The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

September 02, 2009

ColorLines Review: The Real Cost of Prisons Comix: Vivid comics show the impacts of mass incarceration on communities of color

Issue #52, Sept/Oct 2009
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
By Jenna M. Lloyd
Vivid comics show the impacts of mass incarceration on communities of color.

September 2, 2009

Locking 2.3 million people behind bars is a vast social project. It takes work to hide the equivalent of a large US city in plain sight. The explanations served up on the nightly news and by tough-on-crime politicians graphically focus on violent crime, despite its decline. More prisons, they say, will create safe and drug free communities.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (PM Press), winner of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s PASS Award, asks whether the billions of dollars invested annually in mass incarceration delivers on these promises.

Hidden behind these fear-provoking images, the book documents the steep human costs exacted on individual health and freedom, family unity, and community well being. What else could be done with the social wealth and creativity now trapped into cycles of cage-building and neighborhood abandonment?

Through powerful graphics and a wealth of grim statistics The Real Cost of Prisons Comix depicts how the past 30 years of unprecedented prison growth have reshaped the landscape of our urban and rural communities. By showing the concrete work that goes into building and maintaining the prison-industrial complex—from the peddlers of fear to the parole officer—the book serves as a smart, accessible primer on the politics and economics driving prison expansion. Prisons are filled with people who have dreams, raise children, and belong to communities most will rejoin.

The RCPC shows visceral narratives of their lives and the collision of racism, poverty, sexism to trace the systematic ways in which mass incarceration builds on and exacerbates these powerful inequities. Most importantly, it suggests concrete alternatives that can help rebuild safe, healthy communities.

Shrinking the system becomes as important a harm reduction strategy as needle exchange and drug treatment.

Three accomplished comic artists collaborate with long time activists and draw on the work of dozens of researchers imprisoned people, and advocates, to examine one dimension of mass incarceration. Kevin Pyle’s "Prison Town: Paying the Price" shows how millions of dollars poured into moving people hours away from their homes fails to generate promised economic growth for struggling rural communities.

In "Prisoners and the War on Drugs," Sabrina Jones takes on racial disparities in drug laws and policing practices that result in African American and Latino people comprising 93% of those incarcerated in New York, and that lock up more drug users than dealers.

Susan Willmarth’s "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children" examines how women are the fastest growing group of people being imprisoned. Most women are imprisoned for non-violent crimes, half of them drug offenses. But lifetime bans on welfare, public housing, and student loans for felony drug convictions only exacerbate already serious problems of poverty, racism, abuse, and drugs women face in their daily lives.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix grew out of a popular education project Lois Ahrens began in 2000. Since the first printing in 2005, over 115,000 copies have been distributed free of charge, and project’s website receives over 30,000 page views each month. One of the great things about this book as an organizing tool is that it includes letters from readers of the comic books—imprisoned people, political organizers, policy makers, teachers, social service providers—which give us a sense of how resonant these comics have been, and all of the ways they have been put to work on the ground.


The economic depression and fiscal crises facing so many states make the alternatives to mass incarceration the book outlines all the more timely. But it’s also a time when the government is pouring even more money into locking up immigrants. Doing away with prisons isn’t just an issue of pure economics, but will also require confronting the racism, economic inequalities, and sexism that work to fuel the futureless future that they represent.

Larson, a man who is imprisoned in Sing Sing, reminds us: “Anyone planning a prison they’re not going to build for ten or fifteen years is planning for a child, planning prison for somebody who’s a child right now.” What dreams are never realized when billions go to jails and prisons instead of to rebuilding our decimated cities? The Real Cost of Prisons Comix gives us a solid place to begin building the healthy, safe, and free futures we want.

Jenna M. Loyd is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is also co-editing a collection, Beyond Walls and Cages, that analyzes the connections between US migration policy and mass incarceration, and activist efforts to the brutalities of both systems. She can be reached at jloyd@gc.cuny.edu.
http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=598

Posted by lois at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2009

"The Real Murder Mystery? It’s the Low Crime Rate"

The Real Murder Mystery? It’s the Low Crime Rate
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: August 1, 2009
NY Times Week in Review

MAYBE it is time to call in one of those clairvoyants who help detectives solve the case. Because no one else can explain what criminals have been doing in the first half of 2009.

Not that the news is bad — from New York to Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., major crimes, violent or not, are down between 7 percent and 22 percent over the same period last year. In Chicago, the number of homicides dropped 12 percent. In Charlotte, N.C., hard hit by the banking crisis, that total fell an astounding 38 percent. It is too soon to conclude that crime will decline throughout the recession, and the new numbers, which come from standardized reports that police departments send to the F.B.I., have yet to be made into a national measure. But crime was supposed to go up, not sharply down.

The surprise is yet more proof that tea leaves and sun spots may be a better predictor of crime rates than criminologists and the police. Despite the large sums the country spends on law enforcement — just last week, the Justice Department awarded the first of $1 billion in stimulus-package grants to police departments — experts are largely at a loss to explain what makes the crime rate go up or down. Even the exceptions to the latest trend are baffling. Why, for example, did crime go up in Denver, of all places? Denver isn’t sure.

Many experienced criminologists admit to being confounded, but point out that economists have no better track record. “If I could predict the crime rate,” said Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “I’d start working as a stock broker.”

No single lens — sociological, econometrical, liberal or conservative — seems an adequate one through which to view crime. The economy, which seems as if it should be fundamental, has never been a good predictor; the Prohibition era was far more violent than the Great Depression. Adding prison beds has not helped; the incarceration rate has marched grimly upward for decades, while the crime rate has zigzagged up and down, seemingly oblivious. Years ago, criminologists thought demographics explained a lot — remember the warnings about thousands of cold-blooded, teenage “superpredators” in the mid-1990s? — but demographics cannot shed light on what is happening now. Improved policing deserves credit for bigger declines in certain cities, but not the overall national trend.

Scholars have attributed lower crime rates to everything from an influx of immigrants, who tend to keep a low profile; to changes in public housing policy that have dispersed the poor; to better medicine (more lives saved in the operating room equals fewer homicides); to a marked shift in the attitudes of the young and poor (the hip-hop generation, which was supposed to be desensitized by explicit lyrics and large swaths of visible underwear, has turned out fine).

The search for a silver bullet — a single factor that could explain the steady drop in crime since the mid-1990s — has taken theorists far afield. There is the abortion theory, which proposes that legalized abortion reduced the number of unwanted children who turned to a life of crime. It’s a seductive explanation for United States data, but it does not bear out in other countries that legalized abortion in the 1970s, said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. There is the gun theory, which posits that expanded gun ownership rights have deterred criminals who now must consider whether their victims are armed. But that does not explain the most significant decline in the country, in New York City, where gun ownership is low, said Mr. Zimring, who dedicated part of his book, “The Great American Crime Decline,” to debunking such theories. (Despite writing that exhaustive volume, Professor Zimring admits that for criminologists, “the score is Know: 2; Don’t Know: 8.”)

Even mainstream theories can falter under scrutiny. The idea that illegal drug use drives up crime is not bolstered by statistics that show that the percentage of those arrested in New York City with illegal drugs in their system has remained more or less flat, Mr. Zimring said.

One reason for the lack of answers is lack of money, said Alfred Blumstein, a prominent criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “The National Institutes of Health spends $400 million a year on dental research,” he said. “The National Institute of Justice spends $50 million a year on criminal justice research.”

Perhaps as a result, police departments and prosecutors can be swayed by fads, spending millions on programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E., which came under fire from critics who said it lacked a proven success record (it later changed its strategy). “Police research is to research like military music is to music,” Mr. Krisberg said. “It has never matured to be a very sophisticated science.”

For the police, of course, crime policy is a political matter, with new theories attracting new money. In 2006, when violent crime inched up by less than 2 percentage points, the Police Executive Research Forum issued a report called “A Gathering Storm.”

But the police were not the only ones who thought crime could not stay at post-1960 lows. The thugs and marauders were supposed to be back with a vengeance after the horrors of crack cocaine receded from memory; the safety net was dismantled; and education reform proved slow.

Last year, The Third Way, a progressive think tank, gathered governors like Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, now President Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services, and Janet Napolitano of Arizona, now secretary of Homeland Security, to warn of “the impending crime wave,” identifying such factors as “the lengthening shadow of illegal immigration” and “the sprawling parentless neighborhood of the Internet.”

Such appeals to Americans’ fears, several criminologists said, is often linked to a political agenda fueled less by crime than by another variable that is famously unfazed by real-world predictors: public perception. Along with its report, The Third Way released a poll showing that by a 5-to-1 ratio, Americans believed crime was worse than it had been the year before. By year’s end, though, the national crime data showed a decrease. In Atlanta, where crime is down 10 percent, a recent series of high-profile incidents has spurred critics to hammer the mayor over what they call a crisis.

While the decline may not have taken hold in the minds of the public, it has undermined a cherished belief, particularly among liberals, in root causes — that criminals are born of misery and the limited options of poverty. “There are people that are putting up with an awful lot of suffering, and they’re not complaining all that much,” said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

But the fact that so few forces have a demonstrable effect on crime can be viewed, in a twisted kind of way, as good news. The decline, Mr. Zimring said, has shown that it isn’t necessary to accomplish major feats, like improving education or raising wages, or punitive ones, like increasing prison sentences, to bring crime down. Smart policing can have an effect. “Crime isn’t an essential part of cities as we know them,” Mr. Zimring said. Instead, it is a mystery with a direction all its own, one that may be beyond the reach of public policy. Which is easier to tolerate when that direction is down.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 2, 2009, on page WK4 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/weekinreview/02dewan.html?scp=2&sq=crime&st=cse

Posted by lois at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2009

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Third Annual Justice Address

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Third Annual Justice Address
Thursday, July 9, 2009

Laurie, thank you for that wonderful introduction. When I asked Laurie to come back to the Justice Department to lead our Office of Justice Programs, I was keenly aware of how much she would have to give up to join us. Not only did she take leave from the University of Pennsylvania, but she also had to give up her Chair of Vera’s Board of Trustees. I know that the polite thing to do would be to apologize for taking her from you – but the truth is, your loss is our gain. We hope that Laurie stays at the Department for a long time.

It is a privilege to join you this evening as your keynote speaker. Your past speakers have been Nicholas Katzenbach and James Comey, who reflected on the law after their government service. Perhaps one day I might have that kind of conversation with you as a former Attorney General. For now, I stand before you in a different posture, to share some ideas about how I think the American people can best be served by the Department of Justice going forward.

The Vera Institute of Justice has been an extraordinary partner to government in the administration of justice. I thank you in particular for your work with the federal government across a range of issues – from your contributions to the national commission to eliminate prison rape to the administration of Legal Orientation Programs for non-citizens in immigration proceedings. Your practical, rational, data-driven, results-oriented approach can best be described as post-partisan. In the five months that I have served as Attorney General, I have tried to take that same approach, and that is what I would like to talk about this evening: how we can move past politics and ideology in order to get smart on crime.

Getting smart on crime requires talking honestly about which policies have worked and which have not, without fear of being labeled as too hard or, more likely, as too soft on crime. Getting smart on crime means moving beyond useless labels and instead embracing science and data, and relying on them to shape policy. And it means thinking about crime in context – not just reacting to the criminal act, but developing the government’s ability to enhance public safety before the crime is committed and after the former offender is returned to society.

