Trees and Prisons

As an inspiring diversion from our local problems, check out this inspiring lecture by Nalini Nadkarni, who brings tree conservation and life sciences to inmates in Washington State prisons, which “cry for change and dynamicism.”

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Props to Lisa Bach for the link.

Fewer inmates entering Md., Va. prisons

I’m reposting this article from The Washington Examiner because I was intrigued by the connection drawn between international interdiction efforts and local corrections statistics.

By Liz Essley

Special to The Washington Examiner

Maryland and Virginia kept fewer people behind bars last year, in step with a nationwide trend that saw the first drop in states’ prison populations since 1972.

Maryland held 4.6 percent fewer prisoners in 2009 than in 2008 — one of the biggest decreases in the United States — and Virginia held 0.5 percent fewer.

Nationwide, states housed 0.2 percent fewer inmates, though the federal prison population grew by 3.4 percent.

“It absolutely is unprecedented. And that’s what was shocking for us. Within the available data, going back 10 years, [prison population] had gone up for 10 years. The drop is absolutely unprecedented,” said Baron Blakley, an expert with Virginia‘s Department of Criminal Justice Services.

Maryland’s shift — 1,069 fewer prisoners last year, leaving the state with 22,255 inmates — probably reflects new policing policies in Baltimore, said Marty Burns, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office. About 30 percent of the state prison system’s inmates come from Baltimore, he said.

The number of arrests in Baltimore dropped after 2007, when the police commissioner eliminated the city’s “zero-tolerance” crime policy and police started concentrating on violent, repeat offenders, said Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department.

In 2008 and 2009, there were 5 percent fewer arrests, Guglielmi said.

“When you’re reducing the amount at the front of the pipeline, that ultimately will have an effect on the pipeline,” Guglielmi said.

Other factors reducing the number of Baltimore arrests could be tighter budgets and fewer officers, Burns said.

In Virginia, experts say a reduction in cocaine availability is decreasing the number of state prisoners.

The state inmate population was 37,633 in May, down from 38,329 in July 2009.

A 30 percent drop in the number of felony drug arrests over the past few years drove the prison population decline, said Meredith Farrar-Owens, a member of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission.

Police are arresting fewer people for felony drug offenses because cocaine has become less available, according to Blakley. The drug war in Mexico, increased coca eradication in Colombia and an expanding cocaine market in Europe mean less cocaine on the streets of Virginia, he said.

Topography of Crime: The Local Nature of Crime


Several current and former students alerted me to this beautiful topographical rendition of San Francisco crime, rendering crime rates as elevation. The image on the left depicts the city’s narcotics crime map, with obvious peaks in the Tenderloin and the Inner Mission.

Beyond the half-amused recognition of familiar patterns, this nice depiction is a reminder that crime is, above all, a local phenomenon, and it would benefit more from local approaches (policing and problem-solving) than from state-wide mass incarceration.

Don Specter’s Review of CA Prisons: It’s All About Overcrowding

Don Specter’s interesting and important Federal Sentencing Reporter piece is a good overview of conditions in California prisons to-date. I strongly recommend reading the piece in its entirety. I found this bit particularly interesting:

The belief that a reduction in the prison population leads to more crime is not supported by data or the experience in many jurisdictions that have used early release to reduce their correctional populations. A 2007 study by the National Council of Crime and Delinquency reviewed thirteen reports on the early release of prisoners in the United States and Canada.54 In each case, the crime rates remained the same or declined during the early-release period, and the prisoners released early did not commit more crimes than their counterparts who served the full sentence. In jurisdictions that provided community- based supportive services, recidivism rates declined.


Nor is there a change in the crime rate when correctional facilities cap their populations. From 1996 to 2006, twenty-one California counties released 1.7 million inmates early because of jail overcrowding. During that same period, the number of reported serious crimes dropped by 18 percent. A similar, although less dramatic, reduction in the crime rate occurred during the most recent three-year period.

One reason that there is no direct link between releasing prisoners and crime is that parolees are not responsible for as much crime as the public is led to believe. Although featured prominently in media stories about violent crime, parolees actually contribute very little to the crime rate. A study by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that parolees account for less than 5 percent of serious crimes.

