Crime Articles

Lip Reader

Adolescents

• In a postindustrial culture that holds up a workaholic Mr. Nice Guy as its temperamental ideal, the heroic spirit defined by Alexander the Great has fallen from grace. Time and technology have shrunk the number of acceptable outlets for the daring, aggressive nature that swung the sword and mapped the unknown, until it has come to be associated primarily with criminals. This saddens but doesn't surprise Lykken, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota; his work, some of it conducted with subjects behind bars, convinces him that "the psychopath and the hero are twigs of the same branch."
  
  The history of another bull-terrier owner, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the legendary nineteenth-century explorer, spy, scholar, and soldier, brings Lykken's observation to life. By the age of nine, the boy who would be the first white man in many parts of Africa and Asia, and who would translate the Kama Sutra, was, according to his biographer Edward Rice, "virtually a hard-core delinquent," more or less ignored by his parents and known for fighting, shooting at tombstones and church windows, lewdness - and enduring toothache. A prodigy who spoke twenty-nine languages, Burton preferred the army to Oxford. His temperament is summed up by his rationale for visiting the forbidden Muslim city of Harar: no European had successfully entered the city, so visiting it was "therefore a point of honor with me." Had he been born in the gutter rather than in a milieu that provided suitable channels for his aggressiveness, "Ruffian Dick" might have followed his proclivities to the gallows rather than to knighthood. The superficially odd similarity between guys in white hats and guys in black ones, vividly portrayed in Clint Eastwood's recent film Unforgiven, illustrates Freud's observation that although a particular instinct always has the same aim, it may have different objects. What worries Lykken is not the inclination to prevail but how it is directed.
  
  As America reels from a wave of lawlessness, research on the temperamental underpinnings of violence has become increasingly controversial. Because black men compose only six percent of the general population but about half of the imprisoned one, the issue particularly concerns the black community, which is understandably suspicious of biological explanations for behavior. In 1992 a firestorm of protest caused Frederick Goodwin, a psychiatrist and the director of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and the world's authority on manic depression, to resign his job and return to his previous position as director of the National Institute of Mental Health after he drew a parallel between inner-city violence and primate studies showing that young males in the wild were more violent and more sexually active when they had to compete for scarce resources. Black political leaders and others also successfully lobbied the National Institutes of Health to withhold money for a conference, to be held that year at the University of Maryland, on possible genetic components of violent behavior.
  
  Spurred on by family instability, violent crime now touches millions of young lives. The control of crime in the streets, in the schools, and in the home ought to be the pre-eminent "children's issue."
  
  Despite the apprehension that research on violence could stigmatize individuals or groups, what it actually shows is that, particularly where natures like Slick Willy's and Richard Burton's are concerned, nurture is the best predictor of good or bad behavior. The demise of the nineteenth-century bourgeois conscience makes no difference to some types of people, but it makes a big one to others. Mostly because of a large increase in illegitimacy since 1970, Lykken says, "across the land, but mainly in the inner cities, thousands of children aren't being brought up by, but only domiciled with, parents who are indifferent, incompetent, or unsocialized themselves." He continues, "We're running a crime factory that turns out little sociopaths." One reason why this white academic chooses to speak out on a socially sensitive issue becomes clear when he gestures toward photographs of two particularly robust babies displayed in his office. "My grandsons are going to be big African-American males, so they're going to face a high risk of attracting violence themselves and of frightening other people. Because of them, and the fact that crime is threatening to destroy all the great improvements in race relations that have come about in my lifetime, I get kind of steamed up about this problem." He concedes that "there's not a prayer in the world" that the solution he favors - the licensing of people for biological parenthood according to the same criteria that are used for adoption - will be tested in the near future: "My purpose in making an extravagant suggestion is to start a discussion. The problem is so real, and nobody is talking about the solution."

British Prison Policy

The problem is not how long we keep hardened criminals inside but that we keep locking up the wrong people.

On political arguments about crime, I offer you an axiom: both sides are always right. Prison works but also it doesn't. Crime can be explained by background; crime is the fault of the criminal. We need to be tough on crime; we need to release prisoners.

Perhaps Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, tried this defence as the Prime Minister was telling him to abandon his plan to cut sentences in half in return for an early guilty plea. Mr Clarke wants to reduce the prison population by 3,000. However, Andrew Cooper, the Downing Street strategy supremo, a man who dreams in data, has shown the Prime Minister the numbers: the public overwhelmingly hate the policy. It's so unpopular that Liberal Democrat voters are the only group in favour.

David Cameron, of course, is right. But so is Mr Clarke, as long as he realises that, by concentrating on sentencing policy, he is looking in the wrong place. Lenient sentencing can only make a serious dent in the prison population at a price in lost popularity that Mr Cameron will never be prepared to pay.

This latest policy reversal shows that the no-longer-nasty Conservative Party doesn't quite know how to deal with crime. It is telling that Mr Cameron's crime speech next week will be his first on the topic since he became Prime Minister. Obsessed with broke Britain, he has had no time for broken Britain. Aware that his rebranding rests on liberal civility, he has been reluctant to talk tough.

His predecessors had no such qualms. Throughout Margaret Thatcher's time in office, crime was a Tory issue. The Tories were in the lead on it for 15 years. At its widest, the lead over Labour was 39 percentage points. This was because Mrs Thatcher's ministers were clear on an essential point: individuals are responsible for their criminal acts. They dismissed Labour's insistence that crime was a disease with social causes.

The Tory lead on crime suddenly evaporated in the summer of 1994, when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. The famous slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" was a perfect description of the fact that both sides were right. Poverty is powerfully associated with criminal behaviour, but equally the economic cycle commits no crimes. Property crime was much lower in the 1930s than in the 1960s.

It was crucial to Labour that it rediscovered individual responsibility. Indeed, it used to irritate Mr Blair immensely that the Home Office would argue that crime was inevitable in bad times as people were poor and inevitable in good times because there was just so much stuff to steal.

Labour retained its lead for most of Mr Blair's tenure. Gordon Brown always believed that public anxiety about crime was exaggerated. He thought that talking about crime merely encouraged it. Labour's lead on crime collapsed under his leadership. The public teach politicians an inescapable and obvious truth. They care a lot about crime, and they hate it.

The political class has responded to this with a 20-year experiment in policy, and here is the opportunity for the Justice Secretary. In 1992, when Mr Clarke was Home Secretary, there were 44,000 people in prison. Now there are 85,000. This huge change was initiated by Lord Howard of Lympne, who was unequivocal that prison worked.

Lord Howard was and is right. Prison has three functions and it serves them well. It is a punishment for malfeasants. It protects the public by keeping dangerous characters off the streets. And it reduces crime because at least some criminals are locked up.

But Lord Howard was also wrong. Prison does not work in the sense that half of all inmates offend again within a year of being released. It doesn't work in the sense that British prisoners receive no rehabilitation. Nobody is writing Pilgrim's Progress inside. Too many of them can't read it, let alone write it.

The central problem with prison, which should exercise Mr Clarke much more than the length of sentences, is that too many of the wrong people are incarcerated. There are three distinct types of prisoner: immature boys, people in dire need of help and career criminals. The task of penal policy should be to stop the first two ending up in prison and turning into the third. At any one time, young men make up about half the prison population and plenty of them ought not to be in there. If community punishment were better, which is to say more instantly unpleasant and properly enforced, then a custodial stay could often be averted, at lower cost. Even expensive community orders cost less than a third of a place inside. It would help, too, if we updated our Victorian idea of the prison. Jeremy Bentham threw away most of his fortune on the 'panopticon', a prison in which the circular design meant that inmates didn't need to be watched. GPS technology means that we can now confine people effectively without walls. Prisoners who aren't dangerous can be invigilated, while paying their own board and lodging. If we did this better, we could take 20,000 people out of prison without being soft on crime.

Then a further 30 per cent or so of prisoners should be discharged at once. These are people for whom prison is the wrong place. Nobody with a mental health problem or in the grip of drug or alcohol addiction should be in prison. They need treatment and help. And it no more makes sense to imprison 1,300 people for defaulting on fines than it did when Charles Dickens wrote Little Dorrit.

That leaves about 20 per cent of the prison population who are hardened career criminals. All these numbers come with caveats because the Home Office, incredibly, doesn't have reliable data. But we really do know that 100,000 persistent offenders commit half of all crime and that most of them are at liberty at any given time. The authorities know exactly who most of these people are and the future of policing must surely lie in more forensic concentration on prolific offenders.

This is the way that we can have condign punishment for the criminal and reduce the numbers behind bars. Get those for whom prison works inside and those for whom it doesn't out. Mr Cameron is right to respond to public anxiety about crime.

The Castle and Delancey Street

Most of the people who work at Fortune were once themselves drug addicted, homeless or imprisoned. This is important. "The clients can look at the staff and say, 'a few years ago, that person was where I am,'" said Glenn E. Martin, Fortune's vice president of development and public affairs. (He himself served six years in prison, and was released nine years ago.) The staff can also see past appearances: "Some others may see a guy with his pants pulled down and his hat on, yelling, and say 'he's not ready,' " said Martin. "But we'll talk to him." The credibility and understanding produced by having a staff of former offenders is important. But about 300 of Fortune's clients each year get something more: a bed in the Castle, and the chance to start a law-abiding life in the company of other people trying to do the same.

The Castle provides solutions to several of the most important problems facing newly released prisoners. One is housing. Between 10 and 20 percent of people released from state and city prisons and jails have nowhere stable to go - they couch surf with friends or go into homeless shelters. But a stable home is a prerequisite for all the other things needed for a productive life. The Castle can be that home for a few nights or many months, until the person can find work and safe housing he or she can afford.

Anyone newly released from prison with nowhere else to go can apply to live in the Castle. Open beds are filled by the first qualified applicant, but the Castle turns away at least 10 people for every one it accepts. Prisoners throughout New York state apply - because the Fortune Society has physical offices in some jails and prisons, the parole bureaucracy refers them and because prisoners themselves spread the word. "We get several thousand letters a year," says JoAnne Page, the president and chief executive of the Fortune Society. "We get referrals from people's mothers." The Castle has single rooms for residents who earn them; the rest have roommates. It serves meals and has staff on duty around the clock. It has a computer lab, laundry and a cafeteria. Residents are required to go full time to counseling, services such as drug treatment or job placement, or to school.

Residents are surrounded by others who support them, hold them accountable, teach them skills and model good behavior. But perhaps more important than housing, the Castle gives people a new group of friends to identify with. Every Thursday night at 6 the Castle has a group meeting of all its residents. At one recent meeting, people sat around an enormous table and talked about the successes of their week. One woman talked about her job as a janitor at a shelter for women. "It's a safe place, and clean - that's because of me," she said with pride. One man recounted a speech he attended by a political candidate. Another said he opened a bank account for the first time in his life. One woman was applying for jobs and wondered aloud how best to phrase the information that she was a felon. JoAnne Page took the opportunity to deliver one of Fortune Society's key messages: You are not a felon. You committed a felony and did your time, but that is not who you are. One man announced that the Castle's chorus was rehearsing and was open to new members. The residents applauded each other fervently.

Delancey Street, in San Francisco, is a very different community with the same purpose. People come to live at the Delancey Street residential building for an average of four years. Each resident is required to get at least a high school equivalency degree and learn several marketable job skills, such as furniture making, sales or accounting. The organization is completely run by its residents, who teach each other - there is no paid staff at all. Teaching others is part of the rehabilitation process for Delancey residents. The residence is financed in part by private donations, but the majority of its financing comes from the businesses the residents run, such as restaurants, event planning, a corporate car service, a moving company and framing shop. All money earned goes to the collective, which pays all its residents' expenses.

At both Fortune and Delancey, a person emerging from prison is surrounded by a community of people who support him, hold him accountable, teach him skills and model good behavior. Many of the men and women in these programs come to think of themselves as productive members of society for the first time in their lives, and it may also be the first time they ever feel competent at anything besides lawbreaking.

The Delancey Street residence, which began in 1971, has never been formally evaluated. But there is no question that is phenomenally successful. It has graduated more than 14,000 people from prison into constructive lives. Carol Kizziah, who manages Delancey's efforts to apply its lessons elsewhere, says that the organization estimates that 75 percent of its graduates go on to productive lives. (For former prisoners who don't go to Delancey, only 25 to 40 percent avoid re-arrest.) Since it costs taxpayers nothing, from a government's point of view it could very well be the most cost-effective social program ever devised. The program has established similar Delancey Street communities in Los Angeles, New Mexico, North Carolina and upstate New York. Outsiders have replicated the Delancey Street model in about five other places. While some other Fortune Society programs have been researched and found to be effective, there has been no study of the Castle, which began in 2002. Nevertheless, the Castle is often cited by criminal justice experts as a model for helping ex-offenders. New York State's Division of Parole gave a special award to the Fortune Society last month, and parole officers who work with Castle residents speak highly of it. "It's working," said Otis Cruse, a parole officer who has had the Castle in his jurisdiction. "It has counseling, groups, connections to employment - it's one-stop shopping. It's comfortable, quiet, clean and safe - you can sleep without looking over your shoulder. It's an environment where positive people are doing positive things - you are colleagues in pursuing the same goal."

There is one possible caveat about the Castle's effectiveness: most of the people I saw at the Castle were in their 30s or older. Older people who get out of prison, by definition, are more likely than young ones to have served long sentences for serious offenses. And the longer the sentence, the more disconnected and disoriented prisoners are likely to be upon release. So they are important clients for the Castle. But they are also at an age where people are leaving crime on their own, finally ready to accept some responsibility and aware they are not immortal and want a family and a stable life. Crime is a young person's game. It may be true that many people at the Castle successfully turn around their lives. The question is whether their age would help them to do so in any case.

There are two puzzles here. Delancey Street is now celebrating its 40th anniversary. One would think that by now there would be Delancey 2.0 models sprouting all over. But there are not. A related mystery concerns the idea that underlies both Delancey and the Castle: the importance of pro-social peers. Our guts tell us they matter; we know the effect our friends can have on our behavior. Peer pressure may be the single most important factor getting people into crime - surely it should be employed to get them out again. Yet it is not. Besides Delancey and the Castle, there is probably not a single government agency or citizen group working with former prisoners that lists "clean-living peers" alongside housing, job training and other items on its agenda for what former prisoners need to go straight. These two communities of former prisoners are good projects, but they have failed to have a wider impact.

The Dingo Ate My Baby

ULURU, the large red rock in the Australian outback, is a sacred site for aboriginal people. Photographs do not convey how dramatically it looms: an enormous crimson heart in the middle of thousands of miles of flat, muted desert.

It was here, on Aug. 17, 1980, that a dingo - an Australian wild dog - dragged a baby called Azaria Chamberlain from a tent as her parents sat by the campfire. Her body was never found.

Azaria's desperate mother, Lindy, was accused of lying, convicted of murder and sent to prison. The film about her, "A Cry in the Dark," starring Meryl Streep, spawned a thousand jokes: "A dingo's got my baby!" It was not until this week that Lindy and her ex-husband, Michael, were finally given the vindication they longed for: a death certificate that stated that the cause of Azaria's death was a dingo attack.

Why did it take three decades, tens of millions of dollars, a criminal case appealed in Australia's highest court, a royal commission and four inquests to establish Lindy Chamberlain's innocence? In that time, Australia's population grew from 14.5 million to almost 23 million. The case has been a spectacular example of poor forensic science, anxiety about 'evil mothers' and suspicion of religiosity - the Chamberlains are members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which was wrongly portrayed as an infant-slaying cult. Rumors circulated that Azaria meant 'sacrifice in the wilderness' in Hebrew, not 'blessed of God.'

Most Australians thought the dingo was a flimsy excuse. Few people, except park rangers, believed a dingo would attack a baby, and the evidence indigenous trackers gave about drag marks near the tent was brushed aside. In a 1984 poll, 76.8 percent of Australians said Lindy Chamberlain was guilty, and the investigation did little to change their minds.

Then there was Lindy Chamberlain herself. She was thought too 'sexy' and 'cold'; she walked into court with a face set like concrete under large black sunglasses and severely cut black hair. Much was made of her bare, tanned shoulders, her expansive wardrobe and her stoicism. When she did not weep on cue, no one suggested she might have been suffering from shock or trauma. Even worse, she was accused of playing to the cameras that were constantly thrust in her face. She was, we were told, more interested in looking pretty than in the death of her child.

This was a woman, as the prosecution put it, who could murder a baby with nail scissors in the front seat of her car before stuffing the body into a camera case. When a forensic expert claimed there were bloodstains in the front of the Chamberlain's car, those harboring suspicions were triumphant. Guilty! People spat on her as she walked into the courtroom. It took years before it emerged that the marks were from a chemical spray and old milk.

When "A Cry in the Dark" was released in 1988, it presented a significant challenge to public opinion, coming as it did on the heels of a commission that established serious bungling of evidence by the police and judiciary and overturned the conviction for which Lindy Chamberlain served three years. The movie offered a sympathetic portrayal of a woman struck by an inexplicable tragedy and then accused of an inexplicable crime. By then, she had already given birth in prison to her fourth child, who lived with foster parents until her mother was released. Many people wrote her apologetic letters after seeing the film.

When the coroner tearfully declared the Chamberlains innocent this week and gave them Azaria's correct death certificate, there was a surprising display of grief and shame in Australia. Comedians issued public apologies for using Lindy Chamberlain as a punch line; TV hosts were grave and emotional. Azaria would have turned 32 on June 11; her parents' faces crumpled when reminded of it.

The Australian historian Michelle Arrow, who has co-edited a book about the case, believes it was such an engrossing spectacle that we still bear a 'psychic scar' from it. Part of the witch hunt, certainly, was about the way white Europeans viewed aboriginal land; as a remote place where sinister things would happen, a place of dark magic where a young mother would slit her baby's throat as a sacrifice to God.

We see now that our willingness to believe that was a collective failure of empathy. We assumed an innocent woman was guilty. We threw rocks at a grieving mother. And a nation founded by convicts somehow forgot the presumption of innocence.

Lindy Chamberlain is writing a book on forgiveness now. She has learned how to absolve those who mocked, vilified and condemned her. We should take longer to forgive ourselves.

Mugshots

If you work in a prison, as I did a few years ago, there's a decent chance you'll meet a guy who'll tell you to be wary of anyone caught smiling in his mug shot. The wisdom of this counsel will become plainly evident when you discover that the man who offered it, and who was rather insistent about it, is himself smiling in his own mug shot. Lurking behind this prisoner's complicated smile, it seems, is an awareness that this image of his face will be widely seen and interpreted. He knows very well that it will be circulated in public, and that the primary purpose of the mug shot - to identify him to those in power - is only a portion of its evolving significance. When you sit for a mug shot today, your criminal likeness is being entered into a cultural consciousness, not just a legal one - and you know, or ought to know, that it'll probably show up that very same day on a Web site that's also pushing Toyotas.

Web sites devoted to collecting mug shots are popping up everywhere. At first glance, the online culture of mug-shot voyeurism would seem to be the logical extension of our eternal quest for celebrity cellulite. As it turns out, though, celebrity Schadenfreudians are minor players on the mug-shot scene. The most popular sites peddle a more homely stock: the disgraced images of our until recently anonymous neighbors. This is mostly out of editorial necessity. Celebrity mug shots are both not plentiful enough and much too plentiful; they bubble up infrequently and, when they do, go viral immediately. That's not a good combination if you're trying to bring traffic to your Web site. Local mug shots, on the other hand, are a perfect online product. They are gossipy, visually stimulating, and free - and the supply is bottomless, renewing itself by the hour for as long as humans continue to sin. Mug-shots sites harvest their content directly from local authorities that release booking photos and arrest information as a matter of public record.

The most ambitious mug-shot blogs present themselves as hybrids of newspaper and fetish sites, with photos organized under section titles that range from 'Local News' and 'Sports' to 'Transgender' and 'Beat-Up.' (Some news sites have themselves appropriated the form. The CBS-affiliated, WTSP Channel 10 news, 'Tampa Bay's news leader,' runs a slide show called 'Notorious Women' on its Web site, which features dozens of mug shots of attractive women. The entertainment potential of mug shots has crept back to the source: a sheriff's department in Arizona invites users to its Web site to vote on the 'mug shot of the day.') These sites are full of pathos and picturesque weirdness: little old ladies, suspects whose uncooperative heads are propped up by anonymous gloved hands, characters whose masklike expressiveness seems more appropriate to commedia dell'arte, people done up in elaborate Halloween costumes of animals or devils (or, fatefully, of prison inmates), a mild-mannered looking man with a 'FUCK YOU' tattoo covering his entire forehead.