It is imperative that we get smart on crime now, for much has changed since some of our basic, governing assumptions about criminal law enforcement were developed. In the middle years of the twentieth century, America went through an historic increase in crime and illegal drug use. In the 1960s and 70s, the overall crime rate increased more than five-fold. Violent crime nearly quadrupled. The murder rate doubled. And heroin, cocaine and other illegal drug use surged.

Many lawmakers in the 1980s responded by declaring, in rhetoric and in legislation, that we needed to get tough on crime. States passed truth-in-sentencing and three strikes and you’re out laws. Some state parole boards became more cautious, while other states eliminated discretionary parole altogether. The federal government adopted severe mandatory minimum sentencing laws, eliminated parole, and developed the federal sentencing guidelines.

The federal government and states spent billions of dollars in new prison construction. The result was dramatic: the number of inmates in American prisons has increased seven-fold since 1970. Today, one out of every 100 adults in America is incarcerated – the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Few would dispute that public safety requires incarceration, and that imprisonment is at least partially responsible for the dramatic drop in crime rates nationwide in recent decades. By 2007, the nation’s violent crime rate had dropped by almost 40% from its peak in 1991. But just as everyone should concede that incarceration is part of the answer, everyone should also concede that it is not the whole answer. Simply stated, imprisonment is not a complete strategy for criminal law enforcement.

To begin with, high rates of incarceration have tremendous social costs. And, of course, there also is the matter of simple dollars and cents, and the principle of diminishing marginal returns. Every state in the union is trying to trim budgets. States and localities are laying off teachers and canceling sanitation department shifts, but in almost all cases, spending on prisons continues to increase. Not only is this unsustainable economically, but it is also not proving to be effective at fighting crime. For while prison building and prison spending continue to increase, public safety is not improving. Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened. Indeed, crime rates appear to have reached a plateau, and no longer respond to increases in incarceration.

So what can we do to lower the crime rate further, to make American communities safer, to get smarter on crime? We need new tools – and one way to develop new tools is to look several steps past getting people into prison, and to consider what happens to people after they leave prison and reenter society.

We know that offenders who have participated in the federal Bureau of Prisons’ residential drug abuse treatment program are 16% less likely to be re-arrested, have their supervision revoked, and be returned to prison, than similar inmates who did not receive such treatment before their reentry into society. They are also less likely to use drugs once released. We also know that inmates who work in prison industries are 24% less likely to commit crimes again, compared to inmates who have not participated in such programs – which, incidentally, operate at no cost to the taxpayer. The Bureau of Prisons’ educational programs designed to address educational deficiencies – ranging from Adult Basic Education to high school level classes – are also effective in reducing recidivism: inmates who participate in these programs are 16% less likely to commit crime again as compared to their non-participating peers. And inmates who are released through halfway houses are more likely to be gainfully employed, and therefore less likely to commit crime again, as compared to inmates who are released from prison directly to the community.

That recitation of statistics might not sound exciting, but what we do with it is. We rely upon evidence-based methods to innovate in agriculture, transportation, environmental safety, and public health – and it is my belief, that the Department of Justice likewise should embrace modern, evidence-based methods for developing policy.

In particular, it is critical that we work to develop policies – rooted in data – to address what happens after incarceration. For the statistics I cited are even more compelling when coupled with another fact: most crimes in America are committed by persons who have committed crime before. About 67% of former state prisoners and 40% of former federal prisoners are rearrested within three years. Logically, if we reduce the recidivism rate, we will directly lower the crime rate. Even a modest reduction in recidivism rates would prevent thousands of crimes and save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. In other words, being smart on crime means understanding that our work does not end when prison time begins.

Smart risk assessments can identify which offenders can safely remain in their communities and which require continued detention and more intensive supervision. Data analysis can determine which offenders pose a higher recidivism risk based on the type of crime the offender was charged with and the offender’s prior record. For example, risk assessments might determine that removing a 16-year-old, non-violent, first-time offender from his family and school and placing him in a juvenile detention facility is a bad idea because it would actually increase the risk of recidivism, and waste taxpayer dollars besides.

One specific area where I think we can do a much better job by looking beyond incarceration is in the way we deal with non-violent drug offenses. We know that people convicted of drug possession or the sales of small amounts of drugs comprise a significant portion of the prison population. Indeed, in my thirty years in law enforcement, I have seen far too many young people lose their claim to a future by committing non-violent drug crimes.

One promising, viable solution to the devastating effect of drugs on the criminal justice system and on American communities is the implementation of more drug treatment courts. Drug court programs provide an alternative to incarceration for non-violent offenders by focusing on treatment of their underlying addiction. Program participants are placed in treatment and routinely tested for drug use – with the imposition of immediate sanctions for positive tests balanced with suitable incentives to encourage abstinence from drug use. These programs give no one a free pass. They are strict and can be extraordinarily difficult to get through. But for those who succeed, there is the real prospect of a productive future.

New York has been a leader in this area, diverting some non-violent offenders into drug court programs and away from prison, and extending early release to other non-violent offenders who participate in treatment programs. And while national prison populations have consistently increased, in New York the state prison population has dropped steadily and has 12,000 fewer inmates now than it did in 1999. And since 1999, the overall crime rate in New York has dropped 27%. Other states have followed New York’s example. And most importantly, studies show significant reductions in re-arrests, from about 15 to 30 percentage points, for drug-court participants as compared to criminals simply incarcerated.

Furthermore, smart criminal justice policies are not, of course, exclusively reactive – we can also use data and evidence-based methods to prevent crime before it occurs. We have models, for example, in New York’s CompStat program: it uses data to map where crime is most likely to occur, deploy police to those areas to disrupt criminal activity, and evaluate the effectiveness of the enforcement strategies. We can also extrapolate from available data to identify youth that are highly at-risk to commit crimes in the future. For example, it seems that children who are exposed to domestic violence at home are more at-risk. Once we have identified at-risk youth, we can intervene with targeted programs, and I have asked the Department to make a priority of focusing on the issue of children exposed to violence. There is much work to be done in this area, but the underlying premise is already clear: we need to understand crime in context in order to prevent it – and with better understanding and more information, we can develop new approaches to old and seemingly intractable problems.

Although this Administration is still young, we have already started to put into practice what I believe is a data-driven, non-ideological, post-partisan approach to crime. For example, I have asked attorneys throughout the Department to conduct a comprehensive, evidence-based review of federal sentencing and corrections policy. Specifically, the group is examining the federal sentencing guidelines, the Department’s charging and sentencing advocacy practices, mandatory minimums, crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparities, and other racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing. The group is also studying alternatives to incarceration and strategies that help reduce recidivism when former offenders reenter society. We intend to use the group’s findings as a springboard for recommending new legislation that will reform the structure of federal sentencing.

I have also called upon the Department to focus on another part of the criminal justice system: the very difficult issue of indigent defense. Putting politics aside, we must address the fact that, simply put, there is a crisis in indigent defense in this country. Resources for public defender programs lag far behind other justice system programs, constituting only about 3 percent of all criminal justice expenditures in our nation’s largest counties. In many cases, contract attorneys and assigned lawyers receive compensation that does not even cover their overhead. We know that defenders in many jurisdictions carry huge caseloads that make it difficult for them to fulfill their legal and ethical responsibilities to their clients. We hear of lawyers who cannot interview their clients properly, file appropriate motions, conduct fact investigations, or do many of the other things an attorney should be able to do as a matter of course.

This growing crisis is troubling not just because of the government’s constitutional duty to ensure the right to counsel. When defendants fail to receive competent legal representation, their cases are vulnerable to costly mistakes that can take a long time to correct. Lawyers on both sides can spend years dealing with appeals arising from technical infractions and procedural errors. When that happens, no one wins. Addressing the American Council of Chief Defenders last month, I committed to several steps to help improve the indigent defense system, including hosting a national conference with the goal of developing a set of best practices and practical solutions.

I have also made it clear that this Department of Justice will use the available data to improve our handling of the forensics sciences – such as fingerprints, trace evidence, firearms matching. We are studying a recent report from the National Academies of Science that diagnosed problems in the use of forensics sciences and suggested ways forward, and we are working with our partners in the Executive Branch and Congress to act on the report’s insights and recommendations. Our goal is to ensure that forensic science is practiced at the highest level possible, and always in the pursuit of truth. Because we put a premium on truth-seeking – because, indeed, this Administration is committed to using the best science possible whenever possible, including in criminal justice – I also believe that defendants should have access to DNA evidence in a range of circumstances. DNA testing has an unparalleled ability to exonerate the wrongfully convicted as well as to identify the guilty. Federal law already guarantees access to DNA evidence held by the federal government under specific conditions, and I hope that all states will follow the federal government’s lead on this issue.

Many of the things I have mentioned in these remarks are still in early stages or under review. There are numerous areas I have not even mentioned – for example, the prevention and detection of economic crimes and on-line crimes – where we can similarly get smarter with a research-driven approach. I am already certain, however, that change is both necessary and it is possible – if we are willing to make it. Challenges have changed with time: Prison populations are at an all-time high and still climbing, yet the crime rate is no longer declining. States are in serious financial distress. But opportunities have changed too. We are able to compare the cost and suitability of different criminal justice strategies. We no longer must choose between more crime and more prisons: we can reduce crime rates and reduce our dependence on incarceration, and at the same time increase the integrity of our criminal justice system. We can harness science and data to tackle emerging problems and also to preserve our foundational principles. The more we know, the better we can do, the more sophisticated we can be. With the help of the scholars and experts in this room, state and local law enforcement, corrections officials across the country, judges, victims of crime, and always with the fine work of attorneys at the Department of Justice, there is no question that a smarter and better criminal justice system is within our grasp.

Thank you very much.

Posted by lois at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2009

Despite Bleak Economy, Crime Numbers Take Positive Turn

Despite Bleak Economy, Crime Numbers Take Positive Turn
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: June 1, 2009- NY Times

Most types of crime declined nationally last year, despite the economic downturn, according to new data released by the Department of Justice on Monday.

The data assuaged fears that job losses, foreclosures and reduced social services would lead to increased crime, crime statistics experts said.

Preliminary statistics from the Uniform Crime Report, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual compilation of crime reports from local and state police agencies, showed that murders declined by 4.4 percent in 2008, rapes declined 2.2 percent, robberies declined 1.1 percent and assaults dropped 3.2 percent.

Property crimes were also down over all. Burglaries increased 1.3 percent, but motor vehicle theft dropped by 13 percent and arson declined 3.9 percent.

“Everybody knows that because of our economic problems, crime must be skyrocketing — except that it’s not,” said David M. Kennedy, a crime trend expert at the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Historically — and our current experience on the ground around the country proves this — increases in crime are not inevitable when the economy goes sour.”

Crime experts said there was no historical correlation between tough economic times and crime in the United States. Rather, the big shifts in crime trends have more to do with policing strategies and the ebb and flow of illegal substances: alcohol in the prohibition area, heroin in the 1960s and 1970s, and crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s.

A marginal concern for some crime researchers, however, was a rise in violent crime in towns with populations under 10,000. Those places had a 5.5 percent increase in homicides, a 1.4 percent increase in rapes and a 3.9 percent increase in robberies.

The F.B.I. report did not specify the overall number of crimes in these areas, which generally have far fewer incidents than larger cities. Crimes in these areas had a minimal impact on national percentages.

