German Joys

German Prisons Praised (Except for the Fixierung)

Frances Crook, Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform (and English prisoners'-rights organization) visits two prisons in Germany and files this report in her blog. Overall, she finds German prisons impressively orderly and humane, except for the Fixierung (g):

I spent a day in Tegel prison in Berlin, which is the biggest prison in Germany holding 1,600 adult men. It has a budget of 44 million Euros, approximately double that of a similar prison in the UK, and it showed. The huge difference was the number of specialist staff, some translated as “social therapists”, psychologists and social workers based on every landing. The prison is divided into 6 separate jails, with a governor running each as a separate entity, with the overall governor concentrating, as he explained to me, on representing the prison to the outside world. 

I wanted to visit Tegel because it has a reputation for industrial production. The workshops achieve a 37 hour week and the prisoners undergo proper apprenticeships and are paid the same rate as in the community, earning around 300 Euros a month.

...

Tegel also has a therapeutic wing that has 195 places. There were no spy holes into the cells, and when I asked how they carried out surveillance on prisoners in their cells, the staff looked confused – why would they invade privacy like that? The phones are not tapped. The wing was not the most cheerful in décor; it was clean but painted in dull colours. But there were 20 therapists who each worked intensively with a small group of long term prisoners.

Prisoners are unlocked at 6.30 in the morning and normally locked up at about 8pm. They have televisions but have to have them sent in or pay for them.

I was told that prison officers in Germany have to complete school, have worked for a few years and then they have to undergo two years training. In contrast to our prison officers that are not required to have a single GCSE and have only a few weeks training. Managers told me that their philosophy was based on the idea that all staff, not just therapists, should be models for prisoners.

...

[In a youth detention facility she visited], the most noticeable thing was how physically fit and articulate the young people were. They were all tall, looked as though they got decent food and exercise, and engaged in conversation with us, even trying out school English. Such a contrast to some of the poor little things I have seen in English, and Scottish, prisons. Generations of poverty in the UK have taken their toll and I am not sure things have improved much since Lord Kitchener complained about the health of his conscripts a century ago.

But, I was shocked at the Fixierung. This is a separate room, similar to our segregation cells, but with metal handcuffs in the floor that chain the prisoner in a cruciform on the stone floor. We were told that it has last been used in August when a young man was chained up for five and a half hours. There was an open hole in the floor where they could relieve themselves if they were unchained to do this, otherwise they would have to soil themselves. We were told a member of staff sits with them. There was some confusion about whether this treatment was a punishment, a suicide prevention technique or to deal with someone who was violent. I think my facial expression on seeing this gave away my horror.

Crook's report highlights one of the positive sides of Germany's lavish and comprehensive civil-service system. Any job working full-time for the state generally requires years of training, and in return promises a respectable salary; generous overtime, vacation, and pension rights; and at least some degree of Amtscharisma -- that undefinable je ne sais quoi of social prestige that accompanies working for the state in continental countries.* Because you have to jump through hoops to become a prison guard -- and occupy a respected, secure position once you do -- the standards of professionalism at German prisons tend to be unusually high. Especially compared to countries -- such as the UK or the US -- that don't have such a detailed civil-service system.

[H/T JCW of Obscene Desserts]

Shiny Happy* Amis Splitting Up

Sandra Tsing Loh looks at New and Old World matrimonial customs:

Andrew J. Cherlin [makes a comparison] in his scrupulously argued Marriage-Go-Round: compared with our western European counterparts, Americans are far more credulous about marriage. In World Values Surveys taken at the turn of the millennium, fewer Americans agreed with the statement “Marriage is an outdated institution” than citizens of any other Western country surveyed (compare the U.S.’s tiny 10 percent with France’s 36 percent). We are also more religious—more Americans (60 percent) say they attend religious services once a month than do the Vatican-centric Italians (54 percent) or, no surprise, the laissez-faire French (12 percent). At the same time, Americans endure the highest divorce rate in the Western world. In short, although we say we love religion and marriage, Cherlin notes, “religious Americans are more likely to divorce than secular Swedes.”

