The Panopticon Overrules Active Fire

The death of Renee Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026 was unnecessary. As the subsequent news stories show, we live in the Panopticon, a society of all-seeing authority. Theorized 1785-1791 by Jeremy Bentham as a design for prisons, the conceptual model was expanded by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). The "authority" need not be legalistic, but can be (and often is) social. Cameras are everywhere. Therefore, the police practices of active engagement and relentless pursuit are antiquated and largely irrelevant.

Criminologists Marcus Felson and Lawrence Cohen published their "routine activity theory" in 1979. It found common acceptance and, of course, criticism. The elements of crime are a (1) willing perpetrator (2) an available victim and (3) the absence of a capable guardian. The theories of community policing rest in part on the fact that the "capable guardian" might need only to be a grandmother in a rocking chair on the front porch as a visible deterrent, 

The known failures of eye witness testimony are now countered by the plurality of immediate independent recordings. 

In 2006, while earning an associate's degree in criminal justice, I was working the night shift as a campus security officer at Washtenaw Community College. My partner had completed his bachelor's at Eastern Michigan University and had returned to WCC for their MCOLES academy. (The standards are commonly required and are TCOLE here in Texas.) I had viewed a training video from the Los Angeles police department on relentless pursuit. You are on patrol with your partner and you pull up to a jewelry store being robbed. The criminals open fire. Your partner goes down. They jump in their car and drive off. What do you do next? LAPD said that you pursue. You call for medical attention for your partner, but you do not stay there. LAPD advocated relentless pursuit. My partner's voice was bitter. "Thanks, Mike. Now I know where you stand." But what about relentless pursuit? I asked. "Look," he replied. "In this day you cannot harm any protective service, not even a school crossing guard, and not have every law enforcement agency after you. Where are you going to go?" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good

That underscores another fact about punishment as a deterrent to crime. Punishment has three aspects: swift, certain, and severe. All that counts is "certain." If a perpetrator is conscious of the fact that they will be punished, if certainty is assured, the crime does not happen. Yes, there are exceptions, especially when emotions are high in the heat of the moment. But premeditated crime is prevented by the certainty of punishment: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Severity is not just unimportant: it is counter-productive because publicity of severe punishment (public hangings, for example) only cause more violence later as the witnesses are affected by the violent event.

That fact explains so-called copycat crimes and the repetition and expansion of violent acts that are widely publicized, such as shootings at schools, or spontaneous protests. Violence becomes normal. 

The normalization of violence was also factor in the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who as of this date was identified as the officer who killed Renee Good. Ross began his career as a soldier in Iraq, just as very many other police officers have served in the armed forces before wearing a badge. The problem is that the civilian police perceive themselves and then become an occupying army surrounded by a hostile populace.    

Community policing and community courts are common remedies offered by academic criminologists and sociologists. As with Granny in the rocker, there is empirical truth underlying the theories. One problem with community policing is that it makes everyone an informant for the State. This is the underlying power of the totalitarian regime which rules because the populace practices habitual self-enforcement. Things are quiet because there is no liberty.

Previously on Necessary Facts

Eye Witness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project 

Alternatives to Prison Part 3 of 3 

Integrating Criminologies 

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops 

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Sociology is a Science 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

 

Crimes of Conscience: Antigone and Stealing from the Public Library

The libraries at the University of Texas at Austin shelve 83 volumes by Ayn Rand. Of them, 30 have been stolen. Of those, eight are marked in the catalog as “Missing.” In other words, they left the shelves without being checked out. The others were just not returned by the last borrowers who effectively got away with their crimes.  I identify these facts as evidence of a deeper political problem, first posited 2500 years ago by Sophocles in his drama, Antigone.  More recent, and known well to admirers of the works of Ayn Rand, are the trial scenes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  Not so famous, but cutting more deeply into the fabric of law is Ayn Rand’s courtroom drama, Night of January 16^th. The question is whether or not you have a duty to obey the law.

It is important to understand, first, that Ayn Rand was opposed to duty.

The meaning of the term “duty” is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest. – “Causality versus Duty,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It?

