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New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 10 June 11, 2009
America's Prisons: Is There Hope?
By Helen Epstein
Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman's
Fight to Restore Justice to All
by Sunny Schwartz, with David Boodell
Scribner, 204 pp., $24.00
(for the original article, see here)
America's prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this
country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration
rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not
most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison
population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar
fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence
that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more
likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges.[1] Of those, most have no history
of violence or drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.[2]
Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20 percent
of inmates. These "monster factories," as the lawyer and author Sunny
Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in society and
may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released from US jails and
prisons end up back inside within three years. Some studies suggest that the
experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and humiliating that it actually
makes men, in particular, harder and meaner, so that the crimes they commit
the next time around are even worse than what got them incarcerated in the first
place.[3]
Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is currently sponsoring a bill that would create
a commission to review America's entire criminal justice system and make recommendations
for reform. If the bill passes, its commissioners should bear in mind a small
experiment that took place in the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno, California,
some years ago. This project, the subject of Sunny Schwartz's brief, absorbing
memoir Dreams from the Monster Factory, is important not just because
it dramatically reduced recidivism, but also because it could help break the
tired stalemate between liberals and conservatives over punishment versus rehabilitation.
In addition, Schwartz's book is revealing about the criminal mind and its thought
processes, and thus contains valuable lessons for those at risk of incarceration,
and for those close to them.
Schwartz, now in her fifties, began working in the San Francisco county jails
in 1980 as a student intern. She volunteered to spend two days a week writing
reports on prisoners' complaints about sentencing or jail conditions and forwarding
them through the seemingly impenetrable bureaucracy of the California state
justice system. After graduating from law school, Schwartz worked briefly for
an AIDS service organization and then, in 1990, at the request of her old boss
Sheriff Michael Hennessey, she returned to County Jail 7 in San Bruno to launch
a new set of programs designed to help inmates make the transition back into
society after their release.
The inmates at San Bruno were typical of prison and jail populations across
America. Over half were black, although blacks make up only 6 percent of San
Francisco's population. Approximately 75 percent were high school dropouts,
and most had reading skills below the seventh-grade level; 65 percent had been
relegated to special education programs before dropping out of school, and 90
percent had never held a legal job. Eighty percent reported that they had been
physically or sexually abused as children, and 80 percent had committed at least
one act of violence. In jail, these inmates spent their days watching television
(Jerry Springer, slasher movies, cartoons), working out, getting into fights
with one another, being strip-searched by the deputy sheriffs, and composing
elaborate complaints to the authorities.
Some 70 percent of inmates released from San Bruno ended up back in jail within
three years, a slightly higher failure rate than the national average. Schwartz's
job was to develop programs to change this. Her first move was to open a jail-based
high school with classes in reading, writing, math, and other subjects, as well
as "life skills"—meaning how to get and hold on to a job. In
many respects the school she set up was a success. Inmates appreciated having
something to do during the day, and many earned degrees that would greatly increase
their prospects for employment upon release. But this had only a modest effect
on their violent tendencies. During off-hours, they continued to pick fights
with one another. Overhearing inmates yelling into the phones, the guards assumed
that this aggressive behavior would continue after they were released. "We
taught him to read," one of them joked. "Let's put up a sign telling
him to stop beating his wife."
Schwartz began to wonder whether classroom instruction alone would convey the
skills the inmates needed to remain in society once they got there. Although
the jail contained both men and women, the men worried her far more. Some were
so aggressive and violent that they frightened even a seasoned criminal lawyer
like her. Some men even frightened themselves. One who was about to be released
begged Schwartz to keep him inside because he feared that he would be unable
to restrain himself from assaulting a neighbor's five-year-old daughter. She
knew that some men, perhaps including this one, were beyond rehabilitation,
but she also knew instinctively—and correctly, it turned out—that
most could change if they were given the chance, but they would need powerful
emotional assistance to do it. What this assistance would consist of was not
obvious at first.
Shortly after she began work at San Bruno, Schwartz attended a conference in
Minnesota where she heard for the first time about "restorative justice."
Contemporary justice in the United States is largely based on the idea of retribution,
and relies primarily on punishment. Restorative justice, as Schwartz explains
it, is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders
must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others.
