The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

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 25, 2008

MA CORI Reform Update

June 24, 2008
MA CORI Reform Update
The following information regarding the status of CORI legislation is based on an update by Aaron Tanaka of the Boston Worker's Alliance (BWA), an organizational member of the Mass. Alliance to Reform CORI to which CJCP belongs. There are four sections:

1) New Health and Human Services Regulations
2) Urgent CORI Bill Update
3) Call for Action!
4) Fact Sheets and Background

1) Executive Office of Health and Human Service (EOHHS) CORI regulations

In January of 2008, Governor Deval Patrick signed Executive Order No. 495 "Regarding the Use and Dissemination of Criminal Record Information." The campaign to secure an Executive Order on CORI was led by the BWA, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner along with the CJPC. While broader efforts for CORI reform were still stalled in the legislature, advocates pressed Patrick to make good on his campaign promises to take timely and meaningful action on CORI. While the Executive Order and the proposed CORI bill falls short of the Governor's lofty campaign rhetoric, several key provisions will have positive, broad scale impacts for job seekers across the Commonwealth.

Within the Executive Order, three central reforms have been identified as key victories for the CORI reform movement.

CORI Reform Update

The first major reform is a requirement for employers receiving CORI reports to complete training on how to properly read the records. CORI reports are written in difficult to decipher code and employers are often unable to distinguish between cases that were dismissed or found not guilty and those resulting in a conviction. A single incident also often results in multiple entries on a CORI, leading employers who are unable to read records to assume that the applicant was arrested more than once. Under the new regulations, employers must pass a written examination on reading a CORI before being certified to receive the sensitive data.

A second major reform will create Fair Hiring policies for all state agencies that hire public workers. Through the Executive Order, a CORI check can only be conducted after an applicant has received an interview and is considered otherwise qualified for the position. The Executive Order moves the CORI check to the last step in the hiring process, and prevents applicants from being weeded out before having their resume, references and motivation considered. As the largest employer in the Commonwealth, these changes to the state's internal hiring policies will have broad implications for tens of thousands of government jobs.

Third, the Executive Order broadly reformed regulations that prevent those with CORI from working in health and human service fields. Previous Health and Human Service regulations required employers to follow a crime table that disqualified many CORI applicants from work. Additinally, an employer was only allowed to hire people with certain CORIs by obtaining a positive letter from a law enforcement agent or by paying a certified counselor for a mental health evaluation of the applicant. This impractical requirement had effectively barred qualified health care professionals with CORI from obtaining work.

Changes to the Executive Office of Health and Human Service regulations have now reopened this large employment sector to those with criminal records. The new regulations remove the assumed disqualification of those with CORI, and instruct health agencies to only consider misdemeanors that are less than 5 years old and felonies that under 10 years old. The requirement to obtain a letter from law enforcement or from a therapist has also been removed, and a number of crimes have been removed from the crime tables. New EOHHS are also expected to remove the criminal record check box from initial job applications forms.

These EOHHS regulations affect 495 state health and human service agencies, and also apply to the tens of thousands of businesses and agencies that receive contracts from the Health and Human Services Department. In total, the new CORI friendly regulations will affect over 180,000 employees in the human services field across the Commonwealth.

2) Urgent CORI Bill Update

The state legislature is planning to bring a CORI reform bill to a vote before the end of this session. If a bill does not pass before summer recess on July 31st, no new reforms will be considered until 2009. Currently, CORI reform has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee chaired by State Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty (D., Chelsea,) and State Senator Robert Creedon (D., Brockton). The next month represents a critical window to gain desperately needed reforms.

Sealing Old CORI

The Judiciary Committee has settled on Governor Patrick's timid recommendations to reduce the sealing periods to 5 years for misdemeanor and 10 years for a felony from the current 10 years for misdemeanor and 15 or felony. Because the forthcoming bill does not go far enough, the Mass Alliance to Reform CORI continues to build legislative support for 3 and 7 years respectively and will introduce an amendment once a bill is released.

"Ban the Box"

The Chairs are still undecided regarding whether to include our key demand to remove the CORI question from all initial job application forms. Divulging a criminal history in an initial application discourages employers from considering resumes, references or relevance of the offense.

Based solely on the job form, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to callback black applicants with a record (Statistics from the BWA factsheet. See below for a more complete discussion.) Ending upfront discrimination by banning the box would visibly improve job access for residents across the state.

As O'Flaherty and Creedon are still undecided on this provision, widespread public pressure can help ensure that the "ban the box" is included in the upcoming bill. Boston and Cambridge have already removed the criminal question from job applications, and we are calling on the state to expand those model guidelines to all Massachusetts employers.

3) Call for Action!

* Call your legislators and tell them to support CORI Reform. Ask your representative to speak with Chairman O'Flaherty in support of removing the criminal history question from all initial job applications and moving the bill out of committee with a positive recommendation.

Find out who your state representative is at www.wheredoivotema.com / then call the State House operator at (617) 722-2000 to get connected.

* Target the following key decision makers. Write an email, make a phone call or request a meeting! We are a grassroots coalition, so please gather your friends or share your organizational clout to help influence these key politicians.

Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty - 617 722-2396 / :Rep.GeneOFlaherty@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please remove the criminal record question from all initial job application forms. Employers should only consider criminal records for applicants who are otherwise qualified for the job. "

Speaker Sal DiMasi - 617 722-2500 / Rep.SalvatoreDiMasi@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please ensure that a CORI bill is passed this session before summer recess. Reduce the sealing period to 3 and 7 and take the CORI question off of all job applications."

Governor Deval Patrick - 617 725-4005/ Governor Patrick email -
"Please fulfill your campaign promises and your public commitment to pass CORI reform this year. Ensure that the criminal record question is removed from all initial job application forms."

Please email info@cjpc.org to let us know what you have done and any response you receive so we can track legislators. If you need help in meeting with your legislator, call Joel Pentlarge, CJPC Interim Executive Director at 617-426-5222 or Jpentlarge@cjpc.org .

Please help spread the word and thank you for supporting this grassroots movement for jobs, dignity and justice. The time for change is now!

4) Fact Sheets and Background

(a) Remove the Question from Initial Job Applications

The proposed amendment removes the criminal record question from initial jobs application forms. This measure encourages employers to consider the skills and qualifications of an applicant before considering the existence of a criminal history. Removing the criminal record question from initial job applications alters the timing of a criminal record inquiry, but does not limit an employers' access to such information.

Employers who use job applications to screen ex-offenders must delay criminal record inquires until after the applicant is interviewed and deemed otherwise qualified for a position.

According to the BWA employers who use initial employment applications to screen ex-offenders have grown from 56% in 1996 to over 80% of all employers in 2004. Once someone with a CORI record self-reports a criminal history on a job application, most employers will not consider resumes, references or personal character. Based solely on the criminal record question, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to interview black applicants. This type of job discrimination effectively bans people with CORIs from most entry-level jobs, and causes employers to overlook skilled members of our workforce.

In 2004-2005 Boston instituted model CORI reforms by removing the criminal history question from all municipal job applications and requiring over 8,000 private city vendors to also revise their application forms. Following Boston's lead, cities across the country including Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Oakland removed the question from job applications and moved criminal history inquiries to the last step in the hiring process. Any state level CORI reform should begin with the expansion of the Boston and Cambridge successful hiring model to all Massachusetts state, municipal and private employers.

(b) Reduce the Waiting Period to Seal CORIs

Reduce the sealing period of CORI reports to 3 years for misdemeanors and 7 years for felonies after court supervision is complete.

Studies across the country by state Departments of Corrections show rates of recidivism are high in the first two years after release, but are significantly lower in the third year, and approach zero risk by the fifth year. Someone who has not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate.. "Almost half (47%) of inmates who recidivated did so within one year of being released; by 18 months after release, 67percent of those who recidivated had returned to prison."(Massachusetts Recidivism Study, pg.2) Those individuals who have not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate..

Key elements of the proposed amendments are:

· Law enforcement agencies as well as agencies that work with vulnerable populations would maintain access to sealed records.

· Records can only remain sealed if a person does not violate the law again. Any new conviction revives the old convictions, and restarts the waiting period.

· Sex offense records and crimes against children would not be changed by this proposal

Other States

Other states have adopted sealing periods that are significantly shorter than the current Massachusetts waiting time of 10 years for a misdemeanor and 15 years for a felony. Massachusetts should join other states and adopt CORI reform that increases the opportunities for people with CORI records to become fully integrated members of society.

Sample States:

· Michigan: An individual convicted of no more than one offense can have the conviction record set aside 5 years after imposition or completion of sentence, whichever is later. Certain traffic offenses, certain sexual offenses, and some serious offenses cannot be sealed. (In Massachusetts, traffic offenses which carry no incarceration penalty are not a part of CORI, according to CMR 803.203)

· Utah: 15 years for certain multiple "class B and C" misdemeanors, 10 years for alcohol- or drug related traffic offense; otherwise 7 years for most felonies and 3-5 years for a misdemeanor. .

· Oregon: Except for certain violent, sexual, and traffic offenses, many adult convictions may be sealed after 3 years after the completion of the sentence, including class C felonies, misdemeanors for which imprisonment may be imposed.

· Ohio: Non-convictions can be sealed. First offenders may apply to have their record expunged 3 years after a felony conviction, or 1 year after a misdemeanor conviction. Except for murder and certain sexual offenses, juvenile adjudications of unruliness and delinquency may be sealed after 2 years have elapsed since discharge.