Mug-shot sites brand themselves as a public service, and offer the requisite disclaimers that everyone pictured on them is innocent until proven guilty. But, of course, mug shots are the very image of guilt, and seem almost proof of it, which is why some states caution judges and prosecutors against submitting them to juries. And it's for this precise reason - instant lurid appeal - that mug-shot blogs can be profitable. Some, like arrests.org and mugshots.com, run ads from major brands: Southwest Airlines, Zipcar, Adobe, Lysol, Nokia. Mugshots.com partners with ten separate vendors with names like mugshotbusters.com that provide a service for people desperate to have their mug shot removed from the site. This semi-extortion scheme is apparently legal.

In case there's any doubt about the relationship between these sites and online social networks, mug-shot profiles are furnished with a Twitter button. Users can click directly through a particular mug shot to find the person on Facebook. This gets at these sites' unspoken service as a cultural corrective to the endless self-presentation that happens on social-network sites: here we are allowed to see, or to imagine, what our friends and neighbors look like when they aren't reclining on the beach or looking good at parties. Mug shots are the gargoyles crouching at the ledges of the cathedral of Facebook.

The earliest mug shots in the United States, from the eighteen-forties, were intended for the eyes of the police. But those photo collections swelled quickly and soon became unwieldy. It wasn't long before the 'rogues galleries,' as these leather-bound mug-shot photo albums were called, grew too large for police departments, much less for any one officer, to commit to memory. The only way to keep pace with the huge influx of information was to bring more brainpower to the task. Mug shots were published widely, and the job of seeing and remembering criminals' faces was put to the public. The collective gaze is a formidable face-recognition technology. From almost the beginning, the creation of a photographic record of society's criminals was a kind of crowd-sourced project. Implicit in the use of police photos, in other words, is the need for mass publication and a demand that each citizen look closely and acquaint himself with the faces of the notorious.

But what actually happens in this encounter has only partly to do with the practical task of police work. A mug shot doesn't simply provide information, it lures us into a drama in which we are given an intimate, Leviathan's-eye view of the state asserting dominance over an individual. In the old days, this spectacle took place live, on the scaffold of the pillory. Today, it happens in the creation and online circulation of the mug shot. In the faces of these photographic subjects we behold an alarming look of knowledge without consent, and the formal elements associated with this type of portrait - the rigid, head-on stare, the non-professional lighting and institutional accouterment - are charged with the candid photo's shock of spontaneous revelation.

We've seen a version of the mug-shot drama many times before, almost daily in our newspapers. But it is precisely our fluency with it that makes us sensitive to departures in form, and compels us to seek out, promiscuously, every variation on the theme: A tear running down the cheek of a young woman, suggestive intrusions from the world outside of the frame, poses of miraculously unruffled prettiness, the smile in all its varieties. In these images, the power dynamic latent in all photography - the tense encounter between captor and captive, camera and subject - is played out openly. Here the bondage fantasy is a bit more than a fantasy, and it comes in all shades. When the massive and ever-growing collection of mug shots is given over to the hands of the public, people will reorganize the information according to the categories of their desires.

What links mug-shot blogging to its police origins is exactly this impulse to organize faces into categories. Police photos have always been used as a catalogue of physical details, a database that could be used to identify, then classify, a person as a criminal. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, these physical details themselves were regarded as literal reflections of criminality. To some criminologists, the shapes of a person's head and face formed the basis of classification. This view was based on physiognomy, a popular theory that 'all human beings carry charts of their mentality and character at their mast-heads, legible, even in detail, by all who know how read them,' as one contemporary practitioner put it. The physiognomic approach to understanding behavior and character was common in this period among social scientists, novelists, and the general population. Almost from the moment that photographic technology emerged, it was put to the service of another new field, criminology. Criminal physiognomists used photographs, together with elaborate statistical analyses of bodily proportions of every kind - convexity of the jaw, forehead and lip size, for example - in order to isolate and catalogue anatomical signs of criminality.

There's a whiff of nineteenth-century criminal physiognomy in today's mug-shot blogs. Galleries of photos organized by specific physical type, rows of bearded homeless men in arrests.org's 'Wino' category, or many of the other the categories on that site - 'Beat Up,' 'Grandmas', 'Grandpas,' 'Grills,' 'Hair,' 'Hotties,' 'Hunks,' 'Scary,' 'Tatted Up,' 'Transgender,' 'WTF' - bear a telling resemblance to physiognomical studies in which images of prisoners were damningly grouped together by forehead shape, nose size, or jaw proportion. Online collections of the criminal face have similarly translated a giant tangle of information into legible physical categories. Like those old studies, the resulting rows of photos don't merely allow an observer to read the faces for meaning, they make it difficult to not read them this way.

The resemblance isn't just in the method but also in the objective of classification. Like the physiognomy studies of the past, mug-shot blogs aren't interested in individual images but in generalization, in sorting out the entire corpus into a taxonomy. Taken together, the little pictures add up to a big picture. In the nineteenth century, the goal was typically to prove the existence of a biologically determined criminal class, a 'criminal race' that stood quite apart from those who were writing and reading the physiognomy studies. The taxonomy of mug-shot blogs has a slightly different aim - to maximize consumer options by personalizing the site to the tastes of users and advertisers, not to create scientific classification. Still, the result is similar: the clear delineation of two classes, those who sort and consume the data, and those who are the data.

This isn't to say that mug-shotists aren't ambivalent. Guilty pleasure is built into the form. When one blogger recently compiled her list of the thirty hottest mug shots of men, which she'd drawn from the mug-shot blog hotandbusted, she felt compelled to add 'yikes' next to No. 14's charge, domestic violence. At the end of her blog post, she explained, "I get that a lot of these guys 'aren't hot' because they are also criminals (specifically the DUIers and the Domestic Violencers)." In the comments section on the post, her readers pointed out another problem: neither the blogger nor her source included mug shots of black men. This was a particularly egregious omission, said one commenter, given their disproportionately high rate among the mug shot population.

It's hard to know how to untangle the positions in that particular debate. But here's what we do know: the two most popular kinds of images on mug shot sites tend to polarize between the monstrous and the seductive. This isn't a reflection on how mug shots look but rather on how people are looking at them. If, as John Updike wrote, the camera's unblinking eye "invites, likes a psychoanalyst's silence, self-exposure," the troubled gaze returned from our prisoners has a similar effect on us. The more we look at, organize, and annotate their photos, the sharper the exposure of ourselves.

Private Investment Incentives

New York City, embracing an experimental mechanism for financing social services that has excited and worried government reformers around the world, will allow Goldman Sachs to invest nearly $10 million in a jail program, with the pledge that the financial services giant would profit if the program succeeded in significantly reducing recidivism rates.

The city will be the first in the United States to test “social impact bonds,” also called pay-for-success bonds, which are an effort to find new ways to finance initiatives that might save governments money over the long term.

First used in Britain and now being explored in Australia, the bonds are rapidly capturing the imagination of some public officials in the United States: on Wednesday, Massachusetts announced that it was completing negotiations with two nonprofit groups to finance juvenile justice and homelessness programs, with the promise of repayment only if the programs work.

The federal government, Connecticut, New York State and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, among others, are at various stages of considering using the bonds to harness new funds for human-services programs.

In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg plans to announce on Thursday that Goldman Sachs will provide a $9.6 million loan to pay for a new four-year program intended to reduce the rate at which adolescent men incarcerated at Rikers Island reoffend after their release.

The money is not a huge amount for Goldman, which last month reported over $900 million in second-quarter profit, and the investment promises a public-relations benefit for the Wall Street bank. For the city, the money allows the Bloomberg administration to demonstrate, and test, several of its priorities: enlisting private sector help in financing public needs, and tying program money to rigorous outcome evaluations.

The Goldman money will be used to pay MDRC, a social services provider, to design and oversee the program. If the program reduces recidivism by 10 percent, Goldman would be repaid the full $9.6 million; if recidivism drops more, Goldman could make as much as $2.1 million in profit; if recidivism does not drop by at least 10 percent, Goldman would lose as much as $2.4 million.

“This promising financing model has potential to transform the way governments around the country fund social programs, and as first in the nation to launch it, we are anxious to see how this bold road map for innovation works,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement.

“Social impact bonds have potential upside for investors,” he added, “but citizens and taxpayers stand to be the biggest beneficiaries.”

In a twist that differentiates New York’s plan from other governments’ experiments with social impact bonds, Mr. Bloomberg’s personal foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, will provide a $7.2 million loan guarantee to MDRC.

If the jail program does not succeed, MDRC can use the Bloomberg money to repay Goldman a portion of its loan; if the program does succeed, Goldman will be paid by the city’s Department of Correction, and MDRC may use the Bloomberg money for other social impact bonds, said James Anderson, director of the foundation’s government innovation program.

Jeffrey B. Liebman, a professor of public policy at Harvard University who has written about social impact bonds, said the New York contract would be widely scrutinized.

“This will get attention as perhaps the most interesting government contract written anywhere in the world this year,” Dr. Liebman said. “People will study the contract terms, and the New York City deal will become a model for other jurisdictions.”

But social impact bonds have also worried some people in the nonprofit and philanthropy field, who say monetary incentives could distort the programs or their evaluations.

“I’m not saying that the market is evil,” said Mark Rosenman, a professor emeritus at Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, “but I am saying when we get into a situation where we are encouraging investment in order to generate private profit as a substitute for government responsibility, we’re making a big mistake.”

Goldman approached the city after hearing that New York officials and MDRC were interested in social impact bonds. In an interview, Alicia Glen, the head of Goldman Sachs’s Urban Investment Group, said the company was confident that the program would work.

“This is a new approach — no city has ever done something exactly like this before — and we were able to get comfortable with the risks, which other financial institutions may not have been,” Ms. Glen said. “But we are confident that the city will identify enough savings that we’ll get a reasonable return on the investment.”

The Goldman money will finance a program called Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience, or ABLE, as a part of the Bloomberg administration’s year-old Young Men’s Initiative, which seeks to improve prospects for black and Latino adolescents. The jail program, which will offer counseling and education for an estimated 3,400 incarcerated adolescent men each year, will be run by two nonprofit organizations, Osborne Association and Friends of Island Academy, and overseen by MDRC.

Currently, nearly 50 percent of young men released from Rikers reoffend within a year.

City officials said they hoped the concept of social impact bonds could also be used to finance programs on homelessness, foster care, special education or health care. By using the mechanism to pay for prevention programs that are often too expensive for government to afford, the officials say they believe that they could save taxpayers money over the long term.

“Government is paying for outcomes that the government wants to achieve,” Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, the program’s chief architect, said. “This is designed to provide a template for other initiatives so we can do more.”

New York’s program is modeled, in part, after one in Peterborough, a London suburb, that began in September 2010 and is still years from being fully evaluated.

In Massachusetts, Jay Gonzalez, the secretary of administration and finance, is a proponent of social impact bonds. “We’ve got to change from the idea of, ‘We just pay for stuff and hopefully get the results,’ ” Mr. Gonzalez said in an interview. “The beauty of this is if they perform to get the results, then we pay. If they don’t, we don’t pay.”

Convenience Stores and Robbers

What do Clerks, a great many Simpsons episodes and Season 2, Episode 6 of Breaking Bad have in common? The convenience store. There are nearly 150,000 convenience stores in the United States—one for every 2,000 of us, roughly speaking. Total spending at these stores - about $682 billion in 2011, or around $2,200 per person - is greater than the GDP of Sweden. Or Saudi Arabia - perhaps a more apt comparison, given that convenience stores mostly sell petroleum. (Gasoline comprises about 70 percent of total sales.)

At many convenience stores, including every 7-Eleven in the United States, there’s a strip by the door with lines that mark out height in feet. Height strips, it turns out, appear in many retail environments. But what are they for? As always a few guesses:

a) Door-height assessment: For those delivering inventory, the height strip is a quick reminder of the vertical clearance.

b) Eyewitness help: Height strips were developed to help eyewitnesses gauge the height of a fleeing robber.

c) Evidence gathering: Height strips came along after the spread of surveillance cameras, and allow those cameras to capture the height of fleeing robbers.

d) Crime deterrence: The strips don’t often help the cops solve crimes, but they do serve as a psychological deterrent. They are meant to be noticed, so that potential criminals will see them and think twice.

And the answer is ...

b). I suspect this one wasn’t too hard: With their abundant locations, late hours, wide range of products, high cash turnover and often just one clerk on duty, the popular image of convenience stores is as bullet-riddled as Apu, the proprietor of Kwik-E-Mart on The Simpsons. (“Here’s a pointer, try to take it on the shoulder.”).

What’s surprising though, is that while height strips were first deployed to help clerks or customers gauge the height of fleeing criminals, their function today is largely psychological deterrence.

A little history: Back in the mid 1970s, studies were undertaken by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute and Dr. Rosemary Erickson, a leading forensic sociologist, to determine how convenience stores could lower their robbery rates. A series of recommendations included time-controlled safes, limited cash-on-hand, lighting that was not only bright but carefully balanced between indoors and outdoors, and unobstructed lines of sight from outside the store. (The latter is usually achieved by moving the cashier closer to the entrance, and by removing merchandise and posters that block the view into the store. Another good reason cashiers have moved toward the middle or front of stores: As more stores started selling gasoline, clerks needed to be able to activate the pumps—and shut them off in an emergency.)

7-Eleven was the first chain to adopt these recommendations nationally. Later, the National Association of Convenience Stores offered a package of these measures to all its members. For good reason: These measures are remarkably effective. Convenience-store crime rates fell by 50 percent between 1976 and 1986.

Height strips predate such programs, but their widespread deployment came as a result of them. And both happened long before the deployment of video cameras. Rollie Trayte, a security consultant and former police officer with 25 years of experience in convenience-retailing crime prevention, says the plan was that clerks would note the heights of robbers as they fled their stores. “The original idea was that cashiers should be trained to be good witnesses—and not resist or fight with robbers. Treat them like your best customer: give ’em what they want and get ’em out the door.” Dr. Erickson adds another reason height strips were deemed necessary: Clerks, when giving descriptions to the police, frequently overestimated the height of criminals. Anyone can look tall when they’re pointing a gun at you.

Today, though, consultants like Dr. Erickson actually advise clerks - and customers - not to use height strips to clock the heights of criminals. One reason: surveillance cameras will capture not only a criminal’s height but often a good image of their face, if it isn't concealed. The more important reason, though, is that she doesn't want robbers to "see the clerk, or customer, trying to identify them." Witnesses "can get shot for that," she says.

So why keep height strips at all? These days the purpose of height strips is mostly psychological. And their target is both customers and robbers. Convenience store owners want their stores to look safe and welcoming to customers at all hours, and height markers - along with good lighting and security cameras - are meant to signal that the store and the chain take safety seriously. Apparently, the opposite possibility - that anti-crime measures will suggest that a store and its customers have something to worry about - isn't a great concern. Perhaps we’ve gotten used to cameras, or have come to view crime as an ever-present possibility.

Experts say that unlike cameras, the Psy-Ops impact of height strips on regular customers is limited, because few customers notice them, and fewer still consider their purpose. But criminals, they say, do notice them. To a potential stick-up artist, height strips have come to indicate the presence of the entire array of successful anti-crime measures developed for convenience stores over the last few decades. A store that deploys height strips signals that it is taking security seriously. A robber might well decide to take his or her business elsewhere.

Such signaling, though, is open to abuse: Dr. Erickson notes that some businesses simply display height strips without bothering to employ the other essential parts of the anti-crime program, giving “the false impression that they are conscientious.” (Batesian mimicry, anyone?)

There’s another surprising dimension to the psychological impact of height strips. When else might you see one? When you’re being booked by the police, or standing in a police line-up. Chris McGoey, a security consultant in Arizona who was a height-strip pioneer in the 1970s, says it was common for criminals to report that height markers “made them flash back to the last time they stood in a police line-up, or while being photographed before being booked into jail.” In fact, among all the ways a height strip might deter criminals, McGoey ranks this “flashback effect” as the most important.

Rollie Trayte told me that in his decades working on convenience-store safety, he regularly received calls from law enforcement agencies asking them to send over retail-style height strips. Which means that in a convenience store criminals may well encounter exactly the same height strip design that they stood in front of the last time they were arrested.

Not many of us regularly rob convenience stores, but there are other ways a trip to the convenience store can lead to a police station. Drunk driving, for example, is often precded by a booze run at a convenience store. The height strip on the way out, if we notice it, could serve as a reminder of how little we want to see another one at the end of the night.

Long New Yorker story on pickpocketing

The Great Train Robbery

I don’t want to let too much time pass without acknowledging the recent death of Bruce Reynolds, the British criminal who masterminded one of the greatest heists of modern times: 1963’s Great Train Robbery. Reynolds led more than a dozen men in a plot to hijack a Royal Mail train that was carrying about 2.6 million pounds in small bills, the equivalent of about $60 million today. The heist succeeded, though its aftermath reveals why such grandiose criminal plots are few and far between.

The suave, charismatic Reynolds was a criminal straight out of the movies. He wore tailored suits, drove an Aston Martin, and mingled in smart society. As Piers Paul Read put it in The Train Robbers, Reynolds was “propelled by an intense romanticism” that led him to consider careers in journalism, science, and the military. Eventually, he settled on more lucrative pursuits, and he formed a group that “specialized in top-class crime.”

In 1963, Reynolds and his confederates learned that a cash-laden mail train regularly left Glasgow for London, and began devising a plan to rob it. Reynolds built a team: musclemen to intimidate the train personnel, an expert to tamper with the rail signals, an engineer to drive the train. On the night of Aug. 8, the team fooled the train into stopping, and then, after bludgeoning the engineer into submission, stole 121 bags filled with money and made their escape. Afterwards, they holed up in a farm to divide the loot and celebrate, playing Monopoly using the real money they had stolen. Fade to black, roll credits.

OK, this non-cinematic heist didn’t really have a happy ending. Days after the robbery, Scotland Yard discovered the robbers’ hideout. It was covered in fingerprints, which made it easy to identify and capture most of the participants before they’d had time to spend their shares. Many of the robbers received 30-year jail sentences—extraordinarily harsh for a largely non-violent robbery—which some of them served in maximum security conditions. The police recovered just a small fraction of the money that had been stolen. Nevertheless, upon their release, some of the robbers found that the fortune they thought was awaiting them had been sapped by unscrupulous friends and associates.

A few of the train robbers escaped prison or eluded capture, for a time. But their lives were not carefree. They moved constantly to avoid detection; much of their money was spent underwriting their flight. Their funds evaporated, and by 1968 all but one had been brought to justice. The exception was Ronnie Biggs, who escaped from prison in 1965 and fled overseas, first to Australia and then to Brazil, which lacked an extradition treaty with the United Kingdom. Biggs, who lived there openly for decades, became a public figure of sorts, entertaining visitors at his house and even recording a few tracks with the Sex Pistols. But he missed England, and in 2001 voluntarily surrendered and returned to prison. He remained there until 2009, when he was released on compassionate grounds.

As for Bruce Reynolds, after five years living lavishly on the lam in Canada and Mexico, the near-bankrupt criminal mastermind returned to England in 1968. He was captured later that year and sent to prison, where he served 10 years before being paroled in 1978. He later returned to prison for drug trafficking; after being released for that crime, he attempted to trade on his notoriety as the Great Train Robbery’s architect, writing an autobiography and appearing in the media. A BBC obituary noted that, by 1995, Reynolds was “living on income support in a south London flat supplied by a charitable trust.”

The aftermath of the Great Train Robbery shows why high-profile heisting is a bad career move for criminals. Big plans rarely go off without a hitch. Evidence is almost always left behind, and the more public the crime, the more motivated the police are to find that evidence and use it to make a collar.

If they were thinking pragmatically, the train robbers would have been better off sticking to simpler scores. Then again, Bruce Reynolds wouldn’t have been memorialized in the New York Times if he’d stuck to the small time. Was it worth it? The Great Train Robbery did bring some of its participants fame and other intangible rewards. The heist was even dramatized in the 1988 film Buster, in which Phil Collins played title character Buster Edwards, a member of Reynolds’ gang who, after the robbery, went on the lam before realizing that the love and respect of his family was more important than his freedom. The movie ended with Edwards leaving prison and opening a flower stand.They all lived happily ever after. Roll credits.

In truth, the real-life Buster Edwards did run a train station flower stall after leaving prison in 1975. But he found the work boring, and not particularly lucrative. He hanged himself in 1994. Yeah, not such a happy ending.

