Punishment for Homelessness: Life in Prison

I’ve posted several times now about the legal conundrums faced by convicted sex offenders. In this guest column, an attorney highlights the case of Larry Moore Jr. of Georgia, facing life in prison because he could not provide the state with an address.

Guest commentary by Ezekiel Edwards

Should anyone be sentenced to the rest of their lives in prison because they are homeless?

Some people think so.

At least when it comes to the most vilified people in our society -- sex offenders. Sex offenders nationwide are carefully monitored, the public is privy to where they live, and, like many people with criminal records, they are barred from a bevy of employment and housing options.

To be sure, sex offenses should be dealt with seriously, and certain sex offenders require close surveillance. However, some states' concerns over sex offenders has transformed into outright and unacceptable animus, this time in the form of strict new sex offender registry laws.

Take Georgia, for instance, and the case of Larry Moore, Jr., in Augusta. Under state law, Mr. Moore, a sex offender, is prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of a church, school, school bus stop, day care center, church, and swimming pool. That does not leave a lot of places for Mr. Moore to reside. The options are even more limited when considering that almost every shelter in the entire state refuses to accept sex offenders.

Georgia also requires sex offenders to register an address. But given how few places the law allows sex offenders to live, and given that Georgia, like most states, invests far too little resources in helping people released from prison find housing and work, some sex offenders, like some prisoners generally, cannot find housing after prison, or lose their housing, and thus cannot report a legal address.

If it happens once, the result might be some jail time, or additional probation. But if it happens a second time, even if the underlying cause is homelessness, the punishment is life in prison. In other words, the penalty is harsher than if the offender had committed another sex offense.

Just ask Mr. Moore. In 2005, he failed to register as required, spent time in jail awaiting the disposition of his case, and eventually pled guilty. He was released in March 2006, and was left with two places to live that met the law's requirements, both hotels. He registered twice upon his release, registered again in April and June, twice again in July, when the new law took effect. But his job at a fast food restaurant did not pay enough to cover the cost of the hotel, and he was forced to move out.

Homeless, he could not provide the state with an address. Having been convicted of his second violation, Mr. Moore now faces mandatory life in prison under Georgia's law. A lawsuit has been brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union on his behalf.

Some think putting Mr. Moore in jail for the rest of his life is warranted, simply because he is a sex offender. Others argue that it is misleading to say that his life sentence stems from being homeless, as it ignores his original conviction for a sex offense. But no one is ignoring that Mr. Moore is a sex offender -- that is why he is subject to Georgia's cruel and unusual punishment in the first place. But his latest sentence is not for the sex offense, it is for failing to register an address as a sex offender.

Some suggest that sex offenders like Mr. Moore try to use homelessness disingenuously as a defense at trial. First, there are tens of thousands of homeless people in the United States, and included are some sex offenders. Second, under Georgia law, raising the defense of homelessness, even for those who are actually homeless, will always prove futile, as it was for Mr. Moore.

Some have suggested that Mr. Moore should have just found some rural place in Georgia to live. But this ignores the financial and social difficulties involved in moving, particularly for someone who is destitute, and also essentially condones urban cleansing of sex offenders.

Such drastic measures only further undermine sex offenders’ limited residential and employment stability, thereby only increasing the risk of recidivism. Yet unrealistic ostracism is exactly what Georgia and some like-minded folk desire: forcing anyone convicted of a sexual offense to (1) leave the state; (2) languish in prison; or, like in other states, (3) be relegated to the outskirts or underbellies of society. Florida, for instance, authorized five offenders to live under a bridge in Miami after they were unable to find suitable housing that they could afford. In Iowa, offenders have tried complying with the registry law by offering addresses such as "rest area mile marker 149" or "RV in old Kmart parking lot."

It is unconscionable to throw people in jail for the rest of their lives for being homeless and unable to secure an address for sex offender registry purposes. Herding sex offenders under bridges, or into rest areas and parking lots, thereby keeping them outside of the community and yet easily monitored (similar to, say, livestock), is degrading and inhumane.

Making simple residency insurmountable or impractical is not the answer to reducing sexual offenses. Instead, states should implement longer-term, more intelligent, and more humane strategies by paving clear paths to employment, self-sufficiency, and stability and making treatment programs widely available while continuing careful monitoring. If monitoring is difficult because someone is homeless, then the burden should be on the state to provide housing, or to relax the residency restrictions.

This column was originally posted August 14, 2007 at the blog of Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Reposted with written permission of the author.

Ezekiel R. Edwards is a Criminal Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and a Staff Attorney and Mayer Brown Eyewitness Fellow at The Innocence Project in New York.

When teens commit crimes for others

About 7 percent of Finnish youths have shoplifted for someone else, according to a nationally representative study of 15- and 16-year-olds in that country. Their reasons reflect a combination of altruistic and coercive motives that may be difficult to sort out in the real world.

