In case you missed Nicholas Kristof’s column in the 1/27/10 New York Times, it’s right here. Kristof relates statistics and instances of violence in prisons, especially sexual violence, especially in juvenile prisons, especially by prison guards. “I’ve never written about the horrors that unfold in American prisons — especially juvenile correctional facilities — on a far larger scale than at Guantánamo.”
Of course, it is a premise of this blog that our prisons are in a financial crisis. But as Kristof indirectly recognizes, sometimes the economic angle lets me temporarily forget the human angle. Rights that we can often take for granted in this country, including physical safety, are daily struggles frequently lost in our prisons. The real human costs of our failing correctional institutions are sickeningly deplorable, and prison reform will always be about more than money.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has just released its report assessing the Governor’s population reduction plan. The full text of the report can be found here. Here’s the gist of the report.
As a reminder, this refers to the Governor’s initiative, which later became SBX3 18, under which the CA inmate population would be reduced by approximately 18,500 inmates in 2009-2010, and an additional 25,000 in 2010-2011. The legislative analyst reminds us, however, that “the actual reduction in the inmate population from the above policy changes is now estimated to be significantly less than initially planned—about 1,600 inmates in 2009‐10 and 11,800 inmates in 2010‐11. This is primarily due to delays and changes in the implementation of the new policies.” The report also mentions that the state’s plan for the Plata/Coleman panel included two additional measures which were not included in the governor’s plan: adjusting the dollar threshold for grand theft and placing some elderly and infirm inmates under GPS monitoring as an incarceration alternative.
The report recommends that the legislature consider four issues when assessing proposals: budget savings, actual reduction in population, public safety, and imposition on local jails and counties. Based on these criteria, LAO finds that the governor’s plan achieves some savings, but is overstated, partly because of the delays in state employee layoffs.
As to the population reduction, LAO estimates it at 24,000, which is considerably less than the Plata/Coleman requirements, but which “would put the state closer to meeting that poten‐ tial target. Moreover, it could reduce the need for the prison construction projects authorized in Chapter 7, Statutes of 2007 (AB 900, Solorio) to help alleviate the state’s prison overcrowding problem.”
LAO sees no compromise in public safety stemming from the proposals; short-term offenders would still be incarcerated, albeit in cheaper facilities, and prisons can accommodate the more dangerous offenders. It expresses, however, concern about depleting local resources by overcrowding jails. Also, in points out some possible unintended consequences: the proposal could be misconstrued to suggest that offenders with prior records must be convicted for a felony if committing one of the offenses in the proposal.
LAO recommends adopting the proposal, albeit with several modifications: Allowing counties to rely on alternatives to incarceration; revise the language; and consider adding reliance on GPS for elderly and infirm prisoners.
Yesterday’s edition of the Chron reported that the state plans to monitor 1,000 recently paroled gang members using GPS devices. The Chron website does not include this lengthy and interesting article, but the printed edition reports that, rather than complementing early releases, this is merely a parole monitoring aid.
One of the challenges of using GPS is the fact that the information the monitors provide, in itself, is worthless without interpretation. Other issues have been the lack of studies regarding the impact of GPS monitoring on recidivism rates. The ACLU supports monitoring as an alternative to incarceration, but not as an additional requirement. The article also mentions the inability to detect serious sex offenders, such as Phillip Garrido, through GPS monitoring.
Reuters has a fascinating article here on drug courts, empathy, and the monetization of humanitarianism. The author discusses shifting economic priorities in the war on drugs.
Contextually, it begins with Judge Gorsalitz’s drug court in Kalamazoo, MI. The writer’s title, “America’s new touchy-feely war on drugs,” and tone suggest amusement or even contempt for the drug-court approach, but then the litany of drug war harms and legalization benefits belies a different understanding.
The piece favors Judge Aim’s Project Hope in Hawaii, which saves money by making drug treatment voluntary not mandatory, and uses penalties of short jail stays instead of reinstating full sentences. Of course, here in the City&County of SF we have Judge Albers’s Community Justice Center — for its drug court context see Prof. Aviram’s post here.
