CRIME AS AMERICA'S POP CULTURE

As I write, the panic over the Washington-area sniper appears to have ended
with the arrest of a truly bizarre father-stepson combination, but, until
it was over, the saga held us agog for the better part of a month.

Like the exploits of Jack the Ripper in the darkened East End streets of
late-Victorian London, the almost-daily attacks filled us with terror, kept
us glued to the news outlets of our day, and, during the weeks of
uncertainty and rumor, dramatically changed people's daily routines.

Yet, crazy and horrifying as the events were -- from the killings to the
ways communities and individuals reacted to the bloody spree -- they fit
into a long lineage of sensational, sense-defying crimes and all-engrossing
but ultimately short-lived societal reactions.

The fact that the cable-news channels were running virtually nonstop
coverage, and that the tabloid papers, in particular, delighted in relating
every last little salacious detail of the shootings, would have been
instantly understandable to a newspaper editor a century ago, or to a
gossip-mongering balladeer or pamphleteer from 200 or even 300 years past.
After all, a sniper loose in the environs of a capital city is, undeniably,
high drama.

What the editors of old might have found more surprising was the
surrounding cultural landscape out of which the sniper case emerged to
pre-eminence. For, today, much of American pop culture is saturated not
just in the exploits of the truly exceptional crime or criminal, the
flamboyant, scarlet doings of the real McCoy, but also in the mundane,
routine, even clerical, behavior of run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, cops,
judges, and prison wardens.

As TV viewers, we have spent a generation addicted to shows ranging from
Miami Vice to LA Law to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

It is a change that, I would argue, occurred within the last
quarter-century. And it is a change that has had enormous impact on the way
that we, as a society, view, fear, and respond to crime.

For the past five or six years, much of my reporting has been on issues
relating to crime and punishment, and, more specifically, on how changes in
the criminal-justice system have been permeating our entire society,
creating a culture imbued with many of the same excesses and fears that
germinate behind our prison walls.

Nowadays, magazines and newspapers routinely run articles exploring the
wider implications for society of America's bloated prison system.

But when I began, it was, or at least it appeared to me to be (call it the
hubris of a young writer), something cutting edge, an arena in which
astonishing societal transformations were being effected, but one on which
relatively few journalists were focusing their attention. Crime reporting,
the police beat, those had always attracted journalists by the thousands;
but exploring the vaguer contours of a society marinated in the subtleties
of criminal justice -- detailing the cultural shifts that have both
permitted the growth of a more coercive criminal-justice structure, and, in
turn, have grown out of it -- that was a rugged route well off the beaten path.

In the years from Richard Nixon's presidency to George W. Bush's, the
number of Americans incarcerated in prisons and jails around the country
has approximately quintupled. During the latter part of the 1980s and the
early part of the 1990s, those increases in incarceration could be somewhat
directly tallied to soaring crime rates, and, more pointedly, to startling
increases in violent crime.

Strategically, criminologists like James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling,
of "broken windows" fame -- their theory that, when a neighborhood visibly
began to deteriorate, it served as a magnet for criminals to further
degrade the area; conversely, that preventing a neighborhood from declining
in the first place would later pay dividends in reduced crime -- had been
declaring since the mid-1970s that, if criminals had a higher level of
certainty of receiving jail and prison sentences, imprisonment could come
to serve as a realistic deterrent.

In his 1975 book Thinking About Crime, Wilson wrote that "punishment is not
an unworthy objective for the criminal-justice system of a free and liberal
society to pursue. The evidence supports (though cannot conclusively prove)
the view that deterrence and incapacitation work, and new crime-control
techniques ought to be tried in a frankly experimental manner." Later, in
Crime and Human Nature (1985), written with Richard J. Herrnstein, he upped
the ante still more, arguing in favor of altering "permanently and for
large numbers of people the expected disutility of crime." In the Reagan
era, in particular, Wilson's views were increasingly embraced by the
political establishment.

In such a context, with crime rates rising and public confidence in the
social compact waning, expanding the reach of the prison system and using
incarceration as a form of social engineering, as a glue to reconnect
frayed community fibers, made a degree of sense, though one that was always
open to being contested.

Wilson, the University of Minnesota Law School's Michael H. Tonry told me
in an interview several years ago, "has always been perfectly willing not
to be too concerned by the humane implications" of his policy proposals.

Other scholars I have more recently interviewed, like Carnegie Mellon
University's Alfred Blumstein, have also argued that Wilson's anticrime
prescriptions, while deeply deductive, have been shown to be somewhat
oversimplistic.

