Smart on Crime Group Release Report to Congress

Today, a diverse coalition of organizations, including the Innocence Project, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, the Constitution Project, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, has released a comprehensive report titled Smart on Crime: Recommendations for the Administration and Congress.

We will read and assess the recommendations, but for now, here are some tidbits from the press release:

In its review of virtually every major criminal justice issue—from overcriminalization to forensic science—from juvenile justice to the death penalty—and from indigent defense to executive clemency— the report serves as both a source of information and a spur to action for the Administration and Congress.

Just two days before the release of the Smart on Crime report, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) reintroduced the National Criminal Justice Commission Act which would “create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review” of the nation’s criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform. The establishment of such a commission is among the major recommendations of the report.

Virginia Sloan, President of The Constitution Project, said about Smart on Crime, “The criminal justice system is supposed to be about justice—for victims, for those rightly and wrongly accused and convicted of crimes, and for all of us. But a system that costs too much and makes so many mistakes provides justice for no one. Smart on Crime contains an ever-increasing and bipartisan consensus on how to fix the problems that have for too long plagued the system.”

In addition to its recommendation that a National Criminal Justice Commission be formed, the report—developed and published by the Smart on Crime Coalition, a group of more than 40 bipartisan organizations and individuals—offers nearly 100 detailed policy recommendations across 16 criminal justice areas. While contributors do not necessarily have positions on each issue addressed, there was universal agreement that the current system—with its rampant cost, inefficiency, and injustices—is in urgent need of reform.

“Overcriminalization of federal law threatens every American’s liberty and drains the public coffers with pointless prosecutions and unnecessary incarcerations,” said Norman Reimer, Executive Director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “We urge every elected official to end the madness that has produced over 4,450 federal criminal statutes, and countless tens of thousands more arising from the unchecked power of regulatory authorities.”

A Smart on Crime Web site was also created to provide policy-makers, media and the public with quick and easy access to the report. In addition, visitors to besmartoncrime.org can hear report contributors share their insights on criminal justice system problems and solutions in videotaped interviews.

It is interesting that the report comes out, with references to Jim Webb, just as Webb announced that he will not run for another term.

Humonetarianism Transcends Politics: Conservatives Support Prison Reform


This week’s L.A. Times features a piece by Richard Fausset on conservative politicians who transcend the “tough/soft on crime” traditional divide to support prison reform — for humonetarian reasons.

Now, with most states suffering from nightmare budget crises, many conservatives have acknowledged that hard-line strategies, while partially contributing to a drop in crime, have also added to fiscal havoc.

Corrections is now the second-fastest growing spending category for states, behind Medicaid, costing $50 billion annually and accounting for 1 of every 14 discretionary dollars, according to the Pew Center on the States.

That crisis affects both parties, and state Democratic leaders have also been looking for ways to reduce prison populations. But it is conservatives who have been working most conspicuously to square their new strategies with their philosophical beliefs — and sell them to followers long accustomed to a lock-’em-up message.

Much of that work is being done by a new advocacy group called Right on Crime, which has been endorsed by conservative luminaries such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

. . .

The right’s embrace of ideas long espoused by nonpartisan and liberal reform groups has its own distinct flavor, focusing on prudent government spending more than social justice, and emphasizing the continuing need to punish serious criminals.

Even so, the old-school prison reform activists are happy to have them on board.

“Well, when the left and the right agree, I like to think that you’re on to something,” said Tracy Velazquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington think tank dedicated to “ending society’s reliance on incarceration.”

Julie Stewart, founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, even believes that Republicans, with their tough-on-crime credentials, may have a Nixon-in-China cover to push reform further than Democrats.

“There is a safety conservatives have,” she said. “And for better or worse, Democrats don’t always have that luxury.”

The Right on Crime website features Reagan’s decarceration efforts and welcomes influential figures, such as Broken Windows theorist George Kelling.

This group embodies the spirit of humonetarianism. The message is all about retreating from mass incarceration based on considerations of fiscal prudence. One of the more promising aspects of humonetarianism is the potential for rethinking deeper aspects of incarceration policies after questioning them based on the fiscal consideration, and indeed, the group embraces traditionally “lefty” concepts such as restorative justice, a libertarian take on overcriminalization, eliminating mandatory minimums, and support for geriatric parole. The website has a wealth of information, abundant links to research, and much conservative knighthood clout.
The question, of course, is the extent to which this new and wise move among conservatives will find a good home among the New Right tea party-ers.
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Props to Colin Wood for the L.A. Times link.

Children on the Outside

This week, Justice Strategies rolled out their excellent new report, “Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration,” by Patricia Allard and Judith Greene. Read it here.

We knew that the USA’s enormous prison population has high monetary costs and even higher human costs, but this paper documents the particular costs of separating families. Parental incarceration triples the odds that children will engage in violence or drug abuse, and doubles their odds of developing serious mental health issues. There are more children of incarcerated parents than there are total incarcerated persons; nearly 25% of the 1.7 million children with incarcerated parents are under age four, and over 33% will become adults while their parents are locked up.

Trouble in Paradise: The Hawaiian Correctional Crisis


This semester I’m on research leave at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And, as I have started to learn, Hawaii has its own correctional issues and concerns, which are different from California’s, but similar in some important ways.

The Community Alliance on Prisons highlights some important problems with the Hawaiian correctional system. In 2009, when we held our CCC conference, the CAP held its own conference about the local crisis (the proceedings, in full, are here.) The conference debunked the myth that “there are no bad prisons in paradise”, highlighting the oppressive war on drugs, and the disproportionate number of Hawaiian natives behind bars. As late as the mid-1980s, conditions in Hawaiian prisons were outrageous, and included inmates sleeping on floors and cruel corporal punishment. These methods were, apparently, justified by treating inmates the way they supposedly were treated in their native cultures.
Hawaii’s incarceration rate is half that of the United States in average, but it is still alarmingly high. Shockingly, Hawaii is the country’s third largest consumer of private prison services with 34% of Hawaii state inmates in private prisons.
As reported by Meda Chesney-Lind, whose research focuses on gender issues in the criminal justice system, the rates of female incarceration in Hawaii (mostly for low-level drug offenses) are on the rise. Hawaiian prison population in general appears to be comprised mostly of drug offenders, and as explained by Marilyn Brown, the incarceration policy has not been very useful in addressing the problem. And, according to Tom Lengyel, who has studied the impact of drug-related incarceration on families in Hawaii, more benefits with less social costs can be attained through residential programs.
This evening I happened to catch Kat Brady from CAP on the local TV channel, speaking of the sporadic and unsystematic reentry initiatives in Hawaii. She mentioned several policies that made life difficult for inmates, and particularly for female inmates. Women in drug programs, for example, who form friendships within the program, are then prohibited from keeping in touch with their friends after being paroled.
I look forward to learning more about the Hawaiian correctional system, as well as keeping a watchful eye on things back in California.

Merry Christmas, Taxpayers

After a conference and travel hiatus, CCC returns to a semi-regular posting regimen. And what better than a post on California Watch, according to which, despite the fee hikes in the UC system, “on a per-capita basis, UC is still cheaper than another big and expensive component of the California state bureaucracy – the prison system.”

We’ve posted in the past about the gubernatorial problematic effort to create legislation that curbs prison expenditures in relation to educational expenditures. We also reported on the correctional angle to student protests of fee hikes. Here’s hoping that 2011 will be a year that continues the nascent trend of decrease in incarceration rates, and as a result, incarceration expenditures.

The Crime of Punishment in California: NYT Editorial

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an editorial on the California correctional crisis, apropos the Plata/Colemen arguments.

At the intense, sometimes testy argument, Justice Samuel Alito revealed the law-and-order thinking behind the California system. “If 40,000 prisoners are going to be released,” he said overstating the likely number, “you really believe that if you were to come back here two years after that you would be able to say they haven’t contributed to an increase in crime?” To Justice Alito, apparently, it was out of the realm of possibility that, rather than increasing crime, the state could actually decrease it by reducing the number of prison inmates.

Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.

Jonathan Simon writes in Governing Through Crime:

For the Court’s “liberals”, the staggering portrait drawn by the many experts who testified before both original courts and the 3-Judge panel of the way physical and mental health needs are unmet appears to have broken through their own instincts to defer on criminal matters. The routine way in which California prisoners met death not through lethal injections, but by fatal neglect of their obvious and remediable medical needs, or by suicide after florid psychotic symptoms were ignored, animated a livelier questioning of the state in a criminal matter than in a long time. The Court’s “conservatives”, stripped of their preferred grounds of deference to the state’s penological rationality, by the sheer scale of California’s organizational failures over a twenty year period, were left to rest on the primal fear of violent crime and the biblical conviction that keeping people locked up must mean fewer crimes. Of course even if the Supreme Court (5-4), upholds the population cap, it will not end mass incarceration, that claim was not yet before the Court (and probably never will be).

Sobering words.

LA Times favors parole for youth LWOPs

Today’s LA Times carries this piece: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-1208-sara-20101208,0,2931752.story subtitled, “Sara Kruzan’s case shows why juveniles should not sentenced to life without parole.”

The Times had previously written in favor of Sen. Yee’s narrowly-defeated SB 399 to change this policy statewide; today’s Times asks Governor Schwarzenegger to offer clemency, if only in this one extreme case.

My favorite quotes: “She has volunteered for dozens of rehabilitation programs and won awards for her participation and attitude. … The CYA felt that she should have been prosecuted as a juvenile rather than as an adult, which would have put her into a rehabilitation program from which she could have been freed by age 25 — seven years ago.”

Sentenced a minor to life behind bars with no chance of parole is a ghastly, inhumane, cruel practice.

David Onek for SF DA?

Now that Kamala Harris is officially moving up from SF District Attorney to CA Attorney General, there will be a hotly contested election for a new District Attorney here in San Francisco in November 2011. One leading candidate is David Onek, a former member of the SF Police Commission; see http://www.davidonek.com/about

In a post on Calitics last month stumping for Kamala Harris, Mr. Onek embraced the humonetarian view of criminal justice, leading with financial statistics about the expense of recidivism. Onek applauds Harris’s Smart on Crime approach, and in particular the Back on Track program. Overall, the post suggests Onek supports more money for prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation, and less money for useless re-incarceration. Tellingly, Onek’s candidacy for SF DA was recently endorsed by Jeanne Woodford, the reform-minded former director of CDCR who supported Prop 5 in 2008.

Facebook users have the opportunity to support David Onek’s campaign for DA by clicking “Like” at http://www.facebook.com/DavidOnek

CDCR Recidivism Report

CDCR has just released its recidivism report, which is fairly detailed and merits some discussion. First, I think these reports are a good start and CDCR should be commended for tracking down the information and analyzing it. The Office of Research did an overall good job at highlighting some of the major issues and, while I’m sure more could be mined from the raw data, there is enough content to comment on.

Here are some points that come to mind, in no particular order:

The recidivism rates in general, while not surprising, are disheartening, and attest to the complete failure of our prison system in achieving deterrence, rehabilitation, or both. It is telling that the statistics haven’t changed significantly over time, despite increased punitive measures. Clearly, what we are doing under the title “corrections and rehabilitation” does not correct OR rehabilitate. The percentages are particularly distressing for people who have been incarcerated at least once before.

Some interesting demographics: The report tracks people up to three years after release. Almost 50% reoffend within first six months; at one year, the percentage rises to 75%. Women recidivate at much lower rates than men (it would help to have a breakdown of this by offense, because perhaps offense patterns matter here). Unsurprisingly, recidivism declines with age. Also, recidivism rates for first-time offenders are highest for Native Americans, African Americans, and White inmates. But these effects dissipate for re-releases.

The releases from prison are unevenly distributed across counties (a large percentage of released inmates goes to LA). However, most of the folks that end up in LA are first-time releases, which explains why the recidivism rate in LA is actually the lowest. Other counties, such as SF, Fresno, and San Joaquin, have the highest recidivism rates, but they receive re-releases (for whom the rates are higher in general) more than first-time releases.

The distribution of offenses is interesting. 20% of released inmates were in for serious/violent crimes, and this percentage holds for recidivism, so it would appear that people do not “graduate” to more serious crime (perhaps they just do more of the same). Also, there doesn’t seem to be a connection between seriousness of crime and recidivism (which might suggest that it’s the institutionalization that contributes to it). Also, the report doesn’t track a connection between the original offense and the re-offense, save for sex offenders. Notably, however, 47% of returnees to prison are brought back in because of parole violations.

Re sex offenders:

This category merits special attention because it’s the one most often targeted by punitive legislative energy. 6.5% of released people registered as sex offenders. The data suggests that sex offender registration slightly reduces recidivism. However: Only 5% of released sex offenders who recidivate are convicted of an actual sex offense. 8.6% commit an unrelated crime, and 86% are back on a parole violation. This speaks volumes about the pervasiveness of registration rules and limitations and about the low risk of sex offenders.

More than half of the released inmates are in for short sentences – but for recidivists the length of sentence grows (this is probably just the effect of previous offenses enhance sentencing or of repeated parole violations.) There is a rise in recidivism for people who serve 0 to 24 months. After that, the rates decline. Possible intervening variables are health and age.

Recidivism rates rise significantly for folks released after their second incarceration (although subsequent re-incarcerations don’t make much of a difference). The returnees are also more likely to be assigned a high “risk score”. These two findings are not unrelated; I imagine that, when using the CSRA tool for predicting recidivism, one predictor of “high risk” is repeated prison sentencing. This classification therefore probably feeds itself.

On a more general note, I hope that releasing the data also means that our judicial apparatus might rethink some of its policies and approaches. In Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon’s 1992 piece The New Penology, they argue that our “actuarial” approach to justice is behind a transformation from external correctional goals (e.g. reducing recidivism) to internal goals (e.g. reduce riots and escapes). If someone is keeping track of recidivism data, let us hope that the data actually gets used.

Slate/Daedalus new stats on Prison/Poverty cycle

WOW! Great statistics and charts and graphs in this new publication about the school-to-prison pipeline keeping people in poverty. Check out the summary at http://www.slate.com/id/2270328/?from=rss of the report by Western & Pettit at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00019. Here are some stand-out quotes:

“[I]f current incarceration trends hold, fully 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979 (at the start of the upward trend in incarceration rates) will spend time living in prison at some point in their lives, as the chart below shows.”

“After being out of prison for 20 years, less than one-quarter of ex-cons who haven’t finished high school were able to rise above the bottom 20 percent of income earners, a far lower percentage than for high-school dropouts who don’t go to prison.”

“University of California at Berkeley professor of law Jonathan Simon writes that these men and women in many ways become the human equivalent of underwater homes bought with subprime mortgages—they are “toxic persons” in the way those homes have been defined as “toxic assets,” condemned to failure.”