Realignment in Alameda

Read this interesting interview with David Muhammad, the Chief Probational Officer for Alameda County. Seems like his heart is in the right place, and he’s doing some serious thinking on how to make this work. This can be a big success if agencies follow Muhammad’s example, rather than be pulled into the realignment plan kicking and screaming.

On October 1, California will move 848 prisoners from state prisons to Alameda County jails to finish their sentences. The county anticipates an additional 47 new inmates each month after that.
Also, any low-level parolee from Alameda County who violates their parole will go to county jail instead of back to the state prison where they served their sentence.
Once realignment is in full swing, the county expects 267 more people in jail on any given day than are serving time there today.


. . . 


Sergeant J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sherriff’s department said they have the space for the new prisoners in county jail. But they still need the additional state funds for new inmates. “You need to be provided with money,” he said, “to feed and clothe them.”
Eventually, Muhammad’s department expects to supervise and serve an estimated 1,900 new cases.
“I hope that it’s actually huge — that we are doing a much, much better job than the State had been doing,” said Muhammad.
The state, he added, has focused too much on incarceration instead of rehabilitation.
Muhammad wants to shift the focus towards rehabilitation by changing the county’s risk assessment system. When a person is first released to the probation department, officers there assess their likelihood to commit another crime. Probation officers then give the most attention to the people who are at the highest risk.
While this system is good in theory, Muhammad said, they are incorrectly assessing people. Under the current system, someone likely to commit 18 small thefts will score the same as someone likely to commit armed robbery – and will be supervised accordingly.
A study by The Pew Center for the States, however, concludes that low-risk people do better with less supervision.
For example, low-risk people are more likely to have a job, Muhammad said, but if they have to go to the probation office during working hours to meet with a probation officer once a week, they are more likely to lose that job.
Muhammad identified another crucial area where the Alameda County probation can improve – he wants to get the department to the point where each probation officer supervises 50 people.
“Right now,” he said, “the ratio is all over the place.”
Currently 15,000 people are on probation in Alameda County. Eleven thousand of them don’t have probation officers because of a lack of staffing and funding.
AB 109 will provide some of that funding.
“I actually see this as an opportunity where we can fix everything at once,” Muhammad said.

Moving from Tough and Cheap to Lenient and Cheap: Why Conservative States are Ahead of the Curve

Emily Luhrs from the CJCJ posted a really great think piece today. Taking on the ACLU point on the bipartisanism of criminal justice reform, they point out that conservative states have had a much easier time closing down prisons and decrowding institutions than, say, California.

Texas prisons, for example, went from a projected increase of 17,000 new prison beds in 2007 to below capacity in 2011, paving the way for an unprecedented state prison closure this year. The reforms have not only reduced system-swelling, but have led to the desired goal of increased safety. In the years following the reform efforts, crime rates have continued to drop more than the year before. In fact, research proves longer sentences have no effect on deterring future crime.


. . .


While California often leads the country with progressive reform efforts, it is not leading the way on the issue of incarceration. The same issues that are bloating California’s prison population were identified in previously prison-reliant states like Texas, providing hope that California can seek effective rehabilitative options as the state begins to reduce its prison population. CJCJ has long advocated for smart alternatives to incarceration and if Texas can close prisons, maybe California can too.

Here’s my take on the phenomenon Luhrs highlights: This is all about humanitarianism. Clearly, the dominant, if not only, factor at operation here is the wish to cut costs, and it’s the only factor that has succeeded in reversing the punitive pendulum. Conservative states like Texas and Arizona have a distinct edge over California in doing so, because traditionally, both of these penal systems have operated on the cheap. In fact, as Mona Lynch explains in her terrific book Sunbelt Justice, during the big Rehabilitation Years in California (before the 1970s brought disillusionment with that ideal), Texas and Arizona boasted farm/plantation models that were self-sufficient and did things on the tough and cheap. So, operating on the cheap is not a new consideration in these states. They’ve always done corrections with less. They are simply doing less with less. Here in CA, on the other hand, savings and corrections are not concepts that have traditionally gone hand in hand. We’ve done everything–incarceration, parole, probation, death row–on a mammoth scale and are used to decades of immense expenditure on corrections. That mindset may be even more difficult to change than the punitive mindset. The approach that corrections, by definition, have to be expensive, has always been part of the Californian paradigm, and has always been alien to the Texan and Arizonian paradigms.