Between 1992 and 2001, however, crime rates -- as measured by the Bureau of
Justice Statistics' surveys on crime victimization in the United States and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Uniform Crime Report" -- fell. While
recently released FBI data show that violent crime rose slightly last year,
that increase, of approximately 2 percent, is minuscule compared with the
drops in crime registered during the previous decade.

Yet, throughout that decade, the population living behind bars continued to
soar; today, close to two-million people live lives as prisoners in America.

In 1999, the British Home Office conducted a study estimating that the
United States now plays host to close to one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

According to the Sentencing Project, based in Washington, about 12 percent
of African-American men in their 20's are in jail or prison in America,
and, in some Southern states, close to 1 percent of the total population (a
figure that includes children and the elderly) are now imprisoned.

The only countries that have an incarceration rate (the number of
imprisoned people per 100,000 in the population) even approaching that of
the United States are Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. Apartheid-era South
Africa had a lower incarceration rate than the United States has today.

Britain's and Canada's incarceration rates are about a fifth of America's;
Germany's is under a fifth; and Japan's is far lower still.

At the same time, for those who have argued that swift, certain punishment
could serve to break America's love affair with narcotics, incarceration as
a frontline tool in the "war on drugs" seems to have failed miserably.

For, while most types of crime have declined since 1992, drug use remains
stubbornly constant.

Yet there are now over a quarter-million people in state prisons serving
sentences for drug offenses -- nearly doubling since 1990 and up a
staggering twelvefold since 1983. Fully 61 percent of federal-prison
inmates are now serving sentences for drug crimes.

Study after study has shown that Latino and African-American people are
grossly overrepresented among drug prisoners.

Were more white people, especially more middle-class white people, caught
up in the prison system as a result of their drug use, I believe that, as a
society, we would have both engaged in a more serious debate about the war
on drugs and that we would have generated more critical cultural responses
to the ways we rely on law enforcement to manage many of our most
intractable social problems.

Thus the country, and the sections of its population most likely to be
caught up in the criminal-justice system, are faced with two peculiar sets
of facts: generally falling overall crime rates coupled with stubbornly
high levels of incarceration, and ever larger numbers of people imprisoned
for drug crimes coupled with no sign of a decline in the country's appetite
for drugs.

Culturally, we have come to terms with these facts, have come to
rationalize or, worse, not even to notice, our abnormally high
incarceration rates.

Over the years, I have become fascinated by this phenomenon, by what might
be seen as a disjunct between our national perceptions of crime, criminals,
and victimhood, and the more complex, often less sensational, realities.

I have written many articles on the topic, and, in my book, Hard Time
Blues, I explore the cultural and political trends that sustain mass
incarceration; and, within that broader saga, what I regard as the reductio
ad absurdum of current criminal-justice trends (think of California's
embrace of a catch-all Three Strikes and You're Out law that fails to
create moral and consequential distinctions between a repeat offender who
steals produce from a supermarket and a repeat offender who rapes or kills
a young child, imposing a similar punishment of 25-years-to-life on each).

The main character I focus on in my book was a 50-something heroin addict
from East Los Angeles, Billy Ochoa, who has spent his adult life drifting
in and out of prison for relatively low-end, nonviolent crimes committed to
finance his drug habit, and who received a 326-year sentence in 1996, under
the three-strikes law, for 13 counts of welfare fraud (25 years for each
count, plus one additional year for having been convicted of a similar
crime a few years previously). Ochoa is thus slated to spend the rest of
his life in a supermaximum-security prison for crimes that netted him
$2,100 in welfare funds.

I counterbalance Ochoa's sordid, seedy, but -- more to the point --
pathetic life and career with that of former California Gov. Pete Wilson,
who, to great electoral effect, made tough-on-crime rhetoric a central
focus of his political campaigns, both for U.S. senator and California
governor.

One can make a cogent argument that Wilson would probably have lost his
1994 re-election bid had he not become one of the most vociferous
supporters of three-strikes legislation in the wake of the killing of
12-year-old Polly Klaas in the small northern California town of Petaluma.

In a nutshell, it seems to me that very legitimate debates over appropriate
punishments for different crimes, over models and methods of
rehabilitation, and over the value of criminal-justice sanctions as
deterrents at some point gradually got subsumed beneath a rather demagogic
rhetoric that labeled all opinions that ran counter to majority sentiment
as illegitimately "liberal" on crime and punishment. Further, as that
rhetoric heated up from the mid-1980s on, majority sentiment shifted toward
extremely conservative positions that only a few years earlier would have
been dismissed by the political and bureaucratic agencies responsible for
putting into effect criminal-justice policies as being detrimental to the
long-term well-being of society.

