Being a Lever in a Dark Place

Citizen Hope assembled a fascinating panel on Tuesday night at Hastings for a “Conversation on Re-Entry.” The conversation’s starting point was recidivism and re-entry, and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris began by described several of her initiatives aimed at combating recidivism. “Back on Track” targets young (18-30) nonviolent first-time offenders, allowing them, after they’re arrested, to opt into a training program in lieu of an entry of judgment. “Back on Track” participants must have a job or be in college in order to graduate, and the program works “across agencies” to achieve this, bringing together the Housing Department, Child and Family Services, Health and Human Services, the DA, PD, and Court. 

The program is still in its nascence, and so there are lots of questions about its efficacy: is it scalable? Right now it targets a population that self-selected to succeed (if a participant makes any missteps, he is sent back into the regular criminal justice process.) But it’s an important policy innovation because it reflects a growing understanding of how connected recidivism and re-integration are with problems like joblessness and inadequate access to services. 

Harris herself represents another important kind of policy innovation, though, a theme which she sounded as she explained her decision to become a prosecutor, rather than following the more traditional path of the civil rights advocate to the public defender’s office. In lots of counties, programs like “Back on Track” never get started because the District Attorney, with his eye on his conviction record for the next election, doesn’t want to cooperate in a program that takes people out of the normal channels of criminal process. People like Harris are important because they are willing to reconceive their roles and the set of incentives and constraints that define them. Conviction records aren’t the only way to show you’re doing a good job as a law enforcement officer – indeed, they may be a remarkably bad indicator of whether you’re improving public safety. 

Panelist Lateefah Simon echoed this theme towards the end of the evening. Simon, who worked for Harris for four years in the DA’s office, and has a powerful way with words, exhorted the audience of law students and community members to become “a lever in a dark place.” In other words, if a system is the cumulative effect of many little decisions made by people in the course of their routines, then a shift in the kinds of experiences and perspectives those people are considering as they go about their jobs can have a huge impact on the success and widespread expansion of a program like “Back on Track.”

Citizen Hope is a social networking organization focused on political activism. The panel featured SF DA Kamala Harris, Jakada Imani, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Jessica Flintoff, program coordinator of the Safe Communities Reentry Council, Lateefah Simon, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and moderator Steve Ngo of the San Francisco Community College Board. 

Chronicle’s Nevius: An Unlikely Supporter for the Community Justice Center

This morning’s Chron includes an article by C. W. Nevius, reporting about yesterday evening’s Community Justice Center informational meeting at Glide Memorial Church. His description of the meeting depicts a typical San Francisco scenario: people with different agendas speaking past each other, not to each other, thinking how to shoot down a project without understanding what it is about.

The real failing is that the backers of the court haven’t convinced the neighborhood that the effort is worthwhile.

Instead, at the meeting there were accusations that the Community Justice Center is part of a plan to rid the Tenderloin of poor people, build tall luxury apartment buildings, and encourage the police to arrest anyone on the street who looks shabby.

“It’s just the opposite,” sputtered Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn, who is presiding over the Justice Center this week while Commissioner Ron Albers is on vacation. “There is not a single case charged here that wouldn’t have been charged at the Hall of Justice. The difference is, here they can go upstairs and qualify for services.”

The court’s director, Tomiquia Moss, was stressing that the court had heard more than 100 cases, and that they’d gotten 40 individuals into services, such as drug and alcohol treatment.

“And as far as this huge conspiracy to wrangle the poor out of the neighborhood,” Moss said, “I really disagree with that.”

Not that anyone from the opposition was listening. Activists wanted to know what the court was doing to end homelessness and why the money for the court – most of which comes from federal grants and can’t be used for other purposes – isn’t being used for building more shelters and housing.

Oh Boy.

The fact is, the people behind the Community Justice Center – people like Moss, Albers and the myriad social workers – have long and distinguished records of helping the homeless. So how did they get to be the enemy?

“I think people expect that there is never going to be a solution,” Moss said. “So they keep complaining.”