So, as Californians, we need to learn how to be two things that we haven’t traditionally excelled at: Being lenient and being thrifty. Ironically, despite Three Strikes and Marsy’s Law and determinate sentencing and all that, we have a better track record with the former than with the latter. But reality is forcing us to acknowledge that and seeking more financial wisdom with corrections, and this will guide us on the right path with regard to punitivism.

PlataWatch: CDCR to Begin Population Reduction, Albeit Behind Schedule

CaliforniaWatch (via Sara at the Prison Law Blog) reports:

The court’s first benchmark orders the corrections department to lower it prisoner population to 167 percent of capacity by Dec. 27. The department says it expects to reach that benchmark by Jan. 27, 2012.


Corrections department spokesman Oscar Hidalgo said the delay is necessary to allow the department to get a better estimate of the state’s prisoner population.


In a declaration in support of Wednesday’s filing, Jay Atkinson, the department’s acting deputy director of the Office of Research, said:


“CDCR forecasts population levels by using a simulation model, which employs data trends and projected new admissions, to determine how long the new admissions will stay, the number of offenders who will be returned to prison, and how long they and the current inmates will stay. …This simulation is repeated for each individual inmate until the total population is projected. After the Fall 2011 projection is completed, staff in the Office of Research will project the impact on CDCR’s population that Assembly Bill 109, the realignment legislation, will have.”

The decrowding process is being executed pursuant to the Realignment law. Stay tuned in the next months for a blow-by-blow followup on the decrowding process.

On Institutional Responsibility and Overcrowding

This week I traveled in Vancouver Island, BC. In Victoria, I was handed the local newspaper, the Times Colonist, which on Page 4 (!) reported of a prison protest in the Wilkinson Road Jail.

A 30-prisoner standoff broke out in the Wilkinson Road jail Thursday night after prisoners decided an inmate had been denied hospitalization and proper medication.


The inmate has liver cancer and hepatitis C, said Camille Davis, whose boyfriend, Samuel McGrath, is in the same unit as the sick prisoner.


Around 9 p.m., 30 inmates refused to be locked up because they said the issue wasn’t being addressed, said Dean Purdy, a corrections officer supervisor and chairman of the Corrections and Sheriffs Service for the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union. The B.C. Corrections Branch could not be reached for comment.


The result was a 25-minute standoff by the 30 inmates, who wanted the ailing prisoner to be sent to hospital, said Davis.


After the standoff, the sick prisoner was taken to hospital.

It would be rather simplistic to ascribe the differences between this coverage of this incident to the CA newspaper coverage of the Pelican Bay hunger strike, but nonetheless, I can’t resist noticing four peculiar things:

1) Page 4? This Victoria Jail is, apparently, not invisible to the public.

2) Coverage is decidedly sympathetic to the inmates and reports of their success. Note – this is a protest, not a “riot”, and the beginning of the story expands on the inmate’s medical condition and the urgent need to hospitalize him.

3) The first interviewee is the girlfriend of one of the inmates. I don’t recall seeing any CA newspaper being the least bit attentive to inmate families.

And, 4) – the big shocker – here’s what the correctional authority had to say about the protest:

“We’re severely overcrowded and it only stands to reason that when prisoners are incarcerated under these conditions, stress and agitation levels of inmates are going to be very high.”


Wilkinson and eight other provincial jails are operating at 180 per cent of capacity, said Purdy.


He said the overcrowding increases the risk of violent behaviour, escape and deteriorating working conditions for correctional officers.


Overcrowding promotes a “mob-like mentality,” he said. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Does anyone recall a current holder of a correctional position in the US offering such mild commentary about an inmate protest?

Making Sentencing Reform a Priority

Sign this ACLU-California petition at
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageNavigator/CN_petition

Save Money and Increase Public Safety

To Governor Brown, Senate President Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Perez:

As you work to solve the long-term budget deficit, please make sentencing reform a top priority. Sentencing reform will help balance the budget, balance our priorities, and balance the scales of justice.

Two simple sentencing reforms would save California taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually:

  1. Make possession of small amounts of drugs a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
  2. Make low-level, non-violent property offenses misdemeanors instead of felonies.

These two reforms fit with your realignment plan by keeping state prison for violent and serious offenses. But they provide additional benefits – lowering court costs, shortening sentences and saving both state and local dollars that can be used for public safety, drug treatment, social services and public schools and universities.

You have the power to bring back balance to the State of California.

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.