Motivations for these “crimes by proxy” include being pressured or coerced, helping an older friend who did not want to get caught, being paid, trying to fit in with the group, and proving one’s courage to friends.

These last two motivations fit with much study of juvenile crime committed in groups, including my own research with antigay hate crime perpetrators. “It is obvious that for adolescents, shoplifting for someone else is tightly interlocked with social connections and peer groups,” writes researcher Janne Kivivuori in the current issue of the British Journal of Criminology. “Even purely ‘instrumental’ property crimes, such as shoplifting, are often embedded in a system of coercive and altruistic actions within a social group.”

Questioning the autonomy of these teen shoplifters, Kivivuori links proxy crime to obedience to authority. As demonstrated by Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking research in the early 1960s, most people will commit proxy crimes when asked to do so by someone in authority.

Proxy crime may factor into more serious and violent offending as well, blurring the lines between offending and victimization, suggests Kivivuori, who is research director of the National Research Institute of Legal Policy in Helsinki, Finland.

Reference: Kivivuori, J. (2007). Crime by proxy: Coercion and altruism in adolescent shoplifting. British Journal of Criminology.

Photo credit: drinksmachine (Creative Commons license)

Medical doctors' unconscious racism affecting patient care

Does lurking racism affect the workings of our major institutions - government, the judiciary, medicine, and education? And how, if it is underground, can we even answer this question with anything more than speculation and opinion?

Where there's a will, there’s a way.

Psychological scientists have developed a tool called the Implicit Association Test that scientifically measures unconscious racism. That is, it can tell whether you have racial biases that you are not aware of. The test is being used to empirically assess for the presence of individual-level racism in societal institutions.

In the field of medicine, for example, we know that African Americans have higher infant mortality rates and death rates from cervical cancer, heart disease, and stroke than white patients. But are these differences due to outright racism on the part of doctors, or to other factors such as socioeconomic status or lack of health insurance?

While such macro-level factors are undoubtedly significant, a group of Harvard University psychology researchers have used the Implicit Association Test to prove that unconscious racial bias affects how doctors treat heart attack victims.

The study, reported in the current (September) issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, involved giving a hypothetical vignette to doctors about a patient suspected of having had a heart attack. In some cases, the patient was described a white; in others, he was described as black. In all other ways, the patient was the same. Doctors who scored high in unconscious racism on the Implicit Association Test tended to withhold aggressive treatment from the black patients.

The current issue of the journal also reports on another study – this one involving real patients - suggesting that similar racial factors play into doctors' decisions about whether to refer women for osteoporosis screening after a hip fracture.

These and other, recent studies suggest that the empirical study of individual-level racism is hitting its stride. Indeed, I posted recently about similar studies of automatic racial processes in the forensic realm, and how subtle racial bias on the part of police, probation officers, and others affects rates of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

Since unconscious bias is by definition outside of conscious awareness, and since racism is not as popular as it used to be, no one wants to admit to harboring it. Thus, it is difficult to confront without the empirical evidence of its existence.

Unfortunately, such study has barely touched the mental health field. Although we know that psychiatric diagnosis and treatment vary tremendously by race, for everything from schizophrenia to childhood Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, the empirical study remains to be done on why this is so. Until we can identify the precise mechanisms, disparities will remain, affecting the quality of care and in some cases life or death itself.


You can take the Implicit Association Test online.

Reference: Green AR, Carney DR, Pallin DJ, Ngo LH, Raymond KL, Iezzoni LI, & Banaji MR. (2007). Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 22, 1231-1238.

Photo credit: Vanity Press (Creative Commons license)

Can government predict crimes before they occur?

U.S. to ratchet up surveillance with "Project Hostile Intent"

Did you know that when you go to the airport, a "behavior detection officer" might be scanning your face for hostile micro-aggressions?

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to launch Project Hostile Intent (PHI), which will use computers to scan the 400 million travelers who enter the U.S. each year for physical signs of hostile intent.

The Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes to install sensors that will monitor people's pulse, perspiration rate, gait, breathing, eye movements, and other physiological signs through video and audio surveillance and by bouncing lasers or microwaves off your skin.

The full story, "Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime?" will appear in the Aug. 11 issue of New Scientist. Here’s the ominous lead-in:

"IMAGINE the scene. You arrive at New York's JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body. The computer that is processing the data from these hidden sensors is not searching for explosives, knives, guns or contraband. Instead, it is working on a much tougher problem: whether you are thinking about committing a terrorist act, either imminently, or at sometime during your stay in the US. If the computer decides that might be your intention, you will be led off for interview with security officers."

