Riverside Jail Sends Inmates to Fire Camps

Image courtesy prisontalk.com.

This Wednesday, Riverside County Jail became the first county institution to send inmates to California’s fire camps, in which state prisoners help put out fires. Richard de Atley of P.E. bloggers reports:

The 20 inmates were sent Wednesday, June 5 to the CDCR’s Sierra Conservation Camp training facility, in Jamestown. CDCR has agreed to place the trained county inmates in Riverside County fire camps, whenever possible.

. . .

County Supervisors in April approved a Sheriff’s Department proposal to supply county inmates to the fire camp program. More inmates will be sent every two weeks until the program reaches capacity of 200 Riverside County inmates at any time during the next five years.

Riverside County’s five jails have been at capacity shortly after realignment began. More than 10,000 inmates have been released early due to realignment, jail officials have said.

. . .

Riverside County will pay $46.19 daily per inmate. The funds were set aside from realignment money controlled by the Community Corrections Partnership, a joint local agency that includes the probation, sheriff, mental health department and district attorney and public defender’s offices.

Riverside County’s fire camps are located in Norco and Hemet. The county also maintains the Oak Glen camp, located in northern Riverside County inside the San Bernardino National Forest in the San Gorgonio Mountain Range, according to the Riverside County Fire Department’s web site.

In addition to helping fight wildfires, inmate camp members do public road maintenance and community service work.


For readers unfamiliar with California’s fire camps, I highly recommend Philip Goodman’s work (exhibit A, exhibit B). Not only do the fire camps alleviate prison overcrowding, they provide a much-needed public service. As an interesting aside, the strict racial divisions within the institutions blur when inmates work side by side on life-saving work.

Obtaining a job as a fireman after release from prison, however, may be tricky, as the fire departments run thorough background checks.

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Props to Caitlin Henry for the blog link.

Riverside Jail Inmates Sue over Conditions

Breaking news from the Prison Law Office: Three inmates at the Riverside jail have just served a federal action suit over their conditions, particularly the appalling health care. The press release provides two poignant examples:

Angela Patterson, a plaintiff in the case, suffered nearly a year of delays,  cancellations, and inadequate medical care for severe injuries she sustained in a car  accident prior to entering the jail. As a result, a temporary filter implanted near her  heart cannot be removed, and she will suffer a lifetime of anticoagulation  medications and frequent laboratory monitoring, with significant risk of fatal bleeds and other complications. 

Quinton Gray, another plaintiff, was given potent psychotropic medication without  appropriate evaluation or follow-up, placing him at risk for life-threatening  consequences. As a result of the medication mismanagement and treatment  failures, he lives with agonizing side effects: twitching, tongue-biting, increased  seizures and tongue swelling, racing thoughts, disorientation, depression, and  chronic sleep loss. 

The inmates complain that the slashing of medical care budgets in Riverside have yielded unacceptable practices. They are represented by the Prison Law Office and by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP.

Before Realignment, one of the arguments in favor of shifting inmates from prisons to jails was that surely the counties would do a better job than the overcrowded state institutions. This is not the case in several jails, and we might see an increasing number of lawsuits focused on unacceptable jail conditions.

Join us for California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform for a conversation about county jail conditions.

Realignment and Long Jail Terms

An inmate in the Madera County Jail is taken to the inmate
housing unit. Photo courtesy The Press Enterprise.

Realignment was initiated, in part, as a reaction to the ruling in Brown v. Plata and the belief that, whatever the conditions in local jails, surely nothing could be worse than state prisons. But is that true? The Press Enterprise reports that more than 1,100 people are serving terms between 5 and 10 years in county jails, some of which are seriously ill equipped to handle such long sentences.

Authorities originally believed that the maximum jail sentence under realignment would be three years, and anyone with a lengthier sentence would go to prison.

But judges found no legal grounds to send convicted inmates to state prison for most violations detailed under realignment. The number of inmates getting lengthy sentences to county jails has been rising ever since.

