Archive for January, 2011

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Which Cities Do Best (and Worst) at Breaking the Poverty-Violence Link?

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

The Milwaukee Police Department recently supplied the members of the Fire and Police Commission (including yours truly) with some quite interesting data on violent crime rates within the nation’s 50 poorest cites.  As one might expect, the very poorest cities on the list generally tend to have the worst rates of violent crime.  The correlation, however, is far from absolute.  Several cities on the list impressively over-perform or under-perform relative to their poverty rates.  To focus on this, I present below a much simplified version of the table prepared by the MPD, which is based on 2009 data.

Poverty Rank Violent Crime Rank
Detroit, Michigan 1 2
Cleveland, Ohio 2 7
Buffalo, New York 3 6
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 4 21
St. Louis, Missouri 5 1
Miami, Florida 6 14
Memphis, Tennessee 7 3
Cincinnati, Ohio 8 13
Philadelphia 9 11
Newark, New Jersey 10 24
Toledo, Ohio 11 18
New Orleans, Louisiana 12 29
Tuscon, Arizona 13 35
Dallas, Texas 14 28
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania 15 23
Fresno, California 16 38
Minneapolis, Minnesota 17 20
St. Paul, Minnesota 18 31
Columbus, Ohio 19 33
El Paso, Texas 20 49
Atlanta, Georgia 21 15
Stockton, California 22 9
Chicago, Illinois 23 n/a
Phoenix, Arizona 24 45
Baltimore, Maryland 25 5
Houston, Texas 26 17
Bakersfield, California 27 36
Indianapolis, Indiana 28 12
Santa Ana, California 29 47
Los Angeles, California 30 37
San Antonio, Texas 31 43
Tulsa, Oklahoma 32 19
Long Beach, California 33 34
Tampa, Florida 34 32
Sacramento, California 35 26
Denver, Colorado 36 42
Ft. Worth, Texas 37 41
Corpus Christi, Texas 38 27
New York, New York 39 44
Austin, Texas 40 46
Washington, D.C. 41 10
Oklahoma City 42 25
Louisville, Kentucky 43 39
Lexington, Kentucky 44 40
Nashville, Tennessee 45 16
Oakland, California 46 4
Boston, Massachusetts 47 22
Aurora, Colorado 48 48
Kansas City, Missouri 49 8
Albuqueque, New Mexico 50 30

So which cities do best and worst?

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Posted in Crime Data, Milwaukee | 1 Comment »

Reports of Sexual Victimization in Prison on the Rise

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Earlier this week, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released its latest data on sexual victimization in prison. The research covers four different types of sexual victimization over the years 2005-2008: nonconsensual sexual acts, abusive sexual contact, staff sexual misconduct, and staff sexual harassment.

The trends are not good: reported incidents of sexual victimization in prison increased by 21 percent from 2005 to 2008.  Most of the increase (67 percent) was due to a rise in inmate-on-inmate abusive sexual contact (fondling-type conduct).

Even with the increase, the overall numbers are not as high as I would have guessed – just 3.8 per 1,000 prison inmates in 2008.  (If federal prisons are excluded, the number rises to 4.2 per 1,000.)

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Posted in Prison Administration | No Comments »

Spend More on Police, Not Prisons

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Jonathan Simon has a new post on his blog reacting to the Arizona shootings and the recent wave of police killings elsewhere.  There is a lot to chew on, but I would particularly emphasize this point:

[T]his is clearly not a time that governments should be continuing to cut police forces which has been happening due to the severe state and local fiscal crisis. At least in some locales it is pretty clear that more and better policing has helped to drive down crime. Keep in mind that unlike prison systems which have expanded enormously since the 1970s, police forces have increased only a fraction. And unlike prison spending, an expanded police force can address a wide range of community needs other than investigating crimes. As community problem solvers they can add enormously both to our efforts to keep neighborhoods safer from all kinds of routine threats and they are also a major factor in the resiliency of a community facing a catastrophic blow (as we saw all too clearly in NYC on September 11, 2001, and all too clearly did not see in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005).

It is unfortunate that, as we have allocated dramatically increasing resources to the war on crime for the past forty years, those new resources have gone more to prisons than to police.  From a deterrence standpoint, certainty of punishment is more important than severity.  Plus, as Jonathan points out, police are a much more flexible social resource than prisons — they can do a lot more for a community than just apprehend and detain criminals.

Posted in Politics of Crime and Punishment | No Comments »

California Parole May Be Broken, But Federal Courts Cannot Fix It

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

By some curious coincidence, at about the same time that Jonathan Simon was explaining in his Barrock Lecture yesterday that parole has effectively become unavailable in California in homicide cases, the United States Supreme Court was overturning a pair of Ninth Circuit decisions that would have established a basis for federal-court review of parole denials.