Increasingly, a hypercompetitive, fragmented media market is partially
responsible for the shift.

It has found that the old adage "crime pays" holds true, but with a new
twist: Focus on crime, and the audiences will come to you; focus on more
complex, nuanced stories about poverty, homelessness, addiction, and the
like, and the audience will head over to your competitors. Include lurid
detail, as well as discussion of tough-on-crime measures, and you're ahead
of the game. (Think of the way that post-arrest coverage of the sniper case
has highlighted which jurisdictions will allow the death penalty to be
imposed on a juvenile defendant.) Add to that the fact that local crime
reporting is far cheaper for television to cover than are overseas news
stories or sweeping national issues like joblessness, and the market logic
of increasing crime coverage becomes almost irresistible.

As a result, America's population has come to believe it is besieged by
crime -- even in regions of the country where crime rates are extremely
low, and even during years when crime rates have been falling sharply --
and has been demanding ever-tougher legislative responses; which, in turn,
has led politicians to glom onto the issue as a surefire way to gain easy
votes.

And, of course, because complex feedback loops work in many directions
simultaneously, the political focus on crime and punishment in turn has fed
both the media's appetite for the issue and the public's sense of
insecurity, of the likelihood of victimization, thus further cementing
crime and punishment at the center of the national political discourse.

In tandem with this, a strange cultural "normalization" of prison and of
the process of arrest and prosecution leading up to prison has been occurring.

Epitomized by the content of much rap music, by the HBO series Oz, by Fox
TV's Cops, or, in a more nuanced vein, by the various NBC Law & Order
spinoffs, this has gone beyond traditional voyeuristic fascination and
media preoccupation with crime and punishment that America arguably
inherited from the 18th-century English, with their broadsheets touting
public hangings and epic crimes. It has become something more qualitatively
a part of our culture, of how we define ourselves, and of how we interact
with our surroundings.

Use a public urinal these days, and likely as not you'll be facing a "Just
Say No" antidrug message on the bottom of the basin. Turn on the Super
Bowl, and you'll see government-sponsored ads telling teenagers that using
drugs actively supports international terrorism.

Take a trip on an urban subway system, and chances are you'll see
crime-busters posters and signs detailing awards given out to those who
provide the police with tips against criminals.

This isn't just a populace's momentary fascination with a diverting
spectacle -- as was the case, say, when our grandparents followed the
exploits of Bonnie and Clyde or the desperado actions of John Dillinger, or
when 18th-century Londoners, as detailed in Peter Ackroyd's London: The
Biography, followed the machinations of master criminals and escape artists
like Jack Sheppard. Nor, it seems to me, is it simply an elite's way of
ensuring a cowering populace's sullen loyalty -- a function that,
Foucauldians argue, instruments of torture and capital punishment, as well
as centrally located prisons like London's Newgate (finally destroyed by a
mob during the 1780 Gordon riots), historically fulfilled.

Instead, it's something more akin to a cultural mutation -- one that has
altered the ways in which we define our entertainment and our perception of
reality, one that has intertwined our emotional responses to fear and our
emotional desire for titillation in a profoundly strange way. Perhaps the
spectacle of the prison (no longer centrally located, but instead
transported into remote rural counties far from the great population
centers) has come to embody as profound a role in our culture as that of
the gladiator-filled amphitheaters in the Roman world.

They have become places in which we place our malfeasants; but, like the
Romans of old, we expect returns on our ever-growing investment. We expect
the prisons and their inhabitants to, in some way, entertain us.

The end result: an American crime scene with many similarities to that of
other industrial democracies (although with a higher number of certain
categories of violent crimes, probably at least in part because of the
accessibility of guns in this country), but with a far higher incarceration
rate, fueled mainly by the imprisonment of ever-larger numbers of
nonviolent people; and a strangely rosy-hued American cultural fascination,
not just with larger-than-life crime figures or with supercops (as was the
case with past cultural romances with, say, the mafia, or, inversely, the
FBI), but also with the more-mundane mechanisms of everyday law
enforcement, the institution and officials of the prison, and the culture
of violence nurtured behind bars.

We have come to accept as normal incarceration rates that would have seemed
the unlikely progeny of a dystopian fantasy a mere generation ago. And we
have come to regard arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment as fundamental
props of our mass culture, thus elevating one of the more unpleasant duties
and obligations of the civil society -- the prosecution and punishment of
those who flout its laws -- into a cultural commodity that may, ultimately,
come to define what kind of a nation, what kind of a people, we become.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance writer and the author of Hard Time Blues