More Death Penalty Humonetarianism

More bipartisan disgruntlement about the death penalty, fueled by its dysfunctions and discontents: yesterday’s Chron featured an op-ed from Republican lawmaker Tom Harman.

In 2008, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice issued a report stating that the death penalty system in California was failing. In California, as of 2008, 30 inmates had been on Death Row for more than 25 years, 119 for more than 20 years and 240 for more than 15 years. Is California doing something wrong? Absolutely.

Delays in obtaining legal counsel, the appeals process, court-ordered moratoriums and other stalling tactics are routine. These delays ultimately place more value on the life of a convicted criminal than on that of the victim. I believe this is unacceptable to the victims, their families and the voters.

The sad truth in California is that killers on Death Row are far more likely to die of natural causes than at the hands of the state. As the commission noted, the interminable delays that have become the hallmark of the system have weakened the death penalty’s effect on deterring crime.

Harman is a staunch believer in the death penalty, and so his contribution to the debate is particularly interesting. It is also timely, considering the upcoming public hearing on the lethal injection and the Day of Action on June 30th. Here’s Jonathan Simon’s take on this. And here’s another example of this interesting trend.

More Resistance to the Plan to Reduce “Wobbler” Offenses to Misdemeanors


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.

Event: Day of Action to End the Death Penalty

Death Penalty Focus is organizing a Day of Action to end the death penalty on June 30, 2009. The date is scheduled to coincide with the public hearing regarding the reformed execution proceedings using lethal injection, which we reported about here.

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.

GOP opposition to Governor’s Proposed Mass Releases

The Sacramento Bee reports:

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.

The Butterfly Effect of Public Policy

Reading the San Francisco Chronicle these days is like watching a traffic accident about to happen. The budget disaster is so alarming that every day brings news of future depressing decrees and policies.

The latest news come to us from the Governor’s office. Schwarzenegger’s hope that the initiatives would be approved  did not materialize; the problem got bigger. And so, a series of proposed cuts came into being. As reported on the Chron, some of the cuts include:

— $750 million from the University of California and California State University systems, bringing the total reduction over two fiscal years to nearly $2 billion.

— $10.3 million – Eliminate all state general fund spending for UC Hastings College of Law.

— $173 million – Eliminate new Cal Grants.

— $70 million – Eliminate general fund support for state parks, potentially closing 80 percent of them.

— $247.8 million – Eliminate the Healthy Families program, which provides health care to nearly 1 million poor children.

— $1.3 billion – Eliminate the CalWorks program, which primarily helps unemployed single mothers find jobs.

— $809 million – Release nonviolent, non-serious, non-sex offenders one year early, and reduce the Corrections Department’s contract work, rehabilitation and education programs.

Distressed as I am about the prospect of irrational cuts of all general fund spending to my home institution, which produces tomorrow’s nation’s foremost judges, policymakers, public interest lawyers, and business entrepreneurs (and thus extinguishing hope that we can invest enough in their education to produce people capable of solving the problems generated by today’s policymaking!) I think there’s a bigger lesson to be learned here. My concern is that the bottom line regarding prison releases will generate a public outcry that will gear discussion in a nonproductive way.
You see, everything is connected, just like in Edward Lorenz‘s much-quoted (and misquoted) chaos theory maxim, according to which the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas. I’m sure there are many voters and Chron readers who are being exposed, perhaps for the very first time of their lives, to the realities of the imprisonment project in California and how it directly affects their lives, their taxes, and their children’s education. For many years, since the passage of Prop 13, Californians have mistakenly thought that keeping taxes low and guaranteeing money for education had nothing to do with the invisible world of prisons. If you think about it, that is a bit like children who close their eyes, wishfully believing that what is out there does not exist if you cannot see it. So, many Californians may be finding out that many other Californians, who had been appearing and disappearing in their world, were held in massive, expensive institutions, and moreover – financing this institutions, in a world of scarce resources, is something to be considered, not ignored.
Prisons in California are not butterflies in Brazil, and their impact on our lives and wallets is much more direct than the connections in chaos theory. The sooner we understand that non-punitive cuts need to be made (albeit intelligently and after careful planning), the less we have to eat our future as a State, which relies on enough well-educated and skilled scientists, engineers, politicians, and, yes, lawyers.

Guards, Prisons, Education, and Prop 13: The Big Picture

Timothy Egan’s opinion piece on today’s New York Times places the recent CA vote on the budget proposition in context, and ties it to the prison crisis. On the guards, some of whom make $100,000 annually, he says —

The prison guard union, having swelled its well-paid ranks after voter mandates helped to produce a system where 750,000 Californians are either locked up, on parole or on probation, was upset at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for balking at their demands.

