From “Nothing Works” to “Something Works”

This morning, the Guardian is covering a great vocational program in Southern California called Manifest Works, “an immersive workforce development and job placement organization; we turn real-world experience into learning opportunities for those impacted by foster care, homelessness, and incarceration.” From the Guardian story:

One of the most common entry points into the entertainment industry is as a production assistant, or PA. The PA might get coffee, run electrical cords, or break down the set; the job’s chameleonic nature makes it a behind-the-scenes linchpin. Manifest Works, a not-for-profit based in Los Angeles, ties the hustle of a PA job to its training program for people affected by incarceration, homelessness and foster care. Some participants had been out of prison as little as three months.

Williams spoke softly and deliberately, rocking back and forth in his crisp white sneakers. He applied to the program after an alum recommended him. He was doing security before that. “Not what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “This is giving me an opportunity to pursue something closer to what I wanted for myself.”

He still wasn’t sure what on-set role he’d like most. “Everybody wants to be the director,” he said, knowingly.

California, as the country’s most populous state, has one of its highest prison populations, and the highest population of people on probation or parole. It is also home to the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry.

A 2017 study in the Economic Journal evaluated the career trajectories of 1.7 million people released from California prisons between 1993 and 2008, and concluded that, while employment curbs recidivism among the released, the quality of opportunities may be more important than the quantity available.

Sixty-three people have completed the Manifest Works program since it began in fall 2014. Many have established steady freelance careers doing production work. No alum has gone back to prison.

What do they mean by “quality of opportunities?” The study referred to in the Guardian story is by Kevin Schnepel, an economist from the University of Sydney and you can find it here. The abstract reads:

I estimate the impact of employment opportunities on recidivism among 1.7 million offenders released from a California prison between 1993 and 2008. The institutional structure of the California criminal justice system as well as location, skill, and industry-specific job accession data provide a unique framework for identifying a causal effect of job availability on criminal behaviour. I find that increases in construction and manufacturing opportunities at the time of release are associated with significant reductions in recidivism. Other types of opportunities, including those characterised by lower wages that are typically accessible to individuals with criminal records, do not influence recidivism.

This kind of careful study is exactly what we need to counter the despair of the “nothing works” legacy. Because of the dramatic cuts to rehabilitation and vocational programs, which I discuss in Cheap on Crime, opportunities in California prisons really vary. San Quentin benefits from its proximity to the Bay Area, which guarantees an influx of volunteers–but are they programs they offer really effective? More importantly, why are opportunities in construction and manufacturing more important in curbing recidivism than opportunities in other fields, such as service?

A few things come to mind: construction and manufacturing are opportunities that structure one’s day in addition to providing an income. It’s easier to stay the course when you have to be somewhere and perform a job that shows tangible improvement (i.e., putting together a kitchen or producing X gadgets.) They are also jobs that, in the right setting, can provide camaraderie, and have fairly strong unions. But who knows if this is true? To understand why some job opportunities are more effective, we’d need to interview formerly incarcerated folks who are employed in these jobs and ask them about their day and their thoughts about this.

In any case, it’s important for prisons to follow up on studies such as Schnepel’s and on the success of programs such as Manifest Works. Resources are limited, and they need to be invested where they’d yield real results.

Ending Lifetime Registration of Sex Offenders–A Courageous and Sensible Idea

Yesterday’s L.A. Times reports:

“SB 384 proposes thoughtful and balanced reforms that allow prosecutors and law enforcement to focus their resources on tracking sex offenders who pose a real risk to public safety, rather than burying officers in paperwork that has little public benefit,” said Ali Bay, a spokeswoman for the governor.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey sought the change because the current registry has grown to a difficult-to-manage 105,000 people, which reduces its value to law enforcement trying to solve sex crimes by checking those on the list.

Because the registry is public, it also punishes people who have not committed new crimes for decades, including some who engaged in consensual sex, bill supporters argued.

