously. Additionally, as I have noted in part II of this book, I have always been bothered by the lack of attention that criminologists and o thers in higher education have given to the pedagogy of violence and society. My interest in the study of nonviolence and its relative omission came a bit later. Not u ntil I engaged with peacemaking criminology in Aurora did I begin to factor nonviolence into my analyses of violence. Once I found myself intellectually engaged with the production of both vio lence and nonviolence, then examining one without examining the other seemed to be inadequate, to say the least. In short, one cannot fully understand violence or nonviolence without understanding the reciprocal relationships between the two. Over the past quarter of a century, numerous books have been written about particu lar forms of violence, such as gun violence, homicide, terrorism, domestic violence, sexual violence, hate crimes, and war. As for general textbooks on violence and society, few have been written in comparison with the number of textbooks on criminology or criminal justice. Perhaps
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more disturbing, most of these textbooks fail to examine the institutional and structural etiology and expressions of violence as they interact with the individual etiologies and expressions of violence. A notable exception has been the three editions of Violence, Inequality, and H uman Freedom by Peter Iadicola and Anson Shupe.12 Inspired by their work on violence, I wanted to examine all forms of violence, from verbal abuse to genocide. I also utilized their overlapping and intersecting individual, institutional, and structural spheres of violence. Comparatively, there are even fewer general textbooks on nonviolence than there are on violence. Those that do exist include crossover textbooks in the areas of peace and conflict studies, h uman rights, and restorative justice. Significantly, these works are as interested in the institutional and structural forms and relations of nonviolence as they are in the interpersonal forms and relations of nonviolence. One classic text that stands out in our discipline is Criminology as Peacemaking (1991), edited by Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney.13 Again, what is novel in Violence and Nonviolence is the treatment of the indivisibility of violence and nonviolence. In order to appreciate the reciprocal relationships between the pathways to violence and the pathways to nonviolence, on the one hand, and between the dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism, on the other hand, I highlight some of the content to provide a sense of this integrative project. A fter a short introduction that demystified violence and nonviolence, the book was divided into three parts. In part I, “Types of Violence,” the first chapter located the sanctioned and unsanctioned or the visible and invisible forms of violence in historical perspective. The chapter also provided an overview of contemporary vio lence in the United States, specifically addressing such topics as domestic violence, gun violence, sexual violence, violence against the elderly, workplace violence, hate violence, and suicide. In turn, these forms of violence were examined in relation to class, ethnicity, and gender. Chapter 2, “Interpersonal Violence,” examined homicide, juvenile victimization, physical and sexual child abuse, rape, and stalking. Chapter 3, “Institutional Vio lence,” examined f amily vio lence, childhood maltreatment, school vio lence, gang vio lence, police vio lence, and penal vio lence. Chapter 4, “Structural Violence,” examined forms of postcolonial violence, corporate violence, underclass violence, and terrorist violence. Part II, “Pathways to Violence,” consisted of three chapters. Chapter 5, “Explanations of Violence,” provided a summary and critique of the prevailing theories of violence. Chapter 6, Media and Violence, summarized the research on mediated violence from news to entertainment. Chapter 7, Sexuality and Violence, also provided a summary and overview of the research on sex, gender, and violence. The objective h ere was to develop an integrated, holistic, and reciprocal model of violence and nonviolence.
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Part III, “Pathways to Nonviolence,” also consisted of three chapters. The objective here was to capture recovering from violence at the individual, orga n izational, and structural levels of overlapping interaction. Chapter 8, “Recovering from Violence,” opened with a reciprocal approach to violence recovery that complemented my original reciprocal theory of violence introduced in chapter 5. The chapter then examined the workings of interpersonal recovery, institutional recovery, and structural recovery. Chapter 9, “Models of Nonviolence,” began by scrutinizing the paradigms of adversarialism and mutualism as t hese have expressed themselves culturally in violence and nonviolence. Next, the chapter provided a brief history of conspicuous nonviolent strugg le from 1900 to 2000. The last section of the chapter was devoted to an elaboration of four models of active nonviolence: mutuality, altruistic humanism, positive peacemaking, and resilience. The final chapter of the book, “Policies of Nonviolence,” provided a summary of victimization and the pathways to violence; a critique of the adversarial war on violence; and a review of mutualism and the strugg le for nonviolence. The chapter then identified two types of nonviolence strategies and associated policies: t hose that prevent antisocial pathways to social and criminal violence and those that facilitate pathways to positive peace, human rights, and social justice. The book ended with a discussion of social and transformative justice and the need to address both the injustices of victimization and the injustices of distributive justice. A Final Ve r sion of a Reciprocal-I nte ractive Theory of Viol e nce and Nonviole nce Modernist theories of integration have been divided into conceptual and propositional accounts. The conceptual types of integration reveal how concepts from one theory overlap in meaning with concepts from another theory. The propositional types of integration are built on propositions of other theories that have stood the test of time. My integrative account of violence and nonviolence is conceptual and propositional. My theory of violence and nonviolence is also postmodern b ecause it opposes static models of linear, interdependent, or sequential causality. By contrast, my theory adopts dynamic models of dialectical, codetermining, or multiple interactive causality. As Einstadter and Henry differentiate in Criminological Theory: An Analysis of Its Underlying Assumptions: The “static state” theories would include those emphasizing org an ized structures and objectively measurable social roles, constituting individuals with limited internal attributes and a limited capacity for spontaneity,
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as in biological, early personality theories or theories based on rational choice. The “dynamic state” theories would include t hose giving more weight to subjective interpretation, negotiated and spontaneous interaction, informal and creative processes, and conflicts between differences, such as labeling theory, social constructionism, and anarchist criminology.14 A fter Violence and Nonviolence, I wrote “Applying Integrated Theory: A Reciprocal Theory of Violence and Nonviolence,” a chapter for The Essential Criminology Reader (2006), edited by Henry and Lanier. At the same time I wrote another chapter, “A Critical Perspective on Violence,” in which I argued for reciprocal rather than linear models of violence; the chapter appeared in Advancing Critical Criminology: Theory and Application (2006), edited by Walter DeKeseredy and Barbara Perry.15 Since then I have continued to modify this theory as I have taught courses on violence and nonviolence. What follows is the final version of a reciprocal-interactive theory of violence and nonviolence (RITVNV). My reciprocal-interactive theory of violence and nonviolence reflects Albert Bandura’s triadic reciprocal model of causation and the mutually dynamic influence between three sets of factors: (1) internal personal factors in the form of cognitive, affective, and biological occurrences; (2) behavioral patterns; and (3) environmental events. Bandura maintained, some seventy- five years ago, that changes in any one of these sets of f actors result in changes in the other two sets of f actors that may yield “good,” “bad,” or “indifferent” behavioral outcomes. Dialectically, RITVNV neither assumes that h umans are autonomous agents of f ree w ill nor that their environments mechanically determine humans’ behavior. Finally, the theory assumes that personal and social patterns of be h av ior are animated by both general and specific precursors. For our purposes, general precursors are social processes and interactive theories of prosocial and antisocial beh avior. In the case of criminology t hese include social learning theories; imitation and modeling theories; differential theories of association, identification, and reinforcement; and bond, control, and strain theories. Each of t hese theoretical precursors reinforces or subsumes the reciprocal-interactive theory of violence and nonviolence, or does both. Specific precursors refer to reciprocal works and theories of antisocial beh avior that further reinforce RITVNV, subsume it, or both. T hese include “Toward an Interactional Theory of Delinquency” by Terence Thornberry; Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence by James Messerschmidt; Control Balance by Charles Tittle; Crime and Coercion by Mark Colvin; the Germ Theory of Violence from Violence by James Gilligan; and
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the Relational Theory of Aggression from Aggression and Crimes of Violence by Jeffery Goldstein.16 Thornberry maintains: ■ Delinquency is reciprocally interrelated and mutually affected by variables of control, learning, and delinquency. ■ Delinquency is part of a larger causal network, affected by and affecting the social development of t hese variables. ■ Delinquency is a product of the weakening of a person’s bonds to conventional society and from interactional settings that teach and reinforce prosocial beh avior. Messerschmidt maintains that gendered violence is an extension of the following: ■ Socializing experiences of patriarchal and equalitarian f amily relations ■ Socializing experiences of school and street relationships ■ Abilities of youth to perform expressions of masculinity and femininity with re spect to body types, self- identity, and emerging sexualities ■ Embodiment of the social construction of masculine and feminine practices Tittle maintains: ■ Deviance is unlikely to occur when control ratios or the degree to which p eople exercise control vs. the degree to which they are controlled are balanced. ■ Deviance is likely to occur when control ratios are imbalanced, that is when p eople are e ither very controlling and experience a control surplus or when they are very controlled and experience a control deficit. ■ Deviance increases when societies experience more control imbalances or greater inequalities and decreases when societies experience more control balances or greater equalities. Colvin maintains: ■ Cumulative levels of crime are subject to the varying experiences of learning, oppression, and coercion. ■ Cumulative levels of crime increase when individuals and societ ies experience more coercive than noncoercive means of compliance. ■ Cumulative levels of crime rise when differential coercion is erratically applied, producing a sense of unfairness and anger, weakened
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or alienated bonds, coercive modeling, control deficits, debasement, and lower self-control. Gilligan maintains: ■ The epidemiology of violence incorporates systemic and lethal forms of structural neglect and abuse, including poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of exploitation, not to mention everyday expressions of institutionalized privilege and inequality. ■ The epidemiology of violence involves pathogenic human emotions, especially shame. ■ The epidemiology of violence flows from neoliberal policies that are permeated with violent emotional pathogens that spread like contagious diseases. Goldstein maintains that there are opposing tendencies for and against aggression in every situation: ■ Violence is a product of pro-a ggressive stimulant f actors being stronger than anti-a ggressive inhibitors. ■ Nonviolence is a product of anti-a ggressive inhibitors being stronger than pro-a ggressive stimulant factors. In addition to these general and specific precursors to violence and nonviolence, RITVNV is framed by Jonathan Turner’s theory of emotionality from The Sociology of Emotions (2005) and Gordon Fellman’s dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism from Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival (1998).17 Turner begins with our four primary h uman emotions, three of them negative (anger, fear, and sadness) and one of them positive (happiness). Related to these primary emotions are first-and second-order elaborations of emotion. For example, first-order elaborations of anger are abhorrence, jealousy, and suspiciousness, and first- order elaborations of happiness are empathy, gratitude, hopefulness, pride, and wonderment. Related to second-order elaborations of anger, fear, and sadness are shame, guilt, and alienation. From a psychoanalytic perspective, shame and guilt lend themselves to the emotions of social control, whereas alienation lends itself to the emotions of isolation or estrangement and revenge or vengeance. In addition to the emotionally ambivalent outcomes of (1) promoting social order through the motivation of self-monitoring and conformity to normative moral codes and (2) generating other darker emotions such as anxiety, depression, or diffuse anger that may stir pathologies of sanctioned and unsanctioned violent alienation or estrangement, there are (3) the alternatives of individually and collectively reconstructed positive states of emotional well-being and social movements for nonviolent change.
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Fellman demonstrates that historically t here have always been two paradigmatic ways of organizing societies and h uman nature: adversarial and mutualistic. In the adversarial world, human interaction is based on competition, combat, conflicts of interest, wars, and the opposition of p eople to each other and to nature, often producing or characterized by zero-sum outcomes. In the mutualistic world, human interaction is based on cooperation, caring, nurturing, and empathy, often producing or characterized by win- w in outcomes. These two models of interaction are not mutually exclusive, and each contains elements of the other, w hether applied to individuals, small groups, or entire societ ies. From the perspective of dialectical materialism, levels of adversarialism or violence and levels of mutualism or nonviolence are animated by their changing political economies. Significantly, each of t hese ways of acting or behaving enables and reinforces the primary emotions of h uman beings. Adversarialism enables and reinforces second-order elaborations of anger, fear, and sadness by embodying practices of dehumanization, entitlement, and denigration. Adversarialism also reifies discourses of demonization and vilification of the other and facilitates the darker emotions of diffuse anger and rage by spreading oppression, repression, and violence. Mutualism enables and reinforces the first- order elaborations of happiness by embodying discourses and practices of cooperation, empathy, harmony, identification, and peacemaking. Mutualism also promotes positive emotions of unity, connectedness, love, joy, compassion, and peace. RITVNV also incorporates Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and applies his theory of h uman motivation to violence and nonviolence. With respect to h uman need fulfillment, emotionality, and social beh avior, t here are several applicable lessons for understanding violence and nonviolence. Without the basic satisfactions of physical security and love or belonging, fully developed self-esteem is unlikely. Underdeveloped self- esteem in turn reduces ego identification with and empathy for o thers. Weaker self-esteem is similarly conducive to the properties associated with fears and anxieties, which are more likely to produce emotional violence toward self and o thers. Conversely, both self-actualization and authentic morality are more likely to develop with physical well- being; love or belonging; and feelings of self- esteem, pride, confidence, re spect, and worth. In turn, these states of mind are compatible with those properties associated with inner peace and emotional nonviolence toward self and others. This brings us to the reciprocal interactions of violent and nonviolent states of being or to the dialectics of the emotionalities of violence and nonviolence. The emotions or properties of violence refer to the negative
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feelings of being or the aggregate states of pessimism, including abandonment, alienation, anger, anxiety, depression, hostility, humiliation, mortification, rejection, sadness, and shame. T hese properties of violence may also be thought of as t hose negative attributes, characteristics, elements, factors, and other conditions associated with developmental, life course, and reciprocal theories of antisocial beh avior. The emotions or properties of nonviolence refer to the positive feelings of being or to the aggregate states of optimism, including altruism, compassion, contentedness, empathy, gratitude, happiness, hope, humility, pride, relief, and security. These properties of nonviolence may also be thought of as those positive attributes, characteristics, elements, factors, and other conditions associated with both satisfying the hierarchical needs of self-actualization and enabling prosocial beh av ior. As for individual or collective pathways to violence and nonviolence, RITVNV assumes the following: (1) over the life course of a person or a society, both the properties of violence and nonviolence accumulate to varying degrees across interpersonal/familiar, institutional/subcultural, and structural/cultural spheres of human interaction; and (2) like other stratified resources such as money, power, and status, the emotional properties of both violence and nonviolence are the products of the uneven distribution of well-being or illness spread across society. RITVNV holds that the properties and pathways to violence and nonviolence are inversely interdependent and reciprocally related. Accordingly, the theory first hypothesizes that the properties of violence and nonviolence are cumulative in effect. The more or less present the emotions associated with either violence or nonviolence are, the more or less likely that either violence or nonviolence w ill ensue. The theory then hypothesizes that when f amily, subcultural, and cultural pathways to violence or nonviolence overlap and reinforce one another, the forms of violence or nonviolence w ill become more or less intense and the expressions of each w ill become more or less common. To summarize: RITVNV argues that when the properties and pathways of violence and nonviolence converge in time and space between individuals, organizations, and societies, these properties and pathways work cumulatively to reproduce habitual patterns of either violence or nonviolence. Conversely, when the properties and pathways of violence and nonviolence do not converge or are in conflict or at odds with each other, the expressed patterns of violence and nonviolence are mixed and irregular. The theory argues further that as the interpersonal, institutional, and structural interactions of violence or nonviolence reach their respective tipping points, t hese interactions w ill more or less support the behavioral actions of
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either violence or nonviolence. Fin ally, the theory contends that as the number of interpersonal, institutional, and structural pathways to violence or nonviolence converge, t here are three reciprocal or interactive outcomes: the intensity of violence or nonviolence swells in magnitude; the violent or nonviolent actions become more or less prevalent; and the differences in the spheres of interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence or nonviolence become more uncertain.