Today I got my copies of the newest issue of the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal, devoted to the California correctional Crisis. The issue features several articles and notes regarding different aspects of the crisis, as well as a series of shorter informational pieces highlighting issues such as sentencing, alternative adjudication, parole, risk and release, reentry, and, of course, the medical crisis. The issue builds on the conference we held in March 2009.
My own piece, Humonetarianism: The New Correctional Discourse of Scarcity, builds on insights developed during my writing for this blog, for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and for the Daily Journal. I welcome comments and thoughts on it.
The recent 2010-2011 budget proposal from the Governor’s office makes some meaningful changes to the correctional budget, which merit some discussion. The proposal aims at reducing the General Fund expenditures on corrections by $1.19 billion, or 12.7 percent.
The proposal identifies three main cost drivers. The first, which comes as no surprise to those following Gov. Schwarzenegger’s relationship with the CCPOA, is correctional officer salaries, which the proposal states to be “33 percent higher than the average salary for comparable positions in other jurisdictions”. This does not bode well for CCPOA, and their already shaky relationship with the Governor might become shakier.
The second source of costs is identified as “court-driven“: Court orders, primarily those associated with medical treatment for inmates, are said to have increased the expenditure per inmate. As an example, “California’s average annual medical inmate cost is approximately $11,000 per inmate, as compared to approximately $5,757 for New York, which has similar inmate demographics.”
The proposal points to parole-related costs as the third source. These are expenditures incurred by changes in parolee population, as well as “payments to local jurisdictions that temporarily house inmates on behalf of the state”; in other words, the collateral damage from solutions to overcrowding.
The proposal identifies several changes in the correctional budget:
A rather small decrease in inmate and parolee population;
A decrease in expenditures on juvenile programs, stemming from the closure of several institutions, accompanied by a very small decrease in population;
An increase to the Receiver’s budget, devoted to hiring nursing personnel and establishing a proper system of medical records;
Parole reform.
The proposal repeats some of the previous measures recommended by the governor for reducing the prison population, such as using GPS monitoring as an alternative to incarceration, enhancing the usage of good time credits, shifting some inmates to serve sentences in local facilities, more intermediate sanctions for parole violators, and less expenditures by the Receivership on medical care. The proposal also calls for reimbursement from the feds for housing undocumented immigrants in state prisons. ��
Tying in some loose ends from the ALI retreat from supporting the death penalty and from the Governor’s “State of the State” address, the ACLU blog posts today about the potential of cutting correctional costs by abolishing the death penalty.
Housing for just one person on death row costs $90,000 more per year than housing in the general prison population (itself a hefty $50,000 a year). That means we are now paying an extra $63 million a year for death row housing. If the governor acted right now to convert all death sentences to permanent imprisonment, he could cut that much from the corrections’ budget today. Plus, we wouldn’t have to spend $400 million to build a new, expanded death row. And we would save millions more in legal fees.
Today’s NYTimes editorial “Prisons and Budgets” at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04mon3.html?ref=opinion lauds state legislatures for corrections policy changes with positive fiscal impact. The piece calls 3-Strikes “overly harsh” and calls the Florida law mandating serving certain percentages of sentences “dubious corrections policy and terrible fiscal policy.”
My favorite citation is their use of the ACLUNational Prison Project’s new report “Michigan Breaks the Logjam: A New Model for Reducing Prison Populations.” Michigan reduced its prison population by over 8% in about half a year, primarily through justice reinvestment. This leads me to think about how many more teachers, students, doctors, nurses, patients, etc. California could afford to subsidize, were we to reduce our state prison population by as much as 8%.
The United States may soon see its prison population drop for the first time in almost four decades, a milestone in a nation that locks up more people than any other. The inmate population has risen steadily since the early 1970s as states adopted get-tough policies that sent more people to prison and kept them there longer. But tight budgets now have states rethinking these policies and the costs that come with them.
“It’s a reversal of a trend that’s been going on for more than a generation,” said David Greenberg, a sociology professor at New York University. “In some ways, it’s overdue.”