Now, it may be that the court won’t ultimately work. It is just a pilot program. But I can tell you this – simply complaining is a dead end.

I’ve been following Nevius’ commentary on the situation in the Tenderloin for quite a while, and I often disagree with him; when he reported about a homeless man found dead in the San Francisco public library, and linked this tragedy to his defense attorneys successfully battling his quality-of-life offense citations, I fumed for days. But this time, I think, he is right on the money. Nevius understands something that strikes me as very basic: If you have to choose between appearing more-righteous-than-thou and doing the right thing, it’s a no-brainer. One of the regrettable features of our City politics (which are admirable in many other ways) is that, in this kind of debate, too many invariably opt for the former, even before obtaining enough information to make the choice. The conversation stops being about the issue at hand, and becomes an absurd contest of who is more enlightened and whose conspiracy theories are more extreme.

I constantly worry about criminalizing poverty, and am well aware of the many ways in which we do it every day. And, yes, in our flawed system, and within the constraints of a very imperfect social structure, there is a whole host of criminal offenses that act as proxy for social class (and, in many cases, race). However, rallying against people who are trying to make the situation better within this imperfect social structure, I believe, will not change matters. I would really like us to give this experiment a real shot before knee-jerk politics kick in and shoot down the efforts of people who are genuinely trying to do good and who have the qualifications and authority to do so.

“A Conversation on Reentry”, Tue, April 7, at UC Hastings


This is a bit last-minute, but for those of you in San Francisco or the Bay Area, it seems very worth attending: CitizenHope, with a host of Hastings student organizations, is offering “A Conversation on Reentry”: Making Rehabilitation an Essential Part of Public Safety Policy, featuring Kamala Harris, Jakada Imani, Jessica Flintoft, and Lateefah Simon.

Where: UC Hastings, 200 McAllister (2nd floor); a one-block walk from the Civic Center BART station
When: Tuesday, April 7 (tomorrow!), 6-8pm

The event will be followed by a reception at the nearby Soluna Cafe.

California Prison Mental Health – A Failed Delivery System

I have just received the following email from a reader, who introduces him/herself as “a concerned prison mental health clinician” and who prefers to remain anonymous. I am publishing it verbatim.

A suicidal inmate with a diagnosis of Major Depression with Psychosis is handcuffed for up to three hours before he is transferred to a crisis bed.
A correctional officer yells out “you are full of it” to an inmate who requests permission to return to his cell from the yard, because he says he feels that “people are watching him, and he is feeling paranoid.” This inmate has a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type.
A correctional counselor (CC) says to an inmate diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder, “you are just a con, you were up and about yesterday, I saw you, and today you won’t come out of your cell.”
A psych tech refuses repeated requests of an inmate to see a psychiatrist, for nearly three weeks, this inmate suffered from racing, and obsessive thoughts – because this psych tech decided that the inmate was “playing.” This inmate is diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
A mental health clinical supervisor says to his clinical team, that these are all criminals, and they know what to say.
A sergeant in response to an inmate yelling at the TV (because he believes that the TV is talking to him) decides to “clean out his cell” because inmates are not allowed to yell.

These are just a few examples from just one week at a California correctional facility that is supposed to be complying with the Mental Health Service Delivery System, based on the Coleman v. Schwarzenegger decisions. The current prison mental health system is one horror story after another, and here we are talking not about “general population,” but about units that are supposed to specialize in providing mental health treatment.

There are many reasons for this, but primarily it has to do with the way prisons are designed, and the custody culture, that, for the most part, does not consider mental illness to be legitimate. The misperceptions, and stigma that exists in the larger society is hugely magnified inside a prison. Further, the custody staff, and even some of the clinical administration staff do not seem to understand mental health treatment, and the course of recovery.