C hapte r 7
Globalizing Criminology
Teaching has always been far more labor-intensive for me than management. A fter retiring from administration and returning to the faculty in 1996, however, I continued producing and disseminating criminological knowledge at a steady pace. Besides my compulsion to edit and to improve my writing, I credit this annual scholarly yield to two things. First, as I have grown older I have had fewer distractions, such as time-consuming community activism. Second, since becoming a full-t ime faculty member at EMU, the university has awarded me the equivalent of more than five years of release time from teaching for the purposes of facilitating scholarship. The freed-up time has greatly assisted me in doing research and other scholarly activities. In the 2018–2019 academic year, my first and only two- semester sabbatical in forty- five years of university employment allowed me to write Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist. All of the cumulative release time over the years has also made it easier for me to travel and to connect with other criminologists outside of North America. This release from teaching has also facilitated my work with two major publishers to influence the wider circulation and production of criminological knowledge. At different times, I have worked as a series editor for Peter Lang and Rowman & Littlefield, and I have done so for Routledge since 2015. I have also managed to author two award-w inning books for the latter two publishers. At the end of this final chapter, I highlight t hose works as part of my ongoing agenda to develop a political economy of large-scale financial institutions, victimization, and social control. Specifically, Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding (2012) was the last of twelve titles from the Issues in Crime and Justice series with Rowman & Littlefield. The other titles and authors, identified at 7.1 in the appendix, reveal the broad-based diversification of the subject m atter included in the series. Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It (2017) was the first monograph published in the Crimes of the Powerful series with Routledge. Unlike my first coediting experience with Peter Lang, in which I was 193
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brought on to augment an existing series with two other coeditors whom I did not know, the edited series that followed were mine to create and establish from the get-go. With respect to the management and dissemination of knowledge in the twenty-fi rst century, I continued to edit both normal-size and large collections. The former included Crime and Crime Control: A Global View (2000) and Violence, Conflict and World Order: Critical Conversations on State- Sanctioned Justice (2007). Crime and Crime Control was part of the Greenwood Press series, A World View of Social Issues. My volume in the series examined crime and crime control in fifteen nations at the turn of the century. With a couple of exceptions, these countries were investigated by native contributors who had agreed to use the same comparative framework for presenting their findings: Nation Profile; Historical Overview; Public Perceptions; Contemporary Crime; Contemporary Crime Control; and F uture Prospects. The countries studied were categorized into three groups: developed nations, including Germany (Hans- Joerg Albrecht and Raymond Teske), the Netherlands (Henk van de Bunt and Ineke Haen Marshall), New Zealand (George Pavlich), Taiwan (Mayling Maria Chu), the United Kingdom (Nic Groombridge), and the United States (Gary Feinberg); developing nations, including Brazil (Emilio E. Dellasoppa), China (Mark S. Gaylord), India (S. George Vincentnathan), Iran (Hamid R. Kusha), Poland (Wojciech Cebulak and Emil Plywaczewski), and Russia (William Alex Pridemore); and posttraditional (postcolonial) nations, including Ghana (Obi N. Ignatius Ebbe and Chris Abotchie), the Navajo Nation ( Jon’a F. Meyer and James Zion), and Nigeria (Obi N. Ignatius Ebbe). My introduction to the volume included a discussion of globalization, an overview of the theories of development and crime, and a summary of the overall findings from the fifteen nations. As I wrote about our results, “it is still very hard to generalize about particu lar nation formations and their relationship to the patterns and trends in crime and crime control” or “to provide findings that definitively resolve” the contradictions between the competing explanations of modernization, world system, and opportunity theories in relation to crime and crime control. Nevertheless, we w ere able to conclude that as inequality grew, generally, (1) both crime and crime control grew and expanded as worldwide enterprises; and (2) crimes against property expanded at a faster rate than crimes against the person did. We also found that crime and criminal beh avior were more uniform than were the policies of crime control and the processes of criminal justice. Fin ally, it was clear that the bulk of contemporary crime was domestic despite the growing trends of transnational and international crimes. Among the other conclusions reached with respect to developed nations, there was “a g reat deal of risk analysis, actuarial examination, and legal
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rationalization of the criminal justice system,” and yet there were “not clear-cut directions t oward either repressive or social justice in general or in sentencing and punishment trends in particu lar.” With respect to post- traditional nations, there were “concerted efforts to balance the values and practices of traditional and postcolonial forms of law enforcement and adjudication.” As for developing nations, the patterns or trends w ere more mixed. That is, there was “less uniformity in the expressions of crime and crime control” as these varied according “to the extent that political, economic, and social institutions” had been “freed from autocratic or fundamentalist rule.”1 On the back cover of Violence, Conflict and World Order: Critical Conversations on State-Sanctioned Justice, Frank Pearce had this to say: “Violence, Conflict, and World Order explores the relationship between globalizing social processes and recent changes in the level and forms of violence, repre sent at ions of t hese changes, and the varying state responses to them. It pinpoints how the development of neoliberal ideologies and forms of economic and po l iti cal organ i zation have an impact on a range of relationships between individuals and between individuals and wider institutional structures, particularly when the consequences are criminal, repressive, and socially destructive.” This unique pedagogical project was based on a mini conference org an ized by Carole Garrison and held at Eastern Kentucky University in the spring of 2004. Over two days, the topics presented and the conversations in response to them fashioned organic themes, if not narratives, that were assisted by a handful of unnamed or imaginary persons inserted into the text and identified anonymously as audience members. About 30 percent of the fifteen hours of transcribed recordings, or 275 pages of text, constituted the eleven back-to-back presentations. The remaining 70 percent of the edited text derived from the conversations following each of the opening topical remarks, which also spilled over into a larger, open-ended conversation that ensued over the course of the successive present at ions. Throughout the text the conversationalists included the other presenters. In addition, t here was a changing audience of faculty and students from the School of Justice and Safety, who might or might not have been identifiable by name. The conversationalists identified on the back of the book included Mahin Ashki, Gregg Barak, Tom Barker, Robert Bohm, Joan Callahan, Walter DeKeseredy, Jeff Ferrell, David Friedrichs, Carole Garrison, Mark Hamm, Victor Kappeler, Peter Kraska, Ray Michalowski, Karen Miller, Gary Potter, Thomas Reed, and Randall Shelden. Six months a fter the conference was over, transcribed video recordings of the eleven present at ions and perhaps 90 percent of the conversations w ere provided to me. I read, deleted, and edited the text primarily from these
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conversations in order to help shape the continuity within and between our domestic and global conversations. I shared the barely edited topical overviews for each conversation with their authors to ensure accuracy and to confirm that I had not inadvertently changed the meaning of anything in their presentations. As I freely edited these conversations to facilitate the shaping of an overarching and seamless narrative, I did not check on their accuracy. Fin ally, I sandwiched the eleven conversations between my introduction, “Violence in an Age of Globalization,” and my epilogue, “Human Rights, the Corporate State, and Social Justice in a Global Village.” In the appendix please see the t able of contents at 7.2. Examples of the larger collections included Battleground: Criminal Justice—A Two-Volume Encyclopedia (2007), published by Greenwood Press, and The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful (2015). The 840-page encyclopedia consisted of one hundred entries that averaged three thousand words each. Our objective and scope was to address the major controversies or issues pertaining almost exclusively to criminal justice law and beh avior in the United States. In addition to the alphabetical order of entries, six broad topical areas were used to classify these contributions. Please see 7.3 in the appendix. The origins of the international handbook of the crimes of the power ful, a 556-page volume, as well the ensuing Crimes of the Powerful series, both with Routledge, can be attributed to a luncheon meeting that I had at Paesano’s Italian restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 2013. Thomas Sutton, the acquisitions editor of criminology and criminal justice for Routledge Books, was on a Midwest trip to procure scholarly works. During a brainstorming two-hour lunch, Tom and I kicked around ideas for future monographs, edited collections, and handbooks that would have global market appeal. We came away from our meeting with a concrete plan for development. First, we would do and I would edit a handbook on the crimes of the powerful. This volume consisted of thirty-eight chapters, org an ized into nine sections (see 7.4 in the appendix), and began with my lengthy introduction, “On the Invisibility and Neutralization of the Crimes of the Powerf ul and Their Victims.” Next we would spin off applicable full- length monographs from the handbook for the new Crimes of the Powerf ul series and I would write a global book on multinational corporate crime to launch the series. The objective of t hese academic endeavors has been to resist and change the asymmetrical relations of popu l ar knowledge and scholarly inquiry about both crime and social justice, locally and globally. Unfortunately, this state of affairs influences and transcends studies in criminology and is still deeply embedded in our cultural, economic, and political institutions,
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especially in the United States. As I wrote on the first page of the introduction to the handbook: Though most citizens of the world and their properties are more likely to experience victimization from the organ izational and institutional offenses of the powerful than from the erratic and atomized offenses of the powerless, most people are still concerned about the latter and are in the dark about the former. On the other hand, most critical criminologists are aware of the routinization of the crimes of the powerful and they are mindful that people are increasingly at greater risk for harm or injury from these criminals. And yet, our lack of knowledge of the crimes of the powerf ul compared to our knowledge of the crimes of the powerless persist.2 These crimes and the victims of the powerf ul remain relatively invisible thanks, in part, to the concerted efforts of lawyers, governments, and corporations to censor or suppress t hese disreputable and illegal pursuits. W hether prohibited or not, these crimes of the powerful as well as their harms and the injuries to their victims also remain hidden from public scrutiny because of deregulation, the infrequent enforcement of applicable laws, and the other ways these morally wrong beh aviors have been decriminalized or normalized. Significantly, this absence of knowledge continues because criminologists spend only 5 percent of our time researching, teaching, and writing about suite crimes while devoting 95 percent of our time to street crimes. Even this 5 percent figure is inflated because much of what passes for researching and teaching about white collar crime (i.e., embezzlement, identity theft, insurance fraud) has little in common with the daily crimes of powerf ul corporations that victimize masses of p eople and ecosystems alike. In everyday terms, the crimes of both the not so powerf ul and the very powerful include a panoply of criminal and civil offenses that range from the mundane thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence and coercion to the more arcane practices of monopolization, manipulation, market cornering, price-fi xing, and Ponzi schemes, to the exceptional war crimes and much more common crimes against humanity, and fin ally to the ordinary crimes against the environment perpetrated by multinational corporations. Historically, these crimes of the powerful have managed for the large part to avoid or escape criminalization and stigmatization. Time and again, these criminal activities committed by the powerful have been conventionalized or neutralized by way of alliances, negotiations, and justifications that serve to undermine the moralization of t hese offenses. Concurrently, the legal reactions to elite offenses and ideological rationalizations of them,
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by capit alist state actors and other defenders of the status quo, contribute to this demoralization of the crimes of the powerf ul and to the denial of victimhood and liability for t hose harmed or injured. T hese state-routinizing tendencies of criminal nonenforcement have a long tradition of bending to the needs of the org aniz ationa lly powerful and to capital accumulation, dating at least as far back as the rise of industrialization in Europe. Last but not least, the handbook’s unifying framework for examining the crimes of the powerful was found in the dialectical expansion or contraction of harms informed, on the one hand, by the reciprocal relations of accumulating licit and illicit capital and, on the other hand, by the reciprocal relations of capit alist reproduction interloping with the systems of bourgeois legality and the apparatuses of the capitalist state. In light of these pol itical and economic arrangements as well as the traditional and emerging areas of criminological inquiry, this examination classified the international crimes of the powerful into seven clustered or overlapping sets of criminal activities. T hese included: (1) crimes of globalization, (2) corporate crimes, (3) environmental crimes, (4) financial crimes, (5) state crimes, (6) state-corporate crimes, and (7) state-routinized crimes. Ultimately, the driving or unifying forces underpinning these territories of criminality and social control are the political economies of global capitalization and securitization. oing Global G Although I had lived briefly in Sicily and longer in West Germany while I worked for the European Division of the University of Maryland, I did not return to Europe or to other parts of the world for more than a decade. That state of affairs began to change in the 1990s with the well- received publications of Gimme Shelter; Crimes by the Capitalist State; Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime; and Integrating Criminologies. A fter t hose books, Theft of a Nation and Unchecked Corporate Power became my passports abroad. Together, these books brought me to many cities, such as Berlin, Buenos Aires, Groningen, Helsinki, London, Maastricht, Passo Fundo, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Maria, Stockholm, Taipei, Tampere, and Vienna. A fter the Choice list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 1991, announced in May 1992, included Gimme Shelter as one of fourteen books selected from six thousand social and behavioral titles reviewed by the American Library Association that year, I started to hear regularly from publishers pitching book ideas that I might like to write for them. Back then, advances against royalties and developmental monies for book projects w ere still very common. In 1996, Greenwood Press, the owner of Praeger, which had published Gimme Shelter, approached me to edit a volume on homelessness for
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the series A World View of Social Issues. I immediately told Greenwood that I would rather edit a global volume on crime and crime control. At my request, our contract included monies for project development that I used to org an ize two panels about our comparative global project at the 12th International Congress of Criminology, held in Seoul in August 1998. T hese funds also facilitated my attending the conference and meeting with most of the contributing authors to the volume. Less than six months later, from February 17 to March 3, 1999, I was doing a series of lectures in the United Kingdom on both integrative and newsmaking criminologies; Ian Taylor had arranged a speaking circuit that took me to the universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Keele, Middlesex, Northumbria, Sheffield, and Teesside. In September of the same year, Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi invited me to the University of Helsinki, where I gave a lecture on newsmaking criminology and conducted a workshop for a small group of faculty members from a consortium of public policy research institutes and a handful of investigative journalists. And so my globe-t rotting criminological excursions had begun. Fast-forward to April 2014, and I was in Shire Hall, Nottingham, at the Conference on Penal Law, Abolitionism, and Anarchism. The Hulsman Foundation sponsored the conference, and the British and Irish section of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control org a nized the proceedings. A fter presenting my paper, “Non-penal Alternatives to Wall Street Looting and High-R isk Securities Frauds: Limiting Finance Capital and Regulatory Control as the Best Means for Preventing the Next Economic Meltdown and Democratizing the Political Economy,” for the topical area “Markets and the State— M arxist Perspectives,” Marilia de Nardin Budo came up to me and introduced herself. Marilia was a Brazilian lawyer and a news reporter before becoming a newsmaking criminologist and a professor. She presented me with two books in Portuguese that she had written, one based on her doctoral thesis and both having to do with newsmaking criminology. In August 2015 Marilia became my conduit to Brazil. She was an academic ambassador, an entrée, a tour guide, and a colleague all in one person. Marilia had arranged for me to teach a mini course on state-routinized crime to a group of master’s and doctoral students in law and international studies at IMED, Passo Fundo, where she had been a professor before she joined the faculty at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria in 2018. Marilia had also arranged for me to make presentations at three different venues. At the three-d ay Conference on International Law, Democracy, and Sustainability held in Passo Fundo, I presented the paper, “The Crimes of the Powerf ul and the Globalization of Crime.” Before some three hundred people I shared the stage with a moderator as well as Daniel Achutti, a restorative justice advocate and director of the School of Law at the Universidad
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La Salle. I also presented this same lecture to some seventy-five students, a few faculty members, and the dean of the School of Law at Pontifical Catholic Universidade de Rio Grande de Sul (PUC-R S) in Porto Alegre. Within four months, my present at ion had been translated into Portuguese and published in Revista Brasileira de Direito (vol. 11, no. 2 [2015]). Eighteen months later I would return to the same school of law in Porto Alegre as a Fulbright Scholar. In addition to teaching a seminar on globalization and multinational corporate crime to thirteen master’s and doctoral students in criminal sciences, I gave three public seminars open to faculty from across campus on the same material. The third lecture that I gave during the summer of 2015, “Media Represent at ion, the ‘CSI Effect’ and Criminal Adjudication,” was actually a PowerPoint presentation. Marilia had arranged for me to give the annual international lecture at the Escola da Magistrafura do Estado do Rio de Janeiro with three jurist respondents and some one hundred attorneys and judges in the audience. The present at ion highlighted the findings from two collaborative studies of jurors in Ann Arbor and Detroit conducted in 2006 and 2008. This research was carried out by Donald E. Shelton, Circuit Judge for the 22nd Judicial District in Washtenaw County; Young S. Kim, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at EMU; and myself. Our research yielded several peer-reviewed articles demystifying the CSI effect on juror decision-m aking in criminal trials. Most noteworthy of these co-authored publications w ere “A Study of Juror Expectations and Demands Concerning Scientific Evidence: Does the ‘CSI Effect’ Exist?,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law (vol. 9, no. 2 [2007]: 331–368); “An Indirect-Effects Model of Mediated Adjudication: The CSI Myth, the Tech Effect, and Metropolitan Jurors’ Expectations for Scientific Evidence,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law (vol. 12, no. 1 [2009]: 1–43); and “Examining the ‘CSI-Effect’ in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence and Eyewitness Testimony: Multivariate and Path Analyses,” in the Journal of Criminal Justice (vol. 37, no. 2 [2009]: 452–460). A decade later, t hese articles had been downloaded more than ten thousand times combined. Our debunking of the CSI effect on jurors continues to fascinate a lot of p eople, especially legal forensic researchers, prosecutors, and criminal defense lawyers. As Judge Shelton and I underscored in a jointly presented keynote luncheon address to the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law at its annual meeting in Chicago, October 26, 2014, the popularity of t hese publications had more than a little mediated assistance. A fter our first article was published on March 2, 2007, in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, our research went viral four days later because of circumstances we had absolutely nothing to do with, thanks to an essay in the Empirical
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egal Studies Blog. The blogger had somehow connected our findings to the L March 6 guilty verdict of Lewis “Scooter” Libby on four out of five counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice for leaking information of the name of a CIA operative married to a Bush administration critic. Not very long a fter that, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) took an interest in our research, posted our findings on its website, and featured Judge Shelton as keynote speaker at one of the annual NIJ conferences as well as in one of NIJ’s publications. Five years later, on April 17, 2012, Shelton was also featured on the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE for the episode “The Real CSI.” All in all, our newsmaking story about the myth of the CSI effect and its impact on the legal narratives surrounding a very high- profile topic certainly had a long run in the public domain, including coverage in newspapers and legal magazines alike. Although we now receive only occasional requests to view or use our juror questionnaires from the two studies, in the not too distant past such requests were common. Part of g oing global also included my new Crimes of the Powerful series with Routledge established in 2015. Among the first of the books contracted for the series w ere The Crime of Maldevelopment: Economic Deregulation and Violence in the Global South by María Laura Böhm and Natural Resources, Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Latin America: Exploring the Boundaries of Environmental and State-Corporate Crime in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico by Marcela Torres Wong. Böhm is an Argentine-German lawyer at the University of Buenos Aires (UAB) and a criminologist at both the National University of Lomas de Zamora in Argentina and the University of Hamburg, where she also received her PhD in the Social Sciences. Wong is a Peruvian lawyer and an anthropologist formerly at Pontificia Universidad Catholica del Peru. A fter receiving her PhD in political science from American University in Washington, D.C., in 2017, she joined the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO) in Mexico City. I first met Marcela in D.C. when she and Maya became friends around 2012. The next time our paths crossed was when Marcela married Maya and Josh in a civil ceremony in Ann Arbor in May 2015. At the 2016 ASC meetings in New Orleans I heard Böhm give a pre sent at ion about her research on what she was labeling crimes of maldevelopment. A fter the session I introduced myself and asked her whether she was interested in writing a book for the series. Almost a year later, when we were working on the book, Laura learned that I would be doing a Fulbright in Porta Alegre during our spring and their fall, 2017. Since the flight between Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires is only one hour, she invited me to give two lectures at the UAB School of Law. One of t hose lectures on securities fraud and regulatory compliance was translated into Spanish and published as “Fraude En Productos Financieros Y Compliance Regulatorio:
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¿Por Qué Se Necesitan Medios Alternativos De Control?” in Revista Critica Penal y Poder (no. 14 [March 2018]: 76–97), Observatorio del Sistema Penal y los Derechos Humanos, Universidad de Barcelona. A fter the publication of Unchecked Corporate Power in February 2017, six more books, including the ones by Laura and Marcela as well as one collection, Revisiting the Crimes of the Powerful: Marxism, Crime and Deviance, edited by Steven Bittle, Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, and David Whyte, were published in less than two years in the Crimes of the Powerf ul Series. Three of the early authors of the series included contributors from the handbook; their works included Market Criminology: State-Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry by Ifeanyi Ezeonu; Torture as State Crime: A Criminological Analysis of the Transnational Institutional Torturer by Melanie Collard; and State-Corporate Crime and the Commodification of Victimhood: The Toxic Legacy of Trafigura’s Ship of Death by Thomas MacManus. The second title in the series published after mine was Uncovering the Crimes of Urbanisation: Researching Corruption, Violence, and Urban Conflict by Kristian Lasslett. During the early period of the series’ rapid development, Penny Green and Tony Ward had approached Tom Sutton and proposed to him a series on state crime. Both Tom and I thought that there was no need for a separate series on state criminality b ecause these crimes fell in the category of crimes of the powerful. In fact, we had already published several titles on state and state-corporate crime in the series. So at the end of 2017, I was pleased to have Penny and Tony join me as coeditors of the series. I was equally pleased that eighteen months l ater they would coauthor their excellent book in the series, State Crime and Civil Activism: On the Dialectics of Repression and Resistance. Rounding out the series as of spring 2019 was the publication of Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm: Rights, Regulation, and Injustice in the Canadian Oil Sands by James Heydon. In conjunction with marketing the publication of Unchecked Corporate Power and before I left for my Fulbright in Brazil in early 2017 I wrote a series of op-eds for The Crime Report on the new Trump administration. These included “Defining Multinational Corporate Crime Down” (January 4, 2017, http://thecrimereport.org/2017/01/04/efining-multinational-corporate -crime- down/ ); “Keeping It Green: The Looming Battle with Scott Pruitt’s EPA” ( January 18, 2017), http://t hecrimereport.org/2 017/01/18/keeping-i t -g reen-the-looming-battle-w ith-scott-pruitts-epa/); and “Corporate Crime in an Age of Trump” (February 8, 2017, https://thecrimereport.org/2017/02 /0 8/corporate-corruption-i n-t he-a ge-of-t rump/). A fter I returned to the United States from Brazil, The Crime Report interviewed me for a feature story based on Unchecked Corporate Power titled “Why White-Collar Crime Is a Growth Industry” (October 26, 2017, https://thecrimereport.org/2 017 /10/26/why-white-collar-c rime-is-a-g rowth-industry/). The article begins:
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“Critics of the business world lament that crimes ‘of the street’ are much more aggressively prosecuted and punished than crimes ‘of the suite,’ but Gregg Barak, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and author or editor of 20 books, believes the problem goes deeper.” Before the interview actually begins in the article, The Crime Report continued: In his new book Unchecked Corporate Power, Barak argues that governments’ abdication of their responsibility to effectively regulate multinational corporations has enabled white-collar chicanery to flourish on a global scale. In a chat with Nancy Bilyeau, Deputy Editor of The Crime Report, Barak discusses why he believes there’s little chance of policymakers taking action in the near future, the connection between corporate crime and climate change, and how the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal illustrates the impunity of powerf ul CEOs. From a newsmaking criminology perspective and based on my professional relationship with The Crime Report’s editor-i n-chief, Stephen Handelman, it helped that the deputy editor had actually read the book from cover to cover before she interviewed me. Unfortunately, I have done my share of book interviews in which the interviewers had read nothing more than a press release before talking with me. It also helped that Bilyeau was familiar with my essays that had appeared e arlier in the year in The Crime Report. In short, Nancy had done her homework, and she was more than prepared to interview me first by phone and then with follow-up e-m ail. I am particularly interested in sharing her interview questions and my responses because I believe that our conversation indicated the types of alternative narratives or reconstructed understandings of the crimes of the powerful that may be generated through newsmaking criminology: TCR: Fewer criminologists are doing work on white-collar crime than on other crime
sectors, and less work is being published in academic journals. Is this a factor in elite players presently being “unchecked”? GB: . . . In my “White Collar Crime” class this semester, more than one student has asked me the exact same question. In a very indirect kind of way, the lack of investigation by criminologists of multinational corporate crime compared to their investigation of street or index crimes does contribute to the impunity of these acts and omissions, or to the normalization and routinization of t hese crimes. . . . If the field of criminology were paying due diligence to t hese crimes, t here would be more attention given to them. However, that also imagines that public policy on crime and crime control, w hether in the suite or the street, is in fact responding to evidence-based research on the m atter. . . .
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TCR: How long has “state-routinized crime” committed by multinational corpora-
tions been at the unchecked level it is at now? GB: Actually, the track record of checking multinational corporate misbe-
havior has for the most part always been beyond incrimination, so at the present time, it is pretty much business crime as usual. TCR: I s there anything you can single out as bringing us to a fever pitch on this? GB: W hile fundamentally these crimes are related to the contradictions of global capitalism, the one condition that I think stands out in relation to the present state of crisis has to do with global warming and climate change. . . . In the not-too-d istant future, overcoming or succumbing to corporate and multinational pollution—from ecocide to global shortages of water to fracking to electronic waste disposal . . . in the context of climate change and the need to abandon our dependency on harmful fossil fuels, regardless of the bottom-line profits that w ill disappear, or else face the possibility of human extinction, speaks to the necessity of reconstructing or reconstituting what corporations are as legal entities. For example, by the replacing of an unencumbered, privately controlled capitalism . . . w ith an environmentally and democratically controlled public capitalism . . . no longer driven by the irrational and unsustainable exponential growth of capital and consumption, is at the heart of the contradictory relations in both the routinization of licit and illicit behaviors of multinational corporations as well as capitalist states’ routinization of the noncriminal responses to t hese crimes. TCR: W hat role do the media play in the lack of public awareness of unchecked corporate power? GB: Let me just say that the major online newspapers in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Bloomberg, etc. do cover, report on, reveal and expose much of the unchecked corporate power in the world. T here are those economic and business journalists that have and are investigating and connecting the dots. However, they are a minority of reporters and are up against a larger narrative, if you w ill, like the myth of Too Big to Fail. . . . As for the lack of public awareness, I would say that they are not paying attention. If the public h asn’t figured it out a fter the implosion on Wall Street and the Occupy Wall Street movement, a fter the ongoing high-end securities and financial frauds that have continued unfettered to the present day, and a fter Supreme Court decisions like Citizens v. United, I do not know what it w ill take. TCR: In the last presidential election Wall Street’s unchecked financial power got a lot of attention. A year later, do you hear these debates continuing?
