Riverside Jail Sends Inmates to Fire Camps

Image courtesy prisontalk.com.

This Wednesday, Riverside County Jail became the first county institution to send inmates to California’s fire camps, in which state prisoners help put out fires. Richard de Atley of P.E. bloggers reports:

The 20 inmates were sent Wednesday, June 5 to the CDCR’s Sierra Conservation Camp training facility, in Jamestown. CDCR has agreed to place the trained county inmates in Riverside County fire camps, whenever possible.

. . .

County Supervisors in April approved a Sheriff’s Department proposal to supply county inmates to the fire camp program. More inmates will be sent every two weeks until the program reaches capacity of 200 Riverside County inmates at any time during the next five years.

Riverside County’s five jails have been at capacity shortly after realignment began. More than 10,000 inmates have been released early due to realignment, jail officials have said.

. . .

Riverside County will pay $46.19 daily per inmate. The funds were set aside from realignment money controlled by the Community Corrections Partnership, a joint local agency that includes the probation, sheriff, mental health department and district attorney and public defender’s offices.

Riverside County’s fire camps are located in Norco and Hemet. The county also maintains the Oak Glen camp, located in northern Riverside County inside the San Bernardino National Forest in the San Gorgonio Mountain Range, according to the Riverside County Fire Department’s web site.

In addition to helping fight wildfires, inmate camp members do public road maintenance and community service work.


For readers unfamiliar with California’s fire camps, I highly recommend Philip Goodman’s work (exhibit A, exhibit B). Not only do the fire camps alleviate prison overcrowding, they provide a much-needed public service. As an interesting aside, the strict racial divisions within the institutions blur when inmates work side by side on life-saving work.

Obtaining a job as a fireman after release from prison, however, may be tricky, as the fire departments run thorough background checks.

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Props to Caitlin Henry for the blog link.

Federal vs. State Prison Conditions

Yesterday’s afternoon saw a story by Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic about recent scandals of inmate abuse and neglect in four states.

First, on May 22, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department released a report highlighting the unconstitutional conditions of a county prison in Florida. Then, on May 30th, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit alleging atrocious conditions at a state prison in Mississippi. One day later, the feds again sounded out on behalf of inmates, this time against profound abuse and neglect at a Pennsylvania prison. Finally, last week, a federal judge issued an order describing the unconstitutional “brutality” of the prison in Orleans Parish, Louisiana.

There were many common themes in the reports. In each instance, the mistreatment of mentally ill inmates was highlighted. Prison officials have failed to provide a constitutional level of care in virtually every respect, from providing medication and treatment to protecting the men from committing suicide. In the Louisiana court order, one prison expert is quoted by the judge as describing an “extraordinary and horrific” situation with the prison there. In the Florida investigation, federal investigators noted that local prison officials “have elected to ignore obvious and serious systemic deficiencies” in the jail’s mental health services.

Cohen asks why federal authorities are not investigating similar abuses occurring in federal institutions. I think it may be easier for the feds to investigate and regulate state institutions than their own. And yet, lawsuits regarding abuse in federal institutions are constantly filed, such as here and here. This USA Today story, written from the perspective of white collar criminals, suggests that, while federal institutions are safer, some state institutions offer benefits such as visits. The differences in conditions may have much to do with the population in both institutions, which differs according to type of offense, as seen from the BJS pie charts above.

The bottom line is that it is very difficult to make generalizations on the differences between systems when there are so many institutions. The variation in conditions within each system may be greater than the difference between the systems. And, therefore, Cohen’s point that the abuses in some of them closely resemble those in state institutions is well taken.

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Props to Heather Kelly and to Ben Fleury-Steiner for the link.

