Paris Drake is accused of a senseless and brutal crime on a busy Midtown street in broad daylight. Whether or not he is convicted of bashing a woman's head with a brick, his arrest has highlighted the criminal justice system's failure to deal with repeat offenders.
Before the alleged attack, Drake had been jailed more than twenty times and was a free man for exactly 17 days out of the last eight years. Like many of his fellow inamtes, Drake was arrested several times on drug-related charges (an estimated 70% of the City's 70,000 inmates have a history of drug abuse). Most of his crimes were misdemeanors, which typically bring sentences of only a few weeks or months in jail.
Clearly, the system doesn't work for Drake and thousands of others who spend years cycling in and out of prison. Prison advocates call for more drug programs, but too often inmates themselves complain that these programs don't work. Most of the ex-cons I spoke to in a recent study of parole--even those who insisted they needed help to stay clean--ridiculed the rehab programs available to them. Some skipped out without consequences. When Drake, for instance, was finally ordered to seek treatment after years of revolving-door prison stints, he blew it off.
Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki have called for a kind of "three strikes and you're out" policy that would mandate longer sentences for repeat offenders after a certain number of misdemeanors in a given time period. Steven M. Fishner, the mayor's criminal justice coordinator, has said "It is for people like Paris Drake, for offenders who sell marijuana repeatedly in city parks, and for others who make a career of committing crimes and skating under the mandatory sentences for felonies."
Such a plan might please prison-happy public officials, but probably won't change criminal behavior. Why not? The motivation needed to go straight is extremely difficult to manufacture, whether you're giving inmates a boot camp regimen or drug programs, long terms upstate or slap-on-the-wrist sentences. The problem is, for those ex-cons who are determined not to return to prison, it's difficult to find a job that pays the bills, and exceedingly easy to get back into crime, especially selling and using drugs. Until this balance changes--perhaps by making effective pre-release programs a priority--no proposal to reduce the number of repeat offenders is likely to succeed.
Quality of Life Crime #54: Selling cheap goods on the subway. (Good thing too, since mostly recent Chinese immigrants are in that racket nowadays, and with their mangling of the language and their haggard countenances, these people are comical at best, downright disturbing if you're in a bad mood. Not the kind of thing you want the tourists to see. Plus, they're cutting into Duracell and Doublemint sales at legitimate rent-paying stores. And remember the "broken-windows" theory Ð today they're selling yo-yos, tomorrow they're hawking stolen watches, pretty soon they're robbing you at gunpoint when you try to take the train! That's why I'm glad I saw a sting operation last week--six uniformed and two plainclothes officers nabbing two guys who, I was told, make thousands of dollars a week selling $1 batteries. It's a good thing these crooks are off the streets now, but not before pocketing our hard-earned George Washingtons and menacing our quality of life.)
Jerome Chou is a freelance writer. He works part-time interviewing recently released ex-offenders about their re-entry into society.
City officials have settled a lawsuit alleging the New York Police Department improperly strip-searched people arrested for minor offenses in Brooklyn, agreeing to pay $650,000 to 20 plaintiffs in the case. But the jury remains out on whether strip-searches are being used by police only in special circumstances for safety and to collect evidence, or as a matter of routine.
The settlement of the suit contrasts sharply with the 2001 settlement of a similar case involving alleged wrongdoing in Manhattan and Queens, when the city agreed to pay up to $50 million in a class-action suit. In that case, the city conceded its Corrections Department illegally strip-searched tens of thousands of people held in custody on minor charges during a ten-month period in 1996 and 1997.
Federal courts have ruled since the 1980s that strip-searches are allowed for those arrested for minor crimes only under special circumstances, such as when police have reason to suspect a detainee may have a hidden weapon or contraband, usually drugs.
In settling the Brooklyn case, the city has admitted no wrongdoing, although statements from those plaintiffs involved in the suit describe how they were humiliated after being arrested for misdemeanor crimes, sometimes publicly strip-searched in view of other inmates and officers of the opposite sex.
Police policy says strip searches, when necessary, should be "conducted by a member of the same sex as the arrested person in a secure area in utmost privacy and with no other arrestee present."
Yet the lawsuit and a report(in pdf format) issued in May by the Civilian Complaint Review Board paint a far different picture. The board investigated dozens of complaints filed since 2002, and found that in 2003, they were substantiated at a rate of about 19 percent.
Twelve strip-search complaints were substantiated by the review board last year. Through July of this year, the board has substantiated 14 strip-search complaints.
While those overall numbers are small, officers interviewed by the Civilian Complaint Review Board in response to complaints often described strip-searches as routine and necessary to look for drugs, even if the person was arrested for different reasons. This led the review board to express concern that the problem was more wide-spread than the number of complaints might suggest.
The review board sent a letter to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly calling for better training of officers on how to conduct strip-searches and when strip-searches were permissible. Police officials have responded by saying that a new training video has been under development to give officers a better grasp of department policies on strip-searches.
Those involved in the lawsuit described their disappointment in the settlement to The New York Times.
One man in the Brooklyn lawsuit described for the Times how he was strip-searched after a traffic accident in which he was arrested on suspicion of having a suspended license. He described the crowded, dirty conditions of the holding cell, and then being asked to drop his pants in view of female officers.
"When the lawyers offered [the settlement] to me," the man told The Times, "they said, 'That's not bad for one night.' I said, 'You go try it.' I'm a knockaround guy. That night was pretty horrible."
When and how police conduct strip-searches have been questions raised by similar lawsuits across the country, and even the definition of "strip" search is not completely clear. Some legal scholars wonderexactly how much of a right people have not to be strip-searched.
But aside from when and where strip-searches are allowed, federal courts have ruled in similar cases this year that in order to reach class-action status -- and be eligible for multi-million dollar payouts, like the 2001 lawsuit -- the plaintiffs must prove that they are likely to be harmed in the future by police strip-searches. If those involved in the lawsuit were only involved in minor crimes, then it is unclear that those involved would be arrested again and subjected to similar treatment, according to the explanation presented by The Times.
What goes in must come out. Sasha Abramsky's "When They Get Out," in June's Atlantic Monthly, considers how booming incarceration rates have affected our society, and speculates about what will happen when these prisoners are released. The article focuses on national trends (in twelve states, for instance, ex-offenders can never vote again, which may lead to widespread disenfranchisement), but the implications for New York are obvious. One organizer estimates that beginning in the year 2005, New York's prisons will release about 30,000 inmates a year -- people who will have a hard time finding work and medical care. Abramsky asks important questions about a problem we've swept under the rug, but one we'll have to face up to eventually.
41 bullets, 1000 arrests, and countless Mayoral defensive postures later, what have we learned from the City's police brutality crisis? The infamous Street Crime Unit now sports uniforms -- not that the City's minority residents had too much trouble spotting groups of beefy white guys cruising their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, according to a recent poll, 25% of New York's white voters consider police brutality a "serious problem," compared to 81% of black voters. Despite the unlikely multiracial coalition that rallied around Al Sharpton's City Hall protests, as the chant goes, "No justice, no peace" -- at least not until both sides acknowledge common ground. Shrill activists have their sound bites. But who's speaking for residents of poor neighborhoods, who want more, not fewer, cops on the beat? And when will the Mayor and the Commissioner acknowledge the systemic racism that plagues the force? Sit back, we'll be here a while.
Jerome Chou is a freelance writer. He works part-time interviewing recently released ex-offenders about their re-entry into society.