This is an excellent idea. Before you get all riled up, read the actual text:

This bill would, commencing January 1, 2021, instead establish 3 tiers of registration based on specified criteria, for periods of at least 10 years, at least 20 years, and life, respectively, for a conviction of specified sex offenses, and 5 years and 10 years for tiers one and two, respectively, for an adjudication as a ward of the juvenile court for specified sex offenses, as specified. The bill would allow the Department of Justice to place a person in a tier-to-be-determined category for a maximum period of 24 months if his or her appropriate tier designation cannot be immediately ascertained. The bill would, commencing July 1, 2021, establish procedures for termination from the sex offender registry for a registered sex offender who is a tier one or tier two offender and who completes his or her mandated minimum registration period under specified conditions. The bill would require the offender to file a petition at the expiration of his or her minimum registration period and would authorize the district attorney to request a hearing on the petition if the petitioner has not fulfilled the requirement of successful tier completion, as specified. The bill would establish procedures for a person required to register as a tier three offender based solely on his or her risk level to petition the court for termination from the registry after 20 years from release of custody, if certain criteria are met. The bill would also, commencing January 1, 2022, revise the criteria for exclusion from the Internet Web site.

In her book Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles, Chrysanthi Leon of the University of Delaware discusses the changes in our approach toward sex offenders. As she lucidly explains, we used to be able to differentiate between different types of sex offenders and find compassion and pragmatism in our approach toward their punishment and rehabilitation. But with the sex panics of the 1980s, we started blurring lines and seeing all sex offenders as just one category, identifying all of them with the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes. This was a big mistake. Sex offenders, as Tamara Lave reminds us, have a remarkably low rate of recidivism, and the effort to warn the public from them would be better spent on narrow categories of sex criminals that actually recidivate. This bill is a step forward toward more careful classification.

But there’s something else here that is important.

The impetus for the new bill is that the sex offender list has grown so long that it has become difficult to manage. Local authorities spend a lot of time processing paperwork, and time means money. Again, as I discuss in Cheap on Crime, the practicalities of punishment become so cumbersome that we’re taking a step in the right direction. Indeed, any deterrent effect the list has becomes diluted once everyone is on the list for everything, as J.J. Prescott and Jonah Rockoff remind us here.

In sight of the federal disaster that is the Trump/Sessions gratuitous, senseless cruelty enforcement mechanism, it’s nice to see California once again making a reasonable decision.

Has Prop 47 Led to Increased Crime Rates? (Hint: No)

Since the enactment of Proposition 47, which reclassified numerous California felonies as misdemeanors and led to a relief in jail population, cops near and far have been bemoaning a subsequent rise in crime rates. But that a police officer tells a journalist something doesn’t mean that it is necessarily true, or that the correlation holds. Which raises the question: Have crime rates increased? If so, is the increase correlated with Prop 47? If it is, may we assume causality?

In general, whenever a question like this pops up, there are two places to check first: the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ). PPIC, notably, studied crime rates after Realignment, with Steven Raphael and Magnus Lofstrom concluding that the only category in which there was a subsequent correlated increase was, oddly, auto theft – by 14.8 percent. But other crime categories, including violent crime, were not affected by Realignment. With regard to Prop. 47, Lofstrom advises caution:

Upticks in violent and property crime rates during the first year of realignment caused similar concerns, Lofstrom said. With the exception of a boost in auto thefts, however, the spike was in line with increases in states that did not undergo realignment, and crime rates have since dropped again.

With a surge of releases under Proposition 47, “it’s fair to say it puts an upward pressure on crime rates” for the types of low-level offenses those inmates committed, he added. But he said it’s very difficult to attribute a particular change in law to a change in crime rates. Cities and counties vary in their staffing levels, law enforcement priorities and reentry services for released offenders.

There is, however, an early effort to figure out what is going on, and it is a new report by CJCJ. A mere observation of crime rates in January-June suggests a rise in several crime categories, though the numbers for other years appear too inconsistent to draw any pattern.

But the question is, if there is an increase, is it related to Prop. 47? The report reads:

If the reduction in local jail populations after Proposition 47 passed in November 2014 is responsible for the urban crime increase in early 2015, as some sources are arguing, then cities in counties with the largest reductions in jail populations in 2015 would show the biggest increases in crime. However, the data suggest this is not the case. 