Death Penalty in Limbo

On June 7th, Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as the Night Stalker, became the 85th inmate to die of natural causes while on San Quentin’s Death Row. Many Californians still remember his string of heinous crimes committed in Southern California and beyond in the 1980s. A disturbed teen turned serial killer, Ramirez brutally murdered and abused many innocent people, mutilating the bodies, and expressing no remorse for his horrific deeds. If there ever were anyone deserving of the death penalty, it would be Ramirez.
Like his 84 predecessors, Ramirez maximized the usage of his appellate rights. He was still litigating well into the late 2000s, and his numerous appeals were exhausted only a short while before a DNA match linked him to yet one more brutal murder from the 1980s.
Regardless of one’s ideological stance on capital punishment, Ramirez’s death is a sad illustration of the extent to which the death penalty in California is stuck in limbo and broken beyond repair. The litigation efforts in recent years have not focused on the grand questions of the morality of state-sanctioned executions, racial discrimination and deterrence. Instead, courts have, for years, “tinkered with the machinery of death”, and litigation has focused on increasingly technical minutiae of execution protocols, such as the availability and effect of different chemicals used in executions.
The latest installment in death penalty litigation is a case in point. Earlier this week, the 1st District Court of Appeals affirmed a Marin court decision that effectively put the death penalty in California on hold again. The reason: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) did not satisfy the administrative requirements to properly notify the public of various aspects of its recently amended three-drug protocol. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Baze v. Rees (2008) established that three-drug executions did not violate the Eighth Amendment, but CDCR’s protocols preceded the decision and therefore could not rely on it. In the decision, Justice Anthony Kline wrote that the information CDCR provided to the public exhibited numerous inaccuracies and did not include proper discussion of alternatives to the three-drug method or of the protocol’s costs.
While the public certainly needs to be informed of how its tax dollars are spent in the correctional arena, one cannot read the decision without thinking whether our conversation about the death penalty shouldn’t be deeper and more substantive. Searching for a humane method for putting people to death is, by definition, a fairly futile effort, and incessant discussions of this nature, which have become, by necessity, the bread and butter of death penalty litigation, are missing the bigger picture. Capital punishment lawyers and judges may have no choice but to pore over these technical details, but we, as a society of voters and policy makers, owe ourselves and our fellow Californians a better conversation.
Proponents of the death penalty may bemoan the days in which the condemned were summarily executed in the town square without appeals, habeas proceedings, or quibbling over drug protocols. But those days are over, and given the current political climate in the state, they will probably not return; a recent effort by the California District Attorneys’ Association to push for simplified capital litigation with less post-conviction relief has failed. What we know about the incidence of wrongful convictions is a frightening warning sign to anyone who might want to turn time backwards and streamline the execution process. Experts estimate that up to 5 percent of all convictions may be wrongful, and the prospect of an irreversible punishment should be disturbing to anyone who cares about justice, regardless of political affiliation.
Since the lengthy and expensive appellate process is here to stay, it is time for Californians to ask themselves the same good questions that the people of New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, New York and New Jersey have asked themselves since the onset of the financial crisis: Are the benefits of the death penalty, in terms of retribution and deterrence, worth the hassle and expense?
One such good question might be how the families of Ramirez’s numerous victims feel in the wake of his natural death. For some, an execution might have brought closure and relief; others perhaps would consider the thirty-year wait to no avail an excruciating ordeal and a waste of state resources. A recent study of California violent crime victims, conducted by Californians for Safety and Justice, confirms the solid research according to which crime victims are not more punitive than non-victims. The study, albeit limited by response rates, found low-income people and people of color to be disproportionately represented in the victim group. Victims surveyed in the study tended to view incarceration as futile and to prefer investment in rehabilitation and drug programs. It well may be that some victims are underserved by waiting for a cathartic event that may or may never happen, and that the interminable wait (necessitated by the concern over wrongful convictions) does some families more harm than good.
Another such good question would be whether our legitimate desire for retribution–especially justified in cases like Ramirez’s–is making us confuse fact with fantasy. Perhaps the death penalty as some would want it to be would provide proper retribution; the death penalty as administered in California today does not.
And finally, the question of effective deterrence via capital punishment, which was at the forefront of the conversation in the mid-1970s, has been relegated to the provenance of small handful of economists still studying it. The American Law Institute withdrew its support of the death penalty in 2010, finding no strong evidence for deterrence, and a 2012 report from the National Research council concluded that “research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates.” Unfortunately, violent crime will probably never completely disappear, and people like Ramirez will again perpetuate unspeakable crimes. Whether they do so despite, or because, of capital punishment or its absence is, and will always, remain unclear.
Our hearts weep for the many victims of Ramirez’s cruelty, and that of other perpetrators of vicious crimes. Let us punish these people properly, soundly, and economically, by sentencing them to life without parole, and give up on the hollow hopes of a death penalty that is anything but.

Are Crime Victims Punitive?

Research on punitiveness consistently teaches us that, surprisingly, being a crime victim does not make one more punitive. Incidents like today’s death of notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez of natural causes on San Quentin’s Death Row raises the issue of what victims expect from the criminal justice system, and what provides them closure and relief.