Obviously, for some admirers of the works of Ayn Rand, the prospect of a free copy of one of her books was stronger than any irrational duty to the public order. However, it is also true that Rand’s dictum above must be placed in its proper context because she was far more eloquent in her condemnation of “looters” and substantially incisive in her praise for their antithesis, the producers.  Moreover, the moral and political aspects of her philosophy of Objectivism were primarily about the positive virtues of production, creation, and active reason, against which are revealed the negative, destructive, and empty actions of the irrational and non-productive.

The essential question here is: “What justifies stealing from the public library?” It leads to a far wider set of questions and actions. I assert that if it is acceptable to steal Atlas Shrugged from the library, then it is acceptable to take a tree from a public park, or a computer from city hall, or the President’s limousine from the White House.  And, ultimately, it would be acceptable to take anything from anyone who accepted any public benefit, whether a social security check, “land bank” payments for not growing crops, sending their children to public schools, or (of course) borrowing books from the public library (and returning them).

Some libertarians claim that it is moral to steal from the library, or any other government entity, because their assets all come from taxation, and taxation is theft. When you steal a library book, you only take back what was yours in the first place. This also applies by extension to stealing back what was yours from any business that benefits from government subsidies, whether General Motors or Tesla, Inc., a local hospital, or the florist whom you spot coming from the library.

Moving right along, for a philosophical Objectivist (or simply an “admirer” of the works of Ayn Rand), such justifications extend to their irrational mystical altruist collectivist neighbors. The theory is that anyone who goes to church or votes for Democrats is fair game, especially when the risks are very low.  Your neighbors who are tax looters or welfare moochers stole from you first; you are just taking back what was yours. If you can get away with it, why not?

Among the many accurate and precise tools of logic that Ayn Rand employed in her expositions was identifying the error of context dropping. In terms of the social consequences of personal morality, it is the error of moral equivalency. It also a powerful tool in Objectivism that moral success begins in metaphysics and epistemology.  So the moral failing of the looter of the library begins with errors in metaphysics and epistemology. Ayn Rand called it “reifying the zero” i.e., attempting to make a “something” out of nothing.  (See “Axiomatic Concepts” in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Stealing a copy of Atlas Shrugged from the library is not the moral equivalent of buying one from a bookstore.

The primary concern is not whether the owner of the bookstore sends her children to a government-subsidized daycare center, but where you got the money with which you bought the book.  If you did not buy the book at all, if there was no earned money exchanged, then the failure was yours long antecedent to the gross action of mere acquisition of the book.

It is a perhaps curious fact, revealing the nature of the subject, that generally and historically philosophy is about the individual: you and your place in the universe. Even the weak ones and bad ones attempt some answers to the same question: How do I know what to do? We know many exceptions: Plato’s Republic, the social priesthood of Auguste Comte, Marxism-Leninism, …  But they stand out as exceptions within the 2600-year history of philosophy. Ayn Rand consciously built her philosophy of Objectivism to be the ultimate expression of that discovery: your best experience of your own life.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the heroine was so outraged by the desecration of her brothers’ bodies, whatever their crimes against the city, that she disobeyed the commands of the tyrant Creon, in full acceptance of the consequences. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark is prepared to go to prison if he  fails in his appeal to the creative spirit within each of the jurors.  In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden refuses to hand over his metal and tells the government that he cannot stop their trucks and guns if they come to take it. And he is willing to go to prison rather than to acquiesce in the theft of his property.  In Night of January 16^th Karen André has committed or conspired in so many crimes that the play does not even come close to a bill of indictment. She makes no appeal to a higher law or a greater good or a better morality. She does not explain herself at all: no outsider’s opinion is consequential to her.

On the other hand, the hooligan who steals a copy of Atlas Shrugged from the public library makes no public statements, issues no manifesto, and stands not in defiance of authority but slinks away with loot.  It might be informative for a bold privateer to wheel several shelving carts out the door while distributing leaflets condemning the philosophical and economic fallacies of “public goods.” (And when the campus police arrive, he should have a clever cloaking device unless he intends to go to jail for his beliefs.) But that is not the case. Instead, other people whose taxes have paid for goods and services are deprived of the benefit of their bargain by a third party. We call that theft.

