Dickens in Alabama

I know this post has nothing to do with California Corrections, but I could not resist the temptation to write a few words about this NY Times piece, which tells a tale best relegated to Dickens novels.

DECATUR, Ala. — The prisoners in the Morgan County jail here were always hungry. The sheriff, meanwhile, was getting a little richer. Alabama law allowed it: the chief lawman could go light on prisoners’ meals and pocket the leftover change.

And that is just what the sheriff, Greg Bartlett, did, to the tune of $212,000 over the last three years, despite a state food allowance of only $1.75 per prisoner per day.

In the view of a federal judge, who heard testimony from the hungry inmates, the sheriff was in “blatant” violation of past agreements that his prisoners be properly cared for.

“There was undisputed evidence that most of the inmates had lost significant weight,” the judge, U. W. Clemon of Federal District Court in Birmingham, said Thursday in an interview. “I could not ignore them.”

So this week, Judge Clemon ordered Sheriff Bartlett himself jailed until he came up with a plan to adequately feed prisoners more, anyway, than a few spoonfuls of grits, part of an egg and a piece of toast at breakfast, and bits of undercooked, bloody chicken at supper.

The really shocking bit, though, is that this travesty is supported by Alabama law:

An unusual statute here dating from the early decades of the 20th century allows the state’s sheriffs to keep for themselves whatever money is left over after they feed their prisoners. The money allotted by the state is little enough — $1.75 a day per prisoner — but the incentive to skimp is obvious.

What can I say? Words fail me. Hard, Bleak times.

Prison and Parole Cuts: Lean Years, Lean Budget


Yesterday’s Sacramento Bee reported Governor Schwarzenegger’s new budget plan, which has direct implications for corrections policy. The gist of it is as follows:

Parole would be eliminated for all nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offenders. The proposal would cut the parole population by about 65,000 by June 30, 2010, or more than half of the Christmas Eve count of 123,144.

At the same time, the corrections plan calls for increasing good-time credits for inmates who obey the rules and complete rehabilitation programs. Combined with the new parole policies that would result in fewer violators forced back into custody, the proposal would reduce the prison population by 15,000 by June 30, 2010. It stood at 171,542 on Dec. 24.

The California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, who has previously opposed the Governor’s plan for state employees to go on one-day furloughs, opposes this plan as well. This letter from their Executive Vice President, Chuck Alexander, has bits and pieces of the proposed budget in it.

A careful read of the budget will reveal cuts not only in the prison and parole systems, but also in the medical system’s Receiver’s budget. Some rehabilitative re-entry programs might actually see an increase in funding.

Desperate times, apparently, call for desperate measures. These steps echo what I commented on here and here: we no longer care about the merits of a correctional institution or project. We only care about how much it costs.

But wait: isn’t de-crowding our prisons, and cutting our parole system, a good thing on the merits as well? This is a bit more complex than it might seem. A credit accumulation system is certainly a good thing, and it helps focus the release decision on factors having to do with actual behavior and change, rather than on a regurgitation of issues concerning the offense itself (a bit more on that, from a broader doctrinal perspective, in this piece by W. David Ball). But rather than eliminating mandatory parole, if we had the leisure of giving this reform careful thought, we would perhaps be better off retooling parole to act as an institution encouraging and supporting ex-felons in re-entry, rather than supervising them and returning them to jails for technicalities? A reformed parole system could be an invaluable resource for people seeking housing and work upon their return from prison. As is becoming plainly obvious, this is not about common sense, even if, in some cases, it seems to make sense as a policy. This is strictly about the money.

It remains to be seen whether the legislator will approve these changes. To Be Continued.

There is Nothing New Under the Sun


There are prisons, into which whoever looks will, at first sight of the people confined there, be convinced, that there is some great error in the management of them; the sallow meagre countenances declare, without words, that they are very miserable; many who went in healthy, are in a few months changed into emaciated dejected objects. Some are seen pining under diseases, “sick and in prison;” expiring on the floors, in loathsome cells, of pestilential fevers, and the confluent small-pox; victims, I must say not to the cruelty, but I will say to the inattention, of sheriffs, and gentlemen in the commission of the peace.

The cause of this distress is, that many prisons are scantily supplied, and some almost totally unprovided with the necessaries of life.

