Trespass at the Open

The seemingly ageless Bob Costas was conducting an interview near the 18th green of the Olympic Club in San Francisco with U.S. Open winner Webb Simpson.

Suddenly an oddly dressed interloper inserted himself into the picture. Within seconds, the camera cut away — but not before the interruption broke the flow of the interview.

Simpson dealt with the distraction by acknowledging it. “Enjoy your jail cell, buddy,” he said, glancing off camera. His tone seemed to express genuine concern, not derision.

Costas reflected back Simpson’s statement, as good interviewers often do. The “gendarme” was now in charge of the situation, Costas observed.

This was a somewhat odd word choice, it seems to me. After all, “police officer" would have been much more straightforward. But it did give Costas a chance to show off his vocabulary.

In any case, I record the exchange because of how it reflects the reliance our society continues to have on incarceration, even for nonviolent offenses. Locking someone in a cell is America’s default position when dealing with deviant conduct that has been defined as criminal.

We are arguably not as open a society as we like to think ourselves to be. A more open society would probably not be so quick to bundle its enemies off to jail.

Strip Searches and Jail Admissions

About 13 million people are admitted to American jails each year.

Some of them don’t stay long; they may only be booked and released prior to trial. Others may stay for a long time because prison space in some states is at a premium.

All of them, however, may now be strip searched. No matter how minor the offense for which they were arrested.

That’s what the U.S. Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5 to 4 yesterday.

I’m reminded of what former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said years ago. “We are not final because we are infallible,” he said, “but we are infallible only because we are final.”

If You Build It, . . .

"If you build it, they will come." So at least, goes the catch phrase from the film Field of Dreams.

Depending on the context, this sweeping generalization may or may not be true.

For several private prisons in the South, Businessweek reported, it has turned out to be false.

Jail Time for Libel? Not in English Language Version of 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo'

Translating a popular novel from one culture into a film aimed at another is certainly fraught with challenges. It’s essentially an act of double translation: from one culture to another and also from one artistic genre to another.

A host of artistic choices have to be made. Whatever the end result, it isn’t merely a matter of transposing the content from Form A to Form B.

Yet how odd it initially seems that an American film version of a European crime thriller omits a jail term served by one of the key characters. That is what writer / director David Fincher chose to do, however, in his Anglo Saxon take on the sensational Swedish novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

In the Stieg Larsson original, muckraking journalist Mikael Blomkvist must serve a couple of months in jail as part of his sentence after being convicted of libeling a notorious business tycoon. In Fincher’s film, the sentence consists only of fines, with no jail time or even probation.

One might have thought that including the jail term would be quite natural in a film aimed at American audiences. After all, we are the country that leads the world in incarceration rates, the country sometimes called A Nation of Jailers.

Fincher probably felt that the very liberality of the conditions of Blomkvist’s confinement would make it unintelligible to many Americans. For example, Blomkvist gets to choose when he will serve his jail term. Such discretion is little known in our system, geared as it is toward punishment.

Similarly, the jail term itself, when Larsson’s Blomkvist does serve it, turns out to be a positive experience for him - more like going to a summer camp than to a hellhole. This contrasts sharply with the American perception that a jail term must inevitably evoke constant fear and trembling.

Lee Baca Raises the Education Bar

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste," went the old tagline for the United Negro College Fund. It dates me a bit, I realize, even to remember those long-ago TV commercials.

The truth of the statement, however, remains unalterably true. Indeed, it is truer than ever, given how closely tied job prospects  have become to educational attainment.

For that reason, one of the nation's most prominent law enforcement officers has become the champion for putting in place programs for inmates to get a better education. As NPR recently reported, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca in instituting an Education-Based Incarceration Initiative to promote intellectual development among prisoners in his 160,000-inmate jail system.

The program is now in a beta phase, with about 2,000 inmates testing an ambitious curriculum. The areas of instruction range from traditional subjects like reading, writing, and science to life skills and decision-making. The instruction is intended to help inmates progess to more adult levels of thinking, in which they make better choices and commit fewer new crimes.

