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The CCC blog celebrates its second birthday today. This was a very busy year with regard to correctional developments and news. Some good news: Overall, cost-related concerns led to a first-time decline in the U.S. prison population. Crime rates are also dropping nationwide, unrelated to incarceration (and still occurring as a decline in incarceration is evident). The Obama administration appears to be less bent on a tough-on-crime approach for its own sake and has moved toward reducing the cocaine/crack disparity.

In California, some of our top stories involved high-profile litigation; the scofflaws between the three-judge panel and CDCR regarding overcrowding continued, led to a revised state plan which was a combination of release and prison expansion, and eventually led to the current pending case in the Supreme Court (after a wee legal detour), reviewing the panel’s order to decrowd California institutions. Budget woes and partisanism led to serious cuts in rehabilitation programs (sigh). California imported more of its inmates to out-of-state privatized institutions. Some of the proposals for decarceration were more outlandish than others. Improvements to the prison health system were hailed by its designers but the data, and some journalistic efforts, revealed mixed results. We were concerned about some conditions in Pelican Bay and in the behavior modification units. Incidentally, not a week goes by without letters from inmates and their families, addressed to CCC, reporting on the hardships of SHU in Pelican Bay. We were also troubled by the juvenile justice system, especially by the crushed hopes regarding a reassessment of juveniles on LWOP. Another troubling topic was the increasingly hostile approach to immigrants, especially with the rise of the “immigrant-criminal“. We also linked to some useful information regarding the early releases.

In addition to Plata and Coleman, other constitutional issues regarding corrections were discussed. The 9th Circuit heard Valdivia v. Schwarzenegger and instructed the state to assume reporting responsibility for disabled inmates in county jails. Some interesting prison litigation included the right of inmates to a Wiccan prison chaplain and the right to wear a hijab in a courtroom detention cell. As ALI retracted its support of the death penalty, the three “killer counties” in California were exposed.

In addition, we followed the ideas and plans of some officials you will be voting for and against this coming November: Jerry Brown, Meg Whitman, and Kamala Harris. We also provided an assessment of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s correctional legacy.

We covered a variety of other topics, including GPS monitoring, sex offender legislation, the sit/lie ordinance, and the propositions for legalization of marijuana.

Stay with us as we begin our third year following the California correctional crisis. Thank you for your emails, comments, continuous support, and faithful readership.

The Chron reports:

Prison guards shot into a crowd to stop 200 rioting inmates at California’s Folsom State Prison, wounding five, authorities said Saturday. Another two inmates were injured by other prisoners during Friday’s riot, which began at about 7 p.m. in the main exercise yard and ended after 30 minutes. Prison spokesman Lt. Anthony Gentile said officers fired after other efforts to break up the riot failed.

“We tried to control the situation with chemical agents dispersed over the crowd,” Gentile said Saturday. “We fired several rounds of rubber bullets and that didn’t stop them from fighting.”

None of the inmates suffered life-threatening injuries, and none of the 45 to 50 officers who responded were hurt.

The piece provides no background for the riot; the Sac Bee reports that the cause is still under investigation.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has issued this report, which analyzes the savings potential of releasing one half of non-violent offenders.

The argument is that such mass releases would not adversely impact public safety. As the report explains,

Crime can explain only a small portion of the rise in incarceration between 1980 and the early 1990s, and none of the increase in incarceration since then. If incarceration rates had tracked violent crime rates, for example, the incarceration rate would have peaked at 317 per 100,000 in 1992, and fallen to 227 per 100,000 by 2008 – less than one third of the actual 2008 level and about the same level as in 1980.

But is this true? Calculating the extent to which incarceration is the outcome of an increase in crime is a tricky task. One way of looking at this issue is by estimating how much crime reduction we have achieved by increasing our usage of incarceration. The data is not encouraging.

In his book Punishment and Inequality in America, Bruce Western carefully considers data from a variety of sources to estimate the past played by incarceration in crime reduction. Reasoning that the decline in crime rates cannot be attributed to rehabilitative programs in prison (seeing as mass imprisonment has not really been accompanied by developments in that field) he concludes as follows:

Studies of the impact of the prison boom on the crime drop have focused on the deterrent and incapacitative effect of incarceration. Leading studies suggested that the growth in state imprisonment rates through the 1990s can explain one-third of the drop in serious crime. My best estimate suggests that the 66-percent increase in the state prison population, from 725,000 to 1.23 million prisoners reduced the rate of serious crime by 2 to 5 percent – one-tenth of the fall in crime between 1993 and 2001. Fully 90 percent would have happened without the 480,000 new inmates in the system. In 2001, the annual cost of incarcerating a state prisoner was $22,000. This suggests that the 2- to 5-percent decline in serious crime over the eight years from 1993 to 2001 was purchased for $53 billion.