Cherlin believes the reason for this paradox is that Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to a Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a “divorce culture,” it may be partly because we are a “marriage culture,” since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe.

You could call 3/4 saying 'marriage is 4evah' in addition to the highest divorce rate in the Western world a 'Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness', or you could call it something less flattering. To me, it's (1) the desire to claim allegiance to a media-sculpted paradigm of respectable middle-class normality, bumping up against (2) the real world. The telling statistic is not that so many Americans get divorced (divorce rates are notoriously hard to measure), but that 3/4 of them endorse the marriage is for life principle (while, of course, getting divorced and saying you should leave an unhappy marriage). 

This all makes no sense, except from within a paradigm of slap-happy, reality-denying American optimism. (Actually, it still doesn't make sense even then.) When asked what they think about marriage, Americans respond with well-scrubbed, inoffensively optimistic truisms, without stopping to think about the social reality they confront every day. Or with their own personal conduct or life history, for that matter. You can't really even call it hypocrisy, because hypocrisy implies a conscious strategy. Many Americans seem to be just blind. They don't even seem to recognize the absurdity of endorsing 'marriage is for life' along with 'you should leave unhappy marriages', because...er, all marriages are happy?

I never really understood just how incoherent and unserious this aspect of the American worldview was until I moved to Europe. Now I do, and I must confess: it drives me batshit. As it does Barbara Ehrenreich.

These Colors Do Bow

This story by Politico gives a fine insight into Obama's approach to diplomacy, which involves treating the customs of other nations with respect. Obama, for instance, bowed deeply to Emperor Akihito of Japan, and shook hands with various heads of state whom he may not agree with.

Disgraced ex-Vice President Cheney was having none of it:

 "There is no reason for an American president to bow to anyone. Our friends and allies don't expect it, and our enemies see it as a sign of weakness."

So fatuous, on so many levels:

First, how is a polite ten-second bow, when called for by protocol, a sign of weakness? Does Cheney imagine Hugo Chavez crouching behind a shoji screen, waiting for just the right moment to shove a garrote up the First Rectum? 

Second, Cheney fails to mention that his former boss (in the technical sense, at least) literally held hands with other Oriental despots. Not that there was anything wrong with that!

Third, the deepest fatuity is that Cheney's remark perpetuates a theme of so many Bush Administration foreign-policy statements and actions, which raised the suspicion that foreign policy was being made in such a way as to flatter the wrench-wielding macho prejudices of yahoos back home. As a lodestar for successful presidential diplomacy, 'We don't bow to nobody' is on about the same level as 'Don't Tread on Me' and 'These Colors Don't Run'.

George Bernard Shaw once defined a barbarian as someone who "thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." Good to know that the American barbarians, for the time being, can only posture on the sidelines.

Murder Survivors Speak in their Own Words

In the wake of the execution of John A. Muhammad for a 2002 cross-country murder spree, the Washington Post reports on murder victims' relatives who have witnessed the execution of the person who killed their family members:

The same note of ambivalence is what you tend to hear from other victims' relatives who've been there -- watching with tragic eyes from behind the glass in the lonely little witness room, where all is not resolved. They feel better. A little. Not much. It's not the better they thought they would feel. They can hardly explain why. They exit the room with most of the ache they carried in.

"It's not like, 'Whoopee!' " says Dale Alexander. "It's not like a ballgame, we won, home run."

Her daughter, Lisa Alexander Crider, 23, the mother of a 5-year-old boy, was raped and shot in the face with a shotgun on the banks of the James River on Mother's Day 1997. The killer, Brandon W. Hedrick, reportedly an acquaintance, was executed in the electric chair in 2006.

"It helped to see the completion," Alexander says. "It helped to a degree."

Smith and one of his sisters were the first in modern Virginia history to make that trip -- the very first to accept the commonwealth's invitation to victims' relatives to be in the audience for the last act.

What did he expect? He's still not certain. Something . . . more, after all the grief and loss and lawyers. A bang, not a whimper.

