Yesterday Prof. Aviram posted analysis of the newest Plata/Coleman panel court order. She points out, “The panel wants to hear more about the use of rehabilitation and reentry in the community as a population reduction measure that might actually improve public safety.”
So I thought I’d post this cover story from 10/17 last Friday’s LA Times. The piece highlights poignant personal stories of incarcerated, and formerly incarcerated, female addicts. It also provides a damning quote from a recent Schwarzenegger insider: “Kathy Jett, formerly Schwarzenegger’s top aide for prisoner rehabilitation, said gangs may attempt to fill the void created by the absence of programs.”
For purposes of this blog, though, the article also provides some worrisome statistics.
Rehab services lose $250 million a year, more than 40% of what they now get and a quarter of the $1 billion total sliced from the prison system.
“At the same time, the state is eliminating 45% of the seats in its substance-abuse programs for parolees.”
The featured rehab provider previously helped 756 women, and will now reach only 175.
These changes seemed almost calculated to increase addiction and recidivism. One might speculate that even the Governor is knowingly passing on the problem of prison overcrowding to the next administration rather than addressing any of its root causes.
I have been pleasantly surprised by the CCPOA-funded documentary series Prisons Under Pressure. The series is a bit dramatic in terms of editing and presentation, and somewhat shallow in its coverage of the broader social issues, but actually provides a lot of interesting information and includes some fascinating interviews. Episode 4, which you can see here, discusses the dysfunctionalities of parole in California and examines the roots behind the success of some programs. The video includes interesting interviews with Mimi Silbert from the Delancey Street Foundation and with Harriet Salarno from Crime Victims United of California.
In May 1840, Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish administrator with a Navy background, was appointed to run and manage Norfolk Island, . Norfolk was, at the time, one of the toughest correctional institutions in the British empire, housing hardened violent criminals who were sent to Penal Australia.
Maconochie’s correctional ideology was quite revolutionary for the time. Firm in his belief that punishment without reform was a socially empty act, he sought to generate a system under which convicts would earn their own freedom through “marks”, which they would earn for good behavior and hard work. The “marks” could be used to purchase luxuries beyond a diet of bread and water, or to purchase one’s freedom. The imprisonment experience, beginning with a period of solitude, would gradually loosen as convicts rose from level to level (or tighten back for those who “slipped”), to the point of being a closer simulation of life on the outside.
In his three years on the island, Maconochie had created a culture of learning and improvement within Norfolk. The library was stocked with books and prisoners would congregate, read and debate. Theatrical productions were considered. Musical instruments were ordered. Contrary to the previous practice of anonymous graves, headstones were placed on deceased prisoners’ graves. Queen Victoria’s birthday was celebrated as an island holiday, during which the prisoners were free to roam about the island.
Maconochie’s methods produced prodigious results with regard to recidivism rates. During his tenure at Norfolk, he discharged 920 of the twice-convicted offenders; by 1845, only twenty of them had been convicted again. However, these methods, which were initially endorsed by the Empire, became increasingly controversial. Critics complained that inmates were not receiving enough punishment in the initial statements and were horrified to hear about the island holiday. Under much political pressure, Maconochie was sent back to England in late 1843.
Revolutionary rehabilitative systems sometimes work, but they seem to be contingent upon strong personalities with strong convictions, and don’t tend to survive political pressure. Another example is Thomas Murton, a thoughtful administrator and criminologist who revolutionized the Arkansas prison with similar ideals in mind, and whose work at the prison is depicted in the fiction film Brubaker.
So, could such a system work in California prisons? One of the mechanisms considered for inmate release relies on good work credits. A National Conference on State Legislatures report examines the various mechanisms for credit earned. At least 31 states offer such credits in one form or other; usually, state legislation authorizes the correctional authorities to define which programs merit earned time. 21 states reward education and 18 states reward work (California provides credits for disaster relief work). Some states, like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have actually expanded their reliance on such systems, due to budgetary difficulties (humonetarianism in action!). The amount of time earned (how many days of participation are required for one day of early release) also varies from state to state, and also, within a state, between different programs. California offers day-for-day in some programs, and others sometimes provide more than a 1:1 credit ratio.
Do these programs affect recidivism? Several evaluation studies done on good credit programs found no significant difference in recidivism rates between early released inmates and inmates who served the full term. In fact, one study even found a significantly lower recidivism rate for those who were released on good credits.
To read more about Maconochie, read Norval Morris’ terrific book Maconochie’s Gentlemen.