Reducing the long waiting period to seal CORIs promotes the idea that employers should only access records that matter, and to the degree that it increases employment of those with criminal records, and employment of ex-offenders is major factor in reducing recidivism which reduces crime.

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Faith takes a leap in jailhouse conversions. New programs test theory that religion can salvage "criminals"

"Bolstered by President Bush's recent signing of the Second Chance Act, which promises more money for faith-based programs to help rehabilitate prisoners,corrections officials and religious volunteers are testing the largely unproven theory that faith can not only salvage criminals, but ‹ in the long run ‹ make the rest of us safer, too."

June 22, 2008
Faith takes a leap in jailhouse conversions
New programs test theory that religion can salvage "criminals"
By KEVIN SIMPSON
Denver Post
DENVER — Like countless others before him, Jonathan Willis rediscovered God in the solitude of a jail cell, 10 months after he'd been thrown into the Adams County lockup to await trial for murder.

The blur of his crimes crystallized: The coke binge, the break-in, the brutal beating. Then desperation, arrest and, once in jail, the hell-raising that landed him in solitary.

"It went from dream to reality," recalls Willis, 25. "When you reflect, with all the distraction cut away, you're left with the core of life — what matters."

He cried out to God, who answered with a challenge to get serious about his faith. He read the Bible, and the words spoke to him anew. His heart changed.

It was a classic jailhouse conversion.

"It's natural to reach out to God in a period of duress," said Michael Spotts, a volunteer assistant chaplain at the Adams County facility who witnessed the change in Willis. "The thing that tinges the jailhouse conversion with cynicism is that people like Jonathan killed someone. It's inexcusable, horrible. But the genuineness of conversion can be found in absolute confession of what was done wrong, a seeking of repentance."

Spiritual transformation
Against the advice of his lawyer, Willis pled guilty, knowing that he was essentially sentencing himself to life without the possibility of parole.

His spiritual transformation began a chain reaction that already has touched others locked up around him. And, in a broader sense, it touched on a concept of faith-based rehabilitation that's gaining traction as a burgeoning prison population now is going back into the community.

Bolstered by President Bush's recent signing of the Second Chance Act, which promises more money for faith-based programs to help rehabilitate prisoners, corrections officials and religious volunteers are testing the largely unproven theory that faith can not only salvage criminals, but — in the long run — make the rest of us safer, too.

Nearly 700,000 inmates return to the community each year nationwide.

Faith and prisons have been intertwined since the dawn of corrections, with criminal behavior often addressed as a moral issue. But church-and-state legal concerns temper the search for new faith-based ways to attack recidivism, which approaches 70 percent, according to one Department of Justice report.

A new solution?
In Colorado, a volunteer network of chaplains offers 216 programs and the Department of Corrections recognizes 36 faiths. Although those traditions range from Asatru, a polytheistic Norse religion, to Native American rituals to nature-based Wicca, the vast majority of volunteers represent Christian denominations.

Credible research on the effectiveness of faith-based programs remains sparse and inconclusive. But corrections experts and volunteers agree that such efforts, coupled with education, counseling and other therapies, could be part of the solution.

"I get asked all the time what's the best predictor of success when somebody's coming out of prison," says Ari Zavaras, executive director of Colorado's DOC. "Without question, if somebody had a true spiritual conversion — not the jailhouse kind that gets all the jokes, but the kind where they develop a spiritual base — I'd be almost able to bet a year's pay without worry that they're not going to re-offend."

On a pleasant spring evening, about 70 offenders — roughly half the inmates at the minimum-security Camp George West in Golden — crowd a concrete-floored gymnasium to take in two hours of music, humor, feats of strength and Christian testimony.

Strongman and ex-con Mike Benson, who experienced his own jailhouse conversion, takes the stage and proceeds to tear a deck of cards in half, twist a horseshoe into an "S," roll a frying pan into a burrito shape and snap a wooden baseball bat.

After breaking the bat, he briefly holds the two pieces before him to form a cross.

"Before I knew Jesus, this was malicious destruction of property," jokes Benson. "Now, it's ministry."

Prison Fellowship Ministries claims more than 22,000 volunteers at 1,800 institutions.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5849277.html

Posted by lois at 11:59 AM | 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 04, 2008

NY Times Editorial: A Court for Veterans

June 4, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
A Court for Veterans

There is a small bright spot on the normally bleak terrain for military veterans who return home and fall into addiction, mental illness and crime. Buffalo has established a specialized court to give veterans and their family members, mainly those accused of nonviolent crimes, a chance to avoid jail and rebuild their lives.

The program — the only one in the country, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs — operates on the same principles of temperate justice and guided rehabilitation that govern “drug courts” and “mental-health courts,” which have been strikingly successful around the country in reducing crime, saving money and repairing lives.

Buffalo’s experiment, profiled in USA Today, began after a city court judge, Robert Russell, and his office noticed more veterans, many with drug and psychiatric problems, coming through the system. It offers defendants a chance to stay out of jail or avoid more serious charges in return for entering addiction or mental health treatment and taking other steps to right their lives.

The court also puts the sturdy bonds of military service to good use. It enlists other veterans as volunteer mentors to help overcome participants’ resistance to treatment and “to point them in the right direction,” as one mentor told the newspaper.

Other cities would do well to study and learn from Buffalo’s experiment, and the federal government should do more to help, with grants for programs that direct troubled people out of the prison stream and into life-saving treatment. The effectiveness of alternative-sentencing programs is no longer in question, and the nation’s responsibility to its veterans and their families is undeniable.

For soldiers, mental trauma and debilitating stress are part of the job description. When former soldiers go astray, they deserve all the creativity and support the system can muster to get them back where they began: clean, sober and on the right the side of the law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/opinion/04wed4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

NC: Hotels could be used to house people convicted of sex offenses

Jun 03, 2008
Hotels could house sex offenders
Public would pay for temporary stays
Charlotte News and Observer
Dan Kane, Staff Writer
Tough new laws preventing pedophiles, rapists and other sex offenders from living near schools, child-care centers and parks have made it hard for some to find housing when they leave prison.

It has become so difficult, state prison officials say, that they want to put them up temporarily in hotels at public expense.

A provision in a state budget bill that could be voted on this week would let prison officials spend public money on hotel rooms or other temporary housing to prevent them from wandering the streets. It's cheaper than keeping sex offenders in prison, where the average annual cost of housing and feeding an inmate is about $26,000.

Some lawmakers learned about the proposal late last week when House leaders rolled out portions of their budget proposal.

"It was just a shock," said Rep. Pat Hurley, an Asheboro Republican.

State prison officials, though, say they are out of options.

It's not just that prisons are full. Prison officials say some sex offenders are finding it so hard to find a place to stay once they are paroled that they eventually give up and serve the remainder of their sentence behind bars. That happened 10 days ago when a sex offender's housing plans fell through -- he was rejected from a homeless shelter -- and no other alternative could be found, Correction Department spokesman Keith Acree said.

The inmate decided to spend the remaining nine months of his sentence in prison, at a cost of about $19,000 to taxpayers. Prison officials say about a half dozen others have chosen the same option in the past 18 months.

"We're certainly not saying these are bad laws," said Mary Lu Rogers, an assistant prisons director. "We're saying it adds to the complexity of finding a place for them to live."

Girl's death a spur

In 2006, lawmakers prohibited sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school or child-care center. The law was part of a flurry of legislation in many states after a convicted pedophile murdered a 9-year-old girl in Florida.

Some communities have passed ordinances preventing sex offenders from living near parks, and judges often require sex offenders on parole or probation to avoid living in a home with children.

Those actions, along with improved online registries that show where sex offenders live, have stigmatized them to the point where places such as the home of a relative or a homeless shelter are no longer options, prison officials say.

Acree said he is not anticipating the state will start paying hotel bills for hundreds of released sex offenders if the provision becomes law. But hundreds of sex offenders are released from North Carolina prisons each year.

As of Friday, there were 5,280 inmates in state prisons convicted of offenses that would require them to register as sex offenders. Last year, the system released 1,460 sex offenders. State law defines more than 25 crimes as sex offenses. Many involve children, but some include adult victims.

'Benefit for ... public'

Correction Department officials said they went to the leaders of the budget subcommittee that oversees justice and public safety spending two weeks ago. They are Democrat Reps. Alice Bordsen of Mebane and Jimmy Love of Sanford. Bordsen said she and Love included the provision because it does not add to the budget and it provides officials a better opportunity to monitor sex offenders on parole than releasing them to the streets.

"It's not a benefit to the released offender," Bordsen said. "It's a benefit for the general public."

The one-paragraph provision does not mention hotels. Nor does it specifically mention sex offenders. It simply says the Correction Department may use "funds available" to "secure appropriate temporary housing for offenders on post-release supervision, probation, or parole."

It also says the department may contract with "homeless shelters, halfway houses, and other housing providers to provide temporary housing for offenders who do not have a viable home placement plan and are at risk of being homeless."

If housing can't be found in shelters or halfway houses, prison officials would turn to hotels, particularly those that offer reduced rates for extended stays. Those hotels are less likely to cater to families, Acree said. Sex offenders would be required to notify local sheriffs.

Acree said some homeless shelters have started refusing sex offenders out of fear that donations and public funds would dry up.

Robert Harris, executive director of the Zion Shelter and Kitchen in Washington, said the shelter continues to accept sex offenders whose victims are adults, but not pedophiles. The 12-bed shelter for men changed its policy two weeks ago after a parole official warned that it had a liability problem accepting pedophiles. The shelter is in the basement of a church that has youth programs on the weekends.

