Guarded Hope

LESSONS FROM THE HISTORY OF THE PRISON BOOM

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President
Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a
"malignant enemy in America." Although violent crime had declined
markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under
Johnson's watch, and his conservative critics-following the lead of
Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his
failed but galvanizing presidential bid-were eager to pounce. To
outflank them, LBJ ordered his attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach
to chair a blue-ribbon commission to draft a national crime strategy.
"I will not be satisfied," the President warned, borrowing from
Goldwater's paternalistic playbook, "until every woman and child in
this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park . . . and live in any
community at any time of the day or night without fear of being
harmed." He declared "a thorough and effective war against crime."

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Johnson's
belligerent anticrime talk rings familiar, but the policy changes
ultimately put forward by his expert panel in 1967 hail, seemingly,
from another country. Nowhere among the Katzenbach commission's
200-plus recommendations were the sorts of punitive fixes presently
in vogue. Rather than augmenting law-enforcement powers, the
panelists urged greater respect for civil liberties and a national
commitment to police fairness and professionalism, complete with
in-service training courses like "The civil rights movement and
history of the Negro." Instead of strengthening the hands of
prosecutors, the commissioners recommended greater evidence sharing,
eliminating most bail charges, and expanding legal services for
low-income defendants. Instead of tougher criminal sentencing, they
suggested rolling back mandatory-minimum drug penalties passed in the
1950s and shifting resources from imprisonment to probation and parole.

Although the panelists advocated more money for law enforcement and
criminological research, they insisted, above all, that "the
challenge of crime in a free society" could only be met by stressing
prevention over punishment. "We will not have dealt effectively with
crime until we have alleviated the conditions that stimulate it,"
they wrote. Reflecting what would become an unfashionable belief that
government intervention can alleviate social problems by means other
than tax cuts or privatization, the president's advisors asserted
that the Great Society represented the best solution to crime:

[The Commission] has no doubt whatever that the most significant
action that can be taken against crime is action designed to
eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs,
to make sure every American is given the opportunities and the
freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.

Rather than building cellblocks, they called for building
communities. Throwing down the gauntlet before the incipient
law-and-order Right, LBJ's best and brightest called "for a
revolution in the way America thinks about crime."

What they got was counterrevolution. By 1968, when the report was
translated into law, Lyndon Johnson's once formidable
social-democratic coalition had fragmented, a casualty not only of
Vietnam but of the riotous, long, hot summers at home. The domestic
homicide rate was soaring, and as public anxiety mounted, resurgent
Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats took control of the
crime issue in Congress, drafting sweeping legislation that bore
little resemblance to Johnson's. Instead of crafting myriad federal
programs, the revised bill would channel some $400 million into
locally controlled "block grants" for law enforcement, a nod to
states' rights. Instead of "warring on poverty," as the commissioners
urged, the congressional package took aim at the Warren Court,
eliminating restrictions on wiretapping and authorizing police to
interrogate suspects without the pesky involvement of defense
attorneys (Miranda v. Arizona had been decided in 1966).

Johnson's allies disliked the bill-the New York Times decried the
"vicious" legislation's "sectional politics, facile solutions, and
clearly discernable prejudices against the ignorant and the poor"-but
after it motored through the House and Senate, the lame-duck
president held his nose and signed. What had started out as an effort
to outfox the Right-to commandeer Barry Goldwater's divisive talking
points to buttress the Left's anti-poverty and civil rights
agenda-had instead destabilized liberalism and shifted the national
conversation from social services to just deserts.

Whether or not the final version of the quaintly named Safe Streets
Act represented "a giant leap toward a police state," as one
contemporary feared, the law would serve as a blueprint for anticrime
legislation from the late '60s forward. Under President Nixon, who
took Goldwater's rhetoric about crime to the White House, and then
under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush the Crusader, the
federal government promulgated ever harsher, more expansive, and more
expensive versions of Johnson's runaway bill. They declared and
redeclared wars on drugs. They extended sentences, curtailed parole,
facilitated capital punishment, hobbled judges and defense attorneys,
and dispensed billions of dollars for prison construction. This was
the story in Washington, but even harsher measures developed in the
states-think New York's Rockefeller drug laws or California's
three-strikes initiative-with the result that a prison nation grew up
from the wreckage of the Great Society.