Haney on Psychological Consequences of Imprisonment in California

Today I attended a compelling lecture by Dr. Craig Haney of UC-Santa Cruz on the individual psychological consequences of imprisonment in California. His talk was especially well-timed after Dr. Haney was cited six times by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brown v Plata. You may also recognize Dr. Haney as the lead author of the famous Stanford prison study from 1973, in which twenty healthy males, evenly divided into groups of “inmates” and “guards,” acted so brutally that the 2-week experiment was suspended after 6 days.

Since then, Dr. Haney has spent over 30 years touring and studying prisons and prisoners. He began with an overview of the recent expansion of the U.S. prison system, because overincarceration has led to Plata and “prisonization” (stay with me here). The U.S. rate of imprisonment stayed stable around 200,000 from World War I to the mid-1970s, when the War on Drugs sentencing mentality started. From 1973-1993, the CA crime rate hovered around 100 per 100,000, but the incarceration rate increased from 100/100,000 to 350/100,000.

Dr. Haney pointed out that, being a generation older than me, he could still remember a time when prisoners had their own cells. Cellmates, or double-celling, was still seen as an abomination in the mid-1970s. His archives include letters from the prison wardens of 40 years ago, decrying this inhumane practice. Now, of course, prison cells house at least two inmates as a matter of course.

Prison used to aim to rehabilitate prisoners. Through work assignments, education, and other programs, inmates were taught useful skills or conditioned for better lives. In the mid-1970s, states began to veer away from this century-old aim: Haney referred us to Cal. Penal Code § 1170(a)(1), passed in 1976, which begins: “The Legislature finds and declares that the purpose of imprisonment for crime is punishment.” Half of CA prisoners released in 2006 had had no assignment whatsoever: no program, no job, no education. All those years, wasted. In 1973, prisoners averaged a 6th-grade reading level, and this is still the same today.

As recently as the 1970s, people suffering from serious mental health conditions were usually committed to mental hospitals for in-patient treatment. Nowadays, mental health patients are more commonly imprisoned. In the U.S., the rate of hospitalization of mental health patients has fallen from 450 per 100,000 residents over 15 years old in 1950, to only 50/100,000 in 1990. People who would be hospitalized in 1950-1980 are more commonly incarcerated in 1980-2010.

Dr. Haney used this background to discuss institutional history as social history. By taking over so many people’s lives, for so long, commonly at such young ages, the state has become not only a parent, but an abusive parent. Imprisonment retraumatizes inmates who have already experienced the trauma that led to their incarceration in the first place. Prisoners suffer tremendous institutional risk factors: abuse, maltreatment, neglect, an impoverished environment, diminished opportunities, exposure to violence, abandonment, instability, and exposure to criminogenic role models.

Haney’s last slide explained “prisonization” as a set of normal psychological responses to abnormal situations. Prisons create dependence on institutional structures and procedures: newly-released people may suffer a lack of volition and independence as they are separated from these strict regimens. Prisons damage interpersonal skills or even prevent future relationships, by engendering interpersonal distrust, “hypervigilance,” suspicion, emotional overcontrol, alienation, psychological distancing, social withdrawal, and isolation. Prisons diminish self-worth and personal value, and can result in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — PTSD inflicted by slow, continuing trauma as opposed to a discrete event.

Women’s Institutions: Health Issues and Overcrowding

This weekend’s Huffington Post featured an extremely distressing story about California’s women institutions and the health and sanitation conditions in them.

The Human Rights Council report cited in the post provides some further distressing information but fails to properly state which of the facts relate to California prisons and which relate to federal facilities or those in other state. It seems like the particularly horrifying report about male staff members incurring sexual favors in exchange for providing basic sanitation products is from a 2009 report on federal inmates.

Here, however, is the bit that clearly identifies California inmates and institutions:

A number of additional challenges often result in tension and conflict among inmates and with prison staff. These include inadequate access to basic hygiene products, the high costs of telephone calls and, the inadequacy and sufficiency of the food served. This was a particular concern at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) where interlocutors pointed out persistent deficiencies in terms of services and the hostility with which some guards respond to inmates. These challenges are further intensified by the overcrowding in the facility which was designed to hold 2,004 inmates but currently holds 3,686 people.

I wonder – nowhere in Brown v. Plata does the decision explicitly limit itself to men’s institutions. The number of inmates, I believe, is an assessment of ALL state institutions, not just men’s prisons. This week’s population report indicates that, at 168.9% capacity, women’s institutions suffer from an overcrowding problem that also exceeds the 137.5% established by Plata. I assume, therefore, that the population reduction will include these three facilities, and particularly CCWF, which is at 185.7% capacity.