In fact, the cities in 11 counties with the largest decreases in both total jail populations and felony jail populations showed equivalent changes in violent crime, and smaller increases in property and total crime, than the cities in 10 counties with the smallest decreases in jail populations. In these 11 counties (total urban population 7.4 million) with larger jail population decreases (total average jail ADPs decreased 15 percent, average felony ADP dropped 18 percent), the overall crime rate increased by only 1 percent. In the 10 counties (urban population 5.3 million) with smaller jail population decreases (total average jail ADP decreased 7 percent, average felony ADPs dropped 11 percent), overall crime increased by 6 percent. Both sets of counties experienced violent crime increases of 9 percent, while the 11 large jail population decrease counties saw no increase in property crime. Significantly, the 10 smaller jail population decrease counties experienced a six percent increase in property crime. Los Angeles County (shown separately due to the unreliability of its 2014 crime statistics) had a lesser decrease in total jail ADP and an average decrease in felony jail ADP, while the city of Los Angeles saw more unfavorable crime trends than the state as a whole.

The report concludes that “[t]here are no obvious effects associated with Proposition 47 that would be expected if the reform had a significant and consistent impact on crime,” and that “[i]t is too early to conclusively measure the effects of Proposition 47 on crime rates just one year after the law took effect.” Indeed, early 2016 data from Davis and West Sacramento shows a decline in crime rates.

The real source of concern, then, has to do not with compromising public safety, but with the savings that were supposed to be cycled back into local communities for reentry purposes. One of my initial worries about Prop. 47 was that the funds, which were to be allocated by the Board of State and Community Corrections, would trail a year behind the early releases, effectively having people reenter into nothing. It seems that these concerns are warranted, and that supporters are petitioning Governor Brown to increase the fund allocation for reentry programs. 

Prop 47 Passed… What Now?

By now, gentle readers, you’re probably done with celebrating the passage of Prop 47, which will have the effect of reducing charges and misdemeanors for many nonserious, nonviolent offenses. But what does this mean, practically, for inmates and for people with criminal records for felonies that are now misdemeanors?

Californians for Safety and Justice have compiled this neat resource answering your questions. There’s even a form you can use to petition to change your record, from a felony to a misdemeanor. If you’re unclear about how Prop 47 might affect your case, contact the Public Defender’s office in your county.

A Bit of Good News: Inmate Reductions Do Not Increase Crime

Yesterday’s Chron reported on a new Sentencing Project report, examining crime rates in California, New York, and New Jersey. Here are the bits about CA:

From 2006 to 2012, the new report said, California reduced its prison population by 23 percent, from nearly 174,000 to 134,000, while the nationwide inmate count dropped by just 1 percent.

The decline accelerated in October 2011 under a state law implementing Gov. Jerry Brown’s “realignment” program, which sentenced lower-level nonviolent felons to county jail instead of state prison and increased the number of convicts who spent part of their sentences on probation.

The state says it will also comply with court orders stepping up parole of elderly, disabled and low-risk prisoners. A 2012 ballot measure sparing some nonviolent felons from life terms under California’s three-strikes law is further reducing the imprisonment rate.

During the same six-year period, the report said, the rate of violent crime – murder, forcible rape, robbery and assault – fell 21 percent in California, compared with 19 percent nationwide.

. . . 

Despite the improvements, the study said, California’s violent crime rate remains above the national average. The state’s property crime rate is slightly below the national average, although the rate of decline from 2006 to 2012 was 13 percent in the state and 15 percent nationwide, the study said.

Another finding was that auto thefts in California have increased since realignment took effect in 2011, bringing the rates for that crime back up to 2009 levels. Overall, however, the study said the prisons-to-jails program does not appear to have increased serious crime in the state.

The original report can be found here.

CCA Signs Lease of California City Prison

The prison in California City.
Photo courtesy the Tehachapi News.

Your $315 million, gentle readers, are hard at work. The Tehachapi News reports:

Plans to ameliorate the state’s prison overcrowding moved forward Oct. 15 when Corrections Corporation of America announced it struck a deal with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to lease out its correctional center in California City to house state inmates.

The state will lease CCCC for a three-year term, with unlimited two-year renewal options, at a rate of $28.5 million annually, according to CCA’s press release.