Even as the social safety net frayed-and then unraveled from the
Reagan administration forward-America invested generously in criminal
justice, especially prisons. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. inmate
population increased sixfold. By 2008 the total surpassed 2.3
million, more than the populations of Boston, Washington, D.C., and
San Francisco combined. The United States, a republic founded on the
notion of liberty, became the most incarcerated nation on earth.

But why?

Social scientists have put forward a grab bag of answers. Some depict
the transformation as a reasoned response to violence, others as a
panicked reaction to cable news crime coverage. Some blame postwar
economic restructuring, others the populist peculiarities of American
democracy. Three recent books assert comprehensive explanations-one
zeroing in on the cultural causes of criminal justice severity, one
surveying the political geography of the prison boom, and one
assessing the country's changing terrain of law and governance. All
three greatly enrich the conversation, but none are likely to settle
the argument.

Sasha Abramsky's American Furies (2007) is less a causal account of
what he labels "the Age of Mass Imprisonment" than a cri de coeur
against it. He laments that the guiding principles of U.S. social
policy-with respect to criminal justice but also education, welfare,
and taxes-have shifted from equal opportunity to stratification, from
social integration to retribution, and he presents a wide-ranging
examination of the consequences. A peripatetic journalist and author
of two previous books on crime and punishment, Abramsky takes readers
on a tour of America's carceral landscape, from law-enforcement trade
shows to corrupt private prisons to sweltering outdoor jails, and he
shakes his head in dismay wherever he goes.

Abramsky finds particularly disturbing the decline of prisoner
treatment programs and the ascendance of their antitheses,
supermaximum-security control units, which have proliferated even
more rapidly than conventional cellblocks. Designed to curtail prison
disorder by stripping refractory prisoners of even vestigial human
agency, these special housing units now contain tens of thousands of
inmates, many of them severely mentally ill, in a state of almost
perfect isolation. In the harshest facilities-places like
California's Pelican Bay or Texas's Estelle High Security-prisoners
are locked into spare concrete boxes for twenty-three hours a day;
they take their meals through slots and experience human touch only
to be shackled. Abramsky calls these places "storehouses of the living dead."

Lawmakers and their constituents like to imagine that only the worst
of the worst are subject to hardline, high-tech justice, but a
substantial majority of prison and jail inmates in the United States,
more than 1.3 million, have been convicted of non-violent offenses.
According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch study coauthored by Abramsky,
between 200,000 and 300,000 prisoners are mentally ill, with many
more in jails. Even greater numbers have been snared by the War on
Drugs. In 1967 the Katzenbach commission urged more money for drug
treatment and even hinted at decriminalization of marijuana. But
unyielding criminalization became the rule, such that drug offenses
now account for roughly two million annual arrests, some 40 percent
of them for pot possession. For those charged with dealing narcotics,
especially crack cocaine, Abramsky reports that mandatory prison
terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Juveniles, too, are going to prison in record numbers. By 2003 more
than one hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen were
incarcerated in the United States. Most are held in juvenile
facilities or reform schools, inventions of the Progressive Era, but
in recent years, prosecutors and judges have diverted thousands of
them to adult prisons. As Abramsky reports, Florida led the charge,
attracting national attention for sentencing a twelve year-old to
life without parole (later overturned) and for routinely charging
school-age delinquents, from pot smokers to shoplifters, with adult felonies.