An example of this stigma, and lack of understanding about mental health treatment is the statement by Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Matt Cate:
“… We don’t need a treatment room and a yoga room and a music room and a basketball court for our most seriously ill inmates — we need to get those inmates better so they can return to the general population.” From Oakland Tribune by Josh Richman, February 3, 2009

Fact is that most of those with serious mental illness are not going to return to the “general population.” Most of the tens of thousands of seriously mentally ill inmates, if in the community, would qualify for disability (SSI) and would only be expected to work part-time at the very most. They would be living in supportive housing, such as licensed board and care facilities, or supported independent living, with onsite case management. The prison general population is a very high stress environment, and many of the mentally ill inmates would decompensate, and end up being hospitalized, or in crisis within a matter of weeks, if not days.

I was heartened to read by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton’s statement that he is considering placing the mental health services also under a receivership. CDCR does not have the capacity, or understanding to provide effective mental health care. Their role is custody, not mental health treatment.

With 40-50% of California inmates seriously mentally ill, we need to enter into a process of rethinking, and redesigning prison mental health treatment. A few recommendations/suggestions that I, as a prison mental health clinician, have are as follows:

1. Under a future receiver’s office create a clinical oversight body within each prison-institution, comprising of both administrative and line clinical staff (psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and clinical social workers) that would be charged with addressing clinical/treatment issues and obstacles.

2. Recognize that with such high numbers of seriously mentally ill inmates, prisons are effectively locked mental health institutions. The custody staff must re-think their roles as security, and mental health providers. Develop a new classification of “mental health custody” that would specialize in working within mental health units. A very small number of custody staff do have this kind of specialization, and where we have such staff, the units operate smoothly, and some level of mental health services are delivered. Where we do not have this level training, and/or interest, the services are spotty at best – and that would be the case in the vast majority of cases.

3. Begin developing a separate agency outside of the CDCR that would be charged with providing mental health services. This agency would then be held accountable for standards and practices, and would relieve the CDCR from trying to implement services that are outside of its custody role and scope.

4. Mental Health services in prison should be held at the same, or higher level of standard as those delivered in the community in California. This would include confidentiality, and clear protection against abusive or stigmatizing treatment.

5. And finally, but no means least, construct new facilities designed to provide mental health care.

The above recommendations are by no means exhaustive, but we need a public open conversation, and implementation of mental health treatment at the same time. We cannot continue to wait, while the civil and constitutional rights of California prisoners are violated daily. Such stigmatizing treatment would not be tolerated in the community, and there is no reason why such abuse is being tolerated in prisons.

It is time to take mental health out of the hands of the an incompetent state body, and placed in the hands of mental health receivership who would have the necessary mental health background to implement immediate change to the delivery system.

What Works? A Search for Evidence-Based Corrections

In 1974, the world of corrections was quite different from the grim realities we have been discussing here over the last few months. The sentencing system was indeterminate, and the release date of inmates was mostly in the hands of the parole board. Those who grew up with the determinate system adopted in the late 1970s and early 1980s may recall the depiction of this system in The Shawshank Redemption.

Since sentencing was seen as an individualized, offender-based enterprise (as opposed to the administration of guilt, which was based on  completion of the elements of the offense), the main criterion for release was “rehabilitation”, that is, establishing that the inmate had been reformed and was no longer a threat to public safety. Prisons had a variety of rehabilitative programs, though many of these, as depicted in the movie, were farcical fronts for the economic enterprise. The move to a system relying on determinate sentences, giving prosecutors and legislators more power than judges and parole boards, was the outcome of a new discourse, which (among other things) discredited the rehabilitative value of prison programs.

This discourse was impacted in a major day by Robert Martinson’s meta-study What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform, which was published on The Public Interest. In the study, Martinson examined the recidivism rates of 600 prison programs, as examined by other studies, and came to the conclusion that there is —

very little reason to hope that we have in fact found a sure way for reducing recidivism through rehabilitation. This is not to say that we did not find instances of success or partial success; it is only to say that these instances have been isolated, producing no clear pattern to indicate the efficacy of any particular method of treatment. 