“It’s hard to make a lot of sense about the numbers,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “Generally, smaller areas have low homicide rates, so a small increase could create a large percentage increase.”

Professor Fox said the economy rarely affected the national crime rate because many of the people who typically commit serious crimes were only tangentially connected to the greater economy.

“Serious criminal behavior is so intensely concentrated in pockets of the nation that the kids who are committing crimes are usually not part of the factory layoff, they’re not affected by the credit freeze or failing mortgages,” said Frank Zimring, a criminologist at University of California, Berkeley.

New policing technologies allow law enforcement agencies to learn about local crime trends in real time and to deploy resources to hot spots. And community efforts to cut down on crime with after-school programs and other social services probably have a bigger impact on crime than the economy in general, Professor Kennedy said.

But he also emphasized that interpreting national crime statistics demanded humility.

“Anybody who tells you they know exactly what’s going on here is lying,” he said.
GRAPH at this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/us/02fbi.html?scp=1&sq=crime%20rates&st=cse

Posted by lois at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2009

A Racial Shift in Drug-Crime Prisoners Fewer Blacks and More Whites, Says Sentencing Project

A Racial Shift in Drug-Crime Prisoners
Fewer Blacks and More Whites, Says Sentencing Project
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 15, 2009; Page A04

For the first time since crack cocaine sparked a war on drugs 20 years ago, the number of black Americans in state prisons for drug offenses has fallen sharply, while the number of white prisoners convicted for drug crimes has increased, according to a report released yesterday.

The D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported that the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses had fallen from 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005, a 22 percent decline. In that period, the number of white drug offenders rose steadily, from about 50,000 to more than 72,000, a 43 percent increase. The number of Latino drug offenders was virtually unchanged at about 51,000.

The findings represent a significant shift in the racial makeup of those incarcerated for drug crimes and could signal a gradual change in the demographics of the nation's prison population of 2 million, which has been disproportionately black for decades. Drug offenders make up about a quarter of the prison population.

The Sentencing Project report and other experts said the numbers could reflect several factors, including an increased reliance by prosecutors and judges on prison alternatives such as drug courts and a shift in police focus to methamphetamines, which are used and distributed mostly by white Americans. In addition, the report said, crack use and arrests have declined steadily since the 1990s.

The report relied heavily on data compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and covered six years, ending in 2005, the last year the bureau broke down the state prison population by race and drug offense.

Maryland and Virginia authorities said the racial breakdown of prisoners incarcerated in their states for drug offenses was not available. But the racial makeup of their overall prison populations had not changed significantly over that period, they said.

African American drug offenders, who have been convicted most often for dealing and possessing crack cocaine, still made up a disproportionate share of drug offenders in state prisons, 45 percent in 2005. That was down from nearly 58 percent in 1999. Black Americans make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population.
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The number of white drug offenders in state prisons rose from 20 percent to 29 percent, and Latino prisoners made up 20 percent of such inmates.

"I have no doubt that crystal meth explains some of the white increase, but I'm not ready to say it's the reason for all of the white increase," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which opposes stiff penalties for nonviolent drug crimes. "It's also hard to imagine that [drug courts] are not having some effect. Most drug courts are in urban areas where African Americans live."

Twenty percent of white inmates used methamphetamines in the month before they were arrested, compared with 1 percent of black inmates, according to interviews conducted in the nation's 14,500 state prisons and 3,700 federal prisons.

Drug courts offer nonviolent offenders the option of undergoing rigorous substance-abuse treatment and criminal rehabilitation or going to jail. There are more than 2,000 such courts in operation, mostly in cities with large black communities ravaged by violence associated with crack cocaine. White offenders also are increasingly winding up in drug courts for abusing methamphetamines.

Mauer also hypothesized that drug dealers might have shifted from open-air crack cocaine markets to dealing indoors, making them harder for police to catch. And he speculated that because so many African American men have been incarcerated, there are fewer on the street to be arrested.

But James E. Felman, co-chairman of the Sentencing Committee for the American Bar Association, said that in Tampa, where he practices law, black suspects are still being regularly arrested on crack cocaine charges and being handed out long sentences.

"I can't second-guess their study, but I haven't seen a change," Felman said. "Maybe we're getting smarter on crime in some states. That could be part of it."

David B. Muhlhausen, a senior policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said stronger police enforcement of methamphetamine trafficking and use, coupled with treatment options mostly for urban crack cocaine offenders, probably caused the shift. "There is some data out there that suggests that drug courts and drug treatments reduce recidivism," he said. "If you take the less serious offenders and put them into programs other than prison it would be a benefit to society."

The war on drugs began in 1986, when Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act to combat violence associated with the crack cocaine trade. Lawmakers were prompted by the death of University of Maryland basketball player Len Bias, who they mistakenly thought had died from ingesting crack. Bias overdosed on powder cocaine.

Last year, then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) joined several of his colleagues in saying that his support for the legislation was a mistake. The law contributed to the incarceration of more than a half-million people in state and federal prisons for drug offenses, compared with the 40,000 jailed for the same offenses in 1980.

According to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics last year, 7.2 million people are under prison supervision, as inmates, parolees and probationers, at a cost of about $45 billion per year.

California, which has one of the nation's largest prison populations, farmed out 170,000 inmates to private prisons in as far away as Tennessee in 2006 to relieve costs and has relaxed its penal code to relieve prison overcrowding.

Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the record incarceration might be worth the cost. "As the number of people under correctional supervision goes up, crime goes down," he said. Conservative estimates put the annual cost of violent crime at about $17 billion, Sedgwick said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/14/AR2009041401775.html
Report on-line: http://sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cdp_raceanddrugs.pdf

Posted by lois at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2009

JPI: Violent Crime Fell in 2008; Prisons and jails experienced less growth than previous years

Violent Crime Fell in 2008; Prisons and jails experienced less growth than previous years
Justice Policy Institute: January 14, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Violent crime in the United States fell by 3.5 percent and property crimes fell by 2.5 percent in the first half of 2008, according to an analysis released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The analysis, which is based on the FBI Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, finds that this drop in crime came at a time when state corrections spending continued to grow, although at a lower rate than the previous year, and when the prison and jail rates also continued to grow, also at lower rates than in previous years.

According to the analysis, violent and property offenses were down across U.S. cities of all sizes in the first six months of 2008. From 2005-2006, violent crime had increased slightly (1.9 percent), while prison and jail populations also grew (by 2 and 2.5 percent, respectively). However, as the growth rate of prisons and jails has slowed, the violent crime rate declined as well, down 1.4 percent from 2006 to 2007.

"The drop in violent crime is good news for public safety," said JPI Executive Director Tracy Velázquez . "The question policymakers must answer is why prison and jail growth continues despite drops in violent crime. This suggests that more people are being locked up for nonviolent offenses or more people are being returned to jail or prison because of revocations of probation or parole. In both these cases, officials need to look at whether there are ways to improve or expand programs that help people succeed under community supervision, while preserving public safety."

The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based policy group that promotes fair and rational justice policies, cautions that no single factor can explain changes in crime across the nation, or within a jurisdiction. JPI has assembled key findings from these new crime and prison surveys to put the new figures in their appropriate context. "This data also confirms that increasing incarceration is not necessarily the best way to preserve public safety," Velázquez added. "For the greatest return on investment, policymakers should focus on increasing spending at the front end, such as in education and job training, as well as more and better treatment and services at the 'back end' to help people who are diverted from prison or jail or who are re-entering the community."
An analysis at this URL:
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/uploa/09-01_FAC_FBIUCR2008_PS.pdf

Posted by lois at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2008

Study reports murders by Black teenage men rise

"Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates."

December 29, 2008
Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NY Times
The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

The increase coincided with a rise in the number of murders involving guns, Dr. Fox said. The number of young blacks who were victims of murder also rose in this period.

Murder rates around the country are far below the record highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a crack epidemic spawned violent turf battles.

“Regrettably, as the nation celebrated the successful fight against violent crime in the 1990s, we grew complacent and eased up on our crime-fighting efforts,” the authors said.

The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity in violent crime, Dr. Fox said.

But Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

Conservative criminologists place greater emphasis on the breakdown of black families, rather than cuts in government programs, in explaining the travails of black youths.

Much of the increase, experts say, is a product of gang activity, in midsize and large cities.

“The aggregate national murder rate since 2000 has been impressively flat — not to say there haven’t been fluctuations in individual cities,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. “But when you see a spike in a city,” he said, as in Chicago recently, “it very often involves young black males shooting other young black males.”

Dr. Blumstein said that while federal cuts might have contributed to the rise in murders by black teenagers, “I think there are much more endemic problems going on.”

“In the inner city, you have large numbers of kids with no future, hanging out together with a great emphasis on their street credibility,” he said. “They’ll go to great lengths to avenge an insult.” Many of these teenagers do not stay in school, let alone join the Boys Clubs or other after-school programs.

The heightened attention to security after the 9/11 attacks might, paradoxically, have contributed to a decline in crime-fighting.

“One problem we faced was a disinvestment in policing in the post-2001 environment,” said Chief Edward A. Flynn of the Milwaukee police, who served from 2003 to 2006 as secretary of public safety in Massachusetts. “I witnessed homeland security become the monster that ate criminal justice,” Chief Flynn said, as money went to security equipment and communications and the number of police officers fell.

To fight violent crime, Chief Flynn said, the police must be a visible presence in neighborhoods with high crime rates.

From 2000 to 2007, according to the report, murders in Milwaukee by whites ages 14 to 24 rose by 4 percent, while those by blacks rose by 62 percent.

This year, Chief Flynn’s first leading the department, he deployed new teams of officers to the most violent neighborhoods, having them patrol on foot and bicycles, while federal agencies helped bring down some large gangs. The number of murders this year — 70 as of last Friday — is down one-third from last year and is the lowest since 1985.

Still, Chief Flynn said, “any improvements will be temporary unless there’s more investment in the futures of our young people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29homicide.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2008

Justice Policy Institute Report: Moving Target: A Decade of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex

The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a new report this week examining the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)--the relationship between government and private interests that use imprisonment, policing, and surveillance as a solution to social, political, and economic problems. Moving Target: A Decade of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex, examines the progress of reform 10 years after Critical Resistance first launched its efforts to dismantle the PIC. The report underscores:

Despite crime rates at 30-year lows, the criminal justice system has under its control more people than ever.

* More than seven million people live their lives under the control of the criminal justice system in the United States.
* More than seven million people live their lives under the control of the criminal justice system in the United States.
* Spending on the criminal justice system, including police, corrections, the judiciary, has increased 64 percent between 1996 and 2005 to a total of $213 billion.
* The prison system disproportionately impacts communities of color. African Americans and Hispanics make up one third of the U.S. population but makeup 61 percent of the imprisoned population.
* Incarceration rates continue to increase whether crime rates are up or down.

Economic incentives encourage the growth of prisons and support increased surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment.

