This week, Justice Strategies rolled out their excellent new report, “Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration,” by Patricia Allard and Judith Greene. Read it here.
We knew that the USA’s enormous prison population has high monetary costs and even higher human costs, but this paper documents the particular costs of separating families. Parental incarceration triples the odds that children will engage in violence or drug abuse, and doubles their odds of developing serious mental health issues. There are more children of incarcerated parents than there are total incarcerated persons; nearly 25% of the 1.7 million children with incarcerated parents are under age four, and over 33% will become adults while their parents are locked up.
As promised here, I’ve inquired and read further into the correctional situation in Hawaii. Hawaii imprisons less people than CA, and certainly less per 100,000 residents (338 to California’s 471 in 2007). The recent decline in prison population in 2010, however, was twice as impressive in California than in Hawaii.
But the reason Californians should carefully examine the situation with Hawaii has less to do with the bottom-line numbers and more to do with the method of incarceration. According to Meda Chesney-Ling and Kat Brady, Hawaii is particularly notorious for housing its inmates off-state, mostly in private facilities on the mainland. More than a third of Hawaii’s inmates are on the mainland. This is a much more drastic than the condition in CA, which I referred to elsewhere as “the inmate export enterprise“. This move, hailed as a cost-saving measure, is now seriously questioned, and a recent audit attributed this move to “artificial cost figures derived from a calculation based on a flawed methodology, designed entirely on what is easiest for the department to report.” The new governor, Neil Abercrombie, is thankfully rethinking this strategy, and reestimating that bringing home some of the prison population would “easily add millions more to the state budget”.
We once discussed the question whether housing an inmate away from home is less conducive to rehabilitation. There are, however, other immediate concerns. Being housed away from family, friends and a supportive environment, makes an inmate far more vulnerable to attacks, as the distressing stories of Hawaii female inmates sexually assaulted in a Kentucky private facility and male inmates corporally punished in Arizona demonstrate. Despite the fact that this 1997 story paints Texas incarceration of Hawaiians in a positive light, the inmates interviewed mention the difficulties of being away from family and completely detached from the cultural context of their daily lives (Hawaii disproportionately imprisons Hawaiian natives). This CCA story about Oklahoma tells of efforts to change this sense of displacement, but it appears that the problem runs much deeper than that.
There are good reasons why Californians should pay close attention to this seldom-reported phenomenon. The concern is, of course, with other twists and misinterpretations of the Plata/Coleman order. Even if construction is lagging behind (and perhaps because of the delays), the option to ship more California inmates away to CCA facilities around the country is still very much on the table. Sending away more inmates may prove countereffective, and for some inmates, disastrous.
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Many thanks to Meda Chesney-Lind for helping me with more information on this.
Re our posts here, here and here: Yesterday’s Chron offered a summary of CDCR’s progress on construction projects funded by AB900. Four years after authorizing $7.4 billion dollars in bonds, “the state has not completed a single project authorized by that bill, AB900, and has begun planning or construction for only about 8,400 beds” for the 8,200 inmates currently still sleeping in “bad beds”.
The piece quotes some critics of the construction path for decrowding, and it was pleasant to see the CCPOA among them.
Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he believes the state should undertake a “serious review” of AB900, noting that lawmakers have instituted other reforms to deal with crowding since 2007 – including medical parole for severely incapacitated inmates – and that the state’s crime rate has declined.
Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the prison guards union, which opposed AB900, said the construction authorized by the bill will not solve the state’s prison crisis.
I still think, as I pointed out in another post, that despite the open-ended order in Plata/Coleman, it is completely possible to offer an entirely reasonable interpretation of the order, according to which construction projects are not an acceptable response to overcrowding. In fact, the opposite interpretation seems unreasonable to me. The order specifically provided a number of inmates to be released from prison, not an acceptable square yardage. I believe that attempting to build out way out of overcrowding is not only unsound, but also a violation of the court’s order.