Martinson’s results, later confirmed by a review by a National Academy of Science panel, were devastating to the rehabilitative enterprise, and lent scientific credibility to the critique against indeterminate sentencing. While later studies have criticized some of Martinson’s methodology, Martinson provided an invaluable service to us all. As David Farabee argues, there was a broader lesson in all this, which is not different in essence from the important words Harold Atkins said in our opening panel: it is not enough to come up with a rehabilitative program. We have to know that it works.
Newer works in the last few years have come to more optimistic conclusions about rehabilitative programs in prison. Check out, for example, Rick Sarre’s excellent conference paper, pointing to newer meta-studies that found more programs that ‘work’. However, we have to keep in mind, as Doris MacKenzie reminds us, that these programs differ greatly from each other in terms of their underlying philosophies (boot camps are different from drug courts!), and some of them are more suitable than others for certain types of crimes or groups of offenders.  
If Jim Webb’s efforts to create a criminal justice commission, or the important work done in places like the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, come to fruition, one important question it will have to answer is, how do we measure what works? What indexes of success might we have beyond recidivism measures? And, are we to stick to one penological philosophy, or are we willing to accept that different things “work” for different people? what do you think?

Secretary Cate: Seeking Prison Expansion

The Associated Press reports that Secretary Cate plans to ask state legislators to expand three prisons.

The construction projects would be the first to draw money from a nearly $8 billion bond measure approved two years ago. The money was stalled, though, until Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the state budget into law in February.

Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said he plans to seek approval within weeks to build more cellblocks at two prisons near Delano and to convert a juvenile lockup near Paso Robles. Those moves combined would house 2,800 inmates.

The $810 million Cate will seek from legislative budget committees would pay for those three expansions, plus building a re-entry center in Stockton for 500 inmates who are nearing the end of their prison terms. It would be the first of several planned regional re-entry centers to help inmates adjust in the months before they are paroled.

(this was one of the urgent projects seeking approval and financed by bonds approved in 2007, per the L.A. Times)

(and another aspect of the whole thing: prison construction is regarded as one way to generate construction jobs. One person’s problem is another’s salvation).

I have no doubt that prison authorities are sincere in regarding prison expansion as a viable way to reduce overcrowding; however, I can’t help but think about conversations I’ve had with my father, a transport planner, who often marvels at how new roads built to relieve congestion generate incentives to buy more cars, thus increasing traffic. I know the metaphor is not perfect, but it has been preying on my mind.

A Risk-Assessment Model from a Blog Reader

(all images by Tom McGee; click on graphics for clearer, larger image)

One of our readers, Thomas McGee, who worked for many years in the Youth Authority, has given some serious consideration to questions of risk assessment associated with issues such as the Lovell Mixon case. He writes:

Thank you for your blog, California Correctional Crisis. Your posts have been especially helpful.

I am sending this email, rather than posting a comment, because I wanted to enclose an attachment, which was prepared using Excel. It is a chart depicting a proposed Deprivation Decision-Making System. I believe that sentencing should be put in this broader context. You will see that it makes provision for both determinate and indeterminate courses of action. The Mixon matter you have been writing about is a good example of why something like this is necessary. Of course, I do not have access to his case history, but since he was classified as a high-control parolee, there must have been evidence that he was a high risk. Under the system I propose, Mr. Mixon would have completed the accountability part of his Deprivation Plan. But he would not have been moved to a lower level of restraint, because he had a high level of risk.
I know that risk determinations are contentious, but risk is a fact of life. Insurance companies deal with it all the time. It is not possible to predict with complete certain ty who will commit another crime, or what kind. But it is possible to estimate the probability that a person will recidivate,within a probability range. Policy makers have to decide how much risk is acceptable. If risk determinations do not reach a legally acceptable standard, then lets say so and act accordingly, rather than hiding this in some kind of sentencing double-talk.
Just one more point; I think it is ridiculous to ask judges to consider risk at the time of sentencing. Risk changes. Who can say today what an offender’s risk will be five years from now. A Risk Control Board should make periodic risk determinations of this kind. Parole Boards as we knowthem are not equipped for this task.