* Private Prisons: Corrections Corporation of America's stock price has been steadily rising. CCA recently posted a $35 million profit in the last quarter of 2007, up from $32 million in the same period in 2006.
* Prison Industries: Federal Prison Industries, a corporation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has an online catalogue of merchandise for purchase by other federal agencies, including office furniture and clothing. State prison industries employed 56,000 people in prison in 1999 and, according to research published in Labor Studies Journal in 2002, generated $3 billion in sales and $67 million in profits for the states.
* Private Industry in Prison: In 1979, Congress established the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program to authorize private companies to employ people who are held behind bars and to execute contracts. Companies frequently pay people in prison below minimum wage for these "low-skilled" jobs and prisons garnish their wages further by charging for room and board. This process ensures that resources are pumped back into prisons and that individuals see little of their earnings.
* Industry for Surrounding Communities: Although public officials will often claim that prisons will bring jobs to rural or economically depressed areas, actually there is often little or no economic improvement or revitalization of the community.

Investments in policing and surveillance have increased, thereby widening the gateway to the criminal justice system.

* Although local police still receive the majority of funding, increases at the federal level are the most dramatic. Between 1982 and 2005, federal expenditures on police protection have increased 945.1 percent, from $2.15 billion in 1982 to $22.5 billion in 2005.
* Law enforcement agencies have significantly increased their surveillance capacity and presence in certain areas: in just three years the number of police departments using video cameras increased 15 percentage points. In 2000, 45 percent of local police departments regularly used video cameras. By 2003, 60 percent regularly operated video cameras, and an estimated 48,800 in-car cameras were in use.
* Cop-watching groups are increasing and becoming more organized in cities across the counties as a way to monitor police behaviors.
* Specialized police, particularly in schools, has also increased dramatically. In 1999, 54.1 percent of students ages 12 to18 reported the use of security guards and/ or assigned police officers at school, compared to 67.9 percent in 2005.

The prison industrial complex relies on the criminalization of certain actions to thrive.

* Federalization of certain offenses: The U.S. has added one new federal crime to the books every week for the past 7 years. This increase in crimes has directly added to the federal prison system, which has grown at triple the rate of state prison populations.

* War on Drugs: The war on drugs is increasingly waged with paramilitary-style tactics. In the past 20 years, there has been a 1,400 percent increase in the total number of SWAT team deployments.

* Criminalizing Poverty: More cities are relying on policies that are meant to address "quality of life crimes" by having a zero tolerance approach to behaviors such as panhandling, loitering, and "camping." A report in 2006 that surveyed 224 cities around the country on their laws involving the criminalization of homelessness and found that 27 percent of cities prohibited sitting or lying in certain public places and 43 percent prohibited begging in certain places.

* Criminalization of Immigration: The number of USBP agents nearly tripled between 1990 and 2005. In FY 2006 alone, 1,500 more agents were added. Since 1995, the number of people held by ICE in prisons and jails has increased more than 200 percent.

Media messages, public opinion, social policy, and government agencies legitimize the criminalization of certain behaviors to the benefit of the prison industrial complex.

* Crime and Public Safety: The frequency with which media reports crime does not fluctuate with actual crime rates. In 1994 when the violent crime rate was at its peak, there were more than 2,500 media crime stories. But as the violent crime rate continued to fall, the number of crime stories continued to fluctuate for the next 10 years, regardless of trends in violent or property offenses.

* Criminalization of Poverty: Researchers have found that television media relies on stereotypical assumptions about poverty and the symptoms of poverty (crime, drug use, mental illness) by linking those symptoms to visual cues and language ("abandoned house" or "drug-infested"). In one study, of the 239 news stories that mentioned symptoms of poverty, approximately 147 stories showed crime, drugs, and gangs as a manifestation of poverty.

* Criminalization of Immigration: Public opinion polls document public fear about Latino immigrants coming to the United States not to commit a terrorist act but to take jobs and use services typically guaranteed to U.S. residents, and to commit crimes. This is despite research which shows that while the number of undocumented immigrants increased 57 percent from 1990 to 2000, crime rates plummeted to some of the lowest in U.S. history.

Communities of color and people living in poverty are overwhelmingly disproportionately affected by the prison industrial complex.

* Data shows that in 2002, 8.5 percent of whites used illicit drugs, compared to 9.7 percent of African Americans. However, African Americans are admitted to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.

* Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that 83.5 percent of people in jail in 2002 earned less than $2,000 per month prior to arrest.

* People of color are disproportionately affected by poverty and, thus are also more likely to be imprisoned. African Americans made up about 13 percent of the general population but approximately 22 percent of the people living in poverty and 40 percent of people in prisons and jails in 2006.

The report concludes that advocates must be just as innovative and flexible as the prison industrial complex in order to dismantle the system, while resisting so-called reforms that inadvertently expand the reach of the criminal justice system. Positive social investments in education, employment, mental health services, and substance abuse treatment are cost effective means of creating strong communities
Find the report here:
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-09_REP_MovingTargetCR10_AC-PS.pdf

Posted by lois at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2008

Violent Crime Fell in 2007; Areas with lower incarceration rates experienced greater crime reductions

Violent Crime Fell in 2007; Areas with lower incarceration rates experienced greater crime reductions
Monday, September 15, 2008
Justice Policy Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Violent crime in the United States fell by 1.4 percent in 2007, according to an analysis released today by the Justice Policy Institute. The analysis, which is based on findings in the 2007 FBI Uniform Crime Report released today, finds that the drop in crime came at a time when the prison and jail growth rates fell from previous years. The analysis concluded that regions with the lowest incarceration rates also experienced the largest drops in violent crime.

The number of violent and property crimes fell in three of the four regions of the country. The northeast region experienced the greatest drop in violent crime, and also has the lowest incarceration rates in the country. The southern region has the highest incarceration rates and witnessed a rise in violent crimes--the only part of the country to not experience a drop in crime. Furthermore, as the growth rates of prisons and jails fell, the violent crime rate fell as well, possibly indicating that lowering the number of people imprisoned can be an effective way to increase public safety.

"The data clearly demonstrates that the use of incarceration as a means of increasing public safety is a failed public policy," said Sheila Bedi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. "This data underscores that investments in education, employment and housing are what make communities safer."

The Uniform Crime Report also reinforces statistics around youth crime and suggests that punitive practices aimed at youth should be abandoned for more effective alternatives. According the UCR, adults are responsible for the majority of violent offenses, representing 84 percent of all violent crime arrests.

For a useful two page analysis with tables go to:
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-09_FAC_FBIUCR2007_AC-PS.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2008

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

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.

Related Articles at the URL below

Interpreting the Largest ICE Raid in U.S. History: A Personal Account

After Iowa Raid, Families in Limbo

Immigration Raids Lead U.S. to a Moral, Legal Crisis
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a13e17407782c1d2b32067b91183ed1d

Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

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.”

(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.)

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.When buses carrying the first of a planned 1,500 inmates arrive in the city's Woods Run section this week at what is formally called State Correctional Institution-Pittsburgh, no tour guide will point out the Victorian ironwork curlicues or the neoclassical cornices in the masonry.

SCI-Pittsburgh's unexpected reopening, after closing in 2005, is a response to an emergency.

"If you say, 'Am I surprised?' Yeah, we are," Secretary of Corrections Jeffrey Beard said. "We wouldn't have closed it if we knew we were going to have to open it in two years."
Faced with an inmate population that is already 5,000 over capacity and growing at 200 a month, Beard said the state has little choice but to reopen the prison. That will bring the state prison total to 27.

That's only the beginning. Beard has asked the Legislature to fund construction of three new prisons and expand several existing facilities. The cost: $658 million, plus $80 million in annual operating costs added to the department's $1.6 billion budget.

Yet Beard insists building prisons is the wrong way to fight crime. "I'm convinced that this is not the best way to do it. From a public safety perspective, what we're doing is not the best thing," he said.So Beard, who got his start in the department 35 years ago as a psychological administrator, is trying to persuade lawmakers to adopt reforms he claims would better deal with crime and reduce inmate population in the bargain.

He points to New York, which trimmed its prison population 11 percent between 2000 and 2005, faster than any other state in the country.

Beard would like Pennsylvania to emulate the Empire State, which grants inmates early release for completing job-training programs and has put 23,000 drug offenders through a special court system that sentences them to treatment, not hard time.

The secretary has allies. One is House Speaker Dennis O'Brien, R-Philadelphia, who is readying a bill with early-release provisions. It also would set state guidelines to expedite parole once inmates have served their minimum sentences.

"It's not something that's going to happen overnight, but I think if we start doing things in a more thoughtful way, if we try to be smart on crime rather than just locking people up ... we might not have to keep building prisons," Beard said.

Pennsylvania's inmate population rose 15 percent between 2000 and 2005, third-fastest behind Florida and North Carolina among the 10 states with the biggest prison populations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Prison populations in neighboring New York, New Jersey and Maryland declined over that period, and held steady in Delaware and Ohio. West Virginia's increased.

The state is not locking up more violent criminals.

In 2000, the state's prisons held 20,352 convicts guilty of what the FBI calls "Part I" crimes, including murder, rape, assault, robbery and burglary. In 2006, they held 20,349 -- actually three fewer "Part I" inmates. The more than 7,600 inmates prisons added over that time were mostly people convicted of nonviolent "Part II" offenses -- including drug crimes.The rest are parole violators, and most of them are not sent back to prison for committing a new crime, but for so-called technical violations, such as failing a drug test or skipping a meeting with a parole officer.Of the 5,434 parolees recommitted to prison in fiscal 2006, 70 percent were sent back for technical violations, according to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.

From 1940 to 1980, the state's inmate population hovered around 7,000.

So flat were incarceration rates, and for so long, Carnegie Mellon University professor Alfred Blumstein published a paper in 1973 positing a "theory of the stability of punishment."
Blumstein hypothesized that inmate populations were stable because societies have a limit to how many people they are willing to see locked up. The criminal justice system, he said, maintained equilibrium by paroling convicts when prisons got too full.
While Blumstein was formulating his theory, the public got other ideas. Increasingly concerned about rising crime rates and lax judges, voters started demanding tougher sentences.

Legislatures delivered. The Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission was formed in 1978, part of a movement across the country to standardize and toughen punishments.

Combined with President Nixon's call to combat illegal narcotics -- the beginning of the war on drugs -- it was enough to upend Blumstein's equilibrium theory.

Prison populations in Pennsylvania and nationwide started creeping up. They never stopped.

Pennsylvania's inmate population, now more than 45,000, has grown every year since 1976.

"What I've come to appreciate later is the fact that you have people who you don't mind punishing," Blumstein said.

Instead of being reserved for violent criminals, prisons increasingly are holding pens for drug dealers and addicts.

Murderers accounted for 21 percent of state prison inmates in 1980, according to statistics from the Department of Corrections. Less than half a percent -- 311 out of 8,243 inmates -- were behind bars for drug crimes then.Now more than 9,200 are in for drug crimes, making them the biggest group at 20 percent of the inmate population. Murderers are second at 16 percent.

New York once had the nation's strictest drug laws. People caught selling 2 ounces of heroin or cocaine faced sentences of 15 years to life -- the same sentence they would have gotten for murder. But softening those laws and refocusing on treatment programs lowered the number of drug convicts behind bars from 23,000 a decade ago to 14,000 now.

Martin Horn, secretary of parole and corrections for New York City and Beard's predecessor in Pennsylvania, said people should consider whether tax money is best spent on locking up nonviolent criminals.

"A tax dollar can only be spent once, and you can either spend it on prisons, or you can spend it on roads and bridges," Horn said.