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GB: I would say there are discussions in the world of academia, in many online
blogs, and in posted electronic mailings like nakedcapitalism, but less so in the mainstream media. . . . If folks are r unning for office and bring up neoliberal policy, it w ill be debated. A fter all, it is these policies that constitute most of our current crisis and facilitate unchecked corporate power. They need to be abandoned u nless we want things to continue to decline. TCR: I s there any hope for the creation of an international apparatus of regulatory control? GB: In the short term, I do not believe so. . . . TCR: D o you see a possibility that federal prosecutors w ill return to pursuing difficult and prolonged cases such as Enron instead of negotiating fines? GB: I do not see any indication of that especially with the current [Trump] administration. A first step for that to occur would require the creation of a Corporate Fraud Division within the U.S. Department of Justice. TCR: I realize that a producer of independent films is not in the same category as the executives of multinational corporations, but I was struck by a parallel in the Harvey Weinstein case—of his ability to ward off criminal investigations of sexual harassment through a compliant press and corporate partner enabling— and some of what you outline in your book. Do you agree? GB: In a way there are similarities, b ecause these are mostly extremely wealthy and powerf ul men. The sexual abusers at Fox News, for example, had a lot of power over those p eople around them and there’s the fact that they have the money to settle, settle, settle, over and over, for their habitual misdeeds and to avoid the criminal law. During my Fulbright I continued to network in Brazil, thanks to Marilia and to the other people she had introduced me to, including Daniel Achutti. It’s a small world—it turns out he also has a PhD in criminal sciences from PUC-R S, where I was working, in Porto Alegre, where he lives. Daniel arranged for me to do a lecture series on financial and multinational corporate crimes at La Salle Law School, about forty-five minutes due south of Porto Alegre. He and some other faculty members at PUC-R S also arranged for Marilia and me to do a comparative North-South talk on June 24, 2017, at a local bar and restaurant, Mondo Cane, as part of a series of regularly occurring monthly discussions involving criminal law professors and graduate students from several law schools in the greater metropolitan area of Porto Alegre. Marilia and I would turn our remarks into a piece that appeared in the fall 2017 newsletter of The Critical Criminologist entitled “USA and Latin American Criminology, Then and Now (1970s to the Pres ent): What are the Similarities and Dissimilarities?” By now, Marilia and I have become long-d istance colleagues, and she has twice given
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lectures at EMU, most recently in fall 2017 on environmental crimes in the global south. In terms of networking, my Fulbright faculty sponsor from PUC-R S, Ricardo Jacobsen Gloeckner, and a colleague, Augusto Jobim Do Amaral, are the coauthors of Criminologia E (m) Critica (2013). Augusto holds a joint appointment both at the law school and in sociology. He is the author and editor of other books as well. He also has a working relationship with the publisher Tirant lo Blanch. Long story short, both Theft of a Nation and Unchecked Corporate Power are scheduled for translation into Portuguese and publication sometime a fter the release in late 2019 of Leituras de um criminologista norte-americano, edited by Marilia. The selections for the anthology were all of Marilia’s d oing and the organization in Portuguese and the contents in Eng lish may be viewed as 7.5 in the appendix. Earlier translated publications of mine include two articles based on Theft of Nation and translated into Serbian in Foreign L egal Life (Strani Pravni Zivot 2, no. 13: 21–43) and in the Journal of Criminal Justice (Cˇasopis za krivicˇne nauke 1, no. 13: 3–12). Their Eng lish titles read, respectively, “On the Rhetoric and Reality of Fighting Financial Fraud on Wall Street” and “The Financially Respectable Crimes of Wall Street.” Unchecked Corporate Power is being translated into Serbian for publication as I write in 2019. To round out this discussion on my global dissemination of knowledge, I would like to reference the cofounding in 2019 of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime ( JWCCC) with Sage Publications. Like many scholars of white collar and corporate crime, I had reached the conclusion that the time was well past due for the development of a journal devoted to the breadth and depth of white collar crimes, corporate crimes, and the crimes of the powerful. Leveraging my editorial background and recent scholarship in t hese subject areas, I entered into conversations with Taylor & Francis, Sage, and Springer about the possibilities of establishing a new journal. Although I desired an in de pen dent and truly global journal, I quickly learned that u nless I was interested in an open access journal or an online- only publication, then I would have to affiliate the journal with an academic association like the American Society of Criminology (ASC). As timing would have it, the newly forming Division of White-Collar and Corporate Crime was electing its first set of officers. To be in the position of getting the division to support the journal, I ran for and was elected as one of the three executive counselors. During the first business meeting of the division, attended by some one hundred persons in November 2017, I raised the issue about the conspicuous absence of a journal devoted exclusively to white collar and corporate crime. I submitted that the division should be about the business of establishing such a journal. The vast majority of persons in attendance favored the idea
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of creating the long overdue journal. However, a few sen ior white collar criminologists present, notably Sally Simpson and Henry Pontell, w ere dissenters. They opined that having such a journal in the field was probably premature and thought a single special issue in a publication like the annals of political and social science might be more appropriate for now. Following the business meeting, the executive board met and unanimously voted in f avor of pursuing a new journal that would become, if it materialized, an official publication of ASC’s Division of White- Collar and Corporate Crime, and the task of developing and submitting a proposal was assigned to me. The division board also agreed that we wanted the editorial board to be globally representative and inclusive of the multiple disciplines that examine white collar and corporate crime. Kristy Holtfreter, chair; Carole Gibbs, vice chair; and the two other executive counselors, David Friedrichs and Melissa Rorie, provided me with names to add to my own list to invite to become initial board members. While I was putting the board together, I invited Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi to become the European cofounding editor of the JWCCC. The global representation of the first board of editors may be viewed at 7.6 in the appendix. A few weeks after the 2017 meetings, I submitted a proposal that included the aims and scope of the journal; appropriate sample articles; editorial background material on Anne and myself; the proposed composition of the editorial board; and an organ izational plan for operating the journal, reviewing manuscripts, and so on, as well as the format and schedule for this online and print journal. In my proposal to Sage I argued that t here was no journal in the behavioral and social sciences, or in law, economics, business, and policy studies, that was dedicated primarily to the investigation of the wide-ranging areas of white collar and corporate crime. I also provided supportive comments excerpted from e-mail I had received from Mary Dodge, Robert Tillman, John Hagan, Steve Bittle, Isabel Schoultz, Jay Kennedy, and Tina Søreide. Fin ally, with the assistance of Lisa Klopfer, an EMU professor of library science with a PhD in anthropology, I provided two t ables: one on the trend in the number of journal articles on white collar and corporate crime that had been cited from 2006 through 2016, and the other on the breakdown and distribution of t hese 2,738 articles. Out of the fifty journals identified by the search with eight or more articles on white collar and corporate crime, it was notable that the two official publications of the American Society of Criminology barely registered; Criminology did not make the list at all, and Criminology and Public Policy tied with three other journals with a mere eight articles in ten years. However, Critical Criminology, the official publication of ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice, did somewhat better, tying for nineteenth place with 15 articles. Crime, Law, and Social Change, originally
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named Contemporary Crises and founded by William Chambliss back in the late 1970s, finished first with 97 articles. In second place was the Journal of Money Laundering Control with 71 articles, followed by the Criminology Journal of Baikal National University of Economics and Law with 51 and the British Journal of Criminology with 46. Our first unofficial board meeting for the journal occurred at the ASC meetings in Atlanta in 2018. A fter the details of the journal had been worked out and a contract signed with Sage in spring 2019, we launched the first issue of volume one of a biannual publication in January 2020. By the time that I had returned to the United States in the summer of 2017, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller was deep into the Russian investigation and probing into w hether or not President Trump had obstructed justice. In April 2019 the newly installed attorney general, William Barr, would receive Mueller’s unredacted report. Once released, the unambiguous conclusion reached by any reasonable person who has read the redacted 448-page version is that the president’s conduct warranted prosecution for obstruction of justice. T hose reaching this conclusion included nearly one thousand former U.S. prosecutors who signed an online letter in May 2019 stating that Donald Trump’s actions and intentions clearly warranted prosecution for obstruction of justice. However, a very different narrative, one aping President Trump’s refrain of “no collusion, no collusion,” was spun by Attorney General Barr in a shameful four-page letter, preempting the actual summary of the Mueller report with a nonsummary, as well as in the attorney general’s second very misleading public statement two weeks later and just one hour before the report was digitally released to both the U.S. Congress and the public for mass consumption. It made no difference whether or not Barr had not actually read the report b ecause he had already reached his ideological conclusions about the impossibility of the obstruction of justice by a sitting president and about an all-powerful executive branch in which the president is not an “errand boy” for Congress. Barr made his positions abundantly clear only three months before the Republican Senate confirmed his second appointment to the position of AG when he was auditioning to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a Roy Cohn–t ype figure working as the president’s defense attorney and masquerading as an independent AG. Before his appointment, as a “former official,” he had written an unsolicited nineteen- page memo addressed to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ripping apart the Mueller investigation. Barr was anything but neutral on t hese m atters. I am also sure that Barr was well briefed by his legal minions on the merits and contents of the evidence, including Mueller’s legal articulation of the substantive and procedural intricacies at the heart of these two investigations. This was precisely why, when facing a threat of Congressional contempt,
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the AG refused to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives. Barr knew perfectly well that he could never defend any of the absurd public statements he had made and misleading conclusions he had reached about the Mueller report—not to mention his own collusion with President Trump and o thers, as brought out by Kamala Harris’s questioning of Barr during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. More generally, I am also referring to the blatant lies and propagandistic falsehoods told by Barr about the working procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court and alleged FBI spying on Trump, rather than the court being used legitimately to investigate whether there had been political collusion between the Russians and the presidential campaign. Lastly, while Mueller and company did not necessarily find a prima facie case of criminal conspiracy between Russian operatives and Trump campaign officials, the evidence did reveal some 255 contacts between them. Similarly, during several of the AG’s mediated discussions about the Mueller report and its alleged conclusions, including an interview on Fox News, this social reality did not preclude the deceitful AG from deliberately and knowingly conflating the differences between criminal conspiracy and po l iti cal collusion. Meanwhile, it was leaked around this time that Barr had appointed attorney John Durham of Connecticut to investigate the origins of the Russian investigation and to see w hether or not the FBI was spying on President Trump even though the Inspector General’s office as a m atter of protocol was already reviewing the proprieties of the surveillance mechanisms without any concerns about the “deep state” spying on the president. On October 21, 2019, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) administrative review of the origins of the Russia probe was bumped up to a criminal investigation. At the time, Attorney General Barr was u nder strong criticism for already weaponing the DOJ on behalf of Trump, facilitating its use by the president against his political enemies. Barr had also lost his initial creditability as an “independent” AG because of his roles in both suppressing and misrepresenting the findings of the Mueller report, and twisting the legal and political narratives on obstructions of justice. Subsequently, Barr’s personal engagement in literally chasing and trying to affirm globally bogus and discredited conspiracy theories involving a “deep state” as part of an effort to exonerate the Russians from having interfered with the U.S. presidential elections in 2016 on behalf of Trump and against his political opponent Hillary Clinton. In July there was perhaps Barr’s gravest nonaction to date. I am referring to the AG’s taking no action in response to a CIA officer’s whistleblowing complaint involving national security and President Trump’s withholding $390M in military aid to the Ukrainians for their ongoing war with Russia over Crimea, in return for help from the newly elected Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents
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for the 2020 presidential election. Specifically, Trump was demanding that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky publicly announce on CNN tele vision that he was opening up investigations into the corruption of Trump’s front-r unning Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter, over their unrelated political and financial involvements in the Ukraine. Two months later, after the whistle blower had approached the House of Representatives with his complaint and it became publicly known in late September, the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, taking testimonies and depositions of witnesses and so forth behind closed doors in early October. Fin ally, on October 31, 2019, the House voted 232 to 196 to sanction the procedural rules, enabling the public impeachment inquiry of President Trump to begin by the m iddle of November. If t hings went according to the Democ ratic plan, the House of Representatives should have impeached the president before it recessed for holidays, with the trial to remove President Trump scheduled for early 2020. Wor king on White Collar and Corporate C ri m e Before the 2008 financial crisis, I had never conducted any research on white collar or corporate crime, although I had written about these topical areas in my four textbooks. Shortly a fter the Wall Street implosion, I wrote a comparative paper for the 2010 annual meeting of the ACJS. That paper evolved into chapter 2 of Theft of a Nation, “ Bernie Madoff ’s Ponzi Scheme and Wall Street’s Financial Meltdown: A Primer on Investment Fraud and Victimization.” When I began writing the ACJS paper I had no intention of writing a book about white collar or corporate crime, let alone one about the machinations of financial looting, control fraud, and regulation. However, by the end of 2010, I found that I had read or consulted some fifty books on the Wall Street implosion. Economists, journalists, whistle - blowers, former investment bankers, and other authors w ere drawing me into the world of high-stakes financial crimes. As I was reading these fascinating histories and excellent autopsies of the Wall Street financial crisis, I began thinking about the missing criminological accounts that were not being published. Once I finished the ACJS paper I decided that I would write one of those missing accounts. Helping me to find my financial bearings for this endeavor w ere four particu lar books: The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System (2009) by Charles Gasparino; How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (2009) by John Cassidy; 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (2010) by Simon Johnson and James Kwak; and Econned: How Unenlightened
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Self-Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism (2010) by Yves Smith. As it turned out, Theft of a Nation was the only book-length treatment of the financial crisis written by a criminologist. T here was also a comprehensive reader, How They Got Away with It: White Collar Criminals and the Financial Meltdown (2012), edited by criminologists Susan Will, Stephen Handelman, and David Brotherton. 3 One wonders where the other criminologists w ere when the f inancial crimes of the Wall Street banking cartels were blowing up the economy and victimizing millions of people worldwide. Looking back on Theft of a Nation, having subsequently edited The Routledge Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful and written Unchecked Corporate Power, I now regard the financial abuses, moral h azards, high-r isk speculation, banking on the Federal Reserve, and the failure of the capitalist state to criminally sanction any of the Wall Street securities frauds or orchestrated looting as prima facie evidence of state-routinized crime and crime control. From a globally sustainable perspective, Unchecked Corporate Power also investigated how legalized authorities and political institutions charged with the democratic duties of protecting citizens from traditional lawbreaking and injurious activities, especially from t hose with excessive or oligopolistic power, have increasingly become coddlers and enablers of, and colluders with, the very enterprises these authorities and institutions are obliged to monitor, police, and regulate. Fin ally, t hese state actors rationalize, suppress, and normalize the habitually repetitive multinational corporate harms and injuries into anything other than the routinized crimes that they are. The overwhelming findings from these three related projects is that with our collective consent, if not necessarily our political backing, and without our social and mass resist ance, nothing succeeds with such regularity as the active failures of national states to obstruct the crimes of the most powerful people on earth. This is true w hether we are discussing the contradictions of the state to allow unjustifiable police killings of citizens to go unpunished, to sanction outsourced political torture of enemy combatants, or to bail out the fraudulent transactions of high-stakes traders on Wall Street. What these works have also documented is that governmental controls over capital movements worldwide have been steadily less effective than in the recent past, resulting in the systemic inability of states globally to thwart the crimes of the powerf ul. How does this inefficacy in addressing the crimes of the powerf ul work? In brief, with the rise of global financial markets, the power of states has typically declined with respect to productive capital being forced into globally competitive processes in order to attract or retain capital investment. Conversely, multinational forms of capital accumulation and reproduction
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have increased their power over state actors. As a consequence, behemoth corporate entities have been able to dictate to the state the terms by which investments take place. Corporate entities have also been the ones deciding what is criminal and what is not, as well as how the law should be enforced. More broadly, all around the world for the past forty years, governments have had to embrace neoliberal policies of deregulation, lower taxation, and declining expenditures for social, sustainable, and infrastructural development. To precede my final remarks about the state of law, power, and justice in the United States as a way of closing out and coming full circle in these pedagogical Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, what follows is my editorial suturing of excerpted words from seven criminologists who have written about Theft of a Nation, Unchecked Corporate Power, or both. Several months a fter Theft of a Nation received the Outstanding Publication Award from the White Collar Crime Research Consortium and the National Center for White Collar Crime for 2012, a symposium of five six-thousand-word essays and an introductory essay was published in a 2013 special issue of the Western Criminology Review devoted to white collar crime (see 7.7 in the appendix), edited by Stuart Henry and Danielle McGurrin. Let me begin this reproduction of selected excerpts by once again thanking these essayists, as I did at the beginning of my commentary and reflection for the special issue: “Each of these commentators provides thoughtful responses and reflections on the crimes and victims of the powerful: Currie on the implications and wider social consequences for a developed democratic society run by an elite group of financial criminals; Dodge on the complexities of legal status, financial damages, and victimization; Leighton on the diminishing consciousness of corporate crime, the increasing abuses of corporate power, the expansion of economic inequality, and the contraction of class inquiry; Lynch on the structural connections between financial exploitation and other related forms of corporate, ecological, and environmental crime; and Tillman on the criticality of societal dependence on the growth of financial capital as the motive behind Wall Street looting and federal regulatory colluding.”4 Let me also thank these authors for keen insights that I incorporated into fine-t uning my analyses of multinational corporate crime in Unchecked Corporate Power. Fin ally, thanks again to Stuart and to McGurrin for organizing this symposium at the suggestion of David Friedrichs. In her introduction to the symposium, McGurrin wrote, “As of this writing, a small handful of white collar criminologists in the U.S. have studied the current financial crisis. . . . Only critical criminologist and integrative theorist Gregg Barak, has taken on, in book form, the challenging task of researching the financial crimes of large investment banks,
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mega-bankers and mortgage lenders, as well as the governmental policy makers, regulators, and regulations whose interrelated collusion gave rise to the conditions that made the magnitude of this global financial crisis a catastrophe.” McGurrin continued, “In accomplishing this demanding investigative research task, Barak has mined the depths of social history, political economy, and critical legal studies to provide essential interdisciplinary insight informing the study of high finance crimes.”5 Currie posed several questions throughout his essay and answered them as he proceeded: “Let’s ask ourselves for a moment what it means to live in a society whose financial institutions are essentially run by criminals? What are the consequences for all of the things that we value—social solidarity, productivity, material well-being, civic values—of living in a society where the commanding heights of the economy are held by p eople who, pretty much by definition, are out for their own interest and care not at all for the human consequences of their actions?” Toward the end of his essay, Currie wrote: “Again, the picture that Barak paints of the extent of private sector financial looting and the hapless and timid—or actively collusive—response of the regulatory agencies is extraordinarily grim. And it raises the issue of agency—t hat is, agency for social change—in a particularly thorny way.” In other words, “Who is going to make the changes that all serious observers believe need to be made? Who has the capacity to make the private financial sector even remotely honest—or even minimally compliant?” Currie acknowledged that I significantly brought up “the radical possibility of the public taking over the commanding heights of finance . . . usefully point[ing] to a number of examples, both in the United States and abroad, to suggest that nationalization, or the development of strong public banking institutions at the state level, is a potentially fruitful way to go.” In fact, Currie stated, “I think it may well be the only way to go.” He also wanted to see financial scholars “turn their attention toward helping us to understand the outlines of a credible public alternative to the current financial apparatus, and helping us create a roadmap of how to get there through strategic pol itical mobilization.”6 In my next book, Unchecked Corporate Power, I tried to address all of the questions and suggestions Currie raised. In setting up her essay, Dodge informed the reader that “while Barak addresses the complexity of financial wrongdoing and regulation, or lack thereof, in an insightful manner, I chose to focus this commentary on his analysis of victimization.” She underscored, “Barak accurately notes the difficulties of separating individualized and organ izational victimization, particularly related to the Wall Street financial meltdown.” Dodge continued, “Barak and other prominent scholars, to their credit, are attempting to improve our understanding of victimization by focusing on the target of the harm beyond the macro-level social and vague damage estimates.” She
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pointed out that I identified “the victims of white-collar crime as the entire spectrum of the population” and how the “characteristics of the victims of financial crime move beyond traditional views of criminal behavior and victimization.” For example, “Barak initially focuses attention on race and poverty, variables seldom recognized in most financial cases.” Dodge concluded her essay: “Overall, Barak’s Theft of a Nation offers a comprehensive perspective on victimology and white-collar crime, which is portrayed throughout the book. W hether or not it was his intent, he successfully reminds us of the harm and distrust that has become deeply rooted in our social real ity.” 7 Tillman set off his essay by saying that Barak has attempted “to solve a mystery that has puzzled many observers of the financial crisis that began in 2008: Why have so few of t hose responsible for the fiscal crisis—executives and officers at investment banks and mortgage lenders, in particular—been charged with crimes? The explanation Barak offers centers on the existence of a ‘banking cartel’ that consists of the major Wall Street investment banks which ‘along with its political allies pretty much control what does or does not constitute securities violations in the world of fraudulently based market transactions.’ ” He continued: “This cartel is able to maintain its dominant position b ecause of a collusive relationship with key political actors who both set the regulations and standards that govern banks’ operations and who determine when and to whom criminal sanctions w ill be applied.” Tillman’s second paragraph then situated my thesis and provides a succinct overview of my analysis: The ideas that t here are close ties and interests that bind Wall Street and Washington is not new, but Barak’s analysis locates this connection within the broader framework of critical criminology and Marxist informed theories of ‘crimes of capit alist control.’ For Barak, the failure to hold those responsible for the crisis accountable is symptomatic of a larger contradiction in advanced capit ali st societ ies in which the ‘dominant interests and beh aviors of the political economy are both illegal and controlling.’ This contradiction becomes apparent when legal institutions are confronted with evidence of widespread corruption and fraud at the highest levels of the financial system and find themselves ‘in the contradictory position of both trying to chastise and to excuse t hose violations.’ For regulators and prosecutors, one way out of this contradictory position is to avoid the imposition of criminal penalties on malefactors (both individuals and organizations) and instead rely on civil sanctions as part of a conciliatory strategy that seeks to ‘control the damage done to the faith of Wall Street investors in the financial system.’ ”8
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The rest of his essay built on my analysis and “explores further some f actors that lie b ehind the government’s response.” Tillman’s “goal is not to refute [my] argument but to suggest an additional dimension to the factors that have s haped this response.” Tillman wrote in his concluding paragraph: The primary strength of Barak’s work is that he places the issues of the comparative leniency shown to white-collar offenders within a larger theoretical framework that describes the relationship between law, capital, and financial crime. This framework forces us to step back and examine the broader forces that are shaping our economy and our society. In this essay, I have attempted to follow Barak’s lead to consider how the increasing predominance of the financial serv ices industry in our economy has influenced our legal response to financial crime. I would hope that o thers would also take a cue from Barak’s analysis to think about how a changing institutional environment has facilitated white-collar crime.9 Paraphrasing or quoting Leighton on my writing is intere sting, since Paul and I have been writing together for more than twenty years. We are somewhat like an old couple who can finish each other’s sentences and re- edit them as well, so at times I am not sure w hether Paul wrote something or I did. In any case, I quote here from the second and third paragraphs of his essay. In establishing his overview, Paul situated it within the context of both Nils Christie’s A Suitable Amount of Crime (2004) and Jeff Reiman and Paul Leighton’s then forthcoming tenth edition of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (2013), a book that Reiman first solo authored back in 1979:10 Theft of a Nation raises basic questions that need to be addressed about power, money, corporate crime and the perform ance of a democratic government. While capturing considerable nuance it exposes how the major financial institutions are ongoing criminal enterprises; the government acts as a corrupted protection racket that betrays a public interest shared by, if not the poorest 99% then certainly the poorest 90%. The implication is not just that The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, but also that the governments in the U.S. and other developed nations are ‘weak, quasi-states’ that have been ‘reduced to the (useful) role of legal police precincts, securing a modicum of order required for the conduct of business, but need not be feared as effective brakes on the global companies’ freedom.’ Meanwhile, the ‘ janitors of the suitably weakened states’ need to prove their worth, so fighting street crime ‘becomes indispensable in creating legitimacy’ (Christie 2004: 37).