I would appreciate any comments you may have about the enclosure, and these comments. Again, thanks for the blog.

************

One of the interesting things about Tom’s model is that it incorporates quite a multifaceted perspective on offenders and their motivations. One key dilemma in modeling and predicting human behavior has to do with the difficult trade-off between accuracy and simplicity. That is, the more complex the model is , the more accurately it can predict risk, but the more difficult it will be to apply. More on this in future posts.

OIG Inquiry Regarding Mixon’s Parole Proceedings: CDCR Followed Appropriate Proceedings

(photo sources: sfgate.com; cdcr.gov)

The Office of the Inspector General has led an inquiry into the proceedings carried by CDCR regarding Lovelle Mixon’s parole supervision. The conclusion? The parole agents, and everyone else involved, followed department policies and procedures. Here’s the gist of the review, from Undersecretary of Operations Scott Kernan (CDCR story is here and the full report, addressed to Secretary Cate, is here):

“The Inspector General’s conclusions confirm the results of our immediate internal review of the handling of Lovelle Mixon’s parolee supervision records. Our parole agents followed all appropriate supervision, drug testing, and even job assistance protocols when dealing with Mixon, who was classified as a high-control parolee. When Mixon absconded from parole supervision, he was promptly listed as a Parolee-at-Large and search procedures were activated. Local law enforcement agencies were notified and engaged in the attempts to arrest him, and our Fuguitive Apprehension Team laid out a plan to search suspected locations – even notifying the U.S. Marshals on a lead that he may have fled the state”.

Given this modus operandi, what can we say about this senseless tragedy? It is not unlikely that this horrible event is an isolated incident, stemming from individual pathology. But perhaps it also says something much broader about our parole policies and their potential to drive people to commit desperate, heinous acts. I found much of the discourse in the last few days remarkably unhelpful, whether it included racist epithets, super-punitive rage, or venomous anti-police messages. If there is a bigger lesson to be learned from this, let’s try and learn it on behalf of the parolees who struggle to stay on the straight and narrow; and let’s think about reframing parole as a reentry tool, performing aggressive supervision only when appropriate. I believe Evelyn Lara-Lowe, who at our conference last week said that the CDCR has no vested interest in bringing people back into prison; how do we retool parole proceedings and instruments to become a vehicle of hope, rather than desperation?

Prisons and Media

(image courtesy sfgate.com)

This Sunday’s Chron reported on the inmate newspaper at San Quentin. According to the article, rather than being merely a mouthpiece for the administration, the paper holds itself to objective standards of reporting.

Witness the tough-minded piece that ran in the January issue about San Quentin’s administrative segregation unit, “The Hole,” where recalcitrant prisoners are disciplined by being locked up for most of the day in one-man cells. The News described the wing’s dirty cells, ripped and shredded mattresses and generally appalling conditions.

Before the story was published, however, the News’ senior volunteer adviser, retired Associated Press newsman John Eagan, told editor-in-chief Ken Brydon, serving a life term for murder, and managing editor Michael Harris, doing 28 years for attempted murder and drug crimes, that they had to get the other side.

They did, quoting prison Sgt. D. Kilmer to the effect that officers go through a checklist of a cell’s condition, but that “the maintenance repair on lights could be better.” The article was approved by Luna and ran in the newspaper, and the next issue carried a follow-up quoting prison officials at length.

(incidentally, the Pulse of San Quentin’s report is timely and important; yesterday’s New Yorker has a fascinating and disturbing piece on the effects of solitary confinement.)

Prison newspapers are not a new phenomenon. Some of you may find interest, for example, in this historical issue of The Prison Press from 1899. And there has been constant litigation regarding the right of inmates to participate in outside media, whether it be mainstream media or specialized projects like Prison Radio. For some of California’s legacy of outspoken inmates, I strongly recommend Eric Cummins’ excellent The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement.

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Props to Emily Hoag for pointing me to the New Yorker article.