Harvard University Press Blog

Jonathan Lusthaus and His Obsession with Cybercrime

Jonathan Lusthaus has just published Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime, a fascinating account of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have subversively created. We asked Jonathan about how he got interested in this unusual, yet important field.

While Industry of Anonymity is a labor of love, it is also a product of luck. In a different reality, it might never have been written. When I moved to Oxford to begin a Masters program in the sociology department many years ago, I was set on researching religious violence. Unfortunately, the work I wanted to do didn’t match the research strands among the faculty. In a classic student conundrum, I was quickly forced to come up with a new dissertation topic at short notice.

As it happened, just before the deadline for announcing topics, the former Guardian and BBC journalist Misha Glenny came to Oxford to give a talk. A well-known author on organized crime, Glenny was writing a new book on cybercrime at the time. That project would become Darkmarket, and the sneak preview we were treated to opened my eyes to a world I had never considered before.

Cybercrime – something I had figured as a purely technical phenomenon – involved people. These people communicated with each other, worked together and traded products on large online marketplaces. There was a secret world here, an undiscovered economy. I sensed immediately that I wanted to explore and map this new underground economy that seemed to be hidden from sight.

Luckily, I was in the perfect department to do this. Following scholars like Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese (who would become an inspirational doctoral supervisor), one of the strengths of Oxford sociology is the study of extra-legal governance. This examines how groups outside the control of the state, such as criminals and insurgents, regulate their own dealings. They can't rely on the courts or the police, so they have to develop their own institutions of governance.

Cybercrime presented a fascinating sociological puzzle: how do cybercriminals manage to cooperate together on a wide scale? It would seem that criminals, and anonymous ones at that, don’t make great business partners. You ostensibly can’t beat them up if a deal goes wrong. Yet we were seeing increasing levels of collaboration taking place, and later I would come to the realisation that a fully-fledged cybercrime industry had formed. How was this happening? Answering this question became the heart of my research. 

One of the first people I interviewed for this project asked me whether I would continue working in the cybercrime space after my masters. At the time, I was starting out and hadn’t really thought about it. But he told me that this was a fascinating and hugely important area, with tremendous opportunities and one that I should stick with.

After I finished my masters and the pilot research on which this book would be built, I realized that this interviewee was right. I had become obsessed with the topic of cybercrime. I had begun researching this topic with no knowledge of cybercrime and no contacts at all. I wanted to change this and interview the most knowledgeable people I could find – whether from law enforcement, private sector or cybercriminal backgrounds. If I travelled to a country, I wanted to do research on cybercrime while I was there. I knew this was an enormous topic, and an enormously important topic. And I knew that one day it would become a book.

After seven years of fieldwork, this passion had taken me to Russia, Ukraine, Romania, China, Nigeria, Brazil and more. I have interviewed 238 people, including some leading former cybercriminals. I have visited the sites where key historical events took place, such as a conference held in Odessa by some of the pioneers of the cybercrime industry. I have moved from the periphery of the topic towards its heart, and had an amazing adventure along the way.

This journey confirmed my view that the human dimension of cybercrime is vital to understanding the challenge and seeking solutions to fix it. Cybercrime is not just a technical phenomenon but one that is driven by people. Its victims are also people. By focussing on the technical, many can simply turn away and chose not to address the problem. It is complex and ultimately mystifying. But when we have a better understanding of how cybercrime affects us in personal terms and how the attacks stem from people in different parts of the world, we are in a much better position to engage people and make progress in addressing the threat.

Social Breakdown in Revolutionary Russia

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 by examining a frightening rise in violent crime that threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens in the capital city. Through the lens of crime, police behavior, judiciary ineptitude, and public response, Hasegawa demonstrates how the breakdown of political and social institutions paralyzed the city and paved the way for the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Below, Hasegawa introduces his study of the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution, and considers some of its relevance for our world today.

