Support for Hunger Strikers in the New York Times

A New York Times editorial this week picked up the story about the Pelican Bay hunger strike, offering support for the strikers.

With their health deteriorating, those inmates continuing to fast resumed eating after state prison officials met a few modest demands. Inmates in Pelican Bay’s isolation unit will get wool caps for cold weather, wall calendars to mark the passing time and some educational programming. Prison officials said current isolation and gang management policies are under review. But the protest has raised awareness about the national shame of extended solitary confinement at Pelican Bay and at high-security, “supermax” prisons all around the country.


Once used occasionally as a short-term punishment for violating prison rules, solitary confinement’s prevalent use as a long-term prison management strategy is a fairly recent development, Colin Dayan, a professor at Vanderbilt University, said in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times. Nationally, more than 20,000 inmates are confined in “supermax” facilities in horrid conditions.


Prison officials claim the treatment is necessary for combating gang activity and other threats to prison order. It is possible to maintain physical separation of prisoners without ultraharsh levels of deprivation and isolation. Mississippi, which once set the low bar for terrible prison practices, saw a steep reduction of prison violence and ample monetary savings when it dramatically cut back on long-term solitary several years ago.

And there’s a humonetarian angle, too:

Holding prisoners in solitary also is very expensive, and several other states have begun to make reductions. In any case, decency requires limits. Resorting to a dehumanizing form of punishment well known to induce suffering and drive people into mental illness is beyond them.

Leveraging Brown v. Plata to Achieve Correctional Health? Humonetarianism from Vera’s Michael Jacobson

Today’s Bloomberg News features a piece by Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice, who is making points akin to the ones we made in the aftermath of Brown v. Plata. Yes, the decision was limited to the issue of medical services, but it is a grand opportunity to heal California’s broken corrections. Here are his operative suggestions:

Fortunately, there is a way to deal with this influx safely and humanely. Over the past three decades, jurisdictions across the U.S. have ensured that only those who present a genuine threat to public safety fill prison beds, while those who can thrive with supervision and services in the community get the help they need. California officials can begin emulating three steps, starting immediately:
— Statistical analysis has made it possible to accurately predict who is likely to commit new crimes and who isn’t. California officials, especially at the county level, should put in place risk assessment instruments based on this data to decide who needs to be held and who can be supervised safely in the community. Research has shown that overpunishing offenders who present little risk will in many cases turn them into real threats to public safety. Scarce taxpayer dollars need to be used explicitly for strategies and programs that we know will reduce crime, and not increase it.
— Invest in a network of community-based services that can serve those released under supervision, including formerly incarcerated people. Workforce development programs or drug treatment can go a long way toward ensuring that people can remain safely in the community. For instance, in a multiyear evaluation of the Center for Employment Opportunities, a transitional jobs program for former prisoners based in New York City, the nonpartisan education and social policy research organization MDRC found significant drops in recidivism, with the strongest reductions for former prisoners who are at the highest risk.
— Strapped local officials should resist the understandable temptation to use the money that accompanies redirected inmates and parolees for other needed programs, including general services that are being cut. Although public safety need not be as expensive as we currently make it, it can’t be done on the cheap. Besides, the Justice Reinvestment Initiative of the Department of Justice is designed to show that a shift in spending from incarceration to policies like those listed above actually makes communities safer.

As we argued elsewhere, one of the dangers of cost-oriented discourse is its fallacies in encouraging long-term health of the correctional system and its proclivity toward panicky, immediate solutions. The key to leveraging the cost argument to achieve correctional health is to think smarter, not faster.

Roundup: CDCR Budget Cuts, Prison and Slavery

As many of you probably noticed, we’re posting with less frequency than usual these days; CCC will be on a mini-hiatus until late July due to an immense workload. We will, however, provide short updates on criminal justice policy and sentencing.

First, the Sacramento Bee reports that most of the personnel cuts in the Brown budget will be in corrections (a full list of cuts is available here.)

Also, recently, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, surprised the audience at a public talk with the sad fact that more Black men are currently imprisoned than were originally enslaved.

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Props to Eric Chase and Leslie Davis for the links.

Jerry, Cut This

Just a few days ago we reported on Governor Brown’s decision not to build the new death row, commenting that abolition would save even more. Today, Death Penalty Focus is circulating a cost-centered petition to Governor Brown to abolish the death penalty.

Please read and sign. This is our chance to take this crisis and galvanize it into something positive.

