Early Releases for Female Inmates

As reported on Forbes online (by the Associated Press):

More than 4,000 female inmates in California could qualify to serve the rest of their sentences at home, as state officials begin complying with a law designed to keep children from following their parents into a life of crime.


The alternative custody program is for less serious offenders. Qualifying inmates must have less than two years left on their sentences, which would be completed while they are tracked by GPS-linked ankle bracelets and report to a parole officer.


. . .


About two-thirds of the 9,484 female inmates in California’s prison system are mothers whose children are currently with relatives or in foster care, though many of those women won’t qualify for alternative custody.


About 45 percent of the state’s female inmates potentially qualify for the program under the law former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed last year.


Those convicted of sexual offenses are not eligible. To win release, inmates also must compete for a limited number of rehabilitation programs offered by nonprofit and community organizations.


That will sharply reduce the number of women actually freed, said Dana Toyama, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. With no state money for the program, the community organizations are offering services to as many inmates as they can handle for free.


Case managers will determine if qualified inmates have family support, a suitable home and transportation, and are enrolled in drug rehabilitation, anger management or other programs, Toyama said.


“”It’s not like we’re just putting them out in the community and saying good luck,” she said.


The inmates can go to a home, a residential substance-abuse treatment program or a transitional-care facility. Those who complete rehabilitation programs can earn extra time off their sentences.


Women account for less than 6 percent of the nearly 161,000 adults in California prisons. Toyama said men could one day be included in the early release program as the department looks for ways to save money and seeks to comply with the federal court order to reduce its prison population.


The program could save the state $6 million in reduced prison costs next year. No inmates are likely to be released for at least 30 days because the department must first notify local law enforcement.


However, Toyama said the entire program could be short-lived because of a more sweeping law that takes effect Oct. 1.


Under Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison realignment plan, tens of thousands of lower-level criminals who otherwise would go to state prisons will instead be sentenced to county jails and rehabilitation programs if they are convicted after that date.

SB9 Defeated in Assembly

Short by five votes, the measure to allow juveniles serving life without parole to have their sentences reviewed by a judge after fifteen years failed in the Assembly. The Huffington Post reports (complete with links):

[T]the United States is the only country that sends people under 18 to prison for life with no parole. “No other country sentences kids to die in prison,” said Yee’s chief of staff, Adam Keigwin. In California, juvenile offenders are ineligible for a death penalty sentence, but they can be sentenced to life with no parole, guaranteeing that they will die in prison. SB9 aimed to change that by offering a chance to appeal if a defendant served a minimum of 25 years and showed remorse and serious change.

The arguments against the bill were victim-centered. For various reasons we explained in an earlier post, this is political rhetoric more than realistic concern. What a disappointment, albeit not as great as the disappointment over the demise of the death penalty abolition bill. Overall, a disappointing week for Californian criminal justice.

Crimmigration: The Dark Side

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, with the ACLU and several other civil rights organizations, have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the practice of shackling undocumented immigrants appearing before immigration court. The Huffington Post reports:

According to the lawsuit, the overwhelming majority of prisoners who show up in immigration courts have no violent criminal history. The lawsuit seeks to compel the Department of Homeland Security to make individual determinations about shackling rather than have a blanket policy. DHS officials declined to comment Wednesday.

This practice, and others, are an example of the false dichotomy between criminal and immigration matters. Make no mistake – these two issues are closely interrelated, as the financing of Arizona’s SB 1070 by private companies demonstrates. Shackling is a distressing practice, and we’ll be following this lawsuit closely.

Extra credit: As always, the question if one of incrementalism versus radicalism: Is the call to “stop treating undocumented immigrants as criminals” equivalent to a call that perpetuates treating criminals the way we have been treating them? Hmmmm.

SB9 Discussed in Today’s Chronicle

This morning’s Chron features a front-page discussion of Senator Leland Yee’s SB9, which would allow juveniles sentenced to life without parole to have their sentences reviewed by a judge.

This is a very tame, limited version of the proposal.

The California measure, which Yee has tried to make law several times before, is not as ambitious: It would let inmates, after 15 years behind bars, petition the court to change their sentence to 25 years to life, with the possibility of parole. That means that even if the court agreed to modify a sentence, there is no guarantee the inmate would get out: The offender would have to wait until 25 years have been served, then could appeal to the state’s parole board for release. To request a reduced sentence, the offender would have to “describe his or her remorse” and prove he or she has worked toward rehabilitation.