The new approach that emerged from the 1960s signaled not just a
declining tolerance for risk and disorder in an increasingly atomized
society, but also a sea change in public policy presumptions. No
longer would criminal-justice institutions strive, however incapably,
to reclaim and reintegrate lawbreakers. Instead, tough justice in the
post-civil rights era would seek to segregate offenders from free
society, subject them to extended controls, and, ultimately, relegate
them to a permanently subordinate class of citizenship as defined by
conviction status. This time, as before, race would figure
prominently. "The harsh attitudes towards kids right now in the
United States is a harsh attitude to black and Latino kids," a
juvenile justice expert tells Abramsky. "Those other kids."

Abramsky puts the blame everywhere and nowhere. He assails
conservative academics like James Q. Wilson, who distorted the
admittedly mixed performance of prison treatment initiatives to imply
that "nothing works" in the field of criminal rehabilitation. He
censures the victims' rights movement for channeling personal anguish
into calls for public vengeance, and he condemns "Bible Belt
fundamentalists" who preach "eternal damnation." He dismisses
law-and-order reactionaries as "media whores" and lambastes "rant
radio" for feeding Americans "a diet of vitriol that would put some
paranoid schizophrenics to shame." Finally, he resorts to metaphor,
invoking Hobbes, Hitler, and, for his title, Greek mythology. Having
slept through the age of rehabilitation, Abramsky submits, an
American incarnation of the blood-thirsty Erinyes, or Furies, "shook
themselves out of their slumbers" in the 1970s and now hover over a
land "consumed by its desire for revenge." They have built Tartarus on earth.

This rendition of the punitive turn as mass hysteria is precisely the
view that Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the University of
Southern California, aims to counter in her book Golden Gulag (2007).
A political geographer with a Marxist compass, she argues that
super-sized imprisonment is more rational than emotional, more
structural than cultural. It represents not just a rightward jag in
political discourse, she holds, but a fundamental transformation of
the country's political economy.

Gilmore grounds her study on a single, exceptionally large and
dynamic state: California. The choice both complicates and
strengthens her claims. It creates difficulties because California,
thanks largely to its powerful guard union, has resisted prison
privatization and because neither the state nor private contractors
make much use of convict labor. This limits opportunities for profit,
Gilmore acknowledges, thereby undermining simplistic descriptions of
a "prison industrial complex" or a "new slavery."

On the other hand, California has experienced phenomenally expensive
prison growth over the past three decades. Since Governor Jerry Brown
signed legislation to fix sentencing and eliminate parole in 1977,
the state's prisoner population has shot up 790 percent. Since George
Deukmejian took the helm in 1983, California has built twenty-four
major new prisons, making its "golden gulag" the biggest state penal
system in the United States. Once famous for its public universities,
California's largest state agency is now its department of
corrections, with an annual budget of $10 billion.

Most analysts, including Abramsky, who wrote an engaging 2002 book on
California's crime panic, Hard Time Blues, attribute the state's
prison boom to political factors from the Reagan revolt to the
three-strikes campaign. Gilmore, on the other hand, points to three
types of "surpluses" that made it possible: land, labor, and capital.
Rural land once used to grow crops for agribusiness now cultivates
prisons, she finds, while chronic unemployment in urban areas helps
produce the bodies to fill them. Prison construction, at $280 to $350
million a pop, has also put big money to work, not only in the
traditional pork-contractor circuit, but by providing investors
low-risk, tax-exempt government bonds. As the military-Keynesian
order faltered in the 1970s, Gilmore asserts, a "prison fix" steadied
the state-capitalist machine. Prison building was not a conspiracy,
she says, but it did "put certain state capacities into motion, make
use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and
take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets."

Such reasoning may smack of economic determinism, but Gilmore's book
contains a welter of nuanced, well-researched insights. By following
the money, she reveals who gains (Central Valley largeholders and
municipal bond brokerages, among them) and who loses (impoverished
residents in both rural and urban communities) in California's prison
construction frenzy. Because so much trickery was involved in the
credit-market financing, she speculates that California's crackdown
may have been less populist than its ballot initiatives suggest; in
short, voters never saw the bill.

