Violators of domestic violence protective orders are increasingly subjected to GPS monitoring in several States, as reported by the NY Times and by the Chronicle. Implementing such legislation in CA, as opposed to Illinois and Texas, is somewhat of a challenge. The Chron elaborates:
Without GPS, police have been lax to follow up on complaints that partners are ignoring protective orders, said Tara Shabazz, executive director of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.
However, Shabazz and her organization oppose California’s proposed GPS legislation because it would require the state to order GPS tracking for an offender without providing details on how to implement it.
. . .
In California, the cash-strapped government can’t pay for the program, said Alexis Moore, the president and founder of Survivors in Action, a California-based advocacy group. Similarly in Texas, no money was appropriated for GPS implementation.
Given our financial situation, relatively inexpensive alternatives to incarceration or confinement can and should be considered, which does not mean we should not examine such technologies with a critical eye. How is the GPS system managed and monitored? And, should we rely on it to the exclusion of community programs to treat abusive partners,of which we have several in CA?
According to the Shasta County Sheriff’s website, the Shasta County Jail is a high security facility, with a capacity of 381 inmates, 317 males and 64 females. It seems that this capacity has been reached through aggressive parole revocation operations, and the plan now is to scale back on jail time and on parole operations to relieve the budgetary distress.
Here is what seems to be going on:
Shasta County’s drunken drivers, petty thieves and drug users are less likely to serve jail time. Parolees will be given a bit more leeway on violations that can send them back to prison. And even fewer prisoners police bring to the Shasta County jail will spend a night in a cell.
Local officials say that’s the reality now that Shasta County’s 381-bed jail is 150 inmates smaller.
As jailers have been quickly and quietly working to release a third of the inmates from the jail because of budget cuts, local law enforcement officials have been meeting to plan how they’re going to deal with the sudden loss of space at the already chronically full jail.
…
The decision to clear out a floor of the jail came earlier this month after the Shasta County Board of Supervisors refused Sheriff Tom Bosenko’s pleas to find other ways to trim from the county’s general fund budget rather than make him cut more than $2 million cut from his budget.
Bosenko has since ordered the floor closed and the layoffs of six jail employees.
Jailers began freeing up jail space almost immediately after the decision, mainly by stepping up their “capacity-release” program that lets newly admitted prisoners go free, often before they’d even had time to post bail.
“We’re trying not to do a mass release,” said Lt. Sheila Ashmun, the jail’s second-in-command.
In 2010, we may expect to see on our ballots this proposal, which essentially aims to legalize the possession of up to one ounce of cannabis for adult Californians. The language of the proposal is still in draft format and was last amended today; the people behind the proposal are soliciting responses.
What is interesting, and controversial, is the market and fiscal aspect of the proposal, which gives cities the prerogative to set sales tax, procedures and legalization as they please. In that sense, control over possession and sale would be very localized (and I wonder how that would work for the Feds, especially considering the federal lack of respect for permissive local rules, as per Virginia v. Moore).
The proposal to prosecute “wobbler” offenses as misdemeanors, and thus reduce prison population (or, at least, juke the stats so that it appears that prison population is reduced) is encountering opposition not only from local jails. This time, the resistance comes from the Santa Cruz District Attorney, Bob Lee. The CDCR disagrees. Central Coast reports:
Examples of the penal code sections that would be revised, if state legislators agree, include fraud, forgery, grand theft, identity theft, auto theft, owning a “chop shop,” destruction of utility lines, making a false bomb report and possession of methamphetamine, Lee said.
“This amounts to sacrificing public safety to put the fiscal house in order and that is extremely bad policy,” Lee said.
State prison officials say the proposal and two others would ease overcrowding by sending an estimated 19,000 to jail instead of prison. The current prison population is about 167,000 and they estimate the change would shave $400 million from $10 billion prison budget.
“I think most people would agree that public safety is the No. 1 role of government,” said Seth Unger, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “But in a time of very limited resources, we have to focus those resources on higher risk offenders.”
This controversy is illustrative of the very different ways in which politicians and managers view corrections. For more on this stuff, I strongly recommend Katherine Beckett’s Making Crime Pay, which tracks down correctional discourse since the late 1960s. In the book, Beckett traces two discourses that emerged as a response to the rehabilitative discourse, which had been proven a failure: the political discourse, which was punitive in nature, and which impacted public opinion quite dramatically, and the managerial discourse, which was much more low-key and relied on risk assessment and actuarial techniques to manage the increasing inmate and parolee population. It is not surprising that politicians and managers speak quite differently about crime; their interests and perspectives differ, and they seek legitimacy in different ways. While politicians require high profile messages to impact public opinion, managers have to cope directly with the day-to-day costs and burdens of managing the system.