The alliance was originally outlined in Senate Bill 105, which was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown Sept. 12, and which allocates $315 million for the “prison fix” through June 30, 2014.

Of the allocation, CDCR will spend $28.5 million per year on leasing the facility and another $93.5 million on operating costs, said CDCR spokeswoman Dana Simas. The sum amounts to nearly 40 percent of the $315 million budget.

“It is a good chunk,” Simas said of the spending.

She contrasted the operating cost with that of a similar state-run facility, which would be $108 million per year.

As an interesting twist, CCA employees who want to be guards are now testing to be peace officers (and, obviously, join the CCPOA.)

But wait! There’s more!

With the Jan. 27, 2014, deadline looming for reducing state-wide inmate populations to 137.5 percent of capacity, CDCR is in a crunch to relocate about 9,600 inmates. Simas said once the inmates are moved to CCCC, the state will still need to transfer about 4,000 more to meet the court-ordered capacity cap.

The state expects to transfer 2,381 low to medium Level 2 adult male inmates who are currently in California state prisons to CCCC. Per the prison’s website, the facility is of medium/maximum security caliber and has 2,304 beds. Simas said the state plans to double-cell the inmates, which CCA was not previously doing with its federal inmates.

As an aside: I don’t usually read the Tehachapi News, but maybe I should. Great piece of reporting by Emily Brunett. All the information you need, none of the information you don’t need, all the numbers check out, and all angles objectively covered.

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Props to Josh Page for the link.

Jerry, What on Earth Are You Thinking?

Photo courtesy Rich Pedroncelli for
the San Francisco Chronicle.

The new gubernatorial plan to solve the prison crisis Jerry Brown says we don’t have has just been announced: Spending $315 million on private prisons.

No, I am not making this up. The Chron reports:

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday responded to a federal court order to significantly reduce California’s prison population by proposing a $315 million plan to send thousands of inmates to private prisons and vacant county jail cells, hoping to avoid what he said would be a mass release of dangerous felons.

The cost could reach $700 million over two years, with much of the money likely to come from a $1.1 billion reserve fund in the state budget.

During a news conference at the Capitol, Brown bristled at the court’s suggestion that the state could continue its early release of certain inmates to meet the federal judges’ population cap. He noted that California has already reduced the prison population by some 46,000 inmates to comply with the court’s orders and said only the most dangerous convicts remain in state prison.

The judges have ordered the state to release an additional 9,600 inmates by the end of the year.

Brown, however, said sending them to available cells in privately run prisons within California and in other states, as well as to empty jail cells, is the best way to meet the court’s mandate without endangering public safety.

“Public safety is the priority, and we’ll take care of it,” the governor said. “The money is there.”

Governor Brown, what on Earth were you thinking when you concocted this wasteful, ridiculous, idiotic plan? What do you mean, “the money is there”? California is in a state of fiscal disaster, and suddenly we have $315 million to invest in private prisons? And where was all this mysterious money when federal courts asked you why we pack people up like sardines and let them languish in their own feces without appropriate health care? Moreover, how will this lucrative investment manifest itself? Will Correctional Corporation of America and Geo build prisons on Californian soil? Or will we send more inmates than the 9,000 we currently have out of state to Arizona and Tennessee? How are you squaring this off with your traditional allies at the CCPOA? Are you going to put state guards in private prisons to make sure their interests are served, as well? After all the effort we put into realignment–and after countless experts have made reasonable suggestions to keep jail population law by not locking up people who should not be locked up in the first place–this is what it’s coming to? After expert witnesses agreed that decrowding prisons is not a danger to public safety, where does your information to the contrary come from? Can you find a decent, respectable criminal justice scholar in the entire state of California that thinks this is necessary? Are you trying to divert our attention from the fact that this is Day 51 of a hunger strike against the horrific conditions under which you hold inmates in solitary confinement? What the hell is going on?

CCC Field Trip: Wrongful Convictions in Ecuador (and, SCOTUS tells Jerry off)

By now, many readers have already heard the news: Gov. Brown’s plea to modify the release plan and avoid releasing 10,000 inmates per the Plata mandate has failed in the Supreme Court. Justice Kennedy authored the decision.  Law enforcement is already grumbling.