Birth of the Immigrant-Criminal

I’m back from the Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago. The conference itself was fascinating and fun, and offered, among other things, a panel on special criminal court proceedings. The papers examined various aspects of this issue: the promise of a new problem-solving court model, the delicate power dynamics between courts and women who are victims of domestic violence seeking restriction orders, the criteria used by caseworkers to assess who is “sick enough” to neatly fit in a mental health court program, and the thoughts and actions of parents to juvenile delinquents while their children are in the system. Another fun experience, the panel about David Simon’s The Wire, featured David Simon himself on Skype and was absolutely fascinating. Simon’s take on his own creation consists of two main strands: rampant capitalism and the loss of mutual responsibility and care, and a process he calls “shit to gold”, by which failing strategies are not corrected, but rather misrepresented to give the illusion of progress. As he was talking, I had sobering thoughts about how this principle manifested itself in mass incarceration.
I wanted to expand a bit, however, about a strand of conversation we had in the context of a book panel about Mona Lynch’s Sunbelt Justice, which we reviewed here a while ago. Since the book involves the penal history of Arizona, discussion inevitably turned to the recent developments there, including SB1070, the anti-immigrant measure that received so much coverage and critique in California among other places. The interesting thing about the California critique is that we are struggling with similar issues ourselves, and our readers will remember that Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan for decrowding prisons devoted special attention to undocumented immigrant inmates, and some of his ideas on the matter boarded on the grotesque. San Francisco’s experimentation with sanctuary status for juvenile offenders who are undocumented immigrants is yet another signal of our obsession with this particular group. So, it is rather sanctimonious of Californians to perceive the Arizonian law as unique or peculiar in any way. We are just as busy as our neighboring state in addressing illegal immigration through the lens of crime. As Jonathan Simon deftly observed on our panel, “Arizona is California’s id.”

But one of the things we briefly touched upon was the connection between the two labels: Immigrant and criminal. We floated the idea that the universal “bogeyman”, the common enemy whom we fear and bond against in Durkheimian fashion, might have shifted from The Drug-Selling Gang Banger to The Undocumented Immigrant. As we were talking about this, I thought that there is a better way of understanding what happened in Arizona and might happen in California: We have a composite public villain now, the Immigrant-Criminal. Now, xenophobia is not new, of course, but this is a newer version of it. We toyed with some of the characteristics of this villain.

Immigrants are the source of all evil. As per some of the political speeches we hear these days from Steve Poizner and others, “illegals” are the source of our problems. They are to be blamed for the faltering economy, our sense of security, and everything else.
Immigrants are criminals per se, and illegal immigration is a mala per se. This is what criminal law professors refer to as “status offenses”: one is an offender not because of what one does, but because of what one is. Moreover, undocumented immigration is perceived not as a documentation problem, but one of moral failing: Public discourse draws a difference between people who arrive to the United States from Mexico legally to participate in, say, the highly exploitative market of strawberry picking, to those who do the same thing illegally. The latter are making a morally depraved choice. This construct completely misunderstands the reasons why U.S-Mexico relationship and economic interdependence not only encourages illegal immigration, but generates it. If you want to know more about it, I strongly recommend the last chapter of Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness.
On top of that, immigrants are more likely to commit crime. The correlation between illegal immigration and crime is not a new thing, as we know. After 9/11, visa requirements tightened, under the assumption that threats to U.S. security come from these undocumented immigrants, leading to many difficulties entering the country. Recall, by the way, that most of the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocity were in the States on legitimate visas.
The technologies for battling crime are reapplied to battle illegal immigration. Note how the new proposal shifts the usage of searches and profiling from street crime to immigration, including an allocation of police resources for this matter. This is not a new slice of the police expenditure pie; it is a legitimate use of crime-fighting resources. Moreover, as we said elsewhere, the public gets to have a say when not enough money is allocated to the new crusade.
Immigrants are expensive villains; ousting them is cheap. Governing many of our technologies vis-a-vis the immigrants is the anti-humonetarian misperception that they eat up public resources, and that criminalizing them is a wise move, wallet-wise. It is supposedly cheaper to arrest them in the streets than to provide them with social services; it is supposedly cheaper to house them in federal deportation camps than in state institutions. This is a false savings measure, which might or might not displace the costs of illegal immigration, rather than diminishing them. I don’t know whether that would be the case, savings-wise, but neither do those proposing these measures for savings-related reasons.
Underlying all these features is a deep and basic misunderstanding of the problem: Whether or not American society, and particularly the economies of Sunbelt states like California and Arizona, is endangered by undocumented immigrants, it needs them, and its political and economic realities has created them, for better or for worse. As with our complicity in the picture of crime, we cannot ignore our complicity in the creation of illegal immigration.

