Three Thoughts on the Arizona Immigration Law

Much has been written in the last few days about the infamous Arizona measure–provided here in its entirety–which defines undocumented stay on Arizona soil a state offense and authorizes police officers to stop people based on reasonable suspicion that they might be in the country illegally. Beyond the obvious arguments regarding status offenses and racial profiling, here are a few issues that have received a little less publicity.

First, in creating a state offense of being in the country illegally, Arizona would generate somewhat of a conflict: Should people caught under the new measure be incarcerated or deported? It is quite astonishing that, in times of prison overcrowding and resource scarcity, a state would be willing to undertake the trouble and expense to handle people who can just as easily be handed over to the feds. Our regular readers may recall how much Governor Schwarzenegger emphasized the deportation, and federalization, of undocumented inmates, as a way to overcome the overcrowding crisis–even suggesting, at some point, to build special prisons in Mexico. Does Arizona not face similar problems? Mona Lynch’s recent book is eerily apropos here: Over the last few decades, Arizona grew from a state of sparse, swift, cheap punishment, to a penal monster. Does it really need the budgetary burden of handling undocumented inmates?

Second, this brings up the question whether law enforcement agencies are even interested in enforcing this measure. We know the answer is affirmative at least in one case–that of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, famous for his humiliating punishment methods, odd penal innovations, and ruthless persecution of undocumented immigrants (Arpaio has only recently decided against entering the Arizona gubernatorial race). Other lawmakers, however, might resent the need to devote precious resources to the hunt of undocumented immigrants at the expense of curbing violent crime.

Third, the most astonishing bit of this bill seems to be a clause that allows Arizonians a private right of action if the police does not spend the appropriate resources to pursue undocumented immigrants. Given our previous conversations on public punitiveness, this is a great cause of concern; the lack of budgetary literacy in the public, and the lack of knowledge that any expenditure choice comes at the expense of something else, does not bode well for this measure.

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props to my fabulous colleague David Levine for the conversation that sparked this post.

Gender and Incarceration in California: Event at UC Davis

This is a bit last-minute, but better late than never: The Consortium for Women and Research at UC Davis is putting up a terrific one-day symposium titled Gender and Incarceration in California.

This annual symposium brings together scholars, community members, and policy makers around issues of gender and poverty in California. The theme for 2010 is gender and incarceration. Discussion will focus on reproductive rights for women in prison, the consequences of parents’ incarceration for children and families, styles of masculinity promoted by prison culture and sexual violence.

Friday, 9am-5:30pm
Historic City Hall at Bistro 33
226 “F” Street, Davis

The event requires RSVP; the terrific list of speakers, including Valerie Jenness and Lateefah Simon, is on the program (click the link above).

Close the CA Division of Juvenile Justice

Daniel Macallair has made an outstanding argument in the LA Times for closing the Division of Juvenile Justice and its five state-run youth correctional facilities. “The system is broken everywhere you look.” Allowing counties, instead of the state, to house juvenile offenders (currently about 1,400 of them) would save the state government $322.7 million (yes, a third of a billion dollars). County probation systems already handle 99% of juvenile cases.

Mentally Ill Jail Inmates in San Francisco

This morning’s Chron features a piece about mentally ill jail inmates in San Francisco.

Due to a severe reduction in beds, both public and private, for acute treatment, San Francisco is paying a huge price.

Those not given treatment and care are spun out to the streets, often ending up in the criminal justice system. Many ultimately go to state prisons. They are the homeless who live and beg on our streets, consumers of street drugs and both victims and perpetrators of street crime.


. . .

Police bring disturbed individuals to San Francisco General Hospital’s Psych Emergency Services. In 2007, the hospital had 87 locked ward beds. The 2010 budget would convert them to 22 acute beds and 36 sub-acute beds. Acute wards are locked wards with around-the-clock supervision, and provide an alternative to jail for the most severely ill persons, generally those with schizophrenia or bipolar illnesses, brought in by police under a 14-day hold permitted under state law and reimbursed by Medicare. Sub-acute wards are for those patients who are medically stabilized. For the seriously ill, an acute ward is the only alternative to jail.

The San Francisco Behavioral Health Court has been found to significantly reduce recidivism.

Prison Rape: NYRB Series and CA Report

I wanted to draw your attention to Sasha Natapoff‘s recent post on Prawfsblawg about prison rape. She links to a two-part essay in the New York Review of Books about the variation in state efforts to stop prison rape. I really recommend the post.

There is also a California angle: UC Irvine researchers at the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections prepared a 2007 report to CDCR about sexual assault in CA institutions. Conducting face-to-face interviews with 322 randomly-selected inmates, Val Jenness, et al., found great variance in the frequency of assaults: 4% of the interviewee sample reported being sexually assaulted in a CA institution, but the rates were much higher among special populations: 59% of transgender inmates reported abuse. While sexual assault was prevalent for almost all inmates, non-heterosexual inmates and Black inmates were considerable more vulnerable to sexual assault.. There was also a strong correlation between victimization and mental health problems. The report includes some details about the characteristics of incidents, notably the gang context of many incidents, and the difficulty in labeling incidents as coercive, as opposed to “part of prison life”, even when all incidents invoke fear, self-blame, and subsequent problems. Jenness et al also address overcrowding as a contributing factor to sexual assault incidents.