I’m on Quito, Ecuador, on vacation and don’t want to get aggravated, so if you like, go read Scalia’s dissenting opinion for yourselves.

 Quito is a beautiful high-altitude city in the shadow of Mount Pichincha, with amazing art, colonial architecture, and marvelous parks. And, of course, as one does, the first thing I did this morning was read the local paper, El Comercio, which featured this amazing story about a wrongfully convicted man and his post-exoneration life.

Here’s the bit that caught my eye:

Según datos de la Defensoría Pública, el 65% de personas apresadas recuperó su libertad porque no se hallaron pruebas en su contra. Estos datos fueron levantados desde el 2007 hasta el 2010.

(According to data from the Public Defender, 65% of arrested people were freed because there was no proof against them. These data was collected between 2007 and 2010. My translation–H.A.)

In fact, the article notes that wrongful convictions are so common that the Public Defender’s office has a psychological department dedicated to help exonerated people deal with the stigma and reclaim their lives.

Expect more reports on the Ecuadorian justice system.

Hunger Strike Bears Fruit at Martinez Detention Facility

On July 19, 2013, all Martinez Detention Facility hunger strikers suspended their hunger strike. (Prisoners there had joined the statewide California hunger strike when it began on July 8, after submitting their own demands to the warden.) The SF Bay View reports about the demands that have been met, which were detailed explanations about reasons for administrative segregation, the ability to empty one’s trash once a day, more privacy scheduling medical appointments (rather than announcing them on the intercom), separating mentally ill inmates from the general population, and allowing ink pen fillers to be purchased from the canteen.

Congratulations to the strikers on the successful conclusion of their courageous struggle, and best wishes to those who are still on hunger strike.

——
Props to Caitlin Henry for the link. 

Three-Judge-Panel: State Must Comply with Population Reduction Order; Jerry Threatened with Contempt

Image from CDCR’s three-judge-panel page.

A decision came out yesterday from the three-judge-panel that issued the original Plata v. Schwarzenegger decision: The state must comply with the original order. Moreover, should it not do so, it will be held in contempt. The L.A. Times reports:

In a blistering 71-page ruling, the jurists rejected Brown’s bid to end restrictions they imposed on crowding in the lockups. The state cannot maintain inmate numbers that violate orders intended to eliminate dangerous conditions behind bars, they said.

Brown and other officials “will not be allowed to continue to violate the requirements of the Constitution of the United States,” the judges wrote.

“At no point over the past several months have defendants indicated any willingness to comply, or made any attempt to comply, with the orders of this court,” they said. “In fact, they have blatantly defied them.”

The judges gave the state 21 days to submit a plan for meeting the population target by the end of the year. Administration officials said they would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The piece pretty much speaks for itself, but I do want to say something about this to readers wondering why the state hasn’t been held in contempt so far, which is a question I get asked a lot when I talk about this. I think it’s important to understand that, while federal courts–rather than state administrators–have pretty much been the go-to place for inmate rights suits, courts are not natural policy designers. The judicial system is built on the premise of case-by-case arbitration, with an outcome that “takes sides” in a dispute between two parties (Martin Shapiro calls this “the logic of the triad“). Their ability to generalize and supervise is limited. The ways they perceive the world, discursively, are limited to assessing whether state agencies behaved in a way that violated constitutional standards – yes or no. Orders, supervision, revisiting issues–courts do all of those, but they do them because they have to. The hard work has to be done primarily by the state. Which is why, whenever possible, having a consent decree is a priority, and if that is impossible, it is at least useful to get some cooperation from the state and refrain from steps that will escalate the animosity between the state and the courts.

The escalation here–actually threatening the Governor with contempt–is understandable if one considers what Jerry has done in the last few weeks. He has attacked the special masters and receiver, and even griped about attorney’s fees for the inmates’ advocates. When seen in the context of this public relations crusade to besmirch the other side and the court-ordered mechanism, a threat of contempt is a logical response. And of course, the state retaliates by threatening an appeal to the Supreme Court. This is a collision course that will not end well, and it would behoove the Governor, and the state representatives, to consider growing up and collaborating with the courts. As things stand now, everyone has plenty to lose.