Crims and Religion

In 1996, noted criminologist Jewel asked a question that has long haunted those hoodlums prone to pondering the existential consequences of their actions: “Who will save your souls after those lies that you told, boy?” For generations of American crooks, the answer has been “religious do-gooders.” As a 2006 Federal Bureau of Prisons report put it, “faith groups have become involved in offering formal programs within prison to bring about not only the spiritual salvation of the inmates but their rehabilitation in the profane world as well.” The idea is that spiritual rebirth may help tame the criminal impulse, and set wild hearts on the straight and narrow.

Maybe not. A new study in the academic journal Theoretical Criminology (hat tip to the Vancouver Sun) suggests that, far from causing offenders to repent of their sins, religious instruction might actually encourage crime. The authors surveyed 48 “hardcore street offenders” in and around Atlanta, in hopes of determining what effect, if any, religion has on their behavior. While the vast majority of those surveyed (45 out of 48 people) claimed to be religious, the authors found that the interviewees “seemed to go out of their way to reconcile their belief in God with their serious predatory offending. They frequently employed elaborate and creative rationalizations in the process and actively exploit religious doctrine to justify their crimes.”

First of all, many interviewees had only a vague notion of the central tenets of their faiths. Take, for example, an 18-year-old robber whose “street name” was Que:

Que: I believe in God and the Bible and stuff. I believe in Christmas, and uh, you know the commitments and what not.
Int: You mean the Commandments?
Que: Yeah that. I believe in that.
Int: Can you name any of them?
Que: Ahhh … well, I don’t know … like don’t steal, and uh, don’t cheat and shit like that. Uhmm … I can’t remember the rest.

Often, the authors found, these knowledge gaps were self-serving. “God has to forgive everyone, even if they don’t believe in him,” insisted one 33-year-old enforcer for a drug gang, with a vested interest in avoiding damnation for the murders he had committed. A 23-year-old robber called Young Stunna suggested that the circumstances of his upbringing would absolve him of his crimes: “Jesus knows I ain’t have no choice, you know? He know I got a decent heart. He know I’m stuck in the hood and just doing what I gotta do to survive.”

Indeed, many of those surveyed used their understandings of faith to justify their own criminal behavior. A 25-year-old drug dealer called Cool suggested that God doesn’t mind when you do bad things to bad people:

Also another thing is this; if you doing some wrong to another bad person, like if I go rob a dope dealer or a molester or something, then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus. That’s God’s will. Oh you molested some kids? Well now I’m [God] sending Cool over your house to get your ass.

In the end, the authors found, “there is reason to believe that these rationalizations and justifications may play a criminogenic role in their decision making.”

A couple points. First, this is a really small sample size, and it’s possible that if the authors had surveyed more people over a broader geographical area, their results would have been different. Second, as the authors themselves acknowledge, criminals certainly aren’t the only ones who tend to misunderstand religious teachings, or to contort them for their own benefit. Granted, there aren’t usually violent consequences when your Aunt Sue misunderstands something in the Bible; the worst that happens is that she’s just a little more unbearable at Thanksgiving dinner. But, still, the Theoretical Criminology study shouldn’t be interpreted as conclusive evidence that faith-based outreach and rehabilitation programs are worthless.

But the point is, neither is there conclusive evidence that religion on its own actually helps rehabilitate criminals. This becomes a policy question when we’re talking about prisons. As that Bureau of Prisons report put it, while “religious programs in the correctional setting have been the single most common form of institutional programming for inmates,” nobody really knows whether those programs are effective. There’s not much good data. People tend to use tautological arguments to support religion-based rehabilitation programs. That’s not good enough. If we’re going to talk about whether religion helps rehabilitate criminals, we need to insist on data. Don’t just take it on faith.

Is Criminality Genetic?

Psychiatric researchers have conducted scores of studies attempting to detect and quantify the influence of genetics on antisocial behavior. (Antisocial behavior usually encompasses criminality, personality disorders that involve disregard for others, and aggressiveness.) The results have varied widely, with some studies finding virtually no genetic component and others claiming that genetics account for more than 50 percent of the variability in antisocial behavior. The best estimates, which combine results from the most methodologically sound studies, put the genetic influence at between 30 and 40 percent of the variance in criminality among people. If that estimate is correct - and it may be badly off - being raised by a criminal mastermind is a better predictor of criminality than being sired by one.

Criminality clearly runs in families, even if it’s difficult to separate genetic and environmental factors. Study after study has shown that children born to criminal parents are significantly more likely to become criminals. A 2011 study examining 12.5 million Swedes over more than three decades found that those with a first-degree relative who was a criminal were 4.3 times more likely to commit violent crime than those born to a crime-free nuclear family. The effect was even more pronounced for specific crimes, with arson running particularly strongly in families. Other studies have shown that only 8 percent of families account for 43 percent of arrestees.

Studies on the genetic component of criminality or antisocial behavior use one of two methodologies. Twin studies compare the behavior of monozygotic twins, who share a genetic code, and dizygotic twins, who are no more genetically similar than ordinary siblings. If the identical twins behave more like each other than do the fraternal twins, the assumption is that their genetic similarity accounts for that difference. The twin study assumptions, however, are open to several critiques. The second type of criminality study focuses on adoptees, comparing adopted children with either their biological parents or biological siblings. This methodology also has its problems, though. Most obviously, adopted children generally commit crime at higher rates than the general population. Adding to the statistical uncertainty is the fact that twin and adoption studies tend to produce different estimates for the genetic component of criminality, suggesting that one or both of the study designs is flawed.

A review of history’s most notorious criminals provides some anecdotes on this question. Charles Manson’s mother and uncle were criminals. Al Capone was born to apparently law-abiding parents, although several Capone brothers participated in his criminal activities. Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s immediate family does not include any violent criminals. The Kray brothers, a pair of identical twins who terrorized London in the 1950s and 1960s, had a number of relatives who liked to bare-knuckle box, and their father was a World War II draft dodger, but they appear to be the first violent criminals in the family. Many notorious criminals, such as David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) come from such confusing family trees that it’s difficult to determine how many criminals are in the family.

Car Theft as a Debut Crime

Big falls in car theft may have helped to drive down overall crime levels by deterring people from embarking on a criminal career, according to criminologists. They say that stealing cars is a “debut crime” which then draws people deeper and deeper into offending.

Professor Graham Farrell said the opportunistic car thief can then often go on to become a burglar, robber and drug dealer. The stolen car, he said, is frequently used to commit armed robbery or collect drugs. He believes the technology that has made it harder to steal vehicles is reducing the number of career criminals and overall crime levels.

It is the latest in a number of explanations being put forward by criminologists for the big falls in crime in industrial countries which began in the 1990s.

Professor Farrell, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, said that the “debut crime” theory means that if an offender can get away with it, they learn crime is easy. “Car theft has been shown to be a ‘debut crime’ that offenders commit early in a criminal career. So making this crime more difficult may reduce the chances that they undertake a criminal career, or shorten its length”, he said. “Cars are used to facilitate many other types of crime including driving to a suburban burglary, driving to a robbery, as getaway vehicles, for ram raiding, for driving to drug markets and transporting stolen goods. “So stopping car crime may have had positive knock-on effects upon other types of crime that are squeezed as a result”.

Professor Farrell, who formerly worked at Loughborough University, said criminologists had described the knock-on effects of preventing debut crime as the “keystone hypothesis”.

Car crime is a “facilitator” of other crimes as stolen vehicles make offenders more mobile, are used in burglaries, to move stolen goods and purchase drugs. “The keystone is the stone holding the arch together, if you take it away the arch collapses. “If you take out this key crime, car theft through better security, other crimes fall because they are interlinked”, Professor Farrell said.

In a study, he argued that falling car theft may lead to reductions in violent crime. “There would be fewer cars to trade drugs for and for dealers to drive around. There would be fewer stolen cars for use by potential drug market customers and fewer for use in drive-by shootings, robberies and other crimes”, the report said.

Figures from the United States show that the drop in vehicle theft which began in the 1990 preceded the fall in violent offending, his report said. Electronic mobilisers and central locking systems have helped reduce the number of cars stolen in England and Wales from 537,000 in 1993 to 94,000 last year. Theft from vehicles fell from 2.5 million to 894,000 and attempted theft of, or from, vehicles dropped from 1.2m to 192,000. Overall crime has dropped in England and Wales by more than half from a peak of 19 million in 1995 to 8.8 million in the year to September 2012. Violent crime has fallen by more than half to 1.9 million over the same period and burglary by more than 60 per cent to 653,000.

Professor Farrell’s theory is one of a number being put forward as an explanation for major drops in crime in industrialised nations over the last decade. Big falls have been found in the US, England and Wales as well as Australia, Canada and Japan, according to Professor Farrell.

Among explanations for the drop in the US are zero tolerance policing, longer jail terms and the decline in the crack cocaine epidemic. Other explanations include abortion laws which result in fewer unwanted babies. The argument is that unwanted children are likley to be born into homes where they would have a higher likelihood of drifting into crime.

Studies also appear to show that the removal of lead from petrol in the US may have contributed to the fall in crime. Research suggests that a rise in leaded petrol consumption from the 1940s to the early 1970s – when unleaded petrol began to replace it – correspondend with a rise in the crime rate from the 1960s to the early 1990s, and subsequent fall. It suggests pollution inhaled by babies could make them more prone to commit violent crime when they grew up.

Stolen Bicycles

What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

At Priceonomics, we are fascinated by stolen bicycles. Put simply, why the heck do so many bicycles get stolen? It seems like a crime with very limited financial upside for the thief, and yet bicycle theft is rampant in cities like San Francisco (where we are based). What is the economic incentive for bike thieves that underpins the pervasiveness of bike theft? Is this actually an efficient way for criminals to make money?

It seems as if stealing bikes shouldn’t be a lucrative form of criminal activity. Used bikes aren’t particularly liquid or in demand compared to other things one could steal (phones, electronics, drugs). And yet, bikes continue to get stolen so they must be generating sufficient income for thieves. What happens to these stolen bikes and how to they get turned into criminal income?

The Depth of the Problem

In San Francisco, if you ever leave your bike unlocked, it will be stolen. If you use a cable lock to secure your bike, it will be stolen at some point. Unless you lock your bike with medieval-esque u-locks, your bike will be stolen from the streets of most American cities. Even if you take these strong precautions, your bike may still get stolen.

According the National Bike Registry and FBI, $350 million in bicycles are stolen in the United States each year. Beyond the financial cost of the crime, it’s heartbreaking to find out someone stole your bike; bikers love their bikes.

As one mom wrote in an open letter to the thief who pinched her twelve year old son’s bike:

It took CJ three weeks to finally decide on his bike. We looked at a brown bike at Costco, even brought it home to return it the next day, and a blue one at Target. But his heart was set on the green and black Trek he saw at Libertyville Cyclery. CJ knew it was more than we wanted to spend but the boy had never asked for anything before. You see, CJ had to live through his dad being unemployed for 18 months and knew money was tight. Besides, he’s just an all around thoughtful kid.

CJ didn’t ride his bike to school if there was rain in the forecast and he always locked it up. You probably noticed that it doesn’t have a scratch on it. CJ treated his bike really well and always used the kick-stand.

You should know that CJ has cried about the bike and is still very sad. He had to learn a life lesson a little earlier than I had liked - that there are some people in the world who are just plain mean. Now you know a little about my really awesome son and the story behind his green and black Trek 3500, 16-inch mountain bike.

An Economic Theory of Bike Crime

In 1968, Chicago economist Gary Becker introduced the notion that criminal behavior could be modeled using conventional economic theories. Criminals were just rational actors engaged in a careful cost-benefit analysis of whether to commit a crime. Is the potential revenue from the crime greater than the probability adjusted weight of getting caught? Or, as the antagonist in the movie The Girl Next Door puts it, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Criminal activity (especially crime with a clear economic incentive like theft) could therefore be modeled like any financial decision on a risk reward curve. If you are going to take big criminal risk, you need to expect a large financial reward. Crimes that generate more reward than the probability weighted cost of getting caught create expected value for the criminal. Criminals try to find “free lunches” where they can generate revenue with little risk. The government should respond by increasing the penalty for that activity so that the market equilibrates and there is an “optimal” amount of crime.

Using this risk-return framework for crime, it begins to be clear why there is so much bike theft. For all practical purposes, stealing a bike is risk-free crime. It turns out there is a near zero chance you will be caught stealing a bike (see here) and if you are, the consequences are minimal.

There are a few great accounts of journalists getting their bikes stolen and then going on a zealous mission to try to capture bikes thieves (see here and here). In each account, they ultimately learn from local police that the penalty for stealing a bike is generally nothing.

“We make it easy for them. The DA doesn’t do tough prosecutions. All the thieves we’ve busted have got probation. They treat it like a petty crime.”

“You can’t take six people off a murder to investigate a bike theft.”

Bike thievery is essentially a risk-free crime. If you were a criminal, that might just strike your fancy. If Goldman Sachs didn’t have more profitable market inefficencies to exploit, they might be out there arbitraging stolen bikes.

What Happens to the Stolen Bikes?

Just because the risk of a crime is zero, that doesn’t mean that a criminal will engage in that crime. If that were the case, thieves would go about stealing dandelions and day-old newspapers. There has to be customer demand and a liquid market for the product in order for the criminal to turn their contraband into revenue. So, how exactly does a criminal go about converting a stolen bicycle to cash?

We decided to survey the prior literature on where stolen bikes are sold as well as consult with bike shops and experts in San Francisco to get a better picture of who steals bikes and where the stolen bikes end up.

Amateur Bike Thieves. Amateur bike thieves sell their stolen goods at local fencing spots and are typically drug addicts or down on their luck homeless.

Sgt. Joe McKolsky, bike theft specialist for the SFPD, estimates that the overwhelming majority of bike thefts are driven by drug addicts and end up being sold on the street for 5 to 10 cents on the dollar. Any bike will do, whether it’s a $50 beater or a $2,000 road bike. These thieves are amateurs just opportunistically stealing unsecured bikes to get some quick cash:

“Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes… You can virtually exchange one for another.”

In San Francisco, these amateur stolen bikes end up on the streets at the intersection of 7th Street and Market Street in front of the Carl’s Jr restaurant. We chatted with Brian Smith, co-owner of HuckleBerry Bicycles, which is located across the street from this fencing joint. He confirmed it’s not uncommon for people to come into the shop having just purchased a $50 bike across the street or with obviously stolen bikes.

Professional Thieves. On the other end of the spectrum are professional bike thieves. Instead of opportunistically targeting poorly locked bicycles, these thieves target expensive bicycles. They have the tools that can cut through u-locks and aim to resell stolen bikes at a price near their “fair market value.” These thieves acquire the bicycles from the streets, but then resell them on online markets to maximize the selling price.

We asked Aubrey Hoermann, owner of used bicycle shop Refried Cycles in the Mission, about professional bike thieves and where they sell their merchandise:

“It has to end up somewhere where you can sell it in another city. My feeling is that people steal enough bikes to make it worth to take a trip somewhere like LA and then sell it there on Craigslist. If you have about 10 stolen bikes, it’s probably worth the trip.”

Another bike shop proprietor who asked not to be named added:

“Most of these guys are drug addicts, but a lot of them are professionals. You can cut through a u-lock in a minute and a half with the right tools. Steal three bikes and sell them in LA for $1500 a piece and you’re making money.” These thieves essentially are maximizing their revenue per van trip to a market in which they can sell the bicycle. In the past they might’ve been able to resell it locally, but according to Aubrey, this opportunity is fading: You can’t just steal a bike and sell it on Craigslist in San Francisco anymore. It’s too well known that’s where it would be and it’s too much work to change it to make it look different. I used to be a bike messenger and if your bike was stolen you’d go check at 7th and Market. Now that’s too well known to just sell a bike there.

Increasingly when a bicycle is stolen, the victims know where to check locally (Craigslist, 7th and Market, the Oakland Flea Market) so that makes it hard to sell the bikes there. Because bikes aren’t even that popular in the first place, it’s just not worth the effort to customize and disguise them for local sale.

Because of this dynamic, Aubrey concludes that professional bike theft is replacing amateur theft as the predominant form of bike theft. While the police may not penalize bicycle thieves, it’s becoming easier for the person whose bike was stolen to investigate the bike theft themselves. This is making it harder for the amateur thief to casually flip a stolen bike.

Is There at Keyser Söze of the Bike Underworld?

Bike theft is rampant and increasingly the province of professionals. Is there any evidence that a “criminal mastermind” exists behind this network where bikes are stolen in one city, transported to another and then resold? Ultimately, there is no evidence that a bike kingpin exists.

The largest bike theft arrests ever recorded are rather mundane actually. In San Francisco, recently a local teen was arrested with hundreds of stolen bikes found in his storage locker. Did these bicycles end up in some exotic fencing ring? Nope, they were being resold at an Oakland flea market.

In Toronto, a mentally imbalanced bike shop owner was found hoarding 2,700 stolen bikes. Mostly, he was just letting them rust.

Criminal masterminds have to value their time and resources, and bike theft isn’t really that profitable. The transportation costs and low value density ratio of the product likely kill the economics of the stolen bike trade. The bike shop proprietor we interviewed that requested anonymity concluded:

You’d be in the prostitution or drugs business if you were running a criminal ring to make money. There just isn’t that much money in bikes. These people who steal bikes are professionals but small time operators. Or, they’re just assholes.

Conclusion

Ultimately, that’s the point everyone seems to agree on - bike thieves are assholes. For everything else, there is little consensus and hard evidence. However, some things are clear and explain a lot of the bike theft that occurs.

It’s dead simple to steal a bike and the consequences are near zero. You can resell stolen bikes. If you want to get a good price for a stolen bicycle, it requires a decent amount of work. That amount of work is what limits the bike theft trade from really flourishing. Criminal masterminds have an opportunity cost for their time; they can’t be messing around lugging heavy pieces of metal and rubber that are only in limited demand.

So, if your bike ever gets stolen, you can at least take solace in the fact that the illicit bike trade isn’t a very easy way to make a lot of money. That probably won’t make you feel any better though.

Gary Becker and Cost and Reward

From crime to tuition fees, countless aspects of our lives are influenced by the late economist Gary Becker Why did Chris Huhne need to go to jail for dodging his penalty points for speeding? After all, as he constantly points out, hundreds of thousands of people have done this without giving it a second thought. Yet Mr Huhne would find his sentence less baffling if he reflected upon what happened the day that Gary Becker was late.

And in the days after the death of the great professor, I think that’s worth doing.

A little more than 40 years ago, Becker was driving to the oral exam of a student when he realised that he wasn’t going to get there in time. Not only that, but he would have to park the car and there were parking restrictions all around the building in which the exam was taking place. Finding a car park would take ages and then he would have to walk. So here is what he did. He parked in a forbidden area, dashed to the meeting, made it on time and on his way won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

The decision about where to park had, in the end, been relatively simple. The fines for parking outside the building were modest and, more importantly, they were unreliable. In other words, he might park in the restricted area and not get a ticket. Against this was the certain cost of the car park and the professional cost of being late for an important engagement. It seemed to him that the benefit of the parking violation over legal parking was clear.

As he left the car behind, he began to reflect on what he had done. And to wonder whether others weren’t doing it too. The standard theory of criminal behaviour at the time was that criminals were mentally ill or social victims. Becker, however, realised that the decision he had made to break the law had been entirely rational. Those who break the law balance the costs and the benefits of doing it.

From this insight came Becker’s influential analysis of crime, one of the ways he transformed economics and one of the reasons he became a Nobel laureate. When his death was announced last week, Gary Becker was hailed as one of the most significant social scientists of his generation, at least the equal of giants such as Milton Friedman, with whom he worked at the University of Chicago. When awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, George W Bush described Becker as “without question one of the most influential economists of the last hundred years”.

Becker’s contribution was to use the traditional tools of economics — the analysis of supply and demand, the working of incentives, the weighing of costs and benefits — and, for the first time, apply it to social policy.

Take, for instance, Chris Huhne and his penalty points. The former cabinet minister thinks that he was sent to jail despite the fact that so many others commit the same crime and get away with it. In fact, a Becker-style analysis suggests that he was sent to jail precisely because so many others commit the same crime and get away with it. If a crime is very hard to detect, the incentive to commit it is greater. The benefit of the crime outweighs the cost. As a result, you have to make the penalty greater so that, taken together, the punishment and the risk of punishment make transgression too costly to be worthwhile.

Becker’s work was very influential on sentencing policy and prevention of crime. Yet more influential still was his impact on the field of economics. Instead of being a study merely of how money moves around, it became a study of how people behave.

One of his most famous pieces of work concerned racial discrimination in the American South. He showed that you could measure the preference for discrimination of employers by looking at how far they were willing to hire less productive workers merely because they were white.

He also developed and popularised the idea of human capital, now a common term but very controversial when Becker first used it. The professor argued that education could be seen as an economic decision in which the long-term benefit of a better job could offset the short-term cost.