County law-enforcement officials are concerned that increasing the number of long-term jail inmates will lead to a new round of prisoner rights-violation lawsuits. Jails originally were meant to hold sentenced inmates for no more than a year. They don’t have the medical, mental health, disability and work-program facilities found at state prisons

Fresno County already has been sued by inmates claiming mental health and medical care in its jails is inadequate. A prison-rights law firm has been reviewing Riverside County’s facilities.

The piece goes on to document some anti-Realignment bills aimed at minimizing its effects by excluding more categories of offenders or setting a sentencing limit. The fact that there is now one person sentenced to 42 (!) years in L.A. County Jail (presumably for a nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual offense) should be an indication that reform is being done in a horribly wrong fashion.

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Props to Josh Page for the link. Come talk to us about realignment at our conference, California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform, on March 21-22.

Get Tough or Get Smart? Guest Post by Felix Lucero

On February 2nd a panel explored the theme of juvenile justice, from a brief history of reform schools to the over 10,000 adolescents incarcerated in the California Youth Authority by the mid-90’s.  The theme, Get Tough or Get Smart, explored child brain development, socioeconomic background, environmental stressors along with factors that increase the possibilities for rehabilitation and detour future criminal conduct by young offenders.  What stood out was the possibility of change by both youth offenders and the institutions that incarcerate them.  Today, less than 900 youth are incarcerated in CYA and more counties are using restorative justice models to address youth crime.  Innovative programs like the Huckleberry Community Assessment and Referral Center in San Francisco evaluate individual needs of youth offenders and offer solutions that reduce recidivism rates and strengthen the ties between the child and the community.  As a former youth offender and one of the panelists, I can say that I made a rational decision in an irrational situation.  Youth crime and poverty are parallel functions of society; it doesn’t excuse criminal conduct but at the very least we should recognize the transitory qualities of youth and make every effort to correct mal behavior rather than just punish.

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Felix Lucero is an activist working in numerous self-help and community service programs, and a former youth offender.

Dan Macallair, mentioned in the panel, will also speak at our upcoming California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform conference, March 21-22, at the State Building.

Is Realignment Obsolete? Harmful?

In recent days, realignment isn’t getting much love. A Wall Street Journal story this week blames realignment for a recent rise in property crime. Veteran readers of this blog, read the piece (or the excerpt below) and let’s find what’s fishy here.

California saw a year-over-year increase of 4.5% in property crime in the fourth quarter of 2011, immediately after the overhaul, marking the first rise since 2004, according to a report from the state attorney general this fall. In contrast, property crime, which includes burglary, auto theft and larceny, fell 2.4% in the nine months before the sentencing changes stemming from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. 

 While the attorney general doesn’t release 2012 data until late this year, localities ranging in size from Sacramento to Santa Rosa in Sonoma County saw property crimes rise last year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which hasn’t reported 2012 crime data, says property crimes fell 0.5% nationally in 2011 from a year earlier. 

. . . 

Known as realignment, the changes are “causing more of these people to be out in society rather than locked up,” said Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Michael Lazzarini, and that could be a “pretty good reason” for the rise in property crimes. “Not only is it continued workload for the investigators, but it’s also a quality-of-life issue for the citizens,” he said. 

Santa Rosa saw property crime rise 5% last year through November to 3,568 crimes, while violent crimes declined 7% to 585 crimes. Sgt. Lazzarini, the head of the property-crimes-investigation team, said detectives have been stretched thin since the new state law, which he neither supported nor opposed. He said he has struggled to decide which crimes to investigate. 

There aren’t enough data yet to back up Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch on a statewide basis. Gil Duran, a spokesman for Mr. Brown, said it is impossible to make claims about the reason for the crime increase with limited data. “Any respectable criminologist will tell you that [they] don’t determine overall trends in a year or two,” he said in an email. “Attempts to tie any increases to realignment are purely political.”