Posted by lois at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

"Impacts of Jail Expansion in New York State: A Hidden Burden"

"Impacts of Jail Expansion in New York State: A Hidden Burden" by Dana Kaplan, Center for Constitutional Rights. May 2007
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/CCR_NYS_Jail_Report.pdf
An excellent, comprehensive report with includes important race-based analysis and recommendations to alternatives to jail building includes findings that that:

Between 1999 and 2006, the New York state prison population had dropped from 71,000 to 62,928 people, a decrease of 8 percent in less than a decade. Despite the decrease in the prison population, the combined capacity of jails in upstate and suburban New York increased by 20.
Jail construction has cost counties an estimated $1 billion, raising local property taxes in some instances as much as 40 percent and diverting money away from social services.
The growth in the number of people incarcerated in jails has not been caused by an increase in crime or by an increase in population-rather, it has been caused by the expansion mandates issued by the SCOC and new arrest and detention policies, including arrest policies for low-level offenses and misdemeanors; a rising number of mentally ill people in jail; system inefficiencies; and the use of local jails to hold those detained by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

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

April 21, 2007

VT: Officials try to solve 'unsustainable' prison costs

Rutland Herald, Rutland, VT

Officials try to solve 'unsustainable' prison costs
April 20, 2007

By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER ‹ The problem has been clear for years. The number of Vermonters in custody or under supervision of the state's corrections system has been growing at a rapid rate, causing prison overcrowding and an expense the state will have trouble supporting, according to officials.

While changes have been made to try and address the issue, the results have been slow in coming, frustrating lawmakers and officials.

At a meeting Thursday, leaders of the judicial, executive and legislative branches of state government reaffirmed their commitment to do something about the problem. And they enlisted the help of the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan policy research organization that has helped other states in that effort.

"Costs continue to rise at very rapid rates," Gov. James Douglas said. "There is clearly more we need to do."

Some changes to state law in recent years are promising, although it may be some time before their full impact is felt, said Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington, chairman of the judiciary committee.

For instance, one problem has been offenders being returned to prison for violating requirements of their release, but not committing new crimes. So the state has put in place "graduated sanctions" or variable punishments that stop short of prison for some offenders.

And limiting how long nonviolent offenders are on probation has helped lower the number of released offenders in that system by roughly 2,000.

But implementing other recommendations of study groups has been tougher. The state is ready to build another work camp to house low-risk offenders, but has had trouble finding a town willing to host such a facility.

"We are working on citing the second work camp," Douglas said. "It has been more challenging than we anticipated."

It is also difficult to build housing for former inmates, and some offenders remain in prison because they have nowhere to go on the outside.

Although a study recommended putting 400 offenders under electronic surveillance, freeing up prison space, only about 30 are in the program, Sears said. The Legislature had approved 100 such slots.

The number of people in Vermont prisons, or being shipped to private out-of-state facilities at state expense, continues to grow and the corrections budget is expected to be roughly $128 million this year. That is significantly more than the state spends on higher education.

In 10 years, the state's incarceration rate has increased 73 percent, while violent crime has increased 2 percent. Property crimes have dropped 31 percent, said Michael Thompson, director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments.

Meanwhile, the national incarceration rate went up only 19 percent, he added.

There are now more than 2,000 offenders incarcerated in Vermont's corrections system.

But there are also hopeful signs, officials said. For one thing, Vermont's extremely low crime rate results in a low incarceration rate overall. Something needs to be done, said Rep. William Lippert, D-Hinesburg, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, "It's frankly unsustainable in terms of the cost to state government," he said.

But Lippert added that he is hopeful that with the commitment of the leaders at Thursday's meeting the Justice Center can help Vermont reverse the trend of prison population as Connecticut did.

"We have been caught between two pressures," Lippert said. "One of which is to get tough on crime."

He said that is not necessarily a bad thing, for instance in the case of strengthening drunk driving laws and domestic violence awareness.

"Simultaneously we have the pressure of growing costs," Lippert said. Other states, including Connecticut, have discovered that public safety can be improved while fewer people are put in prison, Lippert said.

For instance, Thompson's research shows there may not be a correlation between incarceration rates and improved public safety, Lippert said. The very fact that many Vermont offenders are housed out of state could be helpful, Thompson said.

That is because lowering the prison population in states that use local facilities can take time to save money because more prisons already exist. In Vermont, a lower population of inmates would mean almost immediate savings.

"There is an interesting opportunity it presents," Thompson said. "For every bed out of state you save, it is instant cash back into the coffers."

President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, said another place the state should examine is how it deals with nonviolent offenders.

"Vermont has an unusually low number of criminal offenders behind bars and a high number of substance abusers, folks who need mental health services and young men who had difficulty learning to read," he said. "We are not talking about serial killers and rapists."

"I find it extremely disappointing we haven't made more progress," Shumlin said.

Matthew Valerio, the state's defender general, said it is a hopeful sign that the governor, legislative leaders, three justices of the Vermont Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Paul Reiber, and many corrections and law enforcement officials attended the meeting Thursday.

"This can be an important help if we can get some momentum for change," he said.

The state has already started ‹ and will do more, said Speaker of the House Gaye Symington, D-Jericho.

"We have done solid work in Vermont," she said. "There is some traction here for building on what we have done."

At the same time, few involved in the process are under any illusion about the difficultly of making changes needed to lower the prison population. Commissioner of Corrections Robert Hofmann said all three branches of state government, as well as local municipalities and law enforcement officials and others have to work together to make those changes.

"It's like juggling flaming Rubik's Cubes," Hofmann said.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS03/7042
00348/1004/NEWS03

Posted by lois at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2007

Jason Siedenberg's response to reports of "surge in violence" and the Police Executive Research Forum: "Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge "

Response of Jason Ziedenberg, Executive Director, The Justice Policy Institute to reports of “Violent Crime Upsurge” reported in the NY Times and other newspapers.
NY Times article follows Jason’s letter)
-----------------------------------------
March 10, 2007
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
RE: “Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge,” March 9, 2007.
The Police Executive Research Forum’s (PERF) survey of 2-year crime trends in 56 jurisdictions—something that led them to conclude that there is an “alarming” trend of rising violent crime—needs to be put into context.

According to an analysis by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, and the National Center on Juvenile Justice, it is simply “too soon to tell” if the relatively small increase in crime seen nationally represent a long-term national trend. For example, the violent crime arrest rate for youth under age 18 grew by one percent in the last full-years survey from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To put that change in context, the country would have to see the same increase for 19 more years before we would return the scale of violence seen a decade ago. Surveys by the U.S. Department of Justice show that, an American's chancesof being the victim of a violent crime are still lower than at any point since the 1970s.

There is no way to know if the 56 jurisdictions surveyed by PERF are representative of national trends. Criminologists use national surveys by the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation because the data reported there is subject to some quality control mechanisms. PERF’s survey also shows that, over the last two years, most places reported some mixed pattern of rising and falling violent crime.

Any increase in violence, anywhere, is a reason for concern. While PERF and the U.S. Conference of Mayor have used this small change in crime as justification for increased federal funds for policing, research also shows that lowering unemployment, increasing wages and increasing graduation rates can also lower crime rates.
Jason Ziedenberg
Executive Director
The Justice Policy Institute
1003 K Street, NW, Ste #500
Washington, DC, 20001
website: www.justicepolicy.org
----------------------------------
March 9, 2007, NY Times
Violent Crime in Cities Shows Sharp Surge
By KATE ZERNIKE
Violent crime rose by double-digit percentages in cities across the country over the last two years, reversing the declines of the mid-to-late 1990s, according to a new report by a prominent national law enforcement association.
While overall crime has been declining nationwide, police officials have been warning of a rise in murder, robbery and gun assaults since late 2005, particularly in midsize cities and the Midwest. Now, they say, two years of data indicates that the spike is more than an aberration.

“There are pockets of crime in this country that are astounding,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which is releasing the report on Friday. “It’s gone under the radar screen, but it’s not if you’re living on the north side of Minneapolis or the south side of Los Angeles or in Dorchester, Mass.”
Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.
“There’s a mentality among some people that they’re living some really violent video game,” said Chris Magnus, the police chief in Richmond, Calif., north of San Francisco, where homicides rose 20 percent and gun assaults 65 percent from 2004 to 2006. “What’s disturbing is that you see that the blood’s real, the death’s real.”
The research forum surveyed 56 cities and sheriffs’ departments — as small as Appleton Wis., about 100 miles northwest of Milwaukee, and as large as Chicago and Houston. Over all, from 2004 to 2006, homicides increased 10 percent and robberies 12 percent.
Aggravated assault, which is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by a means likely to produce severe injury or death, according to an F.B.I. Web site, increased at a relatively modest 3 percent, but aggravated assaults with guns rose 10 percent. And some cities saw far higher spikes.
Homicides increased 20 percent or more in cities including Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Hartford, Memphis and Orlando, Fla. Robberies went up more than 30 percent in places including Detroit, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Milwaukee. Aggravated assaults with guns were up more than 30 percent in cities like Boston, Sacramento, St. Louis and Rochester.
Seventy-one percent of the cities surveyed had an increase in homicides, 80 percent had an increase in robberies, and 67 percent reported an increase in aggravated assaults with guns.
This study relies on numbers from cities, rather than yearly F.B.I. totals, which are typically released in the fall. The group collected similar numbers last year, and those numbers were largely borne out by the data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Police chiefs say the trends in aggravated assaults are particularly alarming. They are often considered a better gauge of violence than homicides; the difference between the two is often poor marksmanship or good medical care.
“Had we not had some of the trauma rooms we have here in Rochester, our homicide numbers would be higher,” said Mayor Robert Duffy, who served as a police chief for seven years, before becoming mayor two years ago.
While murder rates hit 11-year highs in places like Boston, police officials note that they are not seeing the highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crack cocaine fueled spikes in homicides, particularly in large cities. Some cities like Denver and Washington had declines in homicides.
Still, the overall trend is mirrored in other places not covered by the report. New York City, for example, which had enjoyed remarkable declines and seemed immune to the rising murder rate elsewhere in 2005, reported a 10 percent increase in homicides in 2006. In Chicago, which had been cited as another model of declining violence, homicides rose 4 percent from 2004 to 2006.
Police officials say the violence tends to happen among young men in their late teens and early to mid-20s. In some cases, it is random. But in many cases, it is among people who know one another, or between gangs, as a way to settle disputes. Arguments that 20 years ago would have led to fistfights, police chiefs say, now lead to guns.
“There’s really no rhyme or reason with these homicides,” said Edward Davis, the police commissioner in Boston. “An incident will occur involving disrespect, a fight over a girl. Then there’s a retaliation aspect where if someone shoots someone else; their friends will come back and shoot at the people that did it.”
In Richmond, Chief Magnus said he would often go to the scene of a crime and discover that 30 to 75 rounds had been fired. “It speaks to the level of anger, the indiscriminate nature of the violence,” he said.
“I go to meetings, and you start talking to some of the people in the neighborhoods about who’s been a victim of violence, and people can start reciting: ‘One of my sons was killed, one of my nephews,’ ” he said. “It’s hard to find people who haven’t been touched by this kind of violence.”
Many chiefs blame the federal government for cutting back on police programs that they say helped reduce crime in the 1990s. But they also say the problem is economic and social. “We seem to be dealing with an awful lot of people who have zero conflict-resolution skills,” Chief Magnus said.
In Rochester, Mr. Duffy said his city had the state’s highest dropout rate — half of all students drop out— and the highest child poverty rate, with 40 percent of children under 18 living below poverty level.
“There’s a direct correlation between the kids who drop out of our high schools who get involved in selling drugs and who end up in homicides,” Mr. Duffy said.
As a police chief, Mr. Duffy brought in programs that had reduced crime in other cities: a project cease-fire to end gun violence, a Compstat data collection program to identify the areas of most stubborn crime. But it has not helped.
“We’re doing all the right things consistently, but we have not seen relief,” he said. “It takes much more than law enforcement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/us/09crime.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2007

MA: Springfield's violent crime declines 16%

Springfield's violent crime declines 16%
Sunday, March 04, 2007

By PATRICK JOHNSON

SPRINGFIELD - Violent crime dropped 16 percent in Springfield last year, but Police Commissioner Edward A. Flynn said it is still an uphill effort before Springfield is no longer seen as a dangerous place.

