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?
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)
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.
(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.
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?
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.)
More on the new interest in national corrections: Glenn Greenwald, on Salon.com, has a favorable post on Jim Webb, highlighting the importance and merit of his interest in the correctional system.
As the national criminal justice commission bill starts its journey, Webb has a piece out in this morning’s Parade Magazine, which many of you may have received with your Sunday papers. The bottom line – which is nothing new to our loyal readers, but may raise the public profile of the problem – is as follows:
With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter.
The State’s correctional crisis is but one disappointing piece in a national mosaic of alarmingly growing incarceration rates. A recent more-or-less bipartisan attempt to solve this problem on the national level is Senator Webb’s new National Criminal Justice Commission Bill, reported on TPM.
What does this consist of? Here’s the full text of the bill. The initial remarks on the bill reiterate all the somber things we already know: booming incarceration rates, public punitiveness, the overrepresentation of minorities, number of parolees, high recidivism rates, high prevalence of gang activity, problems of addiction, and inmate mistreatment.
The bill proposes the creation of a National Criminal Justice Commission, who will provide evidence-based information on a non-exclusive list of issues, including comparative incarceration rates, prison administration around the US, prison costs, gang activity, drug policies, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the historical role of the military in preventing crime (?). The commission will make recommendations for reform in a report, which will be submitted 18 months from the date of the commission’s appointment. The report will be available to the public. The 11-member commission will be bipartisan and will include members appointed by Republican and Democrat lawmakers and governors, with expertise in criminal justice and corrections.
While, in general, more information and less moral panics are something to strive for, several questions can be raised:
How much will this evidence-based information contribute to criminal justice policies? Conducting our affairs based on empirical evidence has not been our strongest suit.
Crime is, for the most part, a local phenomenon; does it make sense to address it at the national level?
Don’t we already know much of this information, to no avail?
Will this be torn to pieces on the floor due to costs?
Stay tuned. ————- Props to Adam Maldonado for sending this my way.
I’ve started working on a broader piece about this. Here’s the abstract:
What do a community court, an expansion to Death Row, and an extension of incarceration periods prior to parole have in common? All three have recently fallen out of favor with California correctional policymakers, not for substantive reasons, but for lack of resources. This paper analyzes the impact of the financial crisis on correctional policies in California, identifying an emerging discourse I call “humonetarianism”. Humonetarianism is characterized by a value-free, superficial, cost-centered approach to correctional initiatives and institutions, which are assessed by their contribution to the state’s deficit rather than on their actual or even perceived merits.
The paper opens by tracing the history of humonetarian discourse and its interaction with the punitive, public-safety-centered discourse of corrections since the 1980s, and the actuarial warehousing policies of the 1990s. The history of sentencing and parole policies in the state shows how humonetarianism emerged when punitive policies, pushed to their logical conclusion, became untenable. The paper continues by providing several examples of humonetarianism: the 2008 correctional propositions (5, 6, and 9), the San Francisco Community Justice Center, the expansion to San Quentin’s Death Row, the decrease in parole supervision over foreign-born inmates, and the recent Plata/Coleman tentative decision. It then generalizes, from these examples, the main features of humonetarianism: cost-driven discourse, political bipartisanship, and a sense of emergency. While this discourse may appear, at first blush, to be less punitive than policies from previous decades, the paper argues that it is extremely harmful in the long run, due to its superficiality, cynical usage by interest groups, and shortsightedness.
I’ll be happy to get your feedback on the idea, here, or by email to aviramh at uchastings dot edu.
More news on several controversial portions of Prop 9, which we discussed here in the past. As our gentle readers may recall, Prop 9 put into legislation more victim involvement in the criminal justice system, including parole hearings. While some of this was not news – and in several counties, at least, was common practice before the passage of Prop 9 – this is the aspect that was prominently displayed on the supporters’ website. However, Prop 9 also included punitive provisions: lengthening parole procedures as well as limiting the right to counsel in parole revocation hearings for indigent defendants.
Yesterday, Judge Karlton invalidated the portions of Prop 9 that infringe on parolees’ rights, particularly the restrictions on the right to counsel, due to a contradiction with a permanent injunction, reached as a consent decree, in 1994 following litigation regarding parolees’ rights. The Sac Bee reports:
In the parolees’ 1994 lawsuit, Karlton found the state’s existing procedures were in violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee. His resulting permanent injunction was ratified by the state and is legally construed as a consent decree.
“To the extent that Proposition 9 conflicts with the permanent injunction, the former may not be enforced,” Karlton said in Thursday’s 34-page published opinion, which cited the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitution defines itself as the “supreme law of the land, and its judiciary supreme in construing what the law is,” the judge declared.
“The state’s action is not given special deference by virtue of having occurred through the initiative process,” he added.
“Especially now, we cannot afford to be spending tens of millions of dollars on unnecessary privileges for convicted felons,” said Nina Salarno Ashford, representing Crime Victims United of California. She urged the state to appeal the ruling “to defend the will of California voters, and the pocketbooks of California taxpayers.”
Indeed. Because, what would get us talking about victim rights and due process for parolees, if not our pocketbooks?
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.