Here’s what’s odd here, from a (respectable?) criminologist:

We’re given data on crime in California and on crime in Santa Rosa. What we are not given is a county-by-country breakdown. I’m not just saying this just to take pleasure in countering Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch (since when does the Wall Street Journal write stories based on police officers’ hunches, anyway?) Every single report on realignment implementation shows that different counties have been dealing with sentencing reform in different ways. The crime rise might not be a result of people being “out of jail”. It might be the result of releasing people after their sentences without any appropriate probation mechanisms to help them find jobs. Or it might be that the recession is hitting some counties worse than others. I want Sgt. Lazzarini to show me that property crime in San Francisco and Alameda is going up (because, supposedly, these counties “let people out”) and down in Los Angeles, Riverside, and Orange (where there is an orgy of county jail building). Now that’ll be special, and even then, correlation is not causation.

Police hunches are not unimportant. Police hunches in individualized, specific situations, can and do save lives. But hunches have no place when generalizing from data, and people who can’t read data carefully should not drive policymaking.

So, apparently Governor Brown also doesn’t buy Sgt. Lazzarini’s hunch. But he has his own beef with realignment. Here’s what Governor Brown said to the federal court this week, as reported by the L.A. Times:

“At some point, the job’s done,” Brown said at a Capitol news conference before catching a plane for Los Angeles, where he repeated the message. “We spent billions of dollars” complying with the court orders, the governor said. “It is now time to return control of our prison system to California.” 

 . . . 

The population now hovers around 119,000 — about 50% more than state facilities were designed to hold. Some prisons are at 180% of their intended capacity. 

The federal courts set a June 2013 deadline to reduce that total to 137.5%. The state says it now expects to exceed the cap by 9,000 inmates. On Tuesday, Brown argued those numbers were meaningless in light of improved inmate healthcare. He further called the design capacity of the state’s prisons “an arbitrary number.” 

But former state prisons chief Jeanne Woodward disputed the governor’s assertion and said she worried that without federal intervention, the governor and Legislature would find it easier to cut funding for improvements such as new healthcare facilities. 

“Without court oversight, resources tend to get taken away,” said Woodward, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law.

This is the most recent attempt by the state to avoid complying with the Plata mandate. Of course the design capacity is an “arbitrary number”; all numbers are arbitrary. What makes this number magical is that it didn’t pop out from the sky; it was decided by the court after hearing expert testimony about proper medical care and quality of life.

And here’s another reason why this is interesting. As you may recall, the government’s solution to depopulation as a response to the Plata order was to combine it with a savings measure. Plans to move inmates from state prisons to jail were in place back in the Schwarzenegger days, before Plata. Now, suddenly we’re being told that further depopulation would not save money; it would actually waste money.

I don’t think that realignment is the best thing since sliced bread, and I think in some cases jail conditions could be worse than prison conditions. But I do think that, done thoughtfully and thoroughly (like what these folks did), it is a step in the right direction. The state’s resistance to the plan as a whole seems misguided. What the state should do instead is guide the counties, with proper fiscal incentives, to do realignment as it should be done.

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Christoffer Lee, David Takacs and Aatish Salvi sent me links. The grumpy commentary is mine and mine alone.

Less Prison, Less Crime: SF Does Things Right

This evening I attended a town hall event with Senator Mark Leno and other guests. The event focused on criminal justice reform in California, but most of the time was spent discussing San Francisco’s policies and practices. It was, for the most part, a happy occasion, with plenty of opportunity to celebrate San Francisco’s sensible approach to law enforcement and corrections.

Senator Leno opened by giving some historical background. Ten years ago, when he started chairing the Public Safety Committee on the Assembly, California was spending 5.3% of its budget on corrections. That rose to 11% pre-realignment. But we’ve turned a corner. In 2014, this figure will be lowered to 7%. And, despite not incarcerating as many people (actually, being the county that incarcerates the least amount of people!), San Francisco is experiencing record low rates of violent crime. How are we doing this without recurring to mass incarceration?