Harris said he has never had a problem with anyone released to his shelter from state prison in the shelter's 22-year history.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/story/1094282.html

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

June 02, 2008

Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?

Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control." For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.

Gotham Gazette
Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?
by Aubrey Fox
02 Jun 2008

It’s an experiment that has arguably run its course.

In the last 20 years, states across the country have quadrupled their spending on jails and prisons from $11 billion in 1987 to $44 billion last year, while imprisoning 2.3 million individuals – or one in 100 American adults, according to a report released by the Pew Center on the States. While some criminologists give incarceration partial credit for cutting crime in the 1990s, many argue that these public safety benefits are evaporating and that money for jails would be better spent in other areas such as health care and education.

Among policymakers and experienced corrections officials, there is a palpable sense of optimism that the political will exists to tackle the issue of mass imprisonment. To them, the Pew Center report’s eye-catching title, "One in 100," has helped focus a long-running debate about the fiscal and human costs of incarcerating so many Americans for so many years. "The report is engaging people who are normally not part of the conversation," said New York City’s Probation and Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn. "I think it’s created a real opportunity."

Even conservative states like Kansas and Texas are beginning to embrace prison reform, with legislators from both sides of the aisle coming together to make change. "There is a growing realization around the country that we can’t build our way out of the crime problem with more prisons," said Adam Gelb, one of the authors of the Pew report.
For New Yorkers this shift in attitude poses a number of questions. How will the state respond? Will it close the prisons that now play such a major role in the upstate economy? And, if the state does realize savings on prisons, how could that money best be used to further reduce crime?

The New York Exception

New York is exhibit number one for reformers who seek to reassure citizens that it is possible to cut crime and incarceration rates at the same time. Virtually alone among states, New York has seen the number of inmates in its prisons decline over the past decade. It has 9,000 fewer state prison inmates than it did 10 years ago, a 12 percent decrease, as crime rates have continued to drop. By the end of 2007, there were a total of 62,260 individuals in state prison. At the same time, the number of people held in New York City jails awaiting trial or imprisoned for a short period shrank from a high of 23,000 in 1993 to just over 13,000 in 2007.

These sharp drops have been driven largely by the city’s plunging felony arrest rate. Violent crime in New York City declined by 75 percent between 1991 and 2004. The city now sends about 8,000 inmates each year to the state’s prison system, down from 20,000, according to Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice and a nationally known expert on incarceration.

Other parts of the correctional system have seen similar declines. In New York City, the number of individuals under probation supervision dropped from 50,870 in 1998 to 45,844 in 2007. The population on parole dropped by 18 percent over the same period for the state as a whole, fueled entirely by a dramatic, 30 percent decline in the number of parolees under supervision in New York City. That translates to 24,756 parolees in New York City in 2007, down from 35,286 in 1998. Probation is a city program that supervises offenders as an alternative to prison or jail. Parole, which in New York is run by the state, supervises offenders after they are released from state prison.

This drop has helped relieve pressure on New York’s budget at a time when other states are grappling with exploding incarceration rates. For example, California spends $8.8 billion a year on corrections, a staggering 216 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 20 years and 8.8 percent of the state’s budget, according to the Pew Center. By contrast, New York spends $2.6 billion on corrections, or 5.1 percent of the budget.
The Politics of Prison Closings

Despite the decline in prisoners, though, New York has had mixed success in meeting another challenge posed by prison reformers: shutting prisons and re-allocating the money spent on them to other uses, such as providing drug treatment, job training and other services to recently released prisoners.

If anything, the process of closing prisons has gotten harder, not easier, in recent years. For example, in 2006 the state legislature passed a bill requiring that employees must receive a year's notice before any prison can be closed.

Then in April Gov. David Patterson quietly withdrew his predecessor's plan to close four upstate prisons. The move would have saved taxpayers $70 million over the next two years, but was shelved in the face of objections from state Senate Republicans, many of whom represent upstate communities where the prisons are located.

The prison system is a $2.7 billion a year industry in New York State, concentrated in many upstate communities. As the economies of these areas have declined, the prisons have remained a source of jobs, income and people. While about two thirds of the prisoners in the state are from New York City, the U.S. Census counts them as residents of the place where they are incarcerated. This boosts the populations of many rural communities, giving them more votes in the legislature than they might otherwise have, along with other benefits.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer had attempted to neutralize political objections to prison closures by proposing that a state commission look into the issue in 2007. Modeled after the federal government's successful effort to shut excess military bases, the idea was the panel would present the legislature with a comprehensive plan that would be difficult to oppose.

The legislature, though, blocked that effort. Spitzer then turned to his state Department of Correctional Services. After what department spokesperson Erik Kriss has described as a "thorough internal review," officials proposed closing a medium security prison, the Hudson Correctional Facility in Columbia County, as well as three minimum security facilities. The department had even begun to transfer "a few dozen" employees out of the facilities slated for closure.

That was clearly premature. When the state budget was announced in April, it restored full funding for all four.

Advocates responded with outrage. "It’s really a jobs program for economically depressed communities," Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, told the New York Times. Gangi holds out hope that Patterson will fight for prison closures in the future. He notes that Patterson has a record of opposing mass incarceration and was even arrested at a demonstration protesting the state's harsh drug laws in 2002. "Maybe [Patterson] will return to it when he gets his sea legs under him," said Gangi.
Reforming Parole

The failure to close state prisons is a blow to state officials who hoped to use the savings to comply with tighter supervision standards for sex offenders, introduced by the legislature in 2006. It also gives the state less flexibility to help re-invigorate parts of the correctional system, like parole and probation, which have long suffered from neglect and under funding.

Advocates are particularly interested in transferring money from prisons to parole, which they see as key to reducing incarceration rates and increasing public safety. Improving parole would have a kind of domino effect: Better supervision of released offenders would reduce the number of offenders who go back to prison, thereby further diminishing the need for prisons, which in turn would free up more money for parole.

In recent years, however, parole officials have had to fend off challenges to the institution’s basic legitimacy. In 2005, the Urban Institute released a report, entitled http://www.urban.org/publications/311156.html "Does Parole Work?" It found that parole had little to no effect on re-arrest rates among offenders. After controlling for demographics and differences in criminal histories, the researchers found little difference between offenders released from prison with no conditions and those released under parole supervision. Roughly 60 percent of offenders in each group were re-arrested within two years. Some groups, such as white males with histories of violence and a long arrest records, actually fared worse under parole supervision than when they were released unconditionally.

In addition, observers credit -- or blame -- parole for helping to fuel the country’s prison boom. Put simply, in many states, parole provides the reason to put many released convicts back in jail. Studies show that about a quarter of all released offenders are re-incarcerated within three years of their release on so-called "technical violations" of their parole, such as failing a drug test or missing a curfew, as opposed to a new arrest.

In some states like California, the problem is particularly acute: According to Michael Jacobson, the state sends three quarters of its parole population back to jail every year for technical violations. In 2001, close to 15 percent of parolees were returned to jail in New York for technical violations, although that accounted for a large share (about one third) of all new prison admissions.

As Jacobson and others describe it, over-taxed parole officers return parolees to jail for minor infractions in an effort to manage caseloads that average 65 or more. The irony is that the parole system, one of the government’s most poorly funded functions, has essentially unchecked authority to authorize millions of dollars of government expenditures by citing offender for violations, guaranteeing their return to jail and the need for more prisons.

Some of parole’s toughest critics are system insiders such as Horn, the former executive director of New York’s Division of Parole. In a 2001 article in Corrections Management Quarterly, Horn called for "ending parole as we know it." He proposed replacing it with vouchers that would allow parolees to purchase needed services like drug treatment, job training or housing on their own. Before being released to the community, inmates would be placed in halfway houses to ease their reentry into society. The role of parole would shift from surveillance to supporting inmates and helping to link them to services. "I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right way to go," said Horn.

Other prominent correctional reformers, such as Jacobson and Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argue that it would be politically difficult to win support for any plan, like Horn's, that does away with post prison supervision of offenders. Instead, Travis favors transferring parole from the executive branch to the judicial branch. He would create "re-entry courts" in which judges would supervise the reentry process.

Jacobson focuses more directly on reforms to parole itself, which include allocating resources so that recently released parolees get the most attention, limiting the length of time that a person stays on parole and curtailing the use of technical violations.

What all these proposals share, however, is the urgent sense that parole in its current form simply does not work. "If almost any of the state parole systems were a Fortune 500 company, the CEO would take one look at it and shut it down," Jacobson writes.
The View from New York

Here again, New York looks pretty good – at least in comparison to other states.

Although New York City’s plummeting crime rate gets most of the credit for the state’s declining incarceration population, some modest changes in correctional policy have had an impact as well. Some state prisoners are eligible for early release if they complete a so-called "shock incarceration" program that includes six months of hard labor. According to the state Department of Correctional Services, the program, in operation since 1987, has saved $1.18 billion in prison costs by granting over 36,000 participants a release an average of 345 days early.

Small changes to the state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, enacted by the state legislature in 2004, have resulted in the early release of about 3,000 individuals, according to the New York State Criminal Justice 2007 Crimestat Report. Finally, in April, four state agencies, including the Division of Parole, launched a new drug treatment center in Harlem aimed at reducing the rate at which parolees, including those who fail a drug test or commit other technical violations, return to prison.

Perhaps most importantly, New York City offers a number of resources for the 15,000 parolees who returned home in 2007. Well-respected non-profit organizations like the Center for Employment Opportunities], the Fortune Society, the Women’s Prison Association and Family Justice all work with this population.