It is timely, therefore, to read Californians for Safety and Justice’s recent report on crime victims in California. Here, for your convenience, are the key findings:

The findings are not unrelated to each other. It is unsurprising that violent crime disproportionately victimizes low income people and people of color. And it is also unsurprising that this is the same population that is affected by mass incarceration. Their views on the value of incarceration are pessimistic, and they are unsurprisingly more likely to hope for justice that works.

The victim advocacy groups that popped up in the mid-1990 to steer California law in a punitive direction represented, for the most part, white, middle-class people who lost family members to violent crime. This group of victims did not experience the devastation that mass incarceration wreaks on low-income communities and communities of color, and they do not speak for the majority of crime victims in the state.

Each victim responds to a violent crime experience in a unique and personal way. For some, lengthy incarceration terms and the death penalty are a relief and a method of closure. For others, they are a waste of money that does not make their personal tragedy a catalyst for world improvement. Before speaking for them, let’s keep in mind what they say when they are allowed to speak with their own voices.

UPDATE: The Chron has picked up the story.

Richard Ramirez becomes 85th Death Row Inmate to Die of Natural Causes

Richard Ramirez, whose horrific crimes terrified residents of Southern California and beyond in the 1980s, died in San Quentin’s Death Row today of natural causes. The AP reports:

Ramirez, 53, had been taken from San Quentin’s death row to a hospital where authorities said he died of liver failure.

He had been housed on death row for decades and was awaiting execution, even though it has been years since anyone has been put to death in California.

At his first court appearance, Ramirez raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, “Hail, Satan.”

His marathon trial, which ended in 1989, was a horror show in which jurors heard about one victim’s eyes being gouged out and another’s head being nearly severed. Courtroom observers wept when survivors of some of the attacks testified.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders that terrorized Southern California in 1984 and 1985 as well as charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

This makes Ramirez the 85th inmate to die of natural causes on Death Row in San Quentin. By comparison, since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 2006, only 13 inmates were executed. Earlier this week I explained on CBS-5 news that the death penalty in California has become, essentially, a very expensive version of life without parole.

My heart aches today for the families of Ramirez’s many victims, some of whom may have waited and hoped to see him executed. We may disagree about the substantive issue of the merits of the death penalty, but if anyone was deserving of such a cruel fate, it was Ramirez. But since we cannot, in modernity, deliver the promise of swift death without risking the execution of innocents (the new developments in Florida raise serious concerns about the prospect of mistakes), maybe it’s time to settle, as closure, for what we’re doing anyway: Life without parole, without expensive incarceration conditions in a dilapidated, outdated facility, and without endless and costly state-funded appellate litigation.

BREAKING NEWS: Death Penalty on Hold in CA

The San Jose Mercury reports:

In a 28-page ruling, the 1st District Court of Appeal found that state prison officials failed to comply with administrative rules when crafting new regulations more than two years ago. The unanimous decision of the three-justice panel sends California back to the drawing board, unless the Brown administration takes the case to the California Supreme Court and keeps more than 700 Death Row inmates on an indefinite reprieve.

The appeals court upheld a Marin County judge, who faulted the prison department for a variety of procedural missteps, including offering no public explanation for why San Quentin officials opted to continue with a three-drug lethal injection method instead of a single-drug execution option being embraced by a number of other states.

State officials have indicated in court papers they are exploring the single-drug option, which involves putting condemned inmates to death with one dose of a sedative. Ohio, Washington and Arizona are among the states that have moved to that option to short circuit legal challenges to the three-drug method.

A prison spokesman said state officials are reviewing the ruling but have not decided how to proceed.

. . .

State Justice J. Anthony Kline, writing for the appeals court on Thursday, found California again violated the administrative rules in 2010, rejecting the state’s argument that more than 20,000 comments were submitted and public hearings were held to consider its new lethal injection procedures. The appeals court concluded that the public did not receive all the necessary information, particularly surrounding the prison system’s decision to stick to the three-drug method, which has been challenged because of concerns it can result in a cruel and painful death.

The full decision can be found here. I will speak about the decision at approximately 8:15 on KPIX (Channel 5) on Sunday.

Why I Am Not an Abolitionist

Examining what might be the beginning of the decline of prison as a massive mode of governance (and government expenditure) sometimes makes me think about abolitionist criminology – that is, a perspective ruling out the usage of prisons as a mode of punishment at all, and sometimes challenging the very concept of crime. I spend a lot of time on this blog decrying the evils of mass incarceration, and with good reason; the prison complex has become a monstruous apparatus controlling the lives of an astonishing percentage of Americans. That this massive project is shrinking a bit because of the economic downturn can be read as a sad testament to the prism of profit as the main perspective on crime and punishment. If we could execute and confine massive amounts of people on the cheap, somehow, we would do it. And that is horrific, and the goal of bringing this system down certainly merits our energy, passion, time, and money.

