Following the Appropriations Committee hearing of the Sentencing Commission bill, it has been moved to the Suspense File. I made some phonecalls to find out what that meant. As it turns out, any proposal above a certain amount – not a lot, these days – or any proposal that saves money above a certain amount – is placed in the Suspense File, and all proposals in the file are then dealt with by the CA State Assembly in a quick-firing session. Since budgeting is a major consideration these days, the proposals might we weighted one against the other.
What impact might this information have on the proposal’s chances? As you may recall, the proposal was amended and its text is now very vague on what the role of the commission might be. Sometimes, vague legislation is passed in hopes that later it will be amended by the Senate. There are some encouraging aspects to all this, which suggest that the proposal might not die a slow death in the suspense file:
1) The proposal comes from Karen Bass, the Assembly Speaker. The previous incarnations of sentencing bills came from a variety of lawmakers.
2) The analysis that accompanied the bill created a strong link between sentencing reform and avoidance of overcrowding. While the expenditures and savings that might result from what is currently a very vague bill are unclear, a strong argument in its favor might be that this is a much better, more organized, and more controlled, alternative to the arbitrary release of tens of thousands of prisoners, and is therefore a more palatable response to overcrowding. In that sense, ironically, the bill has perhaps a better chance to pass in times of scarcity than in times of plenty.
The Sentencing Commission Bill, A.B. 1376, will come today before the Assembly Committee on Appropriations. The Analyst’s review connects the Bill to the overcrowding crisis and to the tentative decision in the health care cases. Its comments about the fiscal effects of the new bill are particularly telling as to the shorter, vaguer, amended version of the bill we have discussed here and here:
1)Because this measure is in skeletal form, precise costs cannot be determined. Based, however, on earlier sentencing commission models, annual costs would be in the range of $2.5million, depending on the authority of the body.
For example, this committee estimated costs for SB 110 (Romero, 2008) – which was charged with developing mandatory sentencing guidelines and significant tasks, such as preparing inmate population projections, developing recommendations on the state’s inmate population, providing training to criminal justice practitioners, conducting research, and developing materials, information systems and annual reports to the legislature – would be in the range of $2.5 million, with a staff of about 20.
2) Prospective costs/savings due to actions of the body cannot be determined, though it is likely a non-politicized sentencing commission, using evidence-based practices and models, could recommend a sentencing/parole scheme that results in significant net state savings. In non-legislative language: Since we don’t know what is proposed, we don’t know how much it costs. But if this is a cover for the same thing that has been proposed time and time again, we’ve already estimated the cost of that. The initiative’s potential for savings depends on how well it does its job.
We’ll post an update as soon as we know what happened at the hearing.
Legislative breaking news: The Sentencing Commission Bill, which was amended on April 13, has gone through the Committee on Appropriations, whose primary jurisdiction is fiscal bills, and is back before the assembly. An analysis of the bill, authored by Asm. Jose Solorio, has a positive take on establishing the sentencing commission, citing, among other sources, the Little Hoover report on the California Corrections Crisis. The report, as some of you may recall, dispelled myths about sentencing commissions, and as you’ll see in the original Little Hoover press release, tried to dissuade politician fears that having a sentencing commission means being “soft on crime”:
The Commission recommended that the State begin a comprehensive evaluation of itssentencing system by establishing an independent sentencing commission with the authorityto develop sentencing guidelines that become law unless rejected by a majority vote of the Legislature. The Commission said California should learn from states with effective sentencing commissions, such as Virginia and North Carolina.
“Critics who suggest that a sentencing commission is a code word for shorter sentencesare misinformed,” Alpert said. “Other states have used sentencing commissions to lengthen sentences for the most dangerous criminals, to expand community-based punishment forcertain offenders and to bring fiscal responsibility to criminal justice policies.”
The Commission asserted that the Supreme Court ruling on January 22, 2007 thatfound California’s determinate sentencing law unconstitutional provides one more impetus foran independent commission to conduct a systematic review of California’s sentencing laws andpropose long-term solutions.
The analysis also details the many times in which sentencing commission bills came before the Assembly and failed. Will our economic concerns lead politicians to leave behind their fears of being soft on crime and fix the sentencing system? Stay tuned!