Through careful case studies of two prison zones-Los Angeles, a
convict exporter, and Corcoran, an inmate importer-Gilmore also shows
how large-scale imprisonment constitutes a form of forced
urban-to-rural migration; how tax dollars are unfairly diverted from
blighted urban cores to withering farm towns; and how prison host
communities, despite the transfer, rarely receive their promised
economic windfall. As a rural development scheme, Gilmore counsels,
imprisonment rarely delivers. The best paid employees commute rather
than relocate, and family members who trek to visit their
incarcerated loved ones rarely drop enough cash to stimulate the
service sector.

Overall, Gilmore's somewhat demanding text convincingly identifies
powerful interests that lined up to haul California's tough-on-crime
bandwagon. What Golden Gulag fails to explain is why the band started
playing in the first place.

Here Jonathan Simon, a Berkeley law professor, steps into the
conversation, turning it from base to superstructure. His ambitious
and carefully reasoned new book, Governing through Crime (2007), the
most thought-provoking of the crop, argues that what sociologists are
calling "mass imprisonment" (because such a large portion of the
population is now involved) signals not only a new approach to
managing crime, but to managing society.

In the criminal justice arena, Simon shows how prosecutors have
gained power as courts have become "judgment machines," constrained
by mandatory sentencing, and how prisons, absent the promise of
rehabilitation, have proliferated as "human toxic waste dumps." The
most innovative sections of his book, however, outline how an
increasingly insular, risk averse, and punitive social ethic has
reshaped not only how the other half lives but how the top half does as well.

In deunionized workplaces, he finds that blue and white-collar
employees alike are subject to more surveillance, more restrictions
on behavior (both on and off the clock), and more legalistic
discipline than in the past. He regrets that in schools music and art
classes have given way to metal detectors and locker searches. Even
the family, he argues, has become "a nexus of crime." On one hand,
family members are regarded as potential criminals, a partial
consequence of feminist campaigns against domestic violence. On the
other, well-heeled parents spend heavily to fortify their homes
against external threats, purchasing intruder-alert systems, nanny
cams, and, if their teens stray, home drug testing kits. As much as
the 5,000 prisons that now punctuate the American landscape, gated
communities and battleship SUVs symbolize the birth of a fearful nation.

Americans' collective reactions to violent crime-especially homicide,
which rocketed upward in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1980s, and
fell back toward earth in the 1990s-are so pervasive, Simon contends,
that crime fighting has become a paradigmatic means of governing, a
dominant pathway to authority and legitimacy for policymakers.
Governors and presidents, even more so after 9/11, have increasingly
posed as lawmen on the campaign trail, while crime victims have
become an idealized class of citizens deemed especially worthy of
government intervention.

The result is not only a bloated penal system but an erosion of civil
society. As war (whether against crime or terror) becomes a leading
metaphor for governing, as politicians swap civil liberties for the
elusive promise of security, as sanctions replace supports in the
nation's social welfare toolkit, and as fear eclipses hope as an
impetus to political action, the edifice of a free society quakes,
Simon argues. "Governing through crime does not, and I believe,
cannot make us more secure," he writes. Instead, it cycles hundreds
of thousands of troubled young people, "a shocking percentage of them
descendants of . . . slaves," through criminogenic jails. It "is
making America less democratic and more racially polarized."

Simon maintains that "the signal event marking the end of the Great
Society era" and the rise of its punitive successor was the 1968
passage of the Safe Streets Act. "Crime was driving a stake through
the heart of the Democrats' urban coalition," and the government's
response was to refabricate the welfare state into the penal state.

There were other options. Simon muses counterfactually that political
leaders could have redoubled the war on poverty or launched
determined campaigns against cancer or pollution. Any of these would
have been preferable arenas for government mobilization, Simon says,
and he is somewhat puzzled that policymakers did not see it that way.
So he maps out obstacles along the roads not taken-corporate
opposition to environmentalism and constitutional impediments to a
European-style social welfare state, for instance-thus suggesting
that crime prevailed at least partly by default, because it "offered
the least political or legal resistance to government action." But
this depiction of the Great American Crime Crackdown as mere
expedience minimizes its structural supports (Gilmore's point), as
well as its political utility, especially to the New Right (witness
the Willie Horton ads of 1988 or this season's insinuations that
"Barack Hussein Obama" will be soft on terrorists).

