Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Sociological Perspective 9781503627352

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INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE

INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE

A Sociological Perspective

EDITED BY CHARIS E. KUBRIN AND THOMAS D. STUCKY

STANFORD SOCIAL SCIENCES

An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford l.J niversity Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Introduction to criminal justice (Stanford, Calif.) Introduction to criminal justice : a sociological perspective I edited by Charis E. Kubrin and Thomas D. Stucky. pagescm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6259-5 (cloth: allIITY NOTIFICATION LAWS

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citizenry of Nebraska would have a vested interest in proactively accessing such information online because they should want to find out where the most dangerous offenders in their community live.

Sampling Design The sample for this study was comprised of respondents from the 2007 Nebraska Annual Social Indicators Survey (NASIS). The sample included telephone numbers of individuals listed in households who have a landline telephone number published in Nebraska telephone directories. As NASIS is intended to sample individuals, a probability process was used to select individuals to be interviewed in each household selected. During this process, interviewers asked whoever answered the telephone the number of adults living in the home and, based on a random selection by computer, the interviewer requested to speak with the adult who is the youngest, oldest, middle, and so forth. If the designated respondent was not present at home at the time of the call, the interviewer then asked what a good time would be to make a return call to the designated person. Weighting procedures were used to correct for sampling bias in order to return the sample to being representative of all eligible adults in the state. The sample was targeted at I ,800 respondents. A total of 5,901 telephone numbers were sampled, of which 4,743 were households. In total, of the 4,743 contacts made, approximately 38% of households completed the survey resulting in a sample of 1,811 adult Nebraska residents aged 19 years or older. Put differently, 62% of the households that were successfully contacted refused to participate in the survey or failed to complete the survey. Appropriate weights were computed by the Bureau of Sociological Research (BOSR). These weights allow for the NASIS to be considered a representative sample of individuals aged 19 and older living in the state of Nebraska.

Survey Instrument and Variables Data for this study were collected as part of a larger survey conducted in Nebraska that elicits responses on a number of social well-being questions. Generally, questions included in NASIS ask citizens' about their financial well-being, health and health care status, access to state parks and other social services in the state as well as their overall mental health status. Independent variables. The independent variables examined in this study included gender, age, marital status, education, children, income, race, and whether the respondent lived in a rural or urban area. These variables have previously been shown to affect citizen opinion and were created from the demographic information collected during the administration of the full survey. Dependent variables. To determine if people had accessed the online state sex offender registry interviewers asked respondents if they had ever accessed Nebraska's sex offender registry. If respondents indicated they had not accessed the registry, they were then asked why they had not accessed the registry. Responses to the question were coded 0 = received information from another source, 1 = no access to the Internet, 2 = no interest/don't care, and 3 = other-specify. If respondents indicated they had accessed the registry, they were

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subsequently asked why they did so (0 =safety, 1 =job obligations, 2 =curiosity or personal interest, and 3 = other-specify). Interviewers recorded any comments citizens gave while responding to the questions as direct quotes. Both contingency questions produced 142 responses that resulted in qualitative data.

Analytic Technique Logistic regression models were used to predict the characteristics of individuals who are at greater odds for providing the two most popular explanations as to why they did or did not access the sex offender registry online. The qualitative data were analyzed using a conceptual ordering technique. Conceptual ordering is the organization of data into categories based on the properties and description of the information, which ultimately was used to develop key themes. The themes provided additional support for the closed-ended responses. RESULTS

After presenting descriptive statistics on the dependent variables, logistic regression was conducted on each of the recoded dependent variables. First, we explored the characteristics of the majority of respondents who said they did not access the registry because (a) they have no interest or (b) they indicated they received the information from another source. Next, we examined the characteristics of the respondents that did access the registry for (a) safety or (b) curiosity/personal interest.

Why Was the Nebraska State Sex Offender Registry Not Accessed? A majority (69.2%) of Nebraska residents indicated that they have never accessed the state sex offender registry, which suggests limited instrumental effects of community notification laws. When respondents were subsequently asked why they had not accessed the registry, a majority expressed they had no interest in the information (59.4%). Roughly, 1 in 5 respondents received the information from another source (20.5%), about 10% indicated that lack of access to the Internet was the reason for not checking ( 10.7% ), and the remaining respondents provided an alternative explanation (9.4%). Our first model begins with predicting the characteristics of those people who did not access registration information because they had no interest. To begin, there was no significant relationship between having no interest in checking the registry and the presence of children at home, marital status, race, or living in a rural or urban environment. The strongest predictor of indicating no interest in accessing the sex offender registry was the respondent's sex. Specifically, men were more likely than women to report a lack of interest in accessing the registry. The next strongest predictor of having no interest in accessing sex offender registry information was the education variable, where the odds of indicating no interest were 1.63 times higher for those respondents who had received some college than those who had not received college education. Similarly, those who reported an annual household income of more than US$20,000 were 1.62 times higher

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than those respondents who made less than US$20,000 per year to indicate they had no interest in accessing sex offender registry information. Last, the age variable overall was significant when reporting a lack of interest as an explanation for not accessing the registry. A number of open-ended responses provided by the respondents offer further insight into why there is a general disinterest in accessing the sex offender registry online. For example, several respondents indicated, they "had no reason or no need to access." In addition, respondents mentioned they "never thought about doing it" or "didn't even know if it (the registry) existed, never really thought about it." Other respondents noted that accessing the registry was "not a concern to me at this time," "there is no interest at this point in time," or "if I needed to I would look, but there is no need to look." Last, some respondents mentioned that it was "not their responsibility to look" or that they were not "worried enough to access." The second model examined which characteristics were related to respondents who did not check the registry because they received sex offender registry information from another source. Only two variables, sex and race, were statistically significant when predicting a respondent who obtained sex offender information from an alternative source. The odds of this explanation were 2.18 times higher for women to offer than men, when controlling for all other independent variables. In other words, women were more likely to get sex offender information from an alternative source than were men. Also, there was a strong negative relationship with race, indicating that Whites are 60% less likely to receive registry information from another source compared to minorities. From where might citizens obtain sex offender information if not from the Internet registry? Several respondents indicated they were kept informed by neighbors or by emails or mailings directly from law enforcement or they received the information from work. Respondents also reported that they discovered the information in the newspaper or on the news. Additional respondents indicated they received the information from a spouse. There are additional open-ended responses worth mentioning with regard to why citizens do not access sex offender information. Although the urban/rural variable was not shown to be significant in the regression models, many respondents indicated that there was no need to check the registry because they "knew everyone in their neighborhood." Additional responses suggest that some citizens assume that sex offenders only offend against small children and if they had small children they would then check. Surprisingly, several respondents voiced concerned over the law itself citing they had not checked because they felt the law was "unconstitutional." One respondent said, "The law does more harm than it does good. It creates crime and makes people not be able to get jobs. Makes people not able get housing, makes people not able to support their dependents and does no good. The law has not prevented a single offense and is just a device that makes people feel about a problem." Others are not sure "how helpful it would be even if they accessed the information" or believe "the law is an invasion of privacy, it singles out people for harassment." One respondent said, "if they (sex offenders) are there, they are there." Similarly, one respondent said she did not check because she "doesn't feel threatened and keeps her children close and uses the buddy system, phone, and keeps pretty close tabs on kids and knowing the neighbors helps too."

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Last, some respondents indicated they did not check because they feared they would respond inappropriately to the information provided. For example, one respondent said if he or she knew where sex offenders lived, "they would shoot them," whereas another respondent indicated that sex offenders "would be taken care of if they lived in the community." One respondent mentioned she would be "scared to find out if a sex offender lived close to her or her family so doesn't bother to check."

Why Was the Nebraska State Sex Offender Registry Accessed? Only one third of Nebraska respondents indicated that they had accessed the Nebraska State sex offender registry online. Respondents who indicated they had accessed the state sex offender registry reported they had done so for safety (56.5%), curiosity or personal interest (28.7%), or job obligations (10.4%). Our third model examines which characteristics were related to respondents who indicated they had checked the registry for safety, the most popular response for checking. There was no significant relationship between checking the registry for safety and age, marital status, education level, race, and living in an urban or rural environment. The strongest predictor of checking the registry for increasing safety was, not surprisingly, the presence of children at home. Children at home increased the odds of checking the registry for safety by 3.69 when compared to those individuals with no children at home. A similar significant relationship was found between checking for safety and respondents' sex. Specifically, being a female increased the odds over one and a half times when compared to males checking for safety. Finally, those respondents who reported being divorced or separated were at increased odds for checking the registry to increase safety than compared to their married counterparts. Roughly 4% of the subsample responded that they had accessed the online registry for other reasons beyond the closed-ended answers provided. Several respondents indicated in their open-ended answers that more than one category appealed to them indicating that they had accessed the registry for a multitude of reasons. Additional open-ended responses showed respondents had accessed the registry for the reasons in which the legislation was intended. For example, Respondent 17 mentioned they accessed the registry "to check on my neighbor who is a registered sex offender." Similarly, Respondent 53 checked because he or she were "just worried about them (sex offenders) being in the neighborhood and worried about my grandchildren." Other respondents said they had checked because of the neighborhood in which they lived or they were asked to by a spouse. Although a variety of reasons were offered as to why citizens accessed sex offender information, the fact remains that a majority of respondents had not accessed the registry and the majority of those indicated it was because they had no interest in the information. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

A number of limitations can be cited for studies based on survey research, including selection bias and internal validity concerns. The availability of open-ended responses helps to address internal validity issues, whereas statistical techniques can try to address sample bias

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inherent in survey data obtained over the telephone. Strikingly, however, those willing to answer survey questions over the phone are likely to be more civic-minded in nature than those not willing to respond, which makes this study's results even more puzzling. Two thirds of those people civic-minded enough to participate in Nebraska's Annual Social Indicators Survey had not checked Nebraska's sex offender registry. Twenty percent of those who reported they had not accessed information, however, stated that they received registry information from elsewhere beyond the Web. This finding suggests that, although these citizens did not proactively seek out this information as the law encourages, alternative notification methods beyond the Internet work to inform the public, and people may be receiving registry information whether they want it or not. Approximately, 30% of Nebraska citizens surveyed did appear to want to receive registry information and did proactively access this information on the Internet. Most of these stated that they did so to increase their own safety or that of their family, which is consistent with other such investigations. The findings of this study suggest that there has been some citizen action, so it would seem that some instrumental effects of notification laws in Nebraska have been realized, but these are limited at best. It is likely that Nebraska legislators hoped that more than one third of the citizenry would take advantage of the availability of registry information, but they can still take some solace in the limited instrumental effects that have been accomplished. Moreover, to the degree that this 30% of people take protective actions and increase the informal surveillance of offenders, another instrumental effect may come to fruition-that of a reduction in reoffending. It is still important, however, to understand why two thirds of citizens surveyed did not proactively seek out sex offender information to better encourage the conditions needed to increase the utility of sex offender registries and engender greater instrumental effects. Previous examinations have found that the overwhelming majority of residents in Nebraska were aware of the existence of Nebraska's sex offender registry, and its existence made them feel safer, yet two thirds of Nebraska respondents in 2008 had still not accessed sex offender information, and the majority of those respondents reported that they had no interest in doing so. The disconnect between the public's desire and support for notification laws and citizens' lack of interest in accessing this information is likely explained by examining the core function of these laws. The inaction of two thirds of citizens to proactively access sex offender information suggests that the function of sex offender notification laws is largely symbolic in nature rather than instrumental. As symbolic legislative action is often intended to do, these laws demonstrated to dtizens that policy makers were trying to address the problem, and for some, their passage has made them feel safer, yet these laws have had limited appreciable effects on citizens' behavior. The question now becomes whether there is something that can be done to encourage citizen action toward accessing information and thus stimulate a greater instrumental dimension to notification laws. It is logical to assume that if more citizens accessed registry information, more preventative measures would be taken, increases in informal surveillance of offenders would occur, and thus a greater reduction in reoffending may be realized. It is then important to consider the factors that predict why people choose not to access information. This study found that men, those making more than US$20,000, and those with some college education were

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more likely to demonstrate a lack of interest in accessing sex offender information than others. Moreover, the results suggest that when citizens do access sex offender information, it is in relation to concerns for personal safety. Given that men are less likely to be victims of sexual attack and those with some college education and having a higher income would be more likely to live in neighborhoods they deem as safe from crime, these results should not be surprising. In addition, women and minorities were more likely to report that they do not access sex offender information because they get it from elsewhere. To the degree that we wish to engender a greater instrumental dimension to notification law, these findings suggest law enforcement should review the other sources from which citizens get sex offender information and do a better job marketing the importance of accessing sex offender information for personal safety. One way to increase citizen action with regard to obtaining sex offender information may be to explain to citizens how the information on sex offender registry website may be used to prevent victimization. Target hardening techniques, both for property and people, could be offered on registry websites. For instance, law enforcement could explain the merits of increasing the lighting in a neighborhood, putting up privacy fences around yards where children play, minimizing the time adolescents spend outside unsupervised after dark, and recommending the increased use of alarm systems for the home and cell phone GPS tracking for children. Law enforcement could then market these websites to citizens as crimeprevention mechanisms rather than simply advertising the availability of information. Also, the empirical realities of sexual victimization should be shared with the public. These results suggest that people's perceptions of their neighborhood, as a function of their education and income, may affect their perceptions of victimization. On websites containing registry information, perhaps a review of the percentage of victimizations that occur at horne, the relationship between victims and offenders, and the groups most likely to report being victims of sexual violence would help citizens understand that victimization can occur across neighborhoods and education and income levels. Moreover, websites could offer some indicators of child sexual abuse for which parents could watch and offer suggestions for ways to approach the topic of sexual abuse with children. The possibility of greater instrumental effects of notification laws are not being stifled due to lack of knowledge of sex offender registries, for most people are aware of registries' existence, but rather due to a lack of interest in the information offered. Perhaps only by educating the public as to the realities of sexual violence can we stimulate more interest in sex offender information. At broader issue, however, is the degree to which crime control policies and laws can offer both symbolic and instrumental effects or at least the degree to which the implementation of symbolic legislation can achieve some instrumental functions. Like Grattet and Jenness' examination of hate crime legislation that suggested these largely symbolic laws directly affected the actions of law enforcement officers under some organizational conditions, it seems the symbolic nature of notification laws has somewhat evolved into directly affecting the actions of people. It remains unclear from this research under what community or organizational contexts notification laws may achieve greater instrumental effects. There are likely some changes to notification Internet sites that can be proposed or enacted to render these laws more instrumental in nature.