The U.S. prison population dropped steadily during most of the 1960s, but it has risen every year since 1972, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
About 739,000 prisoners were admitted to state and federal facilities last year, about 3,500 more than were released, according to new figures from the bureau. The 0.8 percent growth in the prison population is the smallest annual increase this decade and significantly less than the 6.5 percent average annual growth of the 1990s.
Happy Holidays to our readers, and a Happy New Year.
Mona Lynch’s new book Sunbelt Justice will hit very close to home for Californian readers. The book tells the story of the Arizonian correctional system, starting with the early twentieth century and ending with Janet Napolitano’s time as governor. It is a fascinating account, which those of us interested in California corrections will read like a good political thriller.
Two principles underlie the Arizonian correctional philosophy: an ethos of self-sufficiency, which led to a lack of sympathy toward offenders, and a dislike for large governments, accompanied by sentiments of frugality. The early days of Arizona corrections were shaped by these ideas. Unencumbered by a yet-nonexistent central command and headed by strong personalities, prisons and juvenile institutions were run on the cheap, relying on a combination of inmate work and tough discipline for their daily operations.
Things briefly changed during the late 1960s with the formation of the Department of Corrections, which was headed, in its initial years, by outsiders. Its first Director, Allen Cook, was a veteran of the California correctional apparatus, and brought with him the large bureaucracies and rehabilitative ideals that characterized California corrections at the time. Initially welcomed, Cook ended up overstaying his welcome. The series of outsiders that succeeded him – most notably McDougall, who brought with him a system of good credits and community corrections reminiscent of Machonochie and, more recently, Murton – were unsupported, and eventually ousted, by the state politics.
The reign of Director Sam Lewis and his successors can best be seen as a reinstatement of a “new-old regime”. Lynch does an excellent job presenting this era’s complexities. On one hand, it is very much in line with (or ahead of) developments that were occurring elsewhere in the nation: the disillusionment with the rehabilitative idea and the emergence of law-and-order politics. On the other hand, in the Arizonian context, it is a variation on the original old theme of harsh discipline and no rehabilitation, a nostalgic return to the roots, albeit with the complication of exponential growth in prison population and a much larger bureaucratical apparatus.
Particular emphasis is given to this transformative period between the late 1970s and mid-1990s; Lynch provides a multilayered account of state politics, federal prison litigation, and their detrimental impact on prison conditions.
It is illuminating to compare Lynch’s insightful and informative account with the parallel Californian history. Arizona was not nearly as committed as California to the rehabilitative ideal, and its early correctional style was much more “Texan” than Californian. The model of inmate farm labor, accompanied by harsh discipline, reminded me very much of the incredible footage in Susanne Mason’s Writ Writer. In that respect, the backlash of the 1980s felt much more like a “homecoming” to toughness and frugality. However, many features are familiar. The political shift to the New Right and the increasing centrality of crime control to political campaigns are very familiar. So are the various legislative acts and voter initiatives of the mid-1990s, which in Arizona, as in California, failed to take into account the disastrous financial effect of county-level increasing sentences on state-level corrections. Even victim initiatives, which are downplayed in Lynch’s account, are in the background, as in California.
The questions I’m left with have to do with the level at which history is made. Arizonian correctional history was shaped by strong personalities, who played, to varying levels of success, on a changing political arena. Is it possible to swing back the punitive pendulum, citing costs? That is what Director McDougall attempted to do in the early 1980s, with only limited and temporary success. This Arizonian lesson does not bode well for an era in California in which the only effective argument against punitiveness is related to taxpayers’ wallets. The other ominous lesson is that of the Supreme Court’s limited support for federal intervention in Arizona prisons, providing only weak support to Judge Muecke’s constant supervision and review of the state’s prison population and conditions. The Roberts court may exhibit a similar level of inhospitability toward the federal intervention in California. Under such conditions, forceful and innovative personalities can prevail only for a limited time, and the fate of the system is ultimately shaped by broader socio-political developments. Perhaps we are now in a better place, and state citizenry recognizes the unsustainability of our correctional monster. In the meantime, Lynch’s excellent book offers an opportunity for grim reflection.