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The catastrophic social breakdown of Petrograd, capital city of the Russian Empire, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an important aspect of the revolution that has been overlooked. There was euphoric excitement after the February Revolution, with people expecting immediate improvements to their lives. But life only got worse, and the city soon became paralyzed. Provision of electricity and water dwindled and soon stopped. Garbage piled up in the streets and courtyards, uncollected. The city stank so bad that newspapers commented that even an elephant would faint. Worst of all, basic food became scarcer. People had to stand for hours in long queues for a mere loaf of bread. Horses starved to death, and warnings were posted against their consumption. Dogs disappeared, ending up in people’s stomachs. Consequently, epidemics spread, filling the hospitals.

As horrible as this all was, the most frightening change in daily life was the sharp rise of crime, especially violent crime. The Tsar was gone, and the tsarist police were also annihilated. The newly created municipal police force was inexperienced and untrained, and infiltrated by former criminals. Pickpockets became muggers. Robbers became murderers. Faith in daily exchange suffered, as people believed that merchants were taking advantage of shortages and economic decline to soak a population already suffering from rationing and deprivation.

The old court system also became paralyzed, and the temporary new courts passed erratic verdicts without solid legal basis. Soon, even the temporary courts were abolished, leaving the citizens nowhere to go to lodge their daily complaints. The prison system broke down, leading to the mass escape of criminals back onto streets already riddled with crime.

Longing for the order and security that political authorities could not provide, people took the law into their own hands. Crowds turned to mob justice. When witnessing a crime, people attempted to catch the perpetrators, even petty thieves. They surrounded them there on the spot, beat them, sometimes even tearing them from limb to limb. They paraded them through the streets by tying them on carts, or threw them into the canals and rivers to enjoy watching them drown.

This brutal violence is, in my view, one of the most prominent, frightening, and often ignored aspects of the Russian Revolution. The revolution brought out the worst of human emotions—hatred, cruelty, brutality, and vengeance.

It is important to recognize that the Bolsheviks approved and often encouraged this breakdown of social order. Lenin in fact thought mob justice was the expression of justifiable popular anger against the bourgeois order.

But Lenin spoke too soon, because things went from bad to worse under the Bolsheviks. Both crime and mob justice grew in frequency and cruelty. Moreover, under the Bolsheviks a new element of mob violence was added: alcohol pogroms. Mobs attacked wine and vodka cellars in November and December. The most violent and notorious raid took place in the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, where many drowned to death. A Bolshevik high official helplessly observed that the Bolshevik power was drowning in a sea of wine and vodka.

On Preventing Violence Against Law Enforcement Officers

At yesterday’s swearing in ceremony for beleaguered attorney general pick Jeff Sessions, President Trump signed three executive orders regarding law enforcement. One reiterated standing policy against international criminal cartels; another reinforced Trump and Sessions’s inaccurate representations of crime rate trends; and the third declared a new focus on preventing violence against law enforcement officials.

While effectively without substance, the political messaging of that third order is clear: violence against American law enforcement officials is endemic, and, as part of his commitment to restoring law and order, Trump will end it. But it’s simply not true.

In fact, as eminent criminologist Franklin Zimring shows in When Police Kill, the risk of a uniformed police officer being killed by assault has dropped by more than 70 percent since the mid-1970s. And this leads in turn to one of the most important questions facing criminal justice today: why has this enormous drop in police deaths not been accompanied by commensurate reductions in killings by police? If imminent threat to their person is justification for application of lethal force by police, and that threat has been vastly reduced, shouldn’t we expect to see a similar reduction in police use of lethal force?

The reasons for the discrepancy are many and complicated, ranging from outdated police tactics to the risk-reward calculus of local agencies, but one thing Zimring makes abundantly clear is the threat of handguns. Part of the reason why American police kill civilians at rates so far surpassing all other ostensibly peaceful and developed nations is that there are so many more guns in America; more guns equals increased threat to police equals increased use of police force.