Justice Policy Institute release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
May 24, 2010

CONTACT: Adam Ratliff, aratliff@justicepolicy.org, (202) 558-7974 x306

Crime report shows crime fell in 2009 as prison growth rates decreased

Drop in crime comes as states seek ways to reduce prison populations and improve savings for state budgets

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Reported violent crime in the United States fell by 5.5 percent and property crime by 4.9 percent in 2009, according to an analysis released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The analysis, which was based on the FBI’s Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report, released earlier today, also found that this drop in crime coincided with decreasing use of prisons from previous years. This corresponds with a national trend of states seeking ways to curtail corrections spending in light of the economic downturn. JPI applauded the news, saying it highlights that states can save money, promote alternatives to incarceration and still maintain public safety.

“Increased incarceration does not increase public safety,” said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. “The FBI’s report shows that we can improve public safety and put fewer people in prisons, which means savings for taxpayers in addition to stronger communities. Investments in jobs, education and treatment are areas where states should focus their dollars, as all of these will help reduce crime more effectively and fairly than building more prisons.”

According to the analysis, the 2009 drop in crime came at a time when the prison growth rates fell from previous years. While the number of people in prison is still growing, it is at a slower rate than the last few decades.

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom that locking people up makes communities safer, the data is clearly showing that crime is going down as fewer people are being put in prison,” Velázquez added. “Rather than spending more money unnecessarily on policing and incarceration, we recommend that states increase their investments in people and communities, rather than prisons, as a better way of ensuring that public safety continues to improve.”

The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) is a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to reducing society’s use of incarceration and promoting just and effective social policies.

For a more in-depth analysis of crime trends, and information on effective public safety practices, please visit our website at www.justicepolicy.org.

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Film Review: La Mission

We don’t often recommend films or books that are not directly related to corrections, but Peter Bratt’s film La Mission will be an exception for two reasons. First, it is a phenomenal film, which receives its promotion by word of mouth and is fast becoming a Bay Area phenomenon; and second, it is an excellent example of how mass incarceration in California, and the pervasiveness of law enforcement, permeate all aspects of life, especially in neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Mission District.

An independent, modestly-funded, gorgeously-filmed movie, La Mission tells the story of Che (Benjamin Bratt), a man who has lived in the Mission District his whole life, and who has singlehandedly raised his son, Jes, in the neighborhood. He is a Muni driver who devotes much of his spare time to fixing up lowrider cars, an interest he has always shared with his son. Jes has been admitted to UCLA, but has a big secret from his father: He is gay. When Che finds out, he finds the culture he grew up in hard to reconcile with his love for his son. It sounds like a predictable, clichéd story, but when authentically told by the Bratt brothers and a set of first-time actors from the neighborhood, it is anything but. Erica Alexander co-stars in a fantastic, thought-provoking role.

Everyone should see this film, but folks interested in corrections and in the interrelation between crime and other social problems will find it particularly illuminating. Che’s background includes a stint in prison, and this fact shapes and defines him in deeper ways than his neighborhood connections. It is strongly hinted that his homophobia and rigidity have much to do with the incarceration experience, and that this powerful experience frames his experiences with his son. Prison and alcoholism become a master status for Che, a definitive feature of his life, and while the movie almost never explicitly discusses prison, it introduces its deep effects in a subtle and effective way. The viewer is left thinking, in light of mass incarceration, how many “men of their times” share this background, and how deeply it has affected their relationships with family members and loved ones.

The other interesting feature is the realistic depiction of the police’s presence in the film. The police is not there when Jes, Che’s son, needs them to be; however, much of the footage of the Mission High School includes police cars. The police is an active, ever-present feature in high school life, and their readiness to intervene, while sometimes a blessing, is a prime example of Governing Through Crime.

The film has not been marketed by major commercial means, and gets its publicity mostly by word of mouth. It will open next week in several locations in South and East Bay and is playing in several locations in San Francisco. I can’t recommend it enough.