Here is the proposal itself, from Assembly Member Bass, after a few changes made in mid-April. As you’ll see when you read it, the main change is moving the sentencing intentions and definitions out of the proposal itself, as well as out of the hands of the legislature, and into the hands of the commission, whose purpose is now defined much more vaguely:
There is hereby established an independent, multijurisdictional body to provide a nonpartisan forum of statewide policy development, information development, research, and planning concerning criminal sentences and their effects.Â
This is much vaguer than the original intent behind the proposition, and may have to do with the ability to better “sell” a body whose authority is not clearly defined, as well as with the will to keep the commission free from constraints. It also might mean that their decisions would not necessarily be binding. Who knows? Interestingly, Crime Victims United of California consider A.B. 1376 a “placeholder” bill, and see it as a cause for concern.
Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, most research on procedural justice in the criminal justice system focused on the Supreme Court. This is still the case, to some extent, in law review articles, which focus on watershed Supreme Court decisions to the exclusion of the courts that handle the bulk of everyday criminal cases. In the late 1960s, this trend started to change. Several classic studies on lower courts, focusing on plea bargaining, charging decisions, and public defense work, were published, challenging traditional notions of what a day in the courtroom “should” look like, and bringing to the forefront commonplace processes and events that the constitutional discourse kept hidden. Some of these included Milton Hewmann’s groundbreaking study of plea bargaining, an underwhelmingly discussed phenomenon in light of its prevalence; David Sudnow’s anatomy of plea bargaining based on stereotypization of cases according to their conformity to ideal types of “normal crimes”, and Eisenstein and Jacob’s analysis of felony case disposition. A major contribution to this literature was the classic award-winner The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court, by my teacher, mentor, and friend, Malcolm Feeley.
In the book, Feeley provides an anatomy of the Court of Common Pleas in New Haven, Connecticut, analyzing its workings and processes from an organizational perspective. He comes to a (then) startling conclusion: The vast majority of defendants plead guilty. Virtually everyone foregoes his or her right to a jury trial. Judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, are jaded and overworked. Defense attorneys find themselves engaging in social work, rather than legal work. And, most important, the system generates powerful organizational incentives that push defendants to plead guilty, just so that they can avoid the process itself. Despite the fact that most defendants were not sent to jail, but rather had to pay fines, the process was so byzantine, unfathomable, and unpleasant, that most defendants did everything they could to avoid it. The concern about criminal stigma stemming from conviction was not as significant an incentive to insist on a jury trial; most defendants (disproportionally black and poor back in the 1970s as well) already had criminal records, and it was the daunting court process that they aimed to avoid.
Feeley’s findings were not meant to be entirely generalizable to other lower court settings. In fact, one of his main points was that justice could differ from one microcosm to another, and that each county had its own procedural personality, affected by the relationship between the court, the prosecution, and the defense, local politics, and the perception of heavy caseloads. Nevertheless, the main argument highlighted an important piece of the plea puzzle: a lower criminal court is more of a Middle Eastern bazaar than a sterile supermarket with prices neatly marked by every offense.
What has changed in the thirty years since the publication of Feeley’s classic? A great deal – and not a lot. The picture in terms of plea bargaining has not changed. The vast majority of defendants in lower courts still plead guilty. As the Department of Justice reports, 97 percent of all felony convictions within a year were obtained through a guilty plea (there are no misdemeanor cases on file). California statistics are difficult to obtain; databases are siloed in a way that makes it tricky to generalize, but some preliminary (albeit dated) numbers are available from the CA Attorney General’s office, suggesting similar trends.
Since 1979, incentives for plea bargaining have grown. The rise of determinate sentencing and of punitive sentencing schemes such as the Three Strikes Law has shifted the bulk of discretion from judges and parole boards to the hands of legislators and prosecutors, putting more bargaining chips on the criminal justice table. Rather than bargaining the sentence, the parties routinely bargain the charge, as well as a plethora of other provisions, such as whether the offense will be “counted” as a strike. We know (from Jeanne Woodford’s talk at the conference, and from John Pfaff’s study) that the majority of prison inmates are in prison for a very short time; it is not the length of sentence, but rather the volume of incomers, that is overcrowding California prisons and jails. Many of these are the product of plea bargaining in order to avoid much longer sentences.
This leads us to one significant change from 1979: sentences have gone up. In that sense, these days, the punishment is also punishment. It is not just process avoidance that leads defendants to plead guilty, though it may play a part in their decisionmaking process. The existing of more chips on the table, underscored by the war on drugs and by growing concerns about sex offenders, provides the prosecution with unprecedented power to enhance a sentence in multiple ways, and while these are not always used, they certainly impact the negotiation process in important ways.