As the perennial role of fear in racially charged political campaigns
suggests, Simon might have expanded on an alternative explanation
that he entertains but never fully endorses: that governing through
crime developed largely as a reaction against civil rights. This is
the argument described by Glenn Loury in a recent Boston Review
essay, and there is considerable evidence for it. As Simon points
out, it was states'-rights conservatives, inspired by George Wallace,
who first seized on crime as a polarizing issue in national politics;
the Republican Right thereafter picked up the baton and used it as a
cudgel against liberalism for almost half a century. It was in the
South, moreover, in the same jurisdictions that avidly resisted
integration, where prison populations first started to grow (in the
late 1960s vs. the mid-1970s nationally) and where they swelled most
intensely; California may manage the largest state penal system in
the country in absolute terms, but states like Louisiana, Georgia,
and Texas have by far the highest rates of incarceration. Southern
states, too, have taken the lead in resurrecting dour penalties that
allude nostalgically to Jim Crow: chain gangs, striped uniforms,
for-profit prisons, and reactivated death houses.

Simon's categorization of history into distinct policymaking regimes
also lends credence to this backlash hypothesis, though it requires
an alternate interpretive lens. In Simon's schema, political
leadership has periodically coalesced to support favored groups of
citizens that come to stand for the nation: yeoman farmers in the
early republic, freedmen after emancipation, industrial workers in
the Great Depression, and finally, victims of crime. The trouble with
this genealogy of government assistance, however, is that it
underemphasizes a grim counter-story. In truth, the helping hand of
government has always been accompanied by a closed fist-with the
latter all too often out front. In the Antebellum Era, slaveholders
in fact commanded greater political influence than yeoman farmers,
whatever the promises of Jacksonian Democracy. After the Civil War,
it was the Klansman who ultimately prevailed over the agent of the
Freedmen's Bureau-and the robber baron who ended up on top. Out of
the New Deal and World War II came not just stronger labor unions but
McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley.

One of the reasons this alternative history of American repression is
worth remembering is that it more logically leads to our punitive
present. In a Whiggish storyline built around reform, America's late
twentieth-century prison boom materializes as a shocking,
self-defeating aberration. If we redirect our spotlight from the
history of social welfare to the equally pronounced, if less
commemorated, history of social subjugation, however, mass
imprisonment suddenly appears less inexplicable. Rather, it unfolds
as the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle between the ideal
of equal citizenship and the reality of unequal power. It represents
a reaction against democratic efflorescence akin to so many other
reactions in U.S. history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts forward.

In particular, the late twentieth-century punitive turn bears
troubling resemblance to another rightward pivot in American history,
one that took place almost exactly a century before: the resurrection
of neo-Confederate rule from the ashes of Reconstruction. Just as
convict leasing, lynching, and finally segregation developed in the
turbulent wake of emancipation and the first African-American freedom
movement, mass imprisonment took hold in reaction to the second. Put
simply, as white conservatives surrendered on integration, they
insisted on getting much tougher on crime, to which they symbolically
chained a host of developments they found troubling, from civil
disobedience to urban rebellions.

The consequence was unprecedented prison growth, but of a particular
sort. In 1960 the U.S. prison population was 60 percent white. By
2005 it was 70 percent non-white. By most measures of racial
disparity, American criminal justice is more separate and unequal
today than it was when Martin Luther King proclaimed from the Lincoln
Memorial: "Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley
of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice."

This contextualization of the prison boom within the tragically
conflicted saga of American race relations matters not so much
because it offers a singular, definitive account of causation, but
because it helps point the way forward. If racially skewed prison
warehousing represents the latest incarnation of American racism,
then political mobilization and social transformation on the scale of
the civil rights movement may be necessary to dislodge it.