For example, the Center for Employment Opportunities provides short-term paid jobs and other services to about 2,000 parolees every year. Participants spend about eight weeks painting classrooms on college campuses, mopping courthouse floors or filling other temporary positions. After finishing these paid internships, job experts work to match participants to permanent jobs. The goal is to help released inmates manage the transition from incarceration to paid work.

"We feel strongly that a person coming home needs more than help than just creating a resume," said Marta Nelson, the director of policy and planning. "They need someone who can connect them to an employer." The program has cut re-incarceration rates among parolees by almost half, but only for individuals who begin the program within three months of their release. This finding mirrors national research that shows the importance of linking parolees to services immediately.

Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control."

For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime.

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20080602/200/2545

Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

VA: Churches add to effort to restore voting rights

Effort seeks to restore felons' voting rights
The local project will involve sermons, distributing information and conducting workshops.
Daily Press, Newport News VA
By DAVID SQUIRES
May 24, 2008

M.V. Cooke realizes that she made her own bed — hard. She didn't realize that she'd have to sleep in it so long — years after she paid for her crime and made peace.

Roderick Hart feels pretty much the same way.

Both plan to be in church Sunday as local pastors spur a grass-roots effort to help nonviolent offenders get voting rights restored in time for the Nov. 4 presidential election. For the next two Sundays, local churches will announce the program, pass out the necessary forms and plan workshops for offenders wanting their voting rights restored.

Cooke, 62, said that would be a big step toward making her whole again after a drug conviction in the 1980s. She has been out of the probation system since 1992.

"I didn't realize I couldn't vote until after I got out," said Cooke, who served 11 months in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland. But that was merely one of her problems, she soon learned.

"When you have a felony, you can't get a job, a decent apartment, and you can't vote," said Cooke, who married in 1995 and is now a homeowner.

She didn't want to be photographed for this news story because she feared being ostracized in the community. "We're in a new neighborhood," she said. "None of the people in our church knows."

Cooke has sage advice for anyone thinking of crime to jump-start their lifestyle: "Don't do it," she said. "It's not worth it, and it's wrong."

Cooke, who's retired, said one of her biggest frustrations was a stereotype about black people and jobs.

"People always say that black people don't want to work," she said. "But if you go to a temp place, like Labor Finders, all you see is black people. People want to work, but jobs don't want to hire you because of something in your background."

Hart, 51, of Newport News, can relate: Off probation since 2002 for guns and weapons charges, Hart shows up regularly to find work through a Labor Finders location in Newport News.

Hart, who attends Way of the Cross Living Waters Church in Newport News, didn't know that his right to vote could be restored until recent talk about the local project.

He said he was eager to begin the process because as a convicted felon, "You don't have a say in anything. You have no say whatsoever. ... But one vote can make a difference."

The expedited program doesn't apply to violent and drug-distribution offenders. That process will take at least six months — usually longer — because it's more extensive, says Bernard Henderson, deputy secretary of the commonwealth.

Local churches will help collect applications from nonviolent offenders and send them to Richmond by Aug. 1, so the forms can be processed in time to allow registration for the November election. Registration can take place at least 30 days before the election.

The Rev. Paul Sheppard, pastor of Third Baptist Church in Hampton, is coordinating the effort for the Peninsula Baptist Pastors Council, which has asked local churches to participate. Sheppard said his Sunday sermon would refer to the vote-restoration project.

"I'm going to preach about it this Sunday, then I'm going to reinforce it next Sunday," he said. "Right now, I'm looking at Luke 15 — the reaction of a restoring God."

Applicants for restoration of rights must be residents of Virginia or convicted of a felony in a Virginia, federal or military court. They must have paid all costs, fines and restitution associated with their cases and have completed a three-year waiting period after the end of their sentence or release from probation. They also can't have a drunken-driving conviction in the past five years.

Restoration of rights — which are lost when a person is convicted of a felony — has been on the books in Virginia since the 1700s.

This year, the state started the expedited process for nonviolent offenders because the office always gets swamped in presidential-election years.

Three local women — Gaylene Kanoyton, Gisele Russell and G.V. Watson — thought up the local restoration project as a civic project and coordinated with the pastors council.

"This is the election that can restore human dignity to thousands of people who have been disenfranchised in any number of ways: economically, educationally, in the justice system or with basic civil rights," Kanoyton said. "That's why we need to make sure everyone who is eligible actually gets out to vote."

Copyright © 2008, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
dailypress.com/news/local/dp-local_voterestore_0524may24,0,3530066.story

Posted by lois at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration
May 2008
My Sister’s Keeper, A Book for Women Returning Home From Prison or Jail, is a unique compilation of the words and experiences of women from New York in various stages of returning home from incarceration. My Sister’s Keeper offers peer-to-peer guidance, strength and hope to help women in re-entry cope with challenges of reclaiming their lives. The CA’s Women in Prison Project will distribute the guide to women incarcerated in New York’s correctional facilities, as well as women in alternative to incarceration programs and transitional services programs throughout New York State.

http://www.correctionalassociation.org/WIPP/publications/MySistersKeeper_Re-EntryGuide.pdf

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2008

3 letters to the NY Times on Second Chance Act

To the Editor:
Financing of the Second Chance Act will support useful services to support the transition from prison to community. But these services must also be accompanied by removal of conflicting and counterproductive policies that stand in the way of community reintegration.
For example, while New York State allocated $3.1 million to assist re-entry efforts this year, the same budget projects an estimated $40 million in revenues from fees and surcharges imposed on people convicted of crimes, 80 percent of whom are indigent.
This crushing debt will leave releasees unable to acquire employment and housing, reverting to a life of crime that jeopardizes the community safety.
If New York is truly committed to public safety and reintegration, it must stop using financial penalties that undermine the intent of legislation like the Second Chance Act.
Marsha Weissman
Executive Director
Center for Community Alternatives
New York, May 22, 2008

May 27, 2008
Letters
Helping Prisoners Re-enter Society

To the Editor:
Re “A Second Chance” (editorial, May 20):
Most re-entry efforts focus on prison inmates, yet about nine million people cycle annually through our country’s jails. This is roughly 10 times the number who leave prisons.
Jail inmates generally return to their communities after short incarcerations, bringing with them a higher incidence of communicable diseases and mental health conditions than exists in the general population.
Left untreated, these problems add to society’s health burden, emergency room costs and municipal budgets. They also increase the likelihood that inmates will commit new offenses and return to jail again, at public expense.
Jails are required to provide health care to inmates. This mandate creates an opportunity to support re-entry efforts. By linking inmates with community-based doctors, whom they can continue seeing after release, jails can stabilize inmates’ health and help improve the health and safety of the community.
The Second Chance Act is a welcome step. We can do more to support jail inmates by remembering that they are part of our communities and by providing them with community-based health care during incarceration.
Keith Barton
South Londonderry, Vt., May 20, 2008
The writer, a physician, is medical director of Community Oriented Correctional Health Services in Oakland, CA

•
To the Editor:
Your editorial prompts me to note several aspects of New York’s second-chance philosophy.
As The Times has noted, four upstate prisons are being kept open, fully staffed, costing taxpayers $33 million a year, during tough fiscal times and when the prison population is down by 8,000 people over the last decade. That money could be better used for re-entry programs, lessening recidivism, bolstering the upstate economy, and a real battle against crime.
We would never staff a school without students or a hospital without patients. Let’s use criminal justice resources to reduce crime.

Glenn E. Martin
Associate Vice President of Policy and Advocacy
The Fortune Society
Long Island City, Queens, May 21, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/l27jails.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2008

New Tack on Straying Parolees Offers a Hand Instead of Cuffs

May 17, 2008
NY Times
New Tack on Straying Parolees Offers a Hand Instead of Cuffs
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WICHITA, Kan. — Since his release in January after serving time for a 2006 theft conviction, Lonnie Kemp has violated his parole conditions several times, getting drunk and kicked out of a halfway house and showing traces of marijuana in urine tests. If this were a few years ago, he almost certainly would be back in prison.

Similar parole violations after a previous theft conviction, in 1988, had repeatedly landed him back inside. In those days, parole was enforced with a spirit that officials recall, only half-jokingly, as “trail ’em, nail ’em, jail ’em,” overfilling the prisons but doing little to rehabilitate offenders.

Today, Kansas is a leader in a spreading national effort to make parole more effective and useful — to reduce violations and reincarcerations as it protects the public and seeks to help more offenders go straight. Mr. Kemp’s parole officer is keeping close tabs on him, but instead of sending him for a punitive stretch behind bars, he required Mr. Kemp to attend a substance-abuse program, made sure he had a stable home with a relative and helped him get a job with a construction company.

A similar transformation of the parole system has begun in several states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas. It has been prompted in part by financial concerns: more than one-third of all prison admissions are for parole violations, helping to drive an unsustainable surge in prison-building.

It has also been driven by evidence that conventional parole supervision is often a waste of resources. “If we sent him back to prison for 90 days, he’d have to start all over with his life again,” Kent Sisson, parole director for southern Kansas, said of Mr. Kemp. “Instead, he’s working, paying child support and getting a G.E.D.”

Mr. Kemp, 51, said: “Before, you didn’t want to have parole officers around, they’d send you back for almost anything. This time, I have positive people around me and I can call my parole officer any time.”

An influential study in 2005 by the Urban Institute concluded that parole supervision had little effect on the rate at which ex-prisoners were re-arrested.