Another source of concern associated with Gascón’s appointment is his recent declaration that he plans to seek the death penalty in cases that “warrant” it. Gascon is surely aware of the meager community support for the death penalty in San Francisco, but I am sure there are currently prosecutors in office who were unhappy with Harris’ policy of not seeking the death penalty who will welcome this change.
As to pursuing the death penalty in politically progressive counties: The ACLU data show (jump to Appendix A) that Alameda county, consistently “blue”, has been well above the California average in death sentences between 2000 and 2009. San Francisco may now face the same fate.
“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”
–Law & Order opening narration
Lt. Government Elect Gavin Newsom’s choice, in the last days of his mayoral tenure, to appoint George Gascón as San Francisco D.A., was described by the Chronicle as a “bold move”. The article, however, focuses on Gascón’s personal qualities, rather than on an institutional “leap” he will have to perform. Policing and prosecuting, while traditionally on the same side of the adversarial field, are very different occupations, and they require different skills. The prosecutorial realm extends over charging and trial, and while police may be involved in such matters, their traditional realm is that of the investigative phase. Prosecutors are a systemic check over police investigatory practices, by way of incorporating decisions about constitutional violations into their decision whether to charge. This implies a requirement of nonpartisan consideration on the part of prosecutors. Of course, realistically, the relationship between prosecutors and police officers is much more complicated (for some insights on that, check out this Jefferson Institute publication). But it will require a certain shift in thinking. This will certainly change what the SF Weekly Snitch has referred to as a “long history of tension and soured relations” between the prosecution and the police in San Francisco.
Granted, there are some trends in both occupations that make them similar. Both are undergoing continuous change and a redefining of priorities and tasks. Community policing, a set of policies designed to help police be proactive and address community needs, now has a counterpart in the shape of community prosecuting. Both policies aim at transcending the traditional mode of law enforcement by being sensitive to residents’ needs, such as addressing quality of life crimes, something in which Gascón has gained some experience while policing the Tenderloin. And police officers are increasingly more attentive to matters traditionally reserved for other actors in the system, such as reentry and rehabilitation.
It will be interesting to follow up and see what insights Gascón has gained in policing and will bring with him to the prosecutorial office.
This semester I’m on research leave at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And, as I have started to learn, Hawaii has its own correctional issues and concerns, which are different from California’s, but similar in some important ways.
The Community Alliance on Prisons highlights some important problems with the Hawaiian correctional system. In 2009, when we held our CCC conference, the CAP held its own conference about the local crisis (the proceedings, in full, are here.) The conference debunked the myth that “there are no bad prisons in paradise”, highlighting the oppressive war on drugs, and the disproportionate number of Hawaiian natives behind bars. As late as the mid-1980s, conditions in Hawaiian prisons were outrageous, and included inmates sleeping on floors and cruel corporal punishment. These methods were, apparently, justified by treating inmates the way they supposedly were treated in their native cultures.
Hawaii’s incarceration rate is half that of the United States in average, but it is still alarmingly high. Shockingly, Hawaii is the country’s third largest consumer of private prison services with 34% of Hawaii state inmates in private prisons.
As reported by Meda Chesney-Lind, whose research focuses on gender issues in the criminal justice system, the rates of female incarceration in Hawaii (mostly for low-level drug offenses) are on the rise. Hawaiian prison population in general appears to be comprised mostly of drug offenders, and as explained by Marilyn Brown, the incarceration policy has not been very useful in addressing the problem. And, according to Tom Lengyel, who has studied the impact of drug-related incarceration on families in Hawaii, more benefits with less social costs can be attained through residential programs.
This evening I happened to catch Kat Brady from CAP on the local TV channel, speaking of the sporadic and unsystematic reentry initiatives in Hawaii. She mentioned several policies that made life difficult for inmates, and particularly for female inmates. Women in drug programs, for example, who form friendships within the program, are then prohibited from keeping in touch with their friends after being paroled.
I look forward to learning more about the Hawaiian correctional system, as well as keeping a watchful eye on things back in California.
