Today’s Chronicle features an interview with Sunny Schwartz, whose thoughts on rehabilitation and restorative justice are inspiring and thought provoking.
A small excerpt:
My dream is that every jail and prison will be a place of no-nonsense change and responsibility. And that we build the safety nets for continuing education and programming – through our probation departments, churches, synagogues, chambers of commerce – that continue to invest in people’s success.
Can you imagine if we had economic incentives for jails and prisons so they get more money if people don’t return?
The new White House website is attracting some attraction (some of it from bloggers comparing it to the previous version which, in all fairness, was made eight years ago). Given Jonathan Simon’s statement, that no American politician has ever gotten elected on a platform of being soft on crime, it is interesting to state a few things about the new administration’s criminal justice policy.
First, the list of topics on the agenda does not seem to include crime control or law enforcement in any particularly visible way.
Second, these issues have been located under “civil rights“.
Third, the priorities seem to have shifted toward rehabilitation and re-entry, at least on paper. An excerpt from the agenda page:
End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.
Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.
Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.
Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.
How much these national priorities will be reflected in California in the wake of the failed Prop 5? It may well be that the tendency to release prisoners and eliminate parole, supported by Governor Schwarzenegger as a budgetary emergency measure, may actually reflect some of these priorities.
As prison population grows, the parolee population grows too. A series of pieces on the North County Times has recently highlighted the experiences of parolees and the challenges of parole agents.
This is California’s parole system, an overworked, underfunded system that is ill-equipped to deal with a crushing caseload of former prisoners who leave prison with a meager $200 allowance to feed, clothe and house themselves.
It’s a caseload that stands to get much worse if a panel of federal judges conducting a trial in San Francisco to address overcrowding orders the early release of nearly 40,000 men and women now behind bars to ease prison overcrowding.
“California’s parole population is now so large and its parole agents so overburdened that parolees who represent a serious public safety threat are not watched closely and those who wish to go straight cannot get the help they need,” said a federally funded report released last month by three experts on the criminal justice system.
Interestingly, the article sees imprisonment and parole as inversely impacting each other. Naturally, the ecology of imprisonment, release, and reimprisonment, is something that merits attention; but is the problem really the growing rate of release, and if so, is the solution for parole officers’ caseload simply to release less people? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Another piece recounts the optimistic story of George Loving, a parolee who managed a group home in Vista. Among other things, he says:
“I didn’t think I was ever gonna change. I was either gonna die on the streets or die in prison. I didn’t grow up with a whole lot of schooling, so I basically only knew one thing: how to steal. I really didn’t know nothing else.
“You know, the (parole) department can make all the changes they want, but if you’re not ready to change, it really doesn’t matter. And then a lot of us don’t be ready to change. And when you basically been spending your life out and in, out and in, you don’t have no education and all that, you only really know that one way. A lot of people, you get my age and you don’t wanna be talking about going back to school and all that. So you just, like, feel hopeless, like maybe this is all I will ever do.
“And then I took a few programs in prison. After sitting there and listening to people tell their stories, I’d sit back and be thinking, ‘Damn, I did some (stuff) like that,’ and ‘Damn, am I that (messed) up and don’t know about it?’ The programs have a lot to do with me wanting to change, because I thought that there was nothing wrong with me. But there was a whole lot wrong with me.
“It just clicked. I was tired. I was tired, I was getting older, my kids was getting bigger. I just got tired. I been doing this since I was 11.
“This job (at a sheet metal company) don’t pay a whole lot of money, but it beats 10 cents an hour or whatever I was getting in prison.
“I just feel good where I’m out now. Sometimes I think about what took me so long to realize that it’s actually not hard to do that right thing. You know, and I really don’t even get all them old thoughts of doing this and doing that no more, you know. Life has just been good. Just living it the best I can.”
(image from Chronicle article) The Chronicle reports today of an interesting trend in some prisons, albeit not in CA: greening, composting and recycling. In Indiana, North Carolina, and Oregon, prisons are installing solar panels, using energy-saving equipment, and composting food scraps.
While this is, in principle, a cost-saving measure, it has had some heartwarming “side effects.” The Chron reports:
The responsibility of caring for the prison’s three hives of Italian honey bees falls mostly to Daniel Travatte, 36, a soft-spoken former drug addict who is serving 10 years for attempted armed robbery.
Under the supervision of prison counselor Vicki Briggs, Travatte has learned to harvest honey – which inmates occasionally eat with breakfast biscuits – and use beeswax to make lotions. He’s become an expert on their habits.
“I’m trying to change myself,” said Travatte. “A lot of people go through prison with no intention of changing. I love working with the bees. It keeps me busy. I have a lot of responsibility to take care of.”
While there isn’t scientific evidence that such activities are helping inmates, Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., notes anecdotal evidence that it’s working.
“They were stimulating their minds and having conversations that were different than ‘How much more time we have left?’ ” said Nadkarni.
While Cedar Creek went green out of economic necessity – it had to conserve because it didn’t have the wastewater capacity to expand four years ago – it is now embracing other benefits, said Dan Pacholke, a state prison administrator who helped implement many of the practices.
