Dawoud Bey, Stuart Hall, 1998 (source: thenewartexchange.org.uk)

We regret to announce the passing of Stuart Hall, a member of our Editorial Advisory Board since 1983. He was a leading figure of the British Left and a visionary race theorist, making profound contributions to the field of cultural studies at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. In 1993, we published his article, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”. As a modest way to honor his memory, we are offering this article as a free download (please follow the link below).

Stuart Hall, What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture? (download pdf)

by Gregory Shank*

One of the longest-serving Social Justice editorial board members has passed away. Julia Rosalind Schwendinger died at the age of 87 on October 17, 2013, in Hudson, Florida. The daughter of Russian immigrants Jacob and Lena Pliskin Siegel, she was born on September 3, 1926, and grew up on 84th Drive in Jamaica and in the Rockaway Beach area of the New York City borough of Queens. Julia and her husband of nearly 68 years, Herman “Hi” Schwendinger, were inseparable. They helped each other get through college in the years just after World War II by teaching square dancing to teenagers. Julia played the piano and Hi called the moves. A fellow folk dancer and friend, the late Irwin Silber, could be found at Saturday night square dances at Furriers Union Hall on New York City’s West 28th Street in the late 1940s. The People’s Songs/Artists movement spearheaded by Silber and Pete Seeger promoted the music of the American labor movement and raised funds for movement activities. Folksay and People’s Songs, which were affiliated with the American Youth for Democracy, sponsored square dances featuring politically themed calls and folk plays; its publication Sing Out highlighted storied American music treasures such as Woodie Guthrie, who deeply influenced the young Bob Dylan. In 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s inquisitors deemed this music-making, dancing, and theater to be communist-inspired efforts to “control youth groups.”

Julia earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Queen’s College (1947), a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University (1950), and a doctorate in the School of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley (1975). Her dissertation, entitled The Rape Victim and the Criminal Justice System, was intimately connected with her work in founding the first anti-rape group in the United States, which arguably became the model for such work internationally. Julia and Hi became a formidable presence in the fledgling radical criminology movement of the 1970s, as well as in the struggle for women’s rights, and continued to make meaningful contributions throughout the following decades. Julia accomplished this despite a long-term struggle with life-threatening cancer, which was first manifested in the early 1970s.

Julia was consistently an activist-scholar. She opposed the Vietnam War, supported the Civil Rights Movement, and, most recently, the Occupy Movement. In her first social work position, she worked with children and teens in a poor high-crime community. Given Hi’s youthful involvement in gang activity in New York City and his early fieldwork with street gangs as a social group worker, their interests meshed well. That experience and their firsthand knowledge was invaluable in their seminal ethnographic work on adolescent social types and delinquent gangs, which Julia and Hi began while associated with the sociology department at UCLA in the early 1960s. Her community orientation and organizing skills were also apparent in the founding of the Bay Area Women Against Rape (BAWAR) in 1971, along with Oleta “Lee” Abrams. In her Rape and Inequality, Julia described the group as a tiny handful of women composed of political activists and militant feminists who saw themselves as advocates of rape victims in the established institutions. This trendsetting victim-assistance program combined scholarship with community activism, an integral element of the journal Crime and Social Justice (our inaugural title in 1974). Julia was the journal’s book review editor in the first edition and was the lead author of the landmark article “Rape Myths: In Legal, Theoretical, and Everyday Practice.” She was a meticulous editor and polished all of their coauthored writings before they could be considered ready.

Beyond her numerous academic accolades, Julia was a kind and caring mentor. Maggie Bollenbacher, an early BAWAR member, spoke of Julia’s humanity and skillfulness as a leader: “She was sharp and witty, warmhearted, and committed to her family and friends. When I joined BAWAR I was fresh out of college in Minnesota and my eyes were beginning to open to the ways of the world. My associations with Julia Schwendinger and Suzie Dod made me a much wiser and fuller person. Julia strongly influenced me through her intellectual contributions to group discussions at BAWAR meetings in the early 1970s. She offered us a better understanding of a rapist’s mentality within the context of our society. Certainly, our focus was on helping the victims and getting the work done, but Julia and women like Suzie always sought to understand why this harmful behavior was occurring in the first place. Julia pointed to the psychosocial and economic factors underlying violent behavior in America and the ways in which the criminal justice system aggravated the harm already done.” Before her death, Suzie Dod Thomas fondly recalled the inclusive spirit of the period. Although Suzie was working as a secretary at the time, Julia encouraged her to join BAWAR as well as the radical criminology movement, including participation in Crime and Social Justice. Julia and Tommie Hannigan used their BAWAR funding contacts to obtain seed money for the initial editions of the journal.