It is impossible now to debate student tuition fees, for instance, without reference to Becker’s ideas. Given that students increase their earning power as a result of a university education, but also that there is a social benefit, who should pay for it? And would tuition fees put off poorer students?

Becker would not have been surprised (as others have been) that the people most willing to pay tuition fees have proved to be the least well-off, and those least likely to pay have been the middle class. The cost is the same for both groups but the least well-off gain a greater benefit because they have less to fall back on without higher education. During his life Becker was often accused of treating human beings as factors of production and purely self-interested. Yet this is a complete misunderstanding. The real significance of Becker’s work is the opposite.

Becker won the Nobel prize because he demonstrated the way in which economics was about more than money. Understanding people’s incentives, and structuring social institutions in response to them, does not mean that people’s incentives are purely selfish.

People might have a preference for altruism, for example, or for community living. A market-based system takes these preferences into account. It’s quite wrong to equate markets with narrow economic selfishness.

This is relevant to the current debate on free schools or the NHS. Allowing competition and choice is not preferring self-interest over public spirit. It is simply structuring the system in line with people’s preferences, and these preferences may be charitable.

Becker’s work also shows why non-market systems struggle. People calculate the trade-off between costs and benefits. If the system gets in the way of their preferences, they work around it. That’s why tourists used to swap their jeans for hard currency behind the Iron Curtain. Then the punishments get more severe to deter such defiance of the law. The world has lost one of its great thinkers. Fortunately we still have the power of his thought.

Malcolm Gladwell and Crooked Ladders

In 1964, the anthropologist Francis Ianni was introduced to a man in a congressional waiting room. His name was Philip Alcamo. People called him Uncle Phil, and he was, in the words of the person who made the introduction, “a business leader from New York City and an outstanding Italian-American.” Uncle Phil was in his early sixties, twenty years older than Ianni. He was wealthy and charming and told Runyonesque stories about the many characters he knew from the old neighborhood, in Brooklyn. The two became friends. “He spoke the lobbyist’s language, but with a genial disdain for Washington manners and morals,” Ianni later wrote. “He was always very good in those peculiar Washington conversations in which people try to convince each other how much they really know about what is going on in the government, because he generally did know.”

Ianni was by nature an adventurous man. He had two pet wolves, called Remus and Romulus. He once drove his young family from Addis Ababa to Nairobi in a Volkswagen microbus. (“I cannot tell you how many times we broke down,” his son Juan recalls. “I remember my father fixing the generator by moonlight, and the nuts and bolts falling into the sand.”) Uncle Phil fascinated him. At dinners and social functions, Ianni met the other families in the business syndicate whose interests Uncle Phil represented in Washington—the Tuccis, the Salemis, and, at the heart of the organization, the Lupollos. When Ianni moved to New York to take a position at Columbia University, he asked Uncle Phil if he could write about the Lupollo clan. Phil was “neither surprised nor distressed,” Ianni recounted, but advised him that he should “tell each member of the family what I was about only when it was necessary to ask questions or seek specific pieces of information.” And for the next three years he watched and learned—all of which he memorably described in his 1972 book, “A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime.”

The Lupollos were not really called the Lupollos, of course; nor was Uncle Phil really named Philip Alcamo. Ianni changed names and identifying details in his published work. The patriarch of the Lupollo clan he called Giuseppe. Giuseppe was born in the eighteen-seventies in the Corleone district of western Sicily. He came to New York in 1902, with his wife and their two young sons, and settled in Little Italy. He imported olive oil and ran an “Italian bank,” which was used for loan-sharking operations. When a loan could not be repaid, he would take an equity stake in his debtor’s business. He started a gambling operation, and moved into bootlegging; during Prohibition, the business branched out into trucking, garbage collection, food products, and real estate. He recruited close relatives to help him build his businesses—first, his wife’s cousin Cosimo Salemi, then his son, Joe, then his daughter-in-law’s brother, Phil Alcamo, and then the husband of his granddaughter, Pete Tucci. “From all accounts, he was a patriarch, at once kindly and domineering,” Ianni wrote of Giuseppe. “Within the family, all important decisions were reserved for him. . . . Outside of the family, he was feared and respected.” The family moved from Little Italy to a row house in Brooklyn, and from there—one by one—to Queens and Long Island, as its enterprise grew to encompass eleven businesses totalling tens of millions of dollars in assets.

“A Family Business” was the real-life version of “The Godfather,” the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. But Ianni’s portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. There were no blood oaths in Ianni’s account, or national commissions or dark conspiracies. There was no splashy gunplay. No one downed sambuca shots at Jilly’s, on West Fifty-second Street, with Frank Sinatra. The Lupollos lived modestly. Ianni gives little evidence, in fact, that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from Giuseppe’s earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

By 1970, Ianni calculated, there were forty-two fourth-generation members of the Lupollo-Salemi-Alcamo-Tucci family—of which only four were involved in the family’s crime businesses. The rest were firmly planted in the American upper middle class. A handful of the younger members of that generation were in private schools or in college. One was married to a judge’s son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master’s degree in psychology; another was a member of the English department at a liberal-arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, and a stockbroker. Uncle Phil’s son Basil was an accountant, who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island’s North Shore. “His daughter rides and shows her own horses,” Ianni wrote, “and his son has some reputation as an up-and-coming young yachtsman.” Uncle Phil, meanwhile, lived in Manhattan, collected art, and frequented the opera. “The Lupollos love to tell of old Giuseppe’s wife Annunziata visiting Phil’s apartment,” Ianni wrote. “Her comment on the lavish collection of paintings was ‘manga nu Santa’ (‘not even one saint’s picture’).”

The moral of the “Godfather” movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. “Just when I thought I was out,” Michael Corleone says, “they pull me back in.” The moral of “A Family Business” was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O’Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.

Six decades ago, Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was “conformity”: accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). The second strategy was “ritualism”: accept the means (work hard and obey the law) but reject the goal. That’s the approach of the Quakers or the Amish or of any other religious group that substitutes its own moral agenda for that of the broader society. There was also “retreatism” and “rebellion”—rejecting both the goal and the means. It was the fourth adaptation, however, that Merton found most interesting: “innovation.” Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn’t want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated. Irish gangsters dominated organized crime in the urban Northeast in the mid to late nineteenth century, followed by the Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Dutch Schultz, among others. Then it was the Italians’ turn. They were among the poorest and the least skilled of the immigrants of that era. Crime was one of the few options available for advancement. The point of the crooked-ladder argument and “A Family Business” was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion; it wasn’t a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in.

When Ianni’s book came out, there was widespread speculation among Mafia experts about who the Lupollos really were. One guess was that they were descendants of the crime family originally founded by Giuseppe Morello and Ignazio (Lupo) Saietta in the early nineteen-hundreds. (Lupo plus Morello equals Lupollo.) If that is the case, then the origins of the Lupollos were distinctly unsavory. Morello and Saietta were members of the Black Hand, the name given to bands of Southern Italian immigrants who engaged in crude acts of extortion—threatening merchants with bodily injury if protection money wasn’t paid. Saietta was thought to be responsible for ordering as many as sixty murders; people in Little Italy, it was said, would cross themselves at the mention of his name.

During Prohibition, the Lupollo gang moved into bootlegging. The vehicles that were used in the liquor trade became the basis for a trucking business. Gambling money went to family bankers, who directed the funds to Brooklyn Eagle Realty and other legal investments. “After the money from gambling is ‘cleansed’ by reinvestment in legal activities,” Ianni wrote, “the profit is then reinvested in loan-sharking.”

Ianni didn’t romanticize what he saw. He didn’t pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal means of economic mobility in America, or the most efficient. It was simply a fact of American life. He saw the pattern being repeated in New York City during the nineteen-seventies, as the city’s demographics changed. The Lupollos’ gambling operations in Harlem had been taken over by African-Americans. In Brooklyn, the family had been forced to enter into a franchise arrangement with blacks and Puerto Ricans, limiting themselves to providing capital and arranging for police protection. “Things here in Brooklyn aren’t good for us now,” Uncle Phil told Ianni. “We’re moving out, and they’re moving in. I guess it’s their turn now.” In the early seventies, Ianni recruited eight black and Puerto Rican ex-cons—all of whom had gone to prison for organized-crime activities—to be his field assistants, and they came back with a picture of organized crime in Harlem that looked a lot like what had been going on in Little Italy seventy years earlier, only with drugs, rather than bootleg alcohol, as the currency of innovation. The newcomers, he predicted, would climb the ladder to respectability just as their predecessors had done. “It was toward the end of the Lupollo study that I became convinced that organized crime was a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end,” Ianni wrote. Fast-forward two generations and, with any luck, the grandchildren of the loan sharks and the street thugs would be riding horses in Old Westbury. It had happened before.

Wouldn’t it happen again?

This is one of the questions at the heart of the sociologist Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.” The story she tells, however, is very different.

When Goffman was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she began tutoring an African-American high-school student named Aisha, who lived in a low-income neighborhood that she calls 6th Street, not far from campus. (Goffman, like Ianni, altered names and details.) Through Aisha, she met a group of part-time crack dealers and was soon drawn into their world. She asked them if she could follow them around and write about their lives. They agreed. She had taken an apartment close by and lived in the neighborhood for the next six years, profiling the lives of people who, in many ways, were the modern-day equivalents of old Giuseppe Lupollo, in his earliest days on the streets of Little Italy.

At the center of Goffman’s story are two close friends: Mike and Chuck. Mike’s mother worked two and sometimes three jobs, which meant that he was well off by the standards of the neighborhood. His mother’s house was immaculate. Chuck was a senior in high school when he and Goffman met. He had two younger brothers, Reggie and Tim, both of whom were devoted to him. Chuck had a harder time of it; he lived in the basement of his family’s derelict row house, where, Goffman writes, “sometimes the rats bit him, but at least he had his own space.”

Goffman immersed herself in the 6th Street community. Her school friends dropped away. Chuck and Mike—and occasionally another friend of theirs, Steven—eventually moved in with her, sleeping on two couches in the living room. She lived through a war between her friends on 6th Street and the “4th Street Boys.” One day, Mike came home with seven bullet holes in the side of his car. (“We hid it in a shed so the cops wouldn’t see,” she writes.) Goffman, Mike, and Chuck would text one another every half hour, to make sure each was still alive:

You good?

Yeah.

Okay.

Chuck did not survive the gang war. At the end of the book, Goffman attaches a fifty-page “Methodological Note,” in which she describes the night that he was shot in the head outside a Chinese restaurant. The passages are devastating. She came running to the hospital room where his body lay. “I cried to him and told him that I loved him,” she writes. Then Chuck’s girlfriend, Tanesha, and his friend Alex arrived. “Tanesha was talking to him and telling Alex and me what she saw: how he moved his arm because he was fighting, he always was a fighter; how she had followed the ambulance here. How could he leave her and leave his girls? She noticed that his body was beginning to grow stiff.” Tanesha began to cry softly. “You are my baby,” she said. “Why did you leave me?” Finally, gathered around Chuck’s bed, Goffman writes,

we talked about bringing Reggie home from county jail on a funeral furlough. I said that if Reggie came home, all he was gonna do was go shoot someone, and Alex said, “Please—somebody gon’ die regardless,” and Mike nodded his head in agreement, and Tanesha too. Alex counted one, two, three, four with his fingers. The number of people who would die.

Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But, in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. In Chuck’s case, his mother had a serious crack habit. He began dealing at thirteen in order to buy food for the family and to “regulate” his mother’s addiction; if he was her supplier, he figured, she wouldn’t have to turn tricks or sell household possessions to pay for drugs. Chuck’s criminal activities were an attempt to bring some degree of normalcy to his family.

The problem was that on 6th Street crime didn’t pay. Often, Chuck and Mike had no drugs to sell: “their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed this ‘connect’ had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and search.” And, if they did have drugs, the odds of evading arrest were small. The police saturated 6th Street. Each day, Goffman saw the officers stop young men on the streets, search cars, and make arrests. In her first eighteen months of following Mike and Chuck, she writes:

I watched the police break down doors, search houses and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets. I noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence . . . seventeen times. Fourteen times during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.

Years later, when Chuck went through his high-school yearbook with Goffman, he identified almost half the boys in his freshman class as currently in jail or prison. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, Mike had spent three and a half years behind bars. He was on probation or parole for eighty-seven weeks of the hundred and thirty-nine weeks that he was out of prison, and made fifty-one court appearances.

The police buried the local male population under a blizzard of arrest warrants: some were “body” warrants for suspected crimes, but most were bench and technical warrants for failure to appear in court or to pay court fees, or for violations of probation or parole. Getting out from under the weight of warrants was so difficult that many young men in the neighborhood lived their lives as fugitives. Mike spent a total of thirty-five weeks on the run, steering clear of friends and loved ones, moving around by night. The young men of the neighborhood avoided hospitals, because police officers congregate there, running checks on those seeking treatment for injuries. Instead, they turned to a haphazard black market for their medical care. The police would set up a tripod camera outside funerals, to record the associates of young men murdered on the streets. The local police, the A.T.F., the F.B.I., and the U.S. Marshals Service all had special warrant units, using computer-mapping software, cell-phone tracking, and intelligence from every conceivable database: Social Security records, court records, hospital-admission records, electricity and gas bills, and employment records. “You hear them coming, that’s it, you gone,” Chuck tells his little brother. “Period. ’Cause whoever they looking for, even if it’s not you, nine times out of ten they’ll probably book you.” Goffman sometimes saw young children playing the age-old game of cops and robbers in the street, only the child acting the part of the robber wouldn’t even bother to run away:

I saw children give up running and simply stick their hands behind their back, as if in handcuffs; push their body up against a car without being asked; or lie flat on the ground and put their hands over their head. The children yelled, “I’m going to lock you up! I’m going to lock you up, and you ain’t never coming home!” I once saw a six-year-old pull another child’s pants down to do a “cavity search.”

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African-American thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. Chuck’s high-school education ended prematurely after he was convicted of aggravated assault in a schoolyard fight. Another boy called Chuck’s mother a crack whore, and he pushed his antagonist’s face into the snow. In a previous generation, this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system. Until the nineteen-seventies, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake I.D. Today, there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost seventy per cent.

In the previous era, according to Goffman, the police “turned a fairly blind eye” to prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling in poor black neighborhoods. But in the late nineteen-eighties, she writes, “corruption seems to have been largely eliminated as a general practice, at least in the sense of people working at the lower levels of the drug trade paying the police to leave them in peace.”

The Lupollos, of course, routinely paid the police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families of their day. They got the benefit of law enforcement’s “blind eye.” Ianni observed that, in Giuseppe’s lifetime, “no immediate member of the Lupollo clan had ever been arrested.” Uncle Phil hung out in Washington, in a blue suit. “I have met judges, commissioners, members of federal regulatory bodies, and congressmen socially when I have been with Phil Alcamo,” Ianni wrote. At such meetings, “Phil openly discusses the needs of the family where government is concerned and often asks for advice or favors. He also suggests favorable business investments or land-purchase opportunities and will ‘put someone in touch with someone who can do something for them.’ ” Apparently, no one in Washington during that period found anything unusual about a Mafia capo openly discussing “the needs of the family where government is concerned” and suggesting “favorable business investments” for the politicians and regulators whom he was lobbying.

The Federal Witness Protection Program did not yet exist; federal wiretaps weren’t admissible in court. Only the F.B.I. was properly equipped to tackle organized crime, and under J. Edgar Hoover the bureau saw targeting Communism and political subversion as its primary mandate. “As late as 1959, the FBI’s New York field office had only 10 agents assigned to organized crime compared to over one hundred and forty agents pursuing a dwindling population of Communists,” the attorney C. Alexander Hortis writes, in “The Mob and the City.” In the unlikely event that a mobster was arrested, Hortis points out, he could expect to walk. Between 1960 and 1970, forty-four per cent of indictments of organized-crime figures in courts around New York City were dismissed before trial. In that same ten-year period, five hundred and thirty-six mobsters were arrested on felony charges, but only thirty-seven ended up in prison.

Hortis retells the story of the famous Apalachin incident, in 1957, when several dozen mobsters from around the country gathered at the upstate New York property of Joseph Barbara, Sr., for a weekend retreat. The get-together was broken up by the police. Some of the mobsters ran into the surrounding woods—and the resulting arrests led to congressional hearings and headlines. How did this happen? By chance, a detective ran into Barbara’s son at a local motel and eavesdropped on his conversation. He drove by the Barbara estate, saw lots of fancy cars, ran their plates, and called in reinforcements. The subsequent grand-jury investigation, Hortis says, was a “farce.” One mobster claimed that he had dropped in while on an olive-oil sales trip. Another said that he had had car trouble. A third said that he had heard there was free food. Twenty mobsters were convicted on conspiracy charges, and all twenty convictions were reversed on appeal.

That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left her gangster grandfather alone.

The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th Street is justified by the idea that, left unchecked, Mike and Chuck will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize. The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia’s evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that, over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated.

One of the dominant organized-crime figures on Long Island during the nineteen-seventies and eighties was a former garment manufacturer named Salvatore Avellino, and Avellino’s story is an example of the crooked ladder in action. It is a good bet that Ianni’s Lupollos dealt with Avellino, because they were in the garbage business and Avellino was the king of “carting” (as it was known). He was the de-facto head of a trade association called the Private Sanitation Industry Association; it represented a cluster of small, family-owned carting companies that picked up commercial and residential garbage in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Each carter paid membership dues to the P.S.I., a portion of which Avellino dutifully passed on to the Lucchese and Gambino crime families.

Avellino was a gangster. He would burn the trucks of those who crossed him. He eventually went to prison for his role in assassinating two carters who refused to play along with the P.S.I. But, in other ways, Avellino didn’t behave like a thug at all. He worked largely by persuasion and charisma. As the economist Peter Reuter observes in his history of the Long Island carting wars, Avellino’s mission was to rationalize the industry, to enforce what was called a “property rights” system among the carters. Individual firms were allowed to compete for new customers. But, once a carter won a customer, he “owned” that business; the function of Avellino’s P.S.I. was to make sure that no one else poached that customer. Avellino was, essentially, acting as an agent for the garbage collectors of Long Island, inserting himself between his membership and the marketplace the way a Hollywood agent inserts himself between the pool of actors and the studios.

Ordinary thieves act covertly. They hide their identity from the person whose money they are taking. Avellino did the opposite. He ran a public organization. The ordinary thief is outside the legitimate economy. Avellino was integrated into the legitimate economy. When it came to his P.S.I. members, Avellino acted not as a predator but as a benefactor. By Reuter’s estimates, Avellino’s cartel enabled P.S.I. members to charge their commercial customers fifty per cent more than would otherwise have been possible.

On one federal wiretap, Avellino was recorded speaking about a P.S.I. carter named Freddy, who, Avellino says, drove up to his house in a brand-new Mercedes, “the fifty-thousand-dollar one.” Avellino goes on, “So I walked out. It was a Sunday morning and I said, ‘Congratulations, beautiful, beautiful.’ He says, ‘I just wanted you to see it, ’cause this is thanks to you and to P.S.I. that I bought this car.’ ”

In his economic analysis, Reuter marvels at how scrupulously Avellino defended the interests of his carters. Avellino allowed the bulk of that fifty-per-cent margin to go to the carters and the unions—not to the Luccheses and the Gambinos. Reuter reports, with similar incredulity, about Avellino’s personal business dealings. He ran a carting company of his own, but as he expanded his business—buying up routes from other companies—he never demanded discounts. Here was the representative of a major crime family, and he paid retail. “Ya see, out here, Frank, in Nassau, Suffolk County . . . we don’t shake anybody down, we don’t steal anybody’s work, we don’t steal it to sell it back to them,” Avellino says, in another of the wiretaps. “Whenever I got a spot back for a guy because somebody took it, never was a price put on it, because if it was his to begin with and he was part of the club and he was payin’ every three months, then he got it back for nothin’, because that was supposed to be the idea.”

This restraint was, in fact, characteristic of the late-stage mobster. James Jacobs, a New York University law professor who was involved in anti-Mafia efforts in New York during the nineteen-eighties, points out that the Mafia had every opportunity to take over the entire carting industry in the New York region—just as they could easily have monopolized any of the other industries in which they played a role. Instead, they stayed in the background, content to be the middlemen. At New York’s Fulton Fish Market, one of the largest such markets in the country, the Mob policed the cartel and controlled parking—a crucial amenity in a business where time is of the essence and prompt delivery of fresh fish translates to higher profits. What did they charge for a full day’s parking? Twelve dollars. And when the Mob-controlled cartel was finally rooted out, how much did fish prices decline at the Fulton Fish Market? Two per cent.