From When Police Kill:

Many of the social and cultural circumstances of life in the United States contribute somewhat to a rate of killings by police that is so distinctively high that it represents a difference in kind rather than degree. But as we have seen, one characteristic of American society plays a dominant role in provoking the use of lethal force by police and all but guarantees that rates of killing by police will remain much higher in the United States than elsewhere for the foreseeable future. The singular phenomenon that provokes extraordinary rates of police use of lethal force is the proliferation of civilian ownership and use of upward of 60 million handguns. Firearms of all types are the single most frequently used weapon that threatens the life of uniformed police officers, but the handgun is a special danger in the public places where most police patrol because these are guns that are easy to conceal and carry. And the threat that concealed guns can be used is the single reason that the risk of death of police from on-duty assaults is so many times higher in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world.

The statistical trends in fatal attacks against police officers are the classic good news/bad news anecdote: the good news is that the risk of death from attack while on duty has declined about 70 percent in the four decades after 1976 for officers in uniform, from twenty-eight per 100,000 per year to seven per 100,000 per year. The bad news is that even with these dramatic reductions in death risk, the risk of death from assault for an officer on duty is very much greater than in other developed countries.

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Careful evaluation of different police tactics in confrontations and improvements in vests and other protective gear can continue the long-range improvement in risk reduction for all police. But the prospects of any substantial reduction in civilian handgun ownership and use are not good for any time in the middle-range future. So the threat to police of concealed guns will continue at a magnitude much higher than in other developed nations. And that in turn will continue to provoke use of lethal force by American police at levels much higher than is common in other developed nations.

President Trump’s “Executive Order on Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers” states the administration’s intention to “develop strategies, in a process led by the Department of Justice and within the boundaries of the Constitution and existing Federal laws, to further enhance the protection and safety of Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers.” It seems that the logical place to start would be gun control.

Public Syllabi

Two days after nine African Americans were murdered in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of last year, #Charlestonsyllabus started trending on Twitter, with thousands of people using the hashtag to share resources they found helpful in understanding such a horrific event. As Chad Williams, a Professor of African and Afro-American Studies who sparked the exchange later made clear, he was following the example of Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain, who created the #FergusonSyllabus as a way for educators to share ideas on how to talk about Ferguson in their classrooms.

#Charlestonsyllabus was widely embraced, and from the loose list of works shared on social media there soon emerged an organized and cohesive syllabus, posted online by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). The thoughtful curating that took the materials from a firehose of inspiration to a deliberately constructed learning plan is of course the work academics have always done for their courses, but there was something remarkably open and democratic about doing it in public and online. As Williams has noted, the syllabus is more than a list; “It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.” It’s also now a book available from the University of Georgia Press.

It’s been heartening to see this model of communal thought take hold over the past year, with academics sharing a lead in bringing context and rigor to a public discourse disfigured by news cycles. The Public Books site has been particularly active on this front. In the wake of a Chronicle of Higher Education Trump 101 syllabus that lacked a diversity of voices, Public Books shared Trump Syllabus 2.0, assembled by historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain. Then, after the Trump Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, making sexual assault and its denial central to the presidential contest, Public Books posted a Rape Culture Syllabus. In introducing it, Laura Ciolkowski made its purpose clear:

Scholars and activists, poets and playwrights have been writing about rape for centuries. What would the conversation around sexual assault, police bias, and the legal system look like if investigators, police officers, and judges read deeply into the literature on sexuality, racial justice, violence, and power? It is in view of this question that the following syllabus is offered as a scholarly resource—and object of critical discussion and debate—on “rape culture” in the 21st century.

