Secretary Matthew Cate’s column on Flash Report makes a few suggestions for shrinking the correctional budget without releasing inmates.
While no one is happy to be in the position of discussing a $1.2 billion reduction in the corrections budget, the Administration has developed a proposal in coordination with local law enforcement that is smart on crime, cuts prison populations, and saves taxpayer dollars. It is our hope that this reasonable and measured package can allow us to achieve our budget cut targets, without the early release that the public has feared.
Cate’s proposal includes a reduction in the reincarceration of parole violations (a 5,300 reduction in prison population); using GPS monitoring as a prison alternative for low-risk offenders; adjusting property crime thresholds; moving undocumented immigrants to the hands of the Feds; providing good behavior credits for early release; and taking several administrative measures to save money. All in all, the proposal does not differ much from the Governor’s proposal; the magical words “inmate release” aren’t there, but there are a variety of release equivalents, packaged in a way that makes them easier to digest.
The new California budget deal has been struck yesterday, and among other policies, it includes $1.2 billion in unallocated cuts to CDCR. While the San Jose Mercury reports that inmate release is not explicitly mentioned as one of the cuts, the broad issue is still on the table. As expected, some are not thrilled with this humonetarian move. The Sac Bee reports:
The campaign, expected to consist of thousands of phone calls, targets Democrats who plan to run for higher office next year, represent hotly contested districts, or who have been sympathetic or outspoken about law enforcement issues in years past. “Frankly, it will not be possible for anyone who votes for the early release of felons to ever be taken seriously on public safety issues again,” the campaign said in a memo to participants. As part of a much larger plan to bridge the budget gap, the prison agreement would cut $1.2 billion from the prison system, which Melekian and other opponents fear could release more than 19,000 prisoners before their sentences expire. “The concern is that the only way that you get to that amount of money is to release people from prison,” Melekian said. He said police chiefs are also concerned that there is no money available to help with prisoners’ return to society. “There’s no money for job training – there’s no money to do anything to transition these folks from institutional life to life back in the community,” he said. “It’s more than just releasing them. It’s releasing them with no real plan for dealing with them.” Also see the report from UPI.
While releases of non-violent offenders would do good to a system that had no business locking up so many people in the first place, the concerns regarding reentry are certainly warranted. The time to think about reentry options for these released inmates is now.
Violators of domestic violence protective orders are increasingly subjected to GPS monitoring in several States, as reported by the NY Times and by the Chronicle. Implementing such legislation in CA, as opposed to Illinois and Texas, is somewhat of a challenge. The Chron elaborates:
Without GPS, police have been lax to follow up on complaints that partners are ignoring protective orders, said Tara Shabazz, executive director of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.
However, Shabazz and her organization oppose California’s proposed GPS legislation because it would require the state to order GPS tracking for an offender without providing details on how to implement it.
. . .
In California, the cash-strapped government can’t pay for the program, said Alexis Moore, the president and founder of Survivors in Action, a California-based advocacy group. Similarly in Texas, no money was appropriated for GPS implementation.
Given our financial situation, relatively inexpensive alternatives to incarceration or confinement can and should be considered, which does not mean we should not examine such technologies with a critical eye. How is the GPS system managed and monitored? And, should we rely on it to the exclusion of community programs to treat abusive partners,of which we have several in CA?
Thank you for your patience with the recent scant posting. I’ve been away, backpacking through China (and, incidentally, learning a bit about the Hong Kong correctional system). We’re returning to a regular posting schedule and look forward to informing you and being informed by your comments and emails.
One of the sex-offender related legislative innovations of the last decade was the introduction of residence restrictions. As we explained elsewhere, residence restrictions, which prohibit registered sex offenders from living near schools or parks, have made many parts of California inhabitable for those formerly for sex offenses, many of whom have become homeless.
As to others, well, it turns out that at least one CA lawmaker thought they should stay out of his county, even before Jessica’s Law was enacted. . The Sac Bee reports:
In what state Sen. George Runner characterized as a “side agreement” with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the prison and parole agency said it would limit assignments of released offenders into the Antelope Valley to those who had “historical ties” to the area….
CDCR officials, saying that the deal violated the law, terminated the agreement this spring.
“When we took a look at it, we said we can’t treat offenders in this county any different than offenders in any other county,” said Terri McDonald, the CDCR’s chief deputy secretary for adult operations.
Runner sees the agreement as a proper way to correct the imbalance generated by the habit of “dumping” parolees in Lancaster Valley.
“From the very beginning, there was not a connection between the issue of ‘Jessica’s Law’ and this particular issue of parolees in the Antelope Valley,” Runner said in an interview.
He said that the location of a major, maximum-security prison in the Antelope Valley combined with the area’s relatively cheap housing made it “easier to dump (parolees) in Lancaster.”
I think this story is an interesting lesson in the side effects of sweeping punitive legislation, and it is a good reminder of the inequality between different counties. Can we imagine how the segregation of parolees into specific counties might contribute to the big differences in how they are treated and perceived?
Although closing to visitors was considered necessary to minimize the possibility of an influenza pandemic, it came at an unfortunate time for many- the prisons were closed on the weekend of Mother’s Day… [f]ortunately for all involved, only a very small percentage of CDCR’s pending probable cases of the H1N1 “Swine Flu” virus were confirmed by the State Testing Lab and the virus was contained. Dr. Winslow attributes this success to “fast and effective action by our medical and custody staff throughout the State.” He goes on to note that the steps taken by CDCR and CPHCS during the flu outbreak “appear to have helped avoid a potentially dangerous situation.” Visitation has since resumed and the previously cancelled Mother’s Day visitation trip has been rescheduled for June 26th, but precautionary health measures have been implemented to ensure the continued containment of the H1N1 “Swine Flu” virus.
