TWO YEARS AGO Oakland mayor Jerry Brown said that California prisons were nothing more than "postgraduate schools of crime." Now, with his expected campaign for state attorney general coming up in 2006, Brown is implementing policies that get people locked up for lesser crimes and longer periods of time.

Is Brown doing everything he can to make Oakland safer, or is he trying to toughen up his liberal record?

Late last year the mayor pushed through a plan to have Alameda County judges impose a 10 p.m. curfew on Oakland probationers convicted of violent or drug-related crimes. Curfews are sometimes a condition of parole, but this is reportedly the first time a city has sought curfews for its adult probationers.

The move is part of a series of tough-on-crime policies set in place with the mayor's support over the past few months, including a plan to get street-level drug dealers prosecuted in federal court, where they would face longer sentences than those issued by state courts, potentially served in prisons far from their homes and families.

These strategies are the latest phase in Oakland's violence prevention plan, initially developed in 2003 when homicides in the city reached an eight-year high. Early stages of the plan, eagerly promoted by the mayor, included community-based prevention strategies and increased services for prisoners and parolees – the kind of stuff liberals generally love.

But the recent components seem more like the work of a tough-talking conservative, an approach to crime that was also adopted by fellow Democrat and ill-fated former governor Gray Davis. The initiatives have drawn heated protest from community activists, who accuse Brown of trying to maneuver his way across the political spectrum and into state office.

As Oakland school board member Dan Siegel told the Bay Guardian, "He thinks he has the left sewn up. Everyone from the far left to the middle right will have to support him, because the Republicans will put forward someone even further to the right."

Brown spokesperson Gil Duran dismissed allegations of opportunism. "If you're the mayor of Oakland, you have to keep the streets safe," he told us. "That's your job. This year there will be fewer murders on the streets of Oakland." He described anti-curfew protesters as "out there in the stratosphere," scoffing that Brown "did more for the progressive cause before [the age of] 40 than all these fools put together."

Brown argues that the strategies are consistent with his long-term effort to reduce crime and violence in Oakland. In an e-mail to Critical Resistance, one of the main groups fighting the probationer curfew, Brown said the goal of the curfew is to "protect both the probationer and the community" and admonished activists for fighting a policy that "will reduce the number of young men dying on the streets of Oakland."

Oakland activists argue that tough-on-crime strategies will further destabilize the city's already fragmented low-income communities. "Punitive measures that make life harder for people will not make Oakland safer," Critical Resistance organizer Sitara Nieves told us.

In fact, she said, such measures will exacerbate already tense relationships between communities of color and the Oakland Police Department by increasing racial profiling and harassment. "Police already target people based on their race or their neighborhood. This just gives them one more tool to stop people."

Community organizers argue that Brown is basing his policies on faulty data, as well as flawed strategy. A Sonoma University study of juvenile curfews across California is one of several recent studies that call into question the assumption that curfews prevent crime.

While curfews "have been widely cited by policy makers as an effective tool for reducing youth crime," the study concludes, "there is no support for the hypothesis that jurisdictions with curfews experience lower crime levels, accelerated youth crime reduction, or lower rates of juvenile violent death than jurisdictions without curfews."

Abigail Kramer