During the journal’s formative period, Julia and Hi traveled widely, visiting like-minded scholars and practitioners in England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. Many boisterous journal meetings and events such as the launching of The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove took place in the Schwendinger’s home on Vincente Avenue in North Berkeley. Julia cut a striking figure, her long black hair framing her attractive face and ready smile. Her low, smooth voice and self-confidence had a calming influence, while her diminutive mother Lena radiated warmth and a sense of purpose with her ever-present petitions in need of signatures. But make no mistake: Julia was a tough, eloquent, and unapologetic Marxist. She typified the unqualified nightmare then consuming the Berkeley administration and the forces of reaction consolidating in Sacramento under the mantel of Ronald Reagan.

And so the magnificent experiment underway in Berkeley’s School of Criminology was decisively dismantled and most of the core critical faculty and students associated with the journal were sent packing. The noose tightened nationally to eliminate progressive faculty and prevent graduate students radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s from gaining a professional foothold in the academy. In the short term, Julia found work as a private investigator and consultant, providing presentencing reports on offenders for defense attorneys and judges. She was a parole commissioner and director of the Women’s Resource Center for San Francisco Jails, in association with the late Richard Hongisto. In the period Julia described as exile, she taught sociology, criminology, and criminal justice at Vassar, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SUNY (New Paltz), and finally at the University of South Florida. She worked briefly at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change and was an exchange scholar with Hi at universities in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and central Asia.

Based on the latter experiences, Hi and Julia wrote a 1993 firsthand account in Humanity and Society entitled “The Crises of Soviet Legitimacy,” in which they examined the paradoxes and changing class character of Soviet society just before the collapse. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Julia and Hi regularly published articles in this journal on rape, delinquency, prison living standards, and social class and the definition of crime. Working closely with Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, Julia lined up Friendly Fascism author Bertram Gross to participate in an international discussion centered on his essay, “Some Anticrime Proposals for Progressives” (Crime and Social Justice 17, Spring-Summer 1982). Their most recent books are a history of the Berkeley School of Criminology and Big Brother, which analyzes the expansion of surveillance technology in the United States and the repression of left-wing ideas and policies.

Julia will be sorely missed by the many whose lives she touched and especially by Hi and their children, Leni and Joseph.

Julia and Hi, 1974

* Gregory Shank is the Co-Managing Editor of Social Justice and a long-term Bay Area resident.

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

Image from www.usprisonculture.com

The news has not garnered much attention on the national media, yet it is rather striking: for the first time in the last twenty years or so, crime has been rising in the United States for two consecutive years. The US Bureau of Justice has just released data from the 2012 National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), the statistical tool adopted since 1972 to make up for the “dark figure” of unreported crime that affects official statistics. The report reveals that in 2012 property and violent crimes suffered a 12 percent and 15 percent increase, respectively. Thus, what had looked like an exception in 2011—when, according to the NCVS, violent crime had increased by 17 percent and property crime by 11 percent since the previous year—might instead have marked the turning point of a long cycle of declining criminal activity and the outset of a new trend toward higher crime rates.

A note of caution is of course in order here. Despite the undeniable contribution victimization reports have provided for a more reliable understanding of crime trends in the United States, one should not overlook the many limitations affecting the very design of these surveys. It is well known, for example, that victimization surveys focus narrowly on street crimes while ignoring other, equally or more harmful types of criminal activity, namely white collar crime and state crimes—including instances of police brutality, abuses by prison guards against prisoners, or crimes taking place inside the country’s chronically overcrowded correctional institutions. Not to mention the fact that victimization surveys tend to overlook precisely the social groups that are most vulnerable to criminal victimization in the streets, as a consequence of their precarious living conditions: homeless people, various institutionalized populations, undocumented migrants, or individuals with unstable living arrangements. Finally, NCVS offers a misleading image of crime as a uniform and undifferentiated issue affecting all Americans equally (“crime is up” or “crime is down” for everyone), since it ignores the basic fact that within the segregated landscape of American cities, crime (and punishment) is highly concentrated inside areas of urban destitution marked by racial and class boundaries.