Another important development is the fact that some processes are less punitive than they used to be. Problem-solving courts, community courts, and other specialized institutions have sprung and changed the landscape of criminal justice. Also, therapeutic justice is back, albeit for a small portion of cases concerning drugs and mental health. While there may be coercive and problematic elements in these specialized processes as well, the experience is to a large extent more benign than in the chaos of an ordinary criminal court.
There are important indications that, since the late 1970s, public defense has become more prevalent, and its quality has improved in many jurisdictions. These encouraging developments may be dampened by the distubring scarcity of resources for public defense, which we highlighted elsewhere.
The atmosphere of nepotism and political dealings within the court, which Feeley carefully examines in the book, may also have changed. Perhaps, as argued in Benjamin Smith’s interesting post at the Center for Court Innovation blog, Changing the Court, lower courts have become less parochial in their internal bureaucracies. However, it seems to me that the impact of politics on the process has become more pronounced at the higher, policymaking level. The mechanism that many conference speakers (particularly Mark Leno and Jonathan Simon), according to which politicians cannot afford to be “soft on crime”, is hugely influential precisely because of the rising effect that legislative discretion has on the bargaining process.
Finally, we should keep in mind that observing lower courts is a change catalyst in itself. Much of the changes occurring in bargaining and sentencing policies has been affected by increased public attention to the courts’ inner workings. In that sense, the “starship Enterprise” of courtroom observers can never really follow the “Prime Directive“: paying more attention to hidden phenomena, and bringing them to light through high-quality research, is an important enterprise in generating change. Newer generations of scholars, which have been raised on Feeley’s work, are indebted to the groundbreaking work of the 1970s, which is still a model of classic meticulous ethnography, and which is a continuing inspiration for courtroom research.
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.Â
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. Â
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?
One thing that became crystal clear on the Thursday opening panel was the lack of coordination between the different steps of the correctional process, starting with sentencing; but the deep problems, and the immense challenges in fixing them, were fully introduced only on Friday morning on thesentencing panel.
The panel was opened by Judge Tricia Bigelow, Associate Justice at the 2nd District Court of Appeal, who teaches sentencing to judges, and who used the words “labyrinth” and “byzantine” when describing the CA sentencing scheme (citing a colleague who compared our sentencing laws to bureaucratic memoranda and toy assembly instructions!). Since 1977, Judge Bigelow explained, the basic structure for single-count felony sentencing consists of choosing a “base term”, and then adding conduct and status enhancements. The penal code provides “triads” for each particular crime (for example: 2, 3, or 5 years); after Cunningham v. CA, a temporary legislative fix allows the judges to select one term out of the triad based on a set of factors from a non-exclusive list. After adding enhancements – additional prison time due to the nature of the crime (injury, gun, excessive taking in a theft) or to the circumstances of the criminal (previous convictions) – the judge can review a variety of statutory reasons for mitigation or aggravation. This is a fact-specifc process, which is difficult to systematize. The judge must also state reasons for selecting the base term out of the triad.
The picture becomes murkier, though, because CA law is a patchwork of sentencing initiatives that create special sentencing schemes for special cases. Not only do we have a “ghetto” of indeterminate sentencing for lifers, but we also have three strike laws, which, incidentally, create changes in sentencing for two-strikers as well (double the punishment); special sentencing schemes for sex offenders, gun offenders, gang offenders, and others. Judge Bigelow amused/horrified/bewildered us with some of the example cases she gives to judges when she teaches sentencing; it is truly a difficult maze and, as she reports, none of them got one of the examples right. She mentioned the need for a unified system that produces predictable results.
How must we proceed in producing a unified system? Kara Dansky, Executive Director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, strongly advocated for a sentencing commission. She started by highlighting two themes in CA sentencing: the unique rigidity and complexity of our sentencing system, and the shift in discretion from the hands of judges and correctional officials to legislators and prosecutors. What we have now is remarkably different from what the original enactors of the Determinate Sentencing Scheme had in mind in 1976; the triads, which were supposed to simplify matters and provide certainty, ended up being part of a patchwork, and are surrounded by hundreds of enhancements. Every single time a sentencing commission has been proposed – and there have been 11 bills so far – it has died, been vetoed, or stalled. There is now a new bill for a sentencing commission before the Assembly, based on Tentative Draft #1 (which, despite its tentative name, is the last word from the people who brought you the Model Penal Code).
A sentencing commission would have several purposes. It would be expected to develop sentencing guidelines (with an eye toward creating uniformity while still allowing judges room to individualize the sentence); collaborate with judges (who should be more involved than they are now); provide information and generate knowledge from the entire system (there is no single nonpartisan forum for policy, nor is there any communication between the different silos maintaining datasets on CA sentences); explain the logic behind sentencing policy (a duty from which our lawmakers are exempt); and ensure that all of this happens on a permanent and ongoing basis.