The current crisis may bring some of these costs and burdens back to the politicians. A few weeks ago we reported on the downscaling of prosecutions in Contra Costa County. More of this may be happening elsewhere, and perhaps changing the chasm between politicians and managers. However, the differences in perspective are still alive.
The intent to fire thousands of prison guards is very bad news for CCPOA, and the organization is fighting back. However, it seems that the fight, while enthusiastic, is a bit premature.
The judge’s response (attached verbatim in Chuck Alexander’s memo on the CCPOA website) is that “. . . your layoff notification must provide a specific date of layoff to be effective and confer the appropriate appeal rights”.
It seems that many of the proposed measures for cuts in CDCR budget have not yet come to fruition, and we are all collectively waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In keeping with the financial crisis and humonetarianism themes, here’s the ACLU of Northern California report on the costs of the death penalty and the potential savings that might result from its abolition, which we discussed here, here and here.
Local law-enforcement officials warn that an influx of new inmates could force them to release their own prisoners to make room.
Changing sentencing guidelines would eventually steer 20,000 inmates away from state prisons to county jails, Mr. Schwarzenegger estimates. California’s county jails now hold about 80,000 inmates, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
…
Local governments are hurting for money as badly as the state is — with some of the pain coming as a result of reduced state funding. Many have cut budgets for their own local jails and detention facilities. “It’s like a double whammy the state is sending our way,” said Mike Reagan, a Solano County supervisor. “More prisoners and less money — this is going to hurt like hell.”
Mr. Reagan estimated his county would need to take an additional 1,200 inmates a year under Mr. Schwarzenegger’s plan. That would overwhelm its jail system, which has reached capacity at 1,000 inmates, he said.
Meanwhile, the financial crisis is generating plans that go beyond the non-punitive trend that we have called humonetarianism; it is also generating an abundance of plans that consist of playing with the statistics to make the problem appear smaller, in a manner reminiscent to the classic “juking the stats” scenes from The Wire, which is all too common in the criminal justice system. This category of solutions includes the treatment of undocumented immigrants, and especially the process of handing them to the feds. Engaging in these magic feats – making a population seem to disappear while, in reality, it doesn’t – may prove to be a big mistake. The silver lining of the economic crisis is that it presents an opportunity for change, and hiding our overcrowding problem under the carpet means missing that opportunity completely, at someone else’s expense.
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Props to a friend who chooses to remain anonymous for sending the WSJ piece my way.
State Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth said today that most of his GOP colleagues oppose early release for illegal immigrant inmates or other state prisoners to help reduce the state’s $24.3 billion deficit.
“We don’t want to see early release. We don’t want to see criminal aliens being released to the federal government and then deported and returning back to the streets and communities ofCalifornia – for a very small amount of savings, by the way,” Hollingsworth, the SenateRepublican leader, told The Bee’s Capitol Bureau in an interview. The GOP holds 15 out of 40 seats in the state Senate.
As expected, Governor Schwarzenegger’s call to legalize marijuana did not generate a wall-to-wall consensus. One organization that rejects the idea of legalizing and taxing marijuana is DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), which published today a piece in which they argue that marijuana is too harmful to be decriminalized:
“Legalization is not a path we want to pursue,” Dr. Kar added. “This is sending a message that use of marijuana is okay. If marijuana is legalized, people and especially young people, will tend to look at it and think, ‘Well, if it’s legal, it can’t be too harmful.’ It is by no means the benign drug that some would have us think. The most complete, objective and reliable scientific evidence is entirely in the other direction. We would run the risk of having a rise in a sicker and nonproductive population, which would be further detrimental to the state’s economy, if more people were to begin using marijuana.”
These concerns bring up a host of questions, some of which have to do with the medical assessment of harm stemming from marijuana abuse (read more about that debate in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness), and some of which have to do with behavioral economics; namely, whether a change in legal status would lead more people to use marijuana. This last complex question has been the focus of a variety of studies on drug usage deterrence, including the masterful work of Rob MacCoun and Peter Reuter, who also draw parallels from other vices.
(GPS tracking device image courtesy Slate Magazine)