–John Howard (1777), The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with an Account of Some Foreign Prisons

May the return of the light this season, and this year, bring some light to our correctional policy.

Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year,

Hadar

Is overcrowding the reason for the declined standard of care in prisons? More Prison Litigation

DING! Round… I can’t keep track anymore. The Federal District court is, again, discussing the prison lawsuits.

Judges Karlton, Henderson, and Reinhardt are trying to assess whether prison overcrowding (see left) is the reason for the faulty level of services. And, as the L.A. Times reports, they are not sympathetic to the State.

Although the trial is only halfway over, the judges are speaking and acting as if they have already decided to take action against the state. Now they seem only to be searching for answers on precisely what action to take and have openly contemplated an order to release prisoners and impose a cap on the state prison population.

“The question from our point of view is developing an effective set of orders that will protect society . . . and ensure there is a constitutionally sufficient level of care,” explained U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton, who said later that the trial wouldn’t be needed “if the state were to wake up and start behaving in a rational way.”

If the court’s decision is to release prisoners, state officials guarantee an appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, where matters, and sympathies, may go differently.

There are many interesting things here, and several merit special attention:

  • In the article, several people, and among them Jeanne Woodford, are on record stating reincarceration for parole violations as a contributing factor to overcrowding.
  • One of the witnesses, a former Florida prison medical official who has studied California’s medical system, reports the situation has improved since Clark Kelso took charge of matters as a receiver.
  • James Austin, formerly of George Washington University, has questioned the link between release rates and a decline in public safety, and reports findings from various states where release has not impacted the trend of declining crime rates.

A decision is expected early next year: stay tuned.

Prop 9 Comes to Life, But Perhaps Not Entirely


In the wake of the elections, the CDCR is in the process of implementing Prop 9, which we paid some attention to here and http://californiacorrectionscrisis.blogspot.com/2008/11/othering-of-crime-call-for-empathy-in.html.

Prop 9 has a new webpage, detailing some of its provisions.

One of the interesting bits reported by the CDCR is as follows:

Proposition 9 also changed timelines and procedures for parole revocation hearings. However, on December 5, Judge Lawrence K. Karlton with the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, ordered those portions not be implemented in response to a motion filed by plaintiffs in the Valdivia v. Schwarzenegger class action lawsuit, which had previously challenged the constitutionality of parole revocation proceedings. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for March 9, 2009.

In an earlier post, I raised the question whether Prop 9 violated the single-subject rule, by addressing both victim participation and parole timelines. This argument, as a doctrinal argument, doesn’t carry a lot of weight; as Mike Gilbert explains in a phenomenal new piece, the tests used by judges to examine single-subject rule issues are skewed against striking down propositions. However, it seems that the bit that doesn’t fit, the punitive bit that relates, if at all, to a narrow and punitive aspect of victims’ interests, is the one that is at question. I suggest we stay tuned.

More Budgetary Kills: A Bipartisan Initiative to Oppose Death Row Expansion


… and now, to something completely different.

Two legislators from opposing parties and with opposite views on the death penalty joined Tuesday to propose cutting off funding for a new $395 million Death Row at San Quentin, calling it a boondoggle that a financially strapped state can’t afford.

“The Death Row expansion is a bottomless money pit,” said state Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Atwater (Merced County).

“We should use this opportunity, with the state running out of cash, to step back and rethink this project,” said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who joined Denham at a news conference in front of the aging Marin County prison. He referred to the project as a “Cadillac Death Row” and said many condemned inmates could be safely housed at other prisons during their decades of appeals.

A few thoughts:

1) We may have finally arrived to a place where supporters and opponents of the Death Penalty are faced with the realities of a prison system that, regardless of its moral merits, cannot be financially tolerated.

2) At a time when emergency discourse is the required preface to every public discussion, we no longer, perhaps, have the leisure to contemplate what sort of legal system produces such a huge number of people on Death Row in the first place, and the prevalence of this emergency discourse might, yet again, postpone that important discussion.

3) Compare and contrast this to the previous post about the axing of the CJC budget. Perhaps we have finally come to a point in which we can no longer have discussions about the merits of correctional initiatives, only about their costs.

Community Justice Center Budget Killed


This little morsel of information is hidden somewhere in the middle of this Chron piece about the San Francisco budget crisis:

Arguing that they cannot start new programs when existing services are being cut, a majority of the board voted Tuesday to kill nearly $1 million in funding for a pet project of the mayor’s, a Tenderloin community court that will prosecute crimes like aggressive panhandling and selling drugs.