"If I had to compare it with the murder of my father, it was a very easy and peaceful death for Willie Turner," Smith says.

This article highlights several interesting differences in the way criminal justice is discussed in the U.S. and Europe:

• First, the reporter sees the experiences of the surviving relatives as interesting and newsworthy. The survivors, for their part, are willing to talk to a reporter and share their stories with millions of strangers.
• The survivors are not condescended to or denounced for their desire to see their family member's killer executed. They are not called 'barbaric' or 'primitive' or 'vengeance-obsessed' or 'uncivilized'. The reporter notes that many survivors do not want to see their family members' murderer executed, but doesn't treat either view as better or worse.
• The interview subjects are allowed to speak for themselves, in their own words. Grammatical mistakes, if present, are included.
• Perhaps most importantly, the reporter neither explicitly nor implicitly takes sides. He doesn't inject his own personality or views into the reporting by using loaded, moralizing language or drawing historical comparisons to witch hunts or human sacrifice.

Overall, what we see is a style of reporting in which support for capital punishment is seen as a legitimate viewpoint, and people who hold this viewpoint are treated with respect.

I trust that the contrast between this article and most European reporting about the death penalty in the United States will be quite clear to my readers.

Botched Execution Affidavit

For professional reasons, I'm interested in European coverage of capital punishment in the U.S. One of the strangest documents I'll be adding to the collection is this Spanish translation of an affidavit sworn by Romell Broom, an Ohio death row inmate whose execution was postponed after prison staff unsuccessfully probed 18 different locations on his body to try to find a suitable vein for the lethal injection chemicals. Here it is, courtesy of the Spanish newspaper El Pais. The English original can be found here (.pdf).

Broom's execution has been postponed indefinitely to consider appeals he has filed based on the botched execution.

My TV Pick for Tonight

...is Arte's Das Gesetz von Las Vegas. This is a series of five two-hour documentaries about real criminal cases in Las Vegas. I watched the fourth installment online (HT A.M.; thanks for the links!) and was deeply impressed. The fifth and final installment of this series airs tonight at 20:40, and I strongly recommend it. The fourth episode involved the murder trial of De Rac Hanley, a 71-year-old alcoholic living in public housing for senior citizens. For reasons that are never really made clear, Hanley viciously stabbed one of his neighbors to death in Hanley's own apartment. The victim  a 70-year-old man who, Hanley claims, had made sexual advances toward him. Hanley is put on trial in Clark County, Nevada for murder.

He is assigned two public defenders (Pflichtverteidiger, lawyers who work for an agency that represents indigent clients) from the local Public Defender (PD) office, and is prosecuted by two relatively young prosecutors. We see both sides preparing for the case: tracking down witnesses, lining up testimony from pathologists and psychologists, and honing their trial strategy. The defense lawyers travel quite a bit to track down people who might be able to shed light on Hanley's history and state of mind. Not only do they learn quite a bit about him, they also bring him back into touch with his estranged wife and daughter, who attend most of the trial. We see photos of Hanley in better days, when he cut a dashing figure as an Irish immigrant with a taste for adventure. Injuries, and the addiction to alcohol and painkillers that developed out of them, laid him low. We learn much less about the victim, but not for lack of trying; nobody can find any of his living relatives. The last part of the film traces Hanley's trial to its sobering conclusion. The film was fascinating, funny, and quite moving at times.

Three things make this series unusual, and really interesting:

