In fact, during the 1980s every single U.S. state had some kind of furlough program. California ran a furlough program, which had also been in operation years earlier under Governor Ronald Reagan. After a prisoner on furlough committed a murder, Reagan defended the program, saying, “More than 20,000 already have these passes, and this was the only case of this kind, the only murder.” Reagan even bragged about California “leading the nation in rehabilitation. . . . Obviously you can’t be perfect.”
Any criminal justice system imposes costs not just on the perpetrators of crime but on their friends, family, and loved ones. Those costs are particularly acute for children who suffer trauma from absent parental figures. In a social context in which voters and the state understand criminals to disproportionately come from certain areas and segments of society, the vast majority of people can safely ignore those costs, because they are borne by those out of view. A politician can say “get tough on crime,” and the majority of voters won’t worry that it’s their neighbor’s kid who’s going to grow up without a father because he’s doing ten years.
Crime in America is associated with the lower classes, the ghetto, the others, the Colony. But what would the politics of crime look like in a place where people worried not only about victimization but also about the costs of overly punitive policing and prosecution? What kind of justice system would exist in a setting in which each member of society were actually valued as a full human with tremendous potential, even if he or she committed a crime, or hurt someone, or broke the community’s norms and were held accountable? What would it look like to have a system where, behind the veil of ignorance, every member had an equal chance to end up as perpetrator or victim? What would a criminal justice system for the elite look like? How would people with power and privilege and resources and influence choose to collectively police themselves if given the ability?
WE DON’T HAVE TO speculate; hundreds of examples are operating right now across every single state of the union.
I speak, of course, of elite four-year colleges and universities, public and private. I was fortunate enough to attend one of them, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, but the same basic factors apply everywhere from the University of Southern California to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to New York University.
All these schools and hundreds of others draw their student bodies disproportionately from upper echelons of society, and they are places where parents and administrators outright expect students to engage in illicit behaviors.
Almost all campuses have some kind of internal justice system, composed of both campus police and extensive disciplinary codes and procedures for adjudication, appeal, and punishment. When I was eighteen, I found the legal status of the Brown campus police deeply unclear: Were they just private security guards with a fancier name? Did they have the cover of law? I recall seeing them once or twice actually placing someone under arrest and wondering, Can they do that?
The answer is yes. Brown University’s department of public safety “is a fully-accredited police department,” whose eighty-five members are “licensed as RI Special Police Officers” and “are authorized to enforce state statutes and university rules and regulations.”
But having had interactions with both the Brown University Police and the actual Providence Police, I can tell you why we used to call Brown cops “Four Point Nines”: because they weren’t quite Five-Oh.
I remember one night during the glorious week between the end of finals and commencement weekend, when a small group of students had stuck around to work odd jobs or (in my case) rehearse for plays that would be performed during the big weekend when the campus lights up with the prideful glow of thousands of parents.
Having no studying to do or classes to attend, we devoted the evenings to partying—in this case, in a cinder block suite in a dorm building on campus that had (somewhat famously) been designed in the late 1960s during waves of campus unrest to be efficiently penetrated by cops if the situation called for it. Since the building was largely unoccupied, we’d spread our stuff throughout the suite. Sitting on the grungy-carpeted floor of the common room, we passed around a pipe with a stoner pal in town visiting from another school, getting high and blasting vintage hip hop.
Suddenly and silently a Brown police officer appeared in the room. The music was loud, and we were so stoned, I have no idea how long he was standing there before we noticed him. The air was so thick with pot smoke—it must’ve made his eyes water. Eventually we realized he was there, and we looked up. I think it was my stoner friend who had the pipe in his hand, mid-pull.
The cop was young, white, and fresh faced. There was a long pregnant pause, as the room fell silent but for the song on the stereo.
“Hey,” he finally said, “is that Eric B. and Rakim?”
“Yup,” my friend said.
“Love this album,” he said.
We all nodded in vigorous agreement.
“We’re just going through the dorms, since it’s commencement week, making sure everything’s cool. You guys cool?”
“We’re cool.”
“Okay, have a good night.” And he was gone.
A moment of hysterical laughter and deep breaths, and then back to illicit activity and foolish dorm room conversation.
It is possible, I suppose, that had we been in off-campus housing and had a Providence cop shown up on a call only to encounter us smoking pot in the living room, he would’ve done the same thing. I mean, cops do look the other way on occasion. Their authority in the moment of interaction is near-absolute: they can be merciful or vengeful. But I’d bet anything that things would’ve turned out quite a bit differently.