In order to do this, offenders must first confront what they have done, and
then make amends to their families, their communities, and, if possible, their
victims as well. Schwartz writes that she very soon came to believe that restorative
justice could be a means of transforming these men from chronic offenders into
productive members of their communities.
The first step, persuading the San Bruno inmates to face up to their own violent behavior, would be the most difficult. What is particularly striking about violent men is how remorseless they often seem, as if they were devoid of feeling. Schwartz shows how their experience under the justice system only reinforces this sense of detachment. During their trials, defense lawyers coached them to deny or minimize their crimes. In jail, they spent their days complaining about the conditions, their sentences, the behavior of the deputies and other inmates, and society at large. At no time were the men ever required to assess their own behavior or acknowledge the pain they had caused.
Schwartz was familiar with various kinds of "anger management" classes,
most of which simply taught violent men to suppress their rage or walk away
from situations that might provoke it. She wanted something different, a program
that would help the men examine and ultimately "rewire" their own
emotions. She decided to experiment with Manalive, a community-based program
for men who had committed domestic violence that had been created years earlier
by Hamish Sinclair, a San Francisco–based educator and community organizer.
Manalive soon became the foundation for all of Schwartz's other programs, which
collectively came to be called the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or
RSVP.
In November 2008, I visited the San Bruno jail and sat in on an RSVP session.
A group counselor and about fifteen inmates sat on plastic chairs in a semicircle,
while a white twenty-eight-year-old bank robber named Don described a fight
he had been involved in eight years earlier. While the other prisoners looked
on and asked questions, two inmates analyzed his story, writing down every incident
of violence—physical, sexual, and emotional—that Don reported, from
selling drugs at the party, to cheating on his girlfriend, to yelling at the
girl he cheated with, to slugging a fellow party-goer with a beer bottle and
then kicking him as he fell. The session took two hours, and by the end the
entire blackboard was filled with details, not only about whom Don had hurt
and how, but about the ways in which, in telling the story, Don had attempted
to minimize what he had done or blame others for his actions.
"I left out a lot of stuff," Don told me when I talked to him afterward.
Although some inmates volunteer for RSVP, most, like Don, had never thought
of themselves as violent before they were assigned to the program by the jail
administration.
"I knew I had a problem with drugs," he told me, "so I didn't
mind being in drug rehab. But violent? Me? No way." After sitting through
a few mandatory RSVP sessions and watching other men describe their own violent
acts, however, Don told me he began to realize something about himself that
he had never known before. He saw how badly he had hurt other people, not only
the men he had punched and beaten up over the years but also his own family,
who became so terrified of his angry rages that they all but avoided him. When
he entered RSVP, he had been in jail for ten months and had barely heard from
his parents, and had not spoken to his sister at all. Thirteen weeks later,
he was speaking to his parents once a week and to his sister once a day.
While RSVP does not involve direct restitution
to victims, it reinforces prisoners' sense of responsibility by inviting speakers
who have been victims of unrelated violence to address the inmates. RSVP also
encourages restitution to society at large by linking up post-release RSVP "graduates"
with youth violence prevention groups and campaigns such as the San Francisco
Giants' "strike out violence day."
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University
and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP and found that it sharply reduced recidivism
rates. The longer the men stayed in the program, the better it seemed to work.
Among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up
back in jail a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been
through the program.[4]
Schwartz deals only in passing with the factors that led to America's staggering
incarceration rate in the first place. When I first arrived at the San Bruno
jail, I was taken to a surveillance booth with glass panels on the floor from
which it was possible to see an entire open-plan block, or dorm, at once. It
was midday, and men in orange sweatsuits were standing around in groups. Some
were eating lunch, others were playing ping-pong or watching TV. It was no surprise
that most of the men were black. Nationally, one black man in nine between the
ages of twenty and thirty-four is incarcerated, a rate six times higher than
for whites in the same age group. Some 65 percent of black high school dropouts
spend part of their lives behind bars.[5] The growth in America's incarceration
rate, in other words, is owing largely to the soaring incarceration of black
men. This deeply troubling trend is powerful testimony, if we needed any, to
the depth of America's racial problems.