New Bill introduced: Pregnant Inmates and Wards’ Conditions

Assembly Bill 1900, authored by Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, advocates for special standards of care for pregnant inmates and wards.

There has been some attention to the particular circumstances of pregnancy within bars. This 2006 NYT article exposes some of the less pleasant aspects of care: women in labor kept in shackles, given no more than Tylenol, supposedly out of concerns of escape (though there aren’t any known cases of women in labor escaping. Pregnant inmates experience particular challenges during their incarceration. High rates of drug abuse and addiction complicate medical treatment (also see here). In addition, pregnant inmates report traumatic family histories and require more assistance and support during their pregnancy. A 1997 study suggests that adequate shelter and nutritional support make a big difference in terms of birth outcomes among inmates.
The proposed bill would amend the CA Penal Code to require the usage of the least intrusive methods (consistent with public safety concerns) for restricting pregnant inmates or wards during transportation and incarceration. It also requires monitoring other conditions, such as offering nutritional support and counseling about pregnancy, birth, and childcare options. The Corrections Standards Authority would assume responsibility for the particulars and would consult with a variety of professionals before setting them. Some prohibited measures are listed in the bill (though it is not an exhaustive list): shackling the feet and hands, shackling across the body, or shackling to another inmate.
The bill comes before the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee on March 30.
On a related topic, here’s an interesting blog post from Feministing about inmates’ access to abortion.
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Props to Ocean Mottley for alerting me to this.

Are We Focusing on Black Males?

The diagram on the left, taken from the Pew Center on the States’ report on incarceration, breaks down the prison population by race. The results are rather startling, though by no means surprising to anyone following the crisis. What is interesting, though, is the fact that the data has propelled many critical thinkers to address the racial disparities, and not very many to examine the gender disparities.

It is a sobering statistic that one in nine black men aged 18-24 is in prison. And much energy has gone into explicating such disparities in a supposedly post-racial era. Some of the explanations have to do with criminalization and police control, and some offer cultural explanations; this book, which I haven’t read yet (but I will!) seems like it would make an interesting read. This Chron piece from 2007, which is the first reading on my criminology syllabus, is a classic example of the mix of explanations our society offers for these stark racial disparities. One of the most interesting thing about it is observing how professionals make meaning of the connection between race and gang culture: cops mention a lack of morality and values, social workers mention the lack of father figures, some inmates tell of powerful socialization mechanisms. It is a fascinating topic that has received plenty of attention.

One interesting thing I have come across recently is Saperstein and Penner’s study of incarceration and race perception (I found it through this excellent post on the equally-excellent Racism Review). Interestingly, Saperstein and Penner found that–

NLSY participants who self-identified as European American in 1979 were significantly more likely to self-identify as black in 2002 if they had been incarcerated compared with those who had not been incarcerated. As Saperstein and Penner report, “these findings demonstrate . . . that incarceration leads to changes in racial self-identification and the effect operates primarily through making individuals see themselves as not quite white. To put this into perspective, consider that currently nearly 6 million people in the United States have been incarcerated . . . Based on our results, we would expect that more than 250,000 previously incarcerated individuals no longer identify as white as a result of their incarceration” (p. 103).

Saperstein and Penner also found that interviewers were more likely to change the racial/ethnic classification of NLSY respondents if the respondent was currently or had been incarcerated since the time of the last survey – and the change they made was to “darken” incarcerated respondents. That is, respondents who had been classified by interviewers as white prior to incarceration were more likely to be classified by interviewers as black once they were incarcerated.

This self-identification of the African American community with the incarceration experience may have some seriously unsalubrious effects toward black women as well, says L’Heureux Lewis, assistant professor of sociology at the CUNY. In this NPR interview, he talks about black male privilege, especially vis-a-vis black women, and at the expense of victimization discourse. Black men’s experience of racism and oppression, says Lewis, absolves them from the responsibility of supporting and respecting black women, and leads to irresponsible fatherhood and deplorable dating practices on the part of those who “survived the crisis” and managed to reach adulthood without having been to prison. In the interview, he mentions a sexual assault case on campus, in which popular discourse centered on the criminalization of black men rather than on the need to support the victims.

MARTIN: Whats driving this, in your view? Is it their idea that group solidarity is so important in the African-American community, somehow the community has made a decision that when theres an issue involving black men and black women that black men are to be favored?

Prof. LEWIS: I think youve unfortunately identified one of the central issues of black male privilege. So often, black men are used to being under attacked that when it comes to being accountable for the actions we may have, we quickly say, well, I couldnt possibly be doing anything wrong. Look at all the ways in which Im oppressed. Look at all the ways in which Im at the bottom of the barrel. What that does is rob us of an opportunity to actually build stronger community and it robs black men of a chance to actually take hold of the actions that they have so that we can empower the community.

Where to go from here? I don’t know. It seems that any anti-punitivist sentiments stemming from humonetarianism don’t really address the racial disparity problem at a deep level. Blame games and debates about responsibility for the disparities seem unproductive. There has to be a way to generate better, forward-looking discourse about this, as well as about re-entry programs tailored for the needs of specific communities.