But I am not an abolitionist, and I don’t think I ever was. A lot of what Gilmore and Davis say is true, but I don’t come out of this with the same conclusions. This post is my attempt to clarify to myself how I feel about the prison project in general, and it is more reflective than decisive.

The bottom line is this: Despite everything, despite Discipline and Punish, despite Visions of Social Control, despite The New Penology, despite From the Big House to the Warehouse, I still think that prison is preferable to a regime of corporal punishment. And I think that some people – a very small minority of the people currently doing time in correctional institutions – should be in prison, and should be kept there for a long, long time. My objection to mass incarceration is aimed at the scale of the operation, not at its rationale. I would be at peace with a much, much smaller apparatus, designed to confine the very small percentage of people whom I regard non-redeemable, or whose deeds are abominable to the extreme.

A couple of months ago we had the great honor and pleasure of hosting Marc Klaas on stage at the California Correctional Crisis conference. I have fought Mr. Klaas’s politics for much of my professional life, and I truly believe, and always have, that extreme punitive measures advanced as being presumably in the interest of victims are unfair, inhumane, and do much more harm than good. But not only do I have an immense amount of sympathy for Mr. Klaas and the terrible loss of his little girl, I also have a lot of admiration and respect for his commitment to public service and his devotion to what he thinks (and I disagree) is best for California. He is not part of the prison industrial complex. He genuinely believes his work is world-improving, and I have respect for genuine advocacy. And I think some of it, especially the KlaasKids foundation’s work to help identify and locate missing children, is very worthwhile.

I also have some understanding of the retributionist perspective, even though I’m not a big subscriber to its punitive corollary. A few months ago I saw the chilling and depressing film An American Crime, which, to my horror, is faithful to the trial transcript in the very real murder case of Sylvia Likens. I can’t really recommend the film or the trial transcript – I had nightmares for many weeks and wouldn’t wish them upon my readers – but it awakened me to the distressing fact that crime is real, it is sometimes (happily, rarely) truly horrific, and victimization is devastating. Interestingly, the Indiana jury decided, in that trial, not to impose the death penalty. Is the death penalty horrific from a humanistic and systemic perspective? Yes. Would I lose sleep over someone like the defendant receiving it in that case? Probably not. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, found a way to justify the death penalty in that specific case. I consider myself a death penalty abolitionist on various grounds and still agree with her conclusions.

If I have to choose a criminological camp to belong to, therefore, I pledge my allegiance to Jock Young’s left realism. Crime, says Young, is real, and victimization is real. Any effort to present the crack epidemic and its immense devastation as nonexistent, or some sort of fantastic FBI conspiracy, should be rejected (and if you want to know more, read David Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot.) Any effort to present violent street crime as “community organizing” should be firmly rejected. As Jimmy McNulty says in The Wire, an underground economy can and should exist without horrific violence and the devastation of entire neighborhoods. I don’t think I’m feeding into the establishment and justifying mass incarceration by acknowledging crime and victimization.

Yes, crime is situational. But there is almost always a modicum of responsibility. We have to believe in responsibility if we believe in change. Yes, help and initiative and welfare and reform is essential to bring about that change. It cannot happen on its own. But to argue that deprivation, racial and class discrimination, and other situational factors necessarily produce violent crime is an insult to the vast majority of poor people of color who do NOT engage in violent crime. In that way, the abolitionist radical position, that would interpret any criminal act as having political meaning, is as reductionist and offensive to me as the right-wing race- and class-blind position that expects everyone to conform to the law regardless of their status in life, or worse, that assumes that race and class are criminogenic because the perpetrators subscribe to a different set of values.

Moreover, radical criminology does a disservice to poor people of color when it decries stop and frisk wholesale and argues for underenforcement. As Sasha Natapoff convincingly argues in Underenforcement, street crime tends to victimize folks who live in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Yes, police brutality and abuse of power should be fiercely protested and stopped. But no policing at all throws the baby in with the bathwater.

So, let’s all fight the good fight. Let’s demolish the California correctional monster. But let’s not forget that the distinction between offenders and victims is false; let’s not forget that prisons, while instruments of incapacitation, profit and corruptions, are the right place for a small minority of the people who inhabit their walls; and let’s not subscribe to an essentialist view that, by denying crime and its devastating consequences, defies reality.