Preliminary FBI numbers for 2007 indicate crime rose on average by 4 percent nationwide.

The city's 2006 numbers also contrast with a November publication by Morgan Quitno Press, a private publishing company in Lawrence, Kan., that rated Springfield as the most dangerous city in the state.

Flynn, who questioned the ranking at the time, said Springfield saw a 16 percent drop in violent crime between 2005 and 2006, which is better than the seven cities of comparable size in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, which are considered peer communities.

The two Massachusetts peers, Lowell and Worcester, saw declines of 9 percent and 5 percent.

Boston, with a population of 600,000 or roughly four times that of Springfield, is not included among the peers, but Flynn made a point of comparing the two anyway. Boston's total violent crime rate increased by 11 percent, including 28 percent in the homicide rate.

Flynn also highlighted the 12 percent drop in armed robberies and 19 percent decline in aggravated assaults. The city's homicide rate declined by 17 percent, but that figure is misleading, because the actual numbers, from 18 in 2005 to 15 last year, are relatively small.

Rapes, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts increased between 2 percent and 4 percent, and larcenies remained even. Flynn said the number of armed robberies and assaults involving guns also dropped significantly.

There were 70 fewer robberies involving guns last year, a drop of 26 percent, while there were 37 fewer gun assaults, an 11 percent drop.

The total number of 2,265 violent crimes reported is a seven-year low since 2000, he said.

Violent crimes peaked at 3,470 incidents in 2001 and have been declining each year since, he said.

The department's numbers prior to 2000 are not considered reliable, he said.

Flynn said since taking over the department he has emphasized the collection of reliable crime data to get a clearer picture of what types of crimes are happening and where, and where police resources should be deployed.

He said Springfield's crime statistics in the past may have been inflated, because of a methodology of counting some incidents more than once if multiple offenses took place.

For example, a robbery that ended in homicide would be tallied as two separate crimes - armed robbery and murder.

"Instead of counting spiders, we were counting spider legs," he said.

Flynn said he is going to continue beating the drum that the city is safer than being portrayed so that people will not be afraid to leave their houses or venture downtown.

"There's a subset of people in the community who will reject it and say it's right up there with crop circles," he said.

"This will take time," he said. "People kind of believe what they read in the paper, but they really believe what they see and experience."

Panagore said that tackling crime and problems of dilapidated, abandoned buildings and littered, overgrown lots today will only serve to help Springfield's reputation tomorrow.

"What I say repeatedly is that this stuff takes time. It takes a couple of years," he said. "Over the next couple of years, this steady progress is what we're about."

©2007 The Republican

Posted by lois at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

LA Times: Immigrants Boost Pay, Not Prison Populations, New Studies Show

LA TIMES, 02-28-07
Immigrants boost pay, not prison populations, new studies show
Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says.

By Teresa Watanabe, Times Staff Writer
February 28, 2007

Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.

As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.

"The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration," Peri said. "There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed."

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7% of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.

Both studies are based on U.S. census data, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants. They were released just days before the U.S. Congress is to restart debate on major immigration reform legislation and as numerous states, including Texas, consider harsh measures against illegal migrants.

The authors say their work shows that immigrants clearly benefit U.S. residents and are being unfairly scapegoated for problems they do not cause.

"There are grossly distorted perceptions between what people think about immigrants and the reality," Rumbaut said. "The old bromide that education is the way to reduce prejudice comes into play here."

Immigration hawks, however, took issue with both studies.

Steven Camarota of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies said the wage study, by examining immigrants only in California, failed to consider their effect on the rest of the country. Immigrants working for lower wages in a California factory, for instance, could keep wages down in a competing enterprise staffed by native-born citizens in another state, he said.

Immigrants, who make up one-third of California's labor force, could also be discouraging natives from moving to the state and taking advantage of higher-paying job opportunities, Camarota said.

And, by examining only wage effects, the study failed to address the declining percentage of native-born adults working in California, Camarota said. Their share of the workforce declined from 65% in 2000 to 62% in 2005, one of the lowest in the country, which could be caused by competition from immigrants, he said.

"The idea that immigrants compete only with other immigrants is absurd on its face," he said, adding that no industry in America employs only immigrants.

Peri said, however, that his study's more detailed analysis of California's employment trends showed no displacement of native-born workers. Other studies have shown that immigration has had a negative effect on African American high school dropouts. But those conclusions were rooted in different assessments of whether blacks performed the same work as immigrants, he said.

Of the crime study, Camarota said the U.S. government had failed to systematically collect 2000 Census data on immigration status from prisons and other institutions. The study's foundational data are therefore flawed, he argued.

But Rumbaut defended his study, saying the results were consistent with other research stretching back a century. They include national immigration studies conducted in 1911 and 1994, work by two Princeton economists examining 1980 and 1990 census data and more recent analyses of homicide rates in three border cities.

The co-author of the crime study was Walter A. Ewing, a research associate at the Immigration Policy Center. Among other findings, the study showed that the gap in incarceration rates between native-born and foreign-born men was wider in California. Incarceration rates, which rose the longer an immigrant was in the country, were highest among high school dropouts. Those of Asian descent generally showed lower incarceration rates and higher educational levels than Latinos.

Despite the data, Rumbaut said, many continue to perpetuate images of crime-prone immigrants.

Last year, the study says, President Bush blamed illegal immigrants for bringing crime to their communities, as did the city of Hazleton, Pa., in passing an ordinance barring them from renting homes or working.
The problem of crime in American society today is overwhelmingly a problem of natives, not immigrants," Rumbaut said.

In the wage study, Peri examined immigration flows and wages of California workers between 1960 and 2004 using U.S. Census data.

It found that immigrants did not worsen the job opportunities of natives with similar education and experience during the entire period.

The benefit for native-born workers ranged from a 0.2% wage increase for high school dropouts to 6.7% for those with some college, the study showed.

However, the study found that other immigrants suffered wage declines by as much as 20%.

"The findings would seem to defuse one of the most inflammatory issues for those who advocate measures aimed at 'protecting the livelihood of American citizens,' " the study said.

*
graphs at this url:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-me-immigstudy28feb28,1,4004926.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=1

Posted by lois at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2007

Growth of the U.S. prison industry

Monday, February 19, 2007
Growth of the U.S. prison industry
NEAL PEIRCE-
Syndicated columnist. This column ran in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA)

New York's Eliot Spitzer, the tough ex-prosecutor turned governor, wants a commission to examine closing some of his state's dozens of prisons. Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is pressing for $11 billion in bonds to add 78,000 beds to California's already burgeoning and overtaxed system.

What's going on here?

Partly, it's what both men inherited. New York's prison population peaked at 71,000 inmates in 1999 but has dropped by 8,000 since. Major explanations: dropping crime levels (especially in New York City) and increased efforts to find alternative treatment for nonviolent offenders.

California's prison population, meanwhile, has continued to surge. It's now at 173,000 inmates, an $8 billion yearly bill. Overcrowding and threats of riots are so serious that a senior prison official last year warned of "an imminent and substantial threat to the public.''

One ironic twist: Thirty years ago California's prison system was hailed as America's best, providing education and psychotherapy for offenders. New York, meanwhile, endured the tumultuous Attica prison riot of 1971 and enacted Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's infamous drug laws - widely copied in other states - that swelled prison populations by setting sentences up to life for possessing or selling even minuscule amounts of narcotics.

So why the switch? In 1977, responding to a crime surge, California Gov. Jerry Brown did away with the "indeterminate'' sentencing that gave both judges and parole boards flexibility in deciding when it was safe to release an offender. Rehabilitation and treatment were largely written out of the state prison code; punishment became the sole goal. California's Legislature passed more than 1,000 mandatory prison-sentence measures, topped by the 1994 enactment of the state's famed "three strikes law'' decreeing 25-year-to-life terms for most two-time prior offenders.

New York in recent years has been trying reform. Indeed, as some of the more ferociously severe drug-offense penalties were repealed in 2004, then-Gov. George Pataki could proclaim: "The Rockefeller drug laws will be no more.''

That's not to say that any reform is easy after decades of "lock-em-up'' politics and a "war'' on drugs that's helped drive America's incarceration rates to the highest in the world.

Plus, any governor faces formidable political obstacles trying to pare back America's vast prison-industrial complex. In California, it's the Correctional Peace Officers Association, an astounding 31,000 members strong. Commanding a multimillion-dollar campaign war chest, the union is a major factor in gubernatorial and legislative campaigns. The three-strikes law is its full-employment act.

Former Gov. Gray Davis, whom Schwarzenegger ousted in the 2003 recall election, appeased the union unabashedly. It has more than 2,000 members earning over $100,000 a year; its contract-guaranteed pension benefits are today superior to those of the state university system.

On entering office, Schwarzenegger seemed intent on an independent course, championing rehabilitation and appointing a reform prison director. But when he began secret dealings with the union, his director quit in protest. Schwarzenegger still talks of measures to help prisoners straighten out their lives (mental-health counseling and life-skills training, for example). But his latest budget cuts a voter-mandated drug-treatment program that studies have shown to be highly cost-effective. And his big emphasis now is on bricks and mortar to confine more prisoners - $11 billion for added state prison, county jail and juvenile beds.

In New York, Spitzer also confronts a politically powerful prison guard union, and more - local politicians defending a network of upstate prisons built in recent decades to help offset heavy manufacturing job losses. An example: State Sen. Elizabeth Little, whose Adirondacks district includes 12 prisons and prison camps. "There are over 5,000 corrections officers living in my district,'' she told The New York Times. "In most of these communities, the prisons are the biggest employer.''

Left unsaid in Little's frank assessment: a society in which overwhelmingly white upstate New York communities rely economically on massive incarceration of a heavily black and Hispanic prison population.

Will Spitzer, like Schwarzenegger, eventually retreat from his lofty reform goals? New York state government cries out for systemic reform, and his massive (69 percent) election mandate provides a once-in-a-generation leadership opportunity. On ethics standards and issues like prisons, he's showing a willingness to face down legislators, even fellow Democrats.

It's a bold maneuver, all the more dramatic because Spitzer is specifically including a critical look at today's vast prison establishment and culture - the issue most American politicos fear to even discuss.