Whatever their statistical reliability, at least these data further illustrate the substantial divergence between rates of criminal activity and the penal strategies deployed by the state, with particular reference to incarceration. Indeed, another report released by the BJS a few months ago, “Prisoners in 2012,” shows that the correctional population of the United States, including federal and state prisoners, declined (although only by a modest 1.7 percent) in 2012, confirming a downward trend that has now entered its third consecutive year. A disconnect between trends in crime and changes in punishment is certainly not new. It has manifested itself with unprecedented intensity over the last twenty years in the United States, although in an opposite direction to the one we observe today: since the early 1990s, plummeting crime rates have been paralleled by a vertiginous growth of the prison population. Such contradictory tendencies should not surprise sociologists of punishment, who have long been arguing that criminalization is not just a response to crime; that the severity of punishment does not necessarily descend from the seriousness of the criminal act; and that levels of social and institutional punitiveness are shaped by economic, political, and cultural factors more than by the actual risk of victimization. Yet a persisting dilemma in criminology—as well as one of the main reasons for the very existence of the discipline, at least in its mainstream variants—is whether state punishment and related technologies of social control have any effect on crime, and here too the evidence is at best inconclusive (for a recent analysis touting controversial policing strategies like “stop and frisk” and “hot spot” policing as the single major factor behind the great crime decline in New York, see Franklin Zimring’s The City That Became Safe).

What, then, should we make of this sudden increase in crime in the United States? How can it be explained? The obvious answer, one that some commentators had started to propose as a bleak prophecy even before the crime increase was recorded, is the recessionary economic crisis that has swept the country since 2007. Indeed, according to well-established models of crime causation, it makes sense to look at the “usual suspects”—rates of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and so on—to explain shifts in criminal activity, particularly predatory crimes. In this perspective, economic hardships would push a larger fraction of the “truly disadvantaged,” to borrow William J. Wilson’s definition, to commit crimes of survival, which in turn would result in higher incarceration rates. Therefore, penal technologies would be developed by the state simply as a reaction to shifts in criminal activity prompted by socioeconomic transformations that are essentially outside the reach of the state’s regulatory powers. In other words, in this model crime and penal policies are treated as dependent variables, while economic transformations, and, more specifically, economic crises, are treated as an independent variable. Yet we know that in the recent history of the United States such a model has simply not been at work: for most of the past three decades, crime rates have been declining both in times of economic growth and in times of recession, whereas incarceration rates have been rising at a furious pace until three years ago.

I would like to suggest here that a reversal of perspective might be in order. In the age of “mass imprisonment,” close to 1 percent of the US population is in prison or in jail (3 percent if probation and parole are included); one in three black males will go to prison in his lifetime; incarceration is more likely than marriage or college in the life of a young black male; and more blacks are in prison than were in slavery in 1850. Thus, the relationship between economy, crime, and punishment should probably be significantly revised. At the end of forty years of extraordinary concentration of the punitive powers of the state toward the mass criminalization of racialized urban poverty, we should ask whether the penal technologies unleashed by the state at the bottom of the race and class structure of US society have not become themselves constitutive elements of the structural crisis that affects the most marginalized fractions of the urban poor—rather than being simply an institutional reaction to crime as one of the undesirable consequences of such crisis.

Some scholars have recently demonstrated the paradoxical effect of concentrated incarceration on crime. In a process that mimics the economic principle of diminishing marginal returns, when it rises beyond a certain level incarceration will not only relinquish its crime-reducing effect (assuming it ever has one), but it might potentially result in an increase in criminal activity. This is due to the destructive effects of incarceration on already vulnerable individuals and families: financially (lost income, welfare bans for certain convictions, plus phone calls, packages, and trips to the jail), socially (weakening of relationships, loss of social capital, missed educational opportunities, isolation upon release), and politically (felon disenfranchisement). Through the systematic institutional sequestration of entire cohorts of population from already dilapidated urban ghettos, over the last forty years mass incarceration has eroded the social fabric of marginalized communities, displaced large fractions of their populations, depleted their material and immaterial resources, hampered the educational opportunities for a large number of youth, generated a massive diversion of public funds from social services to penal institutions, and (re)produced a large class of socioeconomic pariahs who are essentially unemployable, if not in dead-end and insecure jobs, upon their release from prison (for a powerful analysis of these processes, see Todd Clear’s Imprisoning Communities). The criminogenic effect of the power to punish—and more generally the paradox whereby repressive state intervention often tends to (re)produce the very social problems it is supposed to address—is not an exclusive prerogative of the penal field, as it has been observed in such disparate areas as immigration control, drug policy, and the so-called war on terror. However, the US penal experiment of the last four decades has been so widespread that its crisis-generating effects have extended well beyond the field of crime and punishment, to the point of destabilizing the very social structure of poor urban areas. Furthermore, as Becky Pettit has shown in her recent book Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, the massive warehousing of young disadvantaged minorities has “concealed” a large fraction of the urban poor from society—the media, public opinion, policymakers—as well as from most national surveys, thus reinforcing the ideological misrepresentation of the United States as a post-racial society set on a bright path toward declining social inequalities, narrowing racial gaps, and widespread social mobility. If prisoners were to be included in social and economic surveys, these would reveal that mass incarceration has essentially obliterated the social gains made by African Americans since the civil rights era.