Interestingly, as is often the case with parole-related proposals, the possibility that someone who maintains his or her innocence might want to make use of the review mechanism is not even considered.

The Benefits and Discontents of Incremental Reform

A few recent events have made me think about the advantages and drawbacks of reforming the correctional system incrementally, that is–by “fixing” one aspect of it at a time. Two things in particular came to mind.

The first is the tension between death penalty activism and life imprisonment, or long-term imprisonment, activism. Last year, at the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty meeting, I talked about the perils limiting activism only to the grounds that would “work”, such as innocence and cost. In the same meeting, Senator Mark Leno, for whose good intentions and immense contributions to correctional reform I have much respect, said that  abolishing the death penalty would not hamper public safety, as we could still throw dangerous convicted felons into prisons for the rest of their lives. This idea, of limiting the struggle to the death penalty under  the assumption that life imprisonment was somehow okay or even advisable, worked well in a room in which people were gathered as a narrow coalition – there were representatives of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation in the room, as well as law enforcement agents who oppose the death penalty but are otherwise on board with law and order policies. So, politically, narrowing the struggle to “just” the death penalty is necessary to bring together all these groups of activists. However, narrowing the focus of the struggle to the death penalty under the argument that life imprisonment in a supermax facility, say, under SHU conditions, is not as bad, is a severe blow to the struggle against isolation, debriefing, and other humiliating conditions suffered by inmates who were not sentenced to death–precisely the conditions leading to the hunger strike, now entering its third week. Is this why the strike is getting so little press coverage? Because, in California, it is now politically easier to stomach a potential death penalty abolition than humane conditions for presumed gang members? Both of these goals are worth fighting for, and I wonder whether patience and incremental gains here will be to the inmates’ advantage or detriment.

The second is SB9, the Fair Sentencing of Youth Act, which for all its noble purpose and fancy name affects the sentencing of very few juveniles in CA, and less than 3,000 nationwide should it become national policy. Happily, SB9 recently passed 5 to 2 in the Assembly Public Safety Committee meeting; that is a very good thing, and it may make a meaningful difference in the lives of the few young men and women behind bars with no glimmer of hope for freedom in their future. However, as some blog commentators mentioned here in the last few days, the proposal is limited in effect to those juveniles, rather than giving more hope to juveniles sentenced to life with parole (say, 25 to life) or to otherwise lengthy sentences. Both groups of inmates – and the second group is, of course, more numerous – are worth fighting for, and again, I hope the incremental system will work to the benefit of the second group over time.

Changes and reform in criminal justice policies have historically been incremental. SB9 would not have existed without Roper v. Simmons, after which many activists may have asked themselves why it made sense to separate the fight . Similarly, the current proposal to end the death penalty in CA would not have come to life without years of moratoria and incremental struggles about amounts of this or that drug. And none of this would have been achieved, in my opinion, without the mundane, gray backdrop of the financial crisis, serving as a constant reminder to activists and disinterested citizens alike that we cannot afford mass incarceration and punitive extravaganzas. The current hunger strike in Pelican Bay, which I hope will finally start attracting more media now (mainstream news coverage of this event of seminal importance has been pitiful, with the exception of the L.A. Times), might not have come into existence had the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata not given inmates hope for change.

So, the revolution will not come in a shiny parade. It will happen stone by stone, proposal by proposal, shutting down the mechanism not because all policymakers will suddenly come to the realization that what we have done is excessive, brutal and inhumane, but because we will gradually be unable to afford more and more pieces of the puzzle. It will be less dramatic, but the end result will be no less gratifying, and it is still worth fighting for, step by step, brick by brick.

Women’s Institutions: Health Issues and Overcrowding

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

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

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

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

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

KPFA Report on the Juvenile Justice System

Today’s Morning Mix on KPFA included an interesting coverage of the status quo regarding juvenile justice institutions in California.

The story included interviews with Selena Teji from CJCJ and Bryan Lalock from Bay Area Legal Aid. As Teji and Lalock explained, counties offer a continuum of institutions, ranging from electronic monitoring, through community service, group homes, juvenile hall commitments, to fully locked county-run facilities (camps and ranches). The state level institutions are designed to house the “worst of the worst” and unsuitable for the needs of the juvenile population. The infrastructure is run down and violence runs rampant. There has been extensive litigation addressing the inability of state institutions to provide mental health settings and offer reentry services (the latter are much easier on the county level, where public defense has a better interface with community institutions, and where juveniles are closer to the family).