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Since the late 1980s, the only change that appears to have occurred in the definition of sex crimes or the attention they garner nationally is an expanding definition of what constitutes illegal sexual behavior and an increasing amount of media and legislative attention to these behaviors. As original definitions of sex offenses have been expanded and subsequently reinforced on the public agenda through attention from policy makers and media, we have witnessed not only a stability in the core requirements of notification laws but also an expansion of these laws to all 50 states (Megan's law) and new federal legislation (Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006) requiring Internet notification. Unless citizens in other states access sex offender information in greater proportions than found in Nebraska, however, it is likely that other states' notification laws, and notification under the federal Walsh Act, will also have limited instrumental effects and will be seen as largely symbolic in nature. So the question becomes, is it enough to pass policies and laws that are largely symbolic in nature, or should they try to achieve some instrumental goals as well? Also, is the one-third population who access Internet registry information enough to demonstrate an instrumental purpose to notification laws and justify the resources spent on this legislation? Should American citizens be content with largely symbolic crime policies and laws that demonstrate policy makers' willingness to address problems, ease public fear, solidify public consensus of appropriate and inappropriate behavior, and provide a model of policies and laws for other states, or should they want more from crime control efforts? Is there a tipping point at which time the resources expended to adhere to symbolic laws and a point where the financial and human costs of the law become too high to continue to support lege islation that is largely symbolic in nature? Who should make this judgment? Perhaps this is the role of scholarly research-to assist the public and policy makers in balancing costs and benefits of legislation and helping to identify ways to increase the instrumental effects of symbolic policies and laws. If instrumental effects cannot be achieved, or if these effects are limited at best, perhaps academics' greatest contributions will be to help policy makers determine a tipping point for the costs and functions of policies and laws and help them decide when enough legislation is enough.

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WOMEN'S ACCOUNTS OF THEIR PRISON EXPERIENCES: A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF THEIR SUBJECTIVE REALITIES Mark R. Pogrebin and Mary Dodge

INTRODUCTION

The number of women in the criminal justice system has spurred a great deal of recent social inquiry, particularly as prison populations continue to soar. Early studies of women in prison focused on pseudo-family and relationship building. Many recent studies have relied on comparisons of female and male prison populations. According to female-male comparative research, women pose less custodial and security risk; women are less likely to riot and assault each other; and women are less apt to commit serious institutional infractions. The focus on a gendered dichotomy, however, appears to diminish the fear and violence that delineate the experience of many incarcerated women. This article gives voice to the concerns and hardships as told by formerly incarcerated women.

An Evolving Subculture The pains of imprisonment and the development of prison subcultures are closely related. In 1958, Gresham Sykes identified the loss of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relations, autonomy, and personal security as the basic deprivations associated with prison life. Prison subcultures developed as inmates adapted to life in these isolated and stressful environments. Many inmates strive toward normalcy by creating relationships and mores to supplant outside losses. In fact, early research on women inmates focused on the development of social structures based on family and traditional gender roles. According to Giallombardo, women alleviated the pains of imprisonment by developing kinship links with other inmates. Similarly, Heffernan found that adaptation to prison was facilitated by the creation of a pseudo-family. Owen also notes that the female subculture is based on personal relationships with other women inmates. Others, however, believe that the subculture in women's prisons is undergoing a gradual shift that more closely reReprinted from Journal ofCriminal Justice, vol. 29, no. 6, Mark R. Pogrebin and Mary Dodge, "Women's Accounts of Their Prison Experiences: A Retrospective View of Their Subjective Realities," pp. 531- 541 , Copyright © 2001 , with permission from Elsevier.

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sembles that of male prisons. Fox states, for example, that the cooperative caring prisoner community that has embodied characterizations of female prisons has evolved into a more dangerous and competitive climate. Changes in subcultures may be related to the more pronounced deprivations that women inmates experience. Inmate Experiences and Socialization Female prisoners generally report that institutional adjustment is more difficult than their male contemporaries for many reasons. Women tend to value privacy more than men, and, consequently, experience greater difficulty adjusting to community living and the degrading nature of body searches. Furthermore, women often worry about being abandoned by family and spouses and are concerned with the loneliness they may experience once released. Punishment is compounded for many women inmates when they are separated from their children. The majority of incarcerated women are mothers-estimates range from 60 to 80 percent. Most women inmates were living with their children and provided the sole means of family support prior to incarceration. Imprisoned mothers rank estrangement from children as their primary concern. Rasche notes that the harshest single aspect of being imprisoned may be the separation of mother and child. Women in prison experience an unparalleled sense of isolation. Added to the pains of imprisonment for women are the frustration, conflict, and guilt of being both separated from and unable to care for their children. According to Crawford, as a result of imprisonment, female parents often experience feelings of despair and depression. Crawford further states that these emotions appear to be prevalent, even on the part of women inmates who believe that they were inadequate as parents when they were living with their children at home. Further anxiety arises over fear of losing custody. In some states, authorities use a prison sentence to deprive women oflegal custody. The loss of adult status and childlike treatment by custodial officers exacerbates the stress that female inmates experience. Misbehavior is seldom overlooked. McClellan, who studied rule violations and punishments throughout the Texas Department of Corrections, found from a comparative study of both men and women prisons that women received many more write-ups for minor rule violations than did their male-counterparts. Furthermore, women inmates were more likely to receive the most severe sanctions for their violations. Dobash et al., for example, found that women consistently were punished more frequently as compared to male prisoners for offenses against prison rules and regulations. They note that the difference is a result of a greater willingness to write-up women for behavior that often is tolerated in male correctional facilities. Personal autonomy is threatened in numerous ways, but is particularly insidious when women prisoners become the target of sexual abuse, harassment, and sexual misconduct perpetrated by correctional officers. Reporting incidents of mistreatment often proves to be a futile action. The amount of sexual misconduct by staff toward inmates is difficult to determine. Moss offers numerous reasons for this situation. First, data or investigations are determined in general categories such as assault rather than sexual assault. Second, women fear reprisal or fear they will not be believed by administrators. Third, sexual relations between staff and inmates are seen as beneficial to both parties involved (e.g., trading sex for

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goods). Fourth, sexual misconduct is difficult to investigate and corroboration of another party is necessary to substantiate a female prisoner's claim. Fifth, prison culture adheres to the code of silence, both for staff and inmates, particularly if both inmates and staff lack confidence that those who report sexual misconduct will be safe from any type of retaliation. Finally, in prison settings staff who report sexual misconduct with female prisoners may be ostracized by other correctional officers. The factors discussed thus far are illustrative of some of the conditions experienced by women who are serving time. Although current literature offers profiles of the type of women in prison, there is little data that informs us of just how these women, once released, reflect on their years of incarceration. The research presented here sought to explore the varied dimensions of women's imprisonment and to better understand the significance of their experiences. The major themes that emerged include elements of fear, intimidation, and violence; relationships among inmates; drug-related issues; health and medical concerns; and custodial care problems. METHODS

Data were collected from fifty-four female parolees who were incarcerated at a correctional facility in a western state. With the exception of one former inmate, all the women had served their time at one institution. The facility was constructed in 1968 and had a mixed classification of inmates. The population at the time of this study was approximately 300 women with sixty-one correctional officers, thirty-seven female and twenty-four male. The ethnic and racial composition of the prison population was comprised of the following: 45.6 percent Anglo, 31.5 percent Black, 18.4 percent Hispanic, 1.7 percent Native American, 0.4 percent Asian, and 2.4 percent unknown. Women on parole were contacted at the time they had appointments to see their parole officers. Each person was told the purpose of the study, volunteered to participate, and gave informed consent. A total of fifty-four women agreed to participate and were interviewed over a three-month period. Their ages ranged from twenty-three to fifty-five (median = 36) and their length of incarceration ranged from one to twelve years (median= 4.8) for all classes of offense. Interviews were conducted at the parole offices in private conference rooms. Each interview lasted approximately sixty minutes and was tape-recorded with the subject's consent. A semistructured interview format was used, which relied on sequential probes to pursue leads provided by subjects. This approach allowed the women parolees to identify and elaborate on important domains they perceived to characterize their prison experiences retrospectively, rather than the researchers eliciting responses to structured questions. The interview tapes were transcribed for qualitative data analysis, which involved a search for general relationships among categories of observations employing grounded theory techniques similar to those suggested by Glaser and Strauss. The data were categorized into conceptual domains of the experiences of imprisonment as identified by the subjects. The experiences of these women might not be reflective of all women who have served time, but their narratives add voice and depth to the issues they faced while imprisoned.

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All women parolees were guaranteed confidentiality and were told that they could choose not to tape the interview. Three women requested not to be taped and notes were taken during those interview sessions. All of the former inmates were cooperative and seemed willing to discuss their prior prison life. The women appeared to be open and frank in relating their personal experiences, although at times it was an emotionally painful process. Though, according to Linn, relating their stories may have allowed the women to better understand their feelings. FINDINGS

Initial Impressions When discussing their initial experiences upon entering prison, most of the women interviewed realized genuine fears in being in such an environment for the first time. One respondent explained: I was scared to death. When I went to [the facility], I saw women who looked like men, bigger than me. And they were looking at me and I was like: "Oh No." When discussing her first few days in the facility, a woman related her feelings about the way correctional officers treated her. This experience was like nothing she had ever encountered before in her life. She stated: I try and forget what it was like in prison most of the time. When I just got there they stripped me down and this guard did a full body search. I was shocked, I never had anyone touch me like that, especially with other guards just standing there watching me. Then they threw me these clothes and took me to a cell. While we were walking, some girls were yelling names at me. It was the most scary thing I had ever seen. Inmates who were new to the system, who did not have extensive histories of serving time in county jail or prison, found being incarcerated quite traumatic. According to one novice inmate: Prison was nothing you would believe. I came from a good home. I wasn't prepared. Here I was a middle-class, White female with a drug problem and I was locked up with murderers and gang members and it was bad. You think prison would just be a place where you are locked up, but more stuff goes on there, drugs, sex, and violence. Some of the women knew I was scared and they would harass me. The worst part is the noise. It is never quiet in there. All night long people are talking from cell to cell, screaming, fighting, and the doors opened continually when guards are doing checks. For many prisoners adjusting to living in a total institution for the first time is something no one can prepare for. According to the women in this study, new prisoners, who have had limited criminal backgrounds and had no friends already in prison, had the most difficult time adjusting to this environment. The women had to go through a socialization process for a period of time to survive. The respondents noted that weakness was not a

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valued attribute among inmates and those who displayed fear and remained nonconfrontational when picked on by more aggressive inmates had to adjust for the sake of survival. Weaknesses and Harassment The respondents agreed that women who were threatened by other inmates and did not use aggressive tactics to defend themselves were seen as weak and presented no threat of retaliation. For these respondents, their reputation as weak defined who they were in the eyes of other prisoners. Their passivity to more aggressive women often led to constantly being taken advantage of. One woman put this situation in perspective: It doesn't matter how tough you might think you are, cause it's all a mind game. But people

will be nice to you and I know I was lonely and so like "yeah this isn't so bad," but things happen and then taking it all in and you end up getting shit on. There is a lot of that in there and once you get into a situation like that it is hard to get out and everyone knows they can treat you like that. An extreme case of an inmate's inability to cope with existing in the prison environment resulted in an attempted suicide. Prisoners who were unable or unwilling to act aggressively and stand up for themselves in circumstances where they were constantly harassed by others might find such an ongoing situation unbearable, and believed that ending their life was the only means of escape. One woman related the following story:

I saw a girl; she was a real mess. We all knew she wouldn't make it cause she was weak. She cut her wrists real bad and she was lying in her cell and there was blood everywhere. She was real young and she ended up moving somewhere else, but she was a mess and that was hard cause that place ruined her and I know she wouldn't make it cause she was already dead inside. Instilling fear and intimidation were two strategies that were used by more domineering inmates toward those who showed consistent signs of weakness. That is, there was a utilitarian purpose in instilling fear in weaker prisoners. This is not merely done for reasons of power, but appeared more so for tangible gain. Several former inmates faced this predicament. One subject explained how she resolved her problem with being harassed by other women: Other inmates would harass me by trying to intimidate me. Pushing me around, knocking my food over, telling me if I didn't do what they said, they would kill me. I was scared and alone. Finding herself in an alien world-like prison, this novice inmate turned to a more experienced prisoner, who offered to listen to her problems and befriend her, all for future utilitarian purposes. What occurred because of this so-called empathic relationship happened all too often to those people who had yet to be socialized into the prisonization game. She explained how this friendly relationship turned into one best characterized as exploitative in nature: I made the mistake ofletting this one girl help me. She had been in for a while and she had a reputation for being tougher. I was new and didn't know much about her. I thought she

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was just being nice. She told me to stick by her and she would protect me, I was relieved. I couldn't take care of myself, at least I thought I couldn't. Anyway, it started out great, we would take walks together and I would cry about losing my daughter and being locked up. She would just listen and it felt good having someone who seemed to care. After a while she started having me do little things for her, and I didn't mind, we were friends. Then it got bigger and she knew my family had a little money and got me to give [money] to her. It got out of hand and she ~ould be mean if I didn't give it to her and I was kind of scared. The exploitation of this novice prisoner by the more powerful and experienced inmate lasted for over two years, until the exploiter was transferred to another facility. After she was gone, other prisoners began to demand money from the inmate and her family, but she refused and suffered the consequence for not acquiescing to these demands. The former inmate said: Another girl came up to me and threatened me ifl didn't give her money, but I wasn't getting into that again and I told her no. She bashed my head one day, I had to get six stitches. Another respondent reported her experiences of incarceration in a different state prison. It is obvious from her narrative that her time served there was based on fear for her safety. She related her feelings: I was in prison in Arizona. It was horrible. I was bullied a lot by other women that were involved in gangs. I was terrified to walk outside my cell, that's how bad it was. In those instances in which new prisoners were being harassed and threatened by more experienced, aggressive inmates there often was another prisoner willing to intercede on her behalf. One interviewee chose not to play the passive weak role on advice from an older inmate, although she was extremely scared to stand up for herself. She described her experience: It was hard cause I was scared, but she came at me one day and I fought back. She beat the crap out of me, but I took it. The guards broke it up and we both [were] sent to isolation for seventy-two hours. After that it got better, she still made smart-ass remarks, but she never really bothered me. I guess Shelly [her friend] was right, well I know she was, no matter how bad it is you need to stand up for yourself, cause if you don't everyone will be coming after you and you won't have a chance.