The California parole statute indicates that the state Board of Prison Terms “shall set a release date unless it determines that . . . consideration of the public safety requires a more lengthy period of incarceration.”  According to the California Supreme Court, the statute requires that there be ”some evidence ” in support of a conclusion “that the inmate is unsuitable for parole because he or she currently is dangerous.”  As Simon discussed, this requirement of some evidence of current dangerousness has been applied by the state courts such that the state can justify a parole denial in nearly any case. 

The two cases decided by the Court yesterday in Swarthout v. Cooke (No. 10-333) nicely illustrate Simon’s point.

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Posted in Parole, U.S. Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

Simon Lecture

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Video of Jonathan Simon’s wonderful lecture yesterday, “How Should We Punish Murder,” is available here.  Alan Borsuk’s blog post on the event is here.

Posted in Homicide | No Comments »

Fear of Violence and the Penal Severity Revolution

Monday, January 24th, 2011

I’ve already noted here Jonathan Simon’s upcoming lecture at Marquette on punishment for murder.  Jonathan tells me that the lecture will build on his 2009 Hood Lecture at Oxford, which he has shared with me.  The Hood paper is a provocative work, in which Jonathan makes the case that homicide law and public fear of lethal violence have played an important role in the American phenomenon of mass incarceration.  He is playing here a bit against conventional wisdom, which would emphasize the war on drugs as the main driving force in the prison population explosion of the past generation.

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Posted in Homicide, Politics of Crime and Punishment | No Comments »

Around the Blogs

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

I continue to enjoy Michael Cicchini’s wry posts at The Legal Watchdog.  His latest entry details in typically engaging fashion two extraordinary cases in which the Wisconsin Court of Appeals overturned convictions that were based on only the flimsiest of evidence.  He asks:

Why are some juries and some judges so eager to convict and incarcerate people? Without any evidence, is it based on race or some other physical characteristic that can’t be seen when reading the trial transcript? Or is it just our love of punishment, even in cases where a crime was committed, if at all, by someone else?

Meanwhile, Amelia Bizzaro has a helpful post at her blog on the recent SCOTUS cert. grants on ineffective assistance in plea bargaining. 

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Posted in Defense Counsel--Ineffective Assistance, Federal Post-Conviction Remedies (incl. Habeas), U.S. Supreme Court, Wisconsin Post-Conviction Remedies | No Comments »

A Bad Day for the Right to Effective Assistance

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

As I noted earlier, the Supreme Court reversed two habeas grants on Wednesday.  Both cases involved claims of ineffective assistance of counsel.  In my previous post, I discussed the habeas issues in one case, Harrington v. Richter (No. 09-587).  In this post, I’ll focus on the Sixth Amendment issues in the second case, Premo v. Moore (No. 09-658).

At the outset, I should say that neither case purports to change or add to the basic Strickland test, and neither case reaches a surprising result in applying the test.  Moore, however, uses some unnecessarily broad language along the way that may encourage lower courts to treat some stronger ineffective assistance claims in the future in a dismissive manner.

Moore’s lawyer advised him to accept a plea deal in light of multiple confessions he had given to a killing.  Moore took the deal, but later argued that his lawyer should have moved to suppress one of the confessions before advising Moore to plead guilty.  In light of the availability of the other confessions, however, the Supreme Court held that Moore satisfied neither the prejudice nor the performance prongs of Strickland.

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Posted in Defense Counsel--Ineffective Assistance, U.S. Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

A Bad Day for Habeas Corpus

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned two habeas grants by the Ninth Circuit, both involving claims of ineffectiveness of counsel.  I’ll blog tomorrow about the Sixth Amendment aspects of the decisions.  Today, in this post, I’ll focus on what the Court had to say about habeas law in one of the decisions, Harrington v. Richter (No. 09-587).  It’s not good news.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 strictly limits the availability of habeas relief “with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings.”  28 U.S.C. § 2254(d).  Richter addressed the question of whether a summary ruling in state court counts as an adjudication on the merits.  The Court held that it did.

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Posted in Defense Counsel--Ineffective Assistance, Federal Post-Conviction Remedies (incl. Habeas), U.S. Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

New Deal/Crime Deal

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

In anticipation of Jonathan Simon’s visit next week, I’m spending some time reviewing a few of his many publications.  I’ve just finished a short book chapter of his that nicely pulls together several of the most important themes in his recent work: “From the New Deal to the Crime Deal,” After the War on Crime 48 (Frampton et al., eds. 2008).  The basic thesis is that crime control replaced FDR’s New Deal ideology as the central organizing principle of American political and social life in about the late 1960′s.

For Simon, the concept of risk — and particularly the shifting ways that American society responds to risk — is the key to understanding the politics and law of crime and punishment.

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Posted in Politics of Crime and Punishment | 3 Comments »

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