And on the disastrous impact of the proposition system on our priorities list, particularly with regard to incarceration and education:

But I do blame the voters. They’re part-time citizens, and not very good at it. They shackled the tax system back in 1978 with Proposition 13, limiting how much government could take from a homeowner. It was a reasonable middle class revolt. But then, in succeeding years, voters passed laws that packed California’s prisons with criminals (many of them petty) but also mandated that the education system get a lion’s share of the budget. On top of that, the voters made it nearly impossible to pass a budget. Then they walked away from their car wreck.

It’s a good reminder that we have ourselves to thank, and to blame, for the situation.

————
Props to my fabulous colleague Dorit Rubinstein-Reiss for alerting me to this.

Released Inmates Might Commit “Sensational Crimes”?

I strongly recommend reading the commentary on Larry Corcoran’s panicked words on the Chron yesterday, from the good folks over at the Prison Movement Blog. Just to whet your appetite, Corcoran, spokesman for CCPOA, said yesterday:

“This short-term savings is going to have long-term costs, and the costs will be measured, unfortunately, in lives. . . I anticipate some incredibly sensational crime committed by an individual that should have been incarcerated.”

Now, granted, I entirely agree that mass releases are a very bad short-term solution for a big problem. Releasing people without skills or support programs into an abysmal job market is an extremely faulty strategy. Nevertheless, one would hope that the mass-released folks would not be the ones committing “sensational crimes”, nor is it ever a good idea to focus on those as the catalysts of public policy. Our pals at Prison Movement dissect this better than I could, pointing out inaccuracies, lack of logic, and moral hysteria, but I’ll just add this: at a time when public opinion is probably swaying away from moral panics toward cost-benefit analysis, I doubt this will win many hearts. Corcoran may be speaking the language of yesterday to an audience facing today’s budget shortages.

More Marijuana Humonetarianism: This time, from the Governor

Governor Schwarzenegger is open to the possibility of regulating marijuana, as the Sac Bee reported yesterday. If this is not humonetarianism, I don’t know what is:

…Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opened a new front for discussion this week, saying that while it’s not time to legalize pot, he’s willing to talk about it as a revenue-raising measure.

…

Schwarzenegger, who was filmed smoking a joint in the 1977 film, “Pumping Iron,” sparked headlines by responding to a reporter’s question about a Field Poll. The survey found that 56 percent of voters support taxing pot used for pleasure or partying.

“I think all of those ideas of creating extra revenues – I’m always for an open debate on it. … But just because of raising revenues, we have to be very careful not to make mistakes at the same time,” Schwarzenegger said.

…

California would be the first to legalize recreational pot use under legislation introduced months ago by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, who has shelved it until next year.

The state Board of Equalization has estimated that legalizing marijuana would reduce its street price by 50 percent, increase consumption, and generate about $1.3 billon annually in taxes.

Re-entry Program for Women Parolees

As reported on the CDCR website, the first cohort of female parolees is graduating from the Female Residential Multi-Service Center (FRMSC) in Sacramento. The FRMSC, founded a year ago, is the first of its kind in California and provides gender specific programs (the need for which was so eloquently explained by Barbara Bloom a while ago) and services for female parolees. Here’s more about the program:

Twenty-five women can stay at the center from six months to a year. They are referred to the FRMSC from a parole agent or the Board of Parole Hearings upon release from prison, or in lieu of returning to prison for a violation.

The FRMSC offers a variety of gender responsive services including case management, trauma treatment, substance abuse and domestic violence education, life skills development, family focused services, parenting classes, educational services, GED preparation, vocational training and family reunification services.

…

When a woman arrives to the FRMSC she is assessed by the treatment team which includes an alcohol and drug counselor, family therapist, program director, vocational developer and parole agent. She is then evaluated in the following areas: substance abuse history, traumatic life events, family history, housing needs, legal issues, medical issues, employment and educational history. Based on these assessments, the team will identify strengths and needs and will try to maximize the potential of each individual woman.

…

In order to graduate from the FRMSC program, women either must be employed, enrolled in a vocational training program, or taking college courses. Also, graduates must have a stable place to live.

And true to the spirit of humonetarianism –

Housing a woman at an FRMSC is cheaper than the average cost of housing her in prison. It costs approximately $109 per day at the FRMSC compared to $126 per day at an institution.