Humonetarianism: Death Penalty Edition

John Van de Kamp, former California AG, says we can’t afford the death penalty: 

According to the final report of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which I chaired from 2006 to 2008, the cost of a murder trial goes up by about half a million dollars if prosecutors seek the death penalty. Confinement on death row (with all the attendant security requirements) adds $90,000 per inmate per year to the normal cost of incarceration. Appeals and habeas corpus proceedings add tens of thousands more. In all, it costs $125 million a year more to prosecute and defend death penalty cases and to keep inmates on death row than it would simply to put all those people in prison for life without parole. 

Van de Kamp advocates eliminating the death penalty and commuting all death sentences in California to sentences of life without parole. 

Doing so would incapacitate some of the worst of the worst for their natural lives, and at the same time ensure that a person wrongfully convicted will not be executed. And it would save $125 million each year.

Getting rid of the death penalty would undoubtedly be a great thing for the administration of justice in California, but Life Without Parole does have its own implications. To name a few: what about all the pending appeals and habeas proceedings? How would the Corrections Department transition all those folks from death row? Would the debate over “how much” due process we think we can afford change without the morally-fraught death penalty to galvanize it? 

Reformers are taking advantage of the suddenly inflated salience of cost to the public to push for policies that were total non-starters just a year ago, but the dark side of this strategy is that there is also no willingness to implement these policies in a thoughtful, rather than merely a cost-avoidant, way. How much deeper a hole will we be in a year from now if all our decisions are made with an eye on short-term costs? 

Inmate Employment and Mass Releases

… Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Just A Guy, an inmate blogging from within walls, shares his perpsective on mass releases on the Guardian’s Political Blog. Among other issues, he discusses the impact of mass releases on support services:

In prison, Support Services are programs that often employ the lower-security inmates at lower-security institutions, who support the maintenance and running of higher-security prisons where all the really “bad” guys are. Oh, Support Services also supports various elements of the California government like the California Department of Forestry, where a bunch of us hardened criminals fight California’s fires. The majority of people in lower-security institutions and in fire camps run by CDF are non-violent/non-serious offenders, a good portion of whom have less than a year left on their sentences — and therefore, will be eligible for early release according to Arnold’s plan to commute the sentences of non-violent/non-serious offenders with less than a year left.

Please listen to me, people. What do you think will happen to Support Services and to the CDF if 19,000 people are released early and a large portion of those released are the ones making sure that the “real” criminals in prison have their needs met to an extent where every day isn’t a blood bath? Also, I don’t know the exact numbers, but let’s say that 10% of those released (1,900) are part of CDF. That means that California’s trained firefighters have just been decimated right before fire season. Great.

According to Wikipedia, the California Department of Forestry employs 4,300 inmates.

Images Behind Bars: Prison Photography


Just a quick post to alert you to the terrific and eye-opening Prison Photography Blog, featuring images from prison around the world. The image in this post is Jacob Holdt’s Prison Meal on Toilet, taken in a California prison. 

The images from Siberia and Rio, among other places, raise difficult questions we have already struggled with elsewhere, regarding our attention to correctional practices in other countries. 

Survey Research

This post is only tangentially related to Califronia corrections; my apologies about that. I am posting to invite all of you to participate in a web-based survey I am conducting, which examines how people respond to interpersonal problems.

The survey is anonymous and confidential and can be completed in a few minutes. I will very much appreciate your participation, and will be particularly grateful if you forward the link to your friends, colleagues, and students. We are looking for a large, diverse group of respondents.

http://www.whatwouldyoudosurvey.org/introduction.asp

The survey has been IRB-approved and I am happy to provide the exemption letter upon request.

Thank you,

HA

Opinion piece by the Federal Receiver

You have to give the Federal Receiver Clark Kelso credit. He’s been attacked repeatedly in the press by Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown for spending on “gold-plated” health care, for intruding on state sovereignty, and for other failings. Kelso, to his credit, hasn’t backed down. And he has taken the fight to the press, as well.

Just today, in the Sacramento Bee (my new favorite paper), Kelso published an opinion piece, entitled “Prison health care reform can save money.” According to Kelso,the prison health care system has been racked by waste and abuse. According to Kelso, eliminating these inefficiencies (and worse) has been a central task of the receivership, and the work has started to bear fruit. As Kelso writes, “We have found ways to cut $500 million from the annual cost of prison health care by cutting waste.”