The recent data indicating a timid decline in the US prison population should be welcomed as good news. It should also be noted, however, that this decline has taken place in the wake of budgetary and fiscal emergencies, rather than of any structural process of penal reform—a circumstance that renders these trends extremely precarious and reversible. Nothing short of a structural process of decarceration at the federal, state, and local levels would be needed to begin to dismantle the gargantuan penal machine the United States has built to neutralize its social contradictions; nothing short of a massive reinvestment in social welfare would begin to address the permanent crisis of the American urban poor.

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board.

by Gene Grabiner*

Critics have long been concerned about the potential for government abuse and overreach, as well as the desire of officials to conduct civic affairs beyond public scrutiny. As moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham cautioned, “secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.” Gore Vidal observed that “Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state, whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid.” Jurist William O. Douglas revealed that oppression, like nightfall, descends imperceptibly: “In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

Edwin Black has documented the Nazi state’s alliance with IBM and its reliance on that corporation’s data processing technology for selective repression. Given Edward Snowden’s recent revelations, we now know that the National Security Agency (NSA), a section of the Department of Defense, has been collecting metadata (phone numbers, call times and duration) on all Americans, and using its clandestine PRISM mass electronic surveillance data-mining program to record, directly from servers of Internet providers, the content of certain emails or entire email boxes. PRISM may have scooped up all Facebook content, and the New York Times reported that Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in Silicon Valley with executives at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Intel to discuss how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts. The NSA has easy access to the Cloud, which increasingly houses people’s entire hard drive backups.

Given the ongoing refusal of congressional Republicans to work across the aisle, the initial response to the NSA disclosures has been unusually bipartisan. Karl Rove argued that NSA-style spying on the people is needed to “keep the nation safe.” Congressman Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) says that “if anyone were to violate the law by releasing classified information outside the legal avenues, certainly that individual should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” According to Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California), Edward Snowden “committed an act of treason” and she is upset only insofar as he leaked the fact that we have been spied upon for years. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), as well as Senators Ben Nelson (D-Florida) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia), echoed these comments. Peter King (R-New York), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and a former IRA supporter, called for the prosecution of Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who cover security leaks.

Nonetheless, critical voices have emerged. Tea Party Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) and John Conyers (Michigan Democratic Congressional Progressive Caucus member) introduced a House amendment to a July 2013 Pentagon spending bill that would bar the NSA from spending funds for surveillance on any citizen who was not already the subject of an investigation. The Amash-Conyers anti-NSA amendment lost by twelve votes, 205–217. Eighty-three House Democrats and 134 House Republicans voted against it.

• • •

Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations have clouded the political fault lines on the issue of violations of the Fourth Amendment. Tea Party luminary Rand Paul has staked out an anti-NSA populist-libertarian position and has sponsored the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act. In effect, it states that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any government agency to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause. This constitutional doctrine conflicts with Justice Antonin Scalia’s originalism (“what the Founding Fathers intended”), wherein the animating principle behind the Fourth Amendment is to protect personal property, and thus only prevents “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Without a valid judicial warrant, police cannot attach a GPS tracker to a person’s car and monitor his movements (United States v. Jones). However, it would be permissible to wiretap a person’s conversations by physically attaching a monitoring device to the phone company’s line on a public street, so long as a person’s home is not entered or his/her property trespassed upon.

With Big Brother watching, there is a need for a broader view of Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Metadata make it unnecessary to violate “persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” They are used to identify patterns from the external aspect of information. Instead of listening to the content of your phone calls, it captures the fact that you made a call, to whom and where, and for how long, all the while registering your physical location. In short, the external aspect has multiplied enormously, seemingly overwhelming the internal. Originalism in constitutional law fails miserably in the face of this technological innovation, since the Founders had no plausible notion of what is at issue: with an e-trail containing all the information needed to keep track of people, there is no need to listen to their conversations or enter their houses.