Steven Raphael and Rucker Johnson’s 2006 study, using sophisticated statistical modeling, found that the marginal effect of increasing prison population over crime rates has drastically declined over time, and come to similarly grim conclusions:

When we split the sample into two equal time periods, we find crime-prison effects for the latter period that are less than one-third the size of those for the earlier period. For 1978 to 1990, we estimate that each additional prison year served prevented approximately 30 index crimes. For the period from 1991 to 2004, the comparable figure is eight. Moreover, this decline in level effects corresponds to substantial declines in crime-prison elasticities, suggesting that the constant-elasticity specification often used in previous research under-estimates the degree to which the crime-abating effects of incarceration decreases with scale.

This large decline in the marginal effect of an inmate suggests that the most recent increases in incarceration have been driven by the institutionalization of many inmates who, relative to previous periods, pose less of a threat to society. Indeed, given the much lower crime- abating effects for the most recent period, it is likely the case that for many recent inmates, the benefits to society in terms of crime reduction are unlikely to outweigh the explicit monetary costs of housing and maintaining an additional inmate. Moreover, once one accounts for the additional external costs of incarceration, such as the adverse effects on the families of inmates, the effects on victimizations behind bars, the effects on additional HIV/AIDS infections (Johnson and Raphael 2006), and the potential effects on the long-term employment prospects of former inmates, the benefit cost ratio on the margin is likely to be substantially below one.

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Thanks to Ocean Mottley for the CEPR report, and major props to Josh Guetzkow for the sources.

Tonight’s Passover, a holiday of freedom.

This Spring and onward, may we all be free to sit on city sidewalks without being cited or arrested.
May we be free to choose a rewarding, enriching life path, without poverty constraints.

May we be free from draconian legislation, excessive mandatory minimums, and the Three Strikes Law.
May we be free to provide for our families and to live with dignity, honor and good health.
May those of us who work in the law enforcement system be free to connect with our community and help it without animosity and danger.
May the prosecutors among us be free to do our jobs exercising discretion and compassion, released from constraining legislation and a punitive organizational culture.
May the defense attorneys among us be free to provide our clients with the best representation, released from budgetary constraints.
May those of us who work in corrections be free to do a correctional job that respects our safety and the human dignity of the people entrusted to our care.
May those of us within walls be free from prison rape and abuse.
May those of us within walls be free from boredom, narcotics, the endless chatter on TV.
May we be free to choose education, vocational programs, and avenues of life within walls that will help us rebuild bridges with our loved ones outside upon our release.
May those of us in juvenile care be free to choose a bright future.
May those of us who work in parole be free to furnish our parolees with hope and possibility, rather than oppression and supervision.
May those of us on early releases be free to rebuild our lives.
May those of us who have just been released from prison be free to find a home and a job without discrimination.
May all of us, as a society, be free from prejudices, biases, and irrational fears of the “other”.

The CCC Blog wishes you all a happy Passover.

My friend and colleague Jonathan Simon has focused his undergraduate course at UC Berkeley, Punishment, Culture, and Society, on the California correctional crisis. His lectures are being recorded and podcasts are available here. I’m sure they’ll be of interest to many of our readers.

As you might imagine, we get a lot of emails from blog readers. Much of our recent correspondence involves family members of lifers–many of them third-strikers–who are anxious to know how the Plata/Coleman release order, or the Governor’s plan to reduce prison population, might affect their relatives in prison. The answer, of course, is anyone’s guess; but from the discussions before the court, it would appear that the releases would mostly apply to short-term non-violent drug offenders. Our sympathies, as a society, are often placed first with inmates from this category, rather than with those incarcerated for longer periods, especially for violent sentences. This is why John Irwin’s last book, Lifers, makes for such an interesting read.

(art courtesy: Jacob Barrett for The Real Cost of Prisons)

A Baha’i friend has shared the following video with me.

I have been following stories of the Baha’i persecution in Iran for quite some time. It is an abominable situation, and one which we have very few tools to improve through international negotiation and pressure.

On this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the relative transparency of the California prison system. I am grateful for public court documents and for the CDCR website. I am grateful for public fiscal reports, which inform Californians of the effects our prison population has on their wallets. I am grateful for the Senate and Assembly websites, where we can learn how our legislature thinks about these matters. I am grateful for National Public Radio and for newspapers. I am grateful for my colleagues in the research community who write about criminal justice, prisons, and the death penalty; they work hard to obtain access to databases and information, which we can later find, analyzed and discussed, in their illuminated books and articles (several of these excellent sources will be reviewed here over the next few weeks). I am grateful for organizations like NOBLE, NACDL, and Books Not Bars, for their efforts to produce external reports on police proceedings, courts, and juvenile institutions. I am grateful for the ability to pick up the phone, or send an email, so I can get accurate information from its source that can be shared with our readers. I am grateful for you, our readers, for emailing us with information that can only be obtained from you.

We have a big problem on our hands. A very big problem. But we have ways of obtaining information about the situation, and ways to communicate with policymakers, officials, activists, inmates, and their families. These are important tools and they are not to be taken for granted.