Our pals at Corrections One link today to a phenomenal and touching piece by Michael Cabral, currently serving time at Salinas State Prison, about the impact of the budget crisis on life within walls. Some of his sad words:
Now, six months later, the political solution to California’s budget crisis has eliminated all self-help programs behind the walls. First-time inmates are popping up regularly, impressionable youngsters with a year or so to serve. Without the support of any rehabilitative programs, prison for them will be less “Correction and Rehabilitation” and more “Corruption and Retaliation.”
Of course, a few of the “good guys” will try to lift their spirits, but an overwhelming number will be surrounded by company-seeking misery.
They’ll hear all about the system being out to get them, how their lives are ruined forever, how it would be pointless to parole and look for a decent job (or any job). Then, they’ll hear countless theories and strategies on how to become better, smarter criminals. Their environment will gradually break them down, and mold them into mindless — if not heartless — products of “the way life is” according to convict lore. Finally, they’ll rejoin society, never wanting to return to prison again, but knowing only how to do just that.
The CDCR website features two news items about recent graduations. The first of these is the March 11 graduation of inmates with certificates in marine technology and carpentry. The marine technology graduates laugh as the speaker tells them that they are uniquely skilled for the profession, being more acclimated than others to live in small quarters. As the speakers congratulate the graduates for their newly acquired skills, they inform them, and the audience, that recidivism rates are significantly lower than for the general population (20% for carpentry graduates, and almost no recidivism at all for marine technology). Leonard Greenstone says, beaming with pride “I just hope you guys succeed in this program… every time a group of your leave, stay out of prison, aren’t coming back… really, it’s the most heartwarming, satisfactory feeling a human being can have… we all can take all kinds of credit, but this wouldn’t be here, or successful, without you. God bless you”. Secretary Cate said, “I have become a born again believer in these programs that provide our graduates… with the skills necessary to be successful on parole”, and mentioned that in budgetary constraint times, “this program pays for itself”. He adds, though, “[i]t’s not about politics or about the economy… this is about human beings… one life change impacts many others… one man who has the pride of a skill set and can support a family, can impact a generation”.
While CDCR is not currently accepting applications for guard positions, they feature the first 2009 Peace Officer Graduation streamlined video on their website. Prison guards are assigned to handle a variety of prison and parole operations, including transportations, escort, gang investigations, etc. The 16-week training takes place at theBasic Peace Officer Academy, located in Galt and Stockton.
Finally, my own students are graduating today. While I’m very sad to say goodbye to so many people I have such professional respect and personal affection for, I am proud and happy for them. They are not only exceptionally smart and hardworking people, but also imbued with a strong sense of social conscience and a commitment to making our society better. Many of today’s graduates played an important role in envisioning, organizing, and running our conference this March. While their opinions on law enforcement and corrections vary, they all have a healthy interest in doing their part in improving our criminal justice system. I hope that, despite the current job market situation, they will all be soon gainfully employed in places that allow those of them who wish to do so, to be part of the solution for the California Corrections Crisis. Congratulations, folks; I love you and believe in you.
A key assumption underlying the discourse of correctional policies has been that the ever-increasing sentences, changes in trial structure, and criminalization, represent the will of the public. This is a particularly strong argument in the case of California, since a substantial amount of our correctional reforms occur through voter initiatives. It’s probably time to ask ourselves whether the assumption that Californians are punitive, and desire these reforms, is true.
On its face, the assumption seems to be supported by some anecdotal evidence. In the last elections, Californians passed Proposition 9, which, in addition to strengthening the victim’s position in the criminal process, worsens the inmate’s position in parole hearings (by increasing pre-parole imprisonment periods and diminishing the scope of the right to counsel); while these particular provisions have not been incorporated yet into law, through Judge Karlton’s intervention, they were still elected as “the will of the people”. They also rejected Proposition 5, which promised drug treatment and various diversion options for non-violent drug offenders. Anecdotal evidence also seems to support an assumption of punitiveness; it is enough to glance at the comments at SFGate.com to be confronted with anger about crime, which translates itself into demands for more punitiveness. But is this really true? How does one systematically measure punitiveness? And, more importantly, how do we differentiate between public punitiveness and the initiative of lobbyists, interest groups, and politicians?
The first thing to ask ourselves is whether this is, indeed, a particularly punitive period in our history. While many influential thinkers, such as David Garland, Stanley Cohen, and Jonathan Simon, characterize our times as being increasingly punitive, others disagree. As Roger Matthews reminds us, there also have been examples to the contrary. Think, in the California context, of the recent developments regarding the possibility of decriminalizing marijuana, or on the considerations of incarceration options.
The next step is trying to figure out whether people are particularly punitive, and if so, which factors predict punitiveness. We don’t know much about the punitiveness of Californians in particular, but research conducted elsewhere in the States and in the world suggests that public punitiveness is an empirically complex issue.