Eventually, Spitzer will be obliged to make some compromises on legislation. Yet there's a parallel to Theodore Roosevelt. As William Cunningham, a veteran of two earlier New York administrations, told the Times:

"Roosevelt came in saying he was going to be a reform governor. He immediately got into a fight with Senator Platt, the head of the Republicans, a powerful political boss in the state. History remembers Teddy Roosevelt. You have to be a knucklehead like me to remember Boss Platt.''

Neal Peirce's email address is nrp@citistates.com

Posted by lois at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2007

Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007-2011

Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007-2011. Prepared for the Pew Charitable Trusts by the JFA Institute. February 2007.

http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/PSPP_prison_projections_0207.pdf

By 2011 one in every 178 U.S. residents will live in prison. America will have more than 1.7 million men and women in prison, an increase of more than 192,000 from 2006. That increase could cost taxpayers as much as $27.5 billion over the next five years beyond what they currently spend on prisons.

Among the report’s projections for 2011:

Without policy changes by the states, the nation’s incarceration rate will reach 562 per 100,000, or one of every 178 Americans.
The new inmates will cost states an additional $15 billion for prison operations over the five-year period. Construction of new prison beds will cost as much as $12.5 billion.
Unless Montana, Arizona, Alaska, Idaho and Vermont change their sentencing or release practices, they can expect to see their prison systems grow by one third or more. Similarly, barring reforms, Colorado, Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and South Dakota can expect their inmate populations to grow by about 25 percent.
Connecticut, Delaware and New York are projected to see no change in their prison populations. Maryland will see a 1 percent increase in prison population.
The number of women prisoners is projected to grow by 16 percent, while the male population will increase 12 percent.
Though the Northeast boasts the lowest incarceration rates, it has the highest costs per prisoner, led by Rhode Island ($44,860 per prisoner). Louisiana spends the least per prisoner ($13,009).
State by state projections of the number of men and women incarcerated, crime rates, costs.

Posted by lois at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

Research Shows Prisons Decreasingly Effective in Reducing Crime

Research Shows Prisons Decreasingly Effective in Reducing Crime Wednesday January 31, 2007

NEW YORK, Jan. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Although crime is up in many American cities, lawmakers should think twice before raising penalties and extending prison sentences, advises a study released today by the Vera Institute of Justice, a 45-year-old nonprofit organization that works on safety and justice issues and is headed by Michael Jacobson, who ran New York City's jails and probation system for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

FBI reports of a 3.7 percent nationwide increase in violent crime in the first half of 2006 -- the largest annual increase in 15 years -- may soon have lawmakers calling for tougher measures to protect public safety. However, after surveying the most recent research on the effectiveness of increasing incarceration to reduce crime, Don Stemen, director of research in Vera's Center on Sentencing and Corrections, argues in Reconsidering
Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime that putting more people in prison may not be the most effective solution.

"Thirty years ago, prevailing wisdom was that sending people to prison was the best and only response to rising crime," says Stemen. "But crime is a complex phenomenon, influenced by many factors. Incarceration is just one potential influence, and research shows that increasing incarceration isn't the best or only way to reduce crime."

Instead, Stemen's research review suggests that policymakers consider investing in areas such as policing or education, which show equal or better correlation with lower rates of crime.

"It's always reassuring when empirical evidence supports what one's common sense suggests," says David Keene of the American Conservative Union, the nation's oldest and largest conservative lobbying group. "This study does just that for policymakers and others interested in the question of whether anything worth doing is really worth overdoing," he says.

"The time has come for America to engage in a serious discussion to determine the best way to deal with incarceration," agrees Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of American Target Advertising and a leading conservative voice. "The old ways have failed us."

Little empirical study had been done to confirm or refute the effectiveness of incarceration in reducing crime rates when America began its historic reliance on prisons in the 1970s. Today, conversely, policymakers are faced with a large, complex, and sometimes contradictory body of research. By making sense of this information, Reconsidering Incarceration offers a clear, up-to-date understanding of what works best.

Highlights of the report include:

* Over the past 35 years a 10 percent higher incarceration rate was
associated with a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate, according to the most
reliable research.

* Ever greater rates of incarceration have been subject to diminishing
returns in effectiveness. In some neighborhoods with already high rates
of incarceration, additional increases have correlated with even more
crime than before.

* Government investment in things such as more police, reducing
unemployment, or raising education levels may be more cost effective in
reducing crime. One national study found, for example, that a 10 percent
increase in wages corresponded with a 12 percent drop in property crime
and a 25 percent drop in violent crime.

"This report could not have come at a better time," says Vera's Michael Jacobson. "With crime rates going up in many parts of the country, calls for harsher penalties and more prisons are inevitable. Governors, legislators, and the public need to know that more prison doesn't equal more public safety. You can effectively provide for public safety without overinvesting in prisons."

Between 1993 and 2005, New York City's violent crime rate fell 64 percent. During that time, the number of people sent to prison from the city likewise dropped 47 percent, and its jail population fell 27 percent. Similarly, New York State, which leads the 10 most populous states in violent crime reduction, experienced a 58 percent decline in violent crime between 1993 and 2005. Its incarceration rate also fell during that period by 7.9 percent.

"Removing violent repeat offenders from society obviously makes sense," concludes David Keene, "but the idea of jailing virtually everyone who breaks our laws and throwing them into institutions that are little more than warehouse lock-ups quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns."

A copy of Reconsidering Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime, may be downloaded from Vera's web site at http://www.vera.org/reconsideringincarceration or ordered from the Vera Institute of Justice at (212) 334-1300.

The Vera Institute of Justice is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing safety and justice, promoting fair and efficient policy and practice, and working with leaders of government and civil society to improve the systems people rely upon for safety, security, and justice. Vera is a founding member of the Altus Global Alliance.

Learn more about Vera at http://www.vera.org.
Source: Vera Institute of Justice

Posted by lois at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

NY Times: Op-Ed " The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars"

January 15, 2007, NY Times
Op-Ed Contributor
The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars
By BERNARD E. HARCOURT

Chicago

LAST August, a prison inmate in Jackson, Mich. — someone the authorities described as “floridly psychotic” — died in his segregation cell, naked, shackled to a concrete slab, lying in his own urine, scheduled for a mental health transfer that never happened. Last month in Florida, the head of the state’s social services department resigned abruptly after having been fined $80,000 and is facing criminal contempt charges for failing to transfer severely mentally ill jail inmates to state hospitals.

Ten days ago, the Supreme Court agreed to determine when mentally ill death row inmates should be considered so deranged that their execution would be constitutionally impermissible. The case involves a 48-year-old Navy veteran who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. In the decade leading up to the crime he was hospitalized 14 times for severe mental illness.

According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year.

Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

The graph on the left — based on statistics from the federal Census Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services and Bureau of Justice Statistics — shows the aggregate rate of institutionalization per 100,000 adults in the United States from 1928 to 2000, as well as the disaggregated trend lines for mental hospitalization on the one hand and state and federal prisons on the other.

The numbers include only state and county mental hospitals. There were many more kinds of mental institutions at mid-century, ones for “mental defectives and epileptics” and the mentally retarded, psychiatric wards in veterans hospitals, as well as “psychopathic” and private mental hospitals. If we include residents of those facilities, from 1935 to 1963 the United States consistently institutionalized at rates well above 700 per 100,000 adults — with highs of 778 in 1939 and 786 in 1955. It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

But the graph poses a number of troubling questions: Why did we diagnose deviance in such radically different ways over the course of the 20th century? Do we need to be imprisoning at such high rates, or were we right, 50 years ago, to hospitalize instead? Why were so many women hospitalized? Why have they been replaced by young black men? Have both prisons and mental hospitals included large numbers of unnecessarily incarcerated individuals?

Whatever the answers, the pendulum has swung too far — possibly off its hinges.

It would be naïve, today, to address any of these questions without also considering the impact of imprisonment on crime. One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results.

The effect on crime may not depend on whether the institution is a mental hospital or a prison. Even from a crime-fighting perspective, then, it is time to rethink our prison and mental health policies. A lot more work must be done before proposing answers to those troubling questions. But the first step is to realize that we have been wildly erratic in our approach to deviance, mental health and the prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15harcourt.html graph is at this url

Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

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January 08, 2007

"Incarceration Nation"

The Nation
January 5, 2007 (web only)
Incarceration Nation
Silja J.A. Talvi

Every year, American taxpayers fund an estimated $60 billion for our incarceration system. This system staples together a network of public and corporate-run jails, prisons, pre- and post-release centers, juvenile detention centers and boot camps. All together, these facilities hold well over 2 million human beings, locked away without public oversight or scrutiny.

Yet throwing money at the perceived scourge of criminality in the United States doesn't appear to have had the desired effect: Despite the staggering incarceration statistics, violent crime has actually begun to creep up over the last two years, according to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report.

In the last several years, some signs have emerged of an increasingly organized movement of citizens, family members of the incarcerated, independent-minded judges and correctional or criminal justice experts--who stand in firm opposition to our punitive, nonrehabilitative incarceration system.

Viewed through an optimistic lens, the United States might genuinely be at the beginning of a trend toward real criminal justice reform. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have already paid far too high a price for shortsighted penological policies. Floridian Yraida Guanipa is among them. Guanipa spent the last ten and a half years locked in federal penitentiaries in Florida, locked away from her Miami community, her extended family and two young boys.

Her offense: She agreed to pick up a sealed package for a friend, which turned out to contain cocaine. Although Guanipa had never been arrested before--and had never been a drug user--she was hit with a thirteen-year "drug conspiracy" prison sentence on par with a sentence that a major drug trafficker would have received. Guanipa's good standing in the community, her lack of criminal background and the fact that she had a 1-year-old and a 2-year old had no impact on her sentence.

The story has become sadly familiar to me, particularly as I have spent the last few years corresponding with, meeting and interviewing women like Guanipa in jails and prisons across the country.

In the decade of her imprisonment, Guanipa witnessed two suicides; countless incidents of medical negligence; the brutality of prison retaliation; and the everyday reality of sexual relations between male guards and female inmates.

Guanipa became an outspoken advocate for other prisoners as a self-educated jailhouse lawyer, but most prisoners talk about retreating within themselves to try to survive the ordeal. Concern for collective well-being is difficult, if not impossible, when individual survival is on the line. "Unfortunately, that's what prison does to us," Guanipa explains. "It takes the human feelings out of our body, and we just try to survive."

Tasteless films like Let's Go to Prison notwithstanding, what really goes on in prisons is still a mystery to most Americans, as are the immeasurable collateral consequences of incarceration on families and communities. Arrest and incarceration are woven into the fabric of American life: Today, a black man has one chance in three of ending up in prison at some point in his life, and is more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college.

According to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the US prison and jail population hit a new high of 2,193,798 men and women at the end of 2005, representing a 2.7 percent increase over the previous year. A record number of more than 200,000 women are now doing time behind bars--an estimated 80 percent of whom are mothers. Analysis by the Women's Prison Association has shown that female incarceration has jumped 757 percent since 1977.

More than 95,000 juveniles are also in custody, held in the kinds of facilities that only seem to make their lives more troubled than they were to begin with. As one 14-year-old girl put it to me in Seattle's King County Juvenile Detention Center, "This place just teaches us to be better criminals. It's like a criminal training school."

One in thirty-two US adults are now under some form of correctional supervision. Although Americans only constitute 5 percent of the world's population, one-quarter of the entire world's inmates are contained in our jails and prisons, something that baffles other democratic societies that have typically used prisons as a measure of last resort, especially for nonviolent offenders.

