Here are the effects of our lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key culture.

Listening to Oakland
The city is a stark example of how tough laws are putting more seasoned criminals on the streets of California.

Fated to live in the sunset shadows of San Francisco, Oakland has often been called an underdog town, but it's an underdog with a growl. People with money live in its hills, but Oakland, at heart, is a tough waterfront place, an unflinching antihero of a city that has earned its scars and the right to be suspicious.

Maybe this put-upon feeling is a black thing. Thirty-five percent of Oakland's residents, a slight plurality, are African American, and the political stew boils. It's not for nothing that Oakland, in its struggle for social justice, gave birth to the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s and created the Ebonics language mess in 1996. The struggle continues now amid failing, bankrupt schools, a bustling crack trade and trouble with rogue cops. Yet today, those problems have been compounded by a newer misery—the troubled and troublesome class of Oakland citizens who, largely because of the get-tough laws that state and federal lawmakers adopted in the 1980s, are chronically cycled through jails and prisons and dumped back on the streets.

State law requires the return of parolees to the county of their last residence. Given $200 and a one-way bus pass, they gravitate toward familiar surroundings. They have made Oakland the ex-con capital of California.

One of every 14 adult males in Oakland today is on active parole or probation, with an estimated total of 11,400 parolees and probationers in the city. Those numbers rose quietly through the 1990s, then burst into public view last year as officials searched for reasons the city's homicide rate, after years of decline, jumped abruptly, to 113 from 87 in 2001. If current trends hold, just as many murders will occur this year. Many are linked to drug disputes or old grudges. Parolees or probationers, or others with felony records, were involved in most of the killings, either as murderers or victims, police say.
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