Also this fall, the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective produced a Standing Rock Syllabus in solidarity with those working to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. They write:

The different sections and articles place what is happening now in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus, the founding of the United States on institutionalized slavery, private property, and dispossession, and the rise of global carbon supply and demand. Indigenous peoples around the world have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries. This syllabus brings together the work of Indigenous and allied activists and scholars: anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, and legal scholars, all of whom contribute important insights into the conflicts between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction. While our primary goal is to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, we recognize that Standing Rock is one frontline of many around the world. This syllabus can be a tool to access research usually kept behind paywalls, or a resource package for those unfamiliar with Indigenous histories and politics.

And just this week, a team of historians offered a Prison Abolition Syllabus at AAIHS. Noting the nationwide prison strike, the prominence of Ava DuVernay’s new documentary on the 13th Amendment, and the surging stock prices for corrections-related companies after Trump’s election, the organizers write that the Prison Abolition Syllabus “seeks to contextualize and highlight prison organizing and prison abolitionist efforts from the 13th Amendment’s rearticulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and prison labor exploitation.”

There are other examples (such as the Anna Julia Cooper Center’s Welfare Reform Syllabus), and there are surely more to come. We’re of course happy to see many HUP books and authors listed among the recommended: Crystal Feimster, Estelle Freedman, and Catharine MacKinnon appear on the Rape Culture Syllabus; Ned Blackhawk and Aziz Rana on Trump Syllabus 2.0; Ira Berlin, Stephanie Smallwood, Walter Johnson, and many others on the Charleston Syllabus; and Elizabeth Hinton and Khalil Gibran Muhammad each on more than one. But beyond the satisfaction of seeing these particular books embraced in the public sphere, it’s both gratifying and invigorating to see serious works of scholarship upheld as integral to, as Williams wrote, “critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”

A "Powerful Surveillance Program" Exposed

From Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age:

In the wake of the two grand jury decisions to refuse to indict police officers in the homicides of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, a protest was organized for Saturday, December 13, 2014, in New York City. The organizers of the Millions March set up a Facebook page, where, by the night before, more than 45,000 people had RSVPed. It was posted as a public event on Facebook, so everyone and anyone could see who had signed up to attend—providing everyone and anyone, including the social media unit of the New York City Police Department, a costless, pristine list of all the individuals who feel so strongly about the problem of police accountability that they are willing to identify themselves publicly.

It takes little imagination to think of the ways that such a list could be exploited: As a background check during a police-civilian encounter or stop-and-frisk. As a red flag for a customs search at the airport, or a secondary search at a random checkpoint. As part of a larger profile for constructing a no-fly list, or for attributing a lower priority to a 911 emergency call. For more aggressive misdemeanor arrests in neighborhoods that have higher concentrations of protesters. As part of a strategy to dampen voter turnout in certain precincts. For a cavity search in case of arrest. There are myriad creative ways to misuse the data; our imagination is the only limit. And with a single click, a prying eye can learn everything about each of the digital selves that signed up for the protest on Facebook; using a simple selector, an intelligence analyst could collect all of the digital information about any one of those signatories, read all their emails, attachments, wall posts, and comments, decipher their political opinions and engagements, scan their photos and texts, target their videochats, track them by cell phone location—in sum, follow their every movement and digital action throughout every moment of their day. Once we are identified, we can be relentlessly monitored across practically every dimension of our daily routine—by means of the GPS on our phones, our IP addresses and web surfing, our Gmail contacts, MetroCards, employee IDs, and social media posts.

From the Washington Post:

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

From the ACLU:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

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• Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to the Instagram API, a stream of public Instagram user posts. This data feed included any location data associated with the posts by users. Instagram terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Facebook had provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which is supposed to be a tool for media companies and brand purposes, and which allowed Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts from Facebook that mention a specific topic, including hashtags, events, or specific places. Facebook terminated this access on September 19, 2016.
• Twitter did not provide access to its “Firehose,” but has an agreement, via a subsidiary, to provide Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets. In February, Twitter added additional contract terms to try to further safeguard against surveillance. But our records show that as recently as July 11th, Geofeedia was still touting its product as a tool to monitor protests. After learning of this, Twitter sent Geofeedia a cease and desist letter.