In this instance, her willingness to engage in physical aggression seemed to pay off. The fact that she was beaten- up appeared to be part of the price for gaining a reputation among prisoners that being taken advantage of would not be tolerated. Exploitation, unfortunately, was part of the prisonization process that both male and female prisoners face in a correctional environment. An important part of becoming socialized to the prison subculture was not using correctional staff to help solve interpersonal conflicts. In short, "snitching" was taboo, although prison administrators encourage and use the information from inmate informants to maintain social control in the institution. The following incident best illustrates the consequences of an inmate snitching to correctional staff about another inmate's threatening behavior:

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You don't really want the guards involved in protecting you because you'll become known as a snitch or an ass-kisser. If someone wants to get you, they will find a way to do it and the guards can't do anything about it even if they know. There was this one chick who was young and scared and this other chick was after her, so she went to one of the guards and they told her they would look into it. It was too late and the girl ended up beating the shit out of her. She was in the hospital a long time. For those novice inmates the above incident became an integral part of the social process of becoming a prisoner. The fact that one had to quickly learn to handle interpersonal conflicts by not going to the authorities could be an extremely frightening occurrence. Yet, becoming acclimated to such prisonization norms of behavior seems to be a vital part of prison survival skills that all incarcerated persons must follow to avoid as much conflict as possible.

An Atmosphere of Bedlam Violence and noise were two factors that made institutional living in correctional facilities a difficult adjustment. According to Pollock-Byrne, older women prisoners complain most about the constant noise and violent behavior of younger women. This complaint was heard from the majority of the respondents who claimed that not just older women, but inmates of all ages felt this was a problem. Another former prisoner related a similar experience having been housed with women who were prone to settle disputes in a violent manner: Fights happened all the time-yelling and screaming about someone stealing your shit at least once a day. A lot of girls used weapons that they made from eating utensils, anything they could use to hurt someone. It would get bad sometimes and the guards leave to take someone to get stitches. One time this girl hit this other girl's head on a bar and ended up crushing her skull. It happens a lot, a couple girls have been killed, one while I was there. Two subjects explained what it was like living in prison for the first time. It is obvious from their descriptions that the noise and sporadic violence were new to them and they had to learn to deal with it over time. One woman said: There is violence all the time. The first time I saw a fight and the guards came in, I was shocked. After a while you get use to hearing and seeing it, then you just kind of ignore it, or walk away. There is a lot of screaming and fighting. I guess it's just part of the atmosphere. Another woman described her impressions and feelings: It's always loud, with a bunch of girls screaming and yelling and fighting. It's hell. There isn't any privacy. I was so lonely and I cried, I just wanted out. I never felt so bad in my life. Often fights were due to circumstances that were beyond the inmates' control. For example, when an inmate received bad news, there was little a prisoner could do about it, and this frustration could turn into physical acting out. According to one respondent:

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Some of the girls in there have been in for a long time and when they find out they've been denied parole or they don't hear from their family or their boyfriend cheats on them they get pissed. Then, once you realize there is nothing you can do about it cause you're locked up, it makes it even worse. The reality of prison life as portrayed by these former prisoners was one that posed a constant threat of danger. According to the narratives in this research, some women were better at avoiding trouble than others. For those prisoners who find the adjustment to prison life extremely difficult, their existence was best described as fearful and distrustful of both fellow inmates and correctional staff. One respondent described the difficulty ofliving with women inmates who often act out violently: Some of them were just plain crazy, they would fly off the handle and go nuts. I tried to stay out of their way. There was one chick who gave me hard time. She would push me around and give me all kinds of crap. It was getting out of hand. I needed to stand up to her.

Inmate Relationships This section discusses the relationships among inmates: a subject that has been researched in past studies of women's correctional institutions. Homosexual behavior did exist in the prison where these interview subjects served time and all of those who claimed to have participated in such a relationship were candid and forthcoming in relating their accounts. Homosexuality in women's correctional facilities tends to be consensual with most of participants engaging in these relationships for purposes of emotional fulfillment. Toch points out that women in prison have a great need for emotional support and this is a high priority for them. The emotional fulfillment for a supportive relationship was an important factor for one former inmate: You are locked up with all these girls and you get close with some of them. I had been treated like shit by guys all my life and with women it's just different, it's more of a friendship thing. You get lonely and sad in prison and it is just nice having someone around who understands and cares and knows what you are going through. According to Bowker, homosexual behavior in women's prison is more in the context of a loving relationship based on interpersonal desire for love as opposed to just sexual activity. One woman related her experiences: It's funny how we became friends, cause at first we didn't get along and she's a dyke and I just wasn't into that, but then we started talking and got close. It was like we were really good friends and the fooling around part comes second. For us it was much more, we loved and respected each other and we were just really close. Pearson claims that female inmates have a desire to be romantically linked to another inmate for reasons of personal security. Many of the respondents explained that they entered into homosexual relationships, but this activity had little to do with lesbianism as a sexual preference once they return to the community. One woman said:

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Almost everyone is involved with someone so long as nobody is getting hurt. I was not involved with women before I came to prison and it's difficult when you get out. I didn't think I am a lesbian, but when you are locked up you do anything to pass the time, and I had someone I really cared about. But now that I'm out there I don't think I would be with anyone like that now. There also were respondents who discussed close friendships with other females, but denied that there was anything sexual about the relationship. They claimed that having a dose female friend to share their problems with played an important role in meeting their emotional needs. A former inmate described the difficulty of leaving a friend inside the prison: I am not a lesbian, but I had a few friends. I mean you need people to talk to or you will go crazy. It's hard to know who to trust, but there was one girl who worked in the library with me. She helped me out a lot. She was real smart and she had been in before and when I would get mad she would calm me down. We would talk and we cried together a lot, but it was cool, we helped each other out. You need someone to be your friend to help you just to make it together. Another woman related similar feelings on the need to have friends while incarcerated: I had a few really good friends I met in prison and the funny thing is these girls would do anything for you. I never had anyone like that when I was out. I probably made the best friends I ever had in prison.

Drug Involvement Much female crime can be attributed to the use of illegal substances. Crimes such as forgery, shoplifting, drug sales, prostitution, and a host of other property crimes are directly related to drug use. One former inmate related her perception of the drug problems that many women had before coming to prison. She explained: A majority of the people in there had a drug problem. Most of us start using at a young age and we just never got the help we needed to get over it. So you start using pot or something and then you go into bigger stuff and use more and more and you get more addicted. So when you go into a prison, there isn't a lot of help and you keep using there and when you get out. When addressing the issue of drug availability and use of illegal substances while incarcerated the respondents consistently reported the following type of statement: A lot of people use drugs, mostly like acid and pot and things like that. Pot is tricky cause of the stench, so you have to be careful not to get caught, but yeah, there are a lot of drugs. A lot of women used them, that's what most of us were in for anyway, it just kind of continues. This research can neither attest to the veracity of how many drugs were available in the prison, nor can it show how extensive drug use was among the general population. The vast majority of women, however, did report that drugs were available.

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Most women participants claimed that drug treatment services were not available, or if they were, they could not get into a program due to their sentences being in the later stages and this disqualified them from being accepted. Furthermore, there were some drug abusers who were not motivated to enter into any type of substance abuse rehabilitation program. In short, although most of the participants admittedly had some type of substance abuse problem before entering prison, very few were involved in any rehabilitation program during their time inside. One long-term prisoner disputed the perceptions of most others when she discussed the provision of drug treatment programs. This former inmate served over fifteen years in prison and offered a comparison between the existence of programs in the past and now: Things were different fifteen years ago. They didn't have all the treatment programs they have now. They didn't have anyone to help you with drugs or anything. Now it's different, about the last eight years I was in it got better, there were a lot more things to get involved in, like drug programs, and stuff about sexual and physical abuse. It isn't great, but it's getting better.

Medical Services The provision of health services in female correctional facilities has long been an issue and is still considered a major problem. The majority oflawsuits involving women inmates deal with problems in attaining professional medical care. Furthermore, Dobash et al. claim that receiving medical services is different for women prisoners and that correctional staff often minimize their need to see a doctor. This dilemma was best illustrated by one woman who related her medical problems while imprisoned and the trouble she had in convincing the staff the urgency of her need for medical attention. According to this former inmate: They don't listen and they just don't care. I needed to see a doctor cause I was having a lot of weird vaginal bleeding and I was in pain and I kept telling them this. It took a few weeks for them to let me see a nurse. When she saw me she didn't really cheek me out too good, and about a week later I passed out and was bleeding real bad so they finally paid attention and took me to a hospital. I was there for about two weeks. I had a prolapsed uterus or something like that. They ended up doing a hysterectomy. They said if they caught it earlier they wouldn't have had to do it, but now I can't have kids cause nobody would listen to me. After her hysterectomy, the respondent was being transferred from a community hospital back to prison by two correctional officers who apparently were insensitive to her medical condition. Those guards are assholes. When I was leaving the hospital, they did a full body search to make sure I wasn't trying to bring anything back with me. The guard rammed her hand up me. I still had stitches and everything hurt like hell. But, that's how it is, none of them care, they just treat us like shit. The following description of a seriously ill woman points to the inadequate screening of inmate medical complaints by nurses. In one instance, a nurse either misdiagnosed

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a serious illness or was medically negligent. The respondent relayed the following account: They think you're making stuff up when you complain about being sick. But, there are some that really do have something wrong and they have to suffer. My cellmate had a bad cough, it would keep her up at night and it was going on for weeks, they told her it was a cold. One night she was bad, she was throwing up blood and she was burning up. She ended up having pneumonia or something. She never fully recovered and was still in when I left. She was always real weak and looked bad. I felt awful for her. The attitude on the part of many correctional staff toward prisoners who complain of ill health can best be characterized as one of suspicion. Years of hearing inmate complaints about needing medical attention, when ulterior motives may very likely be involved, can lead to a cynical view of medical complaints. This attitude on the part of medical and custodial staff might lead to negligent behavior when health services need to be provided. Prevailing cynical attitudes toward inmate health needs, coupled with the lack of adequate health care providers, often meant a delay before women received needed medical attention. A former inmate explained: It was like everything else, they were so short-handed it took forever to see anyone. I got

sick a few times and I had a lump in my breast. My mom died of breast cancer so I was scared. It took about a month for me to see the nurse and she kind of felt it and said it was nothing. I had been doing a lot of reading about mammograms and I knew it could be something so I kept on them. Finally, a few months later I saw a doctor and they did a bunch of tests. They ended up doing a biopsy and everything turned out all right, but it was a hassle getting anyone to listen to me.

Relationship Issues with Correctional Officers The supervision of members of one sex by another often leads to issues related to privacy for inmates. Currently, there are an increasing number of male officers working in women's correctional facilities because of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cross-gender supervision presents a unique set of problems regarding issues of privacy, sexual harassment, or just sexual accusations against male staff. Most of the respondents claimed that male officers sexually harassed them and that this behavior took many different forms. The issue of privacy invariably was raised by the former inmates. Almost all of the women had some exposure with male officers seeing them in some stage of undress. A respondent commented: Those of us who were minorities were treated bad. They didn't care how they treated us. They would watch us when we were in the showers. I know that they were getting off watching us. Another former inmate discussed treatment by custodial officers and noted that both female and male custody staff often acted disrespectfully toward inmates in their interpersonal encounters. Inappropriate sexual behavior was included in her discussion:

WOMEN'S ACCOUNTS OF THEIR PRISON EXPERIENCES

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I had to have six stitches in my forehead because a guard pushed me into a wall and I fell down. Also, the guards were always watching us while we were taking showers. There was a lot of abuse in prison. Most of the abuse was either sexual abuse or emotional abuse. The most serious allegation against male correctional officers was that of coercing female inmates into having sexual encounters with them. That is, officers using their position of authority who threaten punishment for those women who refuse to cooperate. Even in those circumstances where reciprocity appeared to exist between a male officer and a female inmate, no consent could exist due to the differential power relationship. Often the officer who initiated the proposition for sex with a woman played on her vulnerability. One prisoner who was sexually involved with a guard related this circumstance: I got caught up in this ring that one of the guards had going. At first, I had no idea what it was about. Then, one day this guard asked ifl would like to earn some extra cigarettes. He knew that I smoked and that was his way of getting me in. He told me that I was going to have to give oral sex to one of the guards. At first, I objected, but then I figured that ifl didn't do it I would get in trouble or get beat. So I gave the guard oral sex. Before I knew it I was doing other things too. After a while it wasn't a big deal. I learned to block out the experience. Those former prisoners who were involved in sexual activities with male officers always pointed to being coerced and then bribed with goods to take part. There was a genuine fear of retaliation by those harassing officers if they did not participate. One woman explained: I used to do thing for guards all the time to get extra things. I would get cigarettes, extra phone time, magazines. I used to get all that stuff. I also saw women who refused to do things for them begin to get write-ups or would be treated badly. I saw that happen all the time. Another woman claimed that "guards were always pressuring women to have sex with them." A respondent discussed her experience with a male guard: They are jerks, they are just doing this job. They just do it badly. They really harass you. I had a lot of trouble with this one guy, he used to follow me around and he made a few threats. I took it for a long time, but it was getting old. I complained a few times, but they just laughed at me. I told my caseworker about it and a formal complaint was written. I guess some other girls had complained in the past, but it was just our words against him and nobody believes a convict. After that it was real bad cause he knew I told on him. I· would come back to my cell and stuff would be everywhere and missing and I wouldn't get my mail for a long time. After a while he was transferred and it got a little better, but I did not meet one guard the whole time I was there who really cared or treated us any good. The low rate of reported sexual misconduct by women is understandable. Apparently, even when inmates report incidents to administrators, the onus of proof is placed upon them. The dilemma for women inmates is really a no-win situation. When they report sexual harassment they are not believed and in those situations where they do make accusations, they suffer from retaliatory acts by the very officers they complained about.