In the mid-eighties, when Jacobs worked for the Organized Crime Task Force in New York, trying to rid the construction industry of racketeering, he said that the task force’s efforts “had no interest from the builders and the employers.” Those immediately involved in the business rather liked having the Mafia around as a referee, because it proved to be such a reasonable business partner. “This was a system that worked for everybody, except maybe the New York Times,” Jacobs said dryly.

“This is one of the most interesting things about the Mafia,” Jacobs went on. “They did business and cooperated. They weren’t trying to smash everybody. They created these alliances and maintained these equilibriums. . . . You’d think that they would keep expanding their reach.”

They didn’t, though, because they didn’t think of themselves as ordinary criminals. That was for their fathers and grandfathers, who murderously roamed the streets of New York. Avellino wanted to be in the open, not in the shadows. He wanted to be integrated into the real world, not isolated from it. The P.S.I. was a sloppy, occasionally lethal but nonetheless purposeful dress rehearsal for legitimacy. That was Merton’s and Ianni’s point. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

“The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard’s School of Business Administration,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, fifty years ago, in a passage that could easily serve as Goffman’s epilogue:

The early settlers and founding fathers, as well as those who “won the West” and built up cattle, mining and other fortunes, often did so by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America’s destiny and their own—or were themselves the law when it served their purposes. This has not prevented them and their descendants from feeling proper moral outrage when, under the changed circumstances of the crowded urban environments, latecomers pursued equally ruthless tactics.

Data Driven Prosecutions

osecutors' offices are finally joining the intelligence revolution that has transformed policing since the 1990s. That revolution dates to 1994, when William J. Bratton took over the New York Police Department and declared that his goal was to prevent crime, not just respond to it. Bratton's new proactive mission for the NYPD required the department to closely analyze crime data on a daily basis and to refine its tactics and deployment according to what the data showed. Bratton's paradigm shift, known as Compstat, quickly spread through police departments across the country.

Violent crime has dropped by more than 40% nationally since 1993, thanks to the spread of Compstat policing. (Los Angeles Times) Prosecution, however, has remained in a reactive mode. District attorneys generally view their role as doing justice in the individual cases that the police bring to them; they are less likely to consider the effect a prosecution might have on broader lawlessness or how a defendant fits into the criminal landscape. Vital information about offender networks gleaned in the course of preparing a case for trial remains on a prosecutor's legal pad without getting conveyed back to the police or to other prosecutors. With few exceptions, prosecutors have gauged their success by convictions, not by crime declines.

That reactive mind-set is changing, however, aided by the exploitation of social media and other cutting-edge technologies. Prosecutors from San Francisco to New York are reconceptualizing their mission to include preventing violence, and they are developing information-sharing systems to accomplish that goal.

The Manhattan district attorney, for example, created a Crime Strategies Unit in 2010 with the single goal of gathering and deploying intelligence on Manhattan's crime patterns and its most serious offenders. The unit has compiled a database of Manhattan's most significant criminal players — now numbering about 9,000 — whose arrest anywhere in the city immediately triggers an alert to one of the Crime Strategies Unit attorneys. The attorney will then contact the local prosecutor who has been assigned the case — whether in Manhattan or another borough — to make sure the defendant is prosecuted to the full extent of the law rather than slipping through the cracks.

Prosecutors from San Francisco to New York are reconceptualizing their mission to include preventing violence.

- The arrest alert system recognizes that a defendant's official history of arrests and convictions may fail to convey his position in the criminal food chain. A 16-year-old gang member may be responsible for numerous shootings, as attested to by his and others' Facebook pages, but never arrested for any of them because his victims and witnesses refused to cooperate with the police.

If he is nabbed for shoplifting, the misdemeanor prosecutor will have a few minutes at most to decide whether to pursue the case. Seeing simply a petty vandal, the charging attorney might well let him walk free. But if that attorney is armed with intelligence gathered on the suspect, he can seek the maximum charge and argue to the judge for high bail. And if detectives have asked to be included in the arrest alert system, they can pay the suspect a visit in jail and see whether he is prepared to cooperate with them.

The arrest alert system also recognizes that a small number of individuals commit a disproportionate amount of crime. "It's not so much that there are crime hot spots as hot people," says Lauren Baraldi, a prosecutor in the Philadelphia district attorney's office, which is replicating Manhattan's Crime Strategies Unit. Incapacitate those crime drivers and you will produce an outsize effect on public safety.

Social media are central to intelligence-driven prosecution. The value of social media to law enforcement became clear after New York police officers arrived at the home of a Brooklyn gang member who had just been shot, and watched the tweets from his fellow gang members planning revenge pop up on his open cellphone as the gangbanger lay dying in front of them.

Intelligence-driven district attorneys constantly track the Internet footprints of suspects in their arrest alert database. The Facebook postings and Twitter feeds of gang members bragging about retaliatory shootings have provided the backbone for several recent gang conspiracy cases in Manhattan. Facebook messages among now-convicted East Harlem gang members, for example, included admonitions to close in on rival gang members before shooting them and to not hog communal guns.

Prosecutors in Richmond, Va., and Rockland County, N.Y., as well as San Francisco and Philadelphia, are building intelligence systems to drive crime down. And the rethinking of prosecution has only begun. San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon is exploring the idea of predictive prosecution, echoing the nascent predictive policing concept.

"We want to create tools to project crime patterns several years out" by mapping the connections between victims and offenders in a neighborhood, Gascon says. And he wants better ways to measure whether his office's court filings are targeted efficiently.

Violent crime has dropped by more than 40% nationally since 1993, thanks to the spread of Compstat policing. Keeping that crime decline going will require every component of the criminal justice system to be at the top of its game. Intelligence-driven prosecution is coming not a moment too soon.

Psychopaths

Contrary to popular belief, psychopaths are not considered to be mentally ill. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), released by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 2013, lists psychopathy under the heading of Antisocial Personality Disorders (ASPD).

Key traits of the psychopath include:

A disregard for laws and social mores
A disregard for the rights of others
A failure to feel remorse or guilt
A tendency to display violent behavior

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that is exhibited by people who employ a combination of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and sometimes violence to control others, in order to satisfy their own selfish desires. It is estimated that approximately 1 percent of the adult male population in the U.S. are psychopaths (1).Men are more likely than women to be psychopaths.

Generally speaking, psychopaths are glib and charming and they use these attributes to manipulate others into trusting and believing in them. Because of their strong interpersonal skills, most psychopaths can present themselves quite favorably on a first impression and many function successfully in society. However, as explained by psychologist Dr. Paul Babiak and his colleagues, a number of the attitudes and behaviors common to psychopaths are distinctly predatory in nature and they tend to view others as either competitive predators or prey.

When psychopaths view others as prey, their lack of feeling and bonding to others allows them to have unusual clarity in observing the behavior of their intended victims. Moreover, they do not become encumbered by the anxieties and emotions that normal people experience in interpersonal encounters.

Can psychopathy be cured? According to mental health experts, the short answer to this question is no. Dr. Nigel Blackwood, a leading Forensic Psychiatrist at King’s College London, has stated that adult psychopaths can be treated but not cured.

Blackwood explains that psychopaths do not fear the pain of punishment and they are not bothered by social stigmatization. Psychopaths are indifferent to the expectations of society and reject its condemnation of their criminal behavior. According to Blackwood and others, callous and unemotional psychopaths simply do not respond to punishment the way that normal people do. Consequently, adult psychopaths in prison are much harder to reform or rehabilitate than other criminals with milder or no antisocial personality disorders.

Because they do not respond in a normal fashion to punishment, reward-based treatment seems to work best with psychopaths. Such strategies have been used effectively with psychopaths in institutional settings.

Their behavior remains good or even improves as they become increasingly fixated on their rewards. Despite the practical utility of reward-based treatments, however, the fact remains that there is no known cure for psychopathy. In other words, it can be managed quite effectively but not cured.

The difference between sociopaths and psychopaths.

Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated. They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage. They are likely to be uneducated and live on the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one place for very long. It is difficult but not impossible for sociopaths to form attachments with others. Many sociopaths are able to form an attachment to a particular individual or group, although they have no regard for society in general or its rules. In the eyes of others, sociopaths will appear to be very disturbed. Any crimes committed by a sociopath, including murder, will tend to be haphazard and spontaneous rather than planned.

Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature. When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous.

The cause of psychopathy is different than the cause of sociopathy (1). It is believed that psychopathy is the result of “nature” (genetics) while sociopathy is the result of “nurture” (environment). Psychopathy is related to a physiological defect that results in the underdevelopment of the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotions. Sociopathy, on the other hand, is more likely the product of childhood trauma and physical/emotional abuse. Because sociopathy appears to be learned rather than innate, sociopaths are capable of empathy in certain limited circumstances but not in others, and with a few individuals but not others.

Psychopathy is the most dangerous of all antisocial personality disorders because of the way psychopaths dissociate emotionally from their actions, regardless of how terible they may be. Many prolific and notorious serial killers, including the late Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, and Dennis Rader ("Bind, Torture, Kill") are unremorseful psychopaths.

I offer many other shocking insights into the minds and actions of deranged serial predators in my book (Scott Bonn) “Why We Love Serial Killers,” which will be released on October 7, 2014.

1000 Year Sentences

Serial child rapist Charles Scott Robinson was given a 30,000 year sentence by an Oklahoma judge in 1994. Clearly, he won't live to see the end of it. But what if he could be made to think he's in jail for 30,000 years? The technologies to do this might soon be available. Would they be ethical? What if they are turned against us as a weapon?

As I explained in the “Body Creep” chapter of my new book, Technocreep, French philosopher Rebecca Roache has noted that there are drugs that alter our perception of the passing of time. Perhaps one could be used to trick the mind of prisoner into thinking that he was serving, say, a 1,000 year sentence. The same technology could be used by repressive regimes as a form of hideous torture.

Roache even suggests that the day may come when we can upload a prisoner’s mind into a computer and alter the mental cycle rate. “Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.” (Read more here.)

She goes on to suggest that “the eight-and-a-half hour 1,000-year sentence could be followed by a few hours (or, from the point of view of the criminal, several hundred years) of treatment and rehabilitation.”

So that vicious serial killer or hardened terrorist could be home in time for supper.

I have enough expertise in computer science to opine that the uploading and downloading of consciousness is still somewhat in the future, though there are technologies, even consumer ones like the NeuroSky biosensor, that are moves in that direction. And this is certainly a very hot research topic for both the military and non-military communities.

Way-out thinkers like Raymond Kurzweil have opined that by the middle of this century, “humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or nonbiologicial,” so that people can have “a biological body at one time and not at another, then have it again, then change it.” (Read more here.)

What I don’t know enough about is the state of the art in time alteration through drugs. Some quick searches reveal interesting research in this area, and tons of blog postings about the time-warping effects of drugs like DMT (although many of those blog postings seem to have been written while under the influence of psychoactive drugs!).

Stealing Tractors

• Tractors are the latest target in Britain for an international criminal gang making millions from stealing top-of-the-range models which are smuggled abroad.
  
  The thefts are planned and carried out so meticulously that investigators believe they could be dealing with former Irish paramilitaries.
  
  Hundreds of tractors are being stolen in an extraordinary crimewave that is worth £3 million a year and affects most counties in rural Britain. It is being investigated by police forces nationwide, working with the National Plant and Equipment Register in Operation Mermaid.
  
  Stolen tractors, diggers, trailers and quad bikes are being transported openly and shipped overseas as far as Australia. The criminals have even managed on occasions to steal equipment that was seized and held by police.
  
  They are particular about their pickings, and have a penchant for the distinctive green and yellow tractors of the John Deere brand. John Deere tractors usually cost between £63,700 and £75,000, and even second-hand models can be sold for up to £50,000. Some top-of-the-range tractors cost more than £100,000.
  
  Another favourite is a machine known as a telescopic handler, similar in function to a forklift, which, if bought new, costs between £70,000 and £80,000. Quad bikes are also popular and vary in value from £2,000 to �5,000, while trailers are sold from £1,500 to £2,000. Other manufacturers affected include New Holland, Case, Massey Ferguson, JCB, Caterpillar and Daewoo.Criminals have routinely been stealing two vehicles in a night from farms or dealerships. Then, within a few days, they break into a different dealership and steal identification documents and the black box, an electronic vehicle management system, from similar but unsold tractors. Tim Purbrick, a manager at Equipment Register, said that the gangs removed the ID plates from the stolen tractors and replaced them with new plates obtained from the dealerships. He said: "This effectively gives them a clean tractor which no-one has reported stolen or missing. They are therefore able to export the vehicles as far as Poland, other parts of Eastern Europe and Australia."
  
  "These are sophisticated thefts by portfolio criminals. We think the gang has previously been involved in Irish terrorist operations, and that they have morphed the skills from terrorism to other serious criminal activity. They use counter-surveillance techniques, are forensically aware and have very good international criminal contacts. They have even stolen seized equipment back from the police, which shows how forward they are."
  
  Mr Purbrick said he was concerned that the failure to include plant theft in police targets issued by the Home Office may be fuelling the scam.
  
  He said: "From the criminal perspective, there is a low-risk, high- reward balance in this activity. Drug smuggling is high risk, but the chances of being caught stealing a tractor are low, and stealing tractors is more lucrative."
  
  He said that in one case a John Deere 6920 tractor and a telescopic handler, worth a total of £115,000, were stolen from a farm in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. New ID numbers and black boxes from similar models were stolen from a dealership. The IDs were changed and the vehicles were transported to Humberside and then shipped to Rotterdam and Sydney. The proceeds were split between criminals in Britain and Australia who, Mr Purbrick suggested, would have made more than £50,000 each from the crime.
  
  The costs of the operation are relatively low. Mr Purbrick suggested that thieves would steal a tractor and a new ID for about £1,000, and that shipping it overseas would cost about £500. He is urging all equipment owners and their manufacturers to tighten security.
  
  Tractors are relatively easy to steal because most ignition keys are standard and can start any vehicle. Mr Purbrick is calling on the industry to start issuing unique keys for plant equipment.
  
  "It's crazy that a machine worth five times more than my car has less security. I have keys in my pocket that can steal any tractor in the country. My Swiss Army knife can do it," he said.
  
  A spokesman for John Deere said that the company was aware of the thefts, and that the industry may have to look again at security issues.
  
  Enforcement action under Operation Mermaid is reaping rewards. In one incident, a John Deere tractor worth £42,000 was stolen from a farm in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. A week later, a driver transporting the stolen vehicle on a low-loader stopped for a break at a service station on the M5, where the Equipment Register, with Gloucestershire Police, had set up a checkpoint.
  
  Officers inspected the tractor and found that the serial number plates had been altered and that a false plate had been fixed to the vehicle. The tractor has since been returned to its owner and investigations into the criminal gang are continuing. Similar police checkpoints are now being established nationwide.

Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery

• The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.
  
  The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.
  
  The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.
  
  Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls 'retail corruption,' the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.
  
  Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
  
  About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.
  
  "I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter," someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. "The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ " — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.
  
  Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.
  
  Last year, the Kingdom of Bhutan’s Anti-Corruption Commission created an online form to allow the anonymous reporting of corruption, and a similar site was created in Pakistan, ipaidbribe, which estimates that the country’s economy has lost some 8.5 trillion rupees, or about $94 billion, over the last four years to corruption, tax evasion and weak governance.
  
  "We’re working to create a coalition of I Paid a Bribe groups that would perhaps meet annually and share experiences," Ms. Ramanathan said.
  
  Ben Elers, program director for Transparency International, a nongovernmental organization, said social media had given the average person powerful new tools to fight endemic corruption. "In the past, we tended to view corruption as this huge, monolithic problem that ordinary people couldn’t do anything about," Mr. Elers said. "Now, people have new tools to identify it and demand change."
  
  Since no names are given on the sites, in part to avoid potential issues of libel and defamation, it is impossible to verify the reports, but Mr. Elers and others experienced in exposing corruption say many of them ring true.
  
  They are threatening enough that when a rash of similar sites popped up in China last summer, the government stamped them out within a couple of weeks, contending they had failed to register with the authorities.
  
  They are, however, only a reporting mechanism. "In their own right, they don’t change anything," Mr. Elers said. "The critical thing is that mechanisms are developed to turn this online activity into offline change in the real world."
  
  Antony Ragui is hoping that happens in Kenya, where he started an ipaidabribe site in December. The site has gotten about thousands of hits since then and recorded about 470 bribery reports. The bribes are as varied as payments to make traffic infractions vanish from records and payments for admission to schools and for passports and identification documents.
  
  "What if that person who paid a bribe to get a driver’s license because he failed his driving test hits your sister or your child?" Mr. Ragui said. "We have a huge issue of Somalis paying bribes to get passports and personal identity cards to come to Kenya — what if one of them is a terrorist who blows something up? The bribes may be small but the consequences may be big for you and me."
  
  His big concern at the moment is how to pay for the site. Unlike the Indian site, which has received money from the Omidyar Network and is housed within a well-financed nonprofit, the Kenyan I Paid a Bribe thus far is supported by Mr. Ragui himself.
  
  Stephen King, the partner who oversees the technology for government transparency and accountability at the Omidyar Network, the organization that manages the philanthropy of the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, said sustainability was an issue for many such groups.
  
  The Omidyar Network supported Janaagraha to develop I Paid a Bribe, but the Web site will have to find a way to sustain itself. "A couple of the organizations we’re working with in the area of transparency and accountability have been looking at things like microdonations, asking for a nominal amount to help cover their costs like a Wikipedia model," Mr. King said. "There’s also some potential for carrying advertising on the sites."
  
  Another idea, he said, was for such organizations to customize their platforms for other groups for a fee.
  
  Mr. Ragui in Kenya is working to develop a system to enable reporting of bribery by mobile phone that he hopes to have ready in time for elections later this year. The idea is to allow people to report vote-buying in real time that will be connected to a map. "It could be really powerful to have real time, granular data to analyze how much corruption affects the election," he said.
  
  "My real goal, though," he added, "is to change just one government department and how it does business."
  
  That is what happened in Bangalore, where Bhaskar Rao, the transport commissioner for the state of Karnataka, used the data collected on I Paid a Bribe to push through reforms in the motor vehicle department. Some 20 senior officers in the department were 'cautioned,' Mr. Rao said, and many others received ethics counseling.
  
  Licenses are now applied for online — and last year, Bangalore became home to the world’s first automated driving test tracks. Drivers navigate a figure eight, demonstrate their ability to parallel park, put their car in reverse and perform other tasks over a test of about nine minutes that is monitored by electronic sensors.
  
  "It totally eliminated the whims and fancies of the motor vehicle inspectors," Mr. Rao, now inspector general of police for internal security, said in a telephone interview. "It is videotaped so everyone can see the results and everything is very transparent."
  
  He said he could not have made the changes without I Paid a Bribe. "It was my unofficial spokesman to drive home the message that the public was really upset about this corruption," Mr. Rao said. "It helped me get my colleagues to fall in line, and it helped me persuade my superiors that we needed to do this."
  
  Such concrete evidence of impact is nice, but Mr. King said the sites also were likely to have a deterrent effect that was difficult to measure. "As the information because more public over time and awareness of such reporting grows," he said, "I suspect those who might have been tempted to engage in this type of corruption are less likely to because the risk of being caught is much greater."

Implanting False Crime Memories Is Easy

Memory's a pretty fluid and complex thing. We don't always remember specific details of an event well, and what details we do remember can be influenced by stuff that happened after the event itself. This is all pretty standard when it comes to memory research. What the authors of a new paper in Psychological Science just pulled off, though, takes things to a whole new level: They were able to convince study participants they had committed a crime that was completely fabricated.

Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter of the universities of Bedfordshire and British Columbia, respectively, got permission from a group of Canadian undergraduates to send surveys to their primary caregivers in which the caregivers were asked to provide details of negative, emotionally charged events (animal attacks, losing money, and other stuff like that) the students had experienced when they were younger.

Then, with these details in their hands, the researchers interviewed the students three times, with each interview lasting for about 40 minutes. Some were asked to remember things that had actually happened to them — the animal attack or whatever — while others were asked to remember details of a crime they hadn't actually committed.