“Parole is a system set up to find failure,” said Michael Jacobson, president of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York and a former chief of corrections and probation for the city. “If what you’re interested in is finding failure and putting people back in prison, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“But it doesn’t work in terms of public safety or public spending,” said Mr. Jacobson, who praised Kansas as a pioneer in reforms.

As part of a get-tough spirit, a number of states in recent decades adopted mandatory sentences and ended the historic discretion of parole boards over release dates. Yet every state still has post-release supervision for most offenders, averaging three years with stiff conditions like not consuming alcohol, having urine tests, abiding by curfews, holding a job and meeting regularly with a parole officer.

The most widespread change is the use of risk assessments that help officials concentrate on those deemed most likely to commit new crimes. Those seen as low risk are only loosely supervised, perhaps even allowed to just send in status reports by mail.

“Half the offenders will do fine without any supervision,” Mr. Sisson said. “We’re trying to better understand who are the 50 percent most likely to commit more crimes, and how we can prevent that.”

The reformers are seeking a deeper change in attitude as well. “We’ve rewritten all our job descriptions,” said Roger Werholtz, the Kansas secretary of corrections. “The idea is to work with offenders to prevent them from violating their conditions of release, rather than just monitoring them to see if violations occur.”

In a sharp break with tradition, here and in some other states, parole agencies are hiring officers with backgrounds in social work rather than law enforcement. Parole officers are partnering with re-entry case workers who help prepare prisoners for society with group therapy and housing and job assistance. They start meeting prisoners well before their release, visit their families and may even drive them to a job interview.

“We now talk about reducing the barriers to success,” said Mr. Sisson, who works closely with the county re-entry director, Sally Frey.

In Kansas, parolees who threaten violence or openly defy the rules are still put back in prison, and those who commit new crimes are put on trial. But for those with lesser lapses, like Mr. Kemp, officials try to judge whether reincarceration will be useful and may rely instead on a combination of help, closer supervision and graduated sanctions.

Those seen as on the edge are required to report six evenings a week to a day reporting center, where they attend group therapy meetings designed to make them examine their motives and goals. They are often required to wear G.P.S. ankle bracelets that record their movements and flag violations, like not being home at curfew or, for a sex offender, going too near a school.

The changes, introduced over the last few years, are having measurable success, Mr. Werholtz said.

In Kansas in 2003, he said, an average of 203 parolees were returned to prison each month. By last year the number dropped to 103 a month. This could simply mean that those violating parole were left unpunished. But the number of convictions for new crimes by parolees has also declined; in the late 1990s, the number of people on parole with new convictions averaged 424 a year; in the last three years, it was down to 280 despite greater overall numbers under supervision.

“I think the data pretty well establish that not only are we keeping people out of prison at a better rate but that the amount of criminal activity they are inflicting on the public has also declined,” Mr. Werholtz said.

The state has also been able to put off costly prison construction plans, he said.

For inmates seen as high-risk, the re-entry team starts meeting them as early as 18 months before their release, often getting them into therapy groups and starting schooling or job training. The parole officers may join in about six months prior to release.

At the Winfield Correctional Facility, Mike Lentz, a parole officer who deals with gang-connected offenders, recently joined a re-entry case worker, Brianna Morphis, and a police liaison and a substance abuse specialist for Mr. Lentz’s first meeting with prisoners he would later supervise.

One of them, Raphael Frazier, 27, has about four months left to serve on a forgery conviction before starting parole. After being sent to prison in 1999 for aggravated robbery, Mr. Frazier was released on parole in 2003 but re-imprisoned in 2004 for three months for absconding, or failure to report.

In 2005 he was convicted on a new charge of forgery. This time he had more help, including group therapy and technical training in airplane building that should land him a good job with one of the aircraft companies clustered around Wichita.

“It makes it easier knowing that people are out to help you, instead of driving a stake in your back every time you turn around,” Mr. Frazier said. “I changed my attitude.”

Another innovation is accountability panels, which are groups of community volunteers, including former inmates, pastors and others who meet with newly released offenders to offer encouragement and meet them later to discuss problems or, ideally, congratulate them for completing parole. Panelists try to be encouraging and helpful.

Lorlei Sontag, 37, who has struggled with crack addiction, recently met her panel when she finally completed drug treatment after failed efforts. She told of going to the dentist and seeing a familiar crack house through the window.

“My stomach was doing flips, but I didn’t go,” she said. As the group applauded her progress, one panelist said she knew of a different dentist Ms. Sontag could see in a less tempting location.

At Wichita’s day reporting center, Shontell J., 31, described his three months wearing a G.P.S.-monitor ankle bracelet: “It’s irritating as hell, you can feel it’s always there.”

Convicted when he was 17 for aggravated battery, he spent twelve and a half years in prison and has a large scar on his cheek from a prison fight.

He started a roofing job while still in prison and has kept it for three years, and he has adopted his girlfriend’s two children.

But he has also had serious parole violations that put him under house arrest three times and then on daily reporting, with G.P.S. surveillance. Once he drove to Topeka, beyond the permitted 50-mile limit, and got caught when he was stopped for a traffic violation. He was arrested in a bar fight in another town and he failed a urine test.

Now, still reporting most days but no longer wearing the ankle bracelet, he said: “I tell myself a thousand times, I will not get into trouble.”

Mr. Kemp’s violations did not result in an ankle bracelet, but Mr. Lentz, his parole officer, said that in the past he still would have sent him back for a prison stay. In the new spirit, though, Mr. Lentz noted that “none of his actions are so heinous or hurtful to the community.”

Mr. Kemp works from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each day, assembling lumber for a company that makes trusses for houses. Initially he is making just $6.50 an hour — “not much, but it pays the bills,” he said — but he is in line for a permanent position and a raise.

“Things are going real smooth now,” he said.

He has one son who is 29 and another who is 14 and living with a relative.

“When I get myself together, I want my two boys to come live with me,” Mr. Kemp said. “I want to be a father.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17parole.html

Posted by lois at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

California parolees get a chance in community programs

California parolees get a chance in community programs
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, May 4, 2008

California corrections officials are again diverting thousands of parole violators into community programs instead of sending them to prison, hoping this time the experiment doesn't fail.

Since August, the prison population has steadily declined as the state pours millions of dollars into community programs like drug treatment and electronic home detention.

Four years ago, a similar effort collapsed. The Bureau of State Audits found in 2005 that the state failed to analyze or monitor the programs for effectiveness. Most of the diverted parolees either didn't complete the programs or wound up back in prison anyway – including 242 who committed new crimes when they otherwise could have been back in prison.

This time, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, supported by top criminal justice researchers from around the country, is evaluating the programs as they roll out. The agency is also assessing the participating offenders for risk, trying to avoid violent public-relations disasters.

Legislative analysts say the prison population reductions could save the state $110 million through the next budget year, but officials say it is too soon to tell whether the trend can continue without compromising public safety.

"I don't know the answer," said UC Irvine criminology professor Joan Petersilia, chair of the committee that is advising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the state's rehabilitation measures. "It depends on how many very low-risk people we have, and we really don't know that yet. It also depends on whether the communities will step up to the plate and sponsor these programs. I think it's an unknown."

The corrections agency already has suffered one spectacular setback.

Last year, it released a parolee named David Kenneth Hamilton despite an assessment that Hamilton had "a high propensity for violence," corrections spokesman Oscar Hidalgo said.

Although he violated parole by not attending classes for spousal batterers, officials did not put Hamilton back in prison or into a community program. On April 20, Hamilton, along with another suspect, robbed and killed a man in Foothill Farms, then torched the victim's house, according to Sacramento sheriff's investigators. Hamilton was later shot and killed while running from deputies.

Hidalgo defended his agency's performance in the Hamilton case, saying that his "missing a meeting did not require an automatic revocation" of his parole. Hidalgo said the corrections department still is "absolutely" committed to following through with the new parole direction.

"We think it is important to find alternatives to incarceration for inmates to give them the best chance to succeed," Hidalgo said.

Parole violators fill prisons

California churns tens of thousands of parolees through the prison system every year for violating the technical terms of their releases, such as missing meetings with their agents, hanging out with other criminals, not attending classes, testing positive for drugs, or failing to comply with any specially set conditions.

Last year, there were 73,657 parole returns to prison, with the average stay amounting to about four months. The result has been massive pressure on the prison system, driving the population last August to an all-time high of 173,614, including 20,030 who at that time were serving short-term parole violations or were awaiting a revocation decision.

In the next seven months, the population dropped by more than 3,600 inmates to 169,949. Short-term parolees in the prison system dropped by 1,500 during that period. Fewer new convictions, mostly for drug and property crimes, accounted for the other half, according to corrections statistics.

A federal class-action lawsuit helped the state reach the lower inmate numbers.

The so-called Valdivia case, settled in U.S. District Court in Sacramento in 2003, forced the state to conduct timely revocation hearings. It also required corrections officials to establish a "remedial sanctions" programs for less-serious parole violators.

Corrections officials shut down the sanctions program once its problems became apparent. After a court challenge, last year the state agreed to make available 1,800 new community drug treatment beds and place 500 more offenders on electronic home detention.

A special master monitoring the case found in November that the state had substantially complied with the order. Plaintiffs lawyer Michael Bien agreed, saying "I think for the first time, there has been a focused, sincere effort to actually come into compliance."

But the state is only accommodating "a tiny percentage" of its short-term parole violators, and it needs to do a lot more, Bien said.

Parole officials said they are trying.

On its own, the state in the past year opened seven new "day reporting" and community centers for parolees, including one in Sacramento. Parole agents also have placed hundreds of homeless parolees into residential facilities, sometimes instead of prison, in instances where they make mistakes.