But mass incarceration in America remains a nonissue, largely because of a lack of any serious or effective discourse on the part of our political leaders. At most, election season brings out the kinds of get-tough-on-crime platforms that have already given us misguided Three Strikes and mandatory-minimum sentencing laws.

But there are now a few signs that today's insatiable carceral state might eventually find it harder to find bodies to fill our already dramatically overcrowded facilities. In December, 2006, a federal judge gave Republican Governor Schwarzenegger until June 2007 to devise a real plan to relieve severe overcrowding in California's thirty-three prisons. Designed to hold no more than 81,000 men and women, California's state prison system is overflowing with more than 173,000 inmates who are often crammed in eight-person cells or can be found sleeping on packed-to-capacity gym floors. A New Year's weekend riot at a Chino State Prison involved hundreds of inmates and sent more than two dozen to the hospital. Schwarzenegger has already authorized shipment of California inmates to private prisons in other states as well as more money for building new prisons. Thankfully, this approach has failed to pass muster with the federal court that could step in to order early release of prisoners unless more productive solutions are found to further alleviate overcrowding.

"I think the climate [for reform] has opened up," says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy organization. "The issue is less emotional and politicized right now. "

Part of the reason for the slight climate shift has to do with the fact that taxpayers are growing increasingly tired of throwing money into fiscal sinkhole of multibillion-dollar corrections budgets. (California's corrections budget is a whopping $8.75 billion, yet two-thirds of prisoners still end up back in prison.) And then there is the fact that adult and juvenile violent crime rates have, until recently, been on an overall decline since 1993, and the hysteria generated by the crack cocaine epidemic has finally died down to a dull ebb.

As the public has slowly gained an understanding of serious drug abuse as a health and addiction issue, millions of American voters have signaled their own dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all-punishment model, voting for treatment diversion programs in a number of states, including the highly successful Proposition 36 in California.

Civil rights/liberties organizations ranging from the ACLU to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (the organization was instrumental in reversing convictions resulting from the Tulia, Texas, drug round-ups of primarily black citizens based on the uncorroborated accusations of one police officer), have made it clear that the grossly disproportionate incarceration of people of color and poor people should be an urgent, front-burner issue for the country as a whole.

In December, 2006, the subject of what it might take to dismantle the American carceral system brought some 500 attendees to New York City. The conference, "Punishment: The U.S. Record," was organized by The New School for Social Research. The event brought together the likes of renowned Princeton sociologist Bruce Western, US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Stephen Bright, president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights, in a unified call for radical, systemic change in the criminal justice system.

From Judge Gertner's perspective, this change necessitates a "re-education" of the judiciary, reclaiming their independence in a criminal justice system that has favored strict guidelines over judicial discretion--especially in drug cases--since the passage of the Reagan-era Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, the law that established the 100-to-one crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparity.

With a new Democratic majority in Congress, a number of pending bills do seek to right some of the legislative wrongs of the past. Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has introduced HR 2456, the Crack -Cocaine Equitable Sentencing Act, introduced in 2005 and still in committee, which would equalize the drug-quantity ratio and eliminate the mandatory minimum for simple possession. Even some conservatives have moved forward on criminal justice reform. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions's S 3725, the Drug Sentencing Reform Act, introduced in 2006, would reduce the drug quantity ratio to a twenty-to-one disparity and mandatory sentence for simple possession to one year.

Marie Gottschalk, author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, cautioned progressives to remember that most political leaders have been slow to enact any significant reforms for fear of seeming weak on public safety issues. In some cases, she said, some of the most regressive legislation and leaps in incarceration numbers have actually occurred under Democratic stewardship, as was the case under former California Governor Gray Davis (with his unapologetically strong allegiance to the state's prison guard union, CCPOA) and President Clinton's signing of the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, which severely limited legal recourse for prisoners to appeal and their ability to plead for relief for abuses suffered while incarcerated.

While many people working in corrections take their jobs seriously, abusive or negligent behavior is a fact of prison life, as are sexual exploitation and violence, the use of restraint chairs, and chemical and electric weapons. Racism and race-based housing has contributed to major prison riots; extended use of supermax-style isolation cells; and shoddy and/or life-threatening medical care are all common problems. Add to this the fact that more than half of all prison and jail inmates report struggling with mild to severe mental-health problems, whose periods of incarceration only tend to exacerbate pre-existing problems.

Back at FCI Coleman in Central Florida, the relief that accompanied Guanipa's move to a halfway house last month--and her eventual release to the "free world" six months from now--is tempered by the knowledge of those she's leaving behind to face the day-to-day struggles of prison life. "The hardships we endure here will be part of our lives when we are released," she says.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070122/incarceration_nation

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December 27, 2006

Murders Up In Big Cities

Murders up in New York, other big cities

By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
NEW YORK -- After many years of decline, the number of murders climbed this year in New York and many other major U.S. cities, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places. Among the reasons given: gangs, the easy availability of illegal guns, a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand, and, in Houston at least, an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

In New York, where the city reported 579 homicides through Dec. 24 -- a nearly 10 percent increase from the year before -- the spike is mostly the result of an unusually large number of "reclassified homicides," or those involving victims who were shot or stabbed years ago but did not die until this year. Thirty-five such deaths have been added to this year's toll, compared with an annual average of about a dozen.

At the same time, Police Department spokesman Paul Browne noted that this year's total is only slightly higher than last year's 539 homicides -- the city's lowest death toll in more than 40 years.

Browne blamed the rise in part on the availability of guns, particularly weapons from out of state. The city this year sued dozens of out-of-state gun shops that it says are responsible for many of the illegal weapons on the streets of New York.

In Chicago, homicides through the first 11 months of the year were up 3.3 percent compared with the same period in 2005, reversing a four-year decline. A police spokeswoman said gang violence has been a contributing factor.

In New Haven, Conn., there were 23 homicides as of Tuesday, compared with 15 in 2004 and in 2005. Police Chief Francisco Ortiz said that about half of this year's killings involve young people settling disputes with guns instead of fists.

"They're all struggling with this thing about respect and pride," Ortiz said. "It's about respect. It's about revenge. It's about having a reputation. It's about turf and it's about girls."

Houston police attribute the 15 percent increase in the homicide count to the influx of Katrina evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

"So we expect that to settle," Lt. Murray Smith said. "We're hoping it will go down."

New Orleans, with its post-Katrina exodus, is the only major U.S. city that saw a sharp decline in the number of homicides. There were 154 in New Orleans this year as of Monday, said police spokesman Sgt. Jeffrey Johnson, down from 210 in 2005. But the city was largely empty during the fall and winter of 2005-06, and even now has only about half of its pre-Katrina population of 455,000.

Some cities, like Cincinnati -- which has had 83 homicides so far, up from 79 in 2005 -- posted their highest numbers ever. Others saw their highest death tolls in years.

Oakland, Calif., had 148 homicides as of Wednesday, up 57 percent from last year and the highest in more than a decade. Philadelphia's 2006 homicide total was 403 as of Wednesday, the first time the number has topped 400 in nearly a decade. There were 380 killings in all of 2005.

Philadelphia officials have struggled all year to reduce the violence. In July, Mayor John F. Street gave a televised address in which pleaded with young people: "Lay down your weapons. Do it now. Choose education over violence."

A few cities reported slight decreases in murders. Los Angeles' total was down about 4 percent to 464 homicides through Dec. 23. San Francisco's fell about 15 percent. San Francisco Police Sgt. Steve Mannina said the drop is partly due to increased patrols in violence-prone areas and more overtime approved by the police chief.

The FBI does not release its national crime statistics until several months after the end of the year. The bureau's statistics for the first six months of 2006 showed an increase of 1.4 percent in the number of murders in the first half of 2006 compared with the first six months of 2005.

Andrew Karmen, a criminologist at John Jay College in New York, said that while there are various theories for the drop in murders in New York and other cities in the 1990s, no one knows for sure why it happened. And if they are going up again, no one knows the reason for that, either, he said.

He noted that police departments tend to take credit when the murder rate goes down. "When crime goes up it will be interesting to see whether they will accept responsibility," Karmen said.

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=548400&category=&BCCode=&
newsdate=12/27/2006

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December 19, 2006

FBI Says Violent Crimes Surged in first half of 2006

Reports of violent crimes surged in first half of 2006
National trend seen, FBI says

Boston Globe

By Dan Eggen, Washington Post | December 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A recent rise in violent crime accelerated in the first half of 2006, providing the clearest sign yet that the nation is in the midst of a prolonged increase in murders, assaults, and other violent offenses, the FBI reported yesterday.

Reports of violent crime surged by nearly 4 percent in the first six months of 2006 when compared with the same time period of a year earlier, including a dramatic increase of nearly 10 percent for robberies, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.

The numbers indicated robbery increases for cities of all sizes, including a 13 percent jump for some of the smallest cities, with populations from 10,000 to 24,999. Murders and assault also rose by more than 1 percent, while the number of reported rapes declined slightly.

The results followed a 2.5 percent surge in violent crimes for 2005, which marked the highest rate of increase in 15 years. The latest numbers suggested that those results were part of the first significant uptick in violent crime since the early 1990s.

The recent crime increases have prompted widespread criticism by police chiefs and state law enforcement officials around the country, who have complained that the federal government has retreated from providing money and other help to localities in favor of programs focused on counterterrorism and homeland security.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston who has been critical of the Bush administration's crime-fighting strategies, said the surge in crime should be expected, given dramatic cuts in assistance to local police agencies and simultaneous increases in the population of young males who are most likely to commit violent acts.

"We have many high-crime areas where gangs have made a comeback, where police resources are down, and where whatever resources there are have been shifted to antiterrorism activity," Fox said. "It's robbing Peter, and maybe even murdering Peter, to pay Paul."

Justice Department officials have previously rejected such criticisms, arguing that federal policies play a limited role in combating local crime. One senior Justice Department official called the 2005 statistics a "yellow flag" that did not represent a trend.

Yet at the same time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales increasingly has focused on combating violence and gang crimes in recent public appearances, and the department has launched a study to find explanations for the recent crime increase.

A Justice Department spokesman said yesterday that researchers are in the midst of visiting the 18 cities that are included in the study, which was announced in October.

The one positive piece of news from the latest FBI report was in the category of property crimes.

In that category, crimes dropped 2.6 percent overall even as violent offenses rose.

Even that portion of the report contained some bad news, however: Burglaries rose 1.2 percent nationwide.

Arson crimes, which are tracked separately from other offenses, also jumped nearly 7 percent -- including a 20 percent increase in cities with fewer than 100,000 people but more than 50,000.

Rising murder rates have prompted particular concern among both local and federal law enforcement officials, particularly because a surge in killings and other violent attacks in the Midwest played a significant role in driving up overall crime rates in 2005.

The latest numbers indicate a continued increase in murders, including an 8.4 percent rise for larger cities of 500,000 to 1 million residents. Overall, reported murders were up 3.1 percent in all metropolitan counties, the FBI said.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said: "We are encouraged by the drop in property crime seen in most areas around the country, but we are again concerned about the increase in violent crime in some cities and towns." He also said the department's ongoing crime study will help determine "what is causing this increase and to determine which crime-fighting efforts are most effective."

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/12/19/reports_of_
violent_crimes_surged_in_first_half_of_2006/

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