Assembly Committee Critiques Receivership Spending

On today’s Chron, Marisa Lagos reports some disturbing findings from the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. Examining expenditures made by the federal receiver appointed by the court to oversee prison health care, the committee found extravagant spending with little or no effect on quality health care.

The findings, which are expected to be announced during a hearing today, show large salaries being paid to construction consultants on an abandoned project, who then turned around and charged taxpayers for housing, meals and dry cleaning. Prison health care spending has also grown by more than 65 percent since 2006, when a three-judge panel appointed the receiver after concluding that substandard medical treatment and neglect were killing one inmate per week.

Today’s public hearing will feature responses from the receivership, whose speaker explained to the Chron that —

all of the expenses paid out by the previous receiver were within federal reimbursement guidelines.

“Those contracts no longer exist, and after Clark arrived he cut back and eventually eliminated all of them,” she said.

Kincaid also noted that Kelso has made great strides toward reining in expenses. The overall death rate at prison health care centers has dropped by at least 10 percent since 2006, according to a presentation Kelso is scheduled to make to the committee today.

(Kelso recently reported continued improvements in inmate health care. Others found mixed results.)

Whether the expenses are attributable to the current or the former receivership should be an easy matter to check. What is less easy is to examine the complex connection between these developments and the overcrowding problem. It seems that both sides to the debate can use this report as ammunition for their position. As some readers may recall, one of the points made by the state in the Plata/Coleman litigation was that appointing the receiver should have been enough. Those concerned about early releases might argue that, had the receivership been more prudent in setting its priorities and spending its budget, there would be no need for the Plata/Coleman panel to order the population reduction. The counterargument, made by Don Specter in the newspaper article, is that regardless of how the receivership spends its money, as long as prisons are overcrowded no construction projects or expensive consultants will be able to improve the quality of health care behind bars.

Jerry Corrections Watch: Abolishing State Juvenile Facilities?


Today we begin a new CCC enterprise: Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be closely monitoring Governor Jerry Brown’s correctional policies. During the gubernatorial race, we posted on Brown’s history with corrections, and with CCPOA, as former governor and as attorney general. It will be interesting to see whether Brown follows in Schwarzenegger’s footsteps in terms of thinking outside the box (perhaps sometimes too far out) about our correctional crisis.

Brown’s new budget deviates from Schwarzenegger’s pattern of budgetary cuts in the correctional apparatus, especially compared with painful cuts to other aspects of government. In fact, the Brown administration plans —
an ongoing augmentation of $395.2 million within the CDCR’s budget to correct previous budget shortfalls and more accurately reflect the operational costs within the adult institutions’ budgets. This augmentation will allow the Department to fully fund the salary and wages of authorized Correctional Officers, Sergeants, and Lieutenants, which is critical to ensuring that the adult institutions have the resources to pay security staff. The augmentation also provides funding to correct for a decline in the number of overtime hours available to CDCR to use within its adult institutions. Due to salary and wage increases for correctional officers over the last eight years, and no increase in departmental overtime funding, the overtime base does not go as far as it originally did. The use of overtime is critical to ensuring that all necessary staffing levels are maintained at CDCR’s institutions, and the decline in funded overtime hours has been a primary cause for redirections of funding from other activities.
In other respects, however, the Brown administration continues a trend from the Schwarzenegger administration: Diverting inmates from the states system to county-level jails. This move continues to draw ire from county officials, given the overcrowding in jails. The latest incarnation of these efforts is Brown’s plan to abolish the state youth correctional system and incarcerate juveniles exclusively at county-level facilities. Given the distressing facts we know about state juvenile facilities, and the decline in juvenile crime, this is not necessarily a bad idea. Barry Krisberg, however, voices a serious concern that counties will prosecute more juveniles as adults, to circumvent Brown’s policies.

Kentucky reforming drug sentences (?!)

So apparently the state of Kentucky is debating legislation to reduce prison sentences and increase diversion for drug convictions. Today’s Lexington Herald-Leader has a detailed, well-written, very informative article about the bill, which was presented Tuesday by members of a special drug-specific sentencing committee called the Task Force on the Penal Code and Controlled Substances Act. Please read the whole thing here, but my favorite passage is:

“The bill would establish a penalty of “presumptive probation” for some lesser offenses, such as drug possession, requiring judges to sentence defendants to probation rather than prison unless the judges can state a compelling reason to do otherwise. It also would require addiction treatment for those convicted of drug possession.