It's probably best to let the researchers take it from here:

Participants were asked to explain what happened during each of the events in turn, after the interviewer provided some accurate cues from the caregiver questionnaire, including the city that the participant lived in and the name of a friend the participant had at the time of the alleged event (a friend who was supposedly present during the event). The interviewer also provided a number of cues, including the participant’s age at the time of the event, the season when it took place, and an indication that the caregiver was involved after the event occurred; for the true event, these were accurate cues, and for the false event, they were randomly assigned inaccurate cues. As expected, participants successfully provided an account of the true event but were unable to provide an account of the false event in the first interview ... When participants had difficulty recalling the false event, the interviewer encouraged them to try to remember it, and (falsely) told them that most people can remember these kinds of memories if they try hard enough. Then, participants were told that the study was an examination of memory-retrieval methods, and they were asked to use context reinstatement and guided imagery to retrieve the memory. They also were told to practice visualization of the false event each night at home. These methods have been shown to effectively generate details that form the foundations of false memories[.]

If you want more details, the study, which is unlocked, has them, but the key takeaway is that by the end of the third interview, after a bunch of carefully crafted nudging to do their best to remember, a full 70 percent of the students said, "Yep, I committed that crime when I was younger," and they "volunteered ... detailed false account[s]" of those crimes.

It's a pretty stunning example of just how malleable memory is, and how open to suggestion people can be in certain circumstances. And while the researchers point out that it's unclear whether these findings are directly applicable to police interrogations — there were no negative consequences to copping to the (non-)crimes in question, which makes for a pretty different overall dynamic — it's hard, after reading this study, not to think about the high-profile false confessions that have caused interrogation procedures to come under a great deal of scrutiny in recent years.

Memory: It just keeps getting weirder and fuzzier.

Easy Hacking

Retailers are putting their customers’ credit card details at the mercy of computer hackers because they have failed to upgrade an obsolete version of the Windows operating system on their machines, a leading online security researcher has warned.

A significant number of stores continue to run Windows XP even though Microsoft stopped providing security updates for the software almost nine months ago, James Lyne, the head of research at Sophos, said.

Windows XP, which was released in 2001, was one of the most popular operating systems in the world and many companies built their computer networks around it. However, Microsoft said last April that it would stop providing software updates for XP in order to concentrate on developing new software instead. When operating systems stop receiving security updates, they become more vulnerable to new types of cyberattack.

“Most retailers in the UK are either completely unprepared or unaware of the danger,” Mr Lyne said. “Or they are over-confident. For a very small amount of money, it is possible to get your hands on kit that can wreak havoc in their systems. And, because XP is not being updated, it is way easier to infect with malware.”

Mr Lyne demonstrated how to perform a hacking attack on Windows XP that was able to extract a string of credit card details in less than a minute. He set up a website, reallysaferetail.com, for which he bought an SSL [Secure Socket Layer] security certificate for £30 online. These certificates activate a padlock icon that appears next to the address bar on a browser, indicating to a user that their connection is secure.

From a cloud computing service based in Ireland, he first infected the Windows XP system with malware, or malicious software, by exploiting one of its security holes. He then instructed the malware to download everything that was held on the computer’s memory in what is known as a RAM [random-access memory] scraper attack, something that is very difficult to detect. Mr Lyne was then able to search for credit card numbers in the downloaded file. He said that it was was also possible to attack non-Windows XP machines, although it was far harder to carry out the initial infection with malware.

Juveniles Talking About Behaviour

"So what would you do if your girlfriend got pregnant? Shoot her?”

“No, punch her in the stomach, real hard.”

This conversation occurred in an observation room at Oregon Social Learning Center. Tom Dishion and his colleagues were trying to learn more about why some kids become delinquent. He and many other behavioral scientists knew that most adolescents who get in trouble do so with other adolescents. Delinquency is a group enterprise. But Dishion took the research a step further. He wanted to see if he could actually observe the social influence processes that motivate kids to defy adult expectations and engage in criminal acts. So he asked young men who were participating in a longitudinal study of delinquency to bring a friend into the lab and have a series of brief conversations about things like planning an activity or solving a problem with a parent or friend.

What he found was startling. The conversations these young men had about deviant activities provided direct and strong reinforcement of deviant behavior. Even though these thirteen-and fourteen-year-old boys knew their conversations were being observed and recorded, some of them talked quite freely about committing crimes, getting drunk, taking drugs, and victimizing girls. Even more surprising was the fact that the amount of this kind of talk predicted whether individuals engaged in delinquent behavior well into adulthood.

You might think this occurred simply because adolescents who are already involved in problem behavior tend to talk more often about deviance. Maybe this topic was a by-product of their delinquent lifestyle and didn’t influence their delinquent behavior. But that was not the case. It is true that young people’s levels of problem behavior predict their future problem behavior. However, even when Dishion’s team controlled statistically for the influence of prior deviant behavior, the level of deviancy talk in these thirty-minute videotaped discussions predicted adult antisocial behavior two years later. The conversations escalated their deviant behavior.

Why would deviant talk lead to deviant behavior? And why did some kids talk about deviance while others didn’t? The answer Dishion reached is the most interesting thing about his research: If you want to understand why people do things, look for the reinforcers. Dishion and his colleagues coded not only the deviant talk of these kids, but also the reactions of their friends. He simply coded deviant and nondeviant talk and two possible reactions to each statement: pause or laugh. They found that the more laughs a boy got for what he said, the more he talked about that topic. In pairs where most of the laughs followed deviant talk, there was a great increase in the deviant talk. In statistical terms, 84 percent of the variance in deviant talk related to the rate of laughter for deviant talk. That is huge.

Even more interesting was the fact that the rate of reinforcement for deviant talk strongly predicted later delinquency. Boys whose friends approved of their talk of delinquent and violent acts were more likely to engage in these acts. Dishion called interactions like this “deviancy training.” In subsequent research he showed that simply letting at-risk kids get together raised the level of their misbehavior.

A colleague of Dishion’s, Deborah Capaldi, studies violence between men and women. She wondered if the deviancy training that Dishion discovered influenced how boys treat girls. When the boys in Dishion’s study were seventeen or eighteen years old, the researchers invited them back to have another conversation with a friend. One thing they asked them to talk about was what they liked and disliked about girls they knew. They coded these conversations in terms of how often they talked in hostile ways about girls. (The example at the beginning of this excerpt comes from one of those conversations.) When the young men were twenty to twenty-three years old, Capaldi got data from them and their girlfriends or wives about how often the men were physically violent. Sure enough, those who had talked approvingly about violence toward women years earlier were, in fact, more aggressive toward their partners.

A further analysis of the interactions of these boys when they were sixteen or seventeen revealed that the men who were most violent at twenty-two or twenty-three were the ones who not only had received reinforcement for talk of deviant behavior, but also had a friend or friends with whom they had coercive interactions. In addition to assessing the deviancy training I described above, this study coded how much the two friends were coercive toward each other. In this case, coercion was defined as engaging in dominant or dismissive behavior, using profanity, and being abusive to the other person. Even when the researchers controlled statistically for the teens’ antisocial behavior as children and the quality of parental discipline, those who talked about deviance the most and were coercive toward their friend were most likely to engage in violence as adults.

Despite all the evidence about how peers influence each other’s deviant behavior, our society routinely deals with delinquency by bringing troubled youth together. Tom Dishion found this out the hard way. He did a randomized trial of the impact of a parenting intervention (an early version of the Family Check-Up) versus a program to teach kids good self-management and study skills. He randomly assigned families of at-risk youth to either participate in the parenting intervention or not, and randomly assigned the youths to participate or not participate in the self-management program. He expected that the best outcomes would be for those who received both programs.

The parenting program worked as expected, but to Dishion’s surprise, the self-management program led to increases in youth smoking. When he coded videotapes of the interactions of youth in self-management training groups, he discovered that those who were talking about deviant activities were most likely to get others’ attention. This was exactly the process he showed in the research I described earlier: peer social approval reinforces deviant behavior.

Additional evidence has accumulated that raises serious questions about many of the things our society does in efforts to deal with at-risk or delinquent youth. We routinely put students who are doing less well academically on a different academic track than those who are doing well. In the process, we stigmatize them and bring them together, where they become friends and have little contact with students who embrace prosocial norms and behaviors. If at-risk kids have trouble in school, they are often transferred to alternative schools where the student body consists almost entirely of kids who experiment with drugs and other forms of risk taking. If they are arrested, they are locked up with other problem youth or treated in groups of adjudicated youth.

If left to their own devices, young people who are at risk for problems typically reinforce each other’s deviant tendencies. Thus, families and schools need to be sensitive to the importance of peer relationships in young people’s development. And while peer influences are especially important in adolescence, ensuring that adolescents have friends who support their positive social development ideally begins in early childhood, when children learn to regulate their emotions and cooperate with others.

Cheap Way To Reduce Juvenile Crime

Programs that help young people find summer jobs are commonly thrown-around examples of government initiatives that can, in theory, improve life for kids in dangerous, low-income neighborhoods. But there have actually been mixed results as to whether or not these programs have the beneficial effects one might expect, particularly when it comes to reducing rates of juvenile delinquency. In a new paper in Science, though, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Sara Heller offers evidence that when it comes to reducing violent crime, summer jobs programs — even relatively cheap ones — can help significantly.

Heller examined a Chicago-based program called One Summer Plus, or OSP. She tracked 1,634 8th–12th-graders, almost all of them African-American, who were “enrolled in 13 high-violence Chicago schools.” Half were assigned to OSP and half to a control group. Within the OSP group, half were offered 25 hours a week of minimum-wage work (that’s $8.25 per hour in Illinois) for eight weeks over the summer, while half were offered 15 hours of work a week paired with ten hours a week of social-emotional learning (SEL) over the same period (the sessions were designed to help them “process social information, manage thoughts and emotions, and set and achieve goals more successfully,” and participants were paid for their attendance). Everyone in the OSP group was also assigned a job mentor to help him or her ”learn to be successful employees and to navigate barriers to employment.” The control group didn’t receive any sort of counseling or employment offers.

Using police data, Heller tracked the rates at which participants in the study were arrested from the day it started until 13 months after its conclusion. She found no statistically significant differences between the OSP and control groups when it came to the rates of arrest for property, drug, and “other” crimes, but she did find a sizable drop in the rate at which OSP participants were arrested for violent crimes: Over the course of the study, they were 43 percent less likely to be arrested. It's impossible to know from the study's design exactly why it worked, but Heller thinks that there's a big hint in the fact that only violent crime rates were affected: These are the sorts of crimes most tightly associated with deficits in "self-control, social information processing, and decision-making" — all skills that are likely bolstered by workplace experience.

On its own, the reduction in crime is a pretty big finding, but when you dig into the study, some other noteworthy points jump out as well:

1. The program’s effectiveness wasn’t just due to the fact that kids were “off the streets” during working hours. Researchers call this the “incapacitation effect” — the idea that you can prevent a crime simply by putting someone in a position where he or she is too preoccupied to commit one (preoccupied in this case meaning anything from “at work” to “in jail”). In this case, Heller found that the incapacitation effect can’t explain the reduction in crime.

In fact, a statistically significant difference in violent-crime arrest rates between the OSP and control groups didn’t kick in until three months after the program ended, and the gap between the groups then proceeded to get larger for about five months before flattening out for the remainder of the study. So there’s more going on here than kids simply being too busy with other stuff to get into trouble — the study can’t definitively state what that “more” is, exactly; maybe it’s the fact that the program enlarged students’ employment network, or maybe students were impacted by the assigned mentors who regularly visited them at work, or maybe it was something else.

2. There was no difference between the group that was only given work and the group that was given work plus social-emotional learning. The two groups experienced almost the exact same drop in the rate at which they were arrested for violent crimes, suggesting the ten hours of SEL didn’t have an impact on this particular type of behavior. Heller cites the possibility that working on its own provides some of the same psychological benefits as counseling — she cited one previous study that found that individuals randomly assigned to an “earnings subsidy program to increase employment … report a greater sense of control over their lives and less anger about their lack of opportunities.” If the teenagers in this study garnered similar psychological benefits from their jobs, it might provide buffers against the sorts of influences and temptations that lead to violent crime.

The answer also may be a bit simpler, though: As Heller points out, $1,400 — the average amount the kids earned for their summer employment (or employment and counseling attendance) — is a significant sum given that they were coming from families with a median income of about $35,000. If the effects observed are caused, or mostly caused, simply by providing money to people who don’t have a lot of it — reducing kids’ incentive to get involved in crime, perhaps, or maybe freeing up parents to spend more time with kids who would otherwise go unsupervised — then the source of that money may not matter a huge amount. (If this is the case, it would would also suggest that if the kids earned more than minimum wage, we might see bigger drops in violent delinquency.)

3. This intervention provided a lot of bang for the buck. When it comes to studying these sorts of programs, the question is often, perhaps unfortunately, not just which methods produce the biggest changes in behavior, but which do so at the lowest cost. There isn’t exactly a huge amount of money floating around for programs targeting low-income teenagers in violent neighborhoods.

This study helped prove, Heller writes, that “such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.” Hopefully future research will provide more evidence to buttress this idea.

Sex Offenders and Where They Live

Dozens of sex offenders who have satisfied their sentences in New York State are being held in prison beyond their release dates because of a new interpretation of a state law that governs where they can live. In short, since 2005, sex offenders in the state can't live within 1,000 feet of a school, and a February ruling from the state's Department of Corrections and Community Supervision extended that restriction to homeless shelters.

Because the onus is on sex offenders to find approved housing before they’re released, Goldstein reported, they’ve been left with very few options, especially in densely-populated New York City, where there are schools everywhere. This has led to an uncomfortable legal limbo and sparked at least one lawsuit (so far) on behalf of an offender who is still in custody even though he was supposed to be out by now.

The unfortunate thing about this situation is that laws designed to restrict where sex offenders can live are really and truly useless, except as a means of politicians scoring easy political points by ratcheting up hysteria. There are many tricky social-scientific issues on which there are a range of opinions and some degree of debate among experts, but this isn't one of them. Among those whose job it is to figure out how to reduce the rate at which sex offenders commit crimes (as opposed to those whose job it is to get reelected, in part by hammering away at phantom threats), there is zero controversy: These laws don't work, and may actually increase sexual offenders' recidivism rates.

Maia Christopher, head of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, sent Science of Us a policy paper her organization has prepared on this issue (it’s not yet online, but should be later this week). ATSA's views on housing restrictions for sex offenders are completely straightforward: the group "does not support the use of residence restrictions as a feasible strategy for sex offender management" because of a lack of evidence they do any good.

The paper notes that these laws have proliferated — “[a]t least 30 states and hundreds of cities” have them — because of some basic misunderstandings about how sex crimes are committed. There’s a collective American fixation on the creepy image of a sex offender salivating just beyond the playground fence, but that’s just not how things usually work.

Rather, these crimes are generally committed by someone known to the victim — 93 percent of the time when it comes to child victims, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics — and the majority take place either in the victim’s home or the home of someone they know. “Therefore,” the authors write, “policies based on ‘stranger danger’ do not adequately address the reality of sexual abuse.”

The policy paper goes on to run through some of the many studies on the subject. In Florida and Colorado, sex offenders who resided near schools or daycare centers didn’t reoffend more frequently than those who did not. In Minnesota, an analysis of 224 “sexual reoffense crimes” found that the “offender was a neighbors of the victim in only about 4% of the cases,” and “the authors concluded that residence restrictions would not have prevented even one re-offense.”

All the literature, in short, points to the same conclusion: restricting where sex offenders can live doesn’t appear to increase public safety one iota. It may decrease it, however, because the "unintended consequences of residence restrictions include transience, homelessness, instability, and other obstacles to community reentry." Since "unemployment, unstable housing, and lack of support are associated with increased criminal recidivism," and housing restrictions lead to all three, they're a bad idea, ATSA argues.

As a social-science writer used to the hedge-y language of “This study suggests that A may cause B,” it felt weird to be exposed to a debate in which the evidence is stacked so highly on one side. So I sent emails to Karen Terry and Cynthia Calkins Mercado, both professors at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice whose primary area of expertise is sex offenders.

Would it really be accurate, I asked them, to say that there’s literally no evidence these policies are useful? “You are correct,” Terry wrote back. “To date, there is no empirical evidence that these policies reduce the rate of sexual offending.” Mercado concurred, and added that there's "considerable evidence that these restrictions make readjustment to the community more difficult and thus may inadvertently increase risk for recidivism."

It should be said that these restrictions are just one part of a larger story — as Human Rights Watch, Radley Balko, and others have pointed out, U.S. laws governing sex offenses are broken in a myriad of ways. But getting rid of such housing laws would still be a step in the right direction, so it’s too bad that this is a pipe dream, at least in the short term. After all, what politician wants to stand up and say, “You know what? I think sex offenders should be able to live closer to children”?

Capital Punishment Weeds Out Violent Genes

Liberal use of the death penalty over the past 500 years weeded out violent genes from Britain and helped to bring down the country’s murder rate, according to a study.

In the early years of the Tudor dynasty, at the start of a period the researchers call the “war on murder”, the homicide rate in England was between 20 and 40 a year for every 100,000 people. Over the next 250 years it fell to two or four. Today it is one.

Traditionally, historians have put this decline down to a cultural shift as the rule of law was tightened, the gallows became more of a deterrent and people developed a greater sense of social responsibility.

The authors of the study claim that there is a flaw in this theory. Although Britain and other western societies became more tolerant of “bad boys” in the second half of the 20th century, they argue, the “reversion to barbarism” predicted in contemporary novels such as Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange has failed to emerge.

Peter Frost, an anthropologist at Laval University in Quebec, and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, argue in their paper that the missing factor is “genetic pacification”, the judicial culling of murderous DNA from the gene pool.

“State repression of personal violence created a cultural norm that favoured individuals who were temperamentally less inclined to personal violence,” they wrote in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

“Such individuals steadily became more prevalent, thus shifting the norm further in the direction of non-violence — in short, gene-culture co-evolution.” Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence was declining around the world because of five “historical forces”: trade, the progress of women’s rights, the nation state, an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook and the spread of knowledge and rationality.

Professor Pinker was unmoved by the argument that genetic pacification had also helped to reduce murder rates. “It’s possible in theory, but it would predict different degrees of impulsive violence across ethnic groups that have lived under state control for different amounts of time, which seems implausible, to say nothing of untestable for political reasons,” he said.

At the height of the Enlightenment, British judges freely prescribed capital punishment. From 1688 to 1791 the list of offences punishable by death under laws known as the “Bloody Code” almost quadrupled from 50 to 222. The crimes included stealing from a rabbit warren, impersonating a Chelsea pensioner and “being in the company of gypsies for a month”.

Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965 and phased it out for rarer crimes including piracy and high treason over the next 33 years.

Since then many Conservative politicians and a broad strand of public opinion have flirted with reintroducing the penalty.

Last year a poll found that Britons backed capital punishment by a narrow margin of 45 per cent to 39 per cent.

Margaret Thatcher favoured its return and in 2003 David Davis, the shadow home secretary, argued that it should be brought back under “narrow circumstances”. The last attempt came in 2013, when Tory backbenchers included the restoration of the death penalty in their “alternative Queen’s speech”.

Virtual Crimes?

"Who are we when we live without consequences?" That's the question a detective poses angrily to the owner of the Hideaway, a virtual clubhouse catering to paedophiles in The Nether, Jennifer Haley's charged, compact play about online morality. The "Nether" of the title, a fully immersive relative of today's internet, lets them indulge in fantasies of molestation and murder – without ever meeting an actual child.

To Morris, the detective, the corruption of the Hideaway's clientele is real, even if their victims are not. Yet for all the pent-up fury with which she argues her case, she cannot induce Poppa, the Hideaway's charismatic proprietor, to admit he has done anything wrong.

Indeed, he insists that in his closely regulated realm – an idyllic and stunningly realised colonial manse – customers can expend their urges entirely safely. Everyone consents, no one comes to harm, and they are happy, as they could never be in the real world. What's wrong with that?

Outside the comfort zone

This is not a comfortable scenario, and The Nether is not a comfortable play; it takes courage to write anything that presents paedophiles in terms other than outright condemnation. Yet Haley's script does not require us to condone paedophilia, only to recognise that paedophiles have desires, motives and emotions too.

And it is remarkable how every character retains their complex humanity no matter what virtual atrocities we know they've committed.

It reminds us that if we regard them as sick – a favourite tabloid descriptor – we must think of them as needing cures, too. For those wary of what they might see, by the way, the play's power relies on suggestion, not shock.

The Nether's audience is confronted by unanswered and perhaps unanswerable moral propositions at every turn of its 85 minutes. Is freedom of speech absolute? Should you ever be prosecuted for the contents of your imagination? Does moral corruption lead to physical degradation? If no one is being forced to act against their will, should such actions nonetheless be forbidden?

In the frictionless Nether, stripped of real-world complications, the arguments are pared to their essentials, sometimes leaving the characters and the audience scrabbling for purchase. For example, Morris is desperate to learn whether there was ever "a real girl" beneath the Hideaway's simulacrum of 11-year-old Iris. The implication is that Poppa would then clearly be complicit in abuse, just as those who trade images of abuse today are complicit in their manufacture.

