Correctional Budget Cuts at the Local Level: Decrowding Shasta County Jail


(Shasta County Jail building image from the Sheriff’s website)

Not long ago we discussed the plan to shift state prisoners into local facilities, as well as the local resistance to the plan. This may not be as feasible as the Governor’s office believes, since many local facilities face financial difficulties of their own.

This morning’s Redding Record Searchlight reports on more humonetarian occurrences on the local level.

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.

More Resistance to the Plan to Reduce “Wobbler” Offenses to Misdemeanors


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.

Event: Day of Action to End the Death Penalty

Death Penalty Focus is organizing a Day of Action to end the death penalty on June 30, 2009. The date is scheduled to coincide with the public hearing regarding the reformed execution proceedings using lethal injection, which we reported about here.

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 Jails Oppose the Plan to Divert “Wobbler” Offenses Away from State Prisons

A while ago, we reported on the Governor’s plan to divert “wobbler” offenses from state prisons to local jails. As expected, local authorities are reacting very badly to this plan to pass the buck. The Wall Street Journal reports:

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.

——————-

Props to a friend who chooses to remain anonymous for sending the WSJ piece my way.

GOP opposition to Governor’s Proposed Mass Releases

The Sacramento Bee reports:

State Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth said today that most of his GOP colleagues oppose early release for illegal immigrant inmates or other state prisoners to help reduce the state’s $24.3 billion deficit.

“We don’t want to see early release. We don’t want to see criminal aliens being released to the federal government and then deported and returning back to the streets and communities ofCalifornia – for a very small amount of savings, by the way,” Hollingsworth, the SenateRepublican leader, told The Bee’s Capitol Bureau in an interview. The GOP holds 15 out of 40 seats in the state Senate.

D.A.R.E. Responds to Governor’s Marijuana Legalization Initiative

As expected, Governor Schwarzenegger’s call to legalize marijuana did not generate a wall-to-wall consensus. One organization that rejects the idea of legalizing and taxing marijuana is DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which published today a piece in which they argue that marijuana is too harmful to be decriminalized:

“Legalization is not a path we want to pursue,” Dr. Kar added. “This is sending a message that use of marijuana is okay. If marijuana is legalized, people and especially young people, will tend to look at it and think, ‘Well, if it’s legal, it can’t be too harmful.’ It is by no means the benign drug that some would have us think. The most complete, objective and reliable scientific evidence is entirely in the other direction. We would run the risk of having a rise in a sicker and nonproductive population, which would be further detrimental to the state’s economy, if more people were to begin using marijuana.”

These concerns bring up a host of questions, some of which have to do with the medical assessment of harm stemming from marijuana abuse (read more about that debate in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness), and some of which have to do with behavioral economics; namely, whether a change in legal status would lead more people to use marijuana. This last complex question has been the focus of a variety of studies on drug usage deterrence, including the masterful work of Rob MacCoun and Peter Reuter, who also draw parallels from other vices.

Senate Bill to Eliminate LWOP for Juveniles Passes Committee Hearing

Since the death penalty was abolished for juveniles in Roper v. Simmons, public debate has shifted to the issue of life without the possibility of parole for juveniles. The most recent news on this come from the California Senate Committee, which, according to the Chron, approved Senator Yee’s bill to eliminate LWOP for juveniles and substitute it for sentences of 25 years to life.

The Chron reports:

The bill would overturn a component of Proposition 115, a tough-on-crime ballot initiative passed by voters in 1990.
The legislation pits law enforcement groups, which argue that there are teens who commit such horrendous crimes that they should spend the rest of their lives in prison, against some child psychiatrists and religious groups, which argue that teens’ brains are still developing and even those who kill should be given a chance at redemption. Parole would be granted only to inmates who convinced both the state’s parole board and governor that they deserve to be released.

Those interested in more information about the special problems concerning juveniles on LWOP might find interest in a PBS debate on the matter, or in the Frontline documentary When Kids Get Life.