Last night, I went to see the Bourne Supremacy, which featured the type of all-knowing, all-seeing state surveillance that is a staple of science fiction books and movies. (One of my favorite such films was 1997's Gattaca.) Watching Bourne (which I enjoyed despite its flaws), I thought the sophistication of the surveillance technology seemed a bit far-fetched. But now, I’m not so sure.

After all, New York City is poised to implement "ring of steel," a Homeland Security-funded system of interconnected license plate readers, surveillance cameras, a coordination center and roadblocks that can swing into action at a moment's notice. If the system works, I’m sure it will be coming soon to a city near you.

If "Traveling while Black" (or Arab) is perilous now, it will be a lot more difficult, and traumatic, once security forces are empowered to use subjective factors like pulse rate and gait as indicators of nefarious intent.

Photo credit: gruntzooki (bird surveillance cameras at Oakland airport), Creative Commons license. Also see Flickr's Panopticon network, dedicated to photographing surveillance cameras.

Guest commentary: 'Predator' gets caught in its own trappings

As "To Catch a Predator" spins off into ever-more-ludicrous dimensions such as "To Catch an i-Jacker," a newspaper columnist ponders what about American culture spawns such voyeurism

by Steven Winn

S.F. Chronicle, August 8, 2007, posted with the written permission of the author

It's a familiar stop on a night of channel surfing. The ballgame's over, the kids are tucked in bed, the dishwasher's whirring - everything's primed for a spell of vicarious "watchdog" justice. It's time "To Catch a Predator."

That's the title of a queasily transfixing series about uncovering and punishing pedophiles that's been airing on the TV newsmagazine "Dateline NBC" since 2004. The network's sister channel, MSNBC, faithfully reruns episodes, just as religious channels recycle the best sermons of their ace televangelists. MSNBC is where many nocturnal channel browsers find these real-life mini morality plays.

Why are we so eager to watch these televised takedowns? Are we witnessing an activist form of TV journalism that bracingly takes grave matters into its own hands? Or are those hands behaving in ways that bear much closer scrutiny, doubt and reflection? A pending lawsuit and an unsettling new piece in Esquire magazine are fuel for thought.

The show's concept is simple: Adults from a group called Perverted Justice pose as children online to attract men trolling for sex. A meeting is arranged by telephone. The purported predator arrives at the meeting place, a house that has been rigged with multiple hidden cameras. With the videotape rolling, the show's clean-cut, youthful-looking star, Chris Hansen, enters and begins his solemn litany of revelation.

Depending on the visitor's response - some make excuses or invent other reasons for their presence, some walk out the door, some confess - Hansen might read from a printed log of the salacious online chat that's preceded the visit. Back in the studio, more evidence is piled on. Sometimes, we learn, the man has sent pictures or videos of his penis to the child he thinks he's going to meet. We might be told about a prior record of sexual solicitations.

Finally, the man is invited to leave, if he hasn't done so already. As soon as he's outside the house, local law enforcement teams rush him, wrestle him to the ground and make the arrest. Off he goes to be booked, arraigned and often, as a postscript indicates, convicted and jailed. One "Predator" show was shot locally, in Petaluma.

There are a number of ways to view the hold that "To Catch a Predator" exerts on the viewer. There is, of course, the power of its apparent authenticity, in high contrast to the numbingly synthetic "reality" that reality TV sells in all its iterations. NBC's "Predator" is like some deadly serious episode of "Candid Camera." Instead of laughing along with the folly of human nature, we're caught up short and cleave instinctively to Hansen's stoic righteousness.

And righteous is what we feel we are right to be. Adults seeking out children and young teenagers for sex carries the unmitigated onus of evil, the stench of the powerful preying on the powerless. Unlike many other crimes - robbery, assault, maybe even murder, which can emerge from a tangled web of human interaction, history and passion-fueled circumstances - sexual predation seems chillingly unambiguous.

For similar reasons, the specific allegations in the dogfighting case against football star Michael Vick and his associates carry a blackly poisonous stain. (Dogs were reportedly bludgeoned, hanged or electrocuted if they failed to perform well in fights.) Animals, like children, are innocent and defenseless, we feel. They require our vigilant unconditional protection.

Watching the parade of alleged pedophiles on a recent rerun of "To Catch a Predator," I felt a stony indifference to the nabbed men's deer-in-the-headlights looks and wheedling prevarications. "People play roles," one said of chat-room life. "People just talk." Another insisted he doesn't need 14-year-old girls. "I can get all kinda girls." A third said he was deeply sorry and would never do it again. In an hour, the show perp-walked 11 men, ages 21 to 49, past the cameras. By the end of it, I felt dragged out and worn down, as if I'd been on some marathon stakeout myself.