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From the next paragraph: This paper explores some implications from Theft of a Nation that deal with economic inequality and the criminological imagination. Although these issues are important, they are a narrow slice of the rich and profound concerns raised by Barak’s book because it does such an admirable job with its core topic. He has done a g reat deal of onerous work digesting a non-criminological literature that is vast, complex, and ideologically charged, and presenting it in a coherent criminological framework that skewers the rhetoric hiding the injustices of this crisis.11 I w ill cut to Michael J. Lynch’s conclusion about Theft of a Nation: “Barak’s book is not only an exceptional contribution to scholarship on white collar crime . . . it provides criminologists with a guide to exploring other forms of white collar, corporate and green crimes as well. It is an excellent example of the kind of work criminologists o ught to produce more often.”12 Lynch’s remarks foreshadow his review of Unchecked Corporate Power, which received the Outstanding Book Award from the ASC’s Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime in 2017. Here I share excepts from Lynch’s review published in Critical Criminology (May 2017) and from Michael L. Benson’s review published in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books (October 2018).13 The review by fellow traveler Lynch was quite flattering. The review by mainstream white collar criminologist Benson was also favorable but not as appreciative as it might have been had this reviewer discarded his positivistic blinders. Lynch: “For the past several years, Gregg Barak has built a body of research addressing corporate/financial/white collar crimes from the perspective of pol itical economic theory.” Benson: “It is fitting” that Unchecked Corporate Power “should appear at the same time there is renewed interest in the life and work of the influential Austrian economic and political theorist, Karl Polanyi. They both warn about the problem of unrestrained power, which seems to be an unavoidable collateral consequence of the industrial revolution and the nature of capitalism. In his masterwork The G reat Transformation (1944), Polanyi demonstrated the social evils that prevail when markets become ‘dis-embedded’ from their societ ies. Unrestrained market forces inevitably overwhelm society u nless some form of countervailing force pushes back. For Polanyi, the countervailing force was to come from highly mobilized and sophisticated worker movements. He might have been correct, but unfortunately labor movements as a countervailing force and potential savior of free, equitable,
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and egalitarian democratic states have been crushed by multinational corporations, their nationally based siblings, and all too many compliant politicians. This institutional trifecta is the focus of Barak’s book.” Lynch: “As Barak notes, multinational corporate power has expanded significantly in recent decades, and as its coffers have swelled, so too has its ability to affect international and national political institutions and legal regulations (criminal, administrative and civil). Barak provides numerous examples of how this happens, and the different forms in which t hese beh av iors appear, such as tax fraud/evasion; super-exploitation and enslavement of workers, including child-labor; overlaps between corporate power and drug control policy; and the creation of legal rules that allow corporations to sue governments when they establish conditions that can be interpreted as impairing business expansion or impeding ‘business as usual’ (p. 10)). These kinds of [state routinized crimes (SRC)] which often are clearly illegal, have essentially been made legal by the state’s failure to address these crimes.” Benson: “The state routinization of corporate crime refers to the ‘institutionalization of societal reactions that tolerate or allow the perpetrators of such offenses to escape criminalization.’ This routinization occurs even though t here are rules and laws in place that would permit the imposition of culpability on corporations and their leaders. Unfortunately, however, t hese rules and laws are, in Barak’s view rarely applied. Why does this happen? It’s complicated and involves the part icu l ar way the law has evolved over the past century coupled with the ascendancy of neoliberal economic perspectives, but the real reason multinationals are able to avoid the criminalization of their be h av ior is because they have seized control of the levers of government.” Lynch on Chapter 2: “. . . d rawing on various theories of the capitalist state, Barak explains how part of the capit alist state’s role is to facilitate and protect capitalism. In d oing so, the state establishes conditions that favor capitalist (and hence corporations)—a process that undermines democracy, fails to promote broader forms of social justice for the many over the interests of the few (capit ali sts), and contributes to economic, social, and pol itical inequality. Barak provides examples of how this process creates specific kinds of SRC, affects how corporate crime is regulated (or really goes unregulated), and contributes to state corruption and lack of accountability, as well as how this process bleeds into other state functions, such as police use/misuse of force, militarization, and counter-terrorism strategies.”
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Lynch on Chapter 5: “Barak points to the fact that corporate crimes include acts that violate ‘the commons,’ or those resources that are held in common by the people (e.g., air, land, water resources). As Barak notes, the structure of law in a capit alist society allows corporations to have enhanced access to those resources, facilitates the pollution of those resources, and provides advantages to corporations while adversely impacting the public owners of t hose resources. The abuse of t hose resources, related to the concept of green crime and the production of ecological disorg an ization by corporations, is an extensive issue, and Barak endeavors to illustrate how the political economic context of capitalism generates these problems in a chapter filled with numerous examples, some of which may be surprising to most criminologists because of the scope of issues to which Barak is able to apply this argument (e.g., refugees and immigration policy, charter schools and public education).” Benson in the m iddle of his review: “Like Polanyi’s analysis of the evils that accompany dis-embedded markets, Barak might be right about the social and financial harms of unchecked corporate power. He certainly has built a thought-provoking case that such unrestrained power is a threat to human society and to the planet. Of course, to be fair, it must be acknowledged that corporations are Janus faced. On the one hand, Barak is right: they have wreaked financial and ecological havoc, but on the other hand, they have also produced stupefying material wealth along with astonishing technological innovations. W hether the scales here are equally balanced or tipping in one direction rather than the other is not clear to this reviewer. Assuming, however, that they are tipping in the direction that Barak fears, then his call for a radical restructuring of corporate law, including the dissolution of corporate personhood and state takeover of multinationals, is a proposal worth considering.” Gregg Barak in real time, as I complete this book: Perhaps with the exception of the utilitarian reader, do o thers agree with Benson’s amoral cost-benefit analysis that “to be fair” we should be weighing the bad against the good, or balancing financial and ecological havoc against material wealth and technological innovations? In the context of the epistemological meanings of theory and those commentators on Theft of a Nation, please consider the passage from Benson sandwiched in between the two remaining excerpts from Lynch. Next, think about the differences in or the implications of what political- economic theory means to Lynch, McGurrin, Currie, Dodge, Tillman, and Leighton, and juxtapose that with evidently what traditional, positivist-only theory means to Benson and other like- minded criminologists who ignore political-economic forces—not that these
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types of theoretical explanations of crime have to be mutually exclusive, as I have already revealed in this book. Fin ally, please reflect on what Tillman wrote near the end of his essay, “Too Big to Fail”: “Those of us who do research in the area of white-collar crime frequently complain about the relatively low visibility of our work in academic and policy discussions.” Tillman further lamented that the situation is “all the more galling in recent years” b ecause of the “series of corporate crimes waves” and other “widespread white- collar criminality.”14 Tillman was also hopeful that Theft of a Nation would help change this dire situation; unfortunately, I see no evidence to that end, nor do I believe that Unchecked Corporate Power w ill turn things around e ither. For white collar crime to have higher visibility in academic or policy discussions, as Tillman advocates, t here w ill first have to be a revolution away from the preoccupations of conventional criminology. Lynch accurately bemoans and diagnoses the social problem confronting our criminological discipline. Lynch: “The most unfortunate aspect” of Unchecked Corporate Power “is that it w ill not be appreciated by the vast majority of criminologists. Historically, as a discipline, criminology can be defined as the science of discovering why the poor commit crimes and how to control the beh avior of the poor—a ‘science of oppression,’ if one w ill. As a consequence, much criminological research focuses its attention on the crimes of the powerless. But, as Barak illustrates—a nd extending the observations of many radical criminologists including his mentor, Tony Platt, as well as others such as William Chambliss, Richard Quinney, Herman and Julia Schwendinger, and Jeffrey Reiman–-t he real crime problem in society are the crimes of the powerf ul. This is a lesson that criminologists generally have failed to learn, and u ntil they do, they w ill fall short of understanding the problem of crime in society.” Gregg Barak: Regrettably, criminologists, mainstream or critical, who become restricted by their ideological assumptions about “science” are often unable to recognize explanations or policies derived from theories when these criminologists are staring these explanations and policies directly in the face. While Michael Benson does indeed recognize the obvious pol itical and economic connections in the work of Polanyi and myself, Benson fails to appreciate the theory of pol itical economy underpinning our overlapping work. To state as he does in the next excerpt that I am “not interested in trying to find the ‘causative patterns’ that underlie variation in corporate criminality” or that I have not conducted a theoretical investigation, even if he qualifies that statement by saying, “in the traditional sense,” simply flies in the face of the very raison d’être of my work. Unfortunately, Benson also
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fails to understand that at the heart of the criminological problem is traditional theory, as Jock Young clearly articulated in The Criminological Imagination (2012), Benson t oward the end of his review asks: “So, what is to be done? To his credit, Barak does not go in for half-measures, and unlike most criminologists who study white-collar crime, he is not interested in trying to find the ‘causative patterns that underlie variation in corporate criminality. . . . In other words, Unchecked Corporate Power is not a theoretical investigation in the traditional sense. Rather it is meant to be a call to action and a consciousness raising experience that is explicitly linked to a particu lar view of Marxist-oriented social theory.” Gregg Barak: The first half of Benson’s last sentence quoted here is partly correct. As a newsmaking criminologist, most everyt hing that I write about and try to circulate has called for some kind of action in the strugg le for social justice. And, yes, following the lead of Herman Schwendinger, my criminological work has always been about raising the consciousness of anyone, especially any other criminologists, who might r eally listen to what I am trying to explain. As for linking this consciousness to a “particu lar view of Marxist-oriented social theory,” even if Benson could explain what he means by that turn of phrase, he would still be incorrect. To be as precise as I can: I am a Marxist criminologist and highly invested in theories of crime and criminality. I am also a social critic and deeply invested in societal transformation, structural change, and nonviolent revolution. Last but not least, the structurally grounded theory of agency that I espouse is that of political economy. I became a political economist back in the early 1970s while conducting historical research for my doctoral dissertation at Berkeley. Since then I have not found a better explanation of most crime and its control or a reason to deviate from the theories of political economy. To be very specific, my analyses of multinational corporate crimes and their lack of control are not linked to some kind of Marxist-oriented social theory. Like most of my works at the margins of law, power, and justice, these analyses continue to revolve around t hose political economies of capitalism grounded in the historical and dialectical relations of materialism. Lynch: “In sum, what Barak has accomplished in a rather concise form is an exploration of a wide range of problems linked to a long and rich history of radical criminological thought derived from the even older intellectual history of political economic analysis. Along the way, he not only introduces a relevant pol itical economic theory of multinational corporate crime, but also offers numerous examples and applies his ideas to crime and policy
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issues criminologists have often avoided. R eally, this is a rather amazing accomplishment within the scope of one book—a nd there is so much h ere that criminologists can examine in more extensive detail and draw upon for further discussion and analysis. This is, in essence, just the beginning of where this type of research can go.” Gregg Barak: So a fter reading Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, if you happen to be looking for some kind of bottom line or a moral ending to this criminological memoir, h ere is one that might work: Unlike critical and radical criminologists—who have had to consume, as a rite of passage, whether we liked it or not, the origins, the development, the methods, and the theories of mainstream criminologies in order to become bona fide card-carrying criminologists—m ainstream or conventional criminologists have not been obliged to reciprocate when it comes to the origins, the development, the methods, and the theories of critical, radical, and postmodern criminologies. As a consequence, whereas critical and radical criminologists are prepared to deal with the canons of mainstream criminology in a serious and meaningful way, should that effort be of value, mainstream criminologists, with rare exceptions, have only an elementary understanding of critical or radical criminology. Pe dagogy, Pol itic al St rugg le, and Law, Powe r, and Justi c e In the fall 2019 semester I taught two classes: an undergraduate required course, Criminal Justice, and a graduate required seminar, Global Criminology. Like most of the courses that I teach these days, each had a strong global orientation. For the former course, I assigned two books: my coauthored Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America (2018) and Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (2019) by Emily Bazelon. In the case of the latter course, I assigned my edited volume The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful (2015) and my Unchecked Corporate Crime: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It (2017). Because of the prohibitive cost of the handbook, I provided my nine graduate students with f ree “bootlegged” digital copies. The related backdrops for both of these courses w ere various political strugg les involving law, power, and justice. For example, the investigations involving candidate Trump and President Trump became critical for the undergraduate course. With respect to the graduate seminar, there were such issues as climate change, migration control, and the predominantly peaceful street protests worldwide over local economies, corruption, and/or political freedoms. Since September 1, 2019, for example, in addition to the
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worldwide demonstrations in response to the climate crisis and on behalf of the ecosystems everywhere, large-scale global protests over economic and political freedom had occurred in Haiti, Ecu ador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile in the Global South; in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq in the M iddle East; in Catalonia (Spain) and the Netherlands; in Russia; as well as in Hong Kong and Indonesia. Most of these protests and demonstrations have persisted for weeks if not longer. What about here at home? Spurred on by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, opposition and grassroots resistance to the new administration’s plans for the United States immediately kicked in. Millions of citizens marched on the day a fter the inauguration; other protestors gathered at airports throughout the country declaring that America must remain open to immigrants. At the same time, demonstrators circled the White House demanding action on climate change. As Dana R. Fisher reveals in American Resistance: From the W omen’s March to the Blue Wave (2019), many of these marchers became activists and some became candidates, resulting in the Blue Wave and a record-breaking 103 w omen elected to the U.S. House of 15 Representatives. Although her samples of protestors and demonstrators may not be generalizable beyond the Washington, D.C., area, the findings are import ant and worth considering. Fisher examined seven of the largest protests in D.C. associated with opposition to President Trump: the 2017 Women’s March, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, the March for Racial Justice, the 2018 Women’s March, the March for Our Lives, and Families Belong Together. Among her findings: at least 54 percent of these participants were w omen, more than 70 percent had a bachelor’s degree, more than 62 percent were white, and the average adult age was between 38 and 49. A wide range of issues motivated t hese marchers: w omen’s rights, environmental protection, racial justice, immigration, and police brutality.16 In the case of the Criminal Justice course, half of students’ graded evaluation was based on weekly readings and discussions, and the other half was based on a take-home examination that I distributed on October 17, 2019. This exam consisted of three questions. The first was worth 50 percent and prompted students to write an essay of 2000–2500 words on one of the following topics: ■ The impeachment case of president Donald J. Trump, addressing the “public facts” in relation to high crimes and misdemeanors, U.S. constitutional issues of the “separation of powers,” and other issues of “law, power, and justice.” ■ The cases against president Donald J. Trump for obstruction of justice, based on the Mueller report (2019) and the impeachment inquiry
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into the Ukrainian scandal (and the U.S. House’s articles of impeachment, assuming they materialize by December 10). ■ The case of the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five in relation to prosecutorial discretion and the administration of criminal justice. The second and third questions w ere worth 25 percent each and consisted of the students’ writing comparative essays of 1000–1200 words on: ■ Any one chapter from the introduction through chapter 10 in Class, Race, Gender, and Crime and any one chapter from the introduction through chapter 14 in Charged. ■ The conclusion, “Crime, Justice, and Policy,” from Barak, Leighton, and Cotton, and the appendix, “Twenty-One Principles for Twenty- First C entury Prosecutors,” from Emily Bazelon.