Jail is, admittedly, a rather unlikely setting for a renewed emphasis on education. For one thing, jail stays tend to be quite short compared to prison sentences. But Baca clearly believes that improved education has to start somewhere, if we are ever to make real progress in reducing the recidivism rate.

As NPR said in its clever headline, the sheriff is attempting to teach inmates to get out of jail. Not by physical escape, but by an education that is the key to the future.

Everybody Loves a Good Krimi

In English, detective novels and other crime stories are often categorized as "mysteries."

That has always seemed to me to be a bit of a stretch. More often than not, pulp fiction does not really explicate the Eleusinian mysteries.

The Germans, however, have a wonderfully pithy word for the genre: Krimi.

For the past few years, the Krimi par excellence on the world stage has been Stieg Larsson's millenium trilogy, which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo.

A friend at work gave me two of the three volumes. Dipping into Dragon Tatoo, I found the early going pleasurable but slightly tepid. Then, when I reached page 92, the hook was set. Like millions of others around the world, I am finding it hard to put the book down.

On page 104, Larsson's memorable character Lisbeth Salander drops a synonym for jail or prison that I omitted from my short list of those terms in my post a couple of months ago. Salander notes that Mikael Blomkvist, the noted journalist convicted of libel, is headed for "the slammer" for three months.

The slammer, I suppose, as in the door slams behind you.

What's in a Name?

Using preposterously high quantity to express the unquantifiable, the singer Bruce Cockburn once wrote a song referring to "the nine billion names of God."

Even when taking poetic license similar to Cockburn's, there are not nearly that many names for "correctional facility." But there are still quite a few, and the nuances are important.

Jail and prison, of course, are still standard terms. They are often wrongly used interchangably, when in fact the terms refer to qualitatively different types of facilities.

Jails are usually operated at the local (county) level and confine people who come from a number of different statuses. One type is convicted offenders whose sentences are for less than one year. But jail populations also often include many other people. Some are waiting for trial, while others are being confined for civil contempt or even non-payment of debts. Still others have been arrested but not yet charged.

Prison, in America, has historically been a place where convicted offenders serving sentences of a year or more are sent. Each state has at least one, and the federal government operates it own system in addition to the state systems.

Traditionally, there was more programming (substance abuse treatment, sex offender treatment, and so on) in prison than in jail. This was because the shorter length of stay in jail did not lend itself as well to successful programming. Today, however, with budgets cuts eroding prison programming, the difference that formerly existed between jail and prison regarding the extent of programming is eroding as well.

In an earlier era of corrections, the operative words were not jail or prison, but penitentiary or reformatory. These names, with their religious origins, pointed to the rehabilitative goal that once animated American corrections. Each person, the thought was, should use the incarceration time to reflect on his or her errors and work to expiate and reform them, in order to become a socially responsible self once again.

In the last few decades, the rehabilitative idea has been in decline and punishment as the primary purpose of incarceration has been ascendant. The term "correctional facility" is therefore the signature one of our time, expressing a sort of bureaucratic indifference to the outcome of what occurs within the walls.

One example of this was related to me by my colleague Gloria, with whom I serve on the board of Prison Congregations of America. Gloria tells the story of how, while serving a sentence at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, she and the other inmates woke up one morning to find that the new governor had changed the name. It was no longer a penitentiary; it was a "correctional facility."

But the generic term "correctional facility," and the commonly used "jail" and "prison," cannot completely displace the many other terms that are in use, either historically or in specific communities.

In the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about being confined to "gaol" - an old word that is etymologically related to jail.

The word "prison" has a host of synonyms, such as "the big house."

The children's novelist Lemony Snicket used the word "brig" in one of his novels and defined it as "an official nautical term for jail."

Star Trek fans know that even in the 23rd century, the Starship Enterprise had a brig for detention purposes. Give Trek creator Gene Rodenberry credit there for a realistic appraisal of the human condition. As much as I have decried excessive incarceration in this blog, I do not suggest that human society can or should try to go without it.

