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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 31, 2001
Latest Update: September 10, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Understanding Violent Crime

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors: September 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Last night, Monday, September 10, 2001, jeanne and Pat and Arnold went to Vroman's in Pasadena to hear Philip Gouravitch on his book tour for A Cold Case. This non-fiction report of the resolution of a 27-year-old murder case addresses the very real issue of violence as it exists in many of our inner-city neighborhoods.

I was particularly interested in Gourevitch's choice of reading for the lecture. He chose to describe Koehler's confession to the detective who finally resolved the case. In particular, Gourevitch noted that Koehler was sociable, even amiable, though he added that he was comfortable that Koehler in jail was right where he had belonged. He spoke of a San Francisco reading in which two of Koehler's nephews showed up and one of them expressed his dismay over the arrest and incarceration of his uncle, and over the portrayal of his uncle in the book. The nephew was sustained by the image of his uncle as the only one who had ever been good to him.

Gourevitch also noted that Koehler objected to the morals of an Irish gang in New York because they would just kill for no reason. The words that stuck in my mind were that Koehler wouldn't kill "unless they disrespected me." This brought to mind the emphasis placed on "disrespect" in the Violent Social World of Black Men, and our many attempts in law, in critical race theory, in postcolonialism, in peacemaking to define and measure "respect."

Some of the audience were firmly convinced that the perpetrator deserved what he got, and they were not open to my questions about what Gourevitch learned about the criminal justice system and new approaches to criminology and incarceration. I was thinking particularly of John Irwin's, Arrigo's, and others' work with convict criminology. John Irwin actually said at one point that he had liked "robbing people" at one point, but that prison had stopped him on his destructive path and turned him around. A warden from a California prison, in Irwin's audience, said that 50% of the felons in his prison should not be there, that John Irwin was right about that.

It was such ideas I wished to explore. From whence come our ideas of sentence length, of surveillance and supervision, and are they the most effective? I'm afraid I got a little indignant when one man insisted that criminal defense attorneys are unethical sharks are worse. After all, I'm a criminal defense attorney, which I barked. I guess I had no idea of the extent to which the dominant discourse constrains our thoughts about violentization, retribution, rehabilitation, and incarceration.

It was a fascinating evening. I have the book, and hope to get to it next weekend. love and peace,
jeanne