As of last month, 5,078 California parolees were enrolled in remedial or intermediate sanctions programs, compared with 1,899 a year ago – a 167 percent increase, according to figures compiled by The Bee.

"We're confident this is a shift in our paradigm," said Robert Ambroselli, deputy director in charge of the corrections agency's parole division.

Parolees accept restrictions

Theresa Joseph, 52, a parolee with a history of credit fraud whose most recent conviction was for attempted robbery, these days wears a wristwatch-sized electronic monitor around her ankle. Her parole agent gave it to her last month when she violated her parole by taking a friend's car without permission.

Joseph needs to be in her mother's south Sacramento home by 8 o'clock every night, at risk of a violation. She said the restriction sure beats prison.

"It's making me think," Joseph said. "Don't do anything wrong – don't do anything wrong. Think before you act. Because the possibility is I could be back in prison. So yes, it's making me more aware of what I'm doing."

In some cases, parolees are volunteering for programs, even if it means they're confined for longer periods of time. Tim Longacre, 45, chose to participate in the three-month Parolee Substance Abuse Program in a locked facility in Folsom and then do three more months in residential aftercare, even though he only faced five months of prison time on his parole violation.

"In (prison), you're up on a bunk," Longacre said. "If you get a book to read, you're lucky. Here you can actually talk to somebody and get some feedback."

Tony DeWeese, 27, who has been to prison 13 times during the past eight years, including multiple returns on parole violations, graduated from the Folsom program last week and is scheduled to be released Thursday.

"This is a chance for rehabilitation," DeWeese said. "It makes you look at yourself and think, maybe I do have a problem. Maybe it was all me."

The programs don't come cheap. This year, California is spending $217 million on them, including post-prison drug treatment for parolees who complete in-prison programs, according to the governor's budget. The administration is asking to increase the spending next year to $247 million.

State Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, whose budget subcommittee monitors prison spending, said the investment carries the potential for huge savings down the road.

"I think we possibly are looking at fundamental changes," Machado said.

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, urged caution. He said he first wants to see some data.

"They've implemented a lot of these changes without showing us how they're going to improve public safety," Spitzer said. "What are the results? Are these guys completing these programs? Are they getting new violations?"

Many states pursue change

Parole and corrections agencies across the country are asking the same kinds of questions. About 20 to 25 states are on the same parole change path as California, according to Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, which works with state and local law enforcement agencies on cost-conscious crime fighting strategies.

"There's a lot of ferment now," Jacobson said. "And California is right there."

Jacobson listed Kansas as a state that is a little further along than most, and its corrections chief thinks he is coming up with some answers.

In February, Kansas corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz reported to his state's Legislature that two years into its parole overhaul, Kansas has cut its rate of parolees committing new crimes in half.

"What we're doing here isn't magic," Werholtz said. "But you've got to take the emotion and the politics out of it, and we've been very lucky in Kansas that we've been able to do that."

Werholtz said that to make the package work, corrections officials need to stick with it even if a parolee does something horrible.

"Those kinds of things will happen," he said. "But if I can lower the aggregate numbers, I think we can prove we can make this state safer."
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/911060.html

Posted by lois at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2008

Seeking Employment for Ex-Cons in Newark

April 27, 2008
Seeking Employment for Ex-Cons in Newark
By ANDREW JACOBS
NY Times

NEWARK — Over the past two years, Peter Santos has hired 40 ex-convicts to help him build and renovate apartments here; 36 did not last, many of them doing unacceptably sloppy work or simply disappearing after a few weeks — or a few days — on the job.

One worker, Ronald O’Reilly, 41, had spent more than half his life in prison, for burglary, drug sales and weapons possession, when Mr. Santos last summer gave him not just a job but a cheap apartment and the furnishings to make the place feel like home. He even paid to repair Mr. O’Reilly’s neglected teeth. “I gave him my all,” Mr. Santos said. “I really thought Ron would be different.”

But within five months, Mr. O’Reilly had rekindled his love affair with crack cocaine, said Mr. Santos and others who knew him. He stopped coming to work, ceased paying his $500 monthly rent, and by the time he was evicted, had not only sold off the contents of the apartment, but also the items in an adjacent storage space that belonged to his erstwhile patron, they said. He was arrested soon after and charged with sexual assault.

The situation epitomizes the way Newark’s two leading problems, crime and unemployment, are intertwined with the huge number of ex-convicts in the city. Some 2,300 men and women pour into the city from prison each year, and 65 percent are rearrested within five years. One in six adult residents of the city has a criminal record.

With Newark’s unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at twice the state average of 4.9 percent — and criminal history and lack of education leaving many chronically unemployable — Mayor Cory A. Booker has tried to make prisoner re-entry a signature issue, aware that his twin promises of safety and economic vitality depend on it. He is part of a growing national movement of local and state politicians trying to tackle the problem; earlier this month, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, allocating $165 million annually to their efforts. “Up until now, the focus has been putting ex-offenders back in jail,” complained Fred Davie, president of Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit group based in Philadelphia that has created prisoner rehabilitation programs in 15 cities and advised the Booker administration. “We need a national approach to what has become a national crisis.”

Even with crime at historic lows, the number of people behind bars in the country is 2.3 million, its highest level ever, according to the Pew Center on the States; last year, there were 7 million people in jail or prison, on probation or on parole.

Most of the prisoner re-entry programs around the country are too new to have been evaluated independently, though the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York is midway through a three-year study of employment and recidivism among 2,000 male ex-convicts in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago.

Here in Newark, Mayor Booker has recruited 50 local companies to hire ex-convicts screened by the city’s workforce-development agency, rewarding them with tax breaks, and persuaded 300 lawyers who had volunteered on his campaign to donate their services to felons facing legal obstacles to employment. He is selling city land at a discount to developers willing to employ former prisoners on their construction sites.

But many of Mr. Booker’s initiatives have been stymied. He created a new post at City Hall dedicated to re-entry, but its first two occupants did not work out. He has lobbied legislators to take down some of the barriers ex-offenders face — like rules preventing those with criminal records from working at the Port of Newark — but many are loath to appear soft on crime. A threadbare municipal budget upended the idea of providing sanitation jobs to parolees.

“We’re making progress but it’s like running on the beach,” the mayor said in a recent interview.

Mr. Booker is invariably approached on Newark streets by young men with tattooed arms, newly released from prison and desperate for work. He explains that City Hall is not hiring and then, after assessing the person’s seriousness, whips out his cellphone and dials Kirsten Giardi at Goodwill Industries.

Ms. Giardi tells the job seeker to show up the next day at Newark’s main train station to catch a van ride to Goodwill, which has a three-year federal grant of $1.8 million to run a job-training center for former prisoners that provides résumé advice, work clothes and training in speaking grammatically correct English. But nearly half of the men never show, Ms. Giardi said, and half of those who do disappear once she informs them that it will be three weeks of preparation before they are sent on an interview.

“A lot of these guys want the easy way out,” she explained. “We can give them everything — hold their hand, give them a job and a place to live — but something has to click in their head. I don’t think anyone has figured out what that magic switch is.”

Of the 415 felons who have come through the program since it started in 2006, 245 have found work. Many, like Murray McNair, have been through two, three, even four jobs.

Mr. McNair, 22, the son of a drug dealer, approached Mayor Booker on the street last summer after the most recent in a string of jail stints for narcotics sales and said, “I’m done running the streets.”

But he quit the first job Ms. Giardi found him — at a refrigerated warehouse that provides food to the airlines — after a few days because, he said, he could not stand the cold. He was fired from the next, as a shelf stocker at Stop & Shop, for goofing around. Then he stopped going to Goodwill.

Until last month, when Mr. McNair showed up looking for another chance. At a Goodwill mentoring session, Mr. McNair listened as a silver-haired grandfather talked tearfully about missing family milestones because he was always in jail.

“I’ve never been to a graduation, never been to nothing,” said the man, Stanley Carter. “I don’t want to end up dying in prison. I don’t want to be killed in the street and be memorialized by some balloons on the sidewalk. I want to be remembered as the old man who turned his life around.”

That night, Mr. McNair returned to the crowded apartment he shares with his pregnant girlfriend, his sister and her two children, and announced that he had found a $9-an-hour job at a warehouse in Perth Amboy. It was 20 miles — two buses and a taxi ride — away.

“I know it’s going to be tough,” he said. “But I can’t be thinking about myself anymore.”

Even the most focused and well-financed efforts run uphill. Parolees with drug convictions do not qualify for federal tuition grants and outstanding traffic fines prevent many from obtaining the driver’s licenses that would give them access to jobs beyond the city’s public transportation system. And because child support payments and court fees accrue while they are behind bars, the paychecks of newly employed offenders are sometimes heavily garnisheed.

Newark’s Nicholson Foundation, which has allocated $9 million for employment training and mentoring programs, runs a program called Opportunity Reconnect, in which parolees can apply for food stamps, housing assistance and mental health counseling in a student union-like setting at Essex Community College.

“The last thing a returning ex-offender needs is to have to chase down a dozen different services to remedy their problems,” said Stefan Pryor, Newark’s deputy mayor for economic development. “If we can produce a light at the end of the tunnel, more individuals will successfully navigate that tunnel.”

Donald Shauger, who owns a property maintenance business, is one of the local employers Mr. Booker successfully recruited to the cause, agreeing to fill a quarter of his 140 positions with parolees. He said that the three he recently hired come to work early and stay long after their shifts end, concluding, “When you give someone a second chance, they truly work hard.”