Rosalynn Carter on Jails as Mental Health Facilities

Is it true, as Rosalynn Carter asserts, that jails and prisons are the largest mental health facilities in America? You can get money for incarceration, the former first lady says, but not - because of the lingering stigma - for the treatment of mental illness.

Mrs. Carter has been at this for 39 years, advocating, raising awareness, and doing everything she can to shed the light of day on a major social problem that is still too often relegated to the shadows. Like her husband, she's still going strong. Earlier this month, she appeared on The Daily Show to discuss her new book, Within Our Reach, with Jon Stewart.

Her claim that 1 in 4 Americans is mentally ill is certainly open for argument. I suppose it depends on how one defines "mentally ill." But she's right, isn't she, about jails and prisons? Haven't they become a dumping ground for people with mental health issues?

Garnish and Pay for Stay

Today I wrote a Web page on wage garnishment for a law firm's website, and as part of my preparation I looked up the word "garnishment" in Black's Law Dictionary.

Black's is the old standard bearer among legal dictionaries, a stuffed repository of long-established information about what lawyers call "black letter law" - i.e., statements so widely held that they are as settled as such things can ever be.

As my eyes scanned quickly down the page looking for "garnishment," I happened to read the first entry for "garnish" on the way, Quite to my surprise, it was a criminal, not civil, usage of the word. According to Black's, in English law, garnish is "money paid by a prisoner to his fellow-prisoners on his entrance into prison."

Paid to fellow prisoners, not the state? Or to private contractors hired by the state? Or to one of the state's subdivisions, such as a county?

No, the definition says the money is paid to fellow prisoners!

Superficially, this sounds somewhat like modern notions of "pay for stay," under which some jurisdictions seek to charge prisoners a certain dollar amount per day for jail stays. But the state or one of its subdivisions assesses and handles that money, not other inmates.

What archaic conception of the circumstances of incarceration lurks here, embedded in the definition of the word "garnish"?

Denny Hecker Goes to Jail

Denny Hecker, the former Twin Cities auto mogul, is experiencing a perfect storm of legal needs. His businesses fell apart in the wake of the Great Recession, amid allegations of fraud concerning his dealings with lenders. His personal finances went Way South - resulting in bankrupcy proceedings. And his marital money matters took on the trappings of farce; last week, he faced lawsuits by his second ex-wife, for nonpayment of alimony, and soon-to-be ex-wife number four, for withholding key information and hiding assets.

Groucho Marx, Rodney Dangerfield, or any comedian worth his or her salt, take it away.

It's hard to find much empathy for someone who lived the high life for so long, and seems so unwilling to take responsibility for his actions. So it was perfectly understandable when Judge Jay Quam decided to give Hecker a taste of jail, to remind him of the importance of candor before the tribunal.

Four days in the Hennepin County workhouse left Hecker gasping for air. Sentenced to 90 days for civil contempt, after failing to comply with numerous court orders, Hecker was released after only 72 hours. The experience of jail for that long, he told the judge, was something "one would not want to experience in a lifetime."

If I were Judge Quam, I might recommend to Denny Hecker that he read Ted Conover's book Newjack, about working as a guard at Sing Sing prison in New York State. Connover recounts how, in the original prison building - built in 1826 by inmate labor and used until 1943 - two prisoners shared a 3 1/2 by 7-foot cell, at first with no central heating, open sewer channels, and little light.

Might Denny, by that standard, be a little pampered?

Say It Ain't So, Sheriff Joe

I’m no fan of Sheriff Joe — Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America.”

I first heard of him n 1997, when I was researching alternatives to incarceration for the Idaho state legislature. He was making headlines then for housing jail inmates in tent cities, outside the traditional jailhouse walls.

Twelve years later, he’s still doing that. In army surplus tents originally manufactured for the Korean War. These days, he’s also added pink underwear, pink handcuffs, and cutbacks on calories (from 300 to 250 per day) for prisoners to his tough guy toolbelt.