What about CA, which has pioneered greening efforts in so many other arenas of public and private life? (image from CDCR website) Well, as per this press release from CDCR, a series of energy-saving projects, including solar plants, are beginning to be implemented in prisons. These seem to belong more in the cost-saving family of changes; no composting, not to mention no community gardens or beehives. One can only hope that someone at CDCR will see the broader perspective and involve the inmate community in greening efforts; something very good might come out of this, beyond saving money.
In a previous post, I briefly presented the three criminal-justice-related propositions on the California ballot. In this post, and two more posts to follow, I’ll expand about each of these, starting today with Proposition 5.
NORA, or the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, builds on the ruins of Prop 36, which was passed in 2000. Prop 36 promised drug abuse treatments for offenders charged with simple possession. Since 2000, the plan received praise as well as critique. Some point to a reduction in recidivism, and others highlight that less than half of the offenders complete treatment. Recently, Prop 36 lost close to half its allocated budget through gubernatorial fund cuts (and here‘s what the critics think about the cuts).
NORA aims to propose a modified version of Prop 36, and it might affect drug offenders in a variety of ways. It emphasizes rehabilitation as an answer to the prison overcrowding crisis, and provides mechanisms that exist in a variety of countries, such as drug treatment which is not accompanied by an official conviction. In this post, I’d like to highlight some aspects of Prop 5, some of which have not been emphasized on other web discussions.
As mentioned in an earlier post, “nonviolent drug offenses”, for the purposes of Prop 5, include simple possession of drugs or paraphernalia, as well as being under the influence. Any such scenario that includes trafficking purposes is excluded from this definition.
The drug treatment programs offered by Prop 5 follow a principle of “harm reduction”, and would be personalized to fit the particular offender and his or her circumstances. They could include science-based instruction, outpatient services, residential treatment, medication, mental health, and aftercare.
The proposition offers three tracks of diversion and treatment, which are left to the court’s discretion: • Track I: treatment diversion with deferred entry of judgment (carrying no criminal conviction) • Track II: treatment diversion after a conviction, as a probation requirement, including sealing of records after probation • Track III: treatment diversion after a conviction for possession of controlled substances: other nonviolent offenses: judicial discretion (for people who failed Track II and continue to have a problem). I should point out that “second chances” are a crucial component of drug programs, because it is unrealistic to expect addicts not to “fall off the wagon”.
Placement is established upon clinical evaluation and is quite flexible.
Prop 5 also addresses the meaning of drug treatments in prison. Successful completion of drug programs in prison would provide “good behavior” credits, equivalent to those earned through work, which add up and might lead to one’s early release. Another important and often neglected aspect of Prop 5 is its emphasis on reentry. Under the proposed legislation, contact with the offender is established 90 days before release from prison, in an attempt to create a good support network, workwise and treatmentwise, upon release.
In addition to these, Prop 5 also includes provisions that make it more difficult to return offenders to prison due to technical parole violations. When the violation is a misdemeanor, non-incarceration options are prioritized.
Prop 5 would require a reorganization of the CDCR, adding a Secretary of Rehabilitation and Parole with increased resources devoted to parole, probation, and rehabilitative programs in prison. There are also a variety of fact-based assessment mechanisms, built to examine the success of Prop 5 programs, including academic evaluation studies and research conferences.
How much money will this cost? The answer to that question is uncertain, as expenses on programs may be offset by savings in prisons. The amount of savings would depend on the success of drug programs in reducing recidivism. What do you think?
Yesterday, we had the pleasure of hosting Dale McNiel from UCSF, who gave a talk about his work with Renée Binder evaluating the effects of the San Francisco Mental Health Court on recidivism. The court offers various programs and close supervision; the defendants’ progress is monitored and, at some point, they graduate from the program. Participation in the mental health court is voluntary. Here’s a pretty positive take on the program.
McNiel and Binder’s study is a great example of an evaluation project on problem-solving courts. One of the problems in measuring the success of sentencing alternatives is that you really need to compare your program to the traditional sentencing and correctional methods. Due to the fact that the mental health court population is self selected (participation in the program is voluntary), the study and control groups are, obviously, not formed through random allocation. Therefore, various pretreatment variables, which might explain why some people might choose to attend mental health court, might also explain differences in recidivism rates. To partially offset this problem, McNiel and Binder use propensity weighting; they select the control group based on criteria that would make them resemble the population that does choose to go to mental health court, as much as possible.
McNiel and Binder’s findings clearly indicate a reduction in recidivism for both violent and nonviolent offenses, which grows over time. They control for a variety of demographic and clinical variables. The nuances are important; the court seems to be better for people with certain disorders, and I’m not sure I fully understand its interaction with substance abuse and homelessness, which many people in the study group experience. Also, as they point out in their discussion, this is only one study of one court; recidivism rates may differ across mental health courts, and may be a function not only of the programs themselves, but of the sanctions imposed by the court. Fascinating stuff, and I hope the followup yields more generalizable results.