At the close of the Bush era, there are scattered signs that
America's prison paroxysm may have run its course. Although the
country's inmate population continues to rise (climbing 16 percent
between 2000 and 2006, not counting the advent of U.S. detention
abroad, from Guantanamo to Bagram), budget crises are forcing an
array of politicians to reckon with what their tough-on-crime
posturing has created. In New York the state assembly has been
revising the Rockefeller drug laws to make them more forgiving. In
Kansas, parole officers are no longer automatically reincarcerating
their charges for low-level violations like failing a urine test. In
Iowa lawmakers are requiring that all new sentencing laws be assessed
for potentially negative racial impacts, and in Nevada politicians
have started rolling back mandatory minimums. Across the country and
on both sides of the aisle, increasing numbers of policymakers are
starting to agree with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who
told the American Bar Association in 2003 that "our resources are
misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all
conclude with guarded hope. Although California's penal system has
become one of the nation's most crowded and dysfunctional in recent
years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for
revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long
after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending
22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes
that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a
redirection of government attention from crime control to health care
and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than
erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a
glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers
Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources
that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore
proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the
same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal
Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers
proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to
judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust
reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs. Bruce
Western discusses some of these proposals in this issue.

One of the most ambitious of these non-governmental efforts, the
Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons, was headed by
none other than Nicholas Katzenbach, now in his eighties. Forty years
had passed since he first surveyed American criminal justice on
behalf of the country's last liberal administration, when in 2005 he
was asked by the Vera Institute, a mid-size think tank, to undertake
a limited follow-up. What Katzenbach found appalled him. Over the
decades, state and federal policymakers had indeed acted on most of
his original recommendations but had invariably done the opposite.
The outcome, he and his small staff concluded after a round of
national hearings, was that the hard end of the criminal justice
system had grown larger, meaner, and, in their view, more socially
corrosive. Prison turbulence had declined since the late '60s, but
rape, crowding, infectious disease, and acute mental illness remained
endemic-and on a monumental scale. Each year, some 13.5 million
people cycle through the country's adult jails and prisons, they
observed. They go in "poor, undereducated, and unhealthy," and they
come out worse.

With a constricted mandate to study only prison conditions,
Katzenbach's second survey coupled strong criticisms-"We should be
astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the
disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and
saddened by the waste of human potential"-with sensibly modest policy
recommendations: more funding for corrections staff, better health
care, independent oversight, and less reliance on supermax isolation.

Yet critics of America's criminal justice system-which now devours
$204 billion a year and circumscribes 7.2 million lives, counting
offenders on probation and parole-would do well to spend more time
with Katzenbach's original report than its cautious sequel. In the
first study, this early advocate for civil rights within the Justice
Department, who once famously faced down George Wallace at the
schoolhouse door, called not only for more professional, more
treatment-oriented prisons, but fewer of them. Imprisonment should be
a sanction of last rather than first resort, he proposed. At the same
time, he and his first commissioners advocated a more expansive
understanding of crime: "The criminal justice system has great
potential for dealing with individual instances of crime, but it was
not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds."
"It needs help," they argued, in the form of better schools, better
housing, better jobs, and genuinely equal citizenship.

In a phone interview, Katzenbach, whose memoir Some of It Was Fun:
Working with RFK and LBJ will be published this fall, says that he
still believes this Great Society approach is the best one. "I'm old
and maybe I can't learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice
system has to be rational and fair," he told me. "Harsh punishment is
satisfying, but our system has to do more than that. It ought to
reflect the type of society we want to be. It ought to stand for decency."

In 1967 Katzenbach titled his report "The Challenge of Crime in a
Free Society," and he still contends in his forthcoming autobiography
that "every law has to satisfy both sides of the equation"-it needs
to confront lawlessness but also safeguard civil liberties and social
justice. To do so, as Katzenbach proposed more than a generation ago,
will require more than technocratic remedies confined to the criminal
justice arena. We will need to embark upon "a revolution in the way
America thinks about crime."