Marijuana possession would drop from a Class A misdemeanor, with a penalty of up to a year in jail, to a Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum jail term of 45 days, if the judge ordered incarceration at all.”

Cause for Concern: What California Should Learn from Hawaii’s Experience


As promised here, I’ve inquired and read further into the correctional situation in Hawaii. Hawaii imprisons less people than CA, and certainly less per 100,000 residents (338 to California’s 471 in 2007). The recent decline in prison population in 2010, however, was twice as impressive in California than in Hawaii.

But the reason Californians should carefully examine the situation with Hawaii has less to do with the bottom-line numbers and more to do with the method of incarceration. According to Meda Chesney-Ling and Kat Brady, Hawaii is particularly notorious for housing its inmates off-state, mostly in private facilities on the mainland. More than a third of Hawaii’s inmates are on the mainland. This is a much more drastic than the condition in CA, which I referred to elsewhere as “the inmate export enterprise“. This move, hailed as a cost-saving measure, is now seriously questioned, and a recent audit attributed this move to “artificial cost figures derived from a calculation based on a flawed methodology, designed entirely on what is easiest for the department to report.” The new governor, Neil Abercrombie, is thankfully rethinking this strategy, and reestimating that bringing home some of the prison population would “easily add millions more to the state budget”.
We once discussed the question whether housing an inmate away from home is less conducive to rehabilitation. There are, however, other immediate concerns. Being housed away from family, friends and a supportive environment, makes an inmate far more vulnerable to attacks, as the distressing stories of Hawaii female inmates sexually assaulted in a Kentucky private facility and male inmates corporally punished in Arizona demonstrate. Despite the fact that this 1997 story paints Texas incarceration of Hawaiians in a positive light, the inmates interviewed mention the difficulties of being away from family and completely detached from the cultural context of their daily lives (Hawaii disproportionately imprisons Hawaiian natives). This CCA story about Oklahoma tells of efforts to change this sense of displacement, but it appears that the problem runs much deeper than that.
There are good reasons why Californians should pay close attention to this seldom-reported phenomenon. The concern is, of course, with other twists and misinterpretations of the Plata/Coleman order. Even if construction is lagging behind (and perhaps because of the delays), the option to ship more California inmates away to CCA facilities around the country is still very much on the table. Sending away more inmates may prove countereffective, and for some inmates, disastrous.
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Many thanks to Meda Chesney-Lind for helping me with more information on this.

Building Our Way Out of Overcrowding?

Re our posts here, here and here: Yesterday’s Chron offered a summary of CDCR’s progress on construction projects funded by AB900. Four years after authorizing $7.4 billion dollars in bonds, “the state has not completed a single project authorized by that bill, AB900, and has begun planning or construction for only about 8,400 beds” for the 8,200 inmates currently still sleeping in “bad beds”.

The piece quotes some critics of the construction path for decrowding, and it was pleasant to see the CCPOA among them.

Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he believes the state should undertake a “serious review” of AB900, noting that lawmakers have instituted other reforms to deal with crowding since 2007 – including medical parole for severely incapacitated inmates – and that the state’s crime rate has declined.

Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the prison guards union, which opposed AB900, said the construction authorized by the bill will not solve the state’s prison crisis.

I still think, as I pointed out in another post, that despite the open-ended order in Plata/Coleman, it is completely possible to offer an entirely reasonable interpretation of the order, according to which construction projects are not an acceptable response to overcrowding. In fact, the opposite interpretation seems unreasonable to me. The order specifically provided a number of inmates to be released from prison, not an acceptable square yardage. I believe that attempting to build out way out of overcrowding is not only unsound, but also a violation of the court’s order.

What’s He Building In There? Part III

More building plans come in the heels of the Michigan construction and the Calaveras and San Bernardino projects. These projects, however, seem to be more benign and have a reentry/therapeutic purpose. The CDCR website describes the three projects as follows:

 Renovation and reuse of the former Northern California Women’s Facility in San Joaquin County as a 500-bed adult male secure community reentry facility pursuant to the mandates of AB 900, which envisioned this new type of correctional facility for inmates within 6-12 months of parole;

 Renovation and reuse of the former El Paso De Robles Youth Correctional Facility in San Luis Obispo County (closed in 2008) as a 1,000-bed Level II adult correctional facility to be named the Estrella Correctional Facility, and

 Renovation and reuse of the former Dewitt-Nelson Youth Correctional Facility in San Joaquin County (closed in 2008) as a 1,133-bed adult correctional facility with a mental health treatment mission.