Appendix
5.1 Crimes by the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality (1991) Part I: Prologue Toward a Criminology of State Criminality Gregg Barak Part II: Classical Forms of State Crime 1. Passion and Policy: Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in Australia, 1980–1989 Kayleen M. Hazlehurst
2. Subcultures as Crime: The Theft of Legitimacy of Dissent in the United States Susan L. Caulfield Part III: On the Dialectical Nature of State Crimes 3. The War on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Christina Jacqueline Johns and Jose Maria Borrero
4. Multi-Tiered Terrorism in Peru R. S. Ratner 5. Piracy, Air Piracy, and Recurrent U.S. and Israeli Civilian Aircraft Interceptions Daniel E. Georges-Abeyie 6. The Abandoned Ones: A History of the Oakdale and Atlanta Prison Riots Mark S. Hamm Part IV: Crimes of State Omission 7. Old Wine, New Bottles, and Fancy Labels: The Rediscovery of Organ izational Culture in the Control of Intelligence A. Stuart Farson
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8. When the State Fails: A Critical Assessment of Contract Policing in the United States John Wildeman 9. Contradiction, Conflicts, and Dilemmas in Canada’s Sexual Assault Law Ronald Hinch 10. The Informal Economy: A Crime of Omission by the State Stuart Henry Part V: Epilogue Resisting State Criminality and the Strugg le for Justice Gregg Barak
5.2 Varieties of Criminology: Readings from a Dynamic Discipline (1994) Part I: Mainstream Criminology 1. Biological and Neuropsychiatric Approaches to Criminal Beh avior C. Ray Jeffery
2. Crime and Psychology of Mind: A Neo-Cognitive View of Delinquency Thomas M. Kelley 3. Human Ecology and Social Disorg an iz at ion Revisit Delinquency in L ittle Rock Jeffery T. Walker 4. Strain, Relative Deprivation, and M iddle Class Delinquency Velmer S. Burton, Jr. and R. Gregory Dunaway 5. Social Control, F amily Structure, and Delinquency Joseph H. Rankin and L. Edward Wells 6. The Collective Reality of Crime: An Integrative Approach to the Causes and Consequences of the Criminal Event Frank Schmalleger 7. A Neofunctionalist Model of Crime and Crime Control Thomas O’Connor Part II: Critical Criminology 8. Confronting the Agenda of Authority: Critical Criminology, Anarchism, and Urban Graffiti Jeff Ferrell
Appendix
9. Young P eople, Culture, and the Construction of Crime: Doing Wrong versus Doing Crime Mike Presdee 10. Crime, Excitement, and Modernity Pat O’Malley and Stephen Mug ford 11. Gender and Justice: Feminist Contributions to Criminology Susan Caulfield and Nancy Wonders 12. Law, Ideology, and Subjectivity: A Semiotic Perspective Dragan Milovanovic 13. Crime, Criminology, and H uman Rights: T oward an Understanding of State Criminality Gregg Barak 5.3 Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology (1994) Part I: Introduction 1. Media, Society, and Criminology Gregg Barak Part II: Constructing Crime News 2. Crime News in the Old West Werner J. Einstadter
3. Communal Violence and the Media: Lynchings and Their News Coverage by The New York Times between 1882 and 1930 Ira M. Wasserman and Steven Stack 4. Crime in the News Media: A Refined Understanding of How Crime Becomes News Steven Chermak 5. Predator Criminals as Media Icons Ray Surette 6. University Professor or Sadistic Killer? A Content Analysis of the Newspaper Coverage of a Murder Case Harry L. Marsh 7. Murder and Mayhem in USA Today: A Quantitative Analysis of the National Reporting of States’ News Robert A. Jerin and Charles B. Fields 8. Patrolling the Facts: Media, Cops, and Crime Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky
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Part III: Reconstructing Crime News 9. Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals, and Crime Gregg Barak
10. Becoming a Media Criminologist: Is “Newsmaking Criminology” Possible? Cecil E. Greek 11. Newsmaking Criminology as Replacement Discourse Stuart Henry 5.4 Representing O. J.: Murder, Criminal Justice, and Mass Culture (1996) Part I: Science, Subjectivity, and Criminal Justice 1. People v. Simpson: Some (Ir)Relevant Variables, Research, and the Future Gilbert Geis
2. Evidence, Probabilities, and L egal Standards for the Determination of Guilt: Beyond the O. J. Trial Brian Forst 3. Juror Reciprocal Antagonisms and the Intermittent Explosive Disorder: A Plausible Clinical Diagnosis of the O. J. Case Laurence Armand French 4. The Social Science Significance of the O. J. Simpson Case Steven E. Barkan Part II: Crime, Consumption, and Mass Media 5. Slash and Frame Jeff Ferrell
6. The Real Menace to Society Earl Ofari Hutchinson 7. O. J. and the Internet: The First Cybertrial Cecil Greek 8. O. J. Simpson and the Trial of the C entury? Uncovering Paradoxes in Media Coverage Lynn S. Chancer 9. Media, Discourse, and the O. J. Simpson Trial: An Ethnographic Portrait Gregg Barak
Appendix
10. Media Madness as Crime in the Making: On O. J. Simpson, Consumerism, and Hyperreality Bruce A. Arrigo Part III: Expressions and Perceptions: On Race, Class, Gender, and Justice 11. Ethnic Expressive Style and American Public Opinion: The O. J. Simpson Case E. L. Cerroni-L ong
12. The Influence of Racial Similarity on the O. J. Simpson Trial K. D. Mixon, Linda A. Foley, Kelly Orme 13. Reality Bites: Black Protectionism, White Denial and O. J. Katheryn Russell-B rown 14. The M atter of O. J. Simpson in Black and White and Green Risdon N. Slate Part IV: Contradictions and Debates: On Cameras in Court, Reasonable Doubt, Jury Nullification, and Fair T rials 15. Undercurrents of Judicial Policy: Demystifying the Third Branch of Government and the O. J. Simpson Case Steve Russell
16. A Not-So-R adical Proposal: Eliminate Private Criminal Defense Thomas J. Bernard 17. On Reactionary Reactions to Race and the O. J. Simpson Verdict James A. Chambers 18. The O. J. Simpson Trial, Jury Legitimacy, and the Continuing Debate James N. Gilbert 19. The American Justice System’s Obsession with Punishment: Whatever Happened to the Fair Trial? Stephen J. Perrello, Jr. 6.1 Integrating Criminologies (1998) Part I: Introduction 1. Criminology and Crime: An Integrative Perspective
2. Crimes and Harms: A Comparative Perspective 3. Punishment and Criminology: A Historical Perspective 4. Theory and Practice: On the Development of Criminological Inquiry
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Part II: Criminological Theory 5. Contributions from Biology: “Body and Temperament”
6. Contributions from Psychology: “Mind and Nature” 7. Contributions from Sociology: “Environment and Structure” 8. Contributions from Law and Economics: “Reason and Rationality” Part III: Criminological Practice 9. Integrating Criminological Theories: A Critique
10. Integrating Criminological Knowledges: A Post-Postmodern Synthesis 11. Integrating Cultural, Media, and Gender Studies: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Crime Production 12. Integrating Crime and Social Control: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Crime Reduction 6.2 Criminology: An Integrated Approach (2009) Part I: Introduction: A Unifying Analysis of Crime and Crime Control 1. Criminology and Criminal Justice: An Integrated Perspective
2. Official and Unofficial Crimes: A Domestic (U.S.) Perspective 3. Official and Unofficial Crimes: A Global Perspective 4. Crime Control, Risk Management, and Surveillance: Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement 5. Crime Control, Dangerousness, and the Penal-Industrial Complex: Punishment and Sentencing Part II: Strands of Criminological Thought: Explaining Criminal Behavior and Crime 6. On the Foundations of Criminological Inquiry: Contributions in Time and Space
7. Interest and Rationality: Contributions from Economics and Law 8. Nature and Nurture: Contributions from Biology 9. Mind and Character: Contributions from Psychology 10. Culture and Society: Contributions from Sociology Part III: Integrating Criminological Strands: Theory and Practice 11. Integrated Models in an Age of Globalization and Transdisciplinarity: An Eclectic Overview of Emerging Approaches
12. Crime, Globalization, and the Capit alist World Order: Implications for Criminology and Strategies for Social Justice
Appendix
6.3 Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America, fifth edition (2018) Barak, Leighton, and Cotton Introduction: Crime, Inequality, and Justice The Social Relations of Class, Race, Gender, and Crime Criminal Justice Theorizing Part I: Crime Control and Criminology 1. The Crime Control Enterprise and Its Workers Globalization and Immigration Militarization Privatization and Revenue Collection Cybercrime and Security Criminal Justice Workers Implications 2. Criminology and the Study of Class, Race, Gender, and Crime Classical, Positive, and Critical Criminologies Class and Criminology Race and Criminology Gender and Criminology Intersectionality and Criminology Implications Part II: Inequality and Privilege 3. Understanding Class and Economic Privilege Social Class and Stratification in Society Economic Distributions—Ideals and Reality Implications 4. Understanding Race and White Privilege The Social Construction of Ethnicity and Race Stereot ypes, Power, and Privilege Implications 5. Understanding Gender and Male Privilege Gender and Sex in Society Male Privilege Implications 6. Understanding Privilege and the Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender No “Master Status” Data and Modeling Black Lives M atter Implications
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Part III: Law and Criminal Justice 7. Victimology and Patterns of Victimization Victimization and Class Victimization and Race Victimization and Gender Victimization and Intersectionality Implications 8. Lawmaking and the Administration of Criminal Law Class, Crime, and the Law Race, Crime, and the Law Gender, Crime, and the Law Intersectionality, Crime, and the Law Implications 9. Law Enforcement and Criminal Prosecution Criminal Identification and Class Control Criminal Identification and Race Control Criminal Identification and Gender Control Intersectionality and the Identification of Criminals Implications 10. Punishment, Sentencing, and Imprisonment Class and the Punishment of Offenders Race and the Punishment of Offenders Gender and the Punishment of Offenders Intersections and the Punishment of Offenders Implications Conclusion: Crime, Justice, and Policy Media, Crime, and Justice The Enduring Strugg le for Justice: Equal, Restorative, and Social
Recommended Policies and Reforms for Alleviating Harm and Reducing Crime Lawmaking Investing in Harm Reduction Investing in Social Capital Law Enforcement Professionalizing the Police Reaffirming Due Process and Equal Protection De-E scalating the Wars on Crime and Terrorism Controlling Police Abuse of Power and Corruption Enriching Community Control of the Police Establishing a Corporate Fraud Division and Eliminating
Appendix
Nonprosecution Agreements Curbing Prosecutorial Discretion and Misconduct Adjudication Improving Representat ion and Technology for Indigent Defendants Reducing Criminal Justice Fees Corrections Abandoning Mandatory Sentences, Reducing Minimum Sentencing, and Abolishing Capital Punishment with the Exception of the Corporate Death Penalty Moratorium on Prison Construction and the Privatization of Prisons Intermediate Sanctions and Community-Based Alternatives Prisoner Reentry and H uman Serv ices Delivery 7.1 Crime and Justice Series Books for Rowman & Littlefield Effigy: Images of Capital Defendants Allison Cotton
The Prisoners’ World: Portraits of Convicts Caught in the Incarceration Binge William Tregea and Marjorie Larmour Perverts and Predators: The Making of Sexual Offender Laws Laura J. Zilney and Lisa Anne Zilney Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance Karen S. Glover State Criminality: The Crime of All Crimes Dawn L. Rothe Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons and Big Business Donna Selman and Paul Leighton Forensic Science in Court: Challenges in the Twenty-first C entury Donald E. Shelton Threat Perceptions: The Policing of Dangers from Eugenics to the War on Terrorism Saran Ghatak Gendered Justice: Intimate Partner Violence and the Criminal Justice System Venessa Garcia and Patrick McManimon Murder Stories: Ideological Narratives in Capital Punishment Paul Kaplan The Complexities of Police Corruption: Gender, Identity, and Misconduct Marilyn Corsianos
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7.2 Violence, Conflict, and World Order: Critical Conversations on State- Sanctioned Justice (2007) Part 1: Domestic Conversations 1. Homeland Security: Which Homeland and Whose Security? Joan Callahan and Mahin Ashki
2. Violence against Women as Normative Gary Potter 3. Restrictions on Women’s Reproduction in the United States Karen Miller 4. Rural Women, Violence, and Divorce Walter DeKeseredy 5. The World of Outlaw Bikers and Women Tom Barker Part 2: Global Conversations 6. Terrorism Post 9/11 Mark Hamm
7. The Blurring of War and Law Enforcement Peter Kraska 8. Crime and Crime Control in an Age of Globalization Gregg Barak 9. White-Collar Crime and Globalization David Friedrichs 10. Capital Punishment and Globalization Robert Bohm 11. Invasion, Empire, and Human Rights Ray Michalowski 7.3 Battleground: Criminal Justice; a Two-Volume Encyclopedia (2007) Law and Society Antiterrorism Laws Disenfranchisement Laws for Felonies Espionage Act of 1917 Exclusionary Rule Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Gang Injunction Laws Homeland Security Immigration and Employment Law Enforcement International Humanitarian Law Enforcement
Appendix
Patriot Act Search Warrants Second Amendment Sex Offender Laws Stalking Laws State Crime Control Supremacy of International Law to National Law Three Strikes Torture and E nemy Combatants Law Enforcement Community Police Driving While Black Lethal Force Militarization of the Police Miranda Warnings Police and Psychological Screening Police Brutality Police Corruption Police-M inority Relations Police Use of Force Prosecution, Courts, and Adjudication Adversarial Justice Alternative Responses to Crime Bail Cameras in the Courtroom Conspiracy and Substantial Assistance Eyewitness Identifications Indigent Defendant Represent at ion International Criminal Court Problem Solving Courts Prosecutorial Discretion Restorative Justice Sentencing and Judicial Discretion Trial Consultation Tribal Court Criminal Jurisdiction Punishment and Corrections Boot Camps Clemency Convict Criminology Corporal Punishment Corrections Education
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Cruel and Unusual Punishment Dangerous Offenders Death Penalty in the United States Executions—Televised Faith-Based Prison Programs Guantanamo Detainees Hawaiians (Ethnic) and Incarceration Juveniles Treated as Adults New Penology Parole Prison Construction Prison Privatization Prison Rape Prison Sexual Assault Prison Violence in the Car ibbean Prisoner Experimentation Prisoner Litigation Prisons—Supermax Sentencing, Determinate and Indeterminate Spiritual Care of Inmates Science and Criminal Justice COMPSTAT and Crime Reduction CSI Effect DNA Usage in Criminal Justice DWI and Drug Testing Environmental Crime Control Expert Witness Testimony Forensic Psychology Marijuana Medicalization (Legalization) Mental Health and Insanity Surveillance—Technological Social Issues, Crime, and Justice African American Criminal (In)Justice Class Justice Crime and Culture Consumption Crime Control Industry Defining Criminal Violence Domestic Violence Practices Equal Justice and H uman Rights Gendered Justice Gun Control
Appendix
Juvenile Justice Juveniles and Social Justice Media Portrayals of Criminal Justice Peacemaking Criminology Provoking Assaults and High Profile Crimes Racial Profiling Risk Management School Violence Sex Offender Registries Sexual Assault in Colleges and Universities Social Justice South Africa and Post-Apartheid Justice War on Drugs 7.4 The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful (2015) Part I: Culture, Ideology and the Crimes of the Powerful Crimes of the Powerf ul and the Definition of Crime David O Friedrichs
Operationalizing Organ izational Violence Gary S. Green and Huisheng Shou Justifying the Crimes of the Powerf ul Vincenzo Ruggiero Corporate Criminals Constructing White-Collar Crime: Or Why There Is No Corporate Crime on the USA Network’s White Collar Series Carrie L. Buist and Paul Leighton Part II: Crimes of Globalization Capital and Catharsis in the Nigerian Petroleum Extraction Industry: Lessons on the Crimes of Globalization Ifeanyi Ezeonu
State and Corporate Drivers of Global Dysnomie: Horrendous Crimes and The Law Anamika Twyman-G hoshal and Nikos Passas Truth, Justice and the Walmart Way: Consequences of a Retailing Behemoth Lloyd Klein and Steve Lang uman Trafficking: Examining Global Responses H Marie Segrave and Sanja Milivojevic
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Globalization, Sovereignty and Crime: A Philosophical Processing Kingsley Ejiogu Part III: Corporate Crimes Corporate Crimes and the Problems of Enforcement Ronald Burns
Corporate-Financial Crime Scandals: A Comparative Analysis of the Collapses of Insull and Enron Brandon A. Sullivan Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Surveillance and Neutralizing Corporate Resist ance: On the Commodification of Risk-Based Policing Hans Krause Hansen and Julie Uldam Walmart’s Sustainability Initiative: Greening Capitalism as a Form of Corporate Irresponsibility Steve Lang and Lloyd Klein Part IV: Environmental Crimes Climate Change, Ecocide and the Crimes of the Powerf ul Rob White
Privatization, Pollution, and Power: A Green Criminological Analysis of Present and Future Global Water Crises Bill McClanahan, Avi Brisman and Nigel South Unfettered Fracking: A Critical Examination of Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States Jacquelynn A. Doyon and Elizabeth A. Bradshaw The International Impact of Electronic Waste: A Case Study of Western Africa Jacquelynn A. Doyon Part V: Financial Crimes Bad Banks: Recurrent Criminogenic Conditions in the US Commercial Banking Industry Robert Tillman
Financial Misrepresent at ion and Fraudulent Manipulation: SEC Settlements with Wall Street Firms in the Wake of the Economic Meltdown David Shichor A Comprehensive Framework for Conceptualizing Financial Frauds and Victimization Mary Dodge and Skylar Steele
Appendix
Part VI: State Crimes Transnational Institutional Torturers: State Crime, Ideology and the Role of France’s Savoir-Faire in Argentina’s Dirty War, 1976 to 1983 Melanie Collard
Para-state Crime and Plural Legalities in Colombia Thomas MacManus and Tony Ward Australian Border Policing and the Production of State Harm Michael Grewcock Gendered Forms of State Crime: The Case of State Perpetrated Violence against Women Victoria E. Collins Part VII: State-Corporate Crimes Blacking Out the Gulf: State-Corporate Environmental Crime and the Response to the 2019 BP oil spill Elizabeth A. Bradshaw
Collaborate State and Corporate Crime: Fraud, Unions and Elite Power in Mexico Maya Barak Mining as State-Corporate Crime: The Case of AngloGold Ashanti in Colombia Damian Zaitch and Laura Gutierrez Gomez Part VIII: State-Routinized Crimes Org an ized Crime in a Transitional Economy: The Resurgence of the Criminal Underworld in Contemporary China Peng Wang
Institutionalized Abuse of Police Power: How Public Policing Condones and Legitimizes Police Corruption in North America Marilyn Corsianos The Appearances and Realities of Corruption in Greece: The Cases of MAYO and Siemens AG Effi Lambropoulou Part IX: Failing to Control the Crimes of the Powerful Postconviction and Powerf ul Offenders: The White-Collar Offender as Professional-E x Ben Hunter and Stephen Farrall
Business Ethics as a Means of Controlling Abusive Corporate Beh avior Jay P. Kennedy
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Ag-G ag Laws and Farming Crimes Against Animals Doris Lin Genocide and Controlling the Crimes of the Powerf ul Augustine Brannigan Controlling State Crime and Alternative Reactions Jeffrey Ian Ross Hacking the State: Hackers, Technology, Control, Resist ance, and the State Kevin F. Steinmetz and Jurg Gerber (Liberal) Democracy Means Surveillance: On Security, Control and the Surveillance Techno-Fetish Dawn L. Rothe and Travis Linnemann Limiting Financial Capital and Regulatory Control as Non-penal Alternatives to Wall Street Looting and High-R isk Securities Frauds Gregg Barak 7.5 Estrutura da Coletânea de Artigos do Gregg Mídia e controle: “Newsmaking Criminology: Reflections on the Media, Intellectuals, and Crime,” Justice Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1988) “Between the Waves: Mass-Mediated Themes of Crime and Justice,” Social Justice 21, no. 3 (Fall–Winter 1995)
Raça, gênero e etnicidade: “Feminist Connections and the Movement Against Domestic Vio lence: Beyond Criminal Justice Reform,” Journal of Crime and Justice IX (Winter 1986) “Cultural Literacy and a Multicultural Inquiry into the Study of Crime and Justice,” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 2, no. 2 (1991) “Review Essay on Race, Crime and Justice,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 53, no. 3 (2010)
Crimes de poder: “Crime, Criminology, and Human Rights: T oward an Understanding of State Criminality,” Journal of H uman Justice 2, no. 1 (1990) “Alternatives to High-R isk Securities Fraud Control: Proposing Structural Transformation in an Age of Financial Expansionism and Unsustainable Global Capital.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 65, no. 3 (2016)
Alternativas à punição: “Repressive versus Restorative and Social Justice: A Case for An Integrative Praxis,” Contemporary Justice Review 3, no. 1 (2000) “Revisionist History, Visionary Criminology, and Needs-Based Justice,” Contemporary Justice Review 5, no. 3 (December 2003) “A Reciprocal Approach to Peacemaking Criminology: Between Adversarialism and Mutualism,” Theoretical Criminology 9, no. 3 (2005)
Appendix
7.6 Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime Founding Coeditors European Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi University of Turku, Finland North American Gregg Barak Eastern Michigan University, USA Associate Editors Kimberly Barrett Eastern Michigan University, USA
Nicole Leeper Piquero University of Texas at Dallas, USA Isabel Schoultz Lund University, Sweden Steve Tombs Open University, UK Book Review Editors Steven Bittle University of Ottawa, Canada
Victoria Collins Eastern Kentucky University, USA Managing Editor Kenneth Sebastian Leon Rutgers University at New Brunswick, USA Editorial Advisory Board Michael L. Benson University of Cincinnati, USA
María Laura Böhm University of Buenos Aires, Argentina John Braithwaite Australian National University, Australia Marilia de Nardin Budo Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil Bryan Burton Southern Utah University, USA Jacqueline M. Drew Griffith University, Australia