The supervisors voted 6-4 against the Community Justice Center, with supervisors Bevan Dufty, Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier and Carmen Chu pushing to keep it. Outgoing Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, who was elected to be a Superior Court judge, abstained. The mayor can veto the measure; it would take eight votes to override his veto.

This, coupled with the defeat of Prop L, may very well be the end of something that could be a very promising solution to a problem of large magnitude. Granted, there is not a lot of independent research examining recidivism rates in community justice programs (and more research should be generated, because programs like Red Hook in Brooklyn have been around for a while.) However, it does not seem as if the current court system has provided such as successful answer to the mix of homelessness, poverty and drugs in the Tenderloin. Much of the critique leveled at the court by the Coalition for Homelessness stems from misunderstandings about how it is supposed to operate (see for yourselves). And, as those who followed previous posts on this may recall, the sad thing is that this court – whether Mayor Newsom vetoes the decision to kill it or not – seems to have become no more than a pawn in the power struggle between Newsom and Supervisor Chris Daly. While this bickering is going on, we are stymied in a legal system that does not address problems in a holistic way.

If we don’t try progressive solutions to our sentencing system, particularly in quality-of-life issues, we’ll never know for sure whether they do, indeed, reduce recidivism. There is only one way to know, and that is to give this a try. And, much as it pains me to say this as a music and dance lover, this might be worth a bit more to the city as a whole than keeping the opera, symphony, and ballet budgets intact.

Parole: An Overview, and a Personal Story


As prison population grows, the parolee population grows too. A series of pieces on the North County Times has recently highlighted the experiences of parolees and the challenges of parole agents.

One of these articles discusses the impact of a constantly growing parolee population on the ability of parole officers to supervise – and rehabilitate – their clients successfully:

This is California’s parole system, an overworked, underfunded system that is ill-equipped to deal with a crushing caseload of former prisoners who leave prison with a meager $200 allowance to feed, clothe and house themselves.

It’s a caseload that stands to get much worse if a panel of federal judges conducting a trial in San Francisco to address overcrowding orders the early release of nearly 40,000 men and women now behind bars to ease prison overcrowding.

“California’s parole population is now so large and its parole agents so overburdened that parolees who represent a serious public safety threat are not watched closely and those who wish to go straight cannot get the help they need,” said a federally funded report released last month by three experts on the criminal justice system.

Interestingly, the article sees imprisonment and parole as inversely impacting each other. Naturally, the ecology of imprisonment, release, and reimprisonment, is something that merits attention; but is the problem really the growing rate of release, and if so, is the solution for parole officers’ caseload simply to release less people? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Another piece recounts the optimistic story of George Loving, a parolee who managed a group home in Vista. Among other things, he says:

“I didn’t think I was ever gonna change. I was either gonna die on the streets or die in prison. I didn’t grow up with a whole lot of schooling, so I basically only knew one thing: how to steal. I really didn’t know nothing else.

“You know, the (parole) department can make all the changes they want, but if you’re not ready to change, it really doesn’t matter. And then a lot of us don’t be ready to change. And when you basically been spending your life out and in, out and in, you don’t have no education and all that, you only really know that one way. A lot of people, you get my age and you don’t wanna be talking about going back to school and all that. So you just, like, feel hopeless, like maybe this is all I will ever do.

“And then I took a few programs in prison. After sitting there and listening to people tell their stories, I’d sit back and be thinking, ‘Damn, I did some (stuff) like that,’ and ‘Damn, am I that (messed) up and don’t know about it?’ The programs have a lot to do with me wanting to change, because I thought that there was nothing wrong with me. But there was a whole lot wrong with me.

“It just clicked. I was tired. I was tired, I was getting older, my kids was getting bigger. I just got tired. I been doing this since I was 11.

“This job (at a sheet metal company) don’t pay a whole lot of money, but it beats 10 cents an hour or whatever I was getting in prison.

“I just feel good where I’m out now. Sometimes I think about what took me so long to realize that it’s actually not hard to do that right thing. You know, and I really don’t even get all them old thoughts of doing this and doing that no more, you know. Life has just been good. Just living it the best I can.”

Happy Thanksgiving.