In May, in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed by a former "Dateline" employee, Marsha Bartel outlined a series of ethical misgivings about "To Catch a Predator" that some media critics have raised themselves. Among other things, Bartel argues that paying Perverted Justice for its services gives the group "a financial incentive to lie to and trick targets of its sting." She's not the only ex-employee, incidentally, to discuss the show's underlying methods. Former "Dateline" anchor Stone Phillips has said that in many of the contrived Internet chats, "the decoy is the first to bring up the subject of sex."

Bartel's assertions about the relationship between NBC and law enforcement are more disturbing. Contrary to the network's claim of "parallel investigations" with police, she says, "Dateline" pays or otherwise reimburses law enforcement officials, trades its video services for information and for dramatically staged arrests, and illegally provides video feeds to prosecutors.

A piece in the forthcoming September Esquire turns the spotlight on the problem in graphic and grim detail. (Esquire, like The Chronicle, is a Hearst publication.) In telling the story of a Dateline "Predator" operation that ended in a man's suicide by gunshot when the police stormed his house with NBC's cameras poised outside, writer Luke Dittrich portrays a network hungry for real-life drama at any cost and a Murphy, Texas, police department only too avid to play along. When the man, a former district attorney named Bill Conradt Jr., failed to show up at the trysting house as arranged, Esquire shows, NBC pressed police to obtain a warrant for his arrest and force a confrontation at his own home. The last footage shot was of the SWAT team loading Conradt's body into the ambulance.

In a mordant footnote to the tragedy, Dittrich reports that because of various problems, including crime venue problems and the lack of proper warrants, the county's district attorney was unable to prosecute any of the 23 men arrested in Murphy during the Texas "Dateline" encampment.

While NBC doesn't comment on future "To Catch a Predator" episodes, the network plainly feels it has established a vital franchise. Spin-offs include "To Catch a Car Thief," "To Catch an ID Thief," "To Catch a Con Man" and the ludicrous "To Catch an i-Jacker." The latter involves leaving iPods around in public and tracking the people who pick them up. "So what's the lesson here?" Hansen asked a teenager who was caught and hauled before the cameras on a recent "Dateline." "Don't steal," he dutifully replied.

Like the multiple versions of "Law & Order," the "To Catch" series may satisfy a simple desire to see the cleansing social order working properly. But in blurring the lines between law enforcement and entertainment, police procedure and sleazy curiosity, "Dateline" is engaging in a much more vexing business, one that's closer to the car-chase videos of "Cops" than it is to some new form of TV justice.

The series capitalizes on America's fantasy of being on the inside track, embedded, empowered by the media's intoxicating blend of intimacy and might. In the end, as Bartel puts it in her lawsuit, NBC may just be feeding "American culture's interest in public humiliation." It may be irresistible to watch, but maybe the old model is worth rethinking. Let law enforcement do law enforcement, and let the media pay very close attention to how it's doing it.

E-mail Steven Winn

Yesterday’s tmz.com features news and video about the current court case of prominent oncologist Maurice Wolin, recently trapped by Dateline NBC.

My previous post on the Predator series is here.

Happy ending for wrongfully deported Mexican-American man

Two months ago, I posted here about a cognitively handicapped Mexican-American man who was illegally deported to Mexico and disappeared.

Pedro Guzman, born in the United States, was mistakenly deported after being jailed in his native Los Angeles on a minor trespassing charge. A former Special Education student, the 29-year-old is described by family members as a slow learner with memory problems.

In the last three months, Guzman said he made repeated attempts to get home, but was turned away by U.S. border agents.

Meanwhile, as he walked the 100 miles from Tijuana to Mexicali, eating out of garbage cans and bathing in rivers, his family was desperately searching for him. The family's pleas for help from both the U.S. and Mexican governments fell on death ears.

Guzman was finally picked up when U.S. authorities at the Calexico border realized he had an outstanding arrest warrant. The warrant, ironically, was for missing probation hearings during the time that he was trying to get home.

Although the U.S. government had promised to immediately notify the family if Guzman was located, he was instead jailed for two days before the family was notified and he was released.

Guzman appeared traumatized and was nearly unrecognizable, family members said at a news conference.

The family's last contact with Mr. Guzman had been on May 11, when he called his sister-in-law from a borrowed cell phone to say he had been deported. The call cut off. Although family members rushed to Tijuana, they were unable to find him.

This is not the first time that a U.S. native has been illegally deported. A similar case 30 years ago also involved a Mexican-American who was mentally disturbed and unable to care for himself. Like Guzman, Daniel Cardona of Clovis (near Fresno) wandered the streets of Tijuana for nearly five months while his frantic family searched for him.

The latest on the Guzman case is at the ACLU of Southern California’s web site.

AP coverage is online through the San Francisco Chronicle.

The “Witness LA” blog has also been covering the story.

But for the most extensive coverage of all, see the excellent L.A. Weekly feature by Daniel Hernandez, “Lost in Tijuana."

Photo (Guzman and his brother) posted with the permission of the ACLU of Southern California.