Because Geofeedia obtained this access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a developer, it could access a flow of data that would otherwise require an individual to “scrape” user data off of the services in an automated fashion that is prohibited by the terms of service (here and here). With this special access, Geofeedia could quickly access public user content and make it available to the 500 law enforcement and public safety clients claimed by the company.

Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color. Using Geofeedia’s analytics and search capabilities and following the recommendations in their marketing materials, law enforcement in places like Oakland, Denver, and Seattle could easily target neighborhoods where people of color live, monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as “overt threats.” We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.

Social media companies and their executives have expressed support for activists, movements, and free speech. Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Black Lives Matter and expressed sympathy after Philando Castile’s killing, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey went to Ferguson. Above all, the companies articulate their role as a home for free speech about important social or political issues.

Yet there is a severe disconnect between these positions and the data access they have provided.

From Exposed:

We face today, in advanced capitalist liberal democracies, a radically new form of power in a completely altered landscape of political and social possibilities.

“We Have to Insist That Our Political Leaders Start Dealing With the History of Our Present”

“The debate we’ve been having about police reform, about body cameras, about black lives mattering, seems not to have fundamentally changed the calculation when a black motorist or pedestrian is stopped on the street.” So said historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad in a conversation with NPR’s Code Switch team after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the horrifying attack on police officers in Dallas.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, spoke of the need to continue working towards more just policing even as events threaten to jeopardize public sympathy. “We have to insist,” he said, “that our political leaders start dealing with the history of our present—which is a history of sustained policing in black communities that is wholly and fundamentally different than it is in the rest of America. That’s a fact.”

When asked by Code Switch how today’s organizers might spur something like the late-1960s sequence that saw urban unrest lead to President Johnson’s formation of a federal commission that ultimately pointed to the failure of housing, education, and social-service policies, Muhammad suggested that the terms of that exchange can no longer be accepted.

The strategy of the civil rights movement was a strategy of compromise, to some extent, and that compromise was a form of respectability politics that essentially said “we’re going to be perfectly articulate, we’re going to be perfectly dressed, we’re going to be nonviolent, and we’re going to fit a model of exceptionalism, such that you will then say ‘how could we not let them eat at our table, how could we not let them live in our neighborhood, how could we not let them into our schools?’” And that’s not the full measure of humanity. We cannot—or can no longer—say to black people “you have to be twice as good to have half the measure of freedom in this country.” You should be able to be poor, you should be able to be doing something illegal that is not violent, and live to be able to face a day in court. That should be able to happen in this country.

In further considering the prevailing culture of policing today, Muhammad drew the line to mass incarceration:

I think that police officers function today in a way that has systematically mass-criminalized black and brown populations. That’s just a fact. You can’t get to the problem of mass incarceration without the problem of hot spots, CompStat policing, the war on drugs, all of it. And I think many people would agree that mass incarceration is a step in the wrong direction. Seven million people under some form of criminal justice supervision is a step in the wrong direction in a moment where we’re supposed to be two generations removed from the civil rights movement. And policing is at the center of that, they are the starting point. If there’s no arrest, then there’s no mass incarceration.

Listen to the full conversation below, starting around the 11:10 mark.

“Operation Sting” and the Creation of Crime Itself

Among the general public, the rise of mass incarceration in America is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.” In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, though, historian Elizabeth Hinton reveals that the nation’s prison problem is the outcome of a historical process that began under the Johnson administration during a period known more for its civil rights legislation and social welfare initiatives than for criminalization of the urban poor. Those Great Society programs were entangled with a set of assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime that underwrote the passage of the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which authorized the infusion of federal money to “modernize” local law enforcement. By the mid-1970s, the federal government had embraced a new tactic, granting urban police departments money to purchase and fence stolen goods as a means of attracting criminals. As Hinton reveals in the passage excerpted below, what started as one outrageous setup in Washington, DC, soon spread across the nation, and these carefully orchestrated sting operations quickly evolved into an attack on black petty thieves and came to involve the creation of crime itself—a central feature of the rise of the carceral state.

