Irony floods DA’s speech on prisons
When he was growing up in Southern California, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen never set foot in a German car. No Volkswagen, no BMW, no Mercedes.
“Nazi cars,” his father called them, and he had reason for his dislike: Rosen’s father and grandmother survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany and two Nazi slave camps in Poland.
This summer, the 48-yearold DA visited Germany as part of a criminal justice reform group inspecting German prisons, considered far more progressive than ours.
When he rented a car in Berlin to drive the 200 or so miles to the Bergen-Belsen camp, the rental company gave him a Mercedes wagon. The Ford subcompact he had requested wasn’t available.
Rosen described his experiences last Wednesday in an understated but powerful speech before the downtown San Jose Rotary Club. A stream of cold irony ran through his words.
Here was an elected DA pushing for more modest incarceration. Here was an ex-homicide prosecutor standing in a photo with a murderer who served 19 years in prison (second-degree, but still).
Here was an observant Jew talking of what he learned about prisons in a country that persecuted his family and killed millions of his people.
The meat of the DA’s speech dealt with the statistics of criminal reform. California spends $9 billion a year on prisons. For African-American men who drop out of high school, 68 percent will go to prison before they’re 30.
Lower murder rate
In Germany, meanwhile, the murder rate is only one-sixth as high as in America, and the incarceration rate is one-tenth as high.
In Germany, inmates wear their own clothing and can cook their own meals. They’re allowed temporary leaves to visit families. The German constitution enshrines “human dignity” as its first priority.
As he flashed slides showing graphs of incarceration rates, Rosen might have passed for a professor of criminal justice. Then he returned to the Mercedes, his personal story.
Ditching the car’s Germanlanguage navigation system for his iPhone, Rosen drove to Bergen-Belsen, where his father and grandmother were held from January to April 1945.
With 60,000 people crammed into one-fifth of a square mile, Bergen-Belsen was a death camp without gas chambers: Afflicted by typhus, typhoid and starvation, 10,000 died after liberation.
Rosen was shown around the camp by Dr. Bernard Horstmann, its historian and chief archivist. He saw the names of his father and grandmother in the record of survivors. He said a Jewish prayer, Kaddish, for the murdered.
The DA’s understatement underscored the horror. But Rosen was also drawing parallels with a country that has instituted a more humane system of prison than our own.
“I didn’t travel to Germany to forgive or forget, and I did neither,” Rosen said. “What I experienced in Germany … reminded me that the world may be broken, but it can be repaired. We are all created with human dignity.”