"Rand fans" are not the only people given to "crimes of conscience." The Roman republican martyr Cato the Younger (Marcus Porcius Cato, Uticensis) became a symbol for Christians and ultimately republicans of the Enlightenment. But, again, Cato the Younger took his own life rather than submit to Gaius Julius Caesar. It remains that the jihadi who kill themselves while they kill others in suicide attacks claim obedience to a higher law, also. But their actions are not  morally equivalent because the consequences are not morally equivalent.

Do you have a duty to obey the law? In the explicit sense identified by Ayn Rand, that a duty is an obligation that supersedes self-interest, you do not. But that begs the question: What is self-interest? Rand devoted herself to answering that question. If you do not understand why productively earning the money with which to buy a book is in your self-interest while the easy pickings of the public library are not, you need to do some reading.  It is a common error in our common education that we want even our “story problems” to be short, when in fact, the most important aspects of living well require more than a slogan to explain.

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Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics  

Alternatives to Prison (Part 1 of 3)

Introduction:  For almost 200 years, the treatment and punishment of convicted criminals was defined by blending the Pennsylvania System and the New York System.  And, of course, it did nothing to remediate either the offender or the harms.  People came out of prison worse than when then went in.  They re-offended.  And their victims often were the same people they hurt before.  It is a cliché in corrections that prisoners are returned to within 100 yards of where they were arrested.  However, we have made progress.  Community corrections, moral reconation therapy, and reintegrative shaming are among the new modes that provide successful outcomes.

Failure Modes

Historically, transgressors were exiled.  The modern prison solves that problem with topology: we lock them in, not out.  However, the modern prison system does not have deep roots in history.  Until America in the 18^th century, prisons were only for holding people until they were brought forward for punishment.  Some people might never leave prison, but incarceration was not the intended punishment for the crime. 

The modern prison began in 1788 with the Penitentiary House of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia.  The purpose was specifically to reform the penitent.  The intention to remake and rehabilitate the offender led to the construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829.  Separating convicts into solitary cells was a radical idea, consistent with the social theories of the Enlightenment.  Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764) launched the modern study of penology within criminology.  Beccaria argued against capital punishment and torture. His ideas were incidentally consistent with Quaker theory on salvation.  For them, solitary confinement was supposed to allow the penitent to come to terms with God.

However, an alternate model also informed penology:  convicted offenders should live and work communally under close supervision coupled with physical punishment for non-compliance.  That was the Auburn System created in New York following the appointment of Elam Lynds as warden of the prison in 1821. When flogging finally was prohibited in 1847, different punishments were invented. The striped uniform was another innovation in the Auburn System.

From chain gangs and work farms to separate facilities for low, medium, and high-risk offenders, prisons in America achieved little except to keep some people out of the sight of others.  Generally, prisoners themselves controlled their daily routines, usually with the most violent preying on anyone less aggressive.  Illegal drugs passed into prisons through corrupt guards.

Radicals and Reformers

Following the intellectual ferment of the 1960s, new methods for remediating harms slowly advanced within criminology; and they have found some success.  The basic assumptions of their sociology often are informed by some school of socialism, whether Marxist, neo-Marxist, or postmodern.  For them, crime is a response to oppression. For the classic Marxist, economic exploitation reduces the proletariat to criminal activity.  In point of fact, we have found that when the economy improves, crime goes up.  The current long recession (from 2001 to the present) has seen crime go down. 

However, their point is well-made because the outcomes of criminal action are different for different classes. And class correlates with race, though correlation is not cause.  See Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class by Lawrence O. Graham (HarperCollins, 1999).  When suburban kids are caught shoplifting, or shooting out streetlights with a pellet gun, or using drugs, their outcomes are different from that of their inner city cohorts. Suburban offenders receive many of the treatments and remediations outlined here.  The poor get prison. 

Moreover, we all offend.  Newt Gingrich once said that for most Americans, the posted speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity.  The only relevant questions are: Whom did you hurt? And what are you going to do about it?