More building plans come in the heels of the Michigan construction and the Calaveras and San Bernardino projects. These projects, however, seem to be more benign and have a reentry/therapeutic purpose. The CDCR website describes the three projects as follows:
Renovation and reuse of the former Northern California Women’s Facility in San Joaquin County as a 500-bed adult male secure community reentry facility pursuant to the mandates of AB 900, which envisioned this new type of correctional facility for inmates within 6-12 months of parole;
Renovation and reuse of the former El Paso De Robles Youth Correctional Facility in San Luis Obispo County (closed in 2008) as a 1,000-bed Level II adult correctional facility to be named the Estrella Correctional Facility, and
Renovation and reuse of the former Dewitt-Nelson Youth Correctional Facility in San Joaquin County (closed in 2008) as a 1,133-bed adult correctional facility with a mental health treatment mission.
In the heels of the report from Michigan come two new construction projects within California, both funded by AB 900. In Calaveras County, the local jail’s capacity is to be quadrupled. And the expansion in San Bernardino adds maximum security beds.
Unsurprisingly, the Republican Caucus has been following on the progress made with AB 900 funding. From their perspective, “[i]t does not help that CDCR seems to have little direction and produces a new strategy plan on an annual basis. In the meantime, Democrats are pushing policies through the legislature – and supported by the Governor – that decrease the population through early release and place the burden of monitoring and controlling these individuals on local entities. Sadly, these are the exact same policies and actions that AB 900 was supposed to prevent.”
From an empirical perspective, however, it is the massive construction of more prison cells that should be prevented. Building prisons is akin to building public highways; as we build more to prevent congestion, congestion gradually increases to fill the volume available. It is frightening to think that incarcerating one in 100 Californians is not enough. But perhaps they are the “wrong” kind of Californians, and therefore the Republican caucus should lose no sleep over them.
In any case, these new construction projects highlight the dark and problematic side of the Plata/Coleman decision. In an effort to be courteous to the state, and not to micromanage its affairs, the three-judge panel asked for a population reduction without mandating methods the state might employ to achieve such reduction. In his response to SCOTUS Justices, Don Specter seemed to agree that building new facilities would be among the range or responses that would be in compliance with the order. I actually think a narrow interpretation of the Plata/Coleman order is not only possible, but reasonable. The court did use the word “reduction” and stated a number of inmates. To say that “reduction” is the same as “dilution” of inmates is a bit of an interpretive push. But the real point is, of course, that building new prisons, in the long run, will push California away from compliance with the order, because the new facilities will, in due course, become just as overcrowded as the old ones.
(image courtesy Cory Morse from the Grand Rapids Press)
The Michigan dream, which encountered some serious hurdles before getting back on track, is apparently becoming reality. Via Sara at the Prison Law Blog, here are some details about the preparations to receive California inmates at this new Michigan facility:
As The GEO Group Inc. prepares to reopen the site once known as a “punk prison” for youth convicts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is getting ready to send nearly 2,600 inmates here to help solve the state’s prison overcrowding.
This time, the inmates will not be deviant youth, but adults who ran afoul of California law for a variety of reasons.
The prisoners coming to Baldwin as part of a $60 million-a-year contract with GEO will be medium-security inmates deemed not extremely dangerous. Still, their backgrounds may include everything from murder to sexual assault.
Michigan has been hailed as a model for inmate population reduction. Apparently, these commendable steps have put them, and GEO corporation, in a position to benefit from our failure to act similarly.
“Tough on crime, tough on crime, lock ’em up! This is how these guys ran, but it isn’t working! . . . We’re locking up people who take a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know we lock them up for ten years. . . Judges say there’s nothing we can do, we got these mandatory sentences. . . They go in as youths, they come out as hardened criminals…”
Bipartisanism reaches new surprising heights with this surprising little Pat Robertson video clip. Happy Holidays!
—————— Many thanks to Billy Minshall for this bit of holiday news.