There are a few things that are in the works. The unsuccessful attempt to reclassify simple possession, a misdemeanor, as an infraction, might be resuscitated. We’re beginning to make use of medical parole (trying to save $150 million dollars spent on health costs and security costs involving treatment of inmates who can’t take care of their basic needs, some of whom are actually comatose.)

The main achievement has been the enactment of SB 678, the counterpart to AB 109, which creates community corrections. Shifting the responsibility for the post-sentence phase to the counties was accompanied by a shift in approach. Wendy Still, the Chief Probational Officer, spoke of her 26 years of experience in corrections and of moving to the counties to make a difference before people come to state prison. New admissions to prison are now down 37% statewide, and 47% in San Francisco, which always held the lowest prison rates and has reduced them now even further. The probationers, now addressed as clients, are no longer perceived to require surveillance and supervision, but rather services to help them get their lives on track. The system of incentives has been modified so that reduction in recidivism makes a difference. The money that counties received upfront to set up SB 678 – $45 million in federal stimulus grants – yielded &180 in correctional savings.

David Onek from UC Berkeley’s center on criminal justice mentioned the unique nature of San Francisco’s criminal justice apparatus and the remarkable collaboration between its different agencies. While it is, he said, too early for a realignment report card, it seems that San Francisco was well ahead of the curve for a long time.

Jeff Adachi talked about the work that still needed doing: Fixing the racial disparity in San Francisco’s correctional institutions and seriously improving our reentry services. One measure taken toward the latter is Clean Slate, which helps folks with convictions start anew and put their lives on track.

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said that San Francisco jails are remarkable in that they are undercrowded. He also spoke of his wish to be the first sheriff to request less beds, or to rebuild dilapidated institutions with less beds than they had in the first place.

Commander John Murphy of the SFPD talked about the collaboration between the city’s different agencies, and of the effective reduction in violent crime (16% less shootings.) The focus is on Anthony Braga‘s hot spots – apparently, 50% of all violent crime in the city happens in 2% of its geographical area, which allows the police to focus their efforts in this area, involve community organizations, and shift the attention away from low-level drug offending (arrests for drug offenses have gone down from 50-100 a day to less than 10.)

It was a self-congratulatory evening, but rightly so; San Francisco has much to take pride in. And, as a side note, it was rather delightful to see a large contingent of the awesome United Playaz in the audience. So glad to see young people politically involved.

Federal Panel to State: Plata Quotas Will Not Be Reduced

In a story that is getting surprisingly little press, today’s Reporter reported on the federal three-judge panel’s response to the State’s request to modify Plata requirement. The long and the short of it: The answer is no.

A federal three-judge panel has given California corrections officials until January to say how they will reduce the state’s inmate population to comply with an order upheld last year by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The state must reduce its prison population by 33,000, to a maximum of 110,000 inmates, by next June.

Corrections officials say they cannot meet that goal if they follow through on their plan to retrieve inmates who are housed in private prisons in other states. They want to do that to save money.

 Bringing back those prisoners would put the state 3,000 inmates over the court-imposed cap. The judges said last month that they would not adjust the inmate cap. 

On Thursday, they told corrections officials to develop a plan to meet the June deadline.

Will the state make its deadline? How would this affect the plan to bring back out-of-state inmates? We’ll continue updating on this vein.

Felon Disenfranchisement and the California Realignment

In 1974,  California voters passed a constitutional amendment extending voting rights to all Californians with criminal records, save for those “imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony.” Prior to the amendment, disenfranchisement was permanent in CA once you were convicted of a crime. The impetus for the amendment was, hard as it may be to believe in the days of public safety rhetoric and redball crime panic, the wish to help people regain their full citizenship after they complete their parole. In a landmark 2006 case, the CA Supreme Court interpreted this provision as follows: Folks in state prison, and under state parole, can’t vote. Folks in jail or under probation (or in jail for a probation violation) aren’t considered “imprisoned” and therefore can, and do, vote.

A new piece I’m working on (coauthored with Jessica Willis) for the upcoming Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium examines the application of this provision, and this interpretation, to a new population of offenders created by the Criminal Justice Realignment in California.