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Reintegrative Shaming was developed by John Braithwaite based on his experience as an administrative regulator of pharmaceutical firms in Australia.  It was quite simple.  If you go in with a warrant, you only meet the lawyers.  If you sit down for tea with the plant manager, you gain voluntary compliance.  “Sitting down for tea” meant getting the manager to acknowledge out loud that he knew about the violation, and knew that it was wrong. Then, he would promise to fix it, and usually did. 

Braithwaite followed those encounters with research into the anthropology of offense.  He found many examples from history and modern first peoples where the offender was brought back into the community after admitting the transgression and apologizing to the victim, making restoration where possible. 

Sometimes, it is not possible.  An Eskimo man killed his wife; and when her brother complained about that, he killed her brother.  So, his friends invited him to go hunting.  Four went out; three came back.  (Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1967. The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.).  Usually, the outcomes are better for everyone because most harms are smaller than murder. 

Even though less than homicide, assault is a violent crime.  Victims suffer multiple traumas, deeper than the physical wounds and scars.  Howard Zehr is a photographer.  He created Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims (Good Books, 2001).   Zehr presented the portraits and the stories of 39 courageous victims of violent crime.  Not all of the encounters brought closure.  In two, the attackers continued to mock their victims.  In one, the subject was a man whose son was killed in prison.  For three dozen other cases, both the victim and the offender found that they could overcome their suffering.

Community Corrections

The Midtown Manhattan Community Court opened in 1993. The Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn opened in the summer of 1998.  Red Hook’s success has served as a model for many other efforts.  Greg Berman invested two years of daily work, laying the social foundation for the center before it opened.  He met with groups.  He met with individuals. His salary came from a grant by the New York City Housing Authority to the Center for Court Innovation and the King County District Attorney’s Office.

The Red Hook court brings offenders and victims together.  The usual harms are domestic violence and shoplifting.  They also get public indecency cases when men are caught urinating in an alleyway.  Their theory on that is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime.   Every transgression harms the community.

In cases of personal crime, perpetrators confront their victims, apologize, and make whatever restitution is possible.  For offenses against the public order, the guilty apologize to an appropriate authority, acknowledge the harm they caused, and perform community service work. 

In many community corrections programs house arrest with electronic tethering is a common judicial sentence, especially for otherwise non-violent offenders such as the habitual drunk driver.  Community programs find work for them.  Their whereabouts are monitored.  It costs less for us, and keeps them integrated to the community.

Self-Awareness

That assailants are also victims is a fact of crime.  In the first place, a police investigation often reveals that the victim was only the last person to get hurt the most.  Whether a fight in a bar or a feud between neighbors, they had a personal interaction that played out over time.  Either one could have withdrawn completely, but neither did. 

Domestic assault is different than that.  There, a lifelong violent offender finds a lifelong victim of violence.  Typically, both grew up in abusive homes, as did their parents.  That is how they learned their roles.  To them, it seems perfectly normal. 

Moral Reconation Therapy is one of the most successful treatment programs for domestic and drug abuse cases.  Not surprisingly, they go together, especially with the drug of choice is alcohol; and MRT is also employed for treating drunk drivers.  MRT is the work of Gregory L. Little and Kenneth D. Robinson.  Launched in 1988, it was based on five years of research in the Tennessee prison system.  Research continues across problem areas and the many multi-year follow-up studies on recidivism place it high on the list of evidence-based therapies. 

The process is simple.  Following a tested and proven workbook, counselors direct clients in small groups to explore their own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.  For them self-awareness is a new experience.  Ayn Rand most cogently pointed out that the root of all evil is the failure to choose to think.  Thinking is not automatic.  It is volitional.  People blank-out, evade, and repress unpleasant thoughts, especially about themselves.  For a child, it does not take many years for them to become fogged into a reactive life of the immediate present.  Non-violent people become dysfunctional neurotics.  The violent ones become aggressive criminals.  Self-awareness cures that in about half the cases.

For over thirty years, MRT and other evidence-based practices typically have had success rates in the mid-fifties percent.  The National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov) is part of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (http://www.samhsa.gov).