What accounts for the high rate of incarceration in the US, particularly of
black males? Opinions vary, but for drug crimes in particular, part of the problem
has to do with excessive surveillance of young black men by the police and other
authorities. White youths may carry and use drugs just as often as blacks, but
they seldom get caught, and if they do, they may be more likely to get off with
a warning. In one recent study, 60 to 75 percent of black teenagers in Baltimore
and Chicago said they were routinely harassed by the police. "Everywhere
we go, we going to get stopped," said one Chicago youth. Once he was approached
by detectives as he and a friend were leaving the church they regularly attended:
They was like, "Do y'all got guns?" or something. "We heard shooting
on the next block, y'all match the description. Where y'all just come from?"
We like, "We just come out the church, y'all done seen it." You know
just, they stopping us for no reason.[6]
While police surveillance and harassment may explain the racial discrepancy
in drug-related crime, it probably explains little of the same discrepancy in
violent crime. When it comes to homicide, which is the most accurately measured
crime of all, the data are clear: blacks are seven times more likely to be offenders
and six times more likely to be victims than whites. This cannot be explained
by discrimination in arrests and sentencing alone.
What would explain it? A controversial 1992 report by the US National Research
Council proposed that some people might be genetically predisposed
to violence; it recommended more research into identifying violence- inducing
brain chemicals, and the development of drugs to alter behavior. Although the
report did not claim that these factors were more common in blacks, the racial
implications were clear, and the report was widely criticized.[7]
What should have been clear to the research council is that wide fluctuations
in murder rates occur much more rapidly than changes in the human genome, which
may take thousands of years. Today, homicide is more common in America than
in Western Europe, but historians estimate that in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, murder rates in London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were just as high
as they were in New York at the peak of the US crime wave in 1990.[8] Until
the 1960s, murder rates were generally lower in Africa than Europe,[9] so a
race-specific "violence gene," if one existed,[10] is unlikely to
have come from Africa. The finding that RSVP worked as well as it did with blacks
and whites alike shows that many violent men can change, and thus that their
violent tendencies are not hard-wired.
Most experts maintain that the relationship between race and violence has to
do with social conditions such as poverty and unemployment. For example, unemployed
people are more likely to engage in crime, and some experts warn that the current
economic crisis might already be contributing to an increase in domestic violence
and to the recent spate of suicidal shooting sprees.[11] However, the connection
between crime and fluctuations in the labor market over longer periods of time
is not clear. While most studies suggest that rising unemployment leads to an
increase in property crimes, it seems to have a much smaller effect on violent
crime.[12] A few highly publicized tragedies notwithstanding, most violent crimes
may be committed by a group of people who would be unemployed in any labor market.[13]
What most studies do find, however, is that violent crime is strongly associated
with the activity of illegal drug markets, which tend to thrive in black neighborhoods.[14]
A 1988 study of homicide in New York found that 40 percent were associated with
drug trade–related disputes, mostly among black men.[15] So while whites
and blacks may use drugs with equal frequency, blacks are more likely to be
involved in the highly lucrative and dangerous business of packaging, distributing,
and marketing them. The drug trade is violent because when disputes arise over
prices, turf, or customers, there are no peaceful means of resolving them. Adversaries
battle out such conflicts with weapons instead of lawyers. It is probably no
coincidence that murder rates doubled during Prohibition
in the 1920s, and fell sharply with the repeal of the Volstead
Act in 1933. Similarly, murder rates doubled again during the "crack
epidemic" in the 1970s and 1980s, when the drug trade became more lucrative
and competitive, and more dangerous.[16]
This makes the growing activity of drug cartels from Mexico and other countries
particularly threatening.[17] But as the Obama administration acknowledges,
it does not help simply to blame the foreign drug traffickers alone. What can
American policymakers do to get the drug trade out of black neighborhoods? Policing
is important, but severe crackdowns could, like Prohibition, make matters worse.
Policymakers could start by improving schools in black neighborhoods, which
suffer severely from underinvestment, overcrowding, class disruption, and high
dropout rates. This endangers us all, and should be addressed, because the likelihood
of incarceration falls with increasing education, especially for black men.