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Mary Dodge University of Colorado Denver, USA Judith van Erp Utrecht University, the Netherlands David O. Friedrichs University of Scranton, USA John Hagan Northwestern University, USA Kristy Holtfreter Arizona State University, USA Aleksandra Jordanoska King’s College, UK Jay P. Kennedy Michigan State University, USA Ronald C. Kramer Western Michigan University, USA Paul Leighton Eastern Michigan University, USA Michael Levi Cardiff University, UK Nicholas Lord University of Manchester, UK Michael Lynch University of South Florida, USA Abiola Makinwa The Hague University, The Netherlands Raymond J. Michalowski Northern Arizona University, USA Nikos Passas Northeastern University, USA Brian Payne Old Dominion University, USA Melissa Rorie University of Nevada at Las Vegas, USA Dawn Rothe Eastern Kentucky University, USA Vincenzo Ruggiero Middlesex University, UK
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Jon Petter Rui University of Bergen, Norway Puma Shen National Taipei University, Taiwan Laureen Snider Queens University, Canada Tina Søreide Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), Norway David Weisburd Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and George Mason University, USA David Whyte University of Liverpool, UK Karin van Wingerde Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands 7.7 Western Criminology Review 14, no. 2 (2013) Preface Special Issue: White Collar Crime Stuart Henry and Danielle McGurrin
Feature Article White Collar Crime Representat ion in the Criminological Literat ure Revisited, 2001–2010 Danielle McGurrin, Melissa Jarrell, Amber Jahn, and Brandy Cochrane Symposium on Gregg Barak’s Theft of a Nation Theft of a Nation Symposium: Introduction Danielle McGurrin An Economy Run by Criminals: Reflections on Gregg Barak’s Theft of a Nation Elliott Currie The Importance of Integrating Victimology in White-Collar Crime: A Targeted Comment on Barak’s Analysis in Theft of a Nation Mary Dodge Too Big to Jail Robert Tillman
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Corporate Crime and the Corporate Agenda for Crime Control: Disappearing Awareness of Corporate Crime and Increasing Abuses of Power Paul Leighton The Extraordinary Relevance of Barak’s Theft of a Nation Michael J. Lynch Commentary and Reflection The Flickering Desires for White-Collar Crime Studies in the Post-Financial Crisis: Will They Ever Shine Brightly? Gregg Barak
Ac k nowle dgm e nt s
For catalyzing my writing this criminological memoir, I would like to acknowledge three millennial criminologists, Marilia de Nardin Budo, Kimberly Barrett, and Ken Sebastian Leon. Their feedback and conversations assisted me when I was first experimenting with this form of writing. I would also like to thank David Freidrichs for his enthusiasm about this project; Ben Wilcox for his discussion on the entire manuscript as it underwent several revisions and repeated tweaking; and Ray Michalowski for including the book in his series, writing the foreword, and giving me critical feedback that helped me to pull this off. Thanks also go to Peter Mickulas at Rutgers University Press for seeing the value of publishing a criminological memoir and for his feedback not only as an editor but also as a trained historian and historiographer. With respect to the autoethnographic nature of this memoir, the following p eople have intersected with, influenced, or impacted my journey, or some combination of these: Daniel Achutti, Laura Albuquerque, Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi, Augusto Jobim Do Amaral, Bruce Arrigo, Nick Astone, Maya P. Barak, Kimberly Barrett, Marcelo Bertoluci, Robert Blauner, María Laura Böhm, Robert Bohm, Avi Brisman, Marilia de Nardin Budo, Carrie L. Buist, David Camic, Susan Caulfield, Bill Chambliss, Lynn Chancer, Marilyn Corsianos, Allison Cotton, Francis Cullen, John Davis, Julian Debro, Walter DeKeseredy, Bernard Diamond, Werner Einstadter, Jeff Ferrell, Charles B. Fields, David Friedrichs, Carole Garrison, Karen S. Glover, Vonnie Gurgin, Ricardo Jacobsen Gloeckner, Mark Hamm, Stuart Henry, Kristy Holtfreter, Terry Hubert, Drew Humphries, Young Kim, Dorie Klein, Barry Krisberg, Richard Korn, Ronald Kramer, June Kress, Jessica Kruger, Lisa Marie Kruse, Mark Lanier, Paul Leighton, Kenneth Sebastian Leon, Mark L essin, Joan L ittle, Coramae Richey Mann, Peter Manning, Fernanda Martins, David Matza, Shelden Messinger, Raymond Michalowski, Martin Miller, Dragan Milovanovic, Gordon Misner, Jayne Mooney, Carolyn Naoroz, Lynn Osborne, Charlotte Pagni, George Pavlich, Frank Pearce, Tony Platt, Henry Pontell, Gary Potter, Mike Presdee, Richard Quinney, Joe Rankin, Charles Reasons, Jeffrey Ian Ross, Dawn Rothe, Katheryn 245
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Russell- Brown, Martin D. Schwartz, Herman Schwendinger, Julia Schwendinger, Donna Selman, Randall G. Shelden, Donald E. Shelton, James Sheptycki, Annika Snare, Richard Spiegelman, Lloyd Street, Dennis Sullivan, Paul Takagi, Ian Taylor, Kenneth Tunnel, S. George Vincentnathan, Jeffery T. Walker, Ben Wilcox, Ernie Woods, Matt Yeager, and Jock Young. Prior to any of the p eople acknowledged so far are my parents and older brother. Lillian Korman was of Polish ancestry and spent all of her youth in Boyle Heights, graduating in 1937 from Freemont High School in Los Angeles before attending Los Angeles City College for one year. Walter Barak was of Russian ancestry and divided his youth between Santa Monica and Berkeley. He graduated from Berkeley High in 1935 at age 15. My parents married in 1939. They raised my older b rother Ronald and me as secularized Jews with an appreciation for our historical and cultural roots. By the time I graduated from high school in 1966, my parents had pushed me out into the world with an empathetic conscience and an ethical compass that prepared me well for an academic life dedicated to disseminating pedagogies of social justice. Each of them helped to shape my orientation to the world in different but related ways. H ere I refer to only a few of the lessons that I learned from them that have always stayed with me. My mother’s volunteer work with suicide prevention organizations as far back as the 1970s and her political campaigning before that had exposed me to the world of community intervention. For example, my mother took part in telev ision promos for Governor Edmund Brown, Sr. (governor of California 1959–1967), as one of his “Brown Girls.” During the 1956 presidential campaign, Mom dragged me to several pol itical gatherings on behalf of Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, who was defeated by Eisenhower for a second time. As a precinct captain, I also recall tagging along with my mother either to get out the vote or work at the polls on election days. My interests in politics I attributed to my mother and to my ninth-g rade social studies teacher, Mrs. Benjamin. My f ather, by contrast, was not particularly interested in politics, although he was a politically pragmatic person. As a furniture retailer, entrepreneur, and real estate developer, my father provided me with several examples about what fairness and justice in human interactions between employers and employees could look like. Two of t hose lessons involved interracial labor and property relations. In the first illustration, my father took it upon himself in the 1950s to see that our neighbors who employed laborers who commuted from across town (Central Los Angeles) as e ither live-in housekeepers or daytime domestics, in the affluent community of Beverlywood (West Los Angeles) where I grew up, contributed their fair share into the Social Security retirement fund for
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anyone these neighbors w ere employing. Back then there were no laws in place that required any Social Security contributions for domestic employees. In the second illustration, prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, my father had established a profit-sharing relationship with the black mana gers of his all-black apartment buildings. Significantly, my f ather was compulsive about seeing that his rental units were always in tip-top condition and in compliance with the applicable codes. His way of treating all people with dignity and respect made for both appreciative and cooperative tenants, especially when other absentee landlords were not doing the same. As a consequence, during the Watts rebellions of August 1965, when my father drove his Cadillac into the conflagration with a loaded handgun in his glove compartment to try to protect his buildings from being burned to the ground, his apartment managers waved him away, as his physical safety was probably in jeopardy. At the same time, his mana gers assured him that his rental properties would be safe and sound. Indeed, whereas many landlords in Watts saw their buildings go up in smoke, my f ather’s buildings came through unscathed. Like my parents, my brother also had a lot to teach me about walking the walk rather than merely talking the talk—especially the lesson about working hard to pull off something, anything, that you believe is worth pursuing. He demonstrated this lesson to me both early and later in life. By the time Ron was in his late teens, he was a world-class all-a round gymnast, and he competed for the 1964 U.S. Olympic team in Tokyo. By the time he was in his early seventies, he had become a legal thriller novelist, having written such books as The Amendment Killer (2017) and The Puppet Master (2018). Between t hese two disciplined pursuits Ron practiced a lot of law, first in the corporate world and then primarily for himself, his associates, and his clients. I would also like to acknowledge Eastern Michigan University for a one-year sabbatical to write this criminological memoir—a nd for supporting my research and scholarly production since I left the administration and re- entered the faculty full- t ime in 1996, with numerous fellowships, spring–summer awards, and sabbaticals. This support has afforded me an abundance of release time from teaching, allowing me to give my attention more fully to research, scholarship, and most of all editing and writing books.
Note s
I ntroduction 1. Complete publication information for works of mine listed in the introduction is as follows: Gregg Barak, ed., Varieties of Criminology: Readings from a Dynamic Discipline (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); Gregg Barak, ed., Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crimes: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology (New York: Garland Press, 1994); Gregg Barak, ed., Representing O.J.: Murder, Criminal Justice, and Mass Culture (Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston, 1996); Gregg Barak, Integrating Criminologies (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998); Gregg Barak, Criminology: An Integrated Approach (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Gregg Barak, Paul Leighton, and Allison Cotton, Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America, 5th edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); Gregg Barak, Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003); Gregg Barak, ed., Crime and Crime Control: A Global View (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Gregg Barak, ed., Violence, Conflict, and World Order: Critical Conversations on State-Sanctioned Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Gregg Barak, ed., Battleground: Criminal Justice (A Two Volume Encyclopedia) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007); Gregg Barak, ed., The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful (London: Routledge, 2015); Gregg Barak, Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Looting (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012); Gregg Barak, Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It (London: Routledge, 2017).
Chap te r 1 C omi ng of Ag e at the Be rke ley Sc h ool of C riminology 1. “Faculty Members W on’t Teach,” Daily Californian, May 21, 1969. 2. Yale Review of Law and Social Action 1, no. 4 (1971): 4–9. 3. Letter to the editor, Daily Californian, October 19, 1967. 4. Quoted in Herman Schwendinger and Julia Schwendinger, Who Killed the Berkeley School? Strug gles over Radical Criminology (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2014), 38. 5. Quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 128. 6. “ ‘Our Nation Is Moving toward Two Societies, One Black, One White— Separate and Unequal’: Excerpts from the Kerner Report,” History M atters, accessed October 2019, http://h istorymatters.g mu.edu/d/6545/. 7. Advertisement by One Berkeley Community, Daily California, April 5, 1971. 8. Letter to the editor, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 1970. 9. Quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 89.
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10. Quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 88. 11. Quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 88. 12. Quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 90.
Chap te r 2 L ife as a Young C riminolog ist 1. Gregg Barak, “In the Defense of the Rich: The Emergence of the Public Defender,” Crime and Social Justice, no. 3 (Summer 1975): 2. 2. Gregg Barak, review of Justice By Consent: Pleas Bargains in the American Court house, by Arthur Rosett and Donald R. Cressey, American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 1 ( July 1977): 251. 3. Quote on page 12 from Gregg Barak’s Request for Reconsideration, April 12, 1977.
Chap te r 3 D oing Publi c C riminology 1. Gregg Barak, “Punishment and Corrections: A Review of Punishment and Penal Discipline: Essays on the Prison and the Prisoners’ Movement, edited by Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, and Corrections: An Issues Approach, edited by Edward Latessa, Martin D, Schwartz, and Lawrence F. Travis,” Crime and Social Justice, no. 18 (Winter 1982): 108–117; Gregg Barak, “The Ominous Policies of Right-Wing Think Tanks: A Review of James Q. Wilson (Ed.), ‘Crime and Public Policy,’ ” Crime and Social Justice, no. 23 (Summer 1985): 166–170; Gregg Barak, “Is Amer i ca Really Ready for the Currie Challenge?” Crime and Social Justice, no. 25 (Summer 1986): 200–204. 2. Following is the full publication information for the works mentioned in this section of the chapter: John Henry Newman, The Idea of the University (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016); The Edu-f actory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive L abor, the Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); and Karl Polanyi, The G reat Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
Chap te r 4 D oing Newsmaking Criminolog y 1. Frank Pearce, The Radical Durkheim (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 2. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953). 3. Herbert Marcuse, One-D imensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Penguin Random House, 1964). 4. John F. Knight, Jr., et al., Intervenor-Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Alabama, State of, Alabama A&M University (AAMU), Alabama State Board of Education, Defendants-Appellees, case No. 08-11527, originally filed 1981. 5. Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991), ix, xi. 6. Gregg Barak, ed., Crimes by the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
Chap te r 5 D oing Multi di sc i pli nary Crim i nolog y 1. Debra Fitzgerald, “Task Force Formed to Explore Interdisciplinary Studies at EMU,” Focus EMU 42, no. 6 ( January 20, 1994), 1, 3.
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2. Jerry G. Gaff, “Overcoming Barriers: Interdisciplinary Studies in Disciplinary Institutions,” Issues in Integrative Studies, no. 12 (1994): 171. 3. Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 196. 4. Jerry A. Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 8–9. 5. Stuart Henry, “Beyond Interdisciplinary Theory: Revisiting William H. Newell’s Integrative Theory from a Critical Realistic Perspective,” Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies 35, no. 2, (2018): 66–107. 6. See Barker’s “Oral History of Criminology with Jay Albanese,” YouTube, June 28, 2018. https://w ww.youtube.com /watch?v = g voNeT5Ov9Y. 7. Var ieties of Criminology: Readings from a Dynamic Discipline, 4. 8. Coramae Richey Mann, Unequal Justice: A Question of Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 9. Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crimes: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology, 6.
Chap te r 6 I nteg rating Criminology 1. Robert Agnew, Toward a Unified Criminology: Integrating Assumptions about Crime, People and Society (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 2. Gregg Barak, “Applying Integrated Theory: A Reciprocal Theory of Violence and Nonviolence,” in The Essential Criminology Reader, ed. Stuart Henry and Mark M. Lanier (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006), 336–346. 3. Integrating Criminologies, xi. 4. Integrating Criminologies, xi. 5. Integrating Criminologies, xii. 6. Integrating Criminologies, 299. 7. Criminology: An Integrated Approach, xiv–xv. 8. Mark M. Lanier and Stuart Henry, Essential Criminology, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004). 9. Complete publication information for the works reviewed in that portion of the book is as follows: Mathew Robinson, Why Crime: An Integrated Systems Theory of Antisocial Behavior (Upper S addle River, NJ: Pearson Educational Inc., 2004); William Pridemore, “Recognizing Hom i c ide as a Public Health Threat: Toward an Integration of Soc iological and Public Health Perspectives in the Study of Violence,” Homic ide Studies 7, no. 2 (2003): 182; Shlomo Shoham, “A New Criminological Frame of Reference,” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 29, no. 2 (2005): 201; David Friedrichs, “The Crime of the Century: The Case for the Holocaust,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 34, no.1 (2000): 21; Michael Arena and Bruce Arrigo, “White Supremacist Beh avior: Toward an Integrated Social Psychological Model,” Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21 (2000): 213; Christopher Schneider, “Integrating Critical Race Theory and Postmodern Implications of Race, Class, and Gender,” Critical Criminology: An International Journal 12, no. 1 (2004): 87; John Walsh, “Integrating Buddhist Philosophy and Peacemaking Theory: Further Thought for Development,” OJPCR: The Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution 2, no. 2 (May 1999): 1; Sheila Brown, “The Criminology of Hybrids: Rethinking Crime and Law in Technosocial Networks,” Theoretical Criminology 10, no. 2 (2006): 223. 10. Hillary Potter, Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime (New York: Rutledge, 2015).
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11. Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 12. Peter Iadicola and Anson Shupe, Violence, Inequality, and H uman Freedom, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). 13. Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney, eds., Criminology as Peacemaking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 14. Werner J. Einstadter and Stuart Henry, Criminological Theory: An Analysis of Its Underlying Assumptions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1994), 308. 15. Gregg Barak, “A Critical Perspective on Violence,” in Advancing Critical Criminology: Theory and Application, ed. Walter S. DeKeseredy and Barbara Perry (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 133–151. 16. Complete publication information for the theories or works incorporated in my theory are as follows: Terence P. Thornberry, “Toward an Interactional Theory of Delinquency,” Criminology 25, no. 4 (Nov 1987): 863; James W. Messerschmidt, Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence: The Struggle for Recognition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012); Charles R. Tittle, Control Balance: T oward a General Theory of Deviance (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995); Mark Colvin, Crime and Coercion: An Integrated Theory of Chronic Criminality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1997); Jeffery H. Goldstein, Aggression and Crimes of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 17. Jonathan H. Turner, The Sociology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Gordon Fellman, Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threats to H uman Survival (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).
Chap te r 7 G lobali zi ng Criminology 1. Gregg Barak, “Introduction: A Comparative Perspective on Crime and Crime Control,” in Crime and Crime Control: A Global View, ed. Gregg Barak (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), xi–x xiii. 2. Gregg Barak, “Introduction: On the Invisibility and Neutralization of the Crimes of the Powerf ul and Their Victims,” in The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 1. 3. Susan Will, Stephen Handelman, and David C. Brotherton, eds., How They Got Away with It: White Collar Criminals and the Financial Meltdown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 4. Gregg Barak, “The Flickering Desires for White-Collar Crime Studies in the Post-Financial Crisis: W ill They Ever Shine Brightly?” Western Criminology Review 14, no. 2 (2013): 61. 5. Danielle McGurrin, “Theft of a Nation Symposium: Introduction,” Western Criminology Review 14, no. 2 (2013): 21. 6. Elliott Currie, “An Economy Run by Criminals: Reflections on Gregg Barak’s Theft of a Nation,” Western Criminology Review 14, no. 2 (2013): 24, 25, 26. 7. Mary Dodge, “The Importance of Integrating Victimology in White-Collar Crime: A Targeted Comment on Barak’s Analysis in Theft of a Nation,” Western Criminology Review 14, no. 2 (2013): 27, 29. 8. Robert Tillman, “Too Big to Jail,” Western Criminology Review 12, no. 2 (2013): 31. 9. Tillman, 35. 10. Nils Christie, A Suitable Amount of Crime (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Jeffery Reiman and Paul Leighton, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 10th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2013).
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11. Paul Leighton, “Corporate Crime and the Corporate Agenda for Crime Control: Disappearing Awareness of Corporate Crime and Increasing Abuses of Power,” Western Criminology Review 12, no. 2 (2013): 38. 12. Michael J. Lynch, “The Extraordinary Relevance of Barak’s Theft of a Nation,” Western Criminology Review 12, no. 2 (2013): 58. 13. Michael J. Lynch, review of Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It, by Gregg Barak, Critical Criminology 25 (2017): 471; Michael L. Benson, review of Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It, by Gregg Barak, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, October 2018, https://clcjbooks.r utgers.edu/books/unchecked -c orporate -p ower -w hy -t he -c rimes -o f -t he -m ultinational -c orporations -a re -routinzed-away-a nd-what-we- can- do -about-it. 14. Tillman, 31. 15. Dana R. Fisher, American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave (New York: Columbia Press, 2019). 16. Fisher, 81, 83.