1. The filmmakers seem to have gotten pretty much unlimited access from all participants. We learn everybody's real name, and accompany camera crews into the houses of victims' relatives, alcoholics living in shelters, and respectable middle-class witnesses. We also see the prosecution and defense teams preparing their strategies. We are even permitted to see the defense lawyers conferring with their own client before trial, and deciding whether he should take the witness stand. As any lawyer knows, these conversations are strictly protected by the attorney-client privilege; seeing them onscreen is an unheard-of privilege for outsiders. The filmmakers must have gotten consent from dozens of people to get this level of access.
2. We see the defense and the prosecution in about equal measure. The prosecutors have their own problems to deal with: recalcitrant witnesses, potential weaknesses in their case, sympathy factors, etc. The public defenders are very good. Judging from the morale, the amount of resources, and the skill of the courtroom presentation, the Clark County PD's office would seem to be doing an excellent job.
3. Related to number 2, the documentary doesn't take sides; it's almost Wiseman-like in its neutrality. The prosecutors aren't portrayed as vengeance-driven ogres, as is usually the case in European documentaries about the American criminal justice system. Nor is the defendant portrayed as a misunderstood victim of circumstances. Nor is the crime he committed glossed over as if it were irrelevant: we see photos of the crime scene, which are not for the faint of heart. Most importantly, there is no voice-over, telling us what to think about what we've seen, helping us fit it all into the predictable, stuffy world-view of European cultural elites. The directory, Rémy Burkel, simply allows the viewer to make up his or her mind about the case. Europeans will surely be surprised by much of what they see, but no narrator takes their hand and patiently instructs them as to why they should disapprove of it. For this blessed omission alone, Burkel deserves a shower of accolades

Well, if I haven't convinced you yet, at least I've done my best. Arte, to their eternal credit, seems to have put together a bunch of online special features, including a 'hypervideo' of the series that gives you extra access to background information. If you do watch the show, tell me what you thought of it in comments, please. 

The Non-Terrifying Truth

Across the world, there are lots of countries whose histories are marked by (1) shadowy conspiracies for power; and/or (2) cult of personality mass-movements in which the entire population was required to adore the Great Leader, and plenty did so quite voluntarily. 

Here's one of Hammel's Golden Rules of intercultural interaction. People from such countries are likely to get America wrong, because they assume that Americans have a similar history and a similar habitus. We're not talking about garden-variety anti-Americanism here; in fact, many of these people are quite pro-American. They just think that conspiracies and cults of personality are universals of human nature, and see them everywhere. Countless Germans wrung their hands about how Obama, the all-powerful soul-sorcerer, might use his uncanny powers of rhetoric to psychologically enslave Americans, build a cult of personality, and install himself as President-for-Life. I met dozens of these people, many of them quite well-educated. A healthy number of Europeans also has bought into various 9/11 conspiracy theories.

And now comes Orly Taitz, a dentist/lawyer from California-by-way-of-Moldova who has been filing lawsuits claiming that Obama is an 'usurper' and 'impostor' because he wasn't born in the U.S., and is therefore not eligible to be President. This is the woman whose accent and, er, striking appearance led Jon Stewart to dub her the 'lost Gabor sister.' Not that I have anything against Moldovans -- or that American doesn't also produce its own fair share of nutcases -- but I can't help noting that every practically every word Taitz says says confirms my thesis:

 [N]o conversation with Taitz is complete without a reference to the "600" camps that she believes FEMA has constructed to keep dissident citizens corralled. FEMA camps are only one of her anxieties. Communist and totalitarian regimes are another. "It is extremely important to ensure that the people of this country don't lose their freedoms, because if they do, this country will turn into a dictatorship, just like the communist Soviet Union, just like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea."

...

But repressive regimes are a conversational well into which she keeps dipping. In her early 20s, Taitz, who says she is of Jewish heritage, emigrated to Israel and lived there for several years. The man who would become her husband, visiting from the United States, asked her to marry him on their second date, something that didn't surprise her -- she says, blushing -- because "he wasn't the first one" who had asked. Some observers believe the animating cause of her crusade is an anti-Muslim bias. She disagrees, saying "I have nothing against any religion." But some of her remarks help fuel such criticisms, as when she mentions hearing rumors of a purported video in which "Obama has made statements that were anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and very pro-Palestinian, pro-Arabic." She says she also heard an Internet rumor that the royal family of Saudi Arabia helped support Obama's education. "I'm questioning: Are there any strings attached? I don't know."

Ultimately, her rhetoric is laced with a suspicion that Obama may be an agent for a foreign power, a modern Manchurian candidate. This is why she wants not only his vital records but his academic ones. "Would you be willing to go with me to Obama and ask him . . . [to] release all of the proper records, your school records, your enrollment records from all those college applications, and financial aid records, which would show whether he was enrolled as a foreign exchange student from Indonesia or Kenya?"