Pricing the Correctional Free Lunch: Bill Facilitating County Jail Funding Passes Assembly

A new bill, AB94 (full text after amendments here), facilitating funding for county jails, was passed by the CA Assembly. Here’s the stated purpose of the bill:

Existing law authorizes the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), participating counties, and the State Public Works Board (SPWB) to acquire, design, and construct local jail facilities approved by the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA). Existing law authorizes the SPWB to issue revenue bonds, notes, or bond anticipation notes in specified amounts to finance the acquisition, design, or construction, and a reasonable construction reserve, of approved local jail facilities, as specified. Existing law requires a minimum of 25% in county matching funds for projects funded under these provisions and requires the CDCR and CSA to give funding preference to counties that assist the state in siting reentry facilities, as specified. AB 111 of the 2011–12 Regular Session, if it becomes operative, instead requires that the CDCR and the CSA give funding preference to counties that committed the largest percentage of inmates to state custody in relation to the total inmate population of CDCR in 2010.


This bill would, if AB 111 of the 2011–12 Regular Session becomes operative, authorize counties that have received a conditional award under one specified jail facilities financing program to relinquish that award and reapply for a conditional award under a separate financing program, as specified. The bill would lower to 10% the required county contribution and additionally require the CDCR and CSA to give funding preference to those counties that relinquish those specified local jail construction conditional awards and agree to continue to assist the state in siting reentry facilities, as specified. The bill would cap at $100,000,000 the amount a county may receive in proceeds from SPWB’s issuance of bonds, notes, or bond anticipation notes under those specified provisions.


This bill would appropriate $1,000 from the General Fund to the CDCR for purposes of state operations to be used by the CSA in the 2011–12 fiscal year.


This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as an urgency statute and a bill providing for appropriations related to the Budget Bill.

From a humonetarian perspective, this bill essentially addresses the “correctional free lunch” problem identified by Zimring and Hawkings in The Scale of Imprisonment:

The parable of the free lunch is relevant to the discussion of prison population because prisons in the United States are. . . paid for at the state level of government out of state correctional budgets, but prison populations are determined by the number of prisoners referred by local officials and the length of sentences imposed at the local level. Since localities do not contribute to central state correctional budgets, the marginal cost of an extra prisoner may be zero at the local level of government, where the decision to confine is made.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s reform shifted the incarceration for several offenses from state prisons to county jails in order to address overcrowding at the state level. This change was heavily criticized by conservative lawmakers for endangering public safety, and opposed by local jail authorities arguing that there was overcrowding at the lower level, too. The new bill would supposedly allow localities to build jails more easily by fronting less money from the county budget before receiving state assistance. On one hand, this indicates fiscal commitment to the welcome trend of shifting population from distant facilities to their communities. On the other hand, this may be another initiative in the “if you build it, they will come” vein, which does not bode well for a decrease in prison population at any level. Also, note that this compounds the correctional free lunch issue: Facilities are built by the locality, but the state assumes more fiscal responsibility for them in the initial stages. Let’s stay tuned on this one.

Brown Cancels Plans to Build New Death Row

The SF Chron reports:

Gov. Jerry Brown announced today that he is dropping plans to build a new $356 million Death Row at San Quentin because of the state’s budget crisis.


In a released statement, Brown said canceling the project – which has been in the works since 2003 – would save the state hundreds of millions of dollars. He said spending that money on a new Death Row while making budget cuts in other services would be “unconscionable.”


“At a time when children, the disabled and seniors face painful cuts to essential programs, the state of California cannot justify a massive expenditure of public dollars for the worst criminals in our state,” Brown said. “California will have to find another way to address the housing needs of condemned inmates.”


The new Death Row would have been able to house up to 1,152 condemned inmates. There are less than 700 people in state prison who have been sentenced to death.

Faithful readers may recall some twists and turns with the plan to rebuild death row. The construction was given the green light by former governor Schwarzenegger, but these plans were then halted through the efforts of progressive lawmakers that argued against the expenditure. The question is, of course: What now? Sixteen states have abolished the death penalty, several of them recently for cost reasons (humonetarianism at work here.) Governor Brown, would you like to save more money for our children, disabled and senior citizens? Join those states and abolish the death penalty.

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Props to Christoffer Lee for the link.

SF Chronicle: CA New Budget Includes Early Releases and Jurisdictional Changes

Today’s Chron reports on the passage of a new California budget, which features deep cuts and aims at reducing the state’s deficit to $14 billion. In the humonetarian tradition, correctional costs make up a big chunk of the article:

Both the Assembly and Senate had contentious debates over a major element of the budget plan – the proposal to move thousands of state prisoners to local jails, which Republicans warned would result in a public safety nightmare.

Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber (Tehama County) a former state parole board member, said counties will be overwhelmed, and thousands of criminals will go free.

“The inmates in state prison will be cheering,” he said. “This is not about the budget, this is about an egregious injustice to the people of California.”

But Assemblyman Charles Calderon, D-Whittier (Los Angeles County), noted the state’s dismal 70 percent recidivism rate and said the bill will actually make California’s streets safer.

“These people are being released from prison … and they haven’t been rehabilitated, because our prisons are overcrowded, and there’s no money to rehabilitate them,” he said. “This realignment will not cause prisoners to go free – they will serve their time, in a new prison called jail.”

The full budget can be found here, and we will provide information about the correctional provisions in a post in the near future.

Out-of-State Incarceration and Recidivism

With more Californians sent out of state to be incarcerated in privatized institutions, one of the key questions is whether such institutions work better or worse in the long run. We recently wrote about the corruption and harm involved in privatized institutions, but what happens after people are released?

A new report for the Hawai’i Attorney General’s office (dear colleague David Johnson is the PI for the report) examines how Hawai’ian parolees incarcerated on the mainland do by comparison to those kept on the island. The many problems about this arrangement notwithstanding, the issue of recidivism is an important one.
Johnson and his colleagues find no statistically significant difference in the recidivism rates of Hawai’i-incarcerated and mainland-incarcerated parolees. While the study is not perfect, and the two inmate populations differ substantially in their criminal profiles, it is a reminder to question the wisdom of sending inmates away. While cost is a consideration, it is only one of many considerations. The report relies on the concept of humonetarianism to explain that “lean justice” does not always equal “lenient justice” and is not without its discontents. As the report states,

States and their leaders have a responsibility to care not only about crime control and the costs of incarceration but also about the present welfare and future well- being of criminal offenders and the communities from which they come. The vast majority of offenders will come home one day, and they will be our neighbors.

Impact of Juvenile Facilities Closure on Adult Criminal Court Filings

Governor Brown’s plan to shut down all DJJ facilities has been scratched, due to budgetary difficulties. Nonetheless, it is important to pay attention to two recent reports by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice on juvenile justice realignment.
The first report assesses the potential impact of DJJ institutional closures on adult charges. This, you may recall, was a cause for concern in some quarters. Nonetheless, the report finds that, while “California counties drastically vary in arrest and incarceration policies. . . even radical variations in reliance on State incarceration have no effect on juvenile crime rates or trends.” Here are the main findings:
In 2009, 24 counties employed locally self-reliant juvenile justice practices. Those counties were Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Colusa, Del Norte, Inyo, Los Angeles, Mariposa, Mendocino, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Diego, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Trinity, and Tulare.

In 2009, 13 counties employed State-dependent juvenile justice practices that would significantly obstruct juvenile justice reform. Those counties were Alameda, Contra Costa, Fresno, Kern, Kings, Merced, Monterey, Orange, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura.

The thirteen State-dependent counties accounted for 37% of juvenile felony arrests but 61% of all direct adult criminal court filings and 46% of all DJF commitments, in 2009.

Kings County is the most State-dependent county, direct filing in adult criminal court 50 times more than Los Angeles, 39 times more than San Diego, and 36 times more than San Francisco in 2009.

Twelve California counties did not utilize the state system during 2009; either for a DJF commitment or an adult criminal court filing despite experiencing juvenile felony arrests during that year (Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Colusa, Del Norte, Inyo, Mariposa, Mono, Nevada, Plumas, Sierra, and Trinity).

Despite having the highest juvenile felony arrest rate in the State, San Francisco County utilized direct adult criminal court filing one-eighth as much as the county with the lowest rate of juvenile felony arrests (El Dorado).
It would appear from the report that adult criminal court filings are a matter of organizational and prosecutorial culture, and the policies are not sensitive to the adult/juvenile divide. It is important to say that these findings make sense in the aggregate. I’m sure that, in single cases that raise true dilemmas, juvenile justice practices might be taken into account by individual prosecutors when making the call whether to charge someone as a juvenile or an adult. But the big picture does not seem to support a structural connection between the two.
The second report examined the capacity of county facilities to house juveniles. As the table shows, California counties currently have the space and infrastructure to house all juveniles who are now held in state prisons.
What does all this mean now that the governor has changed his plans? Perhaps it means that law enforcement officials making charging decisions can, and should, be more amenable to the possibility of charging juveniles with misdemeanors rather than felonies when possible. If the change does not occur as a grand top-down policy, it may have to occur as a bottom-up aggregate set of decisionmaking on the part of prosecutors.