According to one estimate, 23 percent of the discrepancy in black/white incarceration
rates could be eliminated if blacks stayed in school as long as whites, and
that was in 1980, before the thirty-year surge in black incarceration got underway.
An even greater effect was seen with violent crime, such as murder and assault.
According to the authors of this study, a one percent increase in the graduation
rate could save $1.4 billion that would otherwise be spent keeping these men
behind bars.[18]
A high school diploma itself seems to help keep black men out of trouble. The
likelihood of incarceration drops fourfold among black high school graduates
compared to those who make it only to tenth or eleventh grade.[19] It is unlikely
that there is anything special about the twelfth-grade curriculum that would
explain this. However, graduation may indicate a relatively positive attitude
toward society and toward oneself that is more important for keeping black youths
out of trouble than any skill or knowledge acquired in school. Some studies
suggest, remarkably, that a diploma may matter more than one's income, or even
whether one has a job at all.[20] Prison education programs that allow inmates
to earn college degrees have also been associated with a drop in recidivism.[21]
Thus the decision of former New York governor George Pataki to end these programs
in the mid-1990s may well have had consequences for public safety.
Education may help keep black kids out of trouble, but as Schwartz found, for
those already involved in crime, helping them gain self-esteem through education
is not always sufficient to get them out of it. Drug dealing and gangs provide
more than a livelihood to otherwise poorly educated and difficult-to-employ
young men. They also provide an alternative society in which their courage,
toughness, and entrepreneurship are valued. More importantly, they are a way
out of the shame of being poor, jobless, and unable to support a family.[22]
It is this very sense of shame that a growing number of psychiatrists maintain
is at the root of violent behavior.[23]
During the 1980s, James Gilligan, the psychiatrist who evaluated RSVP, was in
charge of mental health services in the Massachusetts prisons, where he conducted
thousands of therapeutic consultations with homicidal inmates. He soon came
to realize that they were especially likely to harm or kill someone when they
felt insulted or humiliated. What these men seemed to fear most were feelings
of weakness and shame—the shame of being seen as inadequate or contemptible—and
they struck back violently against anyone who set off those feelings, whether
it was a sarcastic, unfaithful girlfriend or a rival drug dealer attempting
to impinge on their turf.
Many killers told Gilligan that the fear they saw in the eyes of their victims
made them feel powerful and respected, reinforcing a "tough" self-image
and seeming to justify aggressive reactions to any sign of disrespect, however
minor or unintended.[24] A sense of honor was essential in this outlaw world
and Gilligan wondered whether this was not precisely because these men had so
much to be ashamed of. Like the San Bruno inmates, most of his homicidal patients
had experienced humiliating abuse as children and failures in school or in getting
jobs. Gilligan theorized that these painful life experiences led them not only
to be especially sensitive to individual instances of disrespect, but to build
entire subcultures based upon the promotion of masculine honor, however hollow
and boastful, as a fortress against shame.
As an undergraduate in the 1950s, Gilligan was fascinated by the work of anthropologists
such as Ruth Benedict who classified cultures as being preoccupied predominantly
with, on the one hand, notions of honor and shame or, on the other, notions
of pride and guilt. While guilt and shame have much in common, Benedict argued
that they have different implications for culture and behavior. Guilt, the sense
that you have done something wrong and should feel bad about it whether others
know it or not, tends to lead to private turmoil. But shame implies awareness
of the contempt of others, and therefore has potentially greater implications
for relationships. Pride, like guilt, is an internal feeling of accomplishment,
whereas a sense of honor, like shame, depends on the attitudes of others toward
oneself.
When Gilligan began working as a prison psychiatrist years later, he recalled
Benedict's ideas. "When I first walked into a prison," he told me
recently, "I realized I was in the midst of an honor culture." Since
the 1960s, other prominent experts on behavior, including Thomas Scheff, John
Braithwaite, and Helen Lewis, have also characterized shame as a "master
regulator" of the emotions, and a key to understanding violent behavior.[25]
When Scheff looked back at ten years of taped therapy sessions with his patients,
he claims he never saw an explosion of anger that was not preceded by an incident
that evoked a fleeting expression of shame.