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Family Separation For female inmates in this study, being separated from their children provoked considerable stress, along with threats to their self-esteem. The most difficult aspect of being in prison was voiced by one respondent who seemed to portray a representative opinion for the women who left their children behind. She commented: It was so long. I missed my kids. I missed my freedom. I went to bed every night and woke

up in a tiny cell. I just wish it was all a bad dream and I would wake up and I would still be there. Often inmates with children begin to perceive themselves as bad people, as expressed by one parent whose child was growing up not knowing her: Being away from my daughter affected me a lot. She is only six, so that means that I have been in the system almost her entire life. I haven't been there for her. I feel like a horrible person because of this. Another great concern for women inmate-parents in this study was the dependability of the father of their children to be responsible for them during their incarceration. There were some cases in which the husband did take responsibility for their children, but left his imprisoned spouse for another woman. Obviously, these circumstances caused great distress for incarcerated women. Feelings of abandonment become very real. One woman stated: My husband chose to go to another woman. He cheated on me. It's so much to go through. You lose your husband, you lose your kids, your kid's gonna always love you, but someone else takes care of your kids, another woman, it's so much to go through. It's tragic. Mothers who were in prison often saw their children living in foster homes when there were no relatives who would assume responsibility. If multiple children are involved, they frequently were placed in different homes and separated, making it difficult for incarcerated mothers to find out where all the children are living. Not being able to see your children for long periods of time was a reality for many inmate parents. One respondent explained: My children, there isn't much to say, I had three boys and I lost them when I went in. I haven't seen them since I violated my probation; it's been about five years. I get letters from a social worker telling me how they are doing, but I can't see them or talk to them or anything. I talked to someone from social services about it, but I will never get them back. I really miss them. Most of the women told of extreme difficulties in their attempts to regain custody of their children. A female parent on parole must show that she has sustained employment, can financially support her children, has a permanent and appropriate residence, and is no longer involved in any criminal activity. Obviously, these criteria presented insurmountable obstacles for some women who wished to regain custodial rights.

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DISCUSSION

The women in this study raised a variety of issues that related to the pains of imprisonment and the need to provide safer facilities that could meet their needs. The low inmate population in most states limits the number of options available to prison administrators when dealing with female prisoners. Improvements in prison classification systems, rehabilitation, and medical care represent areas that have been long neglected and may go a long way in diminishing the stress that female inmates experience. The lack of classification was perhaps the most problematic area. Although classification of inmates certainly cannot prevent all violence, such a system could go a long way in providing the separation of inmates by security and psychological needs. Most women's correctional facilities house inmates under one roof and space is unavailable to segregate the more aggressive prisoners from those women who are less prone to initiate violent means for conflict resolution. Those inmates who have severe psychological problems often are not segregated from the rest of the population. Again, this was usually a consequence of housing inmates together without regard for the needs of those who needed treatment and separation from the rest of the offender population. Often, female inmates claim that their fellow prisoners who suffer from serious psychological problems engage in abnormal and dangerous behavior. In addition, there is a serious problem with women inmates who attempt suicide and engage in self-mutilation. Obviously, these inmates should be classified and placed in separate parts of the correctional facility with programs that provide mental health services. Adequate rehabilitation and medical services are crucial to improving the conditions of most prisons. Women prisoners who are substance abusers have distinct treatment needs that should be provided during their period of imprisonment. These treatment services are related to mental and physical health, vocational training, and issues involving family. Additionally, most women come to prison with more of a need for medical services than male inmates. According to Lord, they are sicker, have more recent injuries, and lack previous health care. Women in prison are in need of pre- and postnatal care, yet gynecological and obstetrical services are rare in most institutions. Sexual misconduct by male correctional staff is a serious problem that threatens the autonomy and self-esteem of many female prisoners. According to Human Rights Watch, the grievance or investigatory procedures for threatened and abused women often are ineffectual. Furthermore, correctional employees engage in abuse because they believe that they rarely will be held accountable. Female inmates may not report sexual misconduct by staff because they are afraid of reprisals or fear that they will not be believed, or because sexual activities with staff often offer reciprocity in the way of goods and services. It appeared that being a female imprisoned parent came with a high price. The costs included not seeing your children or, if visits were allowed, having limited contact. In some cases, an inmate parent might suffer the consequences of having the state intercede. The loss of outside personal relationships with husbands or children represented one of the most difficult aspects of imprisonment and was seen by many women as the most painful part of prison life.

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This research showed that an important element of prison life for many women was dealing with the fear and violence. While the experiences related by the former inmates in this study might not be representative of all imprisoned women, the overriding focus on the hostility they endured points to the need for a better understanding of their experiences. The narratives suggested that violence in women's prisons was common and that femalemale comparisons might depreciate the volatile situations and process of socialization that female inmates undergo.

24

COLLECTIVE ACTION IN PRISONS: PROTESTS, DISTURBANCES, AND RIOTS Bert Useem and Michael D. Reisig

Although substantial literature exists on collective disorders in prisons-riots, disturbances, and protest-researchers disagree about the causes of these events. Two theories dominate and offer seemingly contradictory predictions. Inmate-balance theory postulates that collective disorders occur when prison officials go too far in asserting their authority. By cracking down on inmate freedoms and taking away inmate perquisites, prison officials upset the delicate balance of shared authority. This action, in turn, unleashes collective disorder. In contrast, administrative-control theory posits that collective violence is a product of unstable, divided, or otherwise weak management. When prison officials lose control over their facilities, collective disorders become more likely. In addition, some researchers have identified specific factors, such as crowding and inmate organizations, as contributing to inmate collective action. We describe these positions further below. For now, we note that the existing efforts to test these competing explanations are inadequate for two reasons. First, most previous studies have relied on data collected from one or just several prisons that have experienced serious disorders. The problem is that by sampling on a positive outcome of the dependent variable, researchers can only speculate as to whether the identified causes are absent in nonriot prisons. Also, this work has tended to focus on one or more of the celebrated riots. It is worrisome when the number of independent variables exceed the number of observations. A second problem with existing research is its disproportionate focus on one form of inmate collective action, the riot. Yet, the theories discussed above have strong implications for less serious disorders, such as work stoppages, food strikes, and other forms of protest. Not only are these phenomena worthy of explanation in their own right, but we also gain confidence in our theories to the extent they can account for a broader class of phenomena. To remedy the first problem, we test explanations of collective disorder with data collected from a population sample of adult maximum- and medium-security state prisons. Excerpt from Bert Useem and Michael D. Reisig, "Collective Action in Prisons: Protests, Disturbances, and Riots" in Criminology, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 735-59. Copyright © 1999 by the American Society of Criminology.

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Some, but not all, of the sampled facilities had experienced some type of inmate collective action during the study period. In response to the second shortcoming, this analysis distinguishes among three forms of inmate collective action: riot, disturbance, and nonviolent protest. In addition, a fourth dependent variable is used that measures increased severity of collective disorder, that is, increased acts or threats of violence to persons and property. INMATE-BALANCE THEORY AND ADMINISTRATIVE-CONTROL THEORY

In the late 1950s, a group of scholars, working under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), developed a new way of thinking about prisons. Building on the work of Donald Clemmer, the SSRC researchers argued that prisons are, in effect, small societies in which inmates develop their own argot, their own code of conduct, and their own leadership ranks. These informal social ties, the SSRC group argued, kept the peace in the prison setting. Prison officials would grant inmate leaders special privileges, and in return, inmate leaders would keep their followers in line by distributing perquisites obtained from officials. For the system to operate effectively, however, prison officials would have to tolerate minor inmate infractions, such as stealing food and gambling. In so doing, security measures were relaxed, and many official duties were relinquished to inmates. Ultimately, officials withdrew to the walls and allowed inmates to run the prison. The SSRC model is sometimes called the powder keg scenario: Inmates explode into riotous behavior when officials attempt to carry out policy crackdowns and curtail the various licit and illicit privileges associated with the existing informal arrangements. One advantage of this position is that it frames collective prison violence as a facet of a broader theory of prison stability. As Sykes put it, prison outbursts are seen "not as isolated, fortuitous events but as an integral part of the nature of confinement." If the SSRC compendium of essays represents a foundational statement for inmatebalance theory of collective disorders, then the analogues for administrative-control theory are Governing Prisons and States of Siege. Prison disorder is a product of weak, troubled, or otherwise ineffective management. "Administrative breakd9wn" (the term used by Useem and Kimball) was said to have several effects. First, under conditions of administrative breakdown, inmates come to believe their conditions of confinement are not merely bad, but unjust and below perceived standards of fairness. Second, prison officials and front-line officers become indifferent to, or incapable of, routine security measures. The day-to-day tasks of prison management-the locking of gates, maintenance of physical structures, key control, cell searches, and the collection of information on security threats-are less likely to get done. Third, divided or otherwise weak management permits gangs and other illicit groups to t1ourish. These groups, in turn, may help mobilize disturbances. Thus, the emergence of inmate gangs is not a necessary condition for collective disorders; but under conditions of administrative breakdown, these groups may emerge and help mobilize disturbances. In sum, inmate-balance theory maintains that riots and related forms of collective protest occur when prison officials take abrupt action to reassert control. In contrast, administrative-control theory posits that inmate collective action is the product of inef-

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fective authority. Although each approach offers some level of intuitive appeal, they seem contradictory. Inmate-balance theory leads us to expect a negative association between administrative control and prison order. Administrative-control theory, on the other hand, implies a positive association between effective administrative control and prison order. Later in the paper, we will discuss the possibility that, by relaxing some of their assumptions, the two theories can be combined. THE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

As noted above, most studies on collective disorders in prison are based on case-study material. In addition, two studies use data from surveys of institutions.

Case-Study Research Until recently, Gresham Sykes's study of two New Jersey prison riots has provided the strongest evidence in support of inmate-balance theory. Sykes argued that, in the years leading up to the riots at the Trenton facility, prison officials imposed strict security measures, curtailed recreational activities, and carried out other policies designed to tighten the prison environment. According to Sykes, these and related crackdowns fractured the prison's "social equilibrium," and eventually resulted in two riots. More recently, Mark Colvin reaffirmed inmate-balance theory based on an analysis of the 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico at Santa Fe (PNM). According to Colvin, the seeds of the PNM riot were sewn in 1975 when a new prison administration began to crackdown on drug trafficking and eliminated previously established prison programs. These actions, in turn, dismantled the informal inmate social control mechanisms that had served to maintain peace inside the prison. Useem and Kimball and, more recently, Useem et al. adduce evidence that directly contradicts inmate-balance theory and supports administrative-control theory. Taken together, these two studies examined 15 prison riots that occurred over the period 1971 to 1991. According to Useem et al., none of the case studies was preceded by efforts to "crackdown" in the manner Sykes describes. Each of the case studies seemed to flow out of an administrative breakdown.

Survey Research Two studies have used data collected from a large number of institutions. Wilsnack mailed a survey to the largest prison in each state and the District of Columbia, asking an official in each about features of the prison and whether their prison had experienced a riot. He found that neither "tightening security" nor "potentially disorganizing reforms" was associated with prison riots-findings squarely against inmate-balance theory. More recently, McCorkle et al. analyzed data collected from 371 adult, male prisons by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). McCorkle et al. assessed the impact of "prison management" variables on both individual and collective violence. The researchers found several management variables were significant predictors of the rates

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of inmate-on-inmate assault and inmate-on-staff assault. The management variables, however, could not predict prison riots, once control variables were introduced. These results are especially damaging to administrative-control theory, given the (presumably) high level of reliability associated with BJS data. In sum, although a central debate in correctional research is between proponents of the inmate-balance theory and advocates of the administrative-control theory, the available studies have not clearly established which approach is best able to explain collective disorders.

The Crowding Factor Research on specific factors said to cause collective disorders has also produced less than definitive results. Despite claims that "crowding causes riots," empirical support for the crowding hypothesis is weak. Wilsnack did find an association between crowding and prison riots. However, as mentioned above, Wilsnack did not introduce control variables into his analysis, nor did he explain how he measured crowding. McCorkle et a!. operationalized crowding as the ratio of the average daily population to the design capacity of the prison. After controlling for several variables, including inmate population size and security levels, the authors found no significant relationship between crowding and riots. One reason for the lack of consensus concerning the effects of crowding seems conceptual. What does crowding mean, and how is it best measured? In sum, if empirical progress is to be made, more reliable measures of crowding need to be employed.

Inmate Organization Shifting attention to a second factor, the presence of inmate organization, a distinction needs to be made between legitimate and illegitimate inmate organizations. Focusing first on legitimate organization, a broad debate both in prison and nonprison literatures exists concerning the effects of formal organization on collective action. Researchers in the resource mobilization tradition posit a positive association between organization and collective action, including riots. Theorists in the breakdown tradition do not hypothesize such a relationship, or suggest an inverse relationship between organization and riots. Prisons may have a plethora oflegitimate inmate organizations, such as fraternal organizations, therapeutic groups, and religious organizations. Useem and Kimball found that authorized inmate organizations did not promote riots, and in several instances, they acted to prevent collective action. As a result, legitimate inmate organizations are best conceptualized as theoretically distinct from indicators of administrative control. The presence of illegitimate organizations is best thought of as an indicator of administrative control. From a resource mobilization perspective, illegitimate organizations may promote collective action for the same reasons legitimate organizations do; that is, they give inmates resources to mount a challenge. The problem, however, is that the presence of many illegitimate organizations in a prison is also an indicator of management failure. Thus, illegitimate organization is included in this analysis under the rubric of administrative control, rather than as an independent factor.

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DATA AND METHODS

Data for this analysis were collected in 1986. Surveys were distributed to a population sample of adult maximum- and medium-security prisons in 49 of the 50 states. Of the 409 prison executives sampled, 329 completed and returned a survey, yielding an overall response rate of 80%.