Let me present the legal dilemma. In the aftermath of Brown v. Plata, and in order to resolve the serious financial crisis faced by the state (corrections eat up about 7% of CA’s entire budget), the California Penal Code has been amended to sentence non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders to do time in county jail rather than in state prison. Are these people “imprisoned” for the purpose of the constitutional provision?
Constitutional provisions that give people fundamental rights should be interpreted broadly, right? Whenever there’s ambiguity, we should support people’s right ot vote, right? Wrong. The CA Secretary of State instructs felons that, if they are among the realigned group, they cannot vote.

Several civil rights organizations, and several folks doing time in jails or on community supervision, petitioned the CA Court of Appeals for an original writ allowing them to vote (full disclosure – yours truly and coauthor Jessica Willis wrote an amicus brief on behalf of thirty criminal justice scholars in support of the petitioners). The Director of Elections for the City of San Francisco – one of the respondents – actually agreed with petitioners that they should be allowed to vote, and merely asked the Court for instructions what to do. The court threw the case in petitioners’ faces with no reasoning. Petitioners took to the CA Supreme Court, and received pretty much the same response.

In the Article I go in depth into what the Court should have weighed and considered if it took these Californian citizens’ rights seriously. But in a nutshell, here’s what I think is going on: There are two visions of Realignment. You can see it as a technical way to resolve a budgetary problem and warehouse people on someone else’s dime. Or, you can see it as  a real opportunity to bring people back to their communities, through a correctional method that actually might make sense for people who will eventually come out of prison and reintegrate into society. And by throwing the case out, the Court has opted, regrettably and apparently without much thought, for the former vision. A huge opportunity has been missed. People who could, and should, have been reintegrated into society; who could’ve channeled their experiences into civic engagement; and who could’ve started to care about their communities and neighborhoods will remain isolated and alienated.

In the movie Recount, a fascinating flick about the Bush v. Gore election, a person mistaken for a felon is sitting at home, watching Bush’s acceptance speech. His face is difficult to read. Is he angry? Sad? Disillusioned? Robbed of the promise of a voice or full citizenship? When you vote in November, think about the immense number of U.S. citizens behind bars, or under supervision, from whom this right has been denied.
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cross-posted on PrawfsBlawg.

Musical Chairs: Two Visions of Realignment

Credit Michael Czerwonka for WSJ.

A story from early July in the Wall Street Journal looks at the shifts and shuffles in county jails following the realignment. It’s a helpful ground-level story on who differently counties have dealt with this. Here’s a pretty lengthy excerpt:

California’s 58 counties have varied widely in how they manage the inmate shift, known as realignment. Residents in some areas, such as San Francisco, generally have embraced seeking alternatives to incarceration. But as Kern and other counties only begin to experiment with new methods, local residents have protested that people are being let out of jail too early. 

 “I call it ‘justice by geography,’ depending on where you get arrested,” said Barry Krisberg, a criminal-justice expert at the University of California, Berkeley. 

 The total population in the state’s 33 prisons has fallen by 16% to 120,946 from 144,138 in late September 2011—days before realignment began, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. 

Under realignment, people who would have gone to state prison for low-level crimes in the past will now be kept under county supervision. Low-level crimes range from drug sales to deadly hit-and-run accidents, under the state’s classifications. The counties get state money to cover the added costs, and sheriffs are encouraged to avoid overcrowding in their own jails by finding alternatives to locking people up. 

 The change is being closely watched by public-safety experts and other states, which are dealing with their own overcrowded prisons. California’s realignment “certainly has to be one of the most dramatic shifts in responsibility in American history,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project. 

Mr. Gelb and other experts say there is increasing evidence that programs like the ones Mr. Youngblood is trying—such as electronic monitoring along with special types of counseling—can keep people from re-offending more effectively than keeping them behind bars. Still, the policies have been met with skepticism in many California counties. 

