You've got to be Kidding!
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The Best Crimes & Criminal Trials Commentary in Web Space.
“You can count on evil and criminal folly to entertain us or illuminate the human condition or both.”
Jay B. Gaskill
Former Public Defender
Alameda County, CA.
Puzzled Over Oakland?
You’ve Got to Be Kidding!
When the New York Times reported yesterday that authorities and experts were “puzzled” over Oakland’s rising murder rate --(http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/us/22oakland.html?_r=1&oref=slogin )
-- my reaction was as above.
Thugology 101 -- This is not rocket science.
Oakland, California has a critical mass of violence prone individuals, many of whom are habituated to prison life and who therefore are pretty much undeterred by the prospect of leaving the streets inhabited by their home boys and being taken to another location where they will run into their other home boys in the prison yard.
Here’s the deal:
Punishment is a deterrent for that very large subset of crimes, including many murders, in which there is a measure of thinking before acting. When the punishment is insufficient, so is the deterrent effect.
Oakland is one of those jurisdictions where the murder rate is exquisitely sensitive to three factors: (a) the number of cops on patrol during the time the impulse to kill someone is formed; (b) the prospect of getting caught; and (c) the possibility, however remote, of getting the death penalty, or at least spending a couple of very unpleasant decades on Death Row.
Note: Just asking for the death penalty in a stone cold execution murder case represents an act of moral seriousness, one that telegraphs a message that resonates on the street. Even the prospect of spending years and years on death row in a state like California, where 600 are called to wait for possible execution but few are chosen, operates a deterrent in its own right.
Almost all of the recent increase in Oakland’s murder rate consists of non-spontaneous killings, like gang hits, the execution of a “business” rival or witness. These represent the subset of killings that can be deterred because they are crimes with a significant measure reflection and calculation before that trigger is pulled.
A federal district judge has stayed all activity on California's Death Row because execution via injection might be so unpleasant that it would be “cruel” in the constitutional sense. So we have a de facto moratorium in the death penalty, and Oakland’s killers have found it out. My Op Ed reaction (published in the Oakland tribune) to that federal judge’s decision about lethal injection is at http://www.jaygaskill.com/InjectionDeterrence.htm .
Recent studies have confirmed the reality of a grim dynamic that many of us have known about for several years:
Death penalty moratoriums can spark a homicide increase. I’ve written about this several times:
See my Oakland Tribune Op Ed, “Oakland's Climbing Murder Rate”, first printed in 2002 http://www.jaygaskill.com/triba.htm .
Note my detailed update to the Tribune piece about the federally imposed de facto death penalty moratorium at http://www.jaygaskill.com/DeathDeterrenceReform.htm
Find the now famous 2005 Study “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs”, jointly published by the Brookings Institute and American Enterprise Insitute, available on the web in pdf format for free at -
http://aei-brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=922 .
Review my overall take on this issue, including a discussion of the roots of societal ambivalence about executions at http://www.jaygaskill.com/murderpenalty.htm .
I’m sorry to report this to my squeamish friends (particularly those for whom moral/religious qualms have prevented them from accepting the evidence) but the jury is no longer out: A few executions of guilty murders has the effect of sparing some murder victims in the future. This will eventually become the new conventional wisdom. In the meantime a few hundred more people in Oakland may die needlessly from gunfire and knives.
The new mayor in town, former congressman Ron Dellums, has walked from meeting to meeting with a long, solemn face, wondering aloud whether the underlying social problems of the killers can be addressed, while the understaffed Oakland Police Department soldiers on, still struggling to hire its full allotted staffing numbers.
By the "Giuliani New York measure” (the number of cops per crooks), even a full staffed police department in Oakland is too little, too late.
JBG