Given the atrocious status of state institutions, they would have to be replaced, but our budgetary difficulties make that impossible; initially, Governor Brown wanted to do away with all state facilities, but was faced with opposition. The new plan is a “buy back” option, in which countries could receive the money and could either handle inmates within the county or pay the state to house them in state facilities. The choice might be different between bigger and smaller counties. However, for all counties, money is an important factor; state-run institutions have exceedingly high recidivism rates.

Finally, should voters decline to reaffirm the vehicle tax, the realignment may be off, and the situation will not improve.

Listen to the whole show – it also featured a discussion of the prison industrial complex.

Movie Review: On the Outs


Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik’s 2004 movie On the Outs is a heartbreaking, empathetic peek into the world of three girls caught in the juvenile justice system. The script grew from the directors’ experience bringing a workshop into a juvenile detention center in Secaucus, NJ. Their familiarity with, and empathy toward, the girls is palpable and moving, and their experiences getting to know the inmates have made the film credible.

Suzette, a 15-year-old living with a stern, involved mother, meets a guy in the street. Her infatuation with him leads to an unplanned pregnancy and running away from home. As she meets his friends and gets introduced to his world, she learns unpleasant realities about their relationship; she eventually gets arrested when he drops a murder weapon into her bag. Her world begins to spiral out of control, and her well-intentioned mother is powerless to keep her away from the streets.

Marisol is first shown as a dedicated single mother, playing with her daughter in the yard. We later learn that she relies on her grandma in raising her child, as she is hopelessly addicted to crack; her arrest after a car accident leads to losing her child to the foster care system. Marisol’s raw desperation at losing her child is matched in intensity by her continuing need for the drug; she is unable to face and overcome her addiction.

Oz, the daughter of an addict, is the family’s breadwinner; a tough drug dealer, she holds her own in the streets, and has a soft spot for her brother, Chuey, who suffers from mental disabilities and from asthma. Her frustration with her mother’s addiction and her protectiveness of her brother are moving and complement her street wisdom and straight talking, which make her the unofficial leader of the juvenile facility.

Each girl sees the lives of other girls through the prism of her own experiences; Oz, for example, is exasperated with Marisol, because she sees her own helpless mother in her. Suzette, a newcomer to the juvenile justice system, is apprehensive and afraid of the more hardened inmates, but gradually loses her innocence as her romantic dreams fall apart. The girls’ relationships – with their families, with men, with the streets – are woven together to present a tapestry of dysfunction, exploitation, and miscommunication.

All three girls are movingly and convincingly portrayed. The clever script does not shirk away from presenting personal responsibility when appropriate, but places it within the context of environment and circumstances. Suzette’s story was particularly touching to me, because it echoed what I learned this year from the GEMS foundation and from their excellent documentary Very Young Girls. Shying away from generalizations and heavy-handed social critique, the movie focuses on the personal, intimate details of the girls’ lives, leaving it to us to connect the dots.

On the Outs is available for live streaming from Netflix, and might be part of our criminal justice film club next fall.

Support SB9 – the Fair Sentencing of Youth Act

(image courtesy the Fair Sentencing of Youth website)

CCC has been asked, and readily agreed, to endorse SB9, the Fair Sentencing of Youth Act. The bill, introduced by Senator Leland Yee, battles the evil of LWOP sentences for juveniles by making them subject to judicial review:

Existing law provides that the Secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or the Board of Parole Hearings, or both, may, for specified reasons, recommend to the court that a prisoner’s sentence be recalled, and that a court may recall a prisoner’s sentence.