But such assurance is not easy to come by: every time the audience is tempted to think that we are approaching certitude, Haley's script snatches it away. By assuming the technology, and abstracting the problem, she allows the audience to focus on the Socratic method at the play's core and weigh up the protagonists' arguments in a relatively cool-headed manner.

Freedom's limits

And while Haley has picked the most extreme case around which to build her play, the way it probes the limits of freedom, morality and society has much broader relevance. You need look no further than the image-based forum 4chan, or perhaps even Twitter, to appreciate that.

But on the other hand, this approach also means it's hard to relate The Nether to the realities of our world.

We know that some paedophiles have a compulsive urge to abuse because of a brain injury, for example. Others have formed support groups to help them resist their urges, reportedly with some success. So it is hard to imagine that what works for one will work for all.

And our virtual reality technologies have not yet reached the point where online activities can convincingly substitute for real ones, which means that living without consequences remains the stuff of science fiction.

Almost science fact

But The Nether is only just science fiction. Debate began some years ago about the legality and morality of simulated child pornography: does it slake or fuel paedophilic lust? Virtual children have been used to ensnare paedophiles, although there have also been suggestions that childlike sex robots could be used to treat them.

Given recent rapid advances in haptics and virtual reality, combined with ready extrapolation from today's "dark net", the world depicted in the play where some sites don't appear in any search index and are sealed off from outside scrutiny may not be that far off.

If that future does arrive, how will we deal with it? The Nether is a stark reminder that, lacking the evidence and perhaps the will, we have ducked many of the toughest questions about how to behave in virtual spaces. The Nether, dark though it is, makes a compelling case that we should now engage fully: its critique of our times is breathtakingly powerful. Let's hope it doesn't prove equally powerfully prescient about times to come, too.

Norway Prisons

Like everything else in Norway, the tw­o-­hour drive southeast from Oslo seemed impossibly civilized. The highways were perfectly maintained and painted, the signs clear and informative and the speed-­monitoring cameras primly intolerant. My destination was the town of Halden, which is on the border with Sweden, straddling a narrow fjord guarded by a 17th-­century fortress. I drove down winding roads flanked in midsummer by rich green fields of young barley and dense yellow carpets of rapeseed plants in full flower. Cows clustered in wood-­fenced pastures next to neat farmsteads in shades of rust and ocher. On the outskirts of town, across from a road parting dark pine forest, the turnoff to Norway’s newest prison was marked by a modest sign that read, simply, HALDEN ­FENGSEL. There were no signs warning against picking up hitchhikers, no visible fences. Only the 25-­foot-­tall floodlights rising along the edges hinted that something other than grazing cows lay ahead.

Smooth, featureless concrete rose on the horizon like the wall of a dam as I approached; nearly four times as tall as a man, it snaked along the crests of the hills, its top curled toward me as if under pressure. This was the outer wall of Halden Fengsel, which is often called the world’s most humane maximum-­security prison. I walked up the quiet driveway to the entrance and presented myself to a camera at the main door. There were no coils of razor wire in sight, no lethal electric fences, no towers manned by snipers — nothing violent, threatening or dangerous. And yet no prisoner has ever tried to escape. I rang the intercom, the lock disengaged with a click and I stepped inside.

To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-­appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere — these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also something more: the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness.

The treatment of inmates at Halden is wholly focused on helping to prepare them for a life after they get out. Not only is there no death penalty in Norway; there are no life sentences. The maximum sentence for most crimes is 21 years — even for Anders Behring Breivik, who is responsible for probably the deadliest recorded rampage in the world, in which he killed 77 people and injured hundreds more in 2011 by detonating a bomb at a government building in Oslo and then opening fire at a nearby summer camp. Because Breivik was sentenced to “preventive detention,” however, his term can be extended indefinitely for five years at a time, if he is deemed a continuing threat to society by the court. “Better out than in” is an unofficial motto of the Norwegian Correctional Service, which makes a reintegration guarantee to all released inmates. It works with other government agencies to secure a home, a job and access to a supportive social network for each inmate before release; Norway’s social safety net also provides health care, education and a pension to all citizens. With one of the highest per capita gross domestic products of any country in the world, thanks to the profits from oil production in the North Sea, Norway is in a good position to provide all of this, and spending on the Halden prison runs to more than $93,000 per inmate per year, compared with just $31,000 for prisoners in the United States, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.

That might sound expensive. But if the United States incarcerated its citizens at the same low rate as the Norwegians do (75 per 100,000 residents, versus roughly 700), it could spend that much per inmate and still save more than $45 billion a year. At a time when the American correctional system is under scrutiny — over the harshness of its sentences, its overreliance on solitary confinement, its racial disparities — citizens might ask themselves what all that money is getting them, besides 2.2 million incarcerated people and the hardships that fall on the families they leave behind. The extravagant brutality of the American approach to prisons is not working, and so it might just be worth looking for lessons at the opposite extreme, here in a sea of blabaerskog, or blueberry forest.

“This punishment, taking away their freedom — the sign of that is the wall, of course,” Gudrun Molden, one of the Halden prison’s architects, said on a drizzly morning a few days after I arrived. As we stood on a ridge, along with Jan Stromnes, the assistant warden, it was silent but for the chirping of birds and insects and a hoarse fluttering of birch leaves disturbed by the breeze. The prison is secluded from the surrounding farmland by the blueberry woods, which are the native forest of southeastern Norway: blue-­black spruce, slender Scotch pine with red-­tinged trunks and silver-­skinned birches over a dense understory of blueberry bushes, ferns and ­mosses in deep shade. It is an ecosystem that evokes deep nostalgia in Norway, where picking wild berries is a near-­universal summer pastime for families, and where the right to do so on uncultivated land is protected by law.

Norway banned capital punishment for civilians in 1902, and life sentences were abolished in 1981. But Norwegian prisons operated much like their American counterparts until 1998. That was the year Norway’s Ministry of Justice reassessed the Correctional Service’s goals and methods, putting the explicit focus on rehabilitating prisoners through education, job training and therapy. A second wave of change in 2007 made a priority of reintegration, with a special emphasis on helping inmates find housing and work with a steady income before they are even released. Halden was the first prison built after this overhaul, and so rehabilitation became the underpinning of its design process. Every aspect of the facility was designed to ease psychological pressures, mitigate conflict and minimize interpersonal friction. Hence the blueberry forest.

“Nature is a rehabilitation thing now,” Molden said. Researchers are working to quantify the benefits of sunlight and fresh air in treating depression. But Molden viewed nature’s importance for Norwegian inmates as far more personal. “We don’t think of it as a rehabilitation,” she said. “We think of it as a basic element in our growing up.” She gestured to the knoll we stood on and the 12 acres of blabaerskog preserved on the prison grounds, echoing the canopy visible on the far side. Even elsewhere in Europe, most high-­security prison plots are scraped completely flat and denuded of vegetation as security measures. “A lot of the staff when we started out came from other prisons in Norway,” Stromnes said. “They were a little bit astonished by the trees and the number of them. Shouldn’t they be taken away? And what if they climb up, the inmates? As we said, Well, if they climb up, then they can sit there until they get tired, and then they will come down.” He laughed. “Never has anyone tried to hide inside. But if they should run in there, they won’t get very far — they’re still inside.”

“Inside” meant inside the wall. The prison’s defining feature, the wall is visible everywhere the inmates go, functioning as an inescapable reminder of their imprisonment. Because the prison buildings were purposely built to a human scale, with none more than two stories in height and all modest in breadth, the wall becomes an outsize presence; it looms everywhere, framed by the cell windows, shadowing the exercise yards, its pale horizontal spread emphasized by the dark vertical lines of the trees. The two primary responsibilities of the Correctional Service — detention and rehabilitation — are in perpetual tension with each other, and the architects felt that single wall could represent both. “We trusted the wall,” Molden said, to serve as a symbol and an instrument of punishment.

When Molden and her collaborators visited the site in 2002, in preparing for the international competition to design the prison, they spent every minute they were allowed walking around it, trying to absorb the genius loci, the spirit of the place. They felt they should use as much of the site as possible, requiring inmates to walk outside to their daily commitments of school or work or therapy, over uneven ground, up and down hills, traveling to and from home, as they would in the world outside. They wound up arranging the prison’s living quarters in a ring, which we could now see sloping down the hill on either side of us. In the choice of materials, the architects were inspired by the sober palette of the trees, mosses and bedrock all around; the primary building element is kiln-­fired brick, blackened with some of the original red showing through. The architects used silvery galvanized-­steel panels as a “hard” material to represent detention, and untreated larch wood, a low-­maintenance species that weathers from taupe to soft gray, as a “soft” material associated with rehabilitation and growth.

The Correctional Service emphasizes what it calls “dynamic security,” a philosophy that sees interpersonal relationships between the staff and the inmates as the primary factor in maintaining safety within the prison. They contrast this with the approach dominant in high-­security prisons elsewhere in the world, which they call “static security.” Static security relies on an environment designed to prevent an inmate with bad intentions from carrying them out. Inmates at those prisons are watched at a remove through cameras, contained by remote-­controlled doors, prevented from vandalism or weapon-­making by tamper-­proof furniture, encumbered by shackles or officer escorts when moved. Corrections officers there are trained to control prisoners with as little interaction as possible, minimizing the risk of altercation.

Dynamic security focuses on preventing bad intentions from developing in the first place. Halden’s officers are put in close quarters with the inmates as often as possible; the architects were instructed to make the guard stations tiny and cramped, to encourage officers to spend time in common rooms with the inmates instead. The guards socialize with the inmates every day, in casual conversation, often over tea or coffee or meals. Inmates can be monitored via surveillance cameras on the prison grounds, but they often move unaccompanied by guards, requiring a modest level of trust, which the administrators believe is crucial to their progress. Nor are there surveillance cameras in the classrooms or most of the workshops, or in the common rooms, the cell hallways or the cells themselves. The inmates have the opportunity to act out, but somehow they choose not to. In five years, the isolation cell furnished with a limb-­restraining bed has never been used.

It is tempting to chalk up all this reasonableness to something peculiar in Norwegian socialization, some sort of civility driven core-­deep into the inmates since birth, or perhaps attribute it to their racial and ethnic homogeneity as a group. But in actuality, only around three-­fifths of the inmates are legal Norwegian citizens. The rest have come from more than 30 other countries (mostly in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East) and speak little or no Norwegian; English is the lingua franca, a necessity for the officers to communicate with foreign prisoners.

Of the 251 inmates, nearly half are imprisoned for violent crimes like murder, assault or rape; a third are in for smuggling or selling drugs. Nevertheless, violent incidents and even threats are rare, and nearly all take place in Unit A. It is the prison’s most restrictive unit, housing inmates who require close psychiatric or medical supervision or who committed crimes that would make them unpopular in Units B and C, the prison’s more open “living” cell blocks, where the larger population of inmates mixes during the day for work, schooling and therapy programs.

I met some of the prisoners of Unit A one afternoon in the common room of an eight-­man cell block. I was asked to respect the inmates’ preferences for anonymity or naming, and for their choices in discussing their cases with me. The Norwegian news media does not often identify suspects or convicts by name, so confirming the details of their stories was not always possible. I sat on an orange vinyl couch next to a wooden shelving unit with a few haphazard piles of board games and magazines and legal books. On the other side of the room, near a window overlooking the unit’s gravel yard, a couple of inmates were absorbed in a card game with a guard.

An inmate named Omar passed me a freshly pressed heart-­shaped waffle over my shoulder on a paper plate, interrupting an intense monologue directed at me in excellent English by Chris Giske, a large man with a thick goatee and a shaved head who was wearing a heavy gold chain over a T-­shirt that strained around his barrel-­shaped torso.

“You have heard about the case? Sigrid?” Giske asked me. “It’s one of the biggest cases in Norway.”

In 2012, a 16-­year-­old girl named Sigrid Schjetne vanished while walking home one night, and her disappearance gripped the country. Her body was found a month later, and Giske’s conviction in the case made him one of the most reviled killers in Norwegian history. He explained to me that he asked to transfer out of Unit A, but that officials declined to move him. “They don’t want me in prison,” he said. “They want me in the psychiatric thing. I don’t know why.”

He was denied the transfer, I was later told, partly because of a desire not to outrage the other inmates, and partly because of significant concern over his mental health — and his history of unprovoked extreme violence against young women unfortunate enough to cross his path. Giske had previously spent two years in prison after attacking a woman with a crowbar. This time, there was disagreement among doctors over whether he belonged in a hospital or in prison. Until the question was settled, he was the responsibility of the staff at Halden. It was not the first, second or even third casual meal I had shared with a man convicted of murder since I arrived at the beginning of the week, but it was the first time I felt myself recoil on instinct. (After my visit, Giske was transferred to a psychiatric institution.)

Omar handed me a vacuum-­sealed slice of what appeared to be flexible plastic, its wrapper decorated with a drawing of cheerful red dairy barns. “It’s fantastic!” he exclaimed. “When you are in Norway, you must try this! The first thing I learned, it was this. Brown cheese.”

According to the packaging, brown cheese is one of the things that “make Norwegians Norwegians,” a calorie-­dense fuel of fat and sugar salvaged from whey discarded during the cheese-­making process, which is cooked down for half a day until all that remains are caramelized milk sugars in a thick, sticky residue. With enthusiastic encouragement from the inmates, I peeled open the packaging and placed the glossy square on my limp waffle, following their instructions to fold the waffle as you would a taco, or a New York slice. To their great amusement, I winced as I tried to swallow what tasted to me like a paste of spray cheese mixed with fudge.

Another guard walked in and sat down next to me on the couch. “It’s allowed to say you don’t like it,” she said.

Are Hoidal, the prison’s warden, laughed from the doorway behind us and accepted his third waffle of the day. He had explained to me earlier, in response to my raised eyebrows, that in keeping with the prison’s commitment to “normalcy,” even the inmates in this block gather once a week to partake of waffles, which are a weekly ritual in most Norwegian homes.

At Halden, some inmates train for cooking certificates in the prison’s professional-­grade kitchen classroom, where I was treated to chocolate mousse presented in a wineglass, a delicate nest of orange zest curled on top. But most of the kitchen activity is more ordinary. I never entered a cell block without receiving offers of tea or coffee, an essential element of even the most basic Norwegian hospitality, and was always earnestly invited to share meals. The best meal I had in Norway — spicy lasagna, garlic bread and a salad with sun-­dried tomatoes — was made by an inmate who had spent almost half of his 40 years in prison. “Every time, you make an improvement,” he said of his cooking skills.

When I first met the inmates of C8, a special unit focused on addiction recovery, they were returning to their block laden with green nylon reusable bags filled with purchases from their weekly visit to the prison grocery shop, which is well ­stocked, carrying snacks and nonperishables but also a colorful assortment of produce, dairy products and meat. The men piled bags of food for communal suppers on the kitchen island on one side of their common room and headed back to their cells with personal items — fruit, soda, snacks, salami — to stash in their minifridges.

I met Tom, an inmate in his late 40s, as he was unpacking groceries on the counter: eggs, bacon, bread, cream, onions, tomato sauce, ground beef, lettuce, almonds, olives, frozen shrimp. Tom had a hoarse voice and a graying blond goatee, and his sleeveless basketball jersey exposed an assortment of tattoos decorating thick arms. His head was shaved smooth, with “F___ the Police” inked in cursive along the right side of his skull; the left side said “RESPECT” in inch-­tall letters. A small block of text under his right eye was blacked out, and under his left eye was “666.” A long seam ran up the back of his neck and scalp, a remnant of a high-speed motorcycle accident that left him in a coma the last time he was out of prison.

“You are alone now, yeah?” Tom nodded toward the room behind me. I turned around to look.

There were maybe eight inmates around — playing a soccer video game on the modular couch, folding laundry dried on a rack in the corner by large windows overlooking the exercise yard, dealing cards at the dining table — but no guards. Tom searched my face for signs of alarm. The convictions represented among this group included murder, weapons possession and assault.

I was a little surprised, but I stayed nonchalant. I might have expected a bit more supervision — perhaps a quick briefing on safety protocol and security guidelines — but the guards could see us through the long windows of their station, sandwiched between the common rooms of C7 and C8. It was the first of many times I would be left alone with inmates in a common room or in a cell at the end of a hallway, the staff retreating to make space for candid conversation. “It’s O.K.,” Tom assured me, with what I thought sounded like a hint of pride.

A man named Yassin, the uncontested pastry king of C8, politely motioned for me to move aside so he could get to the baking pans in the cabinet at my feet. When Halden opened, there was a wave of foreign news reports containing snarky, florid descriptions of the “posh,” “luxurious” prison, comparing its furnishings to those of a “boutique hotel.” In reality, the furniture is not dissimilar from what you might find in an American college dorm. The truly striking difference is that it is normal furniture, not specially designed to prevent it from being turned into shivs, arson fuel or other instruments of violence. The kitchen also provides ample weapons if a prisoner were so inclined. As one inmate pointed out to me, the cabinets on the wall contained ceramic plates and glass cups, the drawers held metal silverware and there were a couple of large kitchen knives tethered by lengths of rubber-­coated wire.

“If you want to ask me something, come on, no problem,” Tom said, throwing open his hands in invitation. “I’m not very good in English.”

Yassin stood up, laughing. “You speak very nice, Tom! It is prison English!” Yassin speaks Arabic and English and is also fluent in Norwegian, a requirement for living in the drug-­treatment block, where group and individual counseling is conducted in Norwegian. Like many in the prison, Tom never finished high school. He was raised in a boys’ home and has been in and out of prison, where English is common, for more than 30 years. (Yassin’s first prison sentence began at 15. Now 29 and close to finishing his sentence for selling drugs, he wants to make a change and thinks he might like to run a scared-­straight-­style program for teenagers. Before this most recent arrest, the background photo on his Facebook profile was the Facebook logo recreated in white powder on a blue background, with a straw coming in for the snort. He immigrated to Norway as a child with his Moroccan family by way of Dubai.)

“I don’t leave Norway,” Tom said. “I love my country.” He extended his arm with his fist clenched, showing a forearm covered in a “NORGE” tattoo shaded in the colors of the Norwegian flag. But I couldn’t detect any tension between Tom and Yassin in the kitchen. Tom was adamant that overcoming his substance-­abuse problem was his responsibility alone. But he conceded that the environment at Halden, and the availability of therapists, made it easier. Compared with other prisons, “it’s quiet,” he said. “No fighting, no drugs, no problem,” he added. “You’re safe.”

The officers try to head off any tensions that could lead to violence. If inmates are having problems with one another, an officer or prison chaplain brings them together for a mediation session that continues until they have agreed to maintain peace and have shaken hands. Even members of rival gangs agree not to fight inside, though the promise doesn’t extend to after their release. The few incidents of violence at Halden have been almost exclusively in Unit A, among the inmates with more serious psychiatric illnesses.

If an inmate does violate the rules, the consequences are swift, consistent and evenly applied. Repeated misbehavior or rule violations can result in cell confinement during regular work hours, sometimes without TV. One inmate claimed that an intrepid prisoner from Eastern Europe somehow managed to hack his TV to connect to the Internet and had it taken away for five months. (“Five months!” the inmate marveled to me. “I don’t understand how he survived.”)

It is perhaps hard to believe that Halden, or Norway more broadly, could hold any lessons for the United States. With its 251 inmates, Halden is one of Norway’s largest prisons, in a country with only 3,800 prisoners (according to the International Center for Prison Studies); by contrast, in the United States, the average number is around 1,300 at maximum-­security prisons, with a total of 2.2 million incarcerated (according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics). Halden’s rehabilitation programs seem logistically and financially out of reach for such a system to even contemplate.

And yet there was a brief historical moment in which the United States pondered a similar approach to criminal justice. As part of his “war on crime,” Lyndon B. Johnson established the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, a body of 19 advisers appointed to study, among other things, the conditions and practices of catastrophically overstretched prisons. The resulting 1967 report, “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” expressed concern that many correctional institutions were detrimental to rehabilitation: “Life in many institutions is at best barren and futile, at worst unspeakably brutal and degrading. . . . The conditions in which they live are the poorest possible preparation for their successful re-­entry into society, and often merely reinforce in them a pattern of manipulation and destructiveness.” And in its recommendations, the commission put forward a vision for prisons that would be surprisingly like Halden. “Architecturally, the model institution would resemble as much as possible a normal residential setting. Rooms, for example, would have doors rather than bars. Inmates would eat at small tables in an informal atmosphere. There would be classrooms, recreation facilities, day rooms, and perhaps a shop and library.”