Kelso focuses on three key reforms: (1) reducing the very expensive out-of-prison referrrals; (2) developming new cost-saving programs, like a new pharmacy program, and new measures to manage health records; (3) “Implementing performance measures in the prison medical care program.”

Critical Perspectives on Quality of Life Policing

The new Tenderloin Community Justice Center has potential to improve community-police relations in the neighborhood. In order to make sure the project doesn’t stray toward further unfair criminalization of homeless people and other disempowered members of the community, it’s useful to take a look at some of the recent criticism of “Quality of Life” policing. For a critical perspective on the issue, take a look at Incite!’s FAQ and factsheet, available at http://www.incite-national.org/index.php?s=107

Zen and the Art of Prison Maintenance

California’s prison health care imbroglio received a lot of press this week:  Gov. Schwarzenegger and AG Brown filed a motion before federal district judge Thelton Henderson, asking him to remove Clark Kelso, the receiver he appointed to oversee reform of the state’s troubled prison health care system, and return control to the state. The motion, likely directed at higher courts who may be more sympathetic than Henderson, is the latest in what is becoming an increasingly nasty political struggle between the state and Kelso.  

The debate between the two has focused recently on the ability of the state to manage the department of corrections (see Aaron’s post below about the receiver’s most recent tri-annual report), but has relegated the proposed reforms themselves to the sidelines.  Tucked near the end of articles are lines like the following:   

LA Times: State officials estimate that the facilities would cost up to $2.3 billion a year to operate, and draft plans have included exercise rooms, music and art therapy areas, natural light and landscaping. “The environment should be ‘holistic,'” Kelso’s plan says.

SF Chronicle: An early draft of plans for new construction includes space for activities such as yoga and gymnasiums with basketball courts, among other amenities. [Kelso] said that his office did not propose the yoga space but that it was required under state mental health standards. 

It’s easy to characterize any spending on inmates that isn’t strictly orange jumpsuits and cells as frivolous, especially in times of economic crisis when people are more averse than ever to seemingly unnecessary expenditure. But sentences like “the environment should be ‘holistic’” give the impression that we are spending $2.3 billion to turn our prisons into Zen gardens, and, perhaps more than the political posturing, do a disservice to our attempts at substantive debate about what the problems in the prisons actually are, and whether Kelso’s proposed reforms are the right way to address them. 

Taking the Gloves Off


On January 15, 2009, Clark Kelso, the Federal Receiver in charge of reforming California’s prison medical system, released his latest “Tri-Annual Report.”

From the report’s opening lines, it’s clear that the fight over the prison medical system is entering a particularly bitter and contentious phase.

Kelso’s anger with the State is apparent from the opening paragraph: “Since the reporting, period, the Governor and the Attorney General of the State of Calfornia executed a ‘flip-flop’ and ‘bait and switch.’ The immediate victims of the State’s turnabout are the four federal courts and respect for the rule of law; the ultimate victims are the tens of thousands of class members who are waiting for constitutionally required improvements in their medical care as well as the citizens of the state of California.”

Kelso proceeds to outline a list of frustrations and failings. The State has “refus[ed] to work with the federal court to develop a funding mechanism” for reform. It’s response to the budget crisis has been “scattershot, unpredictable and inappropriate.” It’s proposals for corrective action “violate federal court orders and will, in both the short and long-term, serve only to increase existing State funding shortfalls.”

The report continues: “No purpose is served attempting to prove the personal or political motivations which have led the Governor to renege on his Administration’s assurances to pursue a public-private financing transaction to support the Receiver’s construction program if legislation failed, or which now drive the Attorney General to attempt to rewrite the history of four federal court class action cases and wage a war against district court orders to which the State has previously agreed. However, the threat to the orderly administration of justice from their actions cannot be ignored. Court orders are not Hollywood contracts where . . . promises to perform are cheaply given and then ignored when convenient. . . . There are appropriate legal processs for challenging and reconsidering court orders; however, flat out disobedience of courts orders is not the appropriate course of action.”

Hearings on the state of the prison medical system are expected to resume before a three-judge panel during the first week of February.