Portugal Decriminalized All Drugs; Drug Use Dropped


As of this week, it’s been one year since the Cato Institute published its land report “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies,” authored by Glenn Greenwald. The report examines eight years of Portugal’s drug policy: decriminalization of possession of all substances.

Here in America, last week the Providence Journal (the news source of record for the state of Rhode Island) took a related stance. The editorial board called for, not decriminalization, but taxation and regulation of all substances. The editorial argues, “Even if legalization were to increase drug use, that risk is overshadowed by the benefits. Crime would drop in our streets as dealers lose their livelihood, and users don’t have to rob others to support their habit. Governments can regulate the drugs for purity and collect taxes on their sale.”

However, the Cato report found that Portugal’s total decriminalization actually led to declines both in drug usage rates and in HIV infection rates. People found in possession of drugs are sent to a panel of a psychologist, a social worker, and a legal adviser to consider treatment and rehabilitation options. For the short version, read the TIME Magazine summary. This usage decline suggests that the public safety and economic benefits of drug policy reform would not merely offset harms of any increase in drug use, but rather, represent independent public policy gains.

California Humonetarianism Hits the NYT

The developments and reforms in California corrections have drawn attention nationwide. Yesterday’s New York Times included this story, which summarizes the recent developments in terms of prison releases and parole reform. The piece includes some data on the new releases, as well as reports of the backlash which we covered here several weeks ago, and some interviews with Mark Leno, Joan Petersilia, and others. The whole thing is an interesting read, but here’s what grabbed me in particular:

Eric Susie, 24, recently had his parole terms readjusted under the new law. Mr. Susie had served 13 months in prison for possessing an M-80 firecracker wrapped with razors near a school (he argued, unsuccessfully, that it belonged to a friend).

Now, more than a year out of prison, he no longer reports to a parole officer or submits to monthly drug tests and can travel more freely, including out of state to visit family in Las Vegas.

“I feel like I am finally free,” Mr. Susie said. “I feel like I don’t have that monkey on my back, like being a prisoner. I feel like I am a human being and can get my life together.”

Even the guards’ union, which so heavily promoted and supported the tough sentencing of the past that fueled the prison building and expansion boom, now says it supports the idea of alternatives to prison and did not publicly object to the new law.

The overcrowding, union officials now say, poses a physical threat to its members, and the union has sided with plaintiffs battling in federal court to force even greater reductions of 40,000 inmates over the next two years.

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Merci a mon ami en Maisons-Alfort, Simon Grivet, pour le liaison.

On Conspiracy Theories and the Prison Industrial Complex

Business Insider is not one of the usual places where I go for news, but I got there this morning via the Prison Law Blog. The newssite suggests that hedge funders like Bill Ackman might be displeased with the recently dropping prison rates. The reason? Counting on growing imprisonment rates, Ackman has invested heavily in Corrections Corporations of America. Here is his presentation on the company. One of the slides bears the title, “Tenants Unlikely to Default”.

Bill Ackman’s Presentation on Corrections Corp of America (CXW) @ the Value Investing Congress

Much has been written about the business aspect of prisons, and especially on privatization. The broader context is discussed in Nils Christie’s Crime Control as Industry, which defines the prison system as a mechanism of “depersonalized pain delivery”. A more personal-political statement, highlighting racial differences as well as the economic angle, can be found in Angela Davis’ The Prison Industrial Complex. For our purposes, this is an important discussion to have when policymakers are contemplating contracts with CCA for out-of-state institutions as overcrowding relief. The question is whether it is accurate to see Bill Ackman’s cost-benefit calculation as proof of an intentional conspiracy to keep the prison industry alive and well. And if so, who’s in on the conspiracy?

My sense is that a more subtle and nuanced description will do better. While CDCR employment depends on prisons, not all CDCR employees cynically hope for overcrowded prisons. If anything, CCPOA decry prison overcrowding, if only because it makes the correctional staff’s job more difficult. Yes, there are those who make profit off the size of our correctional apparatus. But it’s important to distinguish actors with financial interests from actors within large bureaucracies who operate out of inertia, and some of whom probably rejoice in the news of population decline.

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cross-posted on PrawfsBlawg.