• • •

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
—Benjamin Franklin

Scarcity is a property of capitalist markets. Despite production in abundance, it is not an abundance of human needs fulfillment. As a result, there is a scarcity of healthy ecosystems, nutritious food, crops free of genetic tampering, meaningful employment, housing, peace, and quality public education. According to Nobel-laureate economist Paul Samuelson, “economics is a study of how people and society end up choosing with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that could have alternate uses” [emphasis added]. Elected representatives and members of the media invoke the scarcity principle while discussing NSA snooping whenever they say that we must balance safety against liberty, usually with some liberty placed on the sacrificial altar. At the recent Netroots Nation 2013 conference, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) was booed when she said that as far as Snowden is concerned, “he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents. The fact is, we have to have a balance between security and privacy” [emphasis added].

This market analogy for scarcity, which persists within the US juridical and ideological tradition under the rubrics of “balancing of interests” and “balancing of rights,” is a prestidigitation that tacitly underlies utilitarian domain assumptions (i.e., “if you want security, you must compromise your rights”). The US Supreme Court first asserted this balancing test in Schenck v. United States (1919), in which it was determined that speech can be restricted if it represents a “clear and present danger,” such as “shouting fire in a theater.” That case expanded the power of the 1917 Espionage Act to censor free speech, with the “clear and present danger” being the publication and distribution of a pamphlet that opposed the draft and US entry into World War I. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that the exercise of free speech is contextual. Stating that conscription is tantamount to “involuntary servitude” during peacetime is protected speech, but doing so during wartime is not, and could be construed as an act of national insubordination—a substantive evil that Congress has a right to prevent.

Of course, reason dictates that no one would deliberately cause panic by falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Yet this fiction has contributed to “legal” government censorship, “legal” government trimming of the right of free speech, and the buildup of thought justifying “legal” NSA snooping, in violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments, all of which are major cornerstones of American democracy. Although by 1969 the “imminent lawless action” test achieved ascendancy, given the dominance of antiterrorism ideology, our “context” remains one of permanent war.

• • •

In a period of deepening austerity in the United States, even greater corporate dominance of politics after the Citizens United decision, and governmental paralysis in Washington (in the words of Jimmy Carter, “we do not now have a functioning democracy”), we need effective theoretical tools to analyze a mode of governance that relies upon mass surveillance and is operationalized through secret courts. This spying is a signpost of democracy lost, or at least in profound crisis. To reclaim ourselves from this situation will require an organization or movement capable of challenging intertwining state-corporate incursions.

Political society lies with the people and is invariably the source of real politics. For a new birth of freedom to prevail, we must claim democracy at a higher level. To foreclose the possibility of neofascist options, we, the people, must have a sound and progressive theory of that new birth of freedom, and perhaps a People’s Democratic Party.

* Gene Grabiner is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus (email: genegrab1@verizon.net ). He was a founding member of this journal in 1974, when it was called Crime and Social Justice. This piece is a shorter version of an article that will appear on an upcoming issue of our journal.

We are very sad to announce that yesterday (October 5, 2013) Suzie Dod Thomas, a beloved friend and founding member of the SJ Editorial Board, has passed away after a fierce battle against cancer.

Suzie has been for many years the Assistant Managing Editor for Social Justice. She was a founding member of Bay Area Women Against Rape in 1974 and worked as an organizer in the San Francisco Latin American community, first in 1977, for the Puerto Rican Organization for women, and later for quality health care in the Mission District of San Francisco. From 1976 to 1985, she was active in solidarity work with Central America and Cuba, organizing, leading, and translating for fact-finding delegations to Nicaragua and Cuba. She was also the manager and promoter for author/poet/activist Piri Thomas in his work in high schools, colleges, prisons, youth detention centers, and communities of color throughout the United States.

Suzie will be dearly missed by her family, friends, comrades, and anyone who has been inspired by her warmth, strength, and political passion. Suzie was a long-distance runner for social justice, never giving up on the struggle for a better world, and always taking principled stands against militarism, racism, sexism, and inequality. And she loved to dance and have a good time.

We remember her with the words of a poem Tony Platt wrote for her in 1988.

Leading The Way
(Suzie Dod Thomas, 1947–2013)

She has seen America from its margins.
Straddling its borders,
she could pass through
the front door
if she so chooses.
A white Puerto Rican,
A Latina gringo,
looking in,
while looking out,
holding up mirrors
for us
to
see.

She exchanged her diploma for a vision
but didn’t surrender her smarts.
A builder,
she knows construction,
how to navigate the rocks in the river,
how to steer the water
from mountain top to ocean.
She’ll swim the whole course,
leading the way,
a glint in her eye,
in her hair
an ostrich feather.

In loving memory,
the SJ Editorial Board