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The Washington, DC, Police Department’s sting effort was the most elaborate and the most contrived of those supported by this federal funding. In the summer of 1975, Washington police lieutenant Robert Arscott had set up a small fake fencing operation masquerading as the consulting firm “Urban Research Associates.” The undercover officer who manned the operation in downtown Washington sat behind a desk with a hidden camera and a tape recorder, hoping that thieves who had recently lifted office equipment would attempt to sell the stolen merchandise to the Urban Research Associates outfit. But amid the highest unemployment rate since 1941, the façade attracted more job seekers than criminals. The police department promptly shut down Urban Research Associates.

For its next attempt, the DC Police Department used federal and local funds to purchase an unheated warehouse near Langdon Park in the segregated northeast side of the District as a more convincing space for illegal transactions. Beginning in fall 1975, law enforcement purchased $2.4 million worth of stolen property with $67,000 in government funds. The project, called “Operation Sting,” involved the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA). After only five months, the initiative succeeded in its implicit purpose: to round up hundreds of small-time crooks, nearly all of them unemployed black men. The undercover police officers and federal agents posing as Mafia “dons” gave themselves Italian names straight out of the then-recent Godfather films, including “Angelo Lasagna,” “Mike Franzino,” “Tony Bonano,” “Rico Rigatone,” and “Bohana LaFountaine.” None of the officers were of Italian descent, but they interspersed terms like “Ciao” and “Arrivederci” as they played these roles.

Operation Sting created a demand for crime by providing crooks with a market on which to sell stolen goods. Word quickly spread that the fencing outfit, known to its customers as PFF Inc (for “Police-FBI Fencing Incognito”), was tied to the Mafia and would pay the highest prices in town. The petty thieves furnished PFF Inc with typewriters, adding machines, radios, and television sets, and then went back out to steal more items for the “dons.” If no valuable material goods were to be found, the crooks went after their neighbors’ mail, bringing stolen housing and welfare checks and credit cards. As their employer, PFF Inc provided the thieves with a steady and continuous source of income as long as they could deliver the plunder.

Broken Windows, Trust, System

Over the past several years we’ve had occasion time and again to turn to Bernard Harcourt, Professor of Law and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, for increased understanding of the policing of behavior, the “freedom” of markets, and the intertwining of the two. Harcourt is an authority on “broken windows” policing, a strategy based on the notion that attending to small violations—jaywalking, loitering, etc.—can somehow reduce the more serious and even violent crimes that we most care about. As Harcourt and others have shown, not only is there no reliable evidence for the policy’s efficacy, it also is an invitation to target people of color and lower-income citizens.

The approach stems from a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, but in public discourse it’s likely most associated with the NYC mayoral tenure of Rudy Giuliani. Under Michael Bloomberg the city made an aggressive turn to Stop and Frisk, a broken windows-style tactic that made its racial profiling explicit. When Bill de Blasio took office having pledged to overhaul the practice, he reinstated former NYPD Commissioner and broken windows advocate William J. Bratton, who reintroduced the more subtly biased broken windows policy as a disappointingly transparent replacement for the plainly racist Stop and Frisk.

Now, with much of the nation incensed over the failure to indict the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—each of whom died in encounters rooted in overzealous policing of minor offenses—broken windows is again in the spotlight. And so last week Bernard Harcourt joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe for a discussion of the tactic and his 2001 book, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing:

 

Harcourt has also compiled important fact sheets on the grand juries considering the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, helping to demystify processes whose secrecy serves to exacerbate their perceived miscarriage of justice.