More Construction… This Time, in California

In the heels of the report from Michigan come two new construction projects within California, both funded by AB 900. In Calaveras County, the local jail’s capacity is to be quadrupled. And the expansion in San Bernardino adds maximum security beds.

Unsurprisingly, the Republican Caucus has been following on the progress made with AB 900 funding. From their perspective, “[i]t does not help that CDCR seems to have little direction and produces a new strategy plan on an annual basis. In the meantime, Democrats are pushing policies through the legislature – and supported by the Governor – that decrease the population through early release and place the burden of monitoring and controlling these individuals on local entities. Sadly, these are the exact same policies and actions that AB 900 was supposed to prevent.”

From an empirical perspective, however, it is the massive construction of more prison cells that should be prevented. Building prisons is akin to building public highways; as we build more to prevent congestion, congestion gradually increases to fill the volume available. It is frightening to think that incarcerating one in 100 Californians is not enough. But perhaps they are the “wrong” kind of Californians, and therefore the Republican caucus should lose no sleep over them.

In any case, these new construction projects highlight the dark and problematic side of the Plata/Coleman decision. In an effort to be courteous to the state, and not to micromanage its affairs, the three-judge panel asked for a population reduction without mandating methods the state might employ to achieve such reduction. In his response to SCOTUS Justices, Don Specter seemed to agree that building new facilities would be among the range or responses that would be in compliance with the order. I actually think a narrow interpretation of the Plata/Coleman order is not only possible, but reasonable. The court did use the word “reduction” and stated a number of inmates. To say that “reduction” is the same as “dilution” of inmates is a bit of an interpretive push. But the real point is, of course, that building new prisons, in the long run, will push California away from compliance with the order, because the new facilities will, in due course, become just as overcrowded as the old ones.

Michigan: Preparing a Prison for California Inmates


(image courtesy Cory Morse from the Grand Rapids Press)

The Michigan dream, which encountered some serious hurdles before getting back on track, is apparently becoming reality. Via Sara at the Prison Law Blog, here are some details about the preparations to receive California inmates at this new Michigan facility:

As The GEO Group Inc. prepares to reopen the site once known as a “punk prison” for youth convicts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is getting ready to send nearly 2,600 inmates here to help solve the state’s prison overcrowding.

This time, the inmates will not be deviant youth, but adults who ran afoul of California law for a variety of reasons.

The prisoners coming to Baldwin as part of a $60 million-a-year contract with GEO will be medium-security inmates deemed not extremely dangerous. Still, their backgrounds may include everything from murder to sexual assault.

Michigan has been hailed as a model for inmate population reduction. Apparently, these commendable steps have put them, and GEO corporation, in a position to benefit from our failure to act similarly.

The Crime of Punishment in California: NYT Editorial

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an editorial on the California correctional crisis, apropos the Plata/Colemen arguments.

At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

Jonathan Simon writes in Governing Through Crime:

For the Court’s “liberals”, the staggering portrait drawn by the many experts who testified before both original courts and the 3-Judge panel of the way physical and mental health needs are unmet appears to have broken through their own instincts to defer on criminal matters. The routine way in which California prisoners met death not through lethal injections, but by fatal neglect of their obvious and remediable medical needs, or by suicide after florid psychotic symptoms were ignored, animated a livelier questioning of the state in a criminal matter than in a long time. The Court’s “conservatives”, stripped of their preferred grounds of deference to the state’s penological rationality, by the sheer scale of California’s organizational failures over a twenty year period, were left to rest on the primal fear of violent crime and the biblical conviction that keeping people locked up must mean fewer crimes. Of course even if the Supreme Court (5-4), upholds the population cap, it will not end mass incarceration, that claim was not yet before the Court (and probably never will be).

Sobering words.

LA Times favors parole for youth LWOPs

Today’s LA Times carries this piece: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-1208-sara-20101208,0,2931752.story subtitled, “Sara Kruzan’s case shows why juveniles should not sentenced to life without parole.”

The Times had previously written in favor of Sen. Yee’s narrowly-defeated SB 399 to change this policy statewide; today’s Times asks Governor Schwarzenegger to offer clemency, if only in this one extreme case.

My favorite quotes: “She has volunteered for dozens of rehabilitation programs and won awards for her participation and attitude. … The CYA felt that she should have been prosecuted as a juvenile rather than as an adult, which would have put her into a rehabilitation program from which she could have been freed by age 25 — seven years ago.”

Sentenced a minor to life behind bars with no chance of parole is a ghastly, inhumane, cruel practice.