Such a short post cannot possibly do justice to many topics we could discuss, such as the false distinction between street crime and other forms of crime, and the roots of American incarceration in the abolition of slavery. I acknowledge their importance and welcome thoughts and comments.

Cutting Food Benefits for the Formerly Incarcerated?

An amendment to a farm bill, currently debated in the senate, would permanently drop anyone ever convicted of a violent crime from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Colorlines reports:

According to Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. . . 

The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since. In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut. … Democrats accepted it without trying to modify it to address its most ill-considered aspects.

Two-thirds of SNAP recipients are children, elderly or the disabled, and two-fifths of SNAP households live below half the poverty line.

Beyond the obvious implications for the income gap and the disproportionate harmful impact on the African American community, this provokes some thought about the way the financial crisis has yielded a new perception of the offender. Our focus on inmates prior to their crisis had been on their risk level, and the crisis has focused our attention on their cost. This is what has yielded some of the advances in geriatric and medical parole, but it has also led to some bitterness over the “free healthcare” that inmates receive. This seems to be a development of the same ilk. In an era of competition over resources, formerly incarcerated folks are seen as somehow less deserving of help and compassion than others, and thus their benefits, regardless of economic condition, are first to go.

This is why, even though humonetarianism has made some significant dents in the mass incarceration machine, it cannot be relied upon as an exclusive strategy for reform. We’ve seen enough developments of the tough-‘n’-cheap variety to know that savings don’t always work in the direction of penal reform. The way to frame the savings argument here would be as a  long-term concern: Poor people with nothing to eat have less opportunities and might therefore resort to crime, and one way to save is to reduce recidivism.

Inmates Review Prisons and Jails on Yelp

I suppose in an age of free information and web democracy this was to be expected:

To me, this is interesting because it is the perfect retort to the increasing perspective of viewing inmates as customers. Jails that expect their “guests” to pay for their lodging, food, and health care, shouldn’t be surprised if their “services” get reviewed.

Ban the Box: Screening Job Applicants by Criminal Record

Today’s New York Times editorial is devoted to the problem of screening job applicants who have criminal records.

Sixty-five million Americans have criminal records that might cause them to be denied jobs, even for arrests or minor convictions that occurred in the distant past. Last year, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reaffirmed a longstanding ruling that it was illegal to screen out employees unless the offense was directly related to the job.

The problem, however, has become so acute that a growing number of states and municipalities have explicitly prohibited public agencies — and in some cases, private businesses — from asking about an applicant’s criminal history until the applicant reaches the interview stage or receives a conditional job offer. In addition, many jurisdictions now require employers to show that the disqualifying offenses are directly related to the position in question.

The editorial links to this report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which lists states and localities that have adopted “ban the box” initiatives, which do not allow employes to inquire about prospective employees’ criminal records. Among the localities mentioned in the report are San Francisco, Oakland, East Palo Alto, Carson, Compton, Richmond, Alameda County, and Santa Clara County. As the report explains, many of the “ban the box” initiatives are fairly new (adopted within the last seven years) thanks to the work of prison and reentry activists, and some of them were adopted during the financial crisis and despite job shortages.

As far as statewide policies, a Schwarzenegger gubernatorial executive order from 2010 ordered two questions regarding conviction history removed from the State of California Employment application.  The State Personnel Board has issued a new application, and background checks will not be required for every position. For more information about the successful campaign to bring about Ban the Box in California, read how Legal Services for Prisoners with Children spearheaded the campaign or use the toolkit available on their website.

What about private employers? The California Labor Code, summarized in this report, asking employees to provide information about arrests that did not lead to a conviction is illegal. The statues do not prohibit employers from asking about arrests for which employees are out on bail, but it seems that seeking such information about applicants would be tricky, if not illegal. Asking about criminal convictions is allowed when accompanied by a statement that criminal records do not necessarily disqualify an applicant from consideration, and asking about certain marijuana convictions (more than two years old) and expunged/sealed convictions, as well as misdemeanor convictions for which probation has been completed, is illegal.

The progress made by Ban the Box activists is astounding particularly against the background of job losses in the last few years. It’s a display of fairness and equity in a setting that usually does not have much empathy for currently or formerly incarcerated people. Readers – why do you think that is? Is this a rehabilitative animus – that is, people feel more inclined to help folks who have already completed their sentences? Or is there anything else afoot?