"A Wrongful Conviction Is Our Crashed Plane"

When law professor Brandon Garrett wrote Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, he hoped that his analysis of the first 250 wrongful convictions to be overturned by DNA testing would help to counter the criminal justice system’s vulnerability to patterns of error, abuse, and incompetence. The frequency with which Garrett and his work are cited in the press have suggested he’s been successful in focusing attention on the need for practical reform, but this month we’ve also seen clear indication of Garrett’s influence among those truly empowered to enact changes.

In a letter sent to nearly 250 police departments across the Commonwealth of Virginia, Albemarle County Sheriff J. E. “Chip” Harding urged his colleagues in criminal justice to join him in reading Garrett’s study and working towards reform. “I have spent most of my 40-year criminal justice career investigating serious crime,” wrote Harding. “I took hundreds of felony cases to state and federal courts. I never lost a single one. I thought I was a ‘cutting edge’ investigator, always doing it the right way. I now know I was wrong.”

The Sheriff went on to detail how work by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Innocence Project, law professor Jon Gould, and former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro has convinced him of the need to adopt best practices intended not only to lessen the likelihood of wrongful conviction, but also to protect citizens from the actual perpetrators who remain free. Among these invaluable studies, it’s Garrett’s Convicting the Innocent to which Sheriff Harding recommends his colleagues first turn:

If you would like to know more about the research, I would recommend UVA Professor Brandon Garrett’s recently published book “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions go Wrong.” I have recently purchased a number of copies, at my own expense, to give to you and others that can affect change. If you will promise to read it, let me know, and I will gladly send you a copy.

Sheriff Harding closed by asking for support for the formation of a Justice Commission to review the available research and make recommendations for best practices in criminal justice. In a reference to the month’s dominant news story, he noted how a plane crash leads to investigations and reforms aimed at preventing a recurrence. “A wrongful conviction,” he wrote, “is our crashed plane.”

When Must We Be Alone And When Not?

The deeply rooted American notions of individualism and self-reliance are shadowed by complicated feelings on time spent alone. The thin line between solitude and loneliness serves as a fulcrum of sorts for two recent books by law professor Robert A. Ferguson that don’t immediately present themselves as having much common ground. In one, Ferguson investigates the nature of loneliness in American fiction, while in the other he gives us a humanistic understanding of our massive, out-of-control punishment regime. Solitary confinement figures prominently in the latter, as it does in American prisons, and so we asked Ferguson to help us connect the analysis of isolation running through these two books. His response is below.

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“We live as we dream—alone,” Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness. The comment is famous because more complicated than it first appears. When we dream, we do so in a social milieu that we think is real even though we are by ourselves. No life is complete without its attachments. Pundits and scholars respond by trying to define what percentage of ourselves are ours and what percentage comes from the cohort to which we belong.

My own recent books from Harvard University Press, Alone in America: The Stories That Matter (2013) and Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment (2014) wrestle with these questions from opposite directions. The first takes up the startling fact that a quarter of the people in the United States now live alone—an unprecedented situation fueled by the collapse of families, technological capacity, a country on the move, and the attritions in existence. This book targets a painful psychological truth: most people will admit to almost anything before revealing that they are lonely.

The second book, Inferno, gives considerable space to the problem of solitary confinement or enforced isolation. Current debate over the punitive impulse in our criminal justice system has led reporters and legal experts to deplore what Jeremy Bentham proved in The Rationale of Punishment as early as 1830: namely that enforced isolation causes psychological damage when prolonged. Already in 1830, “the best authorities” knew that solitary confinement causes “madness, despair, or more commonly a stupid apathy.”

This lesson is one we have been slow to learn. Even those protesting against the practice of solitary confinement in prisons today can ignore the established fact. For example, the columnist David Brooks, writing on March 7, 2014 for the New York Times, says “some prisoners who’ve been in solitary confinement are scarcely affected by it.” Scarcely? Everyone is affected by enforced solitude, and the danger grows as we keep more than 100,000 inmates in solitary confinement for months and even years on end, a punishment that most liberal democracies do not use or allow.