There are also interesting features on telemedicine and on the pharmacy improvements. True to the spirit of humonetarianism, telemedicine is advocated as a cost-saving measure.
According to the Shasta County Sheriff’s website, the Shasta County Jail is a high security facility, with a capacity of 381 inmates, 317 males and 64 females. It seems that this capacity has been reached through aggressive parole revocation operations, and the plan now is to scale back on jail time and on parole operations to relieve the budgetary distress.
Here is what seems to be going on:
Shasta County’s drunken drivers, petty thieves and drug users are less likely to serve jail time. Parolees will be given a bit more leeway on violations that can send them back to prison. And even fewer prisoners police bring to the Shasta County jail will spend a night in a cell.
Local officials say that’s the reality now that Shasta County’s 381-bed jail is 150 inmates smaller.
As jailers have been quickly and quietly working to release a third of the inmates from the jail because of budget cuts, local law enforcement officials have been meeting to plan how they’re going to deal with the sudden loss of space at the already chronically full jail.
…
The decision to clear out a floor of the jail came earlier this month after the Shasta County Board of Supervisors refused Sheriff Tom Bosenko’s pleas to find other ways to trim from the county’s general fund budget rather than make him cut more than $2 million cut from his budget.
Bosenko has since ordered the floor closed and the layoffs of six jail employees.
Jailers began freeing up jail space almost immediately after the decision, mainly by stepping up their “capacity-release” program that lets newly admitted prisoners go free, often before they’d even had time to post bail.
“We’re trying not to do a mass release,” said Lt. Sheila Ashmun, the jail’s second-in-command.
The proposal to prosecute “wobbler” offenses as misdemeanors, and thus reduce prison population (or, at least, juke the stats so that it appears that prison population is reduced) is encountering opposition not only from local jails. This time, the resistance comes from the Santa Cruz District Attorney, Bob Lee. The CDCR disagrees. Central Coast reports:
Examples of the penal code sections that would be revised, if state legislators agree, include fraud, forgery, grand theft, identity theft, auto theft, owning a “chop shop,” destruction of utility lines, making a false bomb report and possession of methamphetamine, Lee said.
“This amounts to sacrificing public safety to put the fiscal house in order and that is extremely bad policy,” Lee said.
State prison officials say the proposal and two others would ease overcrowding by sending an estimated 19,000 to jail instead of prison. The current prison population is about 167,000 and they estimate the change would shave $400 million from $10 billion prison budget.
“I think most people would agree that public safety is the No. 1 role of government,” said Seth Unger, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “But in a time of very limited resources, we have to focus those resources on higher risk offenders.”
This controversy is illustrative of the very different ways in which politicians and managers view corrections. For more on this stuff, I strongly recommend Katherine Beckett’s Making Crime Pay, which tracks down correctional discourse since the late 1960s. In the book, Beckett traces two discourses that emerged as a response to the rehabilitative discourse, which had been proven a failure: the political discourse, which was punitive in nature, and which impacted public opinion quite dramatically, and the managerial discourse, which was much more low-key and relied on risk assessment and actuarial techniques to manage the increasing inmate and parolee population. It is not surprising that politicians and managers speak quite differently about crime; their interests and perspectives differ, and they seek legitimacy in different ways. While politicians require high profile messages to impact public opinion, managers have to cope directly with the day-to-day costs and burdens of managing the system.
The current crisis may bring some of these costs and burdens back to the politicians. A few weeks ago we reported on the downscaling of prosecutions in Contra Costa County. More of this may be happening elsewhere, and perhaps changing the chasm between politicians and managers. However, the differences in perspective are still alive.
In keeping with the financial crisis and humonetarianism themes, here’s the ACLU of Northern California report on the costs of the death penalty and the potential savings that might result from its abolition, which we discussed here, here and here.
Local law-enforcement officials warn that an influx of new inmates could force them to release their own prisoners to make room.
Changing sentencing guidelines would eventually steer 20,000 inmates away from state prisons to county jails, Mr. Schwarzenegger estimates. California’s county jails now hold about 80,000 inmates, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
…
Local governments are hurting for money as badly as the state is — with some of the pain coming as a result of reduced state funding. Many have cut budgets for their own local jails and detention facilities. “It’s like a double whammy the state is sending our way,” said Mike Reagan, a Solano County supervisor. “More prisoners and less money — this is going to hurt like hell.”
Mr. Reagan estimated his county would need to take an additional 1,200 inmates a year under Mr. Schwarzenegger’s plan. That would overwhelm its jail system, which has reached capacity at 1,000 inmates, he said.
Meanwhile, the financial crisis is generating plans that go beyond the non-punitive trend that we have called humonetarianism; it is also generating an abundance of plans that consist of playing with the statistics to make the problem appear smaller, in a manner reminiscent to the classic “juking the stats” scenes from The Wire, which is all too common in the criminal justice system. This category of solutions includes the treatment of undocumented immigrants, and especially the process of handing them to the feds. Engaging in these magic feats – making a population seem to disappear while, in reality, it doesn’t – may prove to be a big mistake. The silver lining of the economic crisis is that it presents an opportunity for change, and hiding our overcrowding problem under the carpet means missing that opportunity completely, at someone else’s expense.
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Props to a friend who chooses to remain anonymous for sending the WSJ piece my way.
(image courtesy CDCR)