A scene in the 2008 French film The Class (Entre les Murs), a fictionalized
but highly realistic account of a year in a multiracial Paris secondary school,
convincingly illustrates how the experience of shame can set off violent behavior
and ruin a young person's life. In what might be seen as the movie's turning
point, fifteen-year-old Sulieman, the son of poor West African immigrants and
an amiable troublemaker, learns, along with the rest of the class, that the
teacher thinks he is of "limited" intelligence. As classroom banter
continues in the background, all expression drains from Sulieman's face. Sometime
later he storms out of the class, accidentally hitting a classmate in the face
and nearly slugging the teacher as well, an act for which he will be expelled.
A grim future for the boy, now considered by adults to be "violent"
as well as "limited," seems inevitable.
Emotions have their own logic, Gilligan reminds us, of which their possessors
are often unaware, and therapeutic techniques like Manalive may work by helping
violent men untangle their feelings of pain and anger, and develop more positive
aspects of their character. Fortunately for policymakers such as Senator Webb,
restorative justice techniques like RSVP are one issue on which liberals and
conservatives increasingly agree. In April 2008, President Bush signed the Second
Chance Act, which authorizes federal funding mainly for "faith-based"
initiatives such as Charles Colson's Prison Ministries that emphasize Christian
concepts of confession and redemption and also help inmates find jobs. Although
these programs have not been evaluated as rigorously as RSVP, preliminary results
suggest that only 18 percent of those who have been through them ended up back
in jail a year after release, half the national average. President Obama has
asked Congress for more than $100 million to fund the Second Chance Act and
other similar initiatives.
RSVP is not faith-based and receives no money through the federal Second Chance
initiative. When Schwartz launched the program, she took a firm position on
the separation of church and state and told such volunteer groups as Jehovah's
Witnesses to leave the San Bruno jail. But Schwartz's approach is consistent
with conservative notions of personal responsibility, while the more conservative
faith-based programs accept the liberal notion that lack of education and job
opportunities must also be addressed if inmates are to make a successful transition
to freedom.
Perhaps surprisingly, the greatest resistance to programs like RSVP comes from
some well-intentioned but doctrinaire
leftists who maintain
that it is absurd to expect people to change their behavior when they continue
to be subject to racism, unemployment, bad schools, and the long legacy of inequality
in America. The circumstances in which many African-Americans grow up are indeed
traumatic. But the idea that violent crime, drug abuse, AIDS, and other health
problems that disproportionately affect blacks can't be addressed until these
schematic leftists are satisfied that we are all living in an age of equality
is itself a form of racism, based upon the patronizing assumption that people
are powerless to bring about personal and collective change in their own communities.
Programs like RSVP show that when people have the courage to face up to their
own violent behavior, they can overcome the most harrowing conditions, and inspire
others to do so. Indeed, helping violent men find more constructive ways to
express their masculinity could well be the fastest route to a better future
for themselves and their families.
Obviously, programs like RSVP are only part of a longer-term solution to violence
in America. Senator Webb's commission, if authorized, should also bear in mind
that shame and the toxic culture it gives rise to are being cultivated in America's
overcrowded, badly performing schools; in the economy, which, when it grows
at all, grows largely for the rich; in the casual slights and insults that occur
daily when a black person walks into a shop or hangs out with friends on the
street. They are also cultivated in families in which parents, overwhelmed by
difficulties and disappointments, use violence to discipline their children.
The monster factory isn't just in the prisons; it is also in the starkly inequitable
world outside.
Notes
[1]Both the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the National Institute
on Drug Abuse survey of high school seniors for 1998/1999 found higher rates
of drug use among white teens than black teens.
[2]Jim Webb, "What's Wrong with Our Prisons?," Parade, March 29, 2009.
[3]M. Keith Chen and Jesse M. Shapiro, "Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce
Recidivism? A Discontinuity-Based Approach," American Law and Economics
Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2007).
[4]James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project:
Reducing Violence in the Community Through a Jail-Based Initiative," Journal
of Public Health, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2005).
[5]"One in 100: Behind Bars in America," a report by the Pew Center
on the States, February 2008.
[6]Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Kathryn Edin, Jeffrey R. Kling, and Greg J. Duncan,
"Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare
Better Than Boys," Working Paper #509, Industrial Relations Section, Princeton
University, March 2006.