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Alternatives to Prison (Part 3 of 3)

Laissez-faire Criminology is my assertion (on this blog) that you do not need to react to every wrong or harm, either against yourself or someone else.  Defining “human” as “rational animal” and given that violent offenders lack self-awareness, they cannot be considered human.  Self-righteous punishment of a criminal is no more meaningful than scolding a coyote or attempting to corral a tornado.  (Indeed, prisons are nothing if not corrals full of tornados.)  Sometimes the best thing you can do is to cut your losses and mind your own business.

Private treaties are one way that corporations deal with white collar crime.  Of all the harms that individuals visit on each other, white collar crime perfectly matches the theory of the rational actor.  White collar criminals are planfully competent.  They are privileged, educated, economically comfortable.  Therefore, the remediations are individualized and based on profit.

 “In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...
“While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact...  In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions.  In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types.”
(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988. The Hallcrest Report I and II, by William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, et al., Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 1985 and 1990.)
 

When Nothing Works

Robert Martinson is famous for “What works? Questions and answers about prison reform” (The Public Interest 35.2; 1974: 22-54).  His research was immediately recast as “nothing works.”  Martinson found that every attempt at rehabilitation in prison had failures, often in greater proportion to their successes.  Successful treatments tended to work only for various minorities, often poorly identified or defined. 

Eventually, the claim that “nothing works” generated another response.  Among very many articles, consider:

·       “Beyond ‘What Works?’ A 25-year Jubilee Retrospective of Robert Martinsons Famous Article,” by Rick Sarre, in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 34: 38-46.

·       “Does Correctional Treatment Work? A Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed Meta-Analysis” by D.A. Andrews, Ivan Zinger, et al., Criminology, Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages 369–404, August 1990. 

Reduce your problem population as much as you want, eventually you will find individuals for whom nothing we know of will solve their problems.  What do you do with the unregenerate?

Perhaps we should just kill them.  We would save ourselves the trouble and expense.  Consider that we know that a child who is cruel to animals grows up to be a violent offender.  Would it be right to kill a child for abusing a family pet?  Ideally, the offender would be remediated and re-integrated with one of the other responses.

The therapies and remedies discussed above may not work in all cases.  Ultimately, we are left with an intractable problem. We build very many small spaces for internal exile.  In Russia, they have all of Siberia for internal exile.  That may remain the best solution for the worst cases.

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Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

Recent stories touted by Glenn Beck and flashing across the patriotic blogosphere tell of egregious transgressions by city police officers.  Put your search engine to work on "police violence" or "police corruption" and like the paradox of the marching Chinese, the stories will continue to appear faster than you can read them all.  But the fact is that typically a police officer candidate submits about 40 pages of background in an application. After that investigation, after passing an accredited academy, and after probationary periods and required reviews, some sheep stray from the fold.  Is it the individuals, or the system, or something deeper?

My first class in criminology in 2005 was "Ethics for Criminal Justice" at Washtenaw Community College.  Initially, the syllabus said that we were going to look at police corruption in New Orleans, but Hurricane Katrina hit, and our instructor wanted to give the city time to recover.  The irony is inescapable.

In 2008, completing a bachelor of science in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a required senior class in police organization.  For both that first and last class my research into police corruption found that it is known everywhere, and some places have more of it than others. That opens a sociological or anthropological investigation: why do cultures differ? Physical environment and population can be similar, but outcomes can be pleasantly or horribly disparate.  While police corruption is known in Minneapolis their police force seems to suffer less from moral failures. 

We know at the individual level that female officers write more traffic tickets than do male officers.  Females also have statistically fewer complaints lodged against them by the public.  Education also makes a difference: officers with college education (2-year or 4-year) write more tickets than those with just high school diplomas.  Also, educated officers have fewer complaints lodged against them.  It would seem that the ideal police force would be comprised largely of women with college degrees. 