Data Reliability As noted, previous studies have generally relied either on (1) data from a small number of case studies or (2) data files consisting of information on a large number of prisons. The current analysis opts for the second strategy, but with the advantage of including measures of theoretically important variables that previous second-approach studies have omitted. The significance of this contribution, of course, depends on the reliability of the responses elicited. Possible measurement error is endemic to research on collective disorders in prisons. We sought to check the reliability of the data collected for this study by comparing them with data collected by others. Yet, no single data set-whether collected in intensive case studies, collected by the Census Bureau, or by the survey approach taken here-provides a firm standard against which other data can be tested for their reliability. The findings should be viewed with that caveat in mind.

Dependent Variables Four different dependent variables were included in this analysis. Wardens and superintendents were asked to record whether their facility had experienced a riot, disturbance, or nonviolent protest between January 1, 1984, and September 1, 1986. For this analysis, violent and nonviolent collective protests were used for the period between January 1, 1985, and the end of the study period. Riot occurrence was defined for the respondents as an action that ( 1) included ten or more inmates, (2) prevented authorities from controlling, keeping order in, or traveling freely through some area of the prison, (3) included threats of or acts that resulted in the injury to prison personnel or inmates and damage to prison property, and (4) was not brought under control within five minutes. Nearly 10% of the prisons reported to having experienced a riot during the study period. All of the riotous events were classified as contracted riots because they were resolved within 24 hours of inception. The number of inmate participants varied considerably; additionally, although some level of property damage was reported by most facilities experiencing a riot, injuries to inmates and prison personnel dearly were not the norm. Inmate disturbance was similarly defined, except that this type of event did not necessarily obstruct authorities' control and mobility, and was brought under control within five minutes. Approximately 16% of the facilities reported they had an inmate disturbance. A nonviolent protestwas defined as an event that (1) included ten or more inmates, (2) including inmates who openly disobeyed some rule or order of the administration, and (3) who

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did not use or threaten violence against persons or property. Eighteen percent of the facilities reported having experienced a nonviolent protest. One-half of the nonviolent protests were characterized as either work stoppages or food strikes. Finally, each of the three dependent variables was arranged into a four-point-ordered categorical variable representing increased severity of an unlawful protest(ranging from 0 =no protest to 3 =riot occurrence). Independent Variables Several measures were used to operationalize the administrative-control variables. Administrative sanction was included because previous research has shown that a rift between management and officers, incompetence on behalf of the latter, or both, is associated with inmate collective action. This variable was operationalized as the percentage of disciplinary tickets issued to inmates upheld by the prison administration. To measure esprit de corps among prison officers, a two-item scale ( r = .55) was included by which the prison executive was asked to gauge ( 1) the level of tension between officers and the state's department of corrections, and (2) the level of officer morale at their facility. It has been hypothesized that low levels of esprit de corps among organizational members (e.g., prison officers) will obstruct the attainment of preferred outcomes (e.g., prison order). Another measure of administrative control, paid employment, was included because it has been hypothesized that well-run prisons employ a higher percentage of the inmate population and, as a result, have fewer inmates left idle. The variable prohibited group (i.e., percentage of inmates who were members of officially prohibited organizations) was included under the administrativecontrol heading because evidence has suggested that the existence of such groups in prisons show a breakdown in administrative-control mechanisms. To assess inmate-balance theory, prison executives were asked whether their facility had implemented policy crackdowns on inmate cell assignments, inmate movement, inmate personal property, and inmate work assignments. Inmate-balance theory posits that major policy changes imposing sudden restrictions on inmates increase the likelihood of violent, collective action. Further, inmate-balance theory specifies a cumulative effect; that is, the more restrictions imposed on inmates, the greater the likelihood of collective outbursts. Accordingly, crackdown is represented by an additive scale (ranging from "no policy crackdown" to "four policy crackdowns"). Two scales using factor regression scores were constructed to assess the effects of crowding and inmate organization on inmate collective action in a parsimonious fashion (i.e., crowding and inmate organization). This technique allowed us to weight the items under each conceptual heading by its factor loading. As already noted, crowding is difficult to operationalize. Because no accepted definition of crowding exists, the most important dimensions of crowding (if any) remain unknown. Three specific measures of crowding were used to assess the differential effects of crowding within institutions. These items measured the percentage of inmates housed in different conditions: cell crowding (i.e., cells exceeding designed capacity), temporary housing (e.g., trailers), and nonresidential housing (e.g., gymnasium). Finally, three items were used to reflect the presence of authorized inmate organizations: fraternal, religious, and therapeutic.

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Several models were estimated for each dependent variable. First, individual models including only the variables under each conceptual heading (e.g., administrative control and inmate balance) were estimated. Next, full models, which included all of the variables under each heading and statistical controls, were estimated. Justification for this modeling procedure was twofold: (I) This process allowed us to assess the proportion of explained variance by variable cluster; and (2) we were interested in testing the effects of these different variables, net of control variables, on each measure of inmate collective action. FINDINGS

Multivariate Analysis Logistic regression was the primary analytic model used in the multivariate analysis. The logistic model is the most appropriate statistical technique for assessing the effects of independent variables characterized by different levels of measurement on a binary response variable. After controlling for inmate population and security, crackdown was not associated with riot occurrence. One variable under the administrative-control heading was significant in the riot occurrence analysis. More specifically, esprit de corps was significant: As esprit de corps among officers became more of a problem, the probability of experiencing a riot significantly increased. Neither crowding nor inmate organization is significant in the riot occurrence model. The inmate disturbance analysis revealed that crackdown was not significant. In contrast, three indicators of administrative control were statistically significant. First, there was an inverse relationship between administrative sanction and inmate disturbance. As the percentage of upheld administrative sanctions decreased, the likelihood of an inmate disturbance increased. Second, as hypothesized, the percentage of inmates with paid employment was inversely related to the probability of an inmate disturbance. Finally, the higher the percentage of prohibited group involvement, the greater the likelihood of an inmate disturbance. Consistent with the findings in the riot occurrence model, neither crowding nor inmate organization was a significant predictor in the inmate disturbance analysis. Overall, a more modest level of the variance was explained by the nonviolent protest model (17o/o) when compared with the riot occurrence and inmate disturbance models (20o/o and 27o/o, respectively). One variable under the administrative-control heading was significant in the nonviolent protest model. Paid employment was a significant predictor of nonviolent protest. In this model, however, the relationship was not as hypothesized. Although this finding was unexpected, an interpretation is possible. It may be that because paid inmate jobs are desired commodities in high security prisons, these positions provide remunerative controls that, in turn, (1) discourage inmates from acting out violently, and (2) induce nonviolent forms of collective protest. Additionally, the estimate for crowding was significant, but it also was not in the hypothesized direction. This finding suggests that less crowded facilities are more likely to experience nonviolent forms of inmate collective action.

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Thus far, each perspective has been assessed on three different binary response variables: riot occurrence, inmate disturbance, and nonviolent protest. Another way of assessing each perspective would be to conceptualize the three forms of collective action as existing along a continuum ranging from "no protest" (least severe) to "riot occurrence" (most severe), with nonviolent protest and inmate disturbance found between the two polar extremes. Unlawful protest was constructed using this conceptualization. This variable, then, represents a continuum of severity of violence or threats of it. Still, in actuality, the increased level of severity associated with each type of collective protest presents unknown distances between points. Accordingly, an ordered probit model was used because the technique permits the use of an ordinal dependent variable with unequal distances between thresholds. Two indicators of administrative control were significant predictors of increased severity of unlawful protest. First, administrative sanction was significant. Prohibited group was also significant. Simply put, if administrative sanctions are used ineffectively and prohibited groups are allowed to proliferate, the likelihood of a serious collective act by inmates significantly increases. Collectively, the variables under each of the four conceptual headings explained approximately 15% of the variance in the unlawful protest model. As a final step in the multivariate analysis, the variables under each conceptual heading were assessed as to their ability to explain the variance associated with each dependent variable. To do so, individual models were estimated and goodness-of-fit statistics were calculated for the variables under the administrative-control, inmate-balance, inmate organization, and crowding headings. The administrative-control variables consistently explain more of the variance associated with each of the dependent variables than the inmate-balance, inmate organization, and crowding variables. Additionally, the proportional contribution of the administrativecontrol variables is, in comparative terms, quite impressive. Specifically, the administrativecontrol variables accounted for 49% of the explained variance in the riot occurrence model, 42% in the inmate disturbance model, 27% in the nonviolent protest model, and 36% in the unlawful protest model. By themselves or collectively, the variables under the inmatebalance, inmate organization, and crowding headings do not explain as much variance as the administrative-control variables. Additionally, when looking to the model X2 for each set of variables, the measures of administrative-control clearly provide a better fit to the data. In other words, the model X2 allows us to conclude that the measures of administrative control enhance our ability to predict all four types of collective disorders. In contrast, neither the model X2 for inmatebalance, inmate organization, or crowding was significant. Hence, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that these variables are not related to inmate collective action. DISCUSSION

Inmate-balance theory views the role of prison administration as a negative externality to an otherwise self-regulating inmate social system. Inmate collective action occurs when prison authorities miss the stabilizing nature of this self-regulation and try to seize complete control. Thus, according to inmate-balance theory, ironically, strongly intrusive efforts to

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create order yield the opposite outcome. Moreover, this is not an insignificant thesis with few or no current adherents. Rather, Dilulio correctly observes that over the last 30 years "most prison sociologists have treated Sykes's [inmate-balance] ideas on prison violence as if they were settled matters of fact." One value of administrative-control theory is that it has challenged the settled wisdom. Yet, more than pure challenge, administrative-control theory appears to offer a more accurate explanation of the condition under which collective action occurs in prison. More specifically, our evidence suggests that prisons that achieve a high level of esprit de corps among officers, that successfully combat the development of prohibited inmate groups (e.g., street gangs and racial hatred groups), and maintain a high level of officer competence and a low level of agitation between officers and inmates are less likely to experience unlawful, collective inmate protests than similar prisons that do not meet these managerial challenges. This study does not close the books on a range of issues. The stickiest issue is one of measurement. The data were supplied by prison officials. This factor may have produced biased measures, although we discussed above the reasons for confidence in the data. To that discussion, we would add the following three points. First, the significance of the measurement problems depends on the specific issue being addressed. For example, we believe our crowding measure is a fairly good one, or at least is an improvement over those used by other researchers. Thus, the finding of no association between crowding and inmate collective action should be taken seriously. Second, our measures of inmate-balance theory could be less reliable than our measures of administrative-control theory, which might explain why inmate-balance theory does not perform as well. On this point, however, we would choose not to yield. If prison authorities should report anything accurately, it should be their own effort to crack down. Thus, it would seem logical to conclude that officially collected data would, if anything, be biased in favor of inmate-balance theory and against administrative-control theory. In short, the finding that administrative-control theory performs better than inmate-balance theory does not appear to be a product of measurement error. Third, both administrative-control and inmate-balance theories are more complex theories than our measures allow. For example, administrative-control theory postulates that inmates come to experience a sense of injustice under conditions of breakdown-yet, a sense of injustice is not accounted for in our analysis. Another issue is what "administrative-control" entails. Clearly, institutional leadership and managerial strategy are important, as is the development of an organizational culture. Yet debate continues over the specific configurations that lead to preferred outcomes, and additional research is needed. One possible focus would be the recent success of the New York City Department of Corrections bringing its 16,000 inmate system from near chaos to safety and order. Behind a 90% drop in inmate violence was establishing accountability through a management strategy adapted from the New York City Police, the well-known Compstat meetings. The broader implications of this experience are yet to be explored. At least on its face, the turnaround suggests support for Dilulio's proposition that no prison or prison system is ungovernable, however violent the inmates, antiquated the facilities, or crowded the conditions.

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Finally, the possibility exists that administrative control and inmate-balance theories are complementary, rather than competing, approaches. Before considering how the two theories might be combined, we observe that the results presented above lend no support to the idea that the two theories are complementary. However the analysis was conducted, the results buttress one argument and not the other. Thus, any effort seeking to integrate the two theories must go beyond the data at hand. Integration is sought by reviewing a study by Richard McCleery of the Oahu, Hawaii prison in the 1950s. McCleery describes the Oahu prison during the years 1950-1953 in much of the same terms that Sykes describes the New Jersey prisons: de facto control of the prison by inmates. Like the Trenton facility, Oahu experienced a crackdown, as officials attempted to reorganize the prison. This crackdown, in turn, resulted in high levels of tension and violence. At Oahu, however, the warden effected the transition successfully. According to McCleery, "[t]he warden's direct and eloquent answers to those issues [in the transition] are credited by inmates and staff alike with breaking the back of institutional tension." Thus, inmate-balance theory does accurately predict a crackdown may generate inmate hostility and even instability. Yet, crackdown-generated instability can be managed effectively (as at Oahu) or ineffectively (as at Trenton). This point is consistent with administrative-control theory. To summarize the case study's implications for the issues at hand, inmate-balance theory holds that authority cannot be taken away from inmates, however skilled the effort, because shared authority is the essential element of prison stability. If this assumption is relaxed-taking away authority may generate tensions-the argument becomes more reasonable and administrative-control theory can be brought to bear. This sort of tension is manageable, as administrative-control theory would predict, and as was done at Oahu. We hasten to add that the definitive study of prison riots in the 1950s and early 1960s is yet to be written. In fact, that is also true for all but perhaps a handful of the better known riots in all periods.

25

SOCIAL INSECURITY: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE,

1965-2000 Anthony M. Platt

WE'RE NUMBER ONE!