Shadd Maruna and Anna King, who conducted a survey on the British public, found that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of ‘the youth today’ account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. On the other hand, crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime did not appear to predict punitiveness. Similar trends, connecting punitiveness with strong emotions or sentiments, were found by Devon Johnson, who used U.S. national survey data. Her work shows that anger about crime is a significant predictor of punitive attitudes, after controlling for other factors such as racial prejudice, fear of crime, causal attributions for criminal behavior, and political ideology. Similarly, in a national survey study, Sherwood Zimmerman, David van Alstyne and Christopher Dunn found considerably punitive trends; they then compared the hypothetical outcomes to a recent conviction cohort from New York State, and found that, had the public’s will been faithfully applied to actual convictions, the additional correctional costs would have been very high.
Emotion-driven opinions about punishment are, of course, particularly strong regarding issues like the death penalty. Mona Lynch’s study of pro-death penalty discourse on the internet finds that the death penalty is framed as a symbol of justice, a triumph of sorts of the good (the innocent victim) and the evil (the capital murderer). This essentialist perspective eliminates all consideration of costs, let along empathy for the offender.
Some studies, however, have found less punitive outcomes, particularly by tweaking the methodology of punitiveness surveys. Douglas Thomson and Anthony Ragona have critiqued standard punitiveness surveys, arguing that these generally do not ask respondents to consider contingenciessuch as offense circumstances, behavioral content of varioussentences, or fiscal cost differentials. This means that the public will necessarily appear to be more punitive than judges, because they are not faced with the full spectrum of judicial considerations, nor are they offered information about the relativefiscal costs of current and alternative sentencing practices.Thomson and Ragona, who conducted an Illinois survey incorporating issues of costs found that, on several dimensions,the public turned out to be less vengeful than typically portrayed in publicopinion poll and media accounts, notably in its openness to community sentences. I find this information particularly interesting, because it suggests, in the spirit of humonetarianism, that a discourse of scarcity has the potential to decrease public punitiveness. It is useful, in this context, to remember the rejection of Proposition 6, which suggested extremely punitive measures against juveniles and gang members; Prop 6 was mostly attacked for its high financial costs.
Neville Blampied and Elizabeth Kahan, who conducted a survey study in New Zealand, found creativity and openness to alternative punishments among community members asked about responses to juvenile noncompliance. The outcomes here may have been less punitive because of the case study, but they may also reflect cultural differences between the U.S. and New Zealand, which has been very open to juvenile justice reforms, and uses family group conferences almost to the exclusion of juvenile courts. The last important question is whether public punitiveness – if, indeed, it exists – is the reason for punitive policies. As Katherine Beckett argues in her beautiful book Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics, these policies do not originate with the public. She carefully timelines punitive initiatives, demonstrating how public opinion is being swayed by politicians and the media. In states like California, where much public policy is made directly by the public, it is important to examine who stands behind punitive initiatives and how these campaigns are being run.
In 1974, the world of corrections was quite different from the grim realities we have been discussing here over the last few months. The sentencing system was indeterminate, and the release date of inmates was mostly in the hands of the parole board. Those who grew up with the determinate system adopted in the late 1970s and early 1980s may recall the depiction of this system in The Shawshank Redemption.
Since sentencing was seen as an individualized, offender-based enterprise (as opposed to the administration of guilt, which was based on completion of the elements of the offense), the main criterion for release was “rehabilitation”, that is, establishing that the inmate had been reformed and was no longer a threat to public safety. Prisons had a variety of rehabilitative programs, though many of these, as depicted in the movie, were farcical fronts for the economic enterprise. The move to a system relying on determinate sentences, giving prosecutors and legislators more power than judges and parole boards, was the outcome of a new discourse, which (among other things) discredited the rehabilitative value of prison programs.
This discourse was impacted in a major day by Robert Martinson’s meta-study What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform, which was published on The Public Interest. In the study, Martinson examined the recidivism rates of 600 prison programs, as examined by other studies, and came to the conclusion that there is —
very little reason to hope that we have in fact found a sure way for reducing recidivism through rehabilitation. This is not to say that we did not find instances of success or partial success; it is only to say that these instances have been isolated, producing no clear pattern to indicate the efficacy of any particular method of treatment.
Martinson’s results, later confirmed by a review by a National Academy of Science panel, were devastating to the rehabilitative enterprise, and lent scientific credibility to the critique against indeterminate sentencing. While later studies have criticized some of Martinson’s methodology, Martinson provided an invaluable service to us all. As David Farabee argues, there was a broader lesson in all this, which is not different in essence from the important words Harold Atkins said in our opening panel: it is not enough to come up with a rehabilitative program. We have to know that it works.