My student Billy Minshall has just directed my attention to a short piece by Jeff Adachi, the public defender for San Francisco, on today’s Examiner. Adachi is referring to a special event on re-entry today. Among other things, he writes:
Every year, more than 137,000 parolees are released in California, including 2,400 who return to San Francisco. Of these, only 21 percent are expected to successfully complete parole. Most, like Jesse, have low levels of education, reside in poor neighborhoods and lack basic marketable job skills. With the advent of online criminal background checks, many are eliminated before they are even considered for employment.
Employers are understandably reluctant to hire offenders. Some jobs — such as transport, teaching, and child or patient care — automatically bar offenders. Employers may also fear legal liability if an offender commits a crime while employed. In a recent survey of employers, less than 40 percent said that they would consider hiring an offender.
So, what can be done to help a formerly incarcerated man or woman who wants to work and avoid the revolving prison doors?
The answer is stunningly simple: convince employers to hire offenders.
Not an easy task, but one that can be facilitated through Supervisor Mirkarimi’s plan to insure employers prepared to participate. Given the rates of incarceration, this should really be a top priority.
On the same topic, Jennifer Gonnerman’s new book Life on the Outside documents the re-entry challenges faced by Elaine Bartlett upon her release from prison. The book’s website is a good resources for those of us seeking to connect the broad re-entry issue with a particular human face and story.
Today I came across a Chronicle piece from 2002 about Jeanne Woodford, the previous warden at San Quentin, and her commitment to GED programs and prison education in particular. The CDCR page on San Quentin suggests that the current warden, Robert Ayers, has kept the educational programs in place.
In the article, Woodford points out that many of these programs can be carried out without additional expenses to taxpayers. I wonder if that is still feasible given the increase in prison population.
On Nov. 4, Californians will not only get to decide between Obama and McCain, but also to weigh in about their priorities and values regarding law enforcement and corrections. There are three relevant propositions on the ballot, and voters will need to realize that, to a great extent, supporting each of these comes at the others’ expense. Moreover, it is important to pay attention to the fact that each of the propositions espouses a different ideology about criminal propensity and crime control.
Prop. 5: Nonviolent Drug Offenses; Sentencing, Parole and Rehabilitation
Proponents of NORA (Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act) argue that current drug laws do not allocate resources to treating the problem from the source, which is addiction. According to the proposition, the idea is to preserve resources by reserving punitive measures for violent offenders, and focusing on treating non-violent offenders through the diversionary methods set in Prop. 36. This would be accomplished through a reorganization of entities, adding special divisions at CDCR that would address substance abuse, vocation and education. For the purposes of NORA, a “non-violent drug offender” is someone convicted of “unlawful personal use, possession for personal use, or transportation for personal use, or being under the influence of any controlled substance”; the prop excludes “possession for sale, transportation for sale, production, or manufacturing of any controlled substance”.
The options for deferred entry of judgment and for supervision are ehnanced. The proposition is very much in the spirit of therapeutic justice.
Prop. 6: Police and Law Enforcement Funding; Criminal Penalties and Laws
By contrast, this proposition, also called the Safe Neighborhoods Act and the Runner Initiative, is very much in the spirit of Packer’s Crime Control model. The idea is to increase funding for more traditional law enforcement activities. The proposition identifies a few key criminal phenomena and focuses on aggressive prosecution toward them. One such focus is gang activity; under Prop 6, any youth 14 years or older convicted of a “gang-related” felony would be tried as an adult. Other “focus areas” include violence and methamphetamine trafficking.
The proposition would also criminalize tampering with monitoring devices such as electric cuffs, and would require anyone receiving public housing subsidies to undergo annual criminal background checks.
The official text also provides for strengthening police intelligence and “mapping” high risk areas.
Prop. 9: Criminal Justice System; Victims’ Rights; Parole Prop 9 advocates a third type of justice model, namely, one focusing on victims’ rights in various ways. It includes a CA constitutional amendment as well as regular legislation. Some aspects of Prop 9 include a requirement to pay restitution to victims and a prioritization of these requirements. It also expands victims’ legal rights and their impact not only throughout the adjudication process, but also in parole hearings.
The official text ttt bemoans the faulty implementation of the Victims’ Bill of Rights in 1982, and suggests to improve matters by assuring that victims are informed of developments in the case, including pre-sentence reports, plea bargains, and sentence details. Victims would be notified of bail hearings and would have the right to be heard before a bail decision is made.
In addition, Prop 9 also creates additional limitations on parole, and adds years before parole can be obtained in certain cases.
*********
This is going to be a tough choice. As David Garland argues in The Culture of Control, our criminological “history of the present” is such that several models of criminal justice coexist, along with their contradictory premises. When pitted one against the other, as in the 2008 ballot, the conflict is not only one of ideologies but one of resources. Shifting more resources toward enforcement would come at the expense of rehabilitation and vice versa. Moreover, hiring personnel with a defined agenda, which would be a necessity under each of these propositions, would impact the spirit of criminal justice in general. So, the choice is not merely between priorities, but between paradigms.
