Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

Please note that these are sometimes overlapping categories. For the purpose of this editorial, though, we’ll treat them separately.

There were two news items from last week I thought were noteworthy, mainly because they were footnotes to larger stories. One involved the producer of risqué videos. The other concerns the passing of a California inmate whose most infamous crime took place over 44 years ago.

What’s the difference between a federal judge and God?

Joe Francis is a very successful young man. At 34, he pulls in an estimated $29 million per year producing and selling the “Girls Gone Wild” video series. For those who have been in a coma for the last ten years or so, “Girls Gone Wild” is a kind of crossover between a travelogue and soft-core porn. The GGW crews deploy to vacation spots where students on Spring Break and other holidays congregate to get hammered. Their subjects, or the women at least, are encouraged to get naked and do things their parents probably wouldn’t approve of while the GGW cameras are rolling. Francis and Co. then edit these clips and sell them via TV and the Internet.

While Spring Break is supposed to be a college student activity, some younger folks get in on the fun, too, and it’s difficult to tell the difference between a 16-year-old hottie and one that is 19. GGW supposedly collects model releases and verifies ages, but you know how that stuff goes. Some underage girls whose parents had enough money to hire lawyers got into the final production version, and now Mr. Francis’ attorneys are trying to preserve some of the proceeds from the plaintiffs, all under the supervision of the federal court. Last week, the negotiations went south, and the Honorable Richard Smoak, the sitting judge in Pensacola, FL, found Francis in contempt and ordered him into custody.

Francis responded by saying, “It is a case of a judge gone wild,” and he refused to appear before the court or surrender to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Ah, bad move, Joe. Federal judges are some of the most powerful people on earth. First, they are appointed for life, and it literally takes an act of Congress to fire them. Congress has done that a few times, but in recent years it’s taken a felony conviction and the ironic situation of a fully empowered judge sitting in federal prison to make it happen. If a federal judge holds you in contempt, he can keep you in jail close to indefinitely, or at least until you decide to do what he wants you to do. He also has the United States Marshals Service at his bidding. If a federal judge tells the U.S. Marshal in his district to go find someone and bring them before the court, the marshals have pretty much carte blanche to do whatever it takes to haul that person in, and marshals can be both persuasive and tenacious people. Venturing outside of U.S. borders to enforce the orders of the court is not unheard of.

Wherever Joe is laying low, he should hope he chose well. Given the kind of work I’m doing now, I’m a big fan of the First Amendment, and even though “Girls Gone Wild” isn’t my kind of entertainment, it’s okay with me if he produces it. If he did get underage girls involved (and for the record, that isn’t okay with me), then he needs to be a lot more careful. But Joe’s most immediate problem is to come up with some way to make nice on Judge Smoak. Otherwise, Joe’s franchise might be on hiatus for a few years.

By the way, the answer to the question at the top of this section is “God doesn’t think he’s a federal judge.”

Really Bad People

Jimmy Lee Smith died last week. He was 76 years old. His death went mostly unnoticed, because he hadn’t done anything especially remarkable in a while. But in 1963, Jimmy and his accomplice, Gregory Powell, ambushed and kidnapped two Los Angeles police officers named Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger. Campbell was shot five times in an onion field near Bakersfield. Hettinger escaped and returned to duty, but was eventually forced to resign over some incidents that we would today recognize as evidence of PTSD and survivor’s guilt. Joseph Wambaugh chronicled the incident in his book The Onion Field, which was later made into a movie starring some then-unknown actors named James Woods, John Savage, Ted Danson and Christopher Lloyd. Wambaugh retained a great deal of creative control over the movie, and chose the actors in large part because they resembled the people they were playing. That movie came out when I was a rookie police officer, and I still think it should be required viewing for every cop in America.

Jimmy Lee Smith was a bad guy before he ever met Powell and started down the path that led to the onion field. He had been in and out of prison all his life, and he would continue that pattern. He had been paroled several times since he was sent to San Quentin for his involvement in Ian Campbell’s murder, but he always violated parole and got sent back. When he died, he was in the custody of the LA County Sheriff’s Department pending a hearing on yet another parole violation.

Like many cops and ex-cops, I’m hoping that there is an especially unpleasant spot in hell for Mr. Smith, and I won’t mourn him for a second. But I mention him today because he exemplifies the fault in a commonly-held criminological theory: that all offenders can be rehabilitated. In particular, there’s a belief called the “aging-out process,” where the motivation for committing crime is gradually overcome by the burden of the consequences. Sooner or later - typically, around age 30 - the offender takes a look around and decides that his life sucks. He then makes an effort to go straight in the hopes of enjoying some normalcy for the rest of his days. Sometimes this actually happens, but it’s often too late for the offender, because he is either serving a sentence that is going to keep him inside until he is feeble, or he lacks the basic life skills to stay out of trouble. But most everyone goes straight eventually, if for no other reason than it takes real effort to maintain the lifestyle of a street criminal once you’re old enough for Medicare. Jimmy Lee Smith was an especially determined crook. Even at 76, he was getting into enough trouble to get arrested and thrown back into the box.

We spend a horrific amount of money every year, more than any nation on earth, towards keeping people in jail. A good portion of those people could be at least marginally productive if they were released from prison to be closely supervised, and this process would be far less costly than the $30,000 or so we fork over to keep them inside. Still, there will always be a fraction of the criminal population that are innate predators and victimizers, for whom no amount or type of effort is enough to reform them. For these folks, lock them up and forget about them. Imposing the death penalty would be surer (it does have the advantage of being 100% recidivism-proof), but there are too many ideological bumps in that road. Just warehouse these people, give them cable TV, exercise gear, or whatever it takes to keep them reasonably content and less likely to assault their corrections officers, and forsake any effort to rehabilitate them. Incapacitate them from creating any more victims, and be done with it.

A judge I knew was a believer in the basic goodness of most people, but he was a realist about the rest. He told me, “Some people are just no damn good and need to be locked up.” I can’t help but agree.