Newer works in the last few years have come to more optimistic conclusions about rehabilitative programs in prison. Check out, for example, Rick Sarre’s excellent conference paper, pointing to newer meta-studies that found more programs that ‘work’. However, we have to keep in mind, as Doris MacKenzie reminds us, that these programs differ greatly from each other in terms of their underlying philosophies (boot camps are different from drug courts!), and some of them are more suitable than others for certain types of crimes or groups of offenders.
If Jim Webb’s efforts to create a criminal justice commission, or the important work done in places like the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, come to fruition, one important question it will have to answer is, how do we measure what works? What indexes of success might we have beyond recidivism measures? And, are we to stick to one penological philosophy, or are we willing to accept that different things “work” for different people? what do you think?
The last panel, Reentry and Returning to the Community, was a mixture of somber observations on the correctional process and of rays of hope. It started out with Dorsey Nunn, Program Director for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, who put much of the financial crisis into perspective. The current concern over the national 13 percent employment rate, he said, would be cause for rejoice among the prisoner population; with thousands of formerly incarcerated men and women looking for employment, only a precious few will be able to rebuild their lives. Part of the problem, argued Nunn, is structural in nature; when released inmates are denied basic survival needs, such as jobs that provide medical insurance, the problem is propagated. Even simple, technical things that middle-class citizens would not notice, discriminate and marginalize, such as a “have you ever been convicted?” box on life insurance forms. Much work still needs to be done around discrimination; and the middle-class person’s paranoia when confronted with “someone who looks like me”, said Dorsey, is only half of the picture; released inmates experience a parallel sense of paranoia when asking for houses and jobs. The good news are that formerly incarcerated people are organizing, and questioning much of society’s structure, including their exclusion from the very institutions and enterprises designed to “solve” their “problems”.
A good example of this might be San Francisco’s Safe Communities Reentry Council, about which we heard from Jessica Flintoft. The Council is meant to be a collaboration of formerly incarcerated people with various community figures such as the sheriff’s department, county probation, and human services. In true San Francisco fashion, the idea was kicked off with two councils, one headed by the chief Public Defender and a sympathetic supervisor, the other by the District Attorney and the Sheriff. One of Flintoff’s priorities is combining the two, which requires some compromise regarding their roles and conceptions. The purpose of the Council is to develop local oversight over reentry services and options, which so far have been provided sporadically and on a local level.
Flintoft shared some of the principles and challenges guiding her in her work. First, she mentioned, there is an emphasis on transparency and on allowing everyone to come to meetings and speak up. Second, there have been struggles with her intention to allow parolees to serve (and, as of now, they cannot vote, but they can be council members!). Third, she discussed the need to generate collaboration between the DA and the PD as participants in the process, and to transcend the courtroom adversariness for the purpose of advancing reentry. And, finally, she highlighted the importance of making city services available to people regardless of their offense; this requires educating various segments of the community, who express reluctance to offer housing to drug offenders, services to sex offenders, and the like. Flintoft extended an invitation to seven formerly incarcerated people to join the Council.
The closing speaker of the panel – and the conference – was Professor Gerald Lopez from UCLA, who provided us with sobering reflections on the historical dimensions of criminalization, marginalization, and reentry. Contrary to correctional lore, said Lopez, criminalization and the war on crime are not a product of the 1980s and the Reagan era. The same communities and neighborhood were targeted in many of the same ways; minorities and low-income people were routinely hassled, prosecuted and locked up even in the supposedly more benign days of the 1950s and 1960s. It is also important to remember that rehabilitation programs – what we now call “re-entry” – are also not a new invention.
The transformation in the 1980s, and the worsening of fear-mongering and mass hysteria, operated, said Lopez, in utterly predictable ways. Certain populations suffered disproportionate impact. While there hasn’t been a single “master coordinator” of the war on crime, the system we currently have was ultimately the product of design and choice. Policymakers could predict that the same people who were historically targeted by the criminal justice process would be targeted again; the policies were an utterly racial, and racist, perspective on who was safe, who was not, and what to do with them. Moreover, they reflect an immense indifference to the plight of the communities from which the targeted people came and to which they would eventually return.
Fighting these campaigns of fear and cruelty has been an uphill battle, and in the course of the last few decades activists have encountered situations that seemed imaginary – such as the release of people in NY to random places without an ID. It is, said Lopez, sadistic and stupid to design answers for these problems without involving the people themselves in designing their own fate; they must have a voice in the process, and they must have at least access to information on the available services, let alone some measure of how effective and helpful these services are.