Inde x
abortion, 22, 28 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), 166, 167, 210 Achutti, Daniel, 199–200, 205 Adler, Nathan, 41 Adorno, Theodor, 110 affirmative action, 39, 118, 153, 167 African American(s), 25, 39, 90, 92, 99, 101, 106, 122, 124, 133, 166; Barak mistaken for, 154–155; Barak’s relationship with and support for, 51, 65–66, 109; and Black Power, 33, 38; in Montgomery, Alabama, 113, 114–116, 117–125, 127–130; in the 1960s radical scene, 14, 20, 21; and the O. J. Simpson case, 171; women, victimization of, 183. See also black-on-black crime; Black Panther Party; historically black colleges and universities; racism African American studies, 164 Agnew, Robert, 177 Alabama A&M University (AAMU), 129, 130 Alabama Advisory Committee (AAC), 117–121 Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE), 130, 131 Alabama Democ ratic Conference (ADC), 114 Alabama New South Coa lit ion (ANSC), 114, 116, 122, 123, 135 Alabama Prison Project, 134
Alabama Public Telev ision, 116, 117, 139 Alabama State University (ASU), 109, 115, 123, 129, 132–137, 140, 153, 155; compatibility of Barak with, 116; description of, 113; development and implementation of criminology degree at, 130; and disseminating knowledge on campus, 92–95 Albright, Chet, 108 Algeria, 222 Allyn and Bacon, 52, 166 Alvesalo-Kuusi, Anne, 199, 207, 241 Amazon, 88 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 142, 150 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 115 American Federation of Teachers, 55, 61 American Indian Movement, 33 American Journal of Sociology, 31, 52 American Society of Criminology (ASC), 52, 109–112, 144, 167, 168, 201, 206–208, 216; history and structure of, 2; and radical criminology, vii–v iii Amir, Menachem, 21, 41 Anderson, Darla, 69 Anderson, James F., 132, 133 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 166, 196, 200, 201 Ansheles, Cathy, 134
255
256
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anthropology, 89, 160, 168, 171; sharing a department with criminology, 8, 133, 142–144, 146–147, 149–150, 157 antisocial beh avior, 186, 187, 188, 191 Arena, Michael, 182 Arnett v. Kennedy, 54 Arrigo, Bruce, 165, 182, 229 Arrington, Richard, Jr., 122, 123, 124 Ashki, Mahin, 195, 234 assigned counsel system (ACS), 30–32 Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 157 Association of American Colleges and Universities, 160 Association of Integrative Studies (AIS). See Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Auburn University, 130, 146 Aurora, Illinois, 7–8, 77, 83, 86, 89–93, 95–99, 107–108, 112, 115, 140, 150 Aurora (Illinois) City Council, 97, 99–108, 111, 117 Aurora College (AC; later Aurora University), 8, 89–95, 96, 100 autoethnographies, 5–7 Avalon Housing, Inc., 166 Bailey, F. Lee, 172 Bandura, Albert, 187 Barak, Gregg: at Alabama State University, 109, 112–116; at Aurora College, 89–95; becoming a f ather, 140; books written and edited by, 30, 137, 178–186, 193, 194–198, 201, 202, 211, 212–221; developing the master’s of criminology at ASU, 129–133; at Edinboro State College, 45–46; firing of, from UNLV, 53–71; as a graduate student at the Berkeley School, 22–43; and interdisciplinarity at EMU, 156–165; job talk of, at Pennsylvania State University, 81–82; managing and producing criminological knowledge, 134–138, 165–168; marriage of, to Charlotte, 46;
and multidisciplinary criminology, 168–173; newsmaking criminology of, 117–129, 136–137; pedagogical philosophy of, 46–50; on the politics of academic hiring, 152–156; public criminological practice of, 95–99, 107–108; and the RITVNV, 186–192; r unning for Aurora City Council, 99–106; as SAC department head at EMU, 142–145; stint of, working in Portland, 83; teaching and traveling in Europe, 46, 74–77, 81; on theory vs. practice, 85–86; traveling abroad and lecturing, 198–200; undergraduate experiences of, 13–22; at UNLV, 50–53; working as a series editor, 193; working on white collar and corporate crime, 206–208, 210–221. See also titles of books written and edited by Gregg Barak Barak, Maya Pagni, 139, 140, 141, 142–143, 154, 155, 201; research of, 239 Barak, Ron, 59 Barkan, Steven E., 228 Barker, Tom, 167–168, 195, 234 Barr, Betty, 108 Barr, William, 208–209 Barrett, Kimberly, 241 Battleground: Criminal Justice—A Two-Volume Encyclopedia (Barak, ed., 2007), 9, 196, 234–237 Baumann, Anne, 107–108 Bazelon, Emily, 221, 223 Beccaria, Cesare, 4 Becker, Howard S., 3 Benson, Michael L., 216–217, 218–220, 241 Bentham, Jeremy, 4 Berkeley, California, 14, 16–17, 39, 71, 246 Berkeley School of Criminology, 39, 52, 64, 92, 95–96, 147, 157; Barak’s graduate studies at, 22–27, 45, 47, 75, 220; Barak’s undergraduate studies at, 7, 13–22, 47; closing of, 7, 24, 36–43,
Index 257
53; credentials, 85, 90, 109; historical revisionism at, 28–29; professors at, 14, 17–18, 82; and radical criminology, viii, ix, x, 32–38, 50, 51, 53, 83, 104 Bernard, Thomas J., 229 Bertrand, Marie, 21 Biden, Hunter, 210 Biden, Joe, 210 Bilyeau, Nancy, 203 Birmingham, Alabama, 122, 124, 125, 168 Bittle, Steven, 202, 207, 241 Black Panther Party (BPP), 14, 21, 39 black-on-black crime, 86, 112, 117, 125, 127–129 blacks. See African Americans Blauner, Robert, 25 Blumberg, Abraham S., 49 Board of Regents v. Roth, 54 Böhm, María Laura, 201, 202, 241 Bohm, Robert, vii, 137, 167, 172, 195, 234 Bolivia, 222 Bonger, Willem, 49 Boostrom, Ronald L., 28 Borrero, Jose Maria, 225 Bowker, Albert H., 34 Bradshaw, Elizabeth A., 239 Braithwaite, John, 241 Brannigan, Augustine, 240 Brazil, 194, 199, 202, 205 Brisman, Avi, 238 Brotherton, David, 211 Brown, Renee, 122 Brown, Sheila, 182 Buchanan, James L., 53, 60 Budo, Marilia de Nardin, 199–200, 205, 206, 241 Buel, Ronald A., 37 Buist, Carrie L., 237 “bureaucratic insurgency,” 96 Burgess, Anthony, 48 Burns, Jerald, 133 Burns, Ronald, 238 Burton, Bryan, 241
Burton, Velmer S., Jr., 226 Bush, George W., administration, 201 Butler, Paul, 183 California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), 154–155 Callahan, Joan, 195, 234 Camic, David, 96–97 Canada, 136, 165 capitalism, 27, 29, 83, 109, 220; crimes of, 22, 197–198, 204, 211, 214, 218; and inequality, 217; lack of uniformity in systems of, 88 Caplowitz, David, 128 Caringella-M acDonald, Susan, vii Carlton, Joe, 134 Cassidy, John, 210 Castro, Fidel, 14 Catalonia, 222 Caulfield, Susan, 225, 227 Central Park Five, 223 Cerroni-L ong, E. L., 229 Chambers, James A., 229 Chambliss, William, vii, 69, 144, 208, 219 Chancer, Lynn S., 228 charter schools, 218 Chermak, Steven, 227 Chestnut, J. L., 122–124, 167–168 Chicago, Illinois, 91, 97, 100; Police Department, 40; police misbehavior in, 120; race riots in, 39 child abuse/maltreatment, 126, 185. See also domestic violence Chile, 222 China, 194 Chisholm, Shirley, 124–125 Choice, 198 Christ, Carol T., 17 Christie, Nils, 76, 215 Christie, Vigdis, 76 Chronicle of Higher Education, 144, 151 Church W omen United, 135 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 16, 209
258
Index
civil rights, 8, 33, 66, 115, 116, 117, 167, 168; in Montgomery, Alabama, 109, 113–129 Civil War, 112–113 Clark, Marcia, 172 Clark County, Nevada: marijuana reform bill in, 71; Office of the Court Administrator, 51; Office of the District Attorney, 51, 61; Office of the Sheriff, 73; segregated housing in, 66 class, 49, 127, 171, 172, 179; relationship of, to crime, 5, 110–112, 183–184, 185 Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America (Barak, 2001), 9, 45, 178, 183–184, 221, 223, 231 Cleaver, Eldridge, 14 climate change, 203, 204, 221, 222 Clinard, Marshall B., 48 Clinton, Hillary, 209 Cochran, Johnnie, 172 Cochrane, Brandy, 243 Cohen, Stan, 21 Collard, Melanie, 202, 239 collective vs. individual values, 87–88 Collins, Ronald, 156–159, 164 Collins, Victoria E., 239, 241 Colvin, Mark, 187, 188 community activism/org a n izi ng, x, 8, 35, 86, 137, 189, 193; Barak’s engagement in, 95–108 community control of the police (CCP), 39, 40–41 consumer fraud, 126 Cordner, Gary, 156 corporate crime, 2, 5, 127–129, 166, 179, 196–198, 200, 201–207, 210–221 corrections, 19, 45, 46, 52, 66, 144; courses in, 20, 24, 48, 49, 93. See also prisons; sentencing Corsianos, Marilyn, 233, 239 Cotton, Allison, 233 counterculture, 13–19
Cressey, Donald R., 31, 52 crime: Barak’s perspective on, 19–20, 28–29, 51, 83–84, 96, 98–99, 110–112, 125–129; definitions of, 4–5, 22, 182; measurement and rates of, 99, 179, 188–189; reduction of, 180, 182. See also crime control; criminology; and specific crimes Crime and Crime Control: A Global View (Barak, 2000), 194 Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology, 29, 52, 117 crime control, 179, 180; coursework on and programs in, 44, 93, 94, 131; in Las Vegas, 71–73; new paradigm of, 21, 28–29; in the New South, 125–129; policies of, around the world, 194; and the public defender system, 30–31; publishing on, 98, 110, 165, 169–171, 177–184, 194–195, 199 Crime Report, The, 202–203 crimes against humanity, 197 Crimes by the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality (Barak, 1991), 138, 144, 198 criminal justice (administration of ): and the CSI effect, 200–201; historical revisionism regarding, 28–29, 33, 35–36; and intersectionality, 183–184; policies of, around the world, 194; and the public defender system, 27, 29–32; and the O. J. Simpson case, 171–172 criminal justice (as a field of study), 8, 9, 19, 44–52, 58, 63, 84–86, 89, 155, 166, 181; at Alabama State University, 109, 116, 117, 130–133, 153; at Aurora College, 90–95, 96; at Eastern Michigan University, 142–145, 149–150, 163 criminalistics, 19, 171 criminology, 157, 170; classical, 1, 5, 50, 169, 177, 179; critical, vii–xi, 1–5, 49–51, 83–84, 167, 169, 177, 179, 197,
Index 259
214, 219, 221; feminist, vii, viii, 1, 3, 5, 50, 83, 169; global/globalizing, 181, 182, 193–223; integrative, 177–192; newsmaking, 2, 3, 8, 42, 83, 86, 98–99, 109–141; peacemaking, 2, 3, 184–186; positivist, 1, 5, 50, 169, 177, 179; queer, 2, 184; radical, vii–xi, 2, 5, 7, 22, 32–43, 50–51, 53, 56, 83–84, 109, 219, 220–221; types of, 1–2 Criminology ( journal), viii, 167 Criminology: An Integrated Approach (Barak, 2009), 9, 178–183, 230 Critical Criminologist (newsletter), 167 Critical Criminology: An International Journal, 138 CSI effect, 200–201 Curran, Raymond “Bernie,” 97 curriculum, 92, 94, 161; development and expansion of, 52, 58, 85, 86, 89, 90, 131–132, 144, 158–159, 168; integrative, 163; reinvigoration of because of crisis in higher education, 93 Currie, Elliott, 21, 28, 212, 213, 218, 243 cybercrime, 92 Daily Californian, 37, 40, 43 Darden, Christopher, 172 DARE (Direct Action for Rehabilitation and Employment of Ex- offenders), 97 Daucher, Donald D., 59, 68, 69–70 Davis, Jefferson, 112 Davis, John, 21, 23, 25, 26 Deaner, J. Douglas, 59 Dear, William C., 172 defendants’ rights, 29–31, 172 DeKeseredy, Walter, 187, 195, 234 delinquency, juvenile: classic works on, 20, 25; courses on, 17–18, 45; serv ices for and prevention of, 77, 81, 83, 86, 135; studies of, 28, 178, 187–188 Dellums, Ronald, 39 Democ ratic Party, 37, 66, 124, 126, 138, 210; in Alabama politics,
113–115, 122, 123; and the Aurora City Council election, 101, 102–103, 106, 108 demonstrations. See protests and demonstrations deregulation, 197, 212 Dershowitz, Alan, 172 desegregation. See segregation, racial deviance, 75, 170, 181, 188; courses in, 45, 52 Diamond, Bernard, 20, 34, 37 digitalization/digital communication, 87, 89, 95, 152 discrimination, racial, 25, 66, 115, 129 Dodge, Mary, 207, 212, 213–214, 218, 238, 242, 243 Doebert, Eugene, 100–106 Dolgon, Corey, 84 domestic violence, 86, 97, 105, 112, 137, 172; books on, 184, 185; courses on, 93, 132, 168; shelters for victims of, 8, 33, 98, 107–108 Doyon, Jacquelynn A., 238 draft, military, 15, 17, 18–19, 36 Drew, Jacqueline M., 241 drugs, 111, 217; debate with Alabama drug czar over legalization and decriminalization of, 117, 139–140; and marijuana reform bill in Clark County, NV, 71, 72; and pharm aceu tical, alcohol, and tobacco producers, 126; psychedelic, in the 1960s, 14, 15. See also war on drugs Du Bois, David, 21 Du Bois, W.E.B., 21 due process, 28, 30–32, 152, 232; and Barak’s retention case, 55, 67, 68, 70 Dunaway, R. Gregory, 226 Durham, John, 209 Durkheim, Emile, 49, 109–110 Duster, Troy, 14 Eastern Michigan University (EMU), x, 8, 45, 92, 93, 94, 133, 142–164, 203 Ecu ador, 222
260
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Edinboro State College. See Edinboro University Edinboro University, 7, 27, 44–49, 92 Edmund Pettus Bridge, 123, 168 Edu-f actory Collective, 87, 88, 89 Edwards, Sarah, 60 Egypt, 222 Einstadter, Werner, 144, 147, 186–187, 227 Ejiogu, Kinglsey, 238 elderly abuse/violence, 98, 112, 185 embezzlement, 197 emotionality, 189–190 Engquist-Grabiner, Virginia, 28 Enron, 205 environmental or industrial crimes, 126, 197, 198, 204, 206, 212, 218, 222. See also climate change Erp, Judith van, 242 Eskridge, Chris, 2 Ezeonu, Ifeanyi, 202, 237 Fach, Don, 37 Fair Housing Act, 66, 247 Farber, Jerry, 33–34 Farrall, Stephen, 239 Farson, A. Stuart, 225 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 16, 37, 125, 209 Federal Reserve, 211 Fellman, Gordon, 189–190 femininity, 188 feminism/feminists: and criminology, vii, viii, 1, 3, 50, 83, 169; second-wave, 33 Ferrell, Jeff, 165, 195, 226, 228 Fields, Charles B., 227 financial crisis of 2008, 210–221 Finland, 9, 165 First Amendment, 35, 67, 70, 172 Fish, Barry, 145 Fisher, Dana R., 222 Fisher, Robert M., 20 Fitzgerald, Debra, 156 Fogel, David, 20, 37 Foley, Linda A., 229 Foley, Roger T., 54–55, 65
Folmar, Emory, 122, 125 Folsom, Jim, Jr., 113–114 Fontana, Andrea, 56 Foote, Caleb, 20, 34 Ford, Harold Eugene, Jr., 124 Ford, Harold Eugene, Sr., 124 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, 209 forensic science, 84, 92, 200; forensic psychiatry, 171 forfeiture laws, 94–95 Forst, Brian, 228 Fort, Joel, 14 Fox News, 205, 209 Fox River Valley (Illinois), 95, 96–97, 99, 106 Frankfurt School, ix, 110 Free Breakfast for Children Program, 39 Free Speech Movement, 33, 37, 66 Frey, James, 56 Friedman, Milton, 140 Friedrichs, David, 182, 195, 207, 212, 234, 237, 242 Fulbright Scholarship, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206 functional illiteracy, 128 Gaff, Jerry G., 160–161 Gain, Charles R., 17 Galligar, Jerry, 100 gaming industry, 54, 61, 72, 73 gangs/gang violence, 8, 86, 98, 99, 185 Garcia, Venessa, 233 Gardner, Josh, 143 Garrison, Carole, 195 Gasparino, Charles, 210 Geis, Gilbert, 228 gender: crime and, 5, 126, 179, 183–184; and consciousness raising, 112; courses on, 143; equality, viii, 110; and the O. J. Simpson case, 171, 172; violence and, 93, 94, 185, 188 gender studies, 142, 150, 163 genocide, 22, 179, 185 Gentile, Arthur C., 60
Index 261
Georges-Abeyie, Daniel E., 225 Gerber, Jurg, 240 Germany, 194; teaching in, 46, 74, 75, 81, 82, 198 Gerth, Hans H., 110 Ghana, 194 Ghatak, Saran, 233 Gibbs, Carole, 207 Gideon v. Wainwright, 26, 29, 32 Gilbert, James N., 229 Gilligan, James, 187–188, 189 Gilmore, Mark, 119 Gilmour, Peter, ix globalism/globalization, 2–3, 9, 181, 182, 193–223 Gloeckner, Ricardo Jacobsen, 206 Glover, Karen S., 233 Goffman, Erving, 48 Goldfarb, Joel, 20 Goldstein, Jeffery, 188, 189 Goodman, Oscar, 73 Google, 89 Gouldner, Alvin W., 3 Greek, Cecil E., 170, 228 Green, Gary S., 237 Green, Penny, 202 Greenwood Press, 194, 196, 198–199 greggbarak.com, 166 Grewcock, Michael, 239 gun violence. See violence: gun Gurgin, Vonnie, 20, 41 Gutierrez Gomez, Laura, 239 Hagan, John, 207, 242 Haight-A shbury District, 14 Haiti, 222 Hallwachs, Robert, 104 Hamm, Mark, 195, 225, 234 Handelman, Stephen, 203, 211 Hansen, Hans Krause, 238 Harris, Kamala, 209 Hasse, Roald, 104, 106 hate crimes, 184, 185 Hazlehurst, Kayleen M., 225 HBCUs. See historically black colleges and universities
Headley, Bernard D., 127, 128 Henry, Stuart, 5, 144–148, 158, 226, 228, 243; in Criminological Theory, 186–187; and editing of the Critical Criminologist newsletter, 167; on an integrated definition of crime, 165, 182; on newsmaking criminology, 170; on white collar crime, 212 Hesed House, 98, 112 heteronormativity, viii, x Heydon, James, 202 Heyns, Roger, 15, 38, 42 Hill, Jack, 101, 103, 106 Hinch, Ronald, 226 Hinterlong, Ken, 100, 102–106 hiring, in academia, 152–156 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), x, 8, 86, 109, 116, 129–130, 133, 154 Holtfreter, Kristy, 207, 242 homeland security, 92, 93 homelessness, 8, 84, 86, 98, 112, 118, 137–138, 155, 198–199 homic ide, 127, 172, 179, 184, 185 homosexuality, 22, 28 Hong Kong, 222 Hoover, J. Edgar, 37 Horkheimer, Max, 110 housing, 86, 104, 166; discrimination in, 66. See also homelessness Howard, Leon, 116 Hulsman Foundation, 199 human rights, 22, 33, 66, 86, 92, 118, 185, 186 Humphries, Drew, 28 Hunt, Guy, 114, 117, 139 Hunter, Ben, 239 Huntington, Samuel P., 87 Hutchinson, Earl Ofari, 228 Iadicola, Peter, 185 identity theft, 197 immigration and immigration policy, 184, 218, 222, 231, 234 impeachment, 210, 222–223 imperialism, 15, 22, 33
262
Index
incarceration. See prisons In Defense of Whom? A Critique of Criminal Justice Reform (Barak, 1980), 29, 30, 94, 117 India, 194 indigent defendants, 26, 29–30, 31–32 Indonesia, 222 inequality, 189; of class, race, and gender, 110, 126, 194; and crime/ criminal justice, 35, 45, 126, 194; economic, 183, 212, 216, 217 insurance fraud, 197 Integrating Criminologies (Barak, 1998), 83, 166, 178–183, 198 interdisciplinarity, 8, 156–165. See also criminology: integrative International Association of Chiefs of Police, 37 International Congress of Criminology, 199 Internet, 89, 151, 154 intersectionality, 183–184, 231, 232 Iran, 194 Iraq, 222 Irvin, Richard, 99 Irwin, John, 21 Ito, Lance, 172 Jackson, Jesse, 114, 122 Jacobs, Jerry A., 164 Jahn, Amber, 243 James, Fob, 114 Japanese American internment, 41 Jarrell, Melissa, 243 Jeffery, C. Ray, 226 Jerin, Robert A., 227 Jobim Do Amaral, Augusto, 206 Johns, Christina, 133, 225 Johnson, Lyndon B., 38–39 Johnson, Simon, 210 Jordanoska, Aleksandra, 242 Journal of H uman Justice, 138 Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime ( JWCCC), 9, 206–207
Justice Quarterly, 98, 166, 169 juvenile delinquency. See delinquency, juvenile Kadish, Sanford, 34 Kaplan, John, 48, 49 Kaplan, Paul, 233 Kappeler, Victor, 195 Kasinsky, Renee Goldsmith, 227 Kelley, Thomas M., 226 Kennedy, Jay P., 207, 239, 242 Kent State shootings, 13, 15 Kerner Commission, 38–39; Kerner Report, 39 Kesey, Ken, 48 Kim, Young S., 200 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 14, 113, 122 Kirkpatrick, Samuel A., 153–154 Klein, Julie Thompson, 162 Klein, Lloyd, 237, 238 Klopfer, Lisa, 207 Knight v. Alabama, 129 Knight, John, 122 Koehler, Johann, 34 Korn, Richard, 19–20, 21, 37, 41, 48 Kramer, Ronald C., 170, 242 Kraska, Peter, 195, 234 Krisberg, Barry, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 49, 83 Kuhn, Thomas S., 3 Kwak, James, 210 l abor movement/org an ized l abor, 33, 216 Lamb, Ralph, 54, 71–72 Lambropoulou, Effi, 239 Lang, Steve, 237, 238 Lanier, Mark, 182, 187 Larcom, Tracy, 117 Larmour, Marjorie, 233 Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD), 54, 57, 58, 61, 64, 69, 71, 72 Las Vegas Sun, 7, 61
Index 263
Lasslett, Kristian, 202 Latino(s), 92, 99, 106; cultural studies, 91–92 law enforcement, viii, 28, 66, 86, 195; brute force of, 17, 36; coursework and programs in, 20, 45, 46–47, 48, 49, 52, 93, 104, 144; and the Kerner Report, 39; and the O. J. Simpson case, 172; tension of, with radical criminologists, 35, 40–41, 53, 54, 72, 73; and the war on drugs, 95. See also police and policing Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, 27, 44 Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), 38, 44, 46 League of W omen Voters, 97, 102 Leary, Timothy, 14–15 Lebanon, 222 Leighton, Paul, 148, 215–216, 218, 223, 231, 233, 237, 242, 244; on corporate crime, 212; and editing of the Critical Criminologist newsletter, 167; and writing with Barak, 215 Leon, Kenneth Sebastian, 84, 241 lesbians, 183 Levi, Michael, 242 Lewis, Anthony, 26 Libby, Lewis “Scooter,” 201 Lin, Doris, 240 Linnemann, Travis, 240 Little, Joan, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106 Livingston, Ivor L., 155 Loflin, Marvin, 57, 62–63, 64 Lohman, Joseph, 37, 38 Lord, Nicholas, 242 Los Angeles, California, 23, 41, 92, 154; Barak’s upbringing in, 14, 18, 124, 246; police misbehavior in, 120; poverty and affluence in, 18, 246; public defender law in, 30 Lowry, Joseph, 127 Lynch, Michael J., 212, 216, 217–219, 220–221, 242, 244