[7]National Research Council, Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume
2: Biobehavioral Influences, edited by Albert J. Reiss Jr., Klaus A. Miczek,
and Jeffrey A. Roth (National Academy Press, 1994). See also Fox Butterfield,
"Study Cites Role of Biological and Genetic Factors in Violence,"
The New York Times, November 13, 1992.
[8]Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist
(Knopf, 1999), p. 216; See also Franklin E. Zimring, Crime Is Not the Problem:
Lethal Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 1997).
[9]"Patterns of Murder and Suicide," African Homicide and Suicide,
edited by Paul Bohannan (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 230–266.
[10]In 2006, a variant of the MAOA gene was found to increase violent behavior
in a population of New Zealanders, but only among those who had been abused
as children—a well-known population risk factor for violence in later
life. There is no indication that the violence-inducing MAOA gene is more common
in any particular racial group. See Essi Viding and Uta Frith, "Genes for
Susceptibility to Violence Lurk in the Brain," Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, No. 103 (2006), pp. 6085–6086.
[11]"Domestic Use on Rise as Economy Sinks: Hotline Calls Up from Last
Year as Are Cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome," Associated Press, April 10,
2009.
[12]See Steven D. Levitt, "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four
Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not," Journal of Economic
Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2004); Alfred Blumstein, Frederick P. Rivara,
and Richard Rosenfeld, "The Rise and Decline of Homicide—and Why,"
Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 21 (May 2000); Bijou Yang and David Lester,
"Suicide, Homicide and Unemployment," Applied Economics Letters, Vol.
2, No. 8 (August 1995); Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg, and David B. Mustard,
"Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States:
1979–1997," The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 84, No.
1 (February 2002); Fiona Carmichael and Robert Ward, "Male Unemployment
and Crime in England and Wales," Economics Letters, Vol. 73, No. 1 (October
2001); Cezary A. Kapuscinski, John Braithwaite, and Bruce Chapman, "Unemployment
and Crime: Toward Resolving the Paradox," Journal of Quantitative Criminology,
Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1998).
[13]There is some evidence that sharply increased rates of illegal immigration
into the US since 1980 contributed disproportionately to unemployment among
blacks, and this in turn correlated with increased black incarceration. However,
the effect of immigration appears to be small, accounting for only about 10
percent of the increase in the incarceration of black high school dropouts.
See George Borjas et al., "Immigration and African-American Employment
Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment and Incarceration to Labor
Supply Shocks," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12518,
September 2006.
[14]Jens Ludwig and Jeffrey Kling, "Is Crime Contagious?" The Journal
of Law and Economics, Vol. 50 (August 2007), pp. 491–518.
[15]Paul J. Goldstein, "Crack and Homicide in New York City, 1988: A Conceptually
Based Event Analysis," Contemporary Drug Problems, Winter 1989, pp. 651–687.
[16]See Jeffrey Miron, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition (Independent
Institute, 2004).
[17]See Randal C. Archibold, "Mexican Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over,
Alarming US," The New York Times, March 22, 2009.
[18]Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti "The Effect of Education on Crime:
Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports," The American
Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 1 (March 2004).
[19]Lochner and Moretti, "The Effect of Education on Crime."
[20]Mark Edward Votruba and Jeffrey R. Kling, "Effects of Neighborhood
Characteristics on the Mortality of Black Male Youth: Evidence from Gautreaux,
Chicago," Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 68, No. 5 (March 2009).
[21]"Education from the Inside, Out: The Multiple Benefits of College Programs
in Prison," a report by the Correctional Association of New York, January
2009.
[22]See Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
(Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2002).
[23]For a fascinating review of the psychology of shame, see Robert Karen, "Shame,"
Atlantic Monthly, February 1992.
[24]See James Gilligan, "Shame, Guilt, and Violence," Social Research
(Winter 2003); James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
(Putnam, 1996); James Gilligan, Preventing Violence (London: Thames and Hudson,
2001).
[25]See Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame
and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington, 1991); John Braithwaite, Crime,
Shame, and Reintegration (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Helen Block Lewis,
Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (International Universities Press, 1971).