Dansky also tackled several of the arguments against sentencing commissions, arguing that they were based on misconceptions of the institution and the logic behind it. Two worth mentioning were the concern that commissions would be undemocratic, when, in fact, they would be a transparent governmental agency, and the concern that voter initiatives would render them useless, which may be the case for some, but not all, sentencing situations.
It was a pleasant surprise to find out that not only judges and policymakers had concerns with sentencing; Michael Jimenez, President of CCPOA, showed us that correctional officers and guards have vested interest in what happens to their inmates before they arrive in prison. In fact, Jimenez argued, the sentencing scheme is so bad that he could not imagine anything worse. The CCPOA has been pushing for a sentencing commission as well, but very disheartened with the political process around it. It all revolves, said Jimenez, around money; there is no political fix for the sentencing problem as long as our policy calculations are influenced by short term, year-to-year tactics.
The politics of sentencing reform were furtherly driven home by State Senator Mark Leno, who shared with us the sobering realities of sentencing politics. California, said Leno, now spends 11 percent of its budget on corrections – that is, more than it spends on higher education, and obtains abysmal results. We have twice the national recidivism rate and half the national parole completion rate. 70% of the inmates come out of prison functionally illiterate; 70% face serious alcohol and drug problems; 60% will be homeless and unemployable. We are the only state that has both determinate sentencing and parole – three years of it, irrespective of the crime – and no intermediate sanctions. As prison population ages, the costs per prisoner rise; they double for inmates over 50, and triple for inmates over 60.
Leno told us of several attempts to amend CA laws and how they were fought – unfairly and inaccurately – by aggressive lobbyists using fear tactics. An attempt to amend the three strikes law a few years ago, to require that the third strike be a violent offense, seemed to make sense to voters – until the governor had a wealthy sponsor flood the media with statements on the potential to release dangerous rapists and murderers, information left out of the brochure because of its inaccurate, misleading nature. Another attempt to reform the system by allowing people to exit parole after 12 months – which would have saved 70 million dollars, which would then be directed into rehabilitation programs in prison – was killed by a floor alert saying that the bill would release thousands of rapists and murderers. Immediately after the bill was killed, Leno got the following message from the lobbyists: “we apologize for the inaccuracies in our floor alert”.
Leno highlighted that the fear tactics were not a republican problem. Neither republican nor democrat lawmakers want to appear soft on crime at any cost. Under the circumstances, and given the fear of elected officials, a sentencing commission is necessary.
In the course of responding to an email avalanche from you, our gentle readers, expressing interest in our conference (thank you!) and in the blog (thank you!), I came across the four-part documentary series Prisons Under Pressure, an interesting attempt to present the various perspectives on the overcrowding and medical crises in California prisons. It seems to be available as a pay-per-view, but I have just watched the first episode for free on their website. It’s a good introduction to the crisis for those of you joining us for the first time, and it provides a lot of insight into the financial part of the mess, which at this point may seem incomprehensible to many of us.
California’s correctional crisis is increasingly gaining national attention. In an editorial today entitled, “The California Prison Disaster,” the New York Times notes that California “has the largest prison population, the highest recidivism rate, and a prison budget raging out of control.”
What is to be done? The Times argues that “the solution for California is to shrink its vastly overcrowded prison system,” by moving “away from mandatory sentencing laws” and by reforming what is “perhaps the most counterproductive and ill-conceived parole system in the United States.”
The Times isn’t optimistic the state can turn itself around. “State lawmakers . . . have failed to make perfectly reasonable sentencing modifications and other changes the prisons desparately need. Unless they muster some courage soon, Californians will find themselves swamped by prison costs and unable to afford just about anything else.”
— “The state must take back control of the prison medical system, by developing a plan to work with an organization that can run the system for the State.”
— “The State must immediately take action to improve its management . . . and implement the recommendations made by this and other commissions, including expanding in-prison programs, improving prisoner reentry, and reallocating resources to communitybased alternatives.”
— “The State must re-invent parole, moving to a system of post-release supervision for certain prisoners to ensure public safety.”
— “The State should begin a comprehensive evaluation of its sentencing system by establishing an independent sentencing commission to develop guidelines for coherent and equitable sentencing guided by overarching criminal justice policy goals.
California’s correctional crisis is increasingly gaining national attention. In an editorial today entitled, “