MacLean, Brian, 165, 183 MacManus, Thomas, 202, 239 Makinwa, Abiola, 242 Mann, Coramae Richey, 169 Manning, Peter, 180 Marbury, Carl H., 134 Marcuse, Herbert, 50, 110–111 marijuana. See drugs Marsh, Harry L., 227 Marx, Karl, 49, 109–110, 115. See also Marxism Marxism, 3, 5, 109–110, 214, 220; courses oriented t oward, 22; in criminology, viii, 2, 50, 83, 169 masculinity, 94, 188 Maslow, Abraham, 190 mass media, x, 98, 110–111, 127, 169–172 Matza, David, 25, 26–27 McClanahan, Bill, 238 McCorkle, Lloyd W., 48 McGurrin, Danielle, 212–213, 218, 243 McLaughlin, Michael, 58, 64, 69, 71–72, 73 McManimon, Patrick, 233 McPherson, Vanzetta Penn, 119, 134 McPhillips, Julian, 119 Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology (Barak, ed., 1994), 8, 147, 165, 168, 169–171, 198, 226–227 Meese, Edwin, III, 16, 34 Menkes, Aviva, 21 Messerschmidt, James, 187, 188 Messinger, Sheldon, 23, 24, 34 Michalowski, Raymond J., 195, 234, 242; foreword by, vii–xi Milivojevic, Sanja, 237 Mill, John Stuart, 4 Miller, Karen, 195, 234 Mills, C. Wright, 5, 110, 179 Milovanovic, Dragan, 5, 165, 183, 227 Misner, Gordon E., 20, 37, 39 Mixon, K. D., 229
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Montgomery, Alabama, 91, 112–113, 138, 140, 150, 167; bus boycott in, 33, 113; crime rates in, 125; and police- community tensions, 8, 116–122; segregation in, 116 Montgomery Advertiser, 8, 116, 117, 119–121, 129, 134, 137 Moreno, Fidel, 100, 105–106 Mueller, Robert, 208; Mueller report, 209, 222 Mugford, Stephen, 227 Murchison, Julian, 147 Mutual Ground, 98, 107 Myren, Richard, 35 Naoroz, Carolyn, 84 Nation, The, 110, 111 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. See Kerner Commission National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 114 National Rainbow Coa lit ion, 136 National School Lunch Program, 39 Native Americans, 66 NATO (bases), 46, 74, 104 Navajo Nation, 194 neoliberalism, 182, 189, 195, 205, 212, 217 Netherlands, 194, 222 Nevada Prison System, 74 New York, New York, 53; criminal justice programs in, 38, 44; police misbehavior in, 120 Newman, Graeme, 172–173 Newman, John Henry, 87 Newport, Cal, 151 news. See mass media Newton, Huey P., 39 New Zealand, 194 Nigeria, 194 Nixon, Richard, 13, 15, 19, 126 nonviolence, 9, 168, 178, 182, 184–192 Occupy Wall Street, 204 O’Connor, Thomas, 226
O’Malley, Pat, 227 O’Neal, Erma L., 65–66 One Berkeley Community (OBC), 40 One Montgomery (OM), 121–122 online degrees, 143, 151 org an ized crime, 72, 73 Orme, Kelly, 229 Osborne, Lynn, 28, 52, 53, 57, 59, 68, 69, 70 Packer, Herbert L., 31 Pagni, Charlotte, 46, 71, 76, 81, 82, 91, 100, 109, 112, 138; and birth of d aughter, 140; and housing, 97, 115, 140–141, 142; schooling and c areer of, 55, 76–77, 83, 113, 142–143; travels with, 46, 55, 56, 74, 75 Parsonian models, 49 Passas, Nikos, 237, 242 patriarchy, 35, 93, 188 Paul, Hastings, Josnosky, and Walker, 55, 59 Payne, Brian, 242 peace and conflict studies, 185 Pearce, Frank, 110, 195 pedagogy. See teaching Pendleton, Clarence, 118 Pennsylvania State University, 81–83 penology, 24, 47, 178. See also corrections; incarceration; prisons people of color, x, 21, 33, 66, 92, 106, 153–155. See also African Americans; Latinos People’s Park, 16–17, 42 Pepinsky, Harold, 137, 185 Perrello, Stephen J., Jr., 229 Perry, Barbara, 187 Perry, Betty, 101 Perry v. Sindermann, 54 Peru, 222 Peter Lang, 193 Pinkney, Alphonso, 21 Piquero, Nicole Leeper, 241 Platt, Tony, 20, 21, 22, 28, 39, 83, 219; on Barak’s master’s and dissertation
Index 265
committees, 23, 24, 25–26; and community control of the police, 40–41, 42; and The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, 49 plea bargaining, 29, 30–32, 52 Polanyi, Karl, 88, 216–217, 218, 219 police and policing: Barak learns from, 95, 97; and body cameras, 84; brutality, or use and abuse of force by, 13–17, 28, 36–38, 42, 43, 63, 127, 167, 168, 184, 185, 211, 217, 222, 235; community control of, 33, 36, 39–42; and community relations/conflict resolution, 8, 39–42, 64, 71, 112; courses on, 25, 63; and the Kerner Report, 39; and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, 54, 61, 64, 69, 71–72; and the Montgomery Police Department, 116–122; police science, programs in, 19, 45. See also law enforcement Police Community Relations Bureau (PCRB), 122 police-community relations (PCR) units, 120–122 Police Foundation, 127 Pollock, Randy, 26 pollution. See environmental or industrial crimes Pomeroy, Wesley A., 71 Pontell, Henry, 207 Ponzi schemes, 197 Poor P eople Pulling Together, 51, 65–66, 69 Poor P eople’s Campaign, 134 Portland, Oregon, 7, 30, 77, 83, 101 postmodernism, ix, 3; and Barak’s theory of violence and nonviolence, 186; and criminology, 1, 2, 4, 5, 145, 168, 169, 177, 180, 181; and universities, 87, 88, 89 Potter, Gary, 195, 234 Potter, Hillary, 183 poverty/poor people, 18, 33, 38, 126, 189, 214, 219; and poor-on-poor crime, 127–128. See also
homelessness; indigent defendants; Poor P eople Pulling Together powerf ul, crimes of, vs. crimes of the powerless, 9, 50, 51, 83, 110, 112, 127, 196–198, 202, 219 Presdee, Mike, 227 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement, 119–120 Preston, Fred, 56, 57–59, 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 68 Pridemore, William, 182, 194 prisoner rights, 33, 48, 86, 115, 140 prisons, 20, 24, 26, 74; and the Alabama Prison Project, 134; alternatives to, 97; privatization of, 84; violence in, 185 Pritchard, Linda, 153–154 pro bono defense work, 30, 31, 55, 59, 123 prosocial beh avior, 187, 191 prostitution. See sex industry protests and demonstrations: in the 1960s, 15–17; in opposition to Trump, 222 public defender system, 21, 26–27, 28; Barak’s analysis of the emergence and early development of, 29–32 Quinney, Richard, 21, 48, 49, 69, 137, 185, 219 race/ethnicity: Barak’s, 155; courses on, 48, 49, 52; and crime, 5, 49, 110, 126, 179, 183–184, 185; cultural images of, 172; and programs for better relations, 41 race riots, 21, 39 race theory, viii racial/ethnic studies, 180 racism, 21; blame for, placed on law enforcement and other white people/ institutions, 39; and civil rights activists, 168; courses on, 14, 22; emphasis on black-on-black crime as just another form of, 127, 128; and violence, 189
266
Index
radical criminology. See criminology: radical “radical pragmatism,” 96 Radzinowicz, Leon, 6 Rankin, Joseph, 144, 150, 226 rape/sexual assault, 28, 107, 108, 112, 184, 185; courses on, 93, 168; crisis center for, 33 Ratner, R. S., 225 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 16, 22, 34, 35, 36, 37, 138; administration of, 118 Reasons, Charles, 49, 69 reciprocal-interactive theory of violence and nonviolence (RITVNV), 187–192 Rector, James, 17 Reed, Joe, 123 Reed, Thomas, 195 refugees, 218. See also immigration and immigration policy Reiman, Jeffrey, 127–128, 215, 219 Representing O.J.: Murder, Criminal Justice, and Mass Culture (Barak, ed., 2012), 8, 168, 171–172, 228–229 Republican Party, 34, 66, 126, 208; in Alabama, 113, 114, 125; and the Aurora City Council election, 102–103, 106 restorative justice, 185 Riddle, Donald, 35 right to counsel, 26, 30–32 Robinson, Cyril D., 82 Robinson, Matthew, 182 Rorie, Melissa, 207, 242 Rosenstein, Rod, 208 Rosett, Arthur, 31, 52 Ross, Edward A., 24 Ross, Jeffrey Ian, 165, 240 Rothe, Dawn L., 233, 240, 242 Routledge, 9, 193, 196, 201, 211, 221, 237 Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful, The (Barak, ed., 2015), 9, 196, 211, 221, 237–240 Rowman & Littlefield, 193, 233
Ruggiero, Vincenzo, 237, 242 Rui, Jon Petter, 243 Russell, Steve, 229 Russell-Brown, Katheryn, 140, 229 Russia, 194, 222; probe, 209 Rustigan, Michael, 28 Sadat, Anwar, 76 Sage Publications, 9, 206–208 Sanders, Clinton R., 165 Scheck, Barry, 172 Schmalleger, Frank, 226 Schneider, Christopher, 182 scholarly publishing, 87, 88 Schollaert, Paul, 153–154, 157 school violence, 185 Schoultz, Isabel, 207, 241 Schur, Edwin M., 48 Schwendinger, Herman, 21, 28–29, 52–53, 219, 220; and Barak’s firing from UNLV, 59; and the demise of the Berkeley School, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42–43; on the rise of delinquency, 18; on sociology in North America, 28–29; talent of, as a lecturer, 17–18, 20 Schwendinger, Julia, 42–43, 52–53, 219; and Barak’s firing from UNLV, 57, 59, 68, 69; and the demise of the Berkeley School, 34; on rape victims, 28; on the rise of delinquency, 18; on sociology in North Amer ic a, 28–29 Seale, Bobby, 39 Segrave, Marie, 237 segregation, racial, 115, 116; in higher education, 8, 129–130, 133 Sellin, Thorsten, 49 Selma, Alabama, 122–123, 167 Selman, Donna, 84, 148, 233 Selznick, Philip, 34 sentencing, 33, 99, 195 Sessions, Jeff, 208 sex industry, 54, 71, 72, 73 sexism, 22, 189
Index 267
sexual harassment, 126, 203, 205 sexual violence. See rape/sexual assault Sheen, Martin, 138 Shelden, Randall, 195 Shelton, Donald E., 84, 200–201, 233 Shen, Puma, 243 Sherry, Arthur, 20 Shichor, David, 238 Shoham, Shlomo, 182 Short, James, 35 Shou, Huisheng, 237 Shupe, Anson, 185 Sicily, teaching in, 46, 75, 81, 198 Siegelman, Don, 99, 114 Simpson, O. J., 154–155, 165–166, 171–172 Simpson, Sally, 207 Sindler, Allan P., 34, 35 Skolnick, Jerome, 24, 25, 34, 39, 49 Slate, Risdon N., 229 slavery, 118 Smith, Ronald, 56, 67–68, 69 Smith, Yves, 211 Snare, Annika, 75–76 Snider, Laureen, 202, 243 Snyder, Mitch, 137–138 socialism, viii, 50, 60, 76, 88 social justice, 6, 33, 84, 112, 115, 126, 186, 195, 196; Barak’s community- based strugg les for, ix, x, 8, 66, 86, 95, 220; at the Berkeley School, viii; and capitalism’s failures, 217 social media, 95, 152, 154, 166, 170 sociology, 3, 24, 179, 180; at Aurora College, 90–93; at the Berkeley School, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25; in conjunction with criminology and criminal justice, 45, 64, 85, 182; at Eastern Michigan University, 8, 133, 142, 143–144, 146–147, 149, 151, 157, 168; at UNLV, 46, 51–53, 57–58, 61, 62–63, 65, 67–68 Søreide, Tina, 243 South, Nigel, 238
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 114–115, 135 Southern Poverty Law Center, 115, 127, 135, 140 Spencer, Herbert, 49 Spinner, David L., 132, 140 Stack, Steven, 147, 227 stalking, 185 Stamos, George, Jr., 63–64 Stanford Prison Experiment, 20 state crime/criminality (including state-routinized crime), 22, 179, 198, 199, 202, 204, 211, 217 Steele, Skylar, 238 Steinmetz, Kevin F., 240 Stender, Fay, 48 Steptoe, Roosevelt, 116, 123 Stevenson, Adlai, 37 Stone, Alan J., 89–91 Stone, Richard, 37 Stone, Robert, 134–135 Street, Lloyd, 21, 26, 27 suicide, 112, 185 Sullivan, Brandon A., 238 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, 39 Surette, Ray, 227 Sutton, Thomas, 196, 202 Sykes, Gresham, 26 Taiwan, 194 Takagi, Paul, 20, 22, 34, 39, 43, 48, 83; on Barak’s master’s committee, 23, 24, 25; on community control of the police, 41–42 Tarkanian, Jerry, 67 teaching: Barak’s approach to, 46–51, 86, 164, 193; Barak’s evaluations for, 57, 63, 64, 66; load, 58, 90, 152, more valued than research and scholarship, 85 teenage pregnancy, 128 tenure/tenure system, 54, 89–90 terrorism/counterterrorism, 92, 93, 94, 111, 185, 217
268
Index
textbooks: used by Barak in courses, 47–49; integrative, written by Barak, 9, 166, 177–186, 210 Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding (Barak, 2012), 9, 83, 193, 198, 206, 210–211, 212, 214, 215–216, 218–219 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), 38 Thompson, Robert, 116 Thornberry, Terence, 187–188 Tillman, Robert, 207, 212, 214–215, 218–219, 238, 243 Tittle, Charles, 187, 188 Tombs, Steve, 202, 241 Tregea, William, 233 Troy State University, 130 Trump, Donald, 114, 202, 208–210, 221–222; administration of, 205 Trustman, Ronald, 103 Turner, Jonathan, 189 Twyman-Ghoshal, Anamika, 237 U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 74 U.S. Civil Rights Commission, 8, 116–118 U.S. Congress, 95, 124, 208–209. See also U.S. House of Representatives U.S. Constitution, 31, 129. See also First Amendment U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circ uit, 114, 129 U.S. Department of Defense, 74, 75, 104 U.S. Department of Justice, 44, 209 U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, 54–55, 59 U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, 129–130 U.S. House of Representatives, 124, 209, 210, 222 U.S. Senate. See U.S. Congress U.S. Supreme Court: and Citizens v. United, 204; and Gideon v. Wainwright,
26; and Timothy Leary, 15; and plea bargains, 32; and the property claims of probationary public employees, 54; and the right to counsel, 30; and Don Siegelman, 114 Ukraine, 209–210, 223 Uldam, Julie, 238 Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do About It (Barak, 2017), 9, 193–194, 198, 202–203, 206, 211, 212, 213, 216, 219, 220, 221 u nionizing, faculty, 146; and collective bargaining, 150 United Kingdom, 9, 51, 165, 194, 199 University of California, Berkeley, 15, 16, 19, 20, 44. See also Berkeley School of Criminology University of California, Santa Barbara, 13 University of California system, 22 University of Maryl and, European Division (UMED), 46–47, 74, 75, 81, 198 University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), 7, 18, 46–71, 74, 81, 82, 96 Urban League, 114, 115 Var ieties of Criminology (Barak, ed., 1994), 8, 146, 168–169, 227–228 Viacom Productions, 166 victims’ rights, 86, 99, 172 Vietnam War, 15, 19, 33, 95, 111 Vincentnathan, S. George, 92, 194 violence, 184–192; epidemiology of, 189; gun, 184, 185; higher education coursework on, 93–94, 168; interactive theory of nonviolence and, 178, 182. See also domestic violence; elderly abuse/violence; hate crimes; hom ic ide; nonviolence; rape/sexual assault; suicide; workplace injuries/ violence
Index 269
Violence, Conflict, and World Order: Critical Conversations on State Sanctioned Justice (Barak, ed., 2006), 9, 194, 195, 234 Vold, George, 49 Walker, Jeffery T., 226 Walker, Samuel, 94 Wall Street, 204–205, 210–211 Walsh, John, 182 Wambaugh, Joseph, 97 Wang, Peng, 239 war, 22, 184. See also specific wars war crimes, 197 war on drugs, 94–95, 126, 132, 139, 237 Ward, Tony, 202, 239 Wasserman, Ira M., 227 Watergate, 111 Watkins, Donald, 119, 129 Weber, Max, 49, 110 Weinstein, Harvey, 203, 205 Weinstein, Jay, 151 Weisburd, David, 243 Weiss, Nancy, 102–103 Wellford, Charles, 140 Wells, L. Edward, 226 Western Society of Criminology, 51, 52 white supremacy, x, 35, 182 white collar crime, 84, 166, 179, 197, 202, 203, 206–207, 210–221 White, Rob, 238 Whyte, David, 202, 243 Wildeman, John, 226 Wilhelmy, Gus, 97 Wilkins, Leslie T., 38 Will, Susan, 211 Wilner, Samuel, 59 Wilson, James Q., 49
Wingerde, Karin van, 243 Wilson, O. W., 40 Wolfgang, Marvin, 20, 35; and the Wolfgang Committee Report, 34 women: and the academic hiring process, 153–154; in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, 167; at the Berkeley School, 21; black, victimization of, 183; opposition of, to Donald Trump, 222; violence against, 93, 98, 107–108, 112. See also domestic violence; gender; rape/sexual assault women’s rights, 66, 222 women’s studies, 33, 52, 142, 163, 164, 168 women’s suffrage, 28 Wonders, Nancy, 227 Wong, Marcela Torres, 201, 202 Wood, Kirk, 116 Woods, Ernest, 27 worker exploitation, 22 Workfare, 104, 106 workplace injuries/violence, 127–128, 185 Yale Review of Law and Social Action, 32 Yell (UNLV campus newspaper), 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70 youth development, 77, 86, 98, 104, 112; and gendered violence, 188. See also delinquency, juvenile YouTube, 170 Ypsilanti, Michigan, 142, 145, 146, 150, 159 Zaitch, Damian, 239 Zelensky, Volodymyr, 210 Zilney, Laura J., 233 Zilney, Lisa Anne, 233
About th e Auth or
Gregg Barak is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, a former visiting distinguished professor in the College of Justice and Safety at Eastern Kentucky University, and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar in residence at the School of Law at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2003 he became the 27th Fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and in 2007 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books on crime, justice, media, violence, criminal law, homelessness, and human rights. These include the award-w inning titles Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Con temporary America (1991) and Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding (2012). His most recent book, Unchecked Corporate Power: Why the Crimes of Multinational Corporations Are Routinized Away and What We Can Do about It (2017), was the recipient of the Outstanding Book Award from the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime of the American Society of Criminology.
Available titles in the Critical Issues in Crime and Society series: Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C Laura S. Abrams and Diane J. Terry, Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood among Formerly Incarcerated Youth Tammy L. Anderson, ed., Neither Villain nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers Gregg Barak, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist: Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice Miriam Boeri, Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women Scott A. Bonn, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, Johannes Huessy, The Methamphetamine Industry in America: Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic, Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements, Revised and expanded edition Alexandra Cox, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young P eople Anna Curtis, Dangerous Masculinity: Fatherhood, Race, and Security inside America’s Prisons Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz, Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict Jamie J. Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth Luis A. Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-G lobalization Movement Mike King, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland Ronald C. Kramer, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes Timothy R. Lauger, Real Gangstas: Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment Margaret Leigey, The Forgotten Men: Serving a Life without Parole Sentence Andrea Leverentz, The Ex-P risoner’s Dilemma: How W omen Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance Clara S. Lewis, Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes Michael J. Lynch, Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America’s Penal System Liam Martin, The Social Logic of Recidivism: Cultural Capital from Prisons to the Streets Allison McKim, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer, eds., State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government Susan L. Miller, Victims as Offenders: The Paradox of W omen’s Violence in Relationships
Torin Monahan, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds., Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education Ana Muñiz, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries Marianne O. Nielsen and Linda M. Robyn, Colonialism Is Crime Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 40th anniversary edition with an introduction and critical commentaries compiled by Miroslava Chávez-G arcía Lois Presser, Why We Harm Joshua M. Price, Prison and Social Death Diana Rickard, Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., The Globalization of Supermax Prisons Dawn L. Rothe and Christopher W. Mullins, eds., State Crime, Current Perspectives Jodi Schorb, Reading Prisoners: Lite rature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 Susan F. Sharp, Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused Susan F. Sharp, Mean Lives, Mean Laws: Oklahoma’s W omen Prisoners Robert H. Tillman and Michael L. Indergaard, Pump and Dump: The Rancid Rules of the New Economy Mariana Valverde, Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths Michael Welch, Crimes of Power and States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror Michael Welch, Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook, Life a fter Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity