The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: Crime Statistics Archives

July 16, 2008

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

HispanicLink, News Report, Alex Meneses Miyashita, Posted: Jul 15, 2009
Criminal immigration violation charges are being filed by the federal government at unprecedented levels this year, a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reveals.

The study released in June reports there were 9,350 immigration prosecutions in March, representing a 50 percent surge from the month before, based on official records obtained by the group. When compared to a year ago, the increase was 73 percent.

The independent, nonpartisan group attributes the rise to intensified federal policies under the so-called “Operation Streamline” initiative which launched as a pilot project in Del Rio, Texas, in December 2005.

There were 8,104 immigration convictions in March, representing a 24.4 percent increase from February.

The vast majority of cases referred for prosecution, 99 percent, were charged by U.S. attorneys. The median sentence was about a month, the report indicates.

The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement notes that immigration violations are normally civil offenses prosecuted by immigration judges,adding that under Operation Streamline, the federal government has criminalized these offenses, barring immigrants from future legalization.

“Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable,” stated LCLAA president Milton Rosado. “The administration’s current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals.”

The report states the vast majority of the cases were prosecuted in southwest border districts.

In the Western District of Texas, for instance, prosecutions increased from 626 in January to 3,555 in March. All but 142 were in U.S.-Mexico border districts.

The main charges brought against immigrants in March were for illegal re-entry, bringing in or harboring certain immigrants, entry at improper time or place, visa and document fraud, and misuse and conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States.

Other charges included fraudulent statements or entries, false personification as a U.S. citizen, false statement in application and use of passport, and forgery.

The largest increase in prosecution from a year ago (96.2 percent) was for conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States. Document falsification and related activities has seen the largest surge over the past five years (74.4 percent).

The LCLAA said it is “extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public.”

The organization maintained that criminalizing immigrants will strengthen the myth that ties immigrants to crime even if research has claimed that they tend to commit less crime than other groups.

Rosado attributed the large flow of immigrants to harmful economic policies that have affected workers throughout the hemisphere “causing dislocation and displacement.“

“We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions,” he added.

June 26, 2008

The Sentencing Project's response to George Will's Column: "More Prisons, Less Crime"

The Sentencing Project
www.sentencingproject.org

Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will

In a recent syndicated column (“More Prisons, Less Crime,” Washington Post, June 22, 2008), commentator George Will argues that the world record incarceration rate in the United States has produced safer streets and has been beneficial in particular to African Americans, who are disproportionately victims of crime. Will’s selective use of data and limited vision provide an inaccurate portrayal of current criminal justice policy and its effects. Following is an assessment of some of the key arguments raised in the column.

“Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which ’society’ writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.”

Decades of research documents that people in low-income, minority communities are at greater risk of entering the criminal justice system because of the paucity of prevention programs, early intervention programs, and alternatives to incarceration. While privately run social services programs are widely available in most middle and upper class communities, their limited presence where they are most needed means that the first “intervention” that those less fortunate encounter is often prison.

Evidence-based social programs that address the contributing factors to crime have been demonstrated to be more cost-effective than incarceration. Research shows that quality preschool programs can save the public $17 for each dollar that is invested. Other programs with documented cost-effectiveness include initiatives to improve high school graduation rates and a variety of substance abuse treatment strategies.

“…Obama said that ‘more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.’ Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.”

Will is technically correct that Senator Obama misspoke in his reference to young black men, as opposed to black men of all ages. But current and projected rates of incarceration for black men are indeed dramatic. One of every nine black males in the age group 20-34 is in prison or jail on any given day, and if current trends continue one of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.

“…from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population”

Will is both wrong and misleading on this statistic. First, the violent offense proportion of the state prison population increase, 75%, was substantial, but did not account for “all of the increase.” More importantly, the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. did not begin in 1999. In fact, the incarcerated population has been rising at a dramatic rate for more than three decades. The combined prison and jail population has risen by more than 600% since 1972, increasing from 300,000 to 2.3 million today. A longer term view of the rise in the prison and jail population shows that changes in drug policy have been most significant in contributing to this expansion. From 1980 to today, the number of drug offenders in prison and jail has risen by 1100%, from 41,000 to 500,000.

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”

The unprecedented rise in the prison population described above was brought about primarily as a result of changes in policy, not crime rates. State and federal legislatures passed numerous “tough on crime” laws intended to put more people in prison and keep them there longer than in the past. An analysis of incarceration patterns between 1980 and 2001 by noted criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck concluded that fluctuations in crime rates played no role in the 316% growth in imprisonment. The researchers found that the entire growth was related to changes in sentencing policy, with 53% attributable to an increased likelihood of incarceration following an arrest and 47% resulting from increased time served in prison.

“But [Heather] Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offending.”

While differential crime offending is one contributing factor to racial disparities in prison, a wealth of research documents that it only explains a portion of the patterns in imprisonment. A comprehensive review of research in the field conducted for the National Institute of Justice concluded that "race and ethnicity do play an important role in contemporary sentencing decisions. Black and Hispanic offenders -- and particularly those who are young, male, or unemployed -- are more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to prison; in some jurisdictions, they also receive longer sentences...than do similarly situated white offenders."

“As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants…[citing Mac Donald] ‘it’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so [federal] crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006.’”

The movement to reform federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses is not based on the assumption that these policies represent the entire problem of disparity in the criminal justice system. Instead, as respected organizations including the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the American Bar Association have documented, the crack penalties are both ineffective as drug policy and contribute to unwarranted racial disparities. They are also representative of many of the misguided policies and practices of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in over-incarceration of low-level offenders and disproportionate targeting of communities of color.

“ . . . 10 years of scholarly studies ‘have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime . . . [a] high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.’”

The relationship between incarceration and crime is far more complicated than is suggested by this quote. During the 1990s, a time of historic declines in crime, there was no discernible correlation between incarceration rates and criminal offending. Between 1991 and 1998, states with above average increases in the rate of incarceration (72%) experienced a 13% decrease in crime rates. But states with below average increases in the rate of incarceration (30%) actually experienced a greater decline in crime rates, 17%. During this time the notable “tough on crime” state of Texas experienced a 144% rise in incarceration between 1991 and 1998, and its crime rate fell 35%. However, New York’s crime rate declined by a greater extent, 43%, during this period, despite an increase of incarceration of only 24%. New York continues to experience historic lows in crime while its prison population continues to decline, and there is widespread discussion of closing four prisons in the state because of excess capacity.

In truth, imprisonment has only played a limited role in reducing crime. An analysis of the drop in crime during the 1990s estimated that the growth of imprisonment accounted for about one-quarter of the decline in violent crime. Other contributing factors likely included a growing economy, changes in drug market dynamics, strategic policing, and community engagement in crime prevention efforts. While imprisonment may work at some level to reduce crime through deterrence and incapacitation, there is little evidence supporting the deterrent effect of increasingly longer prison sentences. Research suggests that any deterrent effect is more a function of the certainty of punishment, not the severity.

“‘Deterrence works.’ [Quoting Heather MacDonald] It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.”

While prison has had only a limited impact on crime, it is increasingly resulting in negative consequences for individuals, families, and communities. As a result of mass incarceration there are now 1.5 million children with a parent in prison, including 1 in 14 African American children.

African American communities are also affected by the challenges of reentry for the 700,000 people leaving prison each year. Many persons leaving prison are ill-equipped to handle life on the outside because they have received few services for mental health, substance abuse, education, and vocational skill-building programming while incarcerated.

Upon leaving prison or jail, individuals encounter a tangle of legal restrictions which severely limit their ability to become productive members of society. In addition to longstanding barriers to employment and education, in recent years policymakers have enacted a host of restrictions, many applying solely to drug offenders. These include a federal ban on welfare and food stamps for those with a felony drug conviction, a federal mandate that limits access to public housing, and restrictions on student loans for higher education.

An estimated 5.3 million individuals are unable to vote because of laws that deny this fundamental right to participate in the democratic process to those with felony convictions. These restrictions fall disproportionately on African Americans, with13% of black males currently unable to vote. These policies affect black communities as a whole, whereby even persons who are not disenfranchised experience vote dilution as a result of high rates of legal disenfranchisement in their communities.

Conclusion

Issues of crime and justice are critical ones for all Americans. As such, we need to encourage a national dialogue on promoting safety that assesses the appropriate balance of approaches among prevention, strengthening communities, and criminal justice sanctions. For more than three decades our nation has made unprecedented investments in prison expansion at the expense of other policy options. We now need a national dialogue that is centered on evidence-based research regarding the relative effectiveness of various interventions. Such a dialogue would produce better public safety outcomes for all Americans.

June 28, 2008

Posted by lois at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2008

Jamie Fellner: Onward and Ever Upward -- But Not in a Good Way

June 21, 2008
Onward and Ever Upward -- But Not in a Good Way
Huffington Post
by Jamie Fellner
NEW YORK -- Two new federal reports highlight the profound disconnect in the United States between crime and punishment.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the US prison and jail population has now grown to all-time high of 2.3 million. The United States not only incarcerates the greatest number of people in the world, it also incarcerates at the highest rate: last year 762 out of every 100,000 people in the United States were behind bars, a rate five to ten times that of other western democracies.

The endlessly growing rate of incarceration does not, however, reflect growing rates of crime. The newest FBI crime report shows that violent and property crime declined last year, and remain near historical low levels. Indeed, over the last two decades, prison populations have grown steadily regardless of whether crime was up or down, and for some years now the trend has been down.

So why the never-ending prison growth?

The short answer is that for at least a quarter of a century American criminal justice policies have not been very sensible. Prison should be used parsimoniously, reserved for those who have committed such dangerous or egregious crimes that imprisonment is the only commensurate response. Using prisons this way would protect the public, save money and meet human rights requirements.

But this is not how US prisons are utilized. Three ill-considered policies drive incarceration rates.

First: the war on drugs. Launched more than two decades ago, it is still going strong. About one third of all people entering prison with new sentences were convicted of drug charges. Few of them are kingpins or major traffickers. US prisons are swollen with men and women who sell drugs at the retail level or have menial jobs in the drug business as couriers or lookouts. More than two decades of punitive drug policies should have taught the nation a few things: That as long as a demand for drugs exists, there will be a supply. That aggressive drug law enforcement has little effect on the proportion of adults who regularly use hard drugs or even marijuana. That for every low-level drug seller sent to prison, someone else will take his or her job. Unfortunately, politicians seem to be slow learners: they continue to fund this futile and costly war rather than embracing effective and less expensive public health and harm reduction approaches to drug use.

Second: draconian sentencing laws. Politicians running on "tough on crime" platforms in the 1980s and 90s ratcheted up prison sentences by adopting a spate of laws that require imprisonment even for low-level nonviolent crimes and that require long sentences based on one or two criteria - for instance, weight of drugs sold, or a prior record. But in 2008, who really believes a life sentence makes sense for someone whose third offense consists of stealing some videos from Kmart? Who really believes that selling a small quantity of drugs to an adult should yield a decade or more behind bars?

Third: punitive parole practices. Last year, 240,000 people entered prison because their parole had been revoked, about one third of the total incoming population. Parole should be a time of supervision and support to enable former offenders to get their lives together. But too often it's a game of "gotcha." In most cases parole is revoked not because the parolee committed a new crime (although that happens) but because he or she failed urine tests for drug use, did not come to treatment meetings, or in some other way committed a technical violation of the conditions of parole. Offenders on parole should be held accountable for not complying with parole requirements. But there are cheaper and more productive ways to encourage compliance than automatic returns to prison.

The extraordinary rate of incarceration in the US is not necessary to protect the public -- community-based sanctions and treatment for addiction would be even more effective at reducing most kinds of nonviolent crime and at far less cost. Meanwhile, the unnecessary incarceration of Americans damages individuals (few are better off for being in prison), families (children suffer when parents are sent away) and communities (the social capital of already vulnerable communities is further frayed by high incarceration rates.)

People who care about racial justice have spoken up to challenge a prison population that is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. People who believe punishment should fit the crime have spoken up to criticize unduly severe sentences.

But Americans who are concerned about taxes and who want a sound return on public investments, including criminal justice investments, have remained silent in the face of the needlessly expanding, wildly expensive ($49 billion last year) prison population. It is time for them to speak up too. Until they do, the prison population may just continue endlessly and senselessly upward.

Jamie Fellner is senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and author of numerous works on US criminal justice policies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-fellner/onward-and-ever-upward_b_108382.
html

Posted by lois at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2008

F.B.I. Reports Decline in Crime in ’07

''We shouldn't be fooled into thinking our problems are over,'' Fox said. He pointed out that from 2002 to 2006 the rate of murder committed by black male teens rose 52 percent.
''Violence is down among whites of all ages and both genders; it's up among black males, not black females,'' Fox said. ''When you blend all the national numbers together you fail to see this divergence. There are many more whites in the population, so their decline can dwarf the increase among young black males.''
Fox said black males are ''feeling the impact of the economic decline and an increase in gangs and illegal gun markets. Gangs and youth crime are a growing problem despite these rosy statistics.''
Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University said overall national crime figures have been fairly stable with only small fluctuations since 2000. Gangs have re-emerged in various inner-city neighborhoods in recent years, Blumstein added, but they have not been the highly structured, almost-corporate entities like the Bloods and the Crips that spread out from Los Angeles in the 1970s.

June 9, 2008
F.B.I. Reports Decline in Crime in ’07
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Both violent and property crimes declined in 2007 from the previous year, the FBI reported Monday. But one expert warned the figures could mask rising murder rates among young black men.

In preliminary figures for crimes reported to police, the bureau said the number of violent crimes declined by 1.4 percent from 2006, reversing two years of rising violent crime numbers. Violent crime had climbed 1.9 percent in 2006 and 2.3 percent in 2005, alarming federal and local officials.

Property crimes were down 2.1 percent last year, the largest drop in the last four years.

The largest declines were in vehicle theft, down 8.9 percent and in rape, down 4.3 percent and murder, down 2.7 percent.

The crime trends were not uniform. Murders, for instance, were down in cities of more than 250,000, including an enormous 9.8 percent drop in cities of more than a million residents. But murders rose in some small cities -- up 3.7 percent in cities of 50,000 to 100,000, up 1.9 percent in cities of 100,000 to 250,000, and up 1.8 percent in cities under 10,000. Historically, national murder trends have begun in the largest cities and moved over several years to smaller ones.

Because the FBI preliminary figures do not contain the detailed age, race and gender breakdowns available in the final report later in the year, they may unintentionally mask a growing murder rate among black male teenagers and young adults, particularly with guns, said James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

''We shouldn't be fooled into thinking our problems are over,'' Fox said. He pointed out that from 2002 to 2006 the rate of murder committed by black male teens rose 52 percent.

''Violence is down among whites of all ages and both genders; it's up among black males, not black females,'' Fox said. ''When you blend all the national numbers together you fail to see this divergence. There are many more whites in the population, so their decline can dwarf the increase among young black males.''

Fox said black males are ''feeling the impact of the economic decline and an increase in gangs and illegal gun markets. Gangs and youth crime are a growing problem despite these rosy statistics.''

Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University said overall national crime figures have been fairly stable with only small fluctuations since 2000. Gangs have re-emerged in various inner-city neighborhoods in recent years, Blumstein added, but they have not been the highly structured, almost-corporate entities like the Bloods and the Crips that spread out from Los Angeles in the 1970s.

The biggest changes in this report seem driven more by individual city variations than by regional or national trends, Blumstein said. The big murder decline in the biggest cities and in overall violent crime in the Northeast is substantially attributable to an enormous 17 percent drop in murders in New York City alone, from 596 in 2006 to 496 in 2007, he said.

''When you see a crime spike in a city, it's very often attributable to young black males attacking other young black males,'' Blumstein said. ''The duration depends on how fast the city reacts, and the big cities have more resources and more sophistication about how to respond.''

In New York, police attribute the decline in murders to their Operation Impact, which floods high crime areas with officers, including some fresh from the academy. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also credited ''efforts to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals.''

Of 21 cities with more than 100 murders a year a few years ago, 13 saw murders rise in this report and 8 recorded declines, Blumstein said.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said, ''One preliminary report does not make a trend, but it's going the way we want it to go.'' Kolko cautioned against attributing significance to any shift that hasn't lasted at least two years.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr called the report ''very encouraging'' though he noted the final report could alter the figures.

''The report suggests that violent crime is decreasing and remains near historic low levels, which is a credit to increased cooperation among federal, state and local law enforcement,'' Carr said. ''Some communities, however, continue to face localized violent crime challenges.''

Carr said the Justice Department is ''committed to providing targeted assistance wherever needed.''

But Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who chairs a Senate subcommittee on crime, said, ''The decreases announced today are modest. There are nearly 1.4 million violent crimes and over 17,000 murders in America every year, and that's simply too many. ... The Bush administration has repeatedly ignored the needs of law enforcement, slashing overall funding for state and local law enforcement by billions.''

According to the preliminary report, other violent crimes tracked by FBI statistics -- robbery and aggravated assault -- were both down 1.2 percent.

The other property crimes also declined, larceny-theft by 1.2 percent and burglary by 0.8 percent.

Arson dropped 7.0 percent, but it is not included in overall FBI property crime figures, because fewer localities report on the crime.

Violent crimes dropped most in the Northeast, down 5.4 percent with 1.7 percent declines in both the Midwest and West. But they rose 0.7 percent in the South.

Blumstein said murder figures varied widely among Southern cities, with the biggest increase in New Orleans, up 29 percent from 162 to 209. Atlanta saw a 17 percent rise; Jacksonville, Fla., 12 percent. But murders dropped 18 percent in Birmingham, Ala., and 13 percent in Memphis, Tenn.

Property crimes also rose only in the South, where they were up 1.1 percent. The West recorded a 4.7 percent decline in property crimes, followed by the Midwest, down 3.6 percent and the Northeast, down 2.9 percent.

The FBI's preliminary crime report each year gives percentage changes rather than national totals for each crime because not every jurisdiction has filed its reports yet.

------

On the Net:

FBI crime statistics: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/2007prelim/

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-FBI-Crime.html

Posted by lois at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2008

Boston Globe Op-Ed:Fixing our criminal sentencing system

Fixing our criminal sentencing system
Boston Globe

By David W. White Jr. | April 26, 2008
David W. White Jr. is president of the Massachusetts Bar Association.

A NUMBER of news stories this spring have shown us that the criminal sentencing system is out of line - both in Massachusetts and in the nation as a whole. The United States has not just the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but also one-fourth of all of the prisoners in the world.

What has led us to this? And what is it about our priorities that has us spending more on incarceration than higher education?

In Massachusetts, we have over 25,000 inmates serving time in county jails or state prisons. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed 2009 budget seeks $1.4 billion for the sheriffs' departments and the Department of Correction. This money is primarily for incarceration. The same budget proposes $963 million for higher education.

The prisons and jails are seriously overcrowded, not just with convicts but also with hundreds of additional pre-trial detainees who either cannot make bail or are being held without bail pending their trials. A federal lawsuit has forced one county sheriff, in Worcester, to choose which inmates will be released before their sentences are completed. Some detainees are left in local lock-ups because of space shortages.

Incarceration rates increased dramatically when the "War on Drugs" was launched in the 1980s. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, strict mandatory minimum sentences were enacted for drug dealing. One of those sentences, for selling any type or quantity of drug within 1,000 feet of a school, annually sends more than 300 people to jail for a mandatory minimum of two years.

These convictions are usually known as status crimes. The offenders in question generally weren't dealing drugs to children; rather, they were selling in dense urban areas where a school is rarely more than 1,000 feet away. The application of the school zone offense may vary widely from county to county.

When you look across the vast spectrum of crimes committed each year, so many of them can be traced back to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction. This is no secret, nor is the fact that more than 20 years of get-tough policies have not made a difference in drug-related crimes.

Two other factors are relevant. At the front end of the trial process, the courts are cluttered with the smallest of crimes, such as disturbing the peace or passing a bad check. Because these crimes carry the threat of incarceration, if the defendant is indigent the court must appoint a lawyer at taxpayer expense. If treated instead as civil infractions, with only the risk of fines, the dockets could be cleared, and the legal help could be reserved for more serious matters.

Bigger problems lie at the back end of whatever sentences are imposed. Massachusetts must find a better way to deal with ex-prisoners returning to society. Most released prisoners lack job skills, education, family support, money and, most importantly, supervision. Recidivism is more than likely. A high percentage of Massachusetts inmates complete their sentences by "wrapping up" - or serving out their time - and therefore have absolutely no supervision by a probation department or the Parole Board upon their release. With supervision, however, the likelihood of reoffense drops by one-third.

So what can we do this year, while the budget and the laws are still being written, and before our legislators recess for a season of campaigning?

This is a simple, cost-saving, and effective wish list:

Eliminate mandatory minimums for drug crimes to allow for parole eligibility.

Ensure meaningful post-incarceration supervision through parole or probation.

Resist calls for new mandatory minimum sentences that tie the hands of prosecutors, judges, and corrections officials.

Support policies that provide and promote drug treatment instead of incarceration.

Fully fund prison programs for treatment of mental illness, substance abuse, and training.

None of these ideas suggest that we should be soft on crime. Rather, they represent measures that are smart on crime in ways that Massachusetts can afford - and will be more effective in reducing future crime than the status quo.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/26/fixing_our_criminal_sentencing_system?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

NY Times: American Exception: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

April 23, 2008
American Exception
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK, Page 1
NY Times
Good maps and graphs at the URL for this article.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2008

Immigrants far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes

February 26, 2008
National Briefing | West
California: Study of Immigrants and Crime
By JULIA PRESTON, NY Times

Immigrants in the state, about 35 percent of adults, are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group. Among men ages 18 to 40, the group most likely to commit crimes, native-born Americans were 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for crimes in California prisons and jails. The study included both legal and illegal immigrants, without focusing separately on illegal immigrants. But it found that native-born American men ages 18 to 40 were at least eight times more likely to be imprisoned for crimes than Mexican immigrants in that age range who were not naturalized citizens — a group likely to have a high percentage of illegal immigrants.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26brfs-STUDYOFIMMIG_BRF.html?sq=California%20Crime%20and%20Immigration&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2008

CT: Population soaring in state prisons. Population soaring in state prisons.

"Schissler believes the disparity between whites and minorities is "all about poverty." "Many of these people were raised in financially stricken, security stricken, parentally stricken and educationally stricken environments," he said. But he said if the national media -- which spent months probing and anticipating the results of the Iowa presidential caucus
-- looked at prison conditions in that state, it would find enormous numbers of young whites in jail after turning to crystal meth and crime. "These are children of generations of farmers who are losing their farms," Schissler said. "These kids are seeing the complete obliteration of everything they've known. These are white kids behaving like inner-city groups, turning to drugs and crime because of poverty."
The News Times
Population soaring in state prisons
Number of inmates quadruples since '85

By Michael P. Mayko STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 02/17/2008
The numbers astound lawyers Frederic Ury and Michael Fitzpatrick.

From 1985 to Feb. 15, 2008, Connecticut's prison population has soared from 5,422 to 19,690.

If the trend continues, the prison population could surpass 25,000 in the next four years.

"If those represented the numbers of people attending our institutions of higher learning, I would say that's fantastic," said Fitzpatrick, a past president of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

"Unfortunately," he added, "those are the extraordinary numbers of people in our prisons."

Along with the increased numbers, the average daily cost of keeping an inmate incarcerated has also soared -- from $58.68 per day in fiscal year 1989-90 to $86.08 last fiscal year.

"It's crazy," concedes state Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven. "We are spending more money to run our prisons than run our colleges."

"Think about it," said Ury, a former president of the Connecticut Bar Association. "In just a 20-year period, we have quadrupled the number of people in our prisons and no one seems to be concerned about it."

But the increase doesn't surprise Lawlor or Henry Schissler, an associate professor of sociology at Housatonic Community College. Nor is it a surprise to Sally Joughin, a co-founder of People Against Injustice, a New Haven-based prisoner rights advocacy group, or Thomas Tracy Jr., who at age 42 admits he has been in and out of jail 26 times.

The Jan. 1 figure of 19,438 inmates included 15,001 sentenced prisoners and 4,437 pre-trial detainees. There were 18,144 male inmates and 1,294 female; 8,360 blacks, 5,199 Hispanics, 5,750 whites and 129 designated as "others." (Since Jan. 1, the state has added at least another 252 inmates to the prison system.)

Schissler believes the disparity between whites and minorities is "all about poverty."

"Many of these people were raised in financially stricken, security stricken, parentally stricken and educationally stricken environments," he said.

But he said if the national media -- which spent months probing and anticipating the results of the Iowa presidential caucus -- looked at prison conditions in that state, it would find enormous numbers of young whites in jail after turning to crystal meth and crime.

"These are children of generations of farmers who are losing their farms," Schissler said. "These kids are seeing the complete obliteration of everything they've known. These are white kids behaving like inner-city groups, turning to drugs and crime because of poverty."

Unfortunately, the sociologist said, society finds "it's easier to damn the person and throw them in jail" than "look at the big picture and work to create opportunities."

But the war on drugs, which intensified in the 1980s, is not the only reason for Connecticut's growing prison population.

Off the top of his head, Lawlor, co-chair of the state Legislature's powerful Judiciary Committee, can cite almost a dozen reasons.

One is that drug violence and crack sales led the Legislature to impose longer penalties: 2,824 of Connecticut's sentenced inmates on Jan. 1 were in the system for possession or sale of narcotics, another 1,035 for robbery, and 667 for third-degree burglary.

An outcry over recidivism led to the "truth-in-sentencing" laws of 1993 and 1994, which also brought longer terms in prison.

"That required violent criminals to serve 85 percent of their sentence and everyone else to do at least 50 percent of their term," Lawlor said. "Before the truth-in-sentencing laws, inmates were only serving 10 to 20 percent of their terms. We also took away good-time credit and the ability to be free on supervised home release."

"That's a big difference," said Bridgeport State's Attorney Jonathan Benedict. "I don't think this office is seeking greater sentences for the same crime than we did when I started 30 years ago. But inmates are serving more time on their sentences than they were 30 years ago."

Furthermore, Benedict said, drug dealers are treated more leniently than they were in the 1980s.

"Back then a cocaine dealer arrested for the first time would get three to five years in prison," he said. "Today, the first time dealer, as long as an exorbitant amount (of drugs) isn't involved, gets a suspended sentence and probation. Sometimes its multiple offenses before they go to jail."

Lawlor also said the "mainstreaming" of mentally ill patients into the community without proper supervision resulted in many being sent to prison.

"The hospitals wouldn't take them, and the police couldn't deal with them," he said. "So it was easier to place them in jail."

In the past decade the legislature approved mandatory minimum sentences, enhanced terms for persistent felony offenders, and new laws to deal with drunken drivers, domestic violence offenders and sexual predators.

Benedict said legislators are faced with a strange contradiction.

"On one hand they have to control and reduce the prison population, but on the other there's a lot of pressure to keep people in," the prosecutor said.

Following the July break-in, rape and triple murder of a doctor's family in Cheshire, allegedly by parolees, parole in the state was halted until recently. Bonds increased and sentences got longer.

"I have several clients who expected to be released on parole," Fitzpatrick said. "They now believe they have a better shot at winning the lottery."

Gov. M. Jodi Rell is also pushing a "three strikes" law that would impose life terms on those convicted of three serious felonies.

But Tracy, the convicted felon, believes that's the most dangerous law the legislature could impose.

"You tell someone they're going away for life if they get caught -- well, they're not going down easy," he said. "They're going to bring danger to themselves, the people around them, and the people who come to get them. That's a high price to pay."

With the state's prisons bursting beyond their 18,000-plus capacity, Lawlor sees only three options. The most obvious, he said, is to build more prisons.

Last November it was estimated that building another prison would cost at least $260 million. Already Gov. M. Jodi Rell is calling on the legislature to fund another 125 corrections officers.

"Prison has become a big business," said Joughin, of People Against Injustice. "It creates jobs. It makes money for the suppliers and the telephone companies who charge extra for the collect calls inmates make."

Another option to reduce the population is by releasing more non-violent inmates, Lawlor said. In the past the state has cut the prison population as much as 10 percent this way.

"That's always the quick fix," Fitzpatrick said. "Cherry-pick the less violent for release."

Finally, Lawlor said, "We can do nothing and face being sued in federal court. Then we'll get a federal judge running our prisons."

Fitzpatrick would rather see long-term steps taken, like doing away with mandatory minimum sentences.

"Let the judges and not the legislators pass judgment," he said. "In my 21 years of practicing criminal law, I've always felt the judiciary is capable of setting appropriate and fair sentences taking into account the crime and the defendant."

Fitpatrick, like Schissler and Stephen Cox, chairman of Central Connecticut State University's criminology department, believes the best approach is to attack the reasons for crime.

"No one wants to hear about the factors that cause people to commit crimes
-- substance abuse, joblessness, homelessness," Fitzpatrick said. "They just want them locked up and out of sight."

"We can start by making bigger investments in our inner cities," added Cox.

"We need politicians who will stop playing the sound-bite game," said Schissler. "We know the pieces that need to be fixed -- better education, substance-abuse treatment programs, jobs with living wages -- so why are we choosing not to fix them?"

In the meantime, Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the state Corrections Department, said his agency has been able to deal with the increased prison population.

But what about programs for inmates?

Fitzpatrick said several of his clients are unable to get into programs inside prison.

"We don't have the ability to put everyone in school or a substance-abuse program at the same time," Garnett explained, so there are waiting lists at some institutions and official prioritize who goes into which program.

"Anyone under 21 without a high school diploma or a GED gets first call," he said. "Last year we graduated 1,000 inmates."

The same is true for a substance-abuse program.

"Those closest to going out the door get in," Garnett said. "We feel the treatment will be fresh in their minds and have the greatest effect."

He said the department creates a plan for each inmate by identifying his deficiencies and attempting to get him into programs that will address his issues.

"We have invested heavily into working to prepare the inmate for a successful re-integration into society," he said.

A study done by Central Connecticut State University determined if the Corrections Department offered an inmate no help, roughly 50 percent would go back to jail.

However, the same study found using a halfway house to transition an inmate from prison to society reduced recidivism to about 24 percent.

"So we've doubled the number of halfway house beds from 600 in 2003 to 1,200 today," Garnett said.

http://www.newstimes.com/ci_8289068

Posted by lois at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2008

Crime in MA is dropping... a lot

"Randy S. Chapman, president of the Massachusetts Academy of Criminal Defense Lawyers, calls the school-zone statute the “most racist piece of legislation ever promulgated in this state.”"

Crime in Massachusetts is dropping
http://www.exhibitanews.com/article....true--by-a-lot
True or false? Crime in Massachusetts is dropping
Statistics indicate 'true' -- by a lot
POSTED: Friday, February 1, 2008
by David E. Frank

With stories of mounting murder rates, record numbers of teens firing guns and brazen courthouse attacks regularly dominating the headlines, news that crime in Massachusetts has skyrocketed in recent years doesn’t exactly stop the presses.
But this just might: Data collected annually by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission shows that the number of individuals being convicted of criminal behavior in state courtrooms is down.

Way down.

Despite an 11 percent increase over the past seven years in the number of people spending time behind bars, Sentencing Commission statistics from fiscal year 2006 reveal that, in comparison to 1999, 14,000-plus fewer individuals were found to have broken the law.

“I know a lot of people may be surprised by the results, but I’m not because our data shows that there has been a fairly substantial reduction in the crime rate,” says Francis J. Carney Jr., executive director of the commission since its inception in 1994. “So it makes sense that conviction totals would go down as well. Between 1995 and 2000, the crime rate reduction was 30 percent in Massachusetts, [which] parallels the reduction in the number of convictions.”

While Carney and others are not suggesting that the downward spiral has eliminated the system’s pressing sentencing problems, particularly in the area of prison overcrowding, the data analyzed by Exhibit A backs up the notion that the number of individuals convicted — nearly 85 percent of whom were men at a median age of 32 — has fallen.

“When this report first came out, we were probably at just about the peak of the crime rate in Boston and in Massachusetts,” Carney notes. “In a way, we almost had nowhere to go but down.”

Down and out

In 2000, 63,541 defendants were convicted of crimes on the sentencing grid, which includes all offenses that carry the possibility of a jail sentence (with the exception of operating under the influence and mandatory firearm infractions, which are classified separately).
By 2006, that figure fell by nearly 8,900, with guilty findings entered in the cases of 54,652 defendants following a plea or trial.
That number was more than 36,000 less than the 91,511 who were convicted in 1994 when the commission was first created to help provide uniformity and consistency in state sentencing.
While the data collected by the Sentencing Commission shows that the overall totals are down, Carney says the decrease is far more noticeable in misdemeanor cases.
In 1994, according to Carney, there were 22,021 convictions for motor vehicle offenses. By 2006, that number fell to 10,210 — a 54-percent reduction.

But 9,000 beds short

Despite the crime rate reduction, a number of lawyers and judges say other portions of the Sentencing Commission report speak to new and growing state court troubles.
At a sentencing symposium last fall, Judge Robert A. Mulligan told the audience that Sentencing Commission data revealed that, as of Sept. 1, more than 25,000 people were incarcerated in Massachusetts — the highest total in state history.
He added that county jails were operating 160 percent over capacity, while the state prison system was at 130 percent.
When asked to explain the overcrowding problem, Mulligan and others at the symposium pointed to sentencing statistics that show a greater number of people, mostly minorities, doing time for mandatory drug crimes.
That increase, they said, means more and more cells are being occupied by drug offenders.
“We’re 9,000 beds short of what we need,” Mulligan said. “We have to be more intelligent about our use of those beds, and one way to do that is to do something about mandatory-minimum [sentences] on drug crimes.”While the mandatory-sentence numbers are up, defense attorney Michael J. Traft of Boston, a former prosecutor who currently sits on the Sentencing Commission, says the small number of offenders serving 15-year minimum sentences reveals a flaw in the state’s drug laws.
“The fact that there are a only a handful of people doing 15-year sentences would indicate that that we are either only arresting the mini-players and not getting any of the major drug dealers, or they are being plea-bargained down,” he says.

Several sources claim that of those serving such 15-year sentences, the majority has minimal records.
“The numbers indicate to me that the lower-level drug cases are the crimes that are being prosecuted more heavily and are causing a lot of the overcrowding of the institutions,” says Traft. “So, obviously, it’s a policy question as to whether that makes sense or not.”
But one assistant district attorney, requesting anonymity, says the problems cited in the commission’s data have no impact on his decision-making when it comes to resolving a drug case.
“What are they saying? That drug dealers shouldn’t be in prison? If the Legislature says what the minimum punishment on a conviction should be, my job is to follow [those terms] if someone is found guilty,” says the prosecutor, who regularly handles trafficking-level drug indictments. “If they change the law on Beacon Hill, that’s one thing. But until then, I’m not going to lose sleep about overcrowding and sentencing statistics.”

‘A tall task’

But Judge Mulligan, who testified in favor of sentencing reform at a hearing last November before the House Judiciary Committee, hopes change is on the horizon.
Mulligan has indicated, in particular, that school-zone infractions, which carry mandatory-minimum two-year sentences, should be done away with where they unfairly affect those living in urban areas and fail to punish high-end dealers.
Randy S. Chapman, president of the Massachusetts Academy of Criminal Defense Lawyers, calls the school-zone statute the “most racist piece of legislation ever promulgated in this state.”
The inmate population growth reflected by the Sentencing Commission data is startling, he adds.

“I have clients who are literally sleeping on the floors of gymnasiums where you have 30 people sharing one bathroom,” he says. “The data clearly shows that we’re over spending, and we’re over incarcerating people.” Calling the system flawed, Chapman says he recognizes the nearly insurmountable task ahead for those hoping to change drug-sentencing laws.
“Eliminating mandatory minimums is the legal equivalent of curing AIDS,” he says. “It’s a tall task undoubtedly because you have years and years of momentum that this sentencing philosophy has built up, and you need to somehow blunt that and realize that it isn’t working.”

Sen. Robert S. Creedon, co-chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee, says public furor and political discomfort on Beacon Hill have caused similar initiatives in the past to fizzle before they were even debated.
“As soon as the discussion in the newspapers and elsewhere becomes one of being soft on crime, what we’ve seen is that initiatives like this go nowhere,” he says. “But the data is there, and it clearly shows we have a problem that needs fixing.”

What kills me about this is the line "the number of individuals being convicted of criminal behavior in state courtrooms is down. Way down." So the lower the number of convictions, the less crime there is, and I'm safer. Every one of those CWOFs, dismissed cases after paying court costs, and filed without a finding for criminal cases I read about in the court logs is making this state safer one step at a time.
To me this only re-enforces that saying that "laws define crime, not prevent it."
__________________
-GSG

Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2008

Justice Policy Institute: The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief

Justice Policy Institute (JPI).
The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief: http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf found that the sooner substance abuse is treated, the bigger the long-term cost savings and increases in public safety.
The policy brief found that:
Increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime rates.
Admissions to drug treatment increased 37.4 percent and federal spending on drug treatment increased 14.6 percent from 1995 to 2005. During the same period, violent crime fell 31.5 percent. In California, where Proposition 36 diverted thousands of people from prison and jail to treatment, violent crime fell at a rate that exceeded the national average.
In Maryland, where policymakers have been working to implement various approaches to diverting prison-bound people to treatment, the counties that relied on drug treatment were more likely to achieve significant crime rate reductions than those that relied on drug imprisonment.
Increased admissions to drug treatment are associated with reduced incarceration rates.
Substance abuse treatment prior to contact with the justice system yields public safety benefits early on.
Substance abuse treatment helps individuals transition successfully from the criminal justice system to the community. Community-based drug treatment programs reduce the chance that a person will become involved in the criminal justice system after release from prison.
Substance abuse treatment is more cost-effective than prison or other punitive measures. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) found that community-based drug treatment is extremely beneficial in terms of cost, especially compared to prison. Every dollar spent on drug treatment in the community is estimated to return $18.52 in benefits to society in terms of reduced incarceration rates and associated crime costs to taxpayers.

Posted by lois at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2007

Eureka!: Did an early 'green' law change way people act?

Eureka!: Did an early 'green' law change way people act?
BY KRISTIN PALPINI STAFF WRITER

12/28/2007, Daily Hamsphire Gazette
Northampton, MA

Drape a red cape around the Clean Air Act and stamp a big 'S' on its chest - the environmental policy of the 1970s may have done more to reduce violent crime than any other single crime fighter, according to new research by an Amherst College economics professor.

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has found a link between the Clean Air Act policy which, among other things, banned the addition of lead to America's gasoline, and a drastic drop in violent crime.

"The big implication of this is the idea that environmental policy can serve as social policy," Reyes said. "We need to think about the large scale effect of environmental policies."

Reyes' journey to "out" lead as a criminal instigator began in the late 1990s, a time when criminologists and social scientists were pondering a surprising drop in violent crime.

According to FBI crime statistics, violent crime fell by 35 percent between 1993 and 2003, Reyes said. This drop followed a sharp increase in brutal behavior.

"With the increase in crime, everyone was predicting social collapse under the increasing burden of increasing crime," Reyes said. "When it (crime) started going down, it was just inconceivable. People had no idea what to make of it."

For answers, Reyes decided to look at lead, a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in soft tissues and bone over time, that had been banned from gasoline in the 1970s. It was curious to Reyes that this ban coincided with the reduction in crime just as children of the late 70s and early 80s were reaching adulthood.

In 1970, the average child had 18 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is concerned about any child with 10 or more micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. In the 1990s the average child had about 3 micrograms, Reyes said.

Lead poisoning can affect nearly every system in the body without providing obvious symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead poisoning or long-term exposure can cause learning disabilities, behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma and even death.

Before the Clean Air Act of the early 1970s, gasoline used in cars carried lead. Car fumes were the leading source of lead in the air, Reyes said.

"You had an entire population exposed, breathing it in," Reyes said.

The lead effect was particularly chilling on children, who are more susceptible to the harm of lead exposure because they are still developing neurologically.

Reyes compared the rise and fall of lead-exposure with violent crime rates, but with a 20-year lag. The delay was used to account for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early 1990s.

Reyes made her state-by-state comparisons using a model that considered 12 factors including local economy, poverty rates, higher education and number of prisons.

"When you reduce lead exposure by 10 percent in childhood then 20 years later those adults can expect their violent crime rate to be 7 to 8 percent lower," Reyes said.

"That scales up to a pretty big effect because it's such a big reduction in lead exposure."

In addition to reducing crime, Reyes also asserts that the decrease in lead exposure may have had an affect on the overall intelligence of the nation. On average, children who took IQ tests in the 1990s scored seven to 10 points better than children tested in the 1970s.

"The Clean Air Act is just an amazing public health policy success," Reyes said.

Reyes acknowledges there are some nay-sayers to her theory, but she contends time and more research will bolster her find.

"People will ask, "How can this be? We're not all committing violent crimes?'" Reyes said.

"But maybe the effects are not always as obvious as that. Maybe I'm a little more compulsive than I would have been if I had not been exposed to lead."

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=74097&CSAuthResp=1198895832756491%3AQwx7Jzbb22urGQ%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3A7Br0Lc3ftyMnoplnmbVqqA%3D%3D&CSUserId=8254&CSGroupId=5

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2007

Justice Policy Institute: "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties"

Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a new report which finds that 97 percent of the nation's large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites. The report documents racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses in 193 of the 198 counties that reported to government entities.
"The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties" is the first study to examine drug imprisonment rates at the county level. It is also the first study to document the disproportionate impact of drug imprisonment on African American communities at the county level.

Major findings of The Vortex include:

While tens of millions of people use illicit drugs, prison and policing responses to drug behavior have a concentrated impact on a subset of the population. In 2002, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, 1.5 million drug arrests, and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense. While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
Of the 175,000 admitted to prison nationwide in 2002, over half were African American, despite the fact that African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population.
There is no relationship between the rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses and the rates at which people use drugs in counties.
Higher county drug prison admission rates were associated with how much was spent on policing and the judicial system, higher poverty and unemployment rates, and the proportion of the county's population that is African American.
The full report and a very good interactive map of states and counties is at : http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69

Posted by lois at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2007

“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”

http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf
“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”
The JFA Institute, November 2007. Includes “Crime Rates and Incarceration”, “Three Key Myths About Crime and Incarceration”, “Decarceration, Cost Savings and Public Safety.”
A very interesting report.

Posted by lois at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2007

Justice Policy Institute Brief: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

Latest Brief in a Series of Policy Briefs on Public Safety: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

The Justice Policy Institute today launches the second in a series of research briefs that examine the impact of positive social investments on public safety. "Employment, Wages and Public Safety," one of four briefs, finds that increased employment rates and wages are associated with public safety benefits. The release of this brief
corresponds with concerns about U.S. job losses and the small uptick in the national crime rate.

Key findings from "Employment, Wages and Public Safety" include:

Increased employment is associated with positive public safety outcomes. Researchers have found that from 1992 to 1997, a time when the unemployment rate dropped 33 percent, "slightly more than 40 percent of the decline [in overall property crime rate] can be attributed to the decline in unemployment."

Increased wages are also associated with public safety benefits. Researchers have found that a 10 percent increase in wages would reduce the number of hours young men spent participating in criminal activity by 1.4 percent.

States that had higher levels of employment also had crime rates lower than the national average. Eight of the 10 states that had lower unemployment rates in the United States also had violent crime rates that were lower than the national average. In comparison, half of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates had higher violent crime rates than the national average in 2005.

The risks of incarceration, higher violent crime rates, high unemployment rates and low wages are concentrated among communities of color. Communities of color and African Americans, specifically, experience more unemployment and lower average wages than their white counterparts. At the same time, communities of color are more likely to experience higher rates of violence than are white communities,
and African Americans are more likely to be incarcerated than are whites.

A previous brief examined the impact of investments in education on public safety outcomes. Upcoming briefs will examine the intersection of policies on housing and drug treatment with safety and crime rates. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To read the complete brief, see other materials on crime and public safety, or learn more about the Justice Policy Institute, visit: www.justicepolicy.org

Posted by lois at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

Springfield MA: Statistics: Violent crime down

Statistics: Violent crime down
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
By PETER GOONAN
pgoonan@repub.com

SPRINGFIELD - Violent crime was down 14 percent during the first six months of 2007 compared with the same period last year, another sign that crime strategies are paying off, Police Commissioner Edward A. Flynn said yesterday.

Flynn released the statistics yesterday at police headquarters, comparing the first six months of 2007, ending June 30, with the first six months of 2006.

The statistics show that crime overall is down 7 percent, compared with the same period last year.

The latest statistics follow decreases in violent crime in Springfield already reported in 2006, compared with statistics in 2005.

"Our ambition is to keep building on these positive results," Flynn said. "I recognize that numbers alone are never going to affect people's perceptions of safety. It has taken Springfield a long time to get where it is, and fear is an issue separate and distinct from our crime data."

The department recognizes its obligation "to reduce crime, to reduce disorder and to reduce the level of fear," Flynn said.

Violent crime, down 14 percent during the first half of 2007, consists of cases of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, in line with the FBI's unified crime reporting system, officials said.

Flynn said he is particularly encouraged by double-digit percentage decreases in aggravated assault and gun assault.

"Why that is significant for Springfield is that much of our reputation is driven by our reputation for gun-related violent crime," Flynn said. "As we have said for the last year and a half, our goal is to disrupt that cycle of violence through intelligent planning and intelligent deployment relying on good data analysis, and that appears to be bearing some fruit."

The decline in crime is "tangible proof that our community-based, problem-oriented data-driven strategy is working," Flynn said.

In addition, Flynn continued to state that people are far less likely to be victims of violent crime if they do not deal drugs, do not join gangs and are law-abiding citizens.

Some crime categories increased. There were 11 homicides the first six months of 2007, as compared with nine during the first half of 2006. Four of the 2007 homicides were domestic-related, a high rate that cannot be curbed by police deployment, Flynn said.

There were significant decreases in rapes and car thefts, he said.

There was a slight increase in burglary, cause for concern, and a slight decrease in larceny in the first half of 2007 statistics, Flynn said.

Strategies that are helping reduce numbers include "removing the anonymity of street criminals, deploying based on data, not emotion, and providing officers with appropriate resources," Flynn said.

The latest crime statistics were released immediately after Flynn and other Police Department officials met with the City Council Public Health and Safety Committee to discuss crime statistic trends in contrast to public perceptions.

Committee Chairman Domenic J. Sarno, who is a candidate for mayor, said he hears many expressions of fear about crime despite the positive trend in statistics.

Flynn and Sgt. Peter Albano, who heads the Crime Analysis Unit, said the statistics are closely monitored and accurate. Past problems with crime statistics reporting have been corrected, with the FBI giving the department a high ranking for its methodology, Albano said.

http://www.masslive.com/republican/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-2/118768714718780.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2007

Why Did Crime Fall in NYC: Did the "broken windows" stragegy drive crime down?"

“There remains “a hard-core group of people that are disconnected socially, marginalized, out of work, out of school” that continues to engage in drug-dealing and violent gun play, he said, but far more people have had their anger diluted by “the consumer society.”

(On a side note, he added that the diminution in anger is both good and bad. “They’re not committing crimes, but they’re not tackling these social conditions that have to be remedied,” he said.)”

August 13, 2007, 2:10 pm
Why Did Crime Fall in New York City?

By Sewell Chan

Did the “broken windows” strategy and CompStat drive down crime in New York City in the 1990s?

Both strategies are indelibly linked to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton.

Social scientists and criminologists have endlessly debated the extent to which effective policing was truly responsible for the drop in crime, compared with other factors like the higher incarceration rate, improved economic conditions, the lessening of the crack cocaine epidemic, a relative reduction in the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds and even the abortion rate.

A new round of the debate took place this morning in Manhattan, during the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The meeting, which continues through Tuesday, drew some 6,100 sociologists this year from around the world.

Among the three experts who gave presentations, the consensus seemed to be that effective policing matters – but not nearly as much as Mr. Giuliani and other city officials (including his successor Michael R. Bloomberg) have claimed.

First, some context. The broken windows theory, pioneered by George L. Kelling and often lumped together with the notion of zero-tolerance policing, holds that aggressive enforcement against minor quality-of-life crimes, like loitering and fare-beating, deters further petty crime and ultimately drives down major crime. Compstat is the computerized system Mr. Bratton and one of his top deputies, Jack Maple, devised to keep track of crime problems and hold police commanders accountable for addressing the most crime-prone areas.

Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, spoke first. His research is heavy on statistical analysis, but his general point seemed to be that the correlation between a surge in misdemeanor arrests in the 1990s (one measurement of tougher policing) could not be used to explain the the drop in homicide (a major example of crime reduction) once variations among different neighborhoods are taken into account.

“The story is complicated,” he said. “Clearly, the relation between policing, disorder and crime is cloudy.” A combination of socioeconomic changes and changes in the “physical order” of the city’s neighborhoods probably drove the decrease in homicides in the 1990s, although tougher policing and the drop in cocaine use also played some role, he said.

Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of “New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s” (New York University Press, 2000), spoke next.

Mr. Karmen was more decisive in his presentation, focusing on the role that Compstat has played in driving down crime in New York. He noted that Mr. Giuliani had promised to implement Compstat-like programs across the federal government if elected president.

Mr. Karmen noted that many police departments across the country and even overseas “have adopted a Compstat approach to their daily operations” and added, “A virtual cottage industry has developed as former N.Y.P.D. officials have been hired as consultants to set up Compstat in other departments.” The strategy was seen as so effective, Mr. Karmen noted, that in 1996 Time Magazine called the N.Y.P.D. the “Lourdes of policing.”

A 2001 survey found that more than one-third of nation’s 515 largest police departments had implemented Compstat in some form.

However, Mr. Karmen said, the results in cities that have adopted the Compstat model have been mixed: Philadelphia is “in the grip of a murder wave,” Seattle’s homicide decline “has flattened out,” and the New Orleans police remains as ineffective as it was before Hurricane Katrina. The same dismal trend, he said, goes for Minneapolis, Louisville, Boston and Baltimore.

Mr. Karmen said that it can be hard to evaluate Compstat for a key reason. If crime rates go down, its proponents credit the program. If crime doesn’t go down, the program’s proponents say the program’s six core elements – a clear mission, internal accountability, geographical organization of operational command, organizational flexibility, a reliance on data and innovative problem-solving tactics – were not faithfully followed. Mr. Karmen said he did not rule out the latter explanation: “Implementing Compstat could be a matter of degree, and some departments just don’t get it.”

Yet, he said, “None of the other cities have experienced anything like New York’s remarkable improvement in public safety.” So either those other cities all failed to follow Compstat fully, or Compstat, he said, “is not the entire reason why crime went down.”
Michael P. Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, who was probation and correction commissioner in the Giuliani administration, was the final speaker.

Mr. Jacobson discussed a remarkable phenomenon: Far more arrests took place than in the early 1990s, and yet the number of New Yorkers in jail or in prison has declined.

Before the Giuliani era, he said, about half the people arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court. The proportion now is about 10 percent.

“Essentially, everyone who’s arrested in New York City, in the parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through ‘the system,’” Mr. Jacobson noted. “Most everyone who’s arrested spends, on average, 24 hours in some kind of lockup before they see an arraignment judge.”

Even a short period in a holding cell can be enough to deter further law-breaking, he said:

For a lot of people who go through the system repeatedly, going through the system one more time is probably not a life-altering experience. But if you’ve never gone through the system, even 24 hours – that’s a shocking period of punishment. It’s debasing, it’s difficult. You’re probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet paper. You’re given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green.

The city’s jails now hold about 13,000 to 14,000 people, down from roughly 23,000 in 1993.

“There are tons more people coming in, but they stay for far shorter periods of time, which drives down the need for jailbeds in New York City,” Mr. Jacobson said.

The same pattern holds for the prison system, he said. The city used to send about 20,000 inmates each year to the state prison system; the number now is about 8,000.

During the question-and-answer session that followed the presentations, Mr. Karmen was more explicit about what he saw as the reasons for the crime decline.

“Street crime is a distorted form of social protest,” he said. “It comes out of anger, hostility to the system, to the man, to the rules, to the conditions of life that are so harsh. Frankly, I don’t see young people – including young minority males – being so angry any more.”

There remains “a hard-core group of people that are disconnected socially, marginalized, out of work, out of school” that continues to engage in drug-dealing and violent gun play, he said, but far more people have had their anger diluted by “the consumer society.”

Mr. Jacobson said that “a general consensus” seems to have emerged that effective policing in New York has made some difference – even though “the statistical effects, if they are there at all, are small.”

Joyce Purnick of The Times, who attended the meeting, asked the panelists why the most serious crimes in New York, including homicides, have continued to decline even though crime levels have been moving upward in other cities.

“ In scholarly circles, that’s like it happened yesterday,” Mr. Jacobson said, adding, “It’s a mystery.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/why-did-crime-fall-in-new-york-city/

Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2007

CA: Remaking Prisons: Now’s our chance to design a system that actually works

Remaking Prisons
Now’s our chance to design a system that actually works
August 9, 2007
~ By MINDY FARABEE ~
LA City Beat

Federal judges Thelton Henderson of San Francisco and Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento lost patience with California’s out-of-control penal system last month, and set in motion what could turn out to be a revolutionary rethinking of the way the state punishes lawbreakers.

They ordered the creation of a three-judge panel to bypass the political whims and pressures of Sacramento lawmakers and produce their own study on how to tame an ever-burgeoning prison population. The top solution being considered is whether to cap the population, and what steps, including home detention and drug-prevention programs, could be used to reduce the number of people behind bars.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has filed an appeal of what amounts to a judicial takeover of at least part of the management of the state prison system. He claims the state is well on its way to ameliorating the crisis without intervention. The governor cites his transferring thousands of prisoners out of state and a $7.4 billion plan to build new prisons as evidence of his good deeds. Critics dismiss his plan to send inmates to Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arizona and his prison construction plan, outlined in Assembly Bill 900, as proof of just how off-kilter our approach to law and order has become.

“What’s criminal about [AB] 900 is that there was supposed to be sentencing reform attached to it, but the reform part got cut off,” says Dave Fratello, co-author of Proposition 36, the initiative approved by voters in 2000 that called for drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time, non-violent drug-possession offenders. “It shows how spineless our political system is … there’s only one right answer on criminal justice.”

For three decades, that answer has been a keep-getting-tougher approach that keeps digging us in deeper. Since sentence enhancements became a dominant feature of our judicial landscape in the late-’70s, prison capacity has tripled; during the same period, tougher sentencing laws have caused the prison population to mushroom by more than 800 percent. In the last 30 years, Sacramento has issued some 1,000 bills lengthening jail terms. There are now 173,000 inmates in spaces designed for 100,000.

What all this means, critics say, is that perhaps the federal court’s new panel actually gives California a golden, if embarrassing, opportunity to rethink some seriously flawed policies. Just as some urban planning experts are warning that we’ll have to choke on our own traffic jams before we’ll wean ourselves from auto-dependence, so some governmental analysts are arguing that mandatory prison population caps are the only measures severe enough to shock the system into re-evaluating the entrenched sentencing requirements clogging the system.

To say our state’s prisons are grossly, unconscionably filled beyond capacity is akin to noting that the Pope is Catholic. Some 17,000 inmates are currently not housed in cells at all, but are warehoused in formerly communal spaces like recreation rooms, gyms, and hallways, adding insult to injury as overcrowding pushes out rehabilitation programs along with any semblance of a civilized existence. For years, politicians have called these arrangements an embarrassment, yet still they exist. And that’s ironic, according to Fratello. If the state ceased sending minor drug offenders to do hard time, 10,000 inmates could be freed immediately. But that’s only “if we’re willing to be really forward thinking and smart, which there’s no evidence anyone wants to be,” he says.

As it is, in a 2006 report, the Justice Policy Institute determined that Proposition 36 kept 14,000 potential inmates out of the prison system, and accomplished that on a skimpy budget. A UCLA study said the program needs an infusion of $100 million to be considered optimal funding. Currently, due to extraordinary budget pressures, Prop. 36’s measly $120 million funding could be in jeopardy when the state Senate reconvenes later this month, Fratello says, despite the fact that the state typically pays more than $30,000 to house one inmate for one year. “It’s a sickness in the system that we have to scrape and claw for minimal funding for treatment that changes people’s lives and ends people’s criminal careers, when by contrast it’s so easy to throw money at a solution as long as it locks people up,” Fratello says.

Perhaps voters have a right to wonder what all that taxpayer funding is buying them. “Keep in mind that mass imprisonment is no guarantee of safety,” says UC-Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon. “California experienced significant declines in violent crime during the 1990s while it was locking up record numbers of offenders, but our decline was no better than most states that did not incarcerate at nearly the same rate, and some relatively low incarcerating states, especially New York, did significantly better. Indeed Canada, which has very low incarceration rates compared to California, did just as well.”

Who exactly are we locking up? “There’s a lady in prison now for stealing baby formula for her infant,” says Donna Warren, a spokesperson for Families Against California’s Three Strikes. “Kelly Turner is doing 25 years for writing a bad $500 check to Nordstroms … . There are 4,438 people now doing life for non-violent crimes.”

Fratello estimates that overall, half of our current prison population is considered non-violent. According to Simon, 2005 demographics show that a third of the inmates are locked up for non-violent property crimes, drug charges, or a range of other mostly public order offenses.

“It’s reasonable to suppose that many of these offenders could be handled in the community without setting off a wave of feared crimes,” says Simon, who also co-directs the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and is the author of the recent book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. But beyond those who have yet to commit a violent crime, Simon adds that there’s a great deal of criminological research suggesting that almost all offenders – including those who commit serious and violent crimes – are not likely to commit a crime after age 45 or so. These studies have shown that even persistent offenders give up the habit after middle age. “In 2005, more than 36,000 prisoners were 45 or over,” Simon says. “Most of them probably pose little risk if released.”

As for why our legislators can’t keep their hands off the sentencing button, Simon has a theory. “I believe the main explanation lies in the perverse incentives of term limits.” These limits, he says, have created a system demanding legislators make their mark quickly in order to hop from the Assembly to the Senate and on to statewide offices. To do that, a legislator must sponsor a lot of legislation that actually gets enacted, and sentence enhancement bills don’t have very many influential interests to oppose them, while health care and education reform or economic policy changes invariably draw oodles of powerful opposition. Furthermore, term limits offer the added bonus of ensuring that “legislators are not around long enough to get blamed for big structural problems like the prison crises,” Simon adds, meaning it’s going to take more than term- limits reform to effectively eliminate the incentives for tough-on crime legislation, but it wouldn’t be a bad start.

Until then, “Our best hope to achieve more dramatic gains is a charismatic governor willing to build a state wide consensus behind a different approach,” Simon continues. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is constitutionally barred from being president and probably doesn’t want to go the U.S. Senate is our best chance in decades. Stay posted.”

For the moment, however, not everyone is as optimistic about Schwarzenegger’s leadership. This spring, the Northern California-based Critical Resistance, an organization protesting what they see as California’s over-reliance on using prisons to treat social ills, says they headed up to Sacramento and handed out copies of their pamphlet 50 Ways to Reduce the Number of People in Prison, but to little avail.

“Our point is, there’s a myriad of ways to reduce the prison population tomorrow,” says Rose Braz, a Critical Resistance campaign director. “We just don’t have the political will. When Schwarzenegger first got into office, he said some really promising things … but very, very quickly that changed and now Schwarzenegger is showing no leadership on this issue and we see things are only getting worse.”

Meanwhile, even the federal judges themselves singled out Schwarzenegger’s AB 900 in particular for criticism, as an idea that could only exacerbate the difficulties of managing the state’s already unwieldy system.

“It’s the largest prison expansion plan in the history of the world,” opines Braz.

Currently, the prison system consumes $10 billion a year overseeing 173,000 inmates. AB 900 is a bond measure borrowing $7.7 billion more to construct 53,000 beds, many of which would come online in 18 to 24 months. That’s too long to wait to achieve dicey results at best, according to Braz. “The federal judges flatly said building will only make the problem larger,” she says. “AB 900 is not a prescription for change, and thanks to 900, we’ll soon be spending more on our prison system than our educational system, despite poll after poll after poll showing that voters don’t support funding prison expansion.”

In fact, in past years, voters here have done more than that; they’ve actively voted down bond measures earmarked for prison construction. In light of these past failures, Braz says the state legislature essentially pushed AB 900 through a loophole.

“When California voters rejected prison construction bonds, the legislature created a fiction,” she says. According to Braz, California’s two methods for approving debt separate out general obligation and lease-revenue bonds – the former must be approved by the public, the latter don’t because they’re typically earmarked for projects like toll bridges, which eventually pay for themselves. “The legislature said, ‘Let’s say prisons are revenue generators, because the department of public works will build them and lease them to the department of corrections,”’ Braz says. “It’s not simple to explain what they’re up to, but the simple way to say it is: the voters have a right to approve debt.” And another calculation getting left out of the equation, she says – paying back AB 900’s $7.7 billion debt is likely to jump to $15 billion once all is said and done. “It violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution,” she says.

Indeed, this all might be much simpler if we just let some inmates walk out of prison. State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, is hoping that the governor signs her bill calling for a study of which inmates could be released before finishing their sentences.

08-09-07
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5961&IssueNum=218

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2007

Real Cost of Prisons Project Website Reminder

The Real Cost of Prisons Project website (www.realcostofprisons.org) is constantly updated with new research and papers focused on providing ideas and information to strengthen the work of organizers, family members, students, policy makers and others. PDFs of our three comic book are on line in addition to individual comic book pages which can be downloaded free and used for flyers, tabling, newsletters. There also links to hundreds of organizations. Two of our newest sections: "Comix from Inside" and "Writing from Prison" include political and analytical writing and artwork by men and women who are incarcerated.

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2007

VT: Vermont can't afford to keep locking up nonviolent offenders

"The plan's focus for reductions is on facilities because roughly 75 percent of the corrections budget is spent on incarceration, thus any significant reductions will need to be in prison beds."

Rutland Herald
Perspective
Vermont can't afford to keep locking up nonviolent offenders
July 8, 2007
By SEN. RICHARD SEARS

A seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee is one that is coveted by most senators, and I have been fortunate to have served on that committee for several years. Membership is, however, not without some downside. One of the hardest things we have to do is say "no" to worthy projects and programs. We are often forced to cut, or in some cases eliminate, services because we know that we are limited in what we can spend by the state's long-term fiscal outlook, and that all spending on continuing programs must be sustainable for the foreseeable future.

There is, however, one budget area that is growing at unsustainable rates and every recent attempt to control its growth has not tamed the monster. That monster is, of course, corrections.

In 10 years, Vermont's incarceration rate has increased 73 percent, compared with 19 percent nationwide. In those same 10 years, Vermont's violent crime rate has increased by 2 percent and property crime has decreased by 31 percent. A recent study, released in February by the Pew Charitable Trust, estimates that, "By 2011, without changes in sentencing or release policies, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Vermont can expect to see one new prisoner for every three currently in the system."

Over the past 10 years, Vermont has seen an increase of about 100 beds per year. On June 6, 2006, Vermont's in-state prison population was 1,591, and there were 562 out of state, for a total of 2,153. In fact, state spending on corrections has risen faster than any other area of state government; double-digit increases have been the norm for several years.

Between 2006 and 2008 the budget rose by 16.4 percent, from $110 million in 2006 to nearly $129 million for fiscal year 2008, and if nothing changes, that trend can be expected for the foreseeable future. To put it another way, a family of four will pay an average of $800 in state taxes just to support corrections.

It may be little consolation, but we are not alone: In 1982 American taxpayers spent $9 billion for corrections; by 2002 that number had mushroomed to $60 billion. The Pew Charitable Trust study found that "one in every 32 U.S. adults is currently under some form of correctional supervision" and that "by 2011 Š one in every 182 U.S. residents will live in prison."

I doubt many would argue the need for prison space for violent offenders, but in Vermont between 40 percent and 45 percent of the males who are incarcerated are in prison for offenses that the Corrections Department classifies as nonviolent. With females, roughly 70 percent are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. That means that on any given day, from 900 to 1,000 offenders are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

This year's Town Meeting Day survey by Sen. Bill Doyle, while not scientific, asked: "Should we reduce the Vermont prison population through the use of alternatives for nonviolent offenders?" ‹ 68 percent of those who responded said yes, with 18 percent opposed.

In 2006 the Legislature and the governor came together in support of Senate Bill 156, a corrections reform bill designed to reduce overcrowding. While many of the elements of that law, such as term probation, have yet to have an impact, we expect they will help reduce future prison populations. However, other initiatives in that bill, such as the establishment of a second work camp for 100 offenders and the use of electronic monitoring, have stalled.

This year during the Senate Appropriations Committee's budget deliberations I was trying to find $100,000 for a desperately needed intensive substance abuse program in my district, but the money just was not there. At the same time, I began looking at the cost per bed by correctional facilities in Vermont. The cost to house one offender at the Dale facility in Waterbury in 2006 was $66,667 per year, equivalent to the cost of tuition for six in-state students at the University of Vermont. The overall average in Vermont facilities in 2006 was $42,000 per year, while out-of-state costs averaged about $20,000 per year.

This frustration led to a plan I proposed to the Appropriations Committee that with some modification made its way into law as part of the 2008 budget bill. That plan, while controversial, articulates an effort to reduce the unsustainable growth in the cost of corrections, while at the same time keeping Vermont one of the safest states in the nation.

The plan's focus for reductions is on facilities because roughly 75 percent of the corrections budget is spent on incarceration, thus any significant reductions will need to be in prison beds. The plan includes the option of closing the Dale facility, changing the use of the women's facility in Windsor, renovating the Chittenden facility to make it into a women's facility, and using one or more facilities for detention. In addition, the plan requires the state to seek contracts for out-of-state facilities that are as close to Vermont as possible.

The plan also requires the department to come up with options to reduce operating costs by $4 million ‹ one half of which shall be invested in re-entry services. Finally, it requires the department to come up with a plan to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders incarcerated by 10 percent by July 1, 2008.

In the long term we must do more to prevent crime, and we need to double our efforts in finding reasonable alternatives for nonviolent offenders while holding our limited and valuable prison beds for those we and our families truly need protection from.

Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070708/FEATURES15/
707080301/1030/FEATURES15

Posted by lois at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2007

New Zealand Herald: Inside America's packed Gulags

"Our incarceration rates show that America's crime and punishment policy is completely out of control," says Tracy Huling."
" Prisons are big business in the US. California's system has been called the "Golden Gulag" (Ruth Wilson Gilmore's The Golden Gulag says that since 1980 the US prison population has increased 450 per cent, despite falling crime rates), showering money on the powerful prison guards union, on remote communities that house prisons, and on corporations."

All Rights Reserve: The New Zealand Herald
July 2, 2007 Monday
Inside America's packed gulags

If there was any upside to the whole Paris Hilton brouhaha, it is that her brief incarceration in the Los Angeles County jail system has exposed a real scandal: the dramatic growth of the US prison population and the chronic overcrowding in a penal archipelago bursting at the seams.

In December, the US Justice System announced that 7 million adults - 3 per cent of the US population - were either doing time, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. Of that total, 2.2 million were in federal, state or local jails, 4.1 million were on probation, and 784,000 were on parole. Over the past decade, said the Justice Department, the US prison population grew by 35 per cent, with blacks (40 per cent]), whites (35 per cent) and Latinos (20 per cent) making up most inmates.

A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a US non-profit organisation, sent an even starker message. Unless these grim statistics are improved then, at present growth rates, America's convicts will outnumber the combined populations of Atlanta, Baltimore and Denver within five years.

"Our incarceration rates show that America's crime and punishment policy is completely out of control," says Tracy Huling, a national consultant on prison issues. A tough-on-crime political culture and harsh mandatory sentences for minor crimes, especially drug offences, had criminalised huge numbers. "We send people to prison today for long sentences that 25 years ago would have drawn probation."

This grotesquely swollen prison population evokes the Soviet gulags, or even the 18th-century British penal system.

Take California, where Hilton's sentence highlighted the crisis in state and local jails.

In 2005 America's most populous state had 170,676 convicts - 70,000 over capacity. Some 16,000 sleep in gyms and corridors. Many minor offenders are routinely released early in Los Angeles to ease overcrowding.

The situation is so dire that last month federal judges began hearings on whether the state should cap its prison population.

Last October, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger offered a startling
solution: let convicts serve their time outside the state, a unique upgrade of Britain's 18th-century transportation system. Technically, this would be illegal - inmates were sentenced to California time, not incarceration in Mississippi or Tennessee, two potential destinations - and would also separate prisoners, perhaps by thousands of miles, from their lawyers and families.

"It would impose great hardships on low-income families," says Kara Gotsch, advocacy director of the Sentencing Project, which presses for alternatives to prison. She says people from poor backgrounds - many convicts have led hardscrabble lives - are unable to afford the cost of visiting relatives "warehoused" in institutions far away.

Nonetheless, California's scheme has legs. In April, lawmakers, concerned the ailing prison system would be taken over by the federal government, approved the largest prison expansion in state history, earmarking US$8.3 billion to add 53,000 beds and send 8000 inmates out of state.

Not everyone is happy. "This is not a plan," complained the Senate majority leader, Democrat Gloria Romero. "All we have done is dig ourselves in a deeper hole." While the bill will likely incite a host of legal and fiscal challenges, it reflects a deeply ingrained official culture.

Prisons are big business in the US. California's system has been called the "Golden Gulag" (Ruth Wilson Gilmore's The Golden Gulag says that since 1980 the US prison population has increased 450 per cent, despite falling crime rates), showering money on the powerful prison guards union, on remote communities that house prisons, and on corporations.

The human cost of this trend - and the prospect that at current growth rates 50 per cent of American youth will be enmeshed in the criminal justice system by 2050 - is examined by Prison Town, USA, a new documentary. It focuses on what happens to Susanville, a high-desert Californian town with an economy dominated by two state and one federal prison.

It is a prison colony with more inmates than free people. And although convicts are not allowed to vote, their inclusion as individuals, and often as members of black or Latino minorities, into local population statistics funnels census dollars into the community.

Susanville is part of a growing US penal archipelago. It absorbs tax dollars, either directly for publicly run prisons, or via government contracts for privately run institutions, that add up to a huge windfall for beneficiaries such as the Corrections Corporation of America.

"A lot of special interests are feeding off what is a self-perpetuating system," says Ms Huling. "So any attempt to reduce the size of the system is met with very stiff opposition."

This is expensive for taxpayers. The soaring cost of keeping people behind bars is increasing as inmates age. California spent $1.8 billion on medical care alone last year. At the same time recidivism rates across the board - from federal, state, and local jails - average 40-70 per cent.

Once people are ensnared by the criminal justice system many find it very hard to escape. In recent years there have been tentative steps to confront this issue, most obviously with helping drug addicts. Yet, says Ms Gotsch, there is still "limited access to drug rehabilitation".

Ms Huling says convicts are often sent back to prison for technical violations of their parole, rather than for new crimes. Nonetheless, despite "re-entry" schemes that stress aggressive counselling, job training and monitoring of released convicts, going straight is a daunting prospect.

If life on the street is grim, the rosy view from the prison lobby's boardrooms has stunted political debate on penal philosophy. "The problem is, you can't just change the culture of the prison system," argues Ms Huling. "The system doesn't exist in isolation from the larger culture."

That culture still embraces the penitentiary system, which believes convicts need to become penitent in solitude. The problem is not the system, it says, but the individuals who find themselves locked up. "Sending someone away to sit in a cell is still our primary strategy for addressing crime."

But, given overcrowding - which makes solitary confinement impossible for many convicts - and soaring costs that eat into the public purse, is this philosophy sustainable?

"There's this growing realisation that getting tough on criminals is getting tough on taxpayers," says Adam Gelb, project director for the Pew Charitable Trust's Public Safety Performance Project, which looks at the bottom line.

Certainly, money is probably the major engine for driving US policy makers. Most usually, this results in trade-offs. Thus a scheme to, say, increase funds for rehabilitating convicts via re-entry schemes will likely be countered by handouts for prison construction.

"The interests that are feeding off prisons have the money to influence the legislative process," says Ms Huling. Still, the bottom line is where change might just emerge. In October Steve Aos, an analyst with the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, examined how prison costs might be reduced whilst contributing to lower crime rates.

In essence, Mr Aos concludes that, from both a safety and an economic perspective, the public return on their tax dollars diminishes with greater reliance on incarceration. Instead, more emphasis should be placed on prevention.

Which is hardly balm to the prison lobby. But for those who take their chances sleeping in hallways in overcrowded and volatile prisons, confronting the questions raised by Mr Aos's report can't come fast enough.

Posted by lois at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2007

Sex Offenders Younger, More Violent (?)

Sex Offenders Younger, More Violent (?)--my question mark.
June 9, 2007

By KIM CURTIS
Associated Press Writer

STOCKTON, Calif. (AP) - Courts have seen the number of sex offense cases involving juvenile offenders rise dramatically in recent years, an Associated Press review of national statistics found, and treatment professionals say the offenders are getting younger and the crimes more violent.

Some psychologists blame the increase in numbers _ 40 percent over two decades _ on a society saturated with sex and violence and the fact that many of the accused were themselves victims of adult sexual predators. Others say there aren't more children committing such crimes, simply more awareness, better reporting and a general hysteria about sex offenders.

"I don't think it's appropriate to suggest we have whole schools full of sexual predators ... but we're seeing more of it and more sexually aggressive acts," said Scott Poland, past president of the National Association of School Psychologists. "How do these kids even know about this? It's permeated throughout our society."

Robert Prentky, a psychologist and nationally renowned expert on sex offenders in Bridgewater, Mass., thinks the statistics are misleading.

"There aren't more kids, there are more laws," he said. "We now have fairly draconian laws with very harsh sanctions that apply to juveniles."

The number of children under 18 accused of forcible rape, violent and nonviolent sex offenses rose from 24,100 in 1985 to 33,800 in 2004, the AP's analysis found. Violent offenses include attempted rape and sexual assault, while nonviolent offenses including fondling, statutory rape and prostitution.

By comparison, rape and sexual assaults by adults decreased more than 56 percent from 1993 to 2004. Comparable statistics were unavailable before 1993.

The AP analyzed state and federal crime statistics, as well as independent research on juvenile sex offenders. Sources included the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Center for Juvenile Justice, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that specializes in statistical and policy research; and The Safer Society Foundation Inc., a Vermont nonprofit that works to prevent sexual abuse.

Sharon Araji, an Alaska psychologist who took one of the first broad looks at the problem in her book "Sexually Aggressive Children," thinks the number of child-on-child d sex crimes is actually even higher than the statistics indicate.

Only 28 percent of all violent sexual assaults are reported to police, according to a 1999 National Crime Victimization Survey. And cases of incest between siblings are widely thought to be underreported and may drive the numbers even higher, Araji says.
"The whole society is not yet up on this problem," Araji said. "These kids, on the extreme end, if nothing is done to catch them, they're going to become our adult offenders of tomorrow."

Studies show that one in two sex offenders began their sexually abusive behavior as juveniles.

The rise in juvenile sex offenders has spawned hundreds of new treatment facilities for children as young as 5.
In 2002, there were 937 programs in the U.S. treating adolescent offenders _ generally ages 12-17 _ up from 346 in 1986.

During the same period, the list of programs specifically aimed at children n under 12 grew from zero to 410, according to The Safer Society Foundation.

However, Franklin Zimring, a juvenile justice expert at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks many children are unnecessarily treated as sex offenders. True pedophiles are extremely rare among young people, he says.

"As long as the public temperature is up, you're going to get more referrals from the courts for treatment," he said. "If you don't want to lock a kid up, treatment is a politically safe outcome."

Many experts agree that some amount of sexual exploration by young people is healthy, a line is crossed when force and violence are involved, they say.

Recent incidents include the cases of two 13-year-old boys in Omaha, Neb., who were accused in January of videotaping their assault of two 5-year-old girls and a 3-year-old boy, and of an 8-year-old Buffalo, N.Y., boy accused of assaulting a 6-year-old boy after he saw a prison in rape scene in an R-rated movie.

In Alaska, lawyer Dennis Maloney calls it an epidemic.

His state has one of nation's highest per capita rates of youth sex offenders in treatment and one of the highest rates of treatment programs per capita. Others in the top seven are Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire and Vermont, according to the Safer Society Foundation.

Maloney represents the family of a 6-year-old boy raped by a fellow kindergartner. "He said 'Please, I'll be your best friend,'" the alleged victim said, according to a transcript of an interview with a police officer.

Experts say certain trends emerge among the cases of children charged with sex crimes against other children.

Many _ estimates range from 40 percent to 80 percent _ were molested themselves. And 42 percent have been exposed to hardcore pornography, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a 2001 report.

Psychologists prefer to refer to juveniles charged with sex crimes as "sexually aggressive children," rather than as sex offenders.

Psychologist Heather Bowlds, who runs a sex offender treatment program within California's Department of Juvenile Justice, says sexually aggressive children often have a skewed sense of sexuality in which force or violence becomes normal.

"Some kids see it as how you show affection, how you get your needs met," she said. "If you're a kid watching your father rape your mother ... if I feel like I want it, I can get it, no matter what."

http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=104&sid=1163020

Posted by lois at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2007

Is PA prison growth locked in?

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Is Pa. prison growth locked in?

By Mark Houser
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, June 4, 2007

When it opened in 1882, Western Penitentiary was a model of the future. Today, despite a $32 million renovation to get the state's oldest functioning prison out of "mothball" status and ready for its second opening this week, the penitentiary looks more like a relic.

The perimeter wall is the first clue -- prisons switched to fences long ago. Up against the wall, looking out over the Ohio River, the four-story warden's house in matching stone is abandoned and condemned.Wh