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Systemic Injustice
Employee Theft
Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?
A Forensics Bibliography

The Roots of Poverty

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote: “To seek 'causes' of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”

As a card-carrying criminologist I study the sociology of crime.  Some claim that poverty causes crime.  It may.  But, others claim, also rightfully, that crime causes poverty.  More cogently, in many instances, the criminal mind-set is the mentality of poverty: criminals are creatures of convenience and habit.  At least, some of them are.  (In a paper on criminological metatheory on my website here, I list the 30 or more theories that explain the 30 or more causes of 30 or more kinds of criminal actions.) 

Overfilled dumpster at my apartment complex.

In Goethe's Faust Part 1, Mephistopheles says: "Ich bin der Geist der verneint."  (I am the spirit that negates.)  The devil cannot create, only destroy.  Criminals are creatures of convenience and habit. Entrepreneurs seek new solutions to previously unknown problems.  They find and reduce inefficiencies.  An entrepreneur will invest all the resources available to make a dream come true.  A manager will not go over budget.  A criminal will not make the effort.  (In the Bible, this is the Parable of the Talents.) 

An empty dumpster was only 30 meters away.

I walked the short path between buildings to the next parking lot and found the dumpster there empty. Anyone who threw the next bag of garbage (or left that dead sofa) could have made the same small effort.  But it was too much work.  In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand painted Starnesville, the town abandoned by its productive citizens.  Those who remained had no time, no energy, no interest in effort. 

The distance is maybe 100 feet, 30 meters.

In fact, there were four or five available dumpters, all within a few hundred feet. 

Sociologists claim that when rich people commit crimes, it is because rich people are crooks; and when poor people commit crimes, it is because rich people are crooks.  The easy claim is that crime among the poor is a response to their oppression.  They retaliate against the ruling class by victimizing each other. At least, that is what I was taught in four years of university education in sociology, 2006-2010.  Myself, as an advocate of laissez faire capitalism, and a defender of so-called robber barons, I can see the landlord as the seamy underbelly of property.  Edison invented.  The landlord only holds.  And yet, the owners of this property invest a lot of money in maintenance.  And it is too little appreciated by the poor criminals who live here.


Maintenance worker picks up around the site.

Every day, the grounds crew picks up trash.  They reload the dumpsters, breaking down discarded furniture.  Contractors come in once a week to sweep the grounds, collecting leaves, mowing the lawn - not much of that with central Texas's drought.... but still they come...

The complex is perhaps 30 years old.  The property management firm owns a range of real estate investments in California, Texas, and other places.  The shrubs are trimmed decoratively.  When we moved in, my wife said, "We have real holly!" And, indeed, we do.  But be that as it may ....


Someone works pretty hard to do this.

No matter how much work the owner invests in the property, those who have no ownership stake take no ownership care.  Look closely under that bush in the foregound and you may notice the beer can.  They are all over the place every morning.  In a previous post, I spoke of the scavengers who come for the aluminum.  In a fascinating display of inherent respect, they do not actually walk the grounds.  I wish they would.  They only come to the dumpsters.  They do not want to intrude on the grounds.  If only all the residents here showed the same sense of propriety and respect and self-respect.



Under the round bush in the foreground,
a Modelo beer can
which someone made an effort to crush
but not to discard.

And yet, the problem is complicated and nuanced.  It has texture.  Today, a woman from an apartment along my walkway was vacuuming out her SUV.  I am fairly confident that she did not toss the beer can under the bush.  This morning, I met my neighbor below.  He has a lunch wagon, a converted pickup.  Every day, he gets up, cooks, loads his truck and goes off to construction sites.  I doubt that the beer cans are his.

BudLite can tossed on the ground, not in a dumpster.

Lacking an objective basis for morality, earlier advocates of capitalism only could say that the millionnaire has as much right to his wealth as the laborer to his hundreds. In the 20th century Ayn Rand delineated productive workers at any income from the looters and moochers.  Common laborers or uncommon inventors alike are to be contrasted against those those who look to Washington or to heaven because they cannot look within themselves to find their motivation.

Like poverty, crime has no 'cause.'  It is the ground state, the default, the lack-of-something.  In metaphysics, we say that "nothing is not a special kind of something."  So, too, in ethics, is poverty not a different kind of productivity.