For the first time in many years, crime and punishment was not a contested issue in the 2000 presidential race. By the end of Clinton's second term, the Democratic and Republican platforms shared the same premises about law and order, and disagreed only on details. Unlike Michael Dukakis in the 1988 campaign, Bill Clinton made sure in 1992 that he would not be labeled a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" or represented as the kind of governor who releases a Willie Horton into a work furlough program. While governor of Arkansas, Clinton approved the death penalty and as a presidential candidate he accused Republicans of being soft on crime. During the 1994 midterm election campaign, President Clinton supported a "three strikes" provision in a federal crime bill. George W. Bush arrives in office with a record of presiding over a state with the second largest prison population and almost half the executions carried out in the country in 2000. The recent presidential election may have been in doubt for several weeks, but as far as criminal justice policies are concerned, it made little difference which party triumphed. By 1992, the traditional liberal agenda on crime-prevention, community development, rehabilitation, and abolition of the death penalty-had, like liberalism itself, disappeared from official political discourse, to be replaced by a bipartisan consensus of demagoguery. In 2000, Republicans and Democrats echoed each other's position: Clinton and Gore "fought for and won the biggest anti-drug budgets in history.. . . They funded new prison cells, and expanded the death penalty for cop killers and terrorists. ; .. But we have just begun to fight the forces oflawlessness and violence," called the Democrats. "We renew our call," the Republicans responded, "for a complete overhaul of the juvenile justice system that will punish juvenile offenders" and for "no-frills prisons" for adults. Meanwhile, given the rush to retribution, most people would not know that people's safety is for the most part unrelated to the number of police or severity of punishment; or

Excerpt from Anthony M. Platt "Social Insecurity: The Transformation of American Criminal justice, 1965-2000" in Social justice, vol. 28, no. I, pp. 138-55. Copyright © 2001 by Social justice.

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that most crime is not even reported to the police; or that the overall crime rate has declined over the last 20 years. The drop in the crime rate in the 1990s resulted from a complex interplay of demographic, economic, and social factors. Yet, by the early 1990s, a moral panic about crime and lawlessness was in full swing throughout the country, from Puerto Rico, where the National Guard was called upon to police housing projects, to the beaches of southern California, where curfews were imposed to prevent gang violence, and to Florida, where state politicians proposed reducing the age of execution to 14 and fining welfare mothers for their kids' crimes. Legislators at every level of government were in fierce competition to prove their devotion to criminalization and punishment. In 1994, Congress passed a $30.2 billion crime bill that funded 100,000 new police and $8.8 billion in prison construction. Between 1981 and 1999, the budget of the Department of Justice grew ninefold, from $2.35 billion to $21.09 billion. At the local level, budget-strapped city councils and boards of supervisors were hard at work expanding the justice net through legislation that criminalized "aggressive panhandling" and crammed already overcrowded jails with the homeless and chronically unemployed. Variants of "three strikes and you're out" (mandatory life imprisonment for prisoners convicted of a third felony) now operate in more than 24 states. California, whose voters overwhelmingly supported a three-strikes referendum in 1994, is currently building a maximum-security, 5,000-bed prison in Delano, the 24th new prison in the state since 1980. To avoid any accusation of being soft on crime, New York and Ohio have reduced recreational programs in prison, while Mississippi became the first state to put convicts back in striped uniforms. When it comes to biggest and best, you cannot beat the U.S. criminal justice system14 million arrests annually, and over 1.7 million employed as police, guards, and other functionaries at a total cost to taxpayers of about $7 4 billion (or about three times as much as the economic relief allotted to 4.5 million families on welfare in 1994). The number of prisoners in local, state, and federal prisons has quadrupled in the past 20 years to over two million, at a cost of about $40 billion a year. There are more than 3,500 prisoners stacked up in a waiting pattern on death row, with Texas under Governor Bush leading the nation with 37 executions in 1999 and 40 in 2000, the highest number in one year in any state in the nation's history. By 1993, almost five million people in this country were under some kind of correctional supervision (jail, prison, probation, and parole) and no signs indicate the trend is abating. While the United States has five percent of the world's population, it now has 25% of its prisoners. The U.S. has the largest, most complex, most expensive, and most punitive system of justice in the world-and the most insecurity about crime in the West, with no relief in sight. "Public safety" is an illusion; it is every individual woman, man, and child to his or her own defense. Even the police advise everybody to learn techniques of "target-hardening" and "defensible space"-organize neighborhood watches, look out for suspicious characters, and, if you are a woman, carry a whistle and mace, take classes in martial arts, and stay off the streets after dark. In other words, take personal responsibility and good luck! How did we arrive at this conjuncture of pervasive institutional security and social insecurity?

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PANICS AND PANACEAS

The political preoccupation with crime and justice in the 1990s had little to do with either. With the collapse of liberalism and the Keynesian regulatory state, the old Fordist social pact has been broken, giving rise to more coercive and exclusionary forms of social control. What posed as moral outrage about crime was in fact recognition of the weakening political authority of the state. Some 20 years of structural unemployment and subemployment in the former industrial zones, ruthless cuts in public spending, declining participation in the electoral process, plus sustained policies of malign neglect of the growing racial divide, ripped open the social fabric and created widespread anxieties about personal well-being and security. By the end of the 20th century, the entire U.S. political establishment had followed the lead of the New Right in successfully staking out this terrain of insecurity and couching its repressive measures in a populist moralism, to use Stuart Hall's term. Also, a number of leading intellectuals once again jumped aboard the bandwagon with opinions that echoed the prevailing anti-intellectualism. There is nothing particularly new about politicians, intellectuals, and the media constructing moral panics to mobilize public opinion against illusory crime waves. We have seen it before with crusades against the "dangerous classes" in the 19th century, against vice and degeneracy in immigrant communities during the Progressive Era, against delinquent mothers in the 1950s, and black "muggers" in the 1970s. Today, as often in the past, the law-and-order discourse is a thinly coded representation about race and class, an "ideological conductor" for both popular discontents and the state's inability to manage racial antagonisms. Nobody had any doubt about the racial subtext when Time magazine, in its special issue on crime in 1994, noted that "randomly, irrationally, crime pounds at the door of a slumber party. It pulls up beside a tourist at a highway rest stop. It catches the 5:33." The law-and-order campaign of the 1990s was not simply an ephemeral storm of outrage that emerged suddenly and will quickly dissipate. It was part of a profound shift that occurred in state power over several decades. If we are to have any hope of reconstructing a progressive agenda on crime and justice, we must first understand that there have been significant, qualitative changes in the structures of criminal justice, a process that is almost 40 years old and still unfolding. In the rest of this article, I will identify and discuss five key elements in this transformation. POLICING THE CRISIS

First, it was not crime but social movements and grassroots protest, plus the growing decay of urban centers, that motivated national leaders in the 1960s to modernize criminal justice bureaucracies that had developed regionally, haphazardly, and with little coordination since the 1930s. The anarchic rage unleashed by the post-civil rights ghetto revolts, as well as the obviously chaotic response to them by city police departments and National Guards, prompted the federal government and corporate elites to establish a series of investiga-

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tive commissions (including Johnson's Crime Commission, the Kerner Commission, and Eisenhower's Violence Commission). One immediate result of this attention was the availability of federal funds to stimulate far-reaching reforms and impose national standards and strategies on local and state agencies. Between 1955 and 1971, criminal justice expenditures throughout the country doubled to one percent of the GNP. The rate of increase from 1966 to 1976 was about five times what it was in the previous decade. The main beneficiary of this new largesse was the police, who by 1974 received 57% of the nation's $15 billion criminal justice budget, eight times the amount they had received 10 years earlier. From 1965 to 1975, the number of police increased by about 40% and in large cities like Los Angeles, they grew even faster. This development was shaped by the rise of a police-industrial complex that, backed by government subsidies and a heavy reliance on military expertise, introduced technology (in weaponry, communications, and information systems) and managerial techniques of command and control into policing. During the 1970s, the police were reorganized and diversified (from SWAT units to team policing), armed for every occasion, and plugged into nationally coordinated databases. There was considerable political opposition to these innovations. But by the end of the 1970s, the Left was silenced on these issues and policing had been transformed into a much more disciplined and militarized occupation, loyal to the state, but little else. Though financing of policing slowed down in the 1980s, its growth resumed in the following decade. Between 1993 and 1997, local police employment increased by about three percent per year, compared to one percent from 1987 to 1993. PRIVATIZATION

Second, during the last 35 years, privatization has come to play such an influential role in the routine operation of the criminal justice system that the line between its public and private functions has become quite blurred. Again, this is not new but its recent growth and scope are unprecedented. There has been a significant shift from the post-World War II emphasis by policymakers that crime control is best left to the experts, to today's widely held assumption that the criminal justice system can control only a very small portion of serious crime-and even this requires active "public cooperation." The privatization of criminal justice operates in the arenas of security, administration of prisons, exploitation of prison labor, contracting out of jail services, and purchase of equipment. Aided by deregulation policies and the increasing privatization of public services during the Reagan years, large corporations found lucrative contracts in the expanding criminal justice market for everything from riot batons and surveillance systems to modular prison units and electronic restraints. In the 1980s, criminal justice became a growth industry with bond measures for prison construction and new institutional designs. By the late 1990s, some five percent of prisoners nationwide were housed in private institutions, primarily in Texas and Florida. While private prisons and convict labor represent a modest example of privatization, security firms forged an indispensable niche for themselves as the class and racial divide widened in the 1980s and downtown businesses sought to put a moat around their free-

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enterprise zones. In 1969, private security firms employed some 290,000 personnel and generated about $3.3 billion in business. By 2000, private policing was an estimated $100 billion per annum business (outspending public policing by more than 70%), employing between 1.5 and 1.8 million personnel (compared to about 540,000 in the public sector), an increase of80% since 1980. The brave new world of downtown is now a complex, multifaceted operation, combining a mix of public and private cops, architectural barriers, technologies of omnipresent surveillance, and new forms of instrumental discipline adapted from Disney World and stadium rock concerts. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs there are some 30,000 guarded or gated private housing developments, and another estimated 120,000 private communities. Between 1985 and 1995, there was a fivefold increase in the number of homes with burglar alarms. The price of fortification varies, ranging from low-cost guards to expensive high-tech security, such as a computerized projectile-launching device that fires a cylinder into the bodies of unauthorized cars trying to enter Santa Clarita's Hidden Valley near Los Angeles. Some gated communities create their own police systems, such as the exclusive Frenchman's Creek in Florida's Palm Beach Gardens, which boasts a Special Tactical Operations Patrol equipped with night-vision scopes, infrared heat detectors, and high-speed vehicles. For the urban poor-stuck in unsafe, largely unprotected ghettos, barrios, housing projects, and abandoned real estate-security comes and looks cheaper: walls topped with claws, spikes, and razor-ribbon wire; fenced-in roofs and bolted doors fronted by iron gates; guard dogs and cheap guns. The privatization of justice has bought some security for the upper strata, which are willing and able to pay top dollar. For most people, however, the emphasis on security just nourishes their anxieties and feeds the short-lived illusion that well-being can be consumed with quick-fix solutions. More significantly and dangerously, this trend concedes authority over traditionally public institutions of civil society to what are essentially private armies,· close relatives of the mercenaries and vigilantes who are fast becoming indispensable to state power around the world. IMPRISONMENT REDUX

Third, as public spending on the police peaked in 1977, the fiscal and policy emphasis shifted to incarceration. The unprecedented growth of policing in the 1970s and prisons in the 1980s was financed by drastic cuts in public education, health care, and welfare, only compounding the fiscal crises facing local and state governments. When the economy expanded in the 1990s and boosted government treasuries, criminal justice lobbies and politicians ensured that prisons and police would have first call after the military on the surplus. The prison population grew throughout the 1970s (by 42%, or almost 100,000, between 1975 and 1981), but at an even faster and unprecedented rate in the 1980s. Between 1984 and 1990, there was a 70% increase in the number of guards and other personnel working in state prisons, from 144,855 to 245,750. In California, the state's prison population almost tripled in a decade ( 1983 to 1994), making prison guards into some of the best-paid public

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employees and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association into one of the most powerful unions in the state. By 1993, there were over 1.5 million adults and youth incarcerated in prisons, jails, and detention centers each day. By 1994, California, for example, was spending more on its prisons than it did to educate students in all its 20 state universities and 107 community colleges combined. In the decade of the 1990s, the prison population increased by 77%, or almost 600,000 prisoners. By 1999, for the first time more than two million people were incarcerated, a result of a significant increase in the number of parole violations, longer prison sentences, and imprisonment of drug offenders. The significance of this trend is demonstrated most dramatically in the changing rate of imprisonment: in the late 1970s, the national rate of imprisonment per 100,000 citizens was just over 100 (relatively unchanged since the 1930s). It increased to 139 by 1980 and to 210 by 1986; by 1994, it had increased more than threefold in just 20 years; and by 1998, it was 690 and still growing. Just when the rest of the West began to abandon the 19th-century penitentiary and turn to other less coercive and humiliating forms of social control, the United States resuscitated its prison system. The rate in England is 124, 45 in Japan, and 89 in the Netherlands. The U.S. now leads the world in rates of incarceration, far ahead of South Africa and between six and 12 times higher than other Western countries. Prisons in this country have always been punitive and demeaning, but they reached a new low in the 1990s. Most institutions are now so hopelessly overcrowded that they are routinely in violation of court orders mandating basic human rights. The gutting of public services during the 1980s meant that prisons and jails have become dumping grounds for people with serious health problems, such as tuberculosis and HIV -related illnesses. Also, with the closing of mental hospitals and community clinics, prisons and jails are turning into psychiatric facilities. It is estimated that one-quarter of California's prisoners, for example, suffer from some kind of serious mental illness. The deterioration of penal conditions was recently acknowledged by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which cited the United States for violations of an international treaty against torture for its use of electroshock stun belts and restraint chairs against prisoners, sexual assaults of female prisoners, detention of juveniles, and revival of chain gangs in state prisons. APARTHEID JUSTICE

Fourth, as South Africa moves closer to Western-style democracy, we are moving back to an apartheid system of justice. There is nothing particularly new about the racialization of U.S. criminal justice: witness the use oflynching in the South after Reconstruction, or the selective enforcement of opium laws against Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century, or the routine use of police brutality against black and Latino communities after World War II. Yet, in the wake of the civil rights movements and public exposes of the double standard of justice, there was an expectation that due process and the rule of law would bring some significant changes. That promise has been betrayed. In the 1990s, the return to hyper-segregation in public housing and education finds its parallel in criminal justice.