Rich Liebler, who owns a car dealership in nearby Hillside, N.J., is a veteran in the cause, having run a Newark mechanics training school largely for ex-convicts with felony records since 1996. Of the 50 students per year, Mr. Liebler said, about 30 usually complete the yearlong program, which is financed by nonprofit groups, the Ford Motor Company and Pell grants. He said that 90 percent of the graduates find jobs and stay out of jail, though the program has not been independently studied.

It takes at least a year, Mr. Liebler said, to “deprogram” the felons. Most have never owned an alarm clock — months can pass before they show up for class on time — and few can name a family member with a regular job. “We treat them as if they were in a cult,” he said. “We have to reverse the thought process they’ve grown up into.”

Mr. Santos, the local developer, did not give up after Mr. O’Reilly shirked his job and stole his property. Instead, he gave another ex-convict, Rahman Parker, the keys to the apartment. He has promised, too, to replace the stolen furnishings.

Mr. Parker, a recovering addict who most recently served five months in the county jail for possession of heroin, is 35, a quiet man with big hands, and has been doing demolition work, painting and carpentry for Mr. Santos for the last year and a half. Mr. Santos says he will help Mr. Parker fix his teeth, just as he did for Mr. O’Reilly.

“I think Rahman will be different,” Mr. Santos said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/27excons.html?_r=1&sq=Newark&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

RI: Debtor's Prison

go to reinvestinjustice.org to learn more and see video testimony of people that have in debtor's prison in RI

Skipped debt hearings put 2,500 in ACI
Providence Journal, Tuesday, April 22, 2008
BY EDWARD FITZPATRICK

PROVIDENCE — Nearly 2,500 people were sent to the state prison last year because they failed to appear at hearings regarding court debts, such as fines and court costs.

With Rhode Island facing a big budget deficit and a swelling prison population, that highlights the need to give judges clearer guidelines for waiving court debts and determining if people have the ability to pay, according to a new report by the Rhode Island Family Life Center, a Providence nonprofit group that advocates for and supports people who are leaving prison.

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"While debtors' prisons are thought to be a thing of the past, they still exist in Rhode Island," Family Life Center Executive Director Sol Rodriguez said. "People with criminal records who are trying to get their lives together need support, not a system which throws them back in jail for having trouble paying court fees."

The report found people were sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions 2,446 times in 2007 for missing "ability to pay" hearings, spending an average of three days and two nights behind bars. While most were released after a few days, "several hundred a year spend a week or more just for court debt," the report said.

"Overall, there is a haste to incarcerate individuals for court debt in the state which causes unnecessary, damaging jail time, is an inefficient use of state finances, and disrupts people's lives," the report said. "Incarceration for court debt interrupts medical and rehabilitation treatment, causes individuals to be fired from employment, disrupts families and disrupts housing situations."

The report urges passage of bills introduced by Rep. J. Patrick O'Neill, D-Pawtucket, and Sen. Harold M. Metts, D-Providence. House Bill 8093 and Senate Bill 2234 call for holding hearings within 48 hours to gauge a person's ability to pay, using a financial assessment form and spelling out the types of government assistance that constitute evidence of a limited ability to pay.

The report also recommends using a variety of collection methods before sending people to prison and slashing the warrant fee from $125 to $25 for people brought into court on a warrant.

"One of the most effective ways to avoid this problem is to create a more reasonable system of court fees," Family Life Center policy researcher Nick Horton said. "Rhode Island far and away has higher fees than other New England states. That's the source of this cycle of debt."

Horton said most people do pay the fees and fines imposed by courts, but "for people who can't pay, there needs to be a more concerted effort to waive fines and fees rather than to continue trying to wring blood from a stone."

Overall, 66 percent of the people jailed in connection with court debt were either first-time offenders or had showed up three consecutive times for prior ability-to-pay hearings, the report said. "This contradicts the notion that judges only use incarceration on people that are serially delinquent," the report said.

So what would be the incentive to pay fines and court fees if judges began waiving them with greater frequency? "The idea is that judges consider the person's ability to pay and payment history, and in cases where it's clear the person is unable to pay, judges would eliminate or reduce fines," Horton replied. "So it's not as if they are being wiped out across the board. And if there is an ability to pay, they will still be expected to pay, but they won't be incarcerated unnecessarily. There is still incentive to pay because the fines could increase, and ultimately they could still end up in jail."

The report focuses in part on District Court in Providence, saying that court processes the most cases in the state and deals with the majority of people who owe court debts.

When asked to respond to the report and the legislation, Chief District Court Judge Albert E. DeRobbio said people aren't being locked up because they didn't pay court costs; rather, they're being incarcerated for short periods for failing to obey court orders to appear in court, he said.

"What are we supposed to do? Have a new set of rules that you don't enforce?" DeRobbio asked. "We'd lose all kinds of credibility if we just said, 'OK, ignore it. They didn't show up. We hope they show up next time.' "

District Court judges "don't deprive people of their freedom for no reason at all or failure to pay," DeRobbio said. "Judges of this court are very conscientious about deprivation of liberties, especially about an ability to pay."

As for provisions in the bills, DeRobbio said that if the proposal is "to have an immediate hearing on an ability to pay, you better get about 10 more judges because it's going to take time to fill out the forms and check the background of finances and expenses. If you do that in every case and do it right away, you'll need special calendars and special judges."

DeRobbio noted the state already knocks $150 off a person's court fees and fines for every day they spend in prison in connection with such court debt.

The report said that since that credit jumped to $150 per day in 2006, the number of people held at the ACI in connection with court debt has decreased — going from an average of 24 people a day to an average 18 a day.

But Horton said, "There has to be a better way" because under the current system, the state is losing money twice: by paying an estimated $95 per day to hold a person at the ACI's Intake Service Center and by reducing court debt by $150 per day.

The report — available at riflc.org/pagetool/reports/CourtDebt.pdf — said its recommendations would "decrease the number of unnecessary and costly incarcerations, reduce the burden of fines on the indigent, and lower the prison population."

Rhode Island's prison population reached an all-time high of 4,000 last year, and state officials have been weighing proposals to trim it to avoid reaching a court-imposed population cap and to save money. The state is facing a projected $384-million budget deficit in the coming fiscal year. And the prison population, which typically increases in the spring and summer, stood at 3,851 on Friday, spokeswoman Tracey Z. Poole said.

"Our state can no longer afford to unnecessarily incarcerate people for court debt," Horton said. "There simply isn't room at the prison."

The report said that if all those jailed in connection with court debt had been released within 48 hours last year, the state would have saved about $200,000 and lowered its awaiting-trial population by about 13 people per day.

Poole said the Department of Corrections has taken no position on the proposed legislation. "Anything that has the effect of reducing commitments will affect the population, but how that translates into cost savings is more complicated," she said. "These people are here for very short periods of time, and they are coming and going. So we're not going to be able to shut down a unit. You have to have a critical mass in order to close down a unit, which would result in significant cost savings."

When asked for reaction, courts spokesman Craig N. Berke said, "There is a process currently in place to assess a defendant's ability to pay, but it's entirely within the legislature's prerogative to amend that process."

Assistant public defender Michael A. DiLauro, who is listed as an adviser on the report, said, "How much money does it cost to attempt to collect money from people by incarcerating them and how much is realized from it? That's a conversation we need to have. We know what the answer is: these people can't pay, so they stay in jail 7, 10, 14 days, and how much does that cost? There's no way you can tell me this is an efficient, businesslike, common-sense way of doing things."

DiLauro said the bills do not mandate that judges waive court debts. "It doesn't bind the judge's hand," he said. "It just says that's a factor."

DiLauro said it makes sense to use a financial assessment form to gauge a person's ability to pay fines and court costs. "It's a comprehensive, standardized way of doing things," he said.

Posted by lois at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2008

A life of honor, one day at a time

April 09, 2008
COLUMN ONE
A life of honor, one day at a time

By Susan Brink, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 9, 2008

It happened again at a Taco Bell. The old way of thinking, the criminal voice, wouldn't shut up inside the head of Ken Layton.

Yeah, take out that punk kid, beat the crap out of him, show that pimply faced idiot he ain't nothin' and you're still Folsom Kenny Layton.

He was standing in line at the fast-food joint, behind an overwhelmed woman with an unruly child. She was complaining about her order, and the kid behind the counter kept putting her down. "He was rude," Layton said. "Sarcastic."

Layton, 64, had been out of prison for 20 years. And yet the old thinking was back, a twisted moral code that he wrote in childhood, refined over decades behind bars and enforced throughout early adulthood, no matter who got hurt.

These are the words Layton had planned to say, before the old thinking took over: "Hey, kid, you're in customer service and you're being rude to a customer. If you keep that up, you're not going to make it." Firm. Wise. Helpful. But criminal thinking swept in, rewrote the script and instead he said, "You're a punk, and if you don't like it, I'll meet you in the parking lot."

Folsom Kenny got his taco order and tossed the food in the trash before pounding open the door.

His wife, Carlie, hungry for tacos but seeing no fast-food bag, watched him from their car. "He kind of tilted his head and put on a gangster walk," she said. He didn't smile and wave like he always did; just wordlessly got in, slammed the car door and cut off a driver as he peeled out of the parking lot.

For many ex-cons, this is the kind of moment that can precede a crime and, ultimately, a return to prison. A 2002 Justice Department study that tracked prisoners released in 15 states found two-thirds of them were rearrested within three years for a felony or serious misdemeanor. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in a 2006 report, tracked inmates for two years after their release and found a recidivism rate of 38% after one year. After two years, 51% of released California prisoners were back behind bars.