Some of the problems with this sort of activism have to do with our tendency to invent the wheel and make up new words (such as reentry), ironically precisely when we have so little that would count as re-entry. Other issues relate to the bureaucracy, meetings, and talk without action that is often a feature of this work. But, as Lopez said, among the cops, parole agents, correctional officers, lawyers, and academics, one can find truly rebellious people, who will cut through red tape and meaningless words to get stuff done. It is these folks who are the true hope for change, and their energy can and must be harnessed to generate that change.
After the morning panels, it seemed that reforming our sentencing scheme was almost as impossible as being in three places at once, which is why I was only able to attend one of the concurrent panels on alternative sentencing. Dr. Emily Murphy, a behavioral neuroscientist working at Stanford, provided us with some fascinating information on the potential of neuroscience in rehabilitation in general, and in drug addiction situations in particular.
One of the problems with the emerging trend of neurolaw, which is otherwise a fascinating and promising field, is the tendency of some professionals to aggrandize its promise and advocate it as a cure-all, magic bullet for social ills. Murphy strongly advised against such simplistic perspectives, and her talk was an excellent example of nuanced, intelligent, sane discourse on the promise and limitations of science. Having briefly examined California’s history with brain-altering therapies, in particular the controversial UCLA Violence Project of the 1970s, Murphy turned to dicussing three avenues in which neuroscience could be helpful in criminal justice enterprises.
The first of these, prediction, focuses on the ability to foresee who might recidivate or benefit from a certain kind of treatment. This is a goal we are, at this point in time, far from achieving; there is no such thing as a single “crime spot” or a “violence spot” in the brain we can identify. One thing some scientists have done is focus on the category of psychopathy; psychopaths, sophisticated and manipulative, are highly overrepresented in the incarcerated population. Current diagnostic tools are not very helpful for screening purposes, since they consist of lengthy interviews by extensively trained people; however, Dr. Kent Kiehl has done some research on this on New Mexico inmates using a portable MRI scanner and is optimistic about its predictive potential.* Another issue is the possibility of predicting dangerousness. The Macarthur foundation has devleoped some multifactorial quantitative measures which, albeit imperfect, might have some predictive value. The key would be to obtain brain mapping, follow up on the inmates after their release from prison to see recidivism patterns, and then use the correlation to offer predictions. It should be remembered, however, that typical analysis of MRI relies heavily on statistical correlations, rather than on identifying a single spot on the brain, and therefore cannot be dispositive. It is also quite difficult to predict whether a certain type of treatment would be suitable for a certain offender; pharmacological treatment is akin to a sledgehammer in that it impacts the entire brain, and therefore often has complicated side effects.
Some treatment options are also being explored. In drug addiction cases, this mostly consists of substitution (replacement of the drug with another drug) and/or direct antagonism (drugs which suppress the craving by creating adverse consequences). Going through the existing substitutes – the well-known methadone and several others – was fascinating; naturally, treatment efficacy is seriously impacted by compliance. Also, some of the antagonizing drugs produce other bad reactions that might, ironically, exacerbate drug use.
Some more extreme treatment measures include psychosurgery and brain stimulation, which share an ugly, frightening history. However, brain stimulation has been found to be effective for treating Parkinson’s disease, and may also be valuable for various addictive conditions. The problem is finding dependable studies, based on ethical research, and published in reputable journals, that would confirm the efficacy of treatment.
The mixed results of treatment led Murphy to advocate a research focus on prevention. Several avenues were explored, such as the possibility of vaccination against addiction (which raises compliance issues) and the potential for actual erasure of drug-related memories, thus eliminating the positive associations to drug use. The problem is, as some audience members pointed out, that drug use becomes such a pervasive aspect of a person’s whole life, that a great many things and situations may be associations.
Murphy closed her talk by emphasizing the fact that neuroscience cannot be, in itself, a magic answer to drug prevention, and that holistic, environmental factors should also be taken into account. The perfect environment for considering all these factors is a drug court, which could create the sort of support system that would enhance the efficacy of any treatment chosen. She also reminded us of the need to be subtle and sophisticated about raising ethical questions – not accepting things at face value, but also not ruling them out with a knee-jerk reaction.
Congratulations to those who have achieved this important milesone, which will be invaluable on the other side of the fence. As this data from NCSALL demonstrates, one’s earning potential, particularly if one belongs to a racial minority, substantially increases with a GED. The good folks at Brown University, particularly John Tyler, are continuing to keep track of the impacts of prison education and of other issues pertaining to employment prospects after release, for those of you who want to learn more.