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By 1979, African Americans comprised 46% of all prisoners; in several states, they greatly exceeded the national average-60% of all prisoners in Delaware, 74% in Louisiana, 77% in Maryland, and 97% in Washington, D.C. Similar racial disparities could be found for Latinos in the Southwest and for Native Americans in states like Alaska, Montana, and North and South Dakota. African Americans bear the brunt of the law-and-order crackdown. Almost one in every three arrests now involves an African American, typically male and young. According to Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project, almost one in four black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is either in prison, jail, on probation, or parole on any given day. This means that there are more young black men in the criminal justice system than the total number of black men of all ages enrolled in college. For every one black man who graduates from college, 100 are arrested. Nationwide, African Americans make up 12% of the general population, but over 48% of prisons. The disparity is even more explicit, according to criminologist Michael Tonry, when we look at rates of confinement per 100,000. In 1973, the black rate was 368; in 1979, it was 544; and in the 1990s, it was an extraordinary 1,860 (compared to 289 for whites), a fivefold increase in 20 years. Imagine the public and political outcry if a comparable percentage of young, white men were arrested and incarcerated! CRIMINALIZING YOUTH

From the beginning of the juvenile justice system, anti-delinquency policies were marked by issues of class, race, and gender. In the late 19th century, African American youth were placed in segregated reformatories with inferior resources; Native American youth were forced into boarding schools and stripped of their cultural heritage; young women were targeted by the juvenile court for their sexual behavior; and middle-class delinquents were largely exempt from court referrals and imprisonment. This double standard has permeated juvenile justice for more than 100 years, but in the last 20 years, there has been a significant shift to the right in policies and practices. The discourse of punishment and responsibility increasingly has replaced an earlier emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation. More and more juvenile offenders are now regarded as adult criminals in-the-making. Between 1979 and 1984, the number of juveniles sent to adult prisons rose by 48%. In 1997, the U.S. Department ofJustice reported that during the previous 12 years the number of persons under 18 years of age who were sentenced to adult state prisons each year more than doubled-from 3,400 in 1985 to 7,400. The rate (per 100,000 arrested) increased from 18 to 33 in the same period. Conditions in juvenile institutions also hardened during this period. By 1985, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that two-thirds of the nation's reformatories were chronically overcrowded. In 1983 and 1984, Georgia and Oklahoma introduced "boot camps" as a form of "shock incarceration" for first-time offenders. With their emphasis on military-style discipline and physical labor, they represent a return to the regime of the 19th-century reformatory. By 1993, some 60 boot camps were established throughout the country.

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The political justification for increasingly punitive policies is that they were necessitated by the alarming growth in the juvenile crime rate. Government studies, however, suggest that "the rate of serious juvenile offending as of the mid-1990s was comparable to that of a generation ago .... [C]rime and arrest statistics provide no evidence for a new breed of juvenile superpredator." The impact of punitive policies has fallen hardest on children of color. By 1996, African American males accounted for 44% of all cases referred from juvenile to criminal courts, an increase of five percent since 1987. A federal study found that although minority youth constituted about 32% of the youth population in the country in 1995, they represented 68% of the incarcerated juvenile population. In 1996, black juveniles were referred to juvenile court at a rate more than double that for whites. In addition, once in the system, they are overrepresented in detention and reformatories. Although black youth constituted 30% of all delinquency cases processed in 1996, they represented 46% of all detained cases. By 1997, two-thirds of all incarcerated juveniles were African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. An estimated 25% of young people arrested every year are girls. Girls are more likely than boys to be arrested for running away from home, prostitution, and other "status offenses." This current preoccupation with regulating the sexual behavior of teenagers can be traced to the child-saving movement during the Progressive Era, when women's organizations initiated moral campaigns to rescue "wayward girls." During the 1970s, when Congress called for more selective enforcement of noncriminal laws, girls benefited dramatically from a decrease in incarceration. Nevertheless, a sexual double standard still operates: girls are more likely than boys to find themselves in trouble with the law for "status offenses." Race plays a decisive role in how young women get involved with the juvenile justice system. Black girls are arrested at over twice the rate for white girls, and girls of color make up about 50% of incarcerated youth. A 1993 study by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency found that African American girls had an overall one in 188 chance of being incarcerated before their 18th birthday, compared to a one in 454 chance for Latinas, and a one in 1;000 chance for white girls. The increase during the last 20 years in the imprisonment rates of adults has had an impact on families as well as adults. According to a federal study, of the nation's 72 million children and youths under the age of 17, an estimated two percent (or 1.5 million) have a parent in prison-an increase of more than 500,000 since 1991. Over 70% of these children are African Americans or Latinos. By the mid-1990s, juvenile court systems in large cities were overwhelmed by huge caseloads, insufficient resources, and under political pressure to emphasize punishment over rehabilitation. Chicago, for example, has one of the largest juvenile court systems in the country, with a staff of more than 600 and an annual budget that exceeds $20 million. On any given day, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 cases pending on each judge's docket, numbers that add up to about 75,000 delinquency, abuse, and neglect cases awaiting disposition. Caseloads in Cook County are twice the national standard, and an average case is dispensed with every 12 minutes.

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Of the 23 states that permit the execution of youthful offenders, seven (Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) have carried out executions since 1976. There have been 14 such executions in the last 10 years, more than all other countries combined that permit executions of people who commit capital crimes while under the age of 18, according to Amnesty International. According to a recent study, "the nation that gave birth to the juvenile court is the only non-Third World, post-industrial society on the planet to continue to hold out the death penalty as a viable and potential legal sanction for juvenile crime" (Watkins). CONCLUSION

In the last 35 years, there has been a qualitative transformation of the American criminal justice system. It has become increasingly influenced by national politics and policies, with less and less local accountability. Police and prisons expanded at unprecedented rates in the 1970s and 1980s, paid for primarily by drastic cuts in public health, welfare, and education. Any pretense at "rehabilitation" has been abandoned and prisoners have been transformed from an exploitable commodity into dangerous garbage, to be quarantined out of sight, but never out of mind. Privatization of criminal justice products, services, and ideas has developed at such a pace that it no longer makes any sense to analyze private and public justice as separate systems. Liberal policies with respect to youth crime, which were briefly implemented in the 1970s, have hardened into punitive segregation. And the increasing racialization of social control reinforces the conclusion that the struggle for civil rights remains very much unfinished. The results of the November 2000 elections, in which law and order played a taken-forgranted role, might suggest that the neoconservative campaign for a more authoritarian state has become hegemonic because it appears to mirror "common sense." As personal security remains as precarious as ever, and as millions are denied the full rights of citizenship and access to economic equality, what appears final and victorious is in fact quite provisional and unstable. Popular support for the politics of law and order is certainly broadbased after some 20 years of mostly unchallenged right-wing ideology that was endorsed by both political parties, but such support is also shallow and vulnerable to a critical discourse. There are several signs of insecurity in the security state. Government investigations of "racial profiling" by the New Jersey State Police and of systematic corruption and brutality by officers in Los Angeles' Rampart station have reopened a public debate about institutionalized police racism and the need for watchdog measures. Public support for the death penalty has declined to 66% from 80% in 1984, and there is growing political opposition to executions on the grounds that innocent people may die or that race and region may be determining factors. Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, admitted near the end of her term that she was "sorely troubled" by disparities in the federal death penalty; and even the rightist Supreme Court intervened last November to halt the execution in Texas of a mentally retarded prisoner less than four hours before he was to be put to death by injection.

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In California, which leads the country in prison construction, voters recently approved by 61% a statewide proposition mandating treatment in lieu of incarceration for first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders. This could possibly reduce the prison population by 36,000, according to the state's Legislative Analyst's Office. Passage of Proposition 36 has given encouragement to a coalition of organizations that are trying to stop the construction of what would be California's 34th prison. Meanwhile, at the national level, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops recently issued a statement critical of current criminal justice policies, noting that "the status quo is not really working-victims are often ignored, offenders are often not rehabilitated, and many communities have lost their sense of security." These developments are of course insufficient to turn back right-wing policies that have been three decades in the making. Nor should we expect a law-and-order president, an attorney general with a taste for Confederate culture, a conservative Supreme Court, and an opportunistic Congress to respond quickly to public concerns about the efficacy and equity of the criminal justice system. Yet they do indicate an opening in the facade of consensus and the possibility that if we revitalize a progressive agenda on crime and punishment, people will consider reasons other than crime for their deep sense of social insecurity.

THE POLITICS OF CRIME Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson

Over the past several decades, the United States has declared and waged vigorous wars against crime and drugs. Popular wisdom holds that the policy choices associated with these wars are a consequence of worsening crime and drug problems. However, the best available evidence suggests that crime has not increased significantly over the past several decades. Furthermore, although drug abuse is a serious problem for many individuals and communities, levels of illegal drug use have declined sharply since their peak in the late 1970s. The incidence of crime and drug use thus cannot account for the massive expansion of the criminal justice system. Instead, the growth of U.S. penal institutions is the result of policies aimed at "getting tough" with law breakers, especially drug offenders. In what follows, we suggest that these policy choices reflect a reframing of the crime problem in U.S. political discourse and culture. Social problems like crime may be defined or framed in a number of different ways, and these different frames have quite distinct policy implications. For example, crime may be depicted as evidence of the breakdown oflaw and order, of the demise of the traditional twoparent family, or of social and economic inequality. Crime-related issues are thus socially and politically constructed: they acquire their meaning through struggles over their interpretation and representation. Social actors- sometimes called "claims makers"-compete for the public's attention and attempt to gain acceptance for the frames they prefer. The frames that come to dominate political and media discourse have a significant impact on policy. For example, to the extent that crime is seen as a consequence of lenience within the criminal justice system, policies that "get tough" with criminal offenders seem most appropriate. Conversely, frames that depict crime as a consequence of poverty, unemployment, or inequality suggest the need for policies that address these social and economic conditions. Debates over penal policy are less influenced by criminological research than by the way crime-related problems are framed in political discourse and popular receptivity to these frames. Republished with permission of SAGE Publications, from The Politics of l11justice: Crime a11d Pu11ishme11t ill America by Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, copyright © 1999; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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In this chapter, we suggest that today's "tough-on-crime" policies reflect the success of conservative efforts to frame crime as a consequence of excessive lenience or "permissiveness" in government policy and in society more generally. Conservative politicians have worked for decades to alter popular perceptions of problems such as crime, delinquency, addiction, and poverty and to promote policies that involve "getting tough" and "cracking down." Their claims-making activities have been part of a larger effort both to realign the electorate and to define social control rather than social welfare as the primary responsibility of the state. THE ORIGINS OF THE LAW AND ORDER DISCOURSE

In the years following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, civil rights activists across the South used "direct action" tactics and civil disobedience to force reluctant southern states to desegregate public facilities. In an effort to sway public opinion against the civil rights movement, southern governors and law enforcement officials characterized its tactics as "criminal" and indicative of the breakdown of"law and order." Calling for a crackdown on the "hoodlums," "agitators," "street mobs," and "lawbreakers" who challenged segregation and Black disenfranchisement, these officials made rhetoric about crime a key component of political discourse on race relations. As the debate over civil rights moved to Washington, depictions of civil rights protest as criminal rather than political in nature reached the national stage. For example, after a reluctant President Kennedy finally expressed his willingness to press for the passage of civil rights legislation in 1963, Republicans and southern Democrats assailed him for "rewarding lawbreakers." Former Vice President Nixon also blamed civil rights leaders for the problem of crime and violence, arguing that "the deterioration of respect for the rule of law can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them." The rhetoric of "law and order" became even more salient in 1964, when Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater announced that "The abuse oflaw and order in this country is going to be an issue [in this election)-at least I'm going to make it one because I think the responsibility has to start some place." Despite the fact that crime did not even appear on the list of issues identified by the public as the nation's most important, Goldwater, a prominent civil rights opponent, made "law and order" the centerpiece of his campaign. Initially, Goldwater's plea for a federal war on crime was controversial among conservatives and liberals alike. The United States Constitution allocates most crime control duties to local and state law enforcement. Some conservatives worried that a federally led anticrime initiative would impinge on state and local government authority. Furthermore, given that most southern conservatives opposed federal civil rights legislation on the basis of their commitment to "states' rights," calls for a federal war on crime struck many as highly inconsistent. Liberals also expressed concern, arguing that the proposed federal anticrime effort would compete for funds with the Great Society programs and therefore impede efforts to implement social and racial reform.

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In sum, the introduction and construction of the crime issue in national political discourse in the 1960s reflects the claims-making activities of southern officials, presidential candidate Goldwater, and the other conservative politicians who followed his lead. Phrases like "crime in the streets" and "law and order" equated political dissent with crime and were used in an attempt to heighten opposition to the civil rights movement. Conservatives also identified the civil rights movement-and in particular, the philosophy of civil disobedience-as a leading cause of crime. Countering the trend toward lawlessness, they argued, would require holding criminals (including civil rights protesters) accountable for their actions through swift, certain, and severe punishment. The racial sub text of these arguments was not lost on the public: Those most opposed to social and racial reform were also most receptive to calls for law and order. Ironically, it was the success of the civil rights movement in discrediting more explicit expressions of racist sentiment that led politicians to attempt to appeal to the public with such "subliminally" racist messages. In subsequent years, conservative politicians also found the crime issuewith its racial subtext now firmly in place-useful in their attempt to redefine poverty as the consequence of individual failure and to discredit welfare programs and their recipients. FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE WAR ON CRIME

Throughout the 1960s, civil and welfare rights activists drew national attention to the issue of poverty. According to these activists, inequality of opportunity and racial discrimination ensured that poverty would remain widespread. To remedy this, they sought, among other things, to expand President Johnson's Great Society welfare programs. Largely as a result of their activism, the welfare rolls grew dramatically. Continued migration to northern cities from southern and rural areas meant that increasing numbers of those who received AFDC were African American women and their children. During this period, liberals also argued that crime, like poverty, was a product of blocked opportunities. For example, early in his administration, President Johnson argued that programs that attacked social inequality were, in effect, anticrime programs: "There is something mighty wrong when a candidate for the highest office bemoans violence in the streets but votes against the war on poverty, votes against the Civil Rights Act, and votes against major educational bills that come before him as a legislator." Initially, then, the Johnson administration stressed the need to address crime's "root causes" through initiatives of the welfare state.