 In Merced County, southeast of San Francisco, residents slammed officials in May after a woman convicted of driving under the influence in an accident that killed a local firefighter was sent home on electronic monitoring after serving less than a day of her sentence, according to a spokesman for the county sheriff. In San Joaquin County, residents protested in April when a man who had been released early from jail then tried to kill his girlfriend. 

 Officials in Calaveras County disagreed so strongly over whether to allot a big portion of state money for rehabilitation programs for offenders that the county was left unable to spend about $475,000 until they resolved the fight in April. 

 The stakes are particularly high in Kern County, with a population of about 840,000. The county has the second-highest per capita property-crime rate and the sixth-highest violent-crime among the state’s counties, according to 2009 state data. 

 So far, under realignment, the number of people in Mr. Youngblood’s jails has risen to 2,410 on average from 2,121 last October. The sheriff is seeking funding for a 790-bed jail. 

 At the same time, 981 inmates are supervised with electronic monitoring and other out-of-custody programs—almost double the 499 in October. “This is our virtual jail,” said Sgt. Greg Gonzales, Mr. Youngblood’s realignment coordinator. 

 Rudy Herrera is among those inmates. The 24-year-old, who had already been to state prison and county jail several times, was convicted in February of possessing stolen property. Under the old system, he would have been sent to a state lockup for as long as several years. Under realignment, he served less than four months in a Bakersfield jail, including 90 days in a drug-abuse treatment program. Now Mr. Herrera stays at home with a monitor strapped to his ankle, typically leaving only for work and his drug-treatment sessions. “It keeps me focused,” he said. 

While every county is its own universe, I think we can discern two main approaches. The old-school approach, which dangerously resembles that of state prisons of yesteryear, is to just build and expand, to counter the short-term expansion in inmate numbers. The new approach is to find alternatives to incarceration and to invest in rehabilitation and reintegration with the hopes of reducing recidivism in the long run. Which approach do you think is wiser?
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props to David Greenberg for the story.

Housing People of Imperfection

The Bay Guardian features an interesting insider look at correctional policy and realignment by Eugene Alexander Day, a three-striker in Soledad Prison. It’s worth a read in its entirety. Here’s a short excerpt:

It took some of the sting off my life sentence when the Supreme Court smashed the CDCR in 2011. Systemic mismanagement corrupted a generation of salvageable prisoners. As someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps the politics of justice, the Legislature didn’t simply kick the can down the road – it pushed the state closer to the precipice. State leaders have set a poor example. By failing to follow the evidence in 2007, all 58 counties had Realignment shoved down their throats in 2011.


This lens through which I see the world is depicted as “synchronized drowning” by Attorney General Kamala Harris. For the last 13 years, I’ve struggled to keep my wits in this sea of despair. Deviants need structured treatment, not more of the same. Shifting the responsibility of tens of thousands of offenders away from CDCR is an idea of brilliant simplicity.


Local law enforcement, prosecutors, and the courts are better suited to solve local problems. These offenders are members of your community. The next time the task force stomps through the ghetto snatching up people of color, they must think about how to house all of these people of imperfection. Good. Most need help, not a jackboot.


. . .


The counties might hate Realignment, but I hate the fact it took so long. Marking a happy day in this collaborator’s miserable life, a whole class of offenders have been diverted away from the Monster Factory. Excellent. Realignment is not some hug-a-thug program. It’s basic math. So used to being treated like shit, I will die before I advocate for mollycoddling prisoners. Using offenders as earmarks to maintain an unsustainable status quo is a feeling worse than death. Fix the problem.


My dreams are skewed. In my way of thinking, prisons should become factories that turn monsters into advocates for social justice. Offenders need to learn the difference between pro-social and antisocial behavior, not how to shove dope up their asses or participate in a riot.

I’m not sure whether Day will be pleased or disappointment with the results of the realignment experiment. The intent, to produce jails as instruments of rehabilitation, is laudable, but only if the jails really are up to the task. So far, some initiatives look promising, while others, such as jail building initiatives, absurd cost-rolling measures, and health care fiascos, do not. I guess time will tell.