In the mid-­1970s, the federal Bureau of Prisons completed three pretrial detention facilities that were designed to reflect those best practices. The three Metropolitan Correctional Centers, or M.C.C.s, were the first of what would come to be known as “new generation” institutions. The results, in both architecture and operation, were a radical departure from previous models. Groups of 44 prisoners populated self-­contained units in which all of the single-­inmate cells (with wooden doors meant to reduce both noise and cost) opened onto a day room, where they ate, socialized and met with visitors or counselors, minimizing the need for moving inmates outside the unit. All the prisoners spent the entire day outside their cells with a single unarmed correctional officer in an environment meant to diminish the sense of institutionalization and its attendant psychological stresses, with wooden and upholstered furniture, desks in the cells, porcelain toilets, exposed light fixtures, brightly colored walls, skylights and carpeted floors.

But by the time the centers opened, public and political commitment to rehabilitation programs in American prisons had shifted. Much of the backlash within penological circles can be traced to Robert Martinson, a sociology researcher at the City University of New York. In a 1974 article for the journal Public Interest, he summarized an analysis of data from 1945 to 1967 about the impact of rehabilitation programs on recidivism. Despite the fact that around half the individual programs did show evidence of effectiveness in reducing recidivism, Martinson’s article concluded that no category of rehabilitation program (education or psychotherapy, for example) showed consistent results across prison systems. “With few and isolated exceptions,” he wrote, “the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” Martinson’s paper was immediately seized upon by the news media and politicians, who latched on to the idea that “nothing works” in regard to prisoner rehabilitation. “It Doesn’t Work” was the title of a “60 Minutes” segment on rehabilitation. “They don’t rehabilitate, they don’t deter, they don’t punish and they don’t protect,” Jerry Brown, the governor of California, said in a 1975 speech. A top psychiatrist for the Bureau of Prisons resigned in disgust at what he perceived to be an abandonment of commitment to rehabilitation. At the dedication ceremony for the San Diego M.C.C. in 1974, one of the very structures designed with rehabilitation in mind, William Saxbe, the attorney general of the United States, declared that the ability of a correctional program to produce rehabilitation was a “myth” for all but the youngest offenders.

Martinson’s paper was quickly challenged; a 1975 analysis of much of the same data by another sociologist criticized Martinson’s choice to overlook the successful programs and their characteristics in favor of a broad conclusion devoid of context. By 1979, in light of new analyses, Martinson published another paper that unequivocally withdrew his previous conclusion, declaring that “contrary to my previous position, some treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism.” But by then, the “nothing works” narrative was firmly entrenched. In 1984, a Senate report calling for more stringent sentencing guidelines cited Martinson’s 1974 paper, without acknowledging his later reversal. The tough-on-crime policies that sprouted in Congress and state legislatures soon after included mandatory minimums, longer sentences, three-­strikes laws, legislation allowing juveniles to be prosecuted as adults and an increase in prisoners’ “maxing out,” or being released without passing through reintegration programs or the parole system. Between 1975 and 2005, the rate of incarceration in the United States skyrocketed, from roughly 100 inmates per 100,000 citizens to more than 700 — consistently one of the highest rates in the world. Though Americans make up about only 4.6 percent of the world’s population, American prisons hold 22 percent of all incarcerated people.

Today, the M.C.C. model of incarceration, which is now known as “direct supervision,” is not entirely dead. Around 350 facilities — making up less than 7 percent of the incarceration sites in the United States, mostly county-­level jails, which are pretrial and short-­stay institutions — have been built on the direct-­supervision model and are, with greater and lesser fidelity to the ideal, run by the same principles of inmate management developed for the new-­generation prisons of the 1970s. The body of data from those jails over the last 40 years has shown that they have lower levels of violence among inmates and against guards and reduced recidivism; some of these institutions, when directly compared with the older facilities they replaced, saw drops of 90 percent in violent incidents. But extrapolating from this tiny group of facilities to the entire nation, and in particular to its maximum-­security prisons, is an impossible thought experiment. Much about the American culture of imprisonment today — the training of guards, the acculturation of prisoners, the incentives of politicians, the inattention of citizens — would have to change for the Norwegian approach to gain anything more than a minor foothold in the correctional system. The country has gone down a different road during the past half century, and that road does not lead to Halden Fengsel.

Even understanding how well the Norwegian approach works in Norway is a difficult business. On a Saturday afternoon in Oslo, I met Ragnar Kristoffersen, an anthropologist who teaches at the Correctional Service of Norway Staff Academy, which trains correction officers. Kristoffersen published a research paper comparing recidivism rates in the Scandinavian countries. A survey of inmates who were released in 2005 put Norway’s two-­year recidivism rate at 20 percent, the lowest in Scandinavia, which was widely praised in the Norwegian and international press. For comparison, a 2014 recidivism report from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that an estimated 68 percent of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years.

I asked Kristoffersen if he had spent time at Halden. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a handful of printed sheets. “Have you seen this?” he asked while waving them at me. “It’s preposterous!” They were printouts of English-­language articles about the prison, the most offensive and misleading lines highlighted. He read a few quotes about the prison’s architecture and furnishings to me with disgust. I acknowledged that the hyperbolic descriptions would catch the attention of American and British readers, for whom the cost of a prison like Halden would probably need to be justified by strong evidence of a significant reduction in recidivism.

Somewhat to my surprise, Kristoffersen went into a rant about the unreliability of recidivism statistics for evaluating corrections practices. From one local, state or national justice system to another, diverse and ever-­changing policies and practices in sentencing — what kinds and lengths of sentences judges impose for what types of crimes, how likely they are to reincarcerate an offender for a technical violation of parole, how much emphasis they put on community sentences over prison terms and many other factors — make it nearly impossible to know if you’re comparing apples to apples. Kristoffersen pointed out that in 2005, Norway was putting people in prison for traffic offenses like speeding, something that few other countries do. Speeders are at low risk for reoffending and receiving another prison sentence for that crime or any other. Excluding traffic offenders, Norway’s recidivism rate would, per that survey, be around 25 percent after two years.

Then there was the question of what qualifies as “recidivism.” Some countries and states count any new arrest as recidivism, while others count only new convictions or new prison sentences; still others include parole violations. The numbers most commonly cited in news reports about recidivism, like the 20 percent celebrated by Norway or the 68 percent lamented by the United States, begin to fall apart on closer inspection. That 68 percent, for example, is a three-­year number, but digging into the report shows the more comparable two-­year rate to be 60 percent. And that number reflects not reincarceration (the basis for the Norwegian statistic) but rearrest, a much wider net. Fifteen pages into the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, I found a two-­year reincarceration rate, probably the best available comparison to Norway’s measures. Kristoffersen’s caveat in mind, that translated to a much less drastic contrast: Norway, 25 percent; the United States, 28.8 percent.

What does that mean? Is the American prison system doing a better job than conventional wisdom would suggest? It is frustratingly hard to tell. I asked Kristoffersen if that low reincarceration rate might reflect the fact that long prison sentences mean that many prisoners become naturally less likely to reoffend because of advanced age. He agreed that was possible, along with many other more and less obvious variables. It turned out that measuring the effectiveness of Halden in particular was nearly impossible; Norway’s recidivism statistics are broken down by prison of release, and almost no prisoners are released directly from maximum-­security prisons, so Halden doesn’t have a recidivism number.

After nearly an hour of talking about the finer points of statistics, though, Kristoffersen stopped and made a point that wasn’t about statistics at all.

“You have to be aware — there’s a logical type of error which is common in debating these things,” he said. “That is, you shouldn’t mix two kinds of principles. The one is about: How do you fight crimes? How do you reduce recidivism? And the other is: What are the principles of humanity that you want to build your system on? They are two different questions.”

He leaned back in his chair and went on. “We like to think that treating inmates nicely, humanely, is good for the rehabilitation. And I’m not arguing against it. I’m saying two things. There are poor evidence saying that treating people nicely will keep them from committing new crimes. Very poor evidence.”

He paused. “But then again, my second point would be,” he said, “if you treat people badly, it’s a reflection on yourself.” In officer-­training school, he explained, guards are taught that treating inmates humanely is something they should do not for the inmates but for themselves. The theory is that if officers are taught to be harsh, domineering and suspicious, it will ripple outward in their lives, affecting their self-­image, their families, even Norway as a whole. Kristoffersen cited a line that is usually attributed to Dostoyevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

I heard the same quotation from Are Hoidal, Halden’s warden, not long before I left Halden. He told me proudly that people wanted to work at the prison, and officers and teachers told me that they hoped to spend their whole careers at Halden, that they were proud of making a difference.

“They make big changes in here,” Hoidal said as we made our way through the succession of doors that would return us to the world outside. There was, improbably, an actual rainbow stretching from the clouds above, landing somewhere outside the wall. Hoidal was quiet for a moment, then laughed. “I have the best job in the world!”

Paedophiles

Three quarters of a million men may have a sexual interest in children, according to one of the bosses of Britain’s National Crime Agency. An estimated 250,000 of them are “true paedophiles” with a sexual desire for pre-pubescent children.

Phil Gormley, deputy director of the NCA, warned that every day a new group of young men arrive at puberty and develop an interest in sexual activity with children. He said a fresh approach to tackling the issue was needed as people will not come forward if all the authorities do is arrest and jail perpetrators. “Like most people I am shocked by the estimated number who have this interest. It tells us some unhealthy things about human nature,” he added.

The NCA figures, based on academic and other sources, suggested that between 1 and 3 per cent of men had paedophile tendencies, with Mr Gormley telling The Mail On Sunday: “Whatever the exact figure, it is big.”

Separate figures released by the NSPCC last week showed police are recording sex crimes against children at the rate of 85 a day. The charity said the number of sexual crimes recorded by police rose by a third to 31,000 between 2012-13 and 2013-14.

Yakuza

This year should have been a good one for Japan’s largest organized crime organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi, the one yakuza group that just about ruled them all. But as it marks its 100th year in business, internal squabbles may split the organization apart; it could also result in the kind of large-scale gang warfare that hasn’t been seen in decades.

The Japanese police are on full alert. Thursday (Japan time), the sprawling Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters in Kobe was besieged by a fleet of black Mercedes-Benzes and high-end Toyota Lexuses, transporting the top dogs of the Yamaguchi-gumi, dressed in their finest black suits, for emergency meetings.

The Yamaguchi-gumi is expected to splinter into factions with some gangs supporting current top boss Kenichi Shinoda aka Shinobu Tsukasa, 73, and others supporting a rival group, primarily based in western Japan, that opposes him and his parent faction, the Kodo-kai.

Japan’s organized crime groups, known collectively as the “yakuza,” i.e., “Losers,” or “Gokudo” (the ultimate path), are different from the mafias we know about in the West. They are treated as if they were some sort of controlled substance, dangerous but accepted within certain parameters.

They are Goldman Sachs with guns—not to mention knives, bazooka launchers, sniper rifles, and assassins.

So, in Japan, there are 21 designated organized crime groups that are regulated and policed by the Japanese government, and the yakuza themselves are not outlawed. Many yakuza pay taxes and declare their income. There are yakuza fan magazines; the upper echelon carry business cards. If you go to the webpage of the National Police Agency, you can find a listing of all the major yakuza groups, their headquarters, and their emblems (PDF).

The Inagawa-kai, Japan’s second-largest yakuza group, has its offices across from the Ritz-Carlton Tokyo. The Sumiyoshi-kai is located in opulent Ginza.

The groups are all structured as pseudo-families with lower members pledging allegiance to their surrogate father—the oyabun—and their “brothers.”

Of the yakuza groups, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the largest and most powerful. It had over 23,000 members and associates at the end of 2014, accounting for over 40 percent of those affiliated with gangs in Japan. However, even the Inagawa-kai, due to blood-brother relations between its leader and a senior member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, is essentially under the Yamaguchi-gumi umbrella, giving it a majority stake in the underworld.

The Yamaguchi-gumi isn’t only Japan’s largest organized crime group; it’s also a well-known Japanese corporation, founded in 1915 by former fisherman Harukichi Yamaguchi. It engages in a wide array of business activities, some of them legit and some not, and may treat competitors with, as the saying goes, extreme prejudice. Robert Feldman, an analyst at Morgan Stanley Japan Securities, once called it Japan’s second-largest private equity group and he was not incorrect. They are Goldman Sachs with guns—not to mention knives, bazooka launchers, sniper rifles, and assassins.

The group is divided into over 30 factions, some with over a thousand members, and some with fewer than a hundred.

It owns auditing firms, several hundred front operations, and network management and database companies. It controls Japan’s entertainment industry even now, and over the years its people have sneaked quietly into the backbone of several high-profile IT operations—only getting caught once in 2007, when a member of the Kodo-kai faction was revealed to have taken over the equivalent of Japan’s “classmates.com” - gaining access to the personal data of 3.2 million people. The group owns a chain of private detective agencies and keeps tabs on its enemies and their friends better than any intelligence agency in Japan.

The Yamaguchi-gumi has also had a hand in Japanese politics. The Minister of Education and Science has received donations and political support from Yamaguchi-gumi associates and front companies. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was photographed with a consigliore of the group.

If there were a pamphlet to recruit young college graduates for the yakuza, it would read like this:

The Yamaguchi-gumi Corporation, with large comfortable headquarters in the international city of Kobe and lovely branch offices, complete with swimming pools and gyms in Nagoya and other major cities in Japan, has a proud history of over 100 years of serving the Japanese people. Our construction, real estate, IT, banking, and entertainment businesses are still thriving in a poor economy, and thanks to one of the best R & D sections in any Japanese company, we have a treasure trove of personal data on the elite in Japan’s business and political world that can be judiciously used for blackmailing such individuals and maintaining maximum leverage in the money markets. We not only offer lifetime employment* but we also offer a generous pension plan.

The asterisk would serve for the following disclaimer, which is important:

*A lifetime in the Yamaguchi-gumi does not preclude the possibility of early death. A “lifetime” may also include time served in prison not necessarily for a crime that you actually committed but as a designated fall-guy. However, all members serving time in prison can be assured that we will maintain your family’s living standards until you return. Family may include wives, children, mistresses, and sometimes all of the above.

If you do survive until retirement, the pension plan is generous. In 2013, the final bonus and severance check was 50 million yen, according to a retired boss. That’s almost half a million dollars. The retirement policy was begun decades ago when the Yamaguchi-gumi split into two factions. The Yamaguchi-gumi HQ offered the pension plan as a means of wooing people back. It worked well.

They may have to offer a better pension plan now to quell the current rebellion.

The current leader of the organization, Shinobu Tsukasa, heralds from the Kodo-kai faction, which numbers between 2,000 and 4,000 members. He assumed power in 2005, taking over from Yoshinori Watanabe, who hailed from the Yamaken-gumi, which was once the most numerous and powerful faction.

Watanabe was affectionately known as “Goro-chan,” i.e. Mr. Gorilla, for his simian appearance. While many yakuza in Japan are naturalized Koreans or children of Japan’s former outcaste class, burakumin, and thus were subject to discrimination, the Yamaken-gumi tends to have more outcaste class members while the Kodo-kai has a larger Korean-Japanese makeup. That has helped create tension between the factions.

Why is the group splitting apart?

Police sources and individuals associated with the Yamaguchi-gumi say that the Yamaken-gumi faction first split from the group and convinced other factions to follow. The response of the ruling council of the Yamaguchi-gumi has been to sever ties with the Yamaken-gumi and their backers, including the Takumi-gumi, which may be a severe blow. The head of the Takumi-gumi, Tadashi Irie, is well respected in the underworld for his financial savvy and loyalty to his men.

There have long been other elements within the Yamaguchi-gumi unhappy with the reign of Shinobu Tsukasa. Yamaken-gumi members feel the sharing of power has been unfair and that the aggressive actions of the Kodo-kai towards the police resulted in provoking major crackdowns. Indeed in September 2009, the head of the National Police Agency declared war on the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai faction—not the Yamaguchi-gumi itself, just the Kodo-kai faction—vowing that “we will remove them from public society.”

In October 2011, ordinances which criminalized paying off the yakuza or working with them for mutual profit went into effect with a devastating impact on gang revenue and lifestyles. Some elements in the Yamaguchi-gumi expressed frustration with the puritanical rules of Shinobu Tsukasa, who returned the gang to its roots and forbade dealing in drugs and other moneymaking activities that seem attractive to those gang members who put quick profits before honor.

One middle-ranking member jokes, “You can’t make a dishonest living if you’re following the old rules.”

Other sources of gang discontent are increasingly odious restrictions on the use of gang business cards and the emblem. The Yamaguchi-gumi is a franchise; lower-ranking groups pay to belong and use the symbol under what amounts to a license. If the lower-ranking gangs can no longer use the symbol to strike fear into the hearts of ordinary citizens and extract cash from their wallets, they are reluctant to pay money up the food chain.

A rebellion within the Yamaguchi-gumi is not unprecedented—and the precedents are ugly.

The Yamaguchi-gumi has a history of splits and divisions. The most well known was the Ichiwa-kai rebellion in 1984, when almost half the organization seceded. The resulting conflict dragged on five years with gang warfare erupting all over Japan, and nearly 30 deaths. Bombs were thrown, trucks were driven into houses, and guns were fired in the streets.

(Guns being fired in the streets may seem trivial in to people in the U.S. but Japan has incredibly strict gun control laws. Last year in this nation of over 120 million people there were fewer than 10 gun-related homicides.)

In October 2008, once-powerful crime boss Tadamasa Goto was expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi for insubordination, failure to attend meetings, and for making a deal with the FBI in which he traded organization secrets in exchange for a visa into the United States so that he could obtain a liver transplant at UCLA. Three of his yakuza associates were also able to obtain liver transplants at the hospital.

Goto responded to his expulsion by gathering supporters and made an attempted rebellion that resulted in several top bosses being dismissed. The conflict ended with no shots being fired and ironically sealed the Kodo-kai faction’s lock on power.

Authorities and underworld figures speculate that with the Yamaguchi-gumi split, Goto, who has exiled himself to Cambodia, may also seek a return to power. No one is sure that this time the conflict will be peaceably resolved.

As a police source in Hyogo Prefecture put it, “The last major split in the Yamaguchi-gumi resulted in five years of violent disruptive gang warfare. We are on full alert in case history repeats itself. It would seem likely that it will.”

Scaring Them Straight Doesn't Work

For decades it was regarded as a foolproof method to dissuade wayward teenagers from flirting with crime: confront them with a remorseful former convict. Now, however, senior police are being warned that such encounters simply lead to a life of law breaking.

The College of Policing is urging chief officers to avoid “scared straight” programmes, in which young criminals, or children at risk of becoming delinquent, visit prisons to see the realities of incarceration. Concerns have also been raised about programmes, previously a standard crime prevention technique, in which gang members are brought in to schools to talk about the unglamorous side of their lives.

The college, the newly formed professional body for policing, has employed a team of academics to assess and analyse the available research for a range of crime reduction techniques, and report back on what works.

While policies such as drug courts, drink-driving campaigns and neighbourhood watch were shown to have a positive impact, “scared straight” was shown to contribute to crime.

The review concluded: “After accounting for bias, [the review] estimated that reoffending was 68 per cent higher amongst those juveniles who participated in the programme, as compared to those who did not.” It said that “fear arousal tactics”, such as prison tours and discussions with inmates, “did not have a significant impact or had a negative impact on subsequent criminal behaviour”.

Police chiefs of the 43 forces in England and Wales are being advised to dissociate themselves from such programmes. Alex Marshall, the chief executive of the college and a former chief constable, said that the results were in an online toolkit, so that police chiefs could make the right decisions.

He told The Times: “Specifically I have presented it to chiefs and police and crime commissioners to say, ‘Please look at this and use it when you’re making your decisions about where you spend your money’. Scared straight is an example where we often get requests from PCCs or chiefs saying, ‘We are thinking of doing this’. We are saying, look at the evidence, it’s likely to increase crime not reduce it.”

Mr Marshall said that wilderness exercises in the countryside were much more likely to work for at-risk teenagers. “If you take a teenager on a properly structured exercise, they have to think about their own resilience and they’re properly coached and mentored while doing it. “They have to take decisions for their own consequences that result in their own warmth and food and safety. The evidence is that it can help teens turn away from crime because it emphasises the consequences of their decision making.”

He said that an “old lag” telling young people about “dreadful prison” had been a popular solution to troublesome teenagers. However, “trying to scare a teenager who’s already craving risk is probably not a good idea. The evidence is that doesn’t make them go straight. “Seeing a prisoner in prison might be shocking to the teenager who’s really well behaved, but the one who isn’t might find it an interesting encounter.”

Other Resources

• Books About Crime
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• Quotations About Crime