This bill would authorize a prisoner who was under 18 years of age at the time of committing an offense for which the prisoner was sentenced to life without parole to submit a petition for recall and resentencing to the sentencing court, and to the prosecuting agency, as specified. The bill would establish certain criteria, at least one of which shall be asserted in the petition, to be considered when a court decides whether to conduct a hearing on the petition for recall and resentencing and additional criteria to be considered by the court when deciding whether to grant the petition. The bill would require the court to hold a hearing if the court finds that the statements in the defendant’s petition are true, as specified. The bill would apply retroactively, as specified.
Some FAQs provided by us:
What is this about?
Fancy name aside, this bill would allow the court to consider a petition for “recall and resentencing” by a person on LWOP who was a juvenile when he or she committed the crime. The court would look at the person’s arguments first, then, when appropriate, hold a hearing.
Why does this make sense?
The Supreme Court has acknowledged that juveniles differ from adults in how they cognitively perceive their actions and the repercussions of those actions. This was the reason why, in Roper v. Simmons (2005), the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juveniles. There is something profoundly cruel and unfair about locking up a young person for the rest of their life, which could be a very, very long time, without offering him or her any glimmer of hope, given the differences in how juveniles and adults process information.
Doesn’t this violate the Supreme Court’s position that LWOP for juveniles is constitutional?
The Supreme Court has not, so far, had an opportunity to decide that juveniles cannot be sentenced to LWOP. Therefore, at this point, we do not know what the Supreme Court would decide if confronted with the constitutionality question of LWOP for all juveniles. It is important to note that under Graham v. Florida (2010), it is not permitted to sentence juvenile offenders to LWOP for nonhomicide crimes. And, whatever the federal position on this may be, it is merely a bottom threshold; states can always guarantee more rights than the constitution allows. In fact, six jurisdictions do not allow LWOP for juveniles at all. Should SB9 pass, CA sentencing structure would be more reasonable and humane, but still more severe than in those six jurisdictions, because it would leave LWOP to judicial discretion.
So, are all juveniles on LWOP going to go free? Wouldn’t this hurt public safety?
Of course not. First, the final decision on resentencing is up to the judge, who will consider the circumstances and person in question. Second, someone who is resentenced could still end up spending a substantial period in prison. And third, the risk to public safety greatly depends upon the particular person. As a general statement, criminality dramatically decreases with age; we know that most criminals “grow out of it” as they mature. The lengthy incarceration until their death, therefore, burdens California’s correctional budget with no demonstrable detrimental effect on public safety.
What does it mean that the bill applies retroactively? Is that fair?
In this case, retroactive application is the fairest policy possible. It would allow the courts to reevaluate the sentences of California inmates who are currently on LWOP. It would have been very unfair to allow this option only to future juveniles sentenced by the system, because there is no material difference between their situation and that of present inmates.
CCC is happy to answer more questions. Please, feel free to add your own questions in the comment section, so that we are all better informed.

For-Profit Institutions: Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The debate over privatized correctional institutions is, for the most part, a non-debate. Institutions owned, funded, and directed by such entities as the Corrections Corporation of America are a fact of life, and Californian inmates hare subjected to privatized out-of-state institutions as well as to privatized operations within state prisons. The jury is still out on whether private institutions produce higher or lower recidivism rates (this Florida study suggests no significant differences between private and public institutions; here’s a good lit review from the study of previous projects in the same vein). But beyond the issue of long term gains, privatized institutions provide problematic opportunities for profit making that end up in corruption. And corruption comes in many forms.

What sparked this post was a recent piece on the California Bar Journal about a Pennsylvania judge who has just been convicted by a federal jury of —
taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from the owner of for-profit juvenile detention facilities. Mark Ciavarella was convicted on 12 of 39 counts, including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, mail fraud, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and filing false tax returns. The jury also found that he must forfeit the $997,600 “finder’s fee” he received from the developers of private juvenile detention centers. Another former judge charged in the case, Michael T. Conahan, pleaded guilty to a single racketeering charge last year and is awaiting sentence.
The author, Janice Brickley, informs us of the California Commission on Judicial Performance; lawyers can submit complaints about judges, and in situations such as the Pennsylvania travesty, they should. But much as it is shocking to see a judicial officer whose neutrality is the cornerstone of justice sell off to correctional profiteers, let’s keep in mind that judges are human beings. And the absolute power provided to people – whether it’s over prison management or people’s lives – corrupts absolutely.
We’ve recently seen examples of other kinds of travesty that seems to be the by-product of privatized industries: The sexual assault of Hawai’ian inmates in a private facility in Kentucky, and the distressing complicity of Correctional Corporations of America in bringing about the racist, xenophobic, and arguably unconstitutional, SB1070 in Arizona. Why would judges be better than corporate profiteers or their employees? Why are we so surprised when they transgress, whereas we shrug at CCA’s cynical manipulation of state correctional policies to fill its institutions with inmates? I don’t know. But these sorts of incidents should provide food for thought to those who would expand the privatized empire as a measure to fight overcrowding.
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Props to dear colleague Lois Schwartz for the link.