SHU at Pelican Bay

Our daily correspondence sometimes includes letters from inmates, informing us of the situation within walls. Recently, several letters have arrived from Pelican Bay Prison, from inmates incarcerated at the prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU). A form of supermax incarceration, SHU consists of 22-23 hours of solitary confinement a day.
SHU has been designed for escape risks, violent or threatening inmates, and “members of disruptive groups”, such as gangs. There are some challenges involved in appropriately classifying inmates into SHU or general population. Classification is a crucial issue, because research on solitary confinement consistently shows that SHU-like conditions adversely and severely impact inmates’ mental health (here’s a 1993 piece by Craig Haney on this and a 2009 New Yorker article reviewing research and including interviews).
The concept of solitary confinement is not new. Our visit notes from Eastern State Penitentiary in PA might be useful. However, the purpose has changed. While the original ideology behind solitary confinement was to provoke repentance, rebirth, and rehabilitation, current supermax isolation conditions are aimed at incapacitation and safety.
Here is Laura Sullivan’s 2006 NPR story about SHU and the solitary conditions. The institution currently exceeds its design capacity by approximately 1,200 inmates.

Juvenile Institution in Chino Closed

One way of working toward solving the overcrowding problem is to allocate space efficiently. Reallocation of prisoners across the system based on needs is one way to do so without building new prisons. Today, in an effort to find more room for adult inmates, CDCR closed the systems’ largest juvenile prison in Chino. The Examiner reports:

The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Monday that it officially closed the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, a 50-year-old San Bernardino facility east of Los Angeles.

Authorities say they don’t need the space for 400 minors, who were transferred to other facilities. Changes in state law have cut the number of youths in state custody as more go to county centers.

Instead, the Chino lockup will be retrofitted with an electric fence and other safeguards to house 1,200 adults – for much less than the $500 million it would cost to build an adult prison.

Those of you who have been following the juvenile facility situation know that Stark has been unfavorably reviewed by Books Not Bars, which found it to fail in every possible category. In that respect, the hope is that juveniles will find themselves in better environments. But another mystery concerns the decline in juveniles in custody that even made this arrangement possible.

image courtesy CDCR.

Why is the population at juvenile facilities declining? A 1995 report from the Legal Analyst’s office predicted an increase in juvenile arrests and showed that CA was well above average in juvenile arrests and prosecutions. A later report from 2000 showed a decline in arrests, which it attributed to “the improved economy (and thus more job opportunities for young people), the decline in the use of certain drugs, and the relatively peaceful gang situation in urban areas.” I don’t know which of these are true today–#1 certainly is not–and am also not sure whether some of the continued decline we’re seeing may be attributed to more juveniles tried as adults and held in adult facilities. The main idea, however, seems to be to divert juveniles to county facilities, so they can be closer to home, which makes a lot of sense.

Book Review: Dreams from the Monster Factory by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell

The constant conversations about budget, prison expenditures, and cutting programs, raise the question of cost-benefit from prison programming. Which rehabilitation enterprises are worth investing in for the long run? Which programs actually reduce recidivism to a point that makes them cost-effective for the prison system? Dreams from the Monster Factory provides some thought-provoking information about programs offered at a San Francisco jail by the Sheriff’s Department and rekindles hope in rehabilitation and re-entry programming.

The book reads as a half-personal, half-professional memoir of Sunny Schwartz, a 27-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, who joined the jail staff in the 1980s as part of an initiative to ad programming to the jail daily routine. Her program was rather ambitious and, in some ways, counterintuitive. Rather than creating voluntary programs, she created an ambitious study curriculum, with mandatory attendance and a dense schedule. With the collaboration of (most) of the deputies, she managed to create a series of special programs targeting women, general education and substance abuse. The most impressive part of the book, however, is Schwartz’s description of RSVP (Resolve to Stop the Violence Project), a special program involving a dorm of violent men whose reeducation away from violence instincts is based on the Manalive program. The unique aspect of RSVP is the collaboration between a variety of community advocates whom we are used to thinking of as being at odds with each other: victim organizations, religious organizations, community groups, and counseling services. The role of victims in the program is described in a particularly appreciative, sensitive way, and generates hope that some victim organizations may see beyond punitiveness to healthier paths for activism. Despite the program’s success, Schwartz does not flinch from describing the less glorious moments of this difficult and often frustrating work.
Not all readers will appreciate the book’s unique mix of professional and personal information. Schwartz delves into descriptions of events in her own personal life, including some difficult descriptions of her family and relationships. The strength of these narratives, to me, lay in creating the sense that the inmates were not “different” in any sort of substantial, deterministic way, and that all of us, who have been through life’s trials and tribulations can empathize with their challenges and frustrations. Schwartz does not come off as a “fixed”, “enlightened” prison reformer with all the answers in her pocket, but as a flawed individual who looked inward to find the strength to light a beacon of change, beckoning to the flicker of light in the soul of most of the program’s participants. This will make a good read for those interested in an insight into prison life and in thinking about the potential of programs for generating change.