This Is the Way to Go: Senate Dems Propose Expenditures on Health, Rehab

As a response to Governor Brown’s idiotic $315 mil privatization plan from yesterday, Senate president Steinberg and 16 other Democrat senators “proposed a plan that would spend $200 million more for each of the first two years on rehab and mental health programs to reduce the prison population by the 9,600 inmates ordered by federal judges.”

The L.A. Times reports:

“The governor’s proposal is a plan with no promise and no hope,” Steinberg said. “As the population of California grows, it’s only a short matter of time until new prison cells overflow and the court demands mass releases again. For every 10 prisoners finishing their sentences, nearly seven of them will commit another crime after release and end up back behind bars.”

Steinberg has support among Senate Democrats for a broader approach. Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said that the plan put forward by the governor is inadequate and that he will not support it. It requires $315 million this year and $400 million in future years, said Leno, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

“That is a huge sum of money to be spent on a nonsolution,” Leno said. “I could not support a solution to the court mandate that is based only on greater capacity. And that’s all I see in this proposal, greater capacity.”

Leno said any plan should include greater effort to reduce the recidivism rate, including a revision of the sentencing structure. “If we have learned anything over the past 30 years of criminal justice policy leading to this crisis, it’s that we cannot incarcerate our way out of it,” Leno said. “It doesn’t appear that the proposal deals with the core problems that we have, which are clearly in our sentencing structure and our lack of investment in preventing recidivism.”

A huge sum of money spent on a nonsolution, indeed. I gave an interview to the Daily Journal today (link tomorrow), in which I was asked whether this new proposal from senators is a game changer. I replied there was nothing new here; all criminal justice experts who cared to offer an opinion have repeatedly been saying that building more cells and privatizing more does nothing to ameliorate the prison crisis, and in fact guarantees that we’ll have a more serious crisis for years to come. All Steinberg proposal does is suggest spending the money where it matters – in helping people not come back to prison.

Jerry, What on Earth Are You Thinking?

Photo courtesy Rich Pedroncelli for
the San Francisco Chronicle.

The new gubernatorial plan to solve the prison crisis Jerry Brown says we don’t have has just been announced: Spending $315 million on private prisons.

No, I am not making this up. The Chron reports:

Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday responded to a federal court order to significantly reduce California’s prison population by proposing a $315 million plan to send thousands of inmates to private prisons and vacant county jail cells, hoping to avoid what he said would be a mass release of dangerous felons.

The cost could reach $700 million over two years, with much of the money likely to come from a $1.1 billion reserve fund in the state budget.

During a news conference at the Capitol, Brown bristled at the court’s suggestion that the state could continue its early release of certain inmates to meet the federal judges’ population cap. He noted that California has already reduced the prison population by some 46,000 inmates to comply with the court’s orders and said only the most dangerous convicts remain in state prison.

The judges have ordered the state to release an additional 9,600 inmates by the end of the year.

Brown, however, said sending them to available cells in privately run prisons within California and in other states, as well as to empty jail cells, is the best way to meet the court’s mandate without endangering public safety.

“Public safety is the priority, and we’ll take care of it,” the governor said. “The money is there.”

Governor Brown, what on Earth were you thinking when you concocted this wasteful, ridiculous, idiotic plan? What do you mean, “the money is there”? California is in a state of fiscal disaster, and suddenly we have $315 million to invest in private prisons? And where was all this mysterious money when federal courts asked you why we pack people up like sardines and let them languish in their own feces without appropriate health care? Moreover, how will this lucrative investment manifest itself? Will Correctional Corporation of America and Geo build prisons on Californian soil? Or will we send more inmates than the 9,000 we currently have out of state to Arizona and Tennessee? How are you squaring this off with your traditional allies at the CCPOA? Are you going to put state guards in private prisons to make sure their interests are served, as well? After all the effort we put into realignment–and after countless experts have made reasonable suggestions to keep jail population law by not locking up people who should not be locked up in the first place–this is what it’s coming to? After expert witnesses agreed that decrowding prisons is not a danger to public safety, where does your information to the contrary come from? Can you find a decent, respectable criminal justice scholar in the entire state of California that thinks this is necessary? Are you trying to divert our attention from the fact that this is Day 51 of a hunger strike against the horrific conditions under which you hold inmates in solitary confinement? What the hell is going on?

Day 23 of the Hunger Strike: Light and Shadow in Press Coverage

Two interesting newspaper articles came out recently, bracketing the range of public opinion about the California inmate hunger strike.

The first piece, in the Los Angeles Times, is a profile of Todd Ashker, one of the leaders of the hunger strike, part of the Short Corridor collective, described by the article as the “legal mind” behind the strike. Ahsker’s long and violent criminal record and his membership in the infamous Aryan Brotherhood are examined at length, as is the stabbing of his defense attorney during his trial.

Armed with a prison law library and a paralegal degree earned behind bars, Ashker, 50, has filed or been party to 55 federal lawsuits against the California prison system since 1987, winning the right for inmates to order books and collect interest on prison savings accounts.

“There’s an element within [the Department of Corrections] who would celebrate some of our deaths with a party,” Ashker wrote to The Times in March after prison officials denied access to him.

But others say Ashker is a danger, accusing him of being an Aryan Brotherhood member bent on freeing gang leaders from solitary confinement so they can regain their grip on the prison system.

“We’re talking about somebody who is very, very dangerous … who has killed somebody in a pre-meditated way,” said Philip Cozens, Ashker’s court-appointed defense lawyer in a 1990 murder trial.

Terri McDonald, who ran California’s 33 prisons until a few months ago and now runs the Los Angeles County jail system, said Ashker and his compatriots in the Short Corridor Collective are not fighting for rights, but power.

“From my perspective, they are terrorists,” she said.

Ashker has spent nearly all his adult life in California’s prison system — and much of that time, he has been in solitary confinement. 

Ashker has an intimidating record, indeed, and an unappetizing gang affiliation. But that is how someone ends up in isolation in Pelican Bay or in Corcoran: By committing crime and by being classified as a gang member. The question readers might want to ask themselves is, are we prepared for the moral slippery slope that starts with treating folks like Ashker as not human, and not deserving of basic dignity?

I’ve posted before about why I consider myself a left realist, rather than a radical abolitionist. I don’t care for incessant recitations of the prison industrial complex mantra (frankly, I find this a useless argument with middle-class taxpayers), and I don’t think that all prisoners are political prisoners. And I do think that some folks need to be in prison, for long periods of time, and perhaps Todd Ashker is one of them. I do, however, think that far less people should be incarcerated, and that holding 80,000 people nationwide under conditions that do not befit living human beings, depriving them of all human contact and offering inappropriate ways out, is categorically outrageous, no matter what crimes they perpetuated.

I am, apparently, not alone: Today’s San Francisco Chronicle story lists many thinkers, actors, and political figures, including Jay Leno, Gloria Steinem, Bonnie Raitt, Peter Coyote, and Noam Chomsky, who oppose solitary confinement and support the hunger strikers.

This is the third hunger strike launched since 2011 to protest living conditions in the prison’s security housing units, where 4,500 gang members, gang associates and serious offenders are held in extreme isolation, many of them for indeterminate terms of more than 10 years.

The protesters are demanding an end to indeterminate sentences and for alternative ways to leave the units other than “debriefing,” which the prisoners say is an agreement to inform on gang members and a risk to their safety from reprisals for “snitching.”

The security housing units at Pelican Bay Prison in Northern California are the subject of a lawsuit alleging that the living conditions — which include confinement to the cells for 23 hours a day and very little contact with other people — amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

Maybe this support of the hunger strikers will convey the message that even inmates who commit truly heinous crimes are still human beings, and that cruelty and indignity cannot be justified as being begotten by cruelty and indignity.

—————
Thanks to Tom Oster and to David Takacs for the links.

After Trayvon: Why a Guilty Verdict Is Not The Answer

Like many people of good conscience, I was angry and upset to hear the news last night. The acquittal of George Zimmerman, while not wholly unexpected given the trial coverage, has been a punch in the stomach for those of us who saw race relations in America dramatized yet again in this incident. It is also hard to see this as an isolated incident, and those of us who experienced frustration and rage at the verdict of Johannes Mehserle, who shot Oscar Grant in front of dozens of onlookers are even more enraged and hopeless today.

Which is why this post is a hard one for me to write. Because I have hard things to say, and they will not heal our broken hearts or silence our voices from crying out in indignation today. But maybe they are still worth saying.

Legal Truth and Factual Truth

We all know this, but it bears repeating: Criminal law doctrine–stripped of all realities and considerations and constraints and group effects–allows convicting people only if the evidence supports their guilt beyond reasonable doubt. What that means, exactly; whether it allows for majority decisions; whether jurors understand how to quantify it; and how it relates to actual innocence is a different question. But finding someone not-guilty at trial is not a factual statement that the person did not commit the crime. Also, which is less obvious, finding someone guilty at trial is not a factual statement that the person committed the crime. The legal system would have us believe that it takes legal guilt seriously. That is, that it hopes that legal guilt will approximate, as much as possible, factual guilt. And much of the premise behind the post-Warren court’s chipping away at the Bill of Rights was exactly that: No one wanted factually innocent people to go to prison, but we weren’t all that excited about the factually guilty going free. The legal system and the rule of law rely on legitimacy from the public, and to garner that legitimacy the façade of truth in convictions has to be maintained.

But deep down, the system knows it makes mistakes. Dan Simon’s In Doubt, which analyzes the causes of wrongful convictions, cites the astonishing statistic that we may be wrongfully convicting up to 5% of all people found guilty at trial. We acknowledge this to the point that habeas proceedings have an “actual innocence” exception to the cause and prejudice rule. Part of the reason for this may be that Doreen McBarnet is right, and that the system is inherently biased toward conviction. Throw in one more important factor: Six jurors is a lot less than twelve, which makes not only for cheaper trials but also for an increased tendency to come to a guilty verdict in weak cases. So, six people came to an unpopular decision, and we may disagree with them. But I certainly do not envy them. I have, perhaps, an inkling about the political culture these folks will be going back to this morning, but I still think it’s going to take a lot of guts to explain this legal decision to people who don’t believe the factual assertions behind it.

Facts and Symbolism

Do you know what happened in that Florida gated community the morning that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin? And by “know”, I mean, are you absolutely certain of what happened? And can we be certain at all? I wasn’t there, and neither were you. And even if we were there, or saw a video, we could not be sure.

But you and I have a fairly good idea in our heads, and that idea differs from what six Florida residents decided yesterday. We listened to the tape, and we know that Martin was not armed, and we think that Zimmerman, who was motivated by hypervigilance and racial animosity, shot a defenseless man. And my fear this morning has been that we are allowing the symbolic value of this incident, as we did when Oscar Grant was shot, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of what happened.

The much-awaited movie Fruitvale Station (trailer above) opened yesterday in Oakland theaters. I didn’t see it, but am planning to do so soon; yesterday I had a chance to talk to some people who saw it, and one of them told me that a relative who came with him wanted to know, at the end of the film, whether it was “romanticized.” Films are never an accurate description of the truth, because the truth is messy and does not make for a neat and coherent story. But the story in the film resonates very strongly with those of us who were in Oakland the night of the protests, because it epitomizes what we know and believe is true, namely, that racism is alive and well in America. This feeling would be valid whether or not Mehserle reached to the taser or Zimmerman was attacked by Martin. Because it goes to the heart of a problem, and not to the details.

I read some reviews of Fruitvale Station, which were for the most part laudatory. One of the few exceptions was this piece of drivel by the NY Post’s Kyle Smith. You don’t really need to see the movie to learn something from this review–namely, that Smith doesn’t see Oscar Grant as a human being worthy of life and dignity. To him, Grant is merely a “criminal” and a “recent San Quentin resident,” the “only remarkable aspect” of whose life “was its end.” I suppose that for Smith, as for many people (and, judging from his words to the 911 operator, for George Zimmerman), human life doesn’t have intrinsic value when the person living it has darker skin and a criminal record. I don’t think any of us needs to canonize Grant or even Martin to understand this terrible truth (even though an unarmed honor student is, perhaps, easier to canonize.) That their lives and deaths are a morality tale about the fragile concept of sanctity of life in America for black and brown men is important enough. They don’t have to be all good and flawless. No one is. Even the people we have canonized, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were real human beings with flaws and weaknesses. And when we wear the hoodie, we are not, perhaps, making a factual statement about an interaction we didn’t witness, but about its symbolic meaning.

A Racialized Criminal Justice System

Perhaps the resentment about Zimmerman’s verdict comes not from this place of truth and symbolism, then, but from a bitter acknowledgment that a black defendant would not have received this careful consideration, determined defense work and benefit of the doubt. It is one more data point on our chart of racial inequities in the system. When we decry the correctional binge that has bloated America’s prisons for the last four decades, we highlight the obvious racial aspect of it. Some of us go to the extent of referring to the incarceration system as the new Jim Crow.

As James Forman reminds us, however, the picture is more nuanced. A growing number of white people are criminalized, incarcerated, and their lives savaged by the meth plague, much as the not-imaginary crack epidemic savaged African American communities in the 1990s. Black and brown young men are incarcerated at much higher rates, but the white population is rising steadily as well and possibly faster. Contrary to what we believe, the prison inflation is not solely or even predominantly due to nonviolent drug crimes; violent crimes play a big role, and African Americans perpetrate more of those crimes, which are less open to interpretation. All of this does not mean that the criminal justice system is not racialized or that racism does not exist. Of course it does. But the roots of racialization may be much deeper than merely incarceration rates or stop-and-frisk practices, and go back in history to a place of coercion, slavery, torture, and the resulting deep-reaching inequities. Convicting a white man who killed a black man, no matter how enraged his particular story makes us feel, would not do anything to fix this. It would merely add one more inmate to the population.

The Empty Promise of Punitivism

Why would convicting Zimmerman not make us feel better this morning? Some of us, especially Trayvon Martin’s family, would perhaps find some comfort in a conviction. Even this is not a certainty. Tragically, a conviction will not bring Trayvon back to them, or to any of us, and the anguish and despair experienced at the loss of a loved one is a personal experience that takes its own course toward healing.

And what about the rest of us? Would a conviction make for a better tomorrow? Let’s, indeed, imagine an alternative universe, in which a guilty verdict sends Zimmerman to prison. The racialized lines formed around the trial will accompany him to prison and intensify there. There is no truce or hunger strike in Florida, and Zimmerman is embraced by the Aryan Brotherhood, fueling whatever racial ideas he has about the world and crystalizing them forever. Vilified by some and canonized by those who believe in maintaining the racial caste system in America, Zimmerman would become one more pawn in the battles fought across racial lines in the criminal justice system.

Many of the good, angry, upset, frustrated people who will be in the streets this afternoon protesting spend much of their time protesting the excesses of our prison system. If we believe, generally, that the hyperpunitive character of America’s incarceration project is destructive, dehumanizing, and ultimately counterproductive, then sending one more person, deserving as he may be, to this system is no cause for rejoice.

So, a guilty verdict would not send me frolicking in the streets. It would push me into solemn contemplation of the futility of remedying years of slavery, lynching, discrimination, with one “right” act. And mostly, into contemplation of the immense well of suffering that is to become Trayvon Martin’s family’s life for many, many days to come. Healing doesn’t come from a guilty verdict.

Where Healing Comes From

Nothing good comes from punitiveness, and it will not change what we know or think about the world. Healing comes from taking the rage and hot, burning energy we all feel this morning, and channeling it toward sentiments that produce effective change. It comes from taking a hard look at the immense resources we spend in maintaining a carceral colossus and investing them in educating a new generation of people who do not hate, suspect and judge others based on the color of their skin. That is the commitment I’d like to see renewed today, after our anger subsides and we start asking ourselves where to go from here.

Healing comes from a deeper understanding of the role of implicit biases in our own lives. From asking ourselves why one of Victor Rios’ young interviewees did not get a fast food joint job at an interview in which he refrained from shaking his prospective boss’ hand, not wanting to alarm a white woman with physical closeness. From asking why reaching out to others across skin color lines is such a frightening concept. From taking a cue from California inmates, who have realized that the unfair, torturous, abysmal incarceration conditions they face is a common enemy that transcends race and needs to be fought together.

“Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.”

Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

Happy Father’s Day to Incarcerated Dads

Every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the Get on the Bus project brings children to visit parents in prison. This laudable initiative should draw our attention to the fact that, for all other days in the year, many children still have incarcerated parents.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has issued a special report on parenthood behind bars. The findings are fairly grim; as many as 60% of fathers in prison do not have contact with their children. The racial distribution is distressing as well, and means that entire communities lack the experience of regular father-child contact.

Sesame Street’s Little Children, Big Challenges, has stepped up to the plate and created a kit for children of incarcerated parents. This report includes various clips from the program. And while, as Time Magazine reminds us, the show cannot fight mass incarceration in its entirety, it is a small and important step toward acknowledging mass incarceration as an experience affecting a large number of American children.

Are Crime Victims Punitive?

Research on punitiveness consistently teaches us that, surprisingly, being a crime victim does not make one more punitive. Incidents like today’s death of notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez of natural causes on San Quentin’s Death Row raises the issue of what victims expect from the criminal justice system, and what provides them closure and relief.

It is timely, therefore, to read Californians for Safety and Justice’s recent report on crime victims in California. Here, for your convenience, are the key findings:

The findings are not unrelated to each other. It is unsurprising that violent crime disproportionately victimizes low income people and people of color. And it is also unsurprising that this is the same population that is affected by mass incarceration. Their views on the value of incarceration are pessimistic, and they are unsurprisingly more likely to hope for justice that works.

The victim advocacy groups that popped up in the mid-1990 to steer California law in a punitive direction represented, for the most part, white, middle-class people who lost family members to violent crime. This group of victims did not experience the devastation that mass incarceration wreaks on low-income communities and communities of color, and they do not speak for the majority of crime victims in the state.

Each victim responds to a violent crime experience in a unique and personal way. For some, lengthy incarceration terms and the death penalty are a relief and a method of closure. For others, they are a waste of money that does not make their personal tragedy a catalyst for world improvement. Before speaking for them, let’s keep in mind what they say when they are allowed to speak with their own voices.

UPDATE: The Chron has picked up the story.

Why I Am Not an Abolitionist

Examining what might be the beginning of the decline of prison as a massive mode of governance (and government expenditure) sometimes makes me think about abolitionist criminology – that is, a perspective ruling out the usage of prisons as a mode of punishment at all, and sometimes challenging the very concept of crime. I spend a lot of time on this blog decrying the evils of mass incarceration, and with good reason; the prison complex has become a monstruous apparatus controlling the lives of an astonishing percentage of Americans. That this massive project is shrinking a bit because of the economic downturn can be read as a sad testament to the prism of profit as the main perspective on crime and punishment. If we could execute and confine massive amounts of people on the cheap, somehow, we would do it. And that is horrific, and the goal of bringing this system down certainly merits our energy, passion, time, and money.

But I am not an abolitionist, and I don’t think I ever was. A lot of what Gilmore and Davis say is true, but I don’t come out of this with the same conclusions. This post is my attempt to clarify to myself how I feel about the prison project in general, and it is more reflective than decisive.

The bottom line is this: Despite everything, despite Discipline and Punish, despite Visions of Social Control, despite The New Penology, despite From the Big House to the Warehouse, I still think that prison is preferable to a regime of corporal punishment. And I think that some people – a very small minority of the people currently doing time in correctional institutions – should be in prison, and should be kept there for a long, long time. My objection to mass incarceration is aimed at the scale of the operation, not at its rationale. I would be at peace with a much, much smaller apparatus, designed to confine the very small percentage of people whom I regard non-redeemable, or whose deeds are abominable to the extreme.

A couple of months ago we had the great honor and pleasure of hosting Marc Klaas on stage at the California Correctional Crisis conference. I have fought Mr. Klaas’s politics for much of my professional life, and I truly believe, and always have, that extreme punitive measures advanced as being presumably in the interest of victims are unfair, inhumane, and do much more harm than good. But not only do I have an immense amount of sympathy for Mr. Klaas and the terrible loss of his little girl, I also have a lot of admiration and respect for his commitment to public service and his devotion to what he thinks (and I disagree) is best for California. He is not part of the prison industrial complex. He genuinely believes his work is world-improving, and I have respect for genuine advocacy. And I think some of it, especially the KlaasKids foundation’s work to help identify and locate missing children, is very worthwhile.

I also have some understanding of the retributionist perspective, even though I’m not a big subscriber to its punitive corollary. A few months ago I saw the chilling and depressing film An American Crime, which, to my horror, is faithful to the trial transcript in the very real murder case of Sylvia Likens. I can’t really recommend the film or the trial transcript – I had nightmares for many weeks and wouldn’t wish them upon my readers – but it awakened me to the distressing fact that crime is real, it is sometimes (happily, rarely) truly horrific, and victimization is devastating. Interestingly, the Indiana jury decided, in that trial, not to impose the death penalty. Is the death penalty horrific from a humanistic and systemic perspective? Yes. Would I lose sleep over someone like the defendant receiving it in that case? Probably not. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, found a way to justify the death penalty in that specific case. I consider myself a death penalty abolitionist on various grounds and still agree with her conclusions.

If I have to choose a criminological camp to belong to, therefore, I pledge my allegiance to Jock Young’s left realism. Crime, says Young, is real, and victimization is real. Any effort to present the crack epidemic and its immense devastation as nonexistent, or some sort of fantastic FBI conspiracy, should be rejected (and if you want to know more, read David Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot.) Any effort to present violent street crime as “community organizing” should be firmly rejected. As Jimmy McNulty says in The Wire, an underground economy can and should exist without horrific violence and the devastation of entire neighborhoods. I don’t think I’m feeding into the establishment and justifying mass incarceration by acknowledging crime and victimization.

Yes, crime is situational. But there is almost always a modicum of responsibility. We have to believe in responsibility if we believe in change. Yes, help and initiative and welfare and reform is essential to bring about that change. It cannot happen on its own. But to argue that deprivation, racial and class discrimination, and other situational factors necessarily produce violent crime is an insult to the vast majority of poor people of color who do NOT engage in violent crime. In that way, the abolitionist radical position, that would interpret any criminal act as having political meaning, is as reductionist and offensive to me as the right-wing race- and class-blind position that expects everyone to conform to the law regardless of their status in life, or worse, that assumes that race and class are criminogenic because the perpetrators subscribe to a different set of values.

Moreover, radical criminology does a disservice to poor people of color when it decries stop and frisk wholesale and argues for underenforcement. As Sasha Natapoff convincingly argues in Underenforcement, street crime tends to victimize folks who live in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Yes, police brutality and abuse of power should be fiercely protested and stopped. But no policing at all throws the baby in with the bathwater.

So, let’s all fight the good fight. Let’s demolish the California correctional monster. But let’s not forget that the distinction between offenders and victims is false; let’s not forget that prisons, while instruments of incapacitation, profit and corruptions, are the right place for a small minority of the people who inhabit their walls; and let’s not subscribe to an essentialist view that, by denying crime and its devastating consequences, defies reality.

Such a short post cannot possibly do justice to many topics we could discuss, such as the false distinction between street crime and other forms of crime, and the roots of American incarceration in the abolition of slavery. I acknowledge their importance and welcome thoughts and comments.

NYT Article on School-To-Prison-Pipeline

Photo credit Michael Stravato for the New York Times.

Today’s New York Times story addresses the school-to-prison pipeline:

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun. 

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts. 

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Of course, all of this echoes Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime, in which he talks about the increasing management of education as an enterprise of crime control. But it also echoes recently deceased Stanley Cohen‘s Visions of Social Control, where he spoke of “widening the net.”

The accompanying slideshow tells the story as only photos can.

California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform!

We’re very excited about the upcoming California Correctional Crisis: Realignment and Reform conference! Our conference preparations are well under way and we have terrific speakers and panels. Please check our program to the left!

The conference is free and open to the public, and we offer MCLE credits for lawyers. Registration is through the conference website.

When: Thu-Fri, March 21-22, 2013

Where: California State Building, 350 McAllister Street, San Francisco, CA

What: An up-to-date conversation about the politics, economics, and day-to-day practice of corrections in California, in light of Plata, the Realignment, the recent election, and more!

Who: Senators Mark Leno and Leland Yee, Death Penalty Focus chair Jeanne Woodford, Federal Receiver Clark Kelso, Michael Bien of Rosen, Bien, Galvan and Grunfeld, CDCR General Counsel Benjamin Rice, Judges Richard Couzens and Elizabeth Lee, and various academics, activists, and policymakers.

This is a two-day conversation you don’t want to miss – so please join us!

The Limits of Savings: Cutting Prisons but Not Populations

Inmate working on a flag at the Prison Industries Autority at CCWF.
Image from story on struggle to maintain
vocational programs in prison.
Credit Lea Suzuki for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Over the last five years, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time on this blog discussing the impact of the financial crisis on reversing the punitive trend, a phenomenon that I refer to, in my forthcoming book with UC Press, as humonetarianism. A recent story by Truthout’s Victoria Law is more skeptical about the potential of the crisis for changing real policies, and in fact highlights the perverse ways in which closing prisons and shifting populations negatively affect prison conditions.

Law provides some examples of how consolidating inmates in fewer institutions makes overcrowding worse:

In December 2011, on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s decision that the overcrowding in the California state prison system is unconstitutional, the CDCR proposed converting Valley State to a men’s prison and transferring its women and transsexual prisoners to the neighboring Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF). That month, CCWF was at 160 percent capacity with 3215 people.

“The CDCR has been talking about gender-responsive and gender-humane prisons. They said that women have different needs than men, but look at us now – women are overcrowded with eight to a room,” Wendy stated. A room, according to the Merced Sun-Star, is 348 square feet.

After the CDCR announced the conversion, despite threats of retaliation, 1000 people inside VSP and 200 inside CCWF sent letters against the plan to advocacy groups the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and Justice Now. “Women are not cattle. You can’t just shove us into a barn and [expect that] we will be all right,” wrote one woman. As of January 16, 2013, with Valley State having been emptied of all but five women, CCWF is at 187 percent capacity with 3748 women, making it the state’s most crowded prison.

During the transfers, medications were withheld. Once at CCWF, women reported difficulties receiving them. CCWP campaign coordinator Colby Lenz told Truthout that one woman was taken off her medications for two weeks before she was able to appear before a 12-doctor panel; they reassigned a new medication regimen.

Medical staff reportedly told an 81-year-old woman that she was old and going to die anyway, so they weren’t going to give her anything. Others complained about a particular nurse who was randomly withholding medications.

In addition, those in VSP’s mental health programs must be placed on a waiting list before accessing any mental health counseling. Wendy noted that, although CCWF only has six self-help groups, VSP’s 56 self-help groups, run by the women themselves, have been discontinued.

“No one was able to take their materials to start a [new] group. They [prison staff] are citing overcrowding and the cost to taxpayers of shipping these papers across the street,” said Lenz.
“People [transferred] are in a really horrible state. They are really traumatized,” she said. “The prison wasn’t giving people blankets, pillows, toilet paper, tampons or cleaning supplies.”

Claiming a shortage of staff to supervise the increased numbers, the prison placed many under lockdown. CCWP has been told that some women were transferred from general population at VSP directly into segregation units at CCWF. In addition, women reported that guards were provoking violence against the VSPW “bitches.” The mother of one transferee told Truthout that her daughter had said that conditions were so awful that she was contemplating suicide.
I don’t doubt any of this for a moment. Not only good things have happened in the correctional world since the financial crisis; bad and ugly ones abound. This is not just about increased overcrowding in consolidated institutions. Private prison companies have been making more profit offering local governments savings. Educational and vocational programs have been slashed (in fact, here’s an example of that in the very prison Law writes about). More inmates are housed in presumably more efficient out-of-state settings, taken away from relatives and friends. The trend of rolling incarceration expenses on the backs of the inmates themselves has increased as a “creative solution” for incarceration costs.

But I maintain that a lot of this comes from a misguided, short-term view of the expense argument. When seeking an emergency way to save money, correctional policymakers are likely to make these mistakes, ignoring the potential expensive implications they might have on the future in terms of recidivism rates. It is easier to adopt emergency measures than to think holistically about the challenges of mass incarceration and how they affect our spending later.

Short-term thinking about incarceration is not a new mentality. In a way, you could say this is what started the whole thing. What characterized our thinking about prisons in the 1970s was lack of actually thinking about them. The Nixon administration fueled money into law enforcement, and the expansion of prisons was an afterthought, a result of the increased number of arrests by a better funded and empowered police force. Even our way of funding prisons is a way of passing the buck to future generations, not through taxes we pay in real time but through hidden bonds that will be due later. Is it any wonder that, when trying to patch up the hole in our finances, we’re not considering the possibility that unprogrammed, overcrowded institutions, are a recipe for deteriorated health and decreased skills, which mean more costs and more recidivism?

The key to changing this is to transform the cost argument in a way that incorporates consideration of future recidivism rates into the assessment of everything we try to do. This is not easy to do, because measuring recidivism is tricky, and so is predicting recidivism. But I really hope we can do it, because there doesn’t seem to be any other motivation for change that holds the same amount of public appeal.

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Props to Caitlin Henry for the link.