Martin Bashir’s Nightline segment on December 14 was not primarily prompted by these practices, which by now are somewhat old hat, at least in the Phoenix area. Nightline’s interest seemed to have been piqued by Sheriff Joe’s recent skirmish with the U.S. Justice Department over the tactics his office uses against illegal aliens. Bashir went out on a raid with the sheriff, and the glimpses of the faces of 18 would-be immigrants from Mexico being busted by sheriff’s deputies when their van was pulled over for speeding were poignant.

The stylized colloquy that followed between Bashir and Appaio was all too predictable. Appaio disclaimed any use of racial profiling; it was simply a matter, he said, of enforcing the law. After all, entering the U.S. illegally IS a Class IV felony under Arizona law.

Bashir, an experienced practitioner of in-your-face interviewing, broadened his faux, camera-ready attack. What about deaths and injuries in your jail? What about that off-track crusade against prostitution that ended with a sheriff’s volunteer having a sexual encounter with a prostitute. Didn’t Joe know his “brutal regime” set the tone for all this?

I don’t think Bashir really expected Joe to cave. The sheriff merely corrected him, with the requisite brusqueness, pointing out that the proper term was correctional “officer,” not “guard.”

Instead of the fruitless and largely pointless staged-confrontation, why didn’t Bashir provide any background on what makes Sheriff Joe tick? Herein lies a story on the business model of television journalism that is beyond the scope of this post.

Excruciating Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opened today, the sixth movie in the remarkable series based on J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular books.

I’m only on the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and haven’t seen any of the movies yet. Diane and I are waiting until our boys get a little older, so we can see them together as a family.

A few days ago, Micah, Luke, and I read a chapter in which Harry and his two closest friends, Ron and Hermione, go to visit Hagrid, the good-hearted but accident-prone gamekeeper. Christmas is fast approaching and most of the students at Hogwarts, the school for wizards, have gone home on break. Harry and his friends have stayed at school, however, and they know Hagrid is struggling with a personal issue. They have hopes of cheering him up.

In Hagrid’s hut at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, talk turns to the time he spent the year before detained in Azkaban, the wizard prison. For all its charms (pun very definitely intended), the wizard world lacks due process. In the second Potter book, The Chamber of Secrets, the Ministry of Magic summarily subjects Hagrid to detention in Azkaban on suspicion of committing a terrible crime. Though he is eventually cleared of suspicion and released, Hagrid remains on some level traumatized by his brief but difficult imprisonment.

Hermione asks whether it’s awful in there.

Hagrid replies that in Azkaban, you can’t really remember who you are anymore. Indeed, you struggle to see the point of living at all. He admits to wishing he would die in his sleep.

When he was suddenly released, Hagrid said, it was like being born again. Yet he carries with him the fear of one day being sent back.

How many real Americans are going through a soul-destroying ordeal of incarceration similar to Hagrid's fictional one? I invite anyone uncertain about the answer to this question to read Atul Gawande's recent New Yorker article, Hellhole.

Beyond the bailout mentality

Though I don’t know why Oprah Winfrey puts herself on every single cover, her magazine — called, of course, O — consistently features insightful, thought-provoking essays. In April 2008, the writer Terry Tempest Williams wrote movingly of her stay in the county jail in Soda Springs, Idaho. Arrested for speeding without a valid driver’s license, she chose to forego posting the $200 bail. Instead, after a call to her husband, she replaced her nice clothes and Prada slippers with a standard-issue orange jumpsuit and Keds. Entering a cinder-block pod with 12 other women, she soon found that most of them were there because of a different sort of speed: crystal meth.

In her essay, Williams describes her jail stay as a powerful “note to self”: accept personal responsibility for one’s actions. Too often, having the money to bail ourselves out can get in the way of consciously accepting what one has done and failed to do — and what the ensuing consequences are for oneself and others. The mind-set epitomized by George W. Bush’s various Wall Street bailouts shows this way of thinking writ large in our society, with far-reaching damage when reality finally intrudes. As Obama’s team struggles to deal with the train wreck, our country needs a collective moment of clarity comparable to what Williams experienced at the Soda Springs jail. Obama tried to provide it in his inaugural address, but fundamental change does not necessarily happen in one fell swoop.