The Conservative Attack on the Great Society By contrast, conservative opponents ofJohnson's social welfare initiatives argued that both poverty and crime were caused by a combination of bad people and excessive permissiveness. According to this argument, crime and related social problems originate in individual choice rather than in social conditions. Discussions of crime and poverty were linked in other ways as well. Those who attributed poverty to the immorality of the impoverished often identified crime and delinquency as evidence of dysfunctional lifestyles.

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Highlighting the behavioral pathologies and, especially, the criminality of the poor was an important means of transforming their image from needy to undeserving. By emphasizing street crime and by framing that problem as the consequence of bad people making bad choices, conservatives made it much less likely that members of the public would empathize with the plight of the poor and support measures to assist them. In a further attempt to marshal opposition to welfare programs, conservatives made the cultural argument that programs such as AFDC actually encouraged non-work-oriented lifestyles, thereby worsening the problems of poverty and crime. According to this argument, people will avoid work when possible and welfare programs reward this tendency. Furthermore, the mere existence of welfare encouraged people to think that they are entitled to that which they have not earned. In the mid-1960s, then, liberals and conservatives offered very different interpretations of poverty and crime-related problems. According to conservatives, social pressures such as racism, inadequate employment, lack of housing, low wages, and poor education do not cause crime. If they did, all poor people would be criminals. Instead, people are poor, criminal, or addicted to drugs because they made irresponsible or bad choices. Ironically, social programs aimed at helping the poor only encourage them to make these choices by fostering a culture of dependency and predation. By contrast, liberals argued that social conditions-especially racial inequality and limited opportunities for youth-were the "root causes" of crime, poverty, and addiction.

Defection of the Liberals By 1965, however, the liberal emphasis on the "root causes" of crime began to weaken. Only 4 months after his election, for example, President Johnson declared in an unprecedented special message to Congress his new determination to fight crime: "I hope that 1965 will be regarded as the year when this country began in earnest a thorough and effective war against crime." Toward that end, Johnson established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), an agency with a mission to support local law enforcement. To coordinate law enforcement activities aimed at fighting drugs, he also created the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now called the Drug Enforcement Agency). These initiatives represented a shift away from the view that the most important crime-fighting weapons were civil rights legislation, War on Poverty programs, and other policies aimed at promoting inclusion and social reform. Although Johnson sometimes reiterated his earlier view that social and racial reform efforts would reduce crime, administration officials and other liberal politicians now tempered this argument with the claim that these "long-term" solutions must be balanced by the "short-term" need for increased law enforcement and more efficient administration of justice. Over time, the liberal commitment to assisting the poor also attenuated. The shift in liberal political discourse also occurred in the context of a growing chorus of criticism, from scholars and activists across the political spectrum, of "rehabilitation" as a primary justification for punishment. Conservatives opposed rehabilitation on the grounds that punishment must be harsh and painful if it is to deter crime. Liberals also criticized

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policies associated with rehabilitation, arguing that the open-ended ("indeterminate") sentences designed to facilitate "correction" created the potential for the intrusive, discriminatory, and arbitrary exercise of power. Under the weight of these twin (if quite distinctive) critiques, the rehabilitative project was called into question. This development undoubtedly made it more difficult for liberal politicians to offer a clear alternative to the conservative calls to crack down on criminals and may therefore have facilitated the Democratic leap on to the law and order bandwagon.

The Republican Southern Strategy In the 1968 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon rejected social explanations of crime, arguing that the lenience of the criminal justice system was in fact to blame. Nixon therefore concluded that the "solution to the crime problem is not the quadrupling of funds for any governmental war on poverty but more convictions." The 1968 Republican Party platform concurred with Nixon's critique of liberal "permissiveness." Nixon's rhetorical emphasis on crime and other social issues was part of a political strategy aimed at weakening the electoral base of the Democratic Party-the New Deal coalition. This alliance of urban ethnic groups and the White South had dominated electoral politics from 1932 through the early 1960s. As a result of Black migration to the North, this alliance also included growing numbers of Blacks, a trend that created quite a dilemma for those interested in maintaining White southern allegiance to the party. In 1948, when President Harry Truman responded to the growing number of Black voters by pressing for a relatively strong civil rights platform, the first serious signs of strain in the Democratic partnership appeared. White southerners organized a states' rights party, and in the subsequent election, four Deep South states delivered their electoral votes to this insurgent political force. In the 1952 and 1956 elections, Democrats attempted to placate these southern "Dixiecrat" delegates and pull in disaffected White southerners. The appeasement of southern racism was not without political costs, however, and the Republican share of the Black vote increased from 21% in 1952 to 39% in 1956. In 1957 and 1960, partisan competition for the Black vote led the Democratic Congress to pass the first civil rights measures of the 20th century. Convinced he could not resurrect White southern loyalty to the Democratic party, John F. Kennedy campaigned on a civil rights platform in 1960. Once in office, however, President Kennedy sought to minimize White southern resistance within the Democratic coalition. This ambivalence about the Democratic party's loss of the White South appears to account for Kennedy's weak and delayed support for civil rights legislation. By drawing significant public attention to the plight of Blacks in the South, civil rights activists forced the national Democratic party to choose between its southern White and northern Black constituencies. The high degree of support among nonsouthern Whites for the civil rights cause prior to 1965 and the increasing numbers of African American voters eventually led the Democratic party to cast its lot with Blacks and their sympathizers. This decision, however, alienated many of those traditionally loyal to the Democratic party, particularly White southerners.

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Republican analysts began to argue that they might also find a responsive audience among White suburbanites, ethnic Catholics in the Northeast and Midwest, and White blue-collar workers and union members. Some conservative political strategists frankly admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy. New sets of Republican constituencies were thus courted through the use of racially charged "code words"-phrases and symbols that "refer indirectly to racial themes but do not directly challenge popular democratic or egalitarian ideals." The "law and order" discourse is an excellent example of such coded language, and it allowed for the indirect expression of racially charged fears and antagonisms. In the context of urban riots and reports that the crime rate was increasing, the capacity of conservatives to mobilize, shape, and express these racial fears and tensions became a particularly important political resource. The "southern strategy," as this tactic came to be known, enabled the Republican party to replace the New Deal cleavage between the "haves" and the "have-nots" with a new division between some (overwhelmingly White) working and middle class voters and the traditional Republican elite, on the one hand, and "liberal elites" and the (disproportionately African American and Latino) poor on the other. As the traditional working class coalition that buttressed the Democratic party was ruptured along racial lines, race eclipsed class as the organizing principle of American politics. By 1972, attitudes on racial issues rather than socioeconomic status were the primary determinant of voter's political self-identification.

Nixon's Federalist Dilemma After assuming office, the Nixon administration was forced to contend with the fact that, campaign pledges to the contrary notwithstanding, the federal government has little authority to deal directly with "street crime" outside of Washington, DC. Administration insiders concluded that the only thing they could do was "exercise vigorous symbolic leadership." They therefore waged war on crime by adopting "tough-sounding rhetoric" and pressing for largely ineffectual but highly symbolic legislation. Not fooled, journalists began to report that despite Nixon's tough talk, the crime rate was still rising. Nixon administration officials attempted to resolve this dilemma in several ways. First, Nixon requested-and received-a massive increase in LEAA funds to support local law enforcement. Second, new statistical artifacts were created in the hope that these would permit a more flattering assessment ofNixon' s capacities as a crime fighter. One of the more notorious of these showed that the rate of increase in the crime index was decreasing. Most important, however was the administration's identification of narcotics control-for which the federal government has significant responsibility-as a crucial anticrime weapon. To explain and legitimate this new antidrug strategy, administration officials argued that drug addicts commit the majority of street crimes to pay for their habits. The evidence marshaled to support this claim was quite problematic. For example, in a well-publicized speech in 1971, Nixon claimed that drug addicts steal over $2 billion worth of property per year. According to the FBI, however, the total value of all property stolen in the United States that year was $1.3 billion. Despite these contradictions, fighting drugs became a crucial weapon in the war on crime.

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The Reagan Years Despite the centrality of the law and order discourse to the GOP's electoral strategy, the salience of the crime and drug issues declined dramatically following President Nixon's departure from office. Neither (Republican) President Ford nor (Democratic) President Carter mentioned crime-related issues in their State of the Union addresses or took much legislative action on those issues. As a result of this inattention, both the crime and drug issues largely disappeared from national political discourse in the latter part of the 1970s. During and after the 1980 election campaign, however, the crime issue once again assumed a central place on the national political agenda. Candidate and President Ronald Reagan, following the trail first blazed by his conservative predecessors, lavished attention on the problem of "crime in the streets" and promised to enhance the federal government's role in combating it. Once in office, Reagan instructed the new Attorney General, William French Smith, to establish a task force to recommend "ways in which the federal government can do more to combat violent crime." Because state and local governments are largely responsible for identifying and prosecuting conventional street crime, however, the administration's desire to involve the federal government in combating violent crime was problematic. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration began to pressure federal law enforcement agencies to set aside their focus on white-collar offenses and shift their attention to street crime instead. In the ensuing years, President Reagan frequently returned to the topic of crime, striking all the now familiar conservative themes. Time and again, for example, he rejected the notion that crime and related social ills have socioeconomic causes. According to Reagan, "the American people have lost patience with liberal leniency and pseudo intellectual apologies for crime." Instead, Reagan argued, the new "political consensus" emphasized free will: Choosing a career in crime is not the result of poverty or of an unhappy childhood or of a misunderstood adolescence; it is the result of a conscious, willful choice made by some who consider themselves above the law, who seek to exploit the hard work and, sometimes, the very lives of their fellow citizens. Furthermore, he asserted, the reality of human nature is such that only the threat of punishment will deter criminal behavior. Reagan also echoed his conservative predecessors on the putative relationship between crime and welfare. The naive view that "blocked opportunities" cause crime, Reagan suggested, led liberals to believe that the "war on poverty" would solve the problem. In fact, it is the government's attempt to ameliorate poverty-not poverty itself-that causes crime. President Reagan thus argued that welfare programs such as AFDC not only "keep the poor poor" but also accounted, along with lenient crime policies, for the rising crime rate. In fact, studies investigating the relationship of welfare and crime find that greater welfare spending is associated with lower-not higher-levels of crime. Despite this, the argument that welfare causes crime was used, as it had been by welfare opponents in the 1960s, in an effort to legitimate reductions in welfare spending and the adoption of increasingly punitive crime and drug policies.

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Finally, President Reagan argued that the government's functions had been distorted by his liberal predecessors. The state would be on more legitimate constitutional grounds and would more effectively "help the poor," he suggested, by scaling back public assistance programs and expanding the criminal justice system and law enforcement. Reagan thus articulated the central premise of the conservative project of state reconstruction: Public assistance is an "illegitimate" state function; policing and social control constitute its real "constitutional" obligation. The conservative mobilization of crimerelated issues was thus a key component of the effort to legitimate the shift from the "welfare state" to the "security state," a shift that is illustrated in Figure 26.1. FROM THE WAR ON CRIME TO THE WAR ON DRUGS

When it came time to translate its harsh rhetoric into policy initiatives, the Reagan administration faced the same dilemma as the Nixon administration: in the United States, fighting conventional street crime is primarily the responsibility of state and local government. Once again, the identification of drugs as a crucial cause of crime partially resolved this dilemma. As a result of the Reagan administration's renewed interest in battling drugs, federal law enforcement agencies were able to stave off the General Accounting Office's proposed "across the board" budget cuts. For example, between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug monies increased from $8 million to $95 million, and the budget of the DEA increased from $215 to $321 million. By contrast, funding for agencies with responsibility for drug treatment, prevention, and education was sharply curtailed. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million between 1981 and 1984, and

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antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million. By 1985, 78% of the funds allocated to the drug problem went to law enforcement; only 22% went to drug treatment and prevention. In sum, the Reagan administration's emphasis on the need for a tough approach to crime facilitated the emergence of the "war on drugs" and shaped the nature of that campaign. In particular, its analysis of the causes of the drug problem reflected the conservative emphasis on bad people rather than dangerous social conditions. "Narco-traffickers" and "drug pushers" were evil individuals motivated solely by greed. Drug users were also individually culpable. Although public opinion has not been irrelevant to the development of federal drug policy, the "get tough" approach to drugs was not primarily a response to public attitudes. As of 1981, only 3% of the American public believed that cutting the drug supply was the most important thing that could be done to reduce crime; 22% felt that reducing unemployment would be most effective. Furthermore, the percentage of poll respondents identifying drug abuse as the nation's most important problem had dropped from 20% in 1973 to 2% in 1974 and hovered between Oo/o and 2% untill982. Thus, public opinion polls do not indicate an upsurge in concern about drugs prior to Reagan's declaration of war, nor is there evidence of widespread support for the idea that fighting crime and drugs through tough law enforcement was the best solution to these problems.

The Escalation of the War on Drugs Political and media attention to "the drug issue" intensified significantly in the summer of 1986. In part, this surge in attention to the drug issue was a response to the cocaine-related deaths of athletes Len Bias and Don Rogers and the increasing visibility of crack cocaine. The claims-making activities of federal officials also played a key role. In October 1985, the DEA sent Robert Stutman to serve as Director of its New York City office. Stutman made a concerted effort to draw journalists' attention to the spread of crack. "The agents would hear me give hundreds of presentations to the media as I attempted to call attention to the drug scourge," Stutman wrote later. "I wasted no time in pointing out [the DEA's] new accomplishments against the drug traffickers and using those cases to illustrate the full scope of the drug abuse problem." This campaign appears to have been quite effective. The number of drug-related stories appearing in the New York Times increased from 43 in the latter half of 1985 to 220 in the second half of 1986. Other media outlets soon followed suit. In an attempt to ensure that their party was perceived as taking action on the drug issue, Democrats in the House began putting together legislation calling for increased antidrug spending. Congressional Republicans warned Reagan that unless he came up with more specific antidrug proposals-and quickly-they would be compelled to endorse the $2 to $3 billion bill promoted by the Democratic leadership. And so they were. In September 1986, the House passed legislation that allocated $2 billion to the antidrug crusade for 1987, required the participation of the military in narcotics control efforts, imposed severe penalties for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine, and allowed the death penalty

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