Layton knows why: prison thinking, convict thinking, criminal thinking.

In his case, it was still there, decades after his last crime. But as he drove down the street with his wife, Layton adjusted. Within a few blocks, he'd found a way to stifle Folsom Kenny.

Layton's ability to defuse his anger is a rare skill for an ex-con, but it doesn't have to be. Experts think helping criminals understand how their thought processes are connected to the crimes they commit is more than just a touchy-feely exercise. It can reduce recidivism.

Layton's struggle, chronicled in his own contemporaneous writings and later recollections, is a case study in how the criminal mind works -- and how with guidance, practice and will it can change.

Layton's story, like the stories of many criminals, begins with a litany of gut-wrenching stuff from a deplorable childhood -- raped by his brother, sexually molested and humiliated by his mother, beatings, fights, running away from home. By seventh grade he was sniffing glue, by eighth grade he was stealing cars, and by the age of 14 he was locked up in the juvenile detention center in East Los Angeles.

"I always knew I was a coward at heart," he said, and recalled what he believed to be the core of his criminal thinking:

Ain't nobody going to do that to me again. You think you're going to hurt me. Hah! I'm going to show you something. I'm going to show you some violence you don't want to see. Ain't nobody going to do that again.

It was, he said, a front that concealed other thoughts:

I'm scared. All the time. I talk my way out of fights. I run from them if nobody's looking. If somebody starts peepin' my hold card, I gotta get them away. They gotta know this other guy, this tough guy, not the coward I really am. I know I'm nothin'. Can't let anyone else see it. I've got to learn how to be tough.

Until he reached juvenile detention, he said, he had some vague sense of right and wrong. In fact, he kept a tally, a written list of what he did that was wrong, what he was ashamed of: stealing from his mother, running from a fight.

In juvenile detention, he crumpled the tally, threw it out and never kept a list again. By then, he said, he had decided he was going to be a criminal. His moral code flipped from worrying about right and wrong to consciously and consistently choosing wrong.

[Expletive] that list. I'm just going to do the wrong thing every time. Then I don't have to keep no list. I'll make a new set of rules. I'll be the baddest convict the Laytons ever knew. The whole world is sick and nuts. They want to try to get over on me. Uh uh. I'm gonna get over on them.

Do unto others before they do unto you -- that was his new rule.

When he was released from detention, he continued stealing and fighting. He was about 20 when he switched from knives to guns. He hooked up with a robbery ring and worked his way up from convenience stores to supermarkets and pharmacies. His robberies landed him in San Quentin, Soledad and Folsom prisons for all but a few months of his adult life.

In one robbery, his getaway driver freaked and was gone by the time Layton ran from a supermarket. So he dashed into a house whose owner tried to stop him. He shot and wounded the homeowner, and as the guy fell his wife, seeing her bleeding husband, collapsed with what Layton later found out was a stroke.

He remembers blaming the victim.

What the hell is he doing, running after me. Can't he see I'm the one with the gun? What's wrong with him? He's getting in my way. Don't he know who I am? BANG.

His final crime was a drug store robbery in Oregon. His car broke down during his escape. He hitched a ride with a couple of kids who, after they dropped him at a bus station, called the police to report that he had a gun and appeared nervous.

The cops were waiting at the bus station in San Francisco when Layton got off the Greyhound. None of it wiped the scowl off his face.

But he was stifling a sigh of relief, he said. I'm goin' home, the home I know, where I know the rules and what to do and how to do it.

He rode through the gates of the Oregon State Penitentiary, believing it safer than any prison he had known. This is gonna be a breeze.I'm in heaven. Dope and handball. They sleep in the [expletive] yard! You could never sleep in the yard at Folsom.

By the time he arrived at the Oregon prison in 1977, Layton was 34, 6 feet 2, a tattooed and muscled 200-pounder who wore shades and a navy stocking cap pulled to his eyebrows. Larry Roach, then administrative assistant to the warden, said Layton made the top three on his "most dangerous inmate" list. "He was the fiercest man I had ever seen," Roach said.

Roach started talking to Layton, debating really, about the values of a law-abiding life versus a convict life. Layton argued the virtues of the convict code, the freedom of living without regard to rules, the integrity of not snitching, of loyalty to fellow convicts who also kept the code.

Roach countered that the freedom to come and go is worth the price of following society's rules. "At the end of the day, you go to bed when someone tells you to. You wake up when you're told," he recalled saying. "I go home. I can have a beer, have sex with my wife. Who's free?"

It was an argument that went nowhere for years. Roach still has a treatise Layton wrote in 1980. In it, he compared two classes of prisoner: the lowly inmate, living without a moral compass, and the exalted convict, living according to a strict code.

"Consider the inmate. He is a prisoner who cooperates with prison officials, for personal gain will cooperate with any authority. He is a coward. In prison, he will snitch on, step on and generally disrespect [other prisoners] at every opportunity, as long as protection is sure and swift. . . .

"The title 'convict' is earned. The convict, by his own choice, lives outside society's social structure. He has chosen to adhere to the social structure commonly known as the 'convict code.' It's never been written up. It's a code of survival as an independent person. He knows with cool certainty that no authority nor any man can break him. The convict is, and will be, the top of the line in his world, as long as he adheres to his chosen code of ethics. He will, till his last breath, be a man of integrity, and in his heart, he will be free."

Roach began to see the distorted integrity in Layton's values. "He was studiously adherent to 'the code.' It's not our code, but in their world it's morality," Roach said.

Layton thought he found backing for the code in philosophy and religious writings. He read Viktor Frankl, who wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man but . . . the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Layton took that to mean The Man couldn't mess with the integrity of his convict code.

And when he read "A Course in Miracles," a kind of New Age spiritual text, it too reinforced his criminal values.

Look at me. I'm the Special Son of God, don't you know.

Then Layton got sick. He had systemic vasculitis, an inflammation of all the blood vessels in his body, a consequence of Hepatitis B infection. The inflammation was attacking all his of organs, and he was slipping away. Roach moved him to the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland.

The doctors there, using immunosuppressive drugs, restored his health. He was in shape to return to prison, but he had lost the strength and speed he had always counted on to keep safe. He said to Roach, "I can't do this anymore."

Roach asked him what he wanted, and both remember his response: "I want to be an honorable man, but I don't know how."

He was ripe for change. Roach helped him get admitted to the prison system's correctional treatment program at Oregon State Hospital near the prison.

The director was Jack Bush.

"We teach people how to be objective observers of their own thoughts," said Bush, who now consults with a similar treatment program in Vermont's prisons.

On his first day of treatment, Feb. 28, 1985, Layton was asked to write down ways in which he had hurt people. It was a long list. And as he left the room, he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He held eye contact with his reflection, recognizing who he was.

"I walked out of that little room. I seen the mirror. I said, 'It's you that does this [expletive]. It ain't your mother; it ain't your father. It's you.' When I saw the mirror, I realized I always blamed everybody else. But it was me, a nobody, who cut a swath through the world and didn't give a [expletive] about anybody. I shot people; I humiliated people," he said.

Layton was challenged to see the connections between his thoughts (I want that car) and his actions (car theft). Then, Bush said, the program challenges prisoners to examine the attitudes behind the thoughts, and to imagine alternative attitudes.

The goal, Bush said, is to turn an antisocial moral code into an acceptable moral code.

Prisoners are told to "pay attention to your thinking, pay attention to the connection between thinking and action," Bush said.

And then they're told to try an attitude adjustment. A criminal's attitude, for example, could well be: No one respects me; therefore, I respect no one. Bush has seen that change to " 'I can respect them, even if they don't respect me.' That's coming out of the mouths of serious felons," Bush said.

Layton was ahead of the game before he got to the treatment program, Bush said, because he had already named his goal: "I want to be an honorable man."

In everyday interactions at the program, he followed the rules. One was to report other inmates in the program if he saw them breaking the rules. "When I was in the program, reporting a crime meant that if I seen a fellow patient doing something wrong, I was supposed to take it to group," he said. "But when I was a convict, the rule was you don't tell."

Once, in a walk around the grounds outside the program, another patient talked to a woman through a window in one of the female units -- a rule violation. "I said, 'Man, I'm going to have to take this to group.' And I did. It was one of the hardest things I ever done. It was breaking a lifelong code."

I ain't no snitch fought mightily with I am a responsible citizen, and the latter won out.

He kept journals during the three years of his treatment. He kept writing down his thoughts for a few years after his release in 1988. And when Bush moved to Vermont, Layton continued to write to him, and later e-mail him, especially when his thoughts started slipping dangerously close to criminal thinking.

Soon after he got out he went to a Wal-Mart, and a clerk gave him $10 too much in change. He returned it.

Practice, practice. I'm a citizen.

The process had taken hold.

He met Carlie at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She was the clean and sober single mother of a 5-year-old, and he was a clean and sober ex-con. They played softball on the same team, went out for coffee, played golf and took short trips with her son, Skip. Within a year they were married, and Layton jumped at the chance to be a stepparent. "God sent me Skip, and I lightened the load for Carlie," he said. "I had to be an example for him, and it built my self-esteem."

Carlie sees her husband's criminal past as a chapter written by a man she has never known. "He always felt safe to me," she said. "He has this calmness about him."

Layton appears able to recreate how he thought for the first 40 years of his life and compare it with what goes on within his gray matter today. Like an alcoholic or an addict who doesn't drink or shoot up, a criminal who doesn't commit crimes faces a one-day-at-a-time