And so on, and so on. Of course, she finds plenty of Americans to follow her down this primrose path, including her legal assistant, a disbarred lawyer who calls himself an 'anarchist'.

"How well you do your work . . . [is] the only measure of human value."*

Europeans have soft, cuddly, teddy-bear like Christian Democratic parties who begin gibbering 'social' promises every time someone says 'boo' to them. The Brits, for their part, have the Tories, whose current party leader bicycles to work, for God's sake. Even the so-called 'liberal' parties just want a little teeny bit of change to the tax code and a wee smidgen less bureaucracy.

Weak tea indeed to red-blooded Americans**! When Europe's so-called 'conservatives' fly across the Atlantic to commune with their U.S. brethren, they suddenly realize they're not in Nantes anymore. Ayn Rand has a lot to do with this. You can't understand America without understanding the suburbs, and you can't understand the suburbs without understanding Ayn Rand, whose executive-suite Nietzscheanism still sells like hotcakes there. Jonathan Chait, reviewing two new biographies of this curious human, drops some objectivist science:

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left.... Rand ... argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution--that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous--and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

Most of her books have, alas, been translated into German (g). Not to fear, though -- most of them, in a testament to the good sense of the German consumer, are out of print!

* A quote from Rand, of course. See how simple it is to measure human dignity, once you strip away all the quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo?

** Note slide 35!

German Politicians and the Internet

An American journalist asks me the following question: "Why do you think the Germans, and in particular the German parties, have been so slow on the uptake regarding online campaigning? And do you have any sense of how politics in other countries on the Continent has behaved?"

Here's my rapid-response, off-the-cuff answer:

 

·      First of all, Germans as a whole are much less Internet-oriented than Americans. I’d say the level of general sophistication about the Internet in Germany is right now where it was in about 2002 in the United States. I have intelligent, well-educated city-dweller friends who still feel no need to have an Internet connection at home. In fact, I’ve heard from many Germans that they actively prefer not to use the Internet during their leisure time, because they associate it with work, and Germans like to preserve a strict work-private life separation. If you want to discuss politics, you do it face-to-face at your stammtisch, among your friends or colleagues.

· Don’t forget that German society is demographically older than the U.S. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that older people don’t like them newfangled computers.

· German political campaigns are much more heavily publicly financed than U.S. political campaigns, so fundraising is not a big priority here. The notion of giving your own private money to a political campaign seems very odd to most Germans. (Also, Germans have far fewer credit cards than Americans, and are very wary of sharing their bank data on the Internet.) German political campaigning is also much more party-based, as opposed to individual- and personality-oriented. It’s much less exciting to donate money to a generic party than to a particular candidate you happen to like.

· German newspapers, radio, and TV still have very large circulations and influence. If a political party wants to get its message out, it still thinks in terms of a printed editorial in a newspaper or a speech. The number of Germans who get their news from newspapers, as opposed to the Internet, is still much higher than it is in the U.S. Further, Germans tend to distrust the Internet as a news source. At a newspaper, at least, the political reporting and commentary have been vetted by educated people, and are therefore more reliable (or so goes this line of thinking).

· German copyright laws are much stricter (and more willingly obeyed) than the U.S., and large media concerns are more protective of their intellectual property. This makes it hard to share and post segments of TV shows or political commentary, since most German politics and talk shows are not embeddable, and much political commentary is printed in newspapers and never put online.

· Sophisticated, well-run blogs such as Talkingpointsmemo or Washington Monthly or Andrew Sullivan don’t exist in Germany. Much of the online political commentary you find is from individuals, who may be highly idiosyncratic or one-issue oriented or both.

· German politicians are not internet-savvy. With a few notable exceptions, their websites and blogs are generally afterthoughts, and consist mostly of speeches or press-releases converted hastily into digital form. After all, they think, what’s the use of putting a lot of effort into an Internet site, when (1) the really important people don’t rely on the Internet for news; (2) the majority of visitors to your website are probably going to vote for you anyway; and (3) fundraising isn’t very important?

 

What say you, gentle readers?

Kimmelmann on Tatort

Michael Kimmelmann of the New York Times takes on Tatort:

Consider the show a kind of microcosm of the German Federal Republic. Its producers proudly tout it that way. Each “Tatort” makes something of its regional roots, with actors speaking in local accents, solving crimes based on local imbroglios; and Germans talk about their favorite “Tatort” roughly the way they do about their local soccer teams. The “Tatort” from Münster plays for laughs. In Konstanz, a green swath of the country, the “Tatort” detectives often crack environmental cases. Hamburg stars a hunky, James Bond-like Turkish detective who works alone; Hanover, a beautiful, clever female detective, also a loner.

You could say it’s “CSI,” regionally speaking, but it’s too German to be confused with that American franchise, meaning not slick, far less bloody and with an eye toward spicy headlines.

...

“[Schimanski] was a strong character, active, not apologetic or careful,” [Rosemarie Wintgen, producer of the Berlin Tatort] said. “He was not how German men acted but how, in secret, they wanted to think of themselves.”

When presented with that thought during a break in filming a new episode here recently, [Berlin Tatort stars] Mr. Aljinovic and Mr. Raacke pondered and then somewhat reservedly agreed. “That was a while ago,” Mr. Raacke said, perhaps feeling a little competitive with a predecessor whom even now no one here seems to have forgotten. Over the course of more than 700 episodes “Tatort” has featured 70 detectives. There are common threads: They’re never Sherlock Holmes. They’re almost invariably glum, gloomy characters, mired in bad relationships or alone — in the end, ordinary people, which is how a country, democratic to a fault, tends to like its stars. In that respect too “Tatort” is notably German.

Or as Ms. Wintgen put it: “Its detectives stand for the dreams of the people. The plain-looking guy or the middle-aged blonde who in the end solves all of life’s problems and finds the murderer.

“That’s our kind of hero.”

I quite like Kimmelmann's work. Considering the space constraints he works with, he usually manages to convey a real sense of German life and the German psyche, and I'd say this piece is a good example of that.

There are two additional features of Tatort that I might have mentioned.

First, as I've noted before here and here, Tatort scripts go through the German public-broadcasting political-correctness approval procedure, which means they almost always portray the suspects as victims of broader social forces, not as fully responsible individual evildoers. According to my sources, people who write Tatort scripts perceive themselves as having a responsibility to edify the broad population as to what they consider to be the true causes of crime (discrimination, social dysfunction, mental illness, extortion, etc.), and blunt the Bild-reading masses' instinct for revenge. Nothing could be further from the mentality of CSI or 24.

Second, the basic message of Tatort is, as Feridan Zaimoglu recently put it in a review of a Tatort episode in Die Zeit, 'jeder hat Dreck am stecken' -- everyone has a dirty secret to hide. All of the people who seem 'ordinary' at the beginning of the episode are shown to be secretly snorting something in the backroom, screwing their secretary, stalking co-workers or celebrities, cooking the books, beating their partners, or hiding a shameful past and/or mental illness. And if they're not themselves doing the screwing over or screwing up, they're looking the other way while other people do it.

Now, you might object that you would expect a show about murders to highlight the darker side of human nature, but that's not what's happening here. As Zaimoglu aptly put it, jeder (everyone) hat Dreck am stecken. Even the people who turn out innocent of the murder are usually guilty of some other sordid misdeed. If you watch a few episodes of Tatort, you will come away with the impression that most Germans are cynical, cowardly, dishonest, sniveling neurotics who spend most of their waking hours -- when not engaged in sordid misdeeds -- throwing screaming tantrums, drinking themselves senseless, or meandering alone along waterfronts / in parks, stewing in self-pity.

If you can imagine millions of Germans watching this show every weekend and not seeing anything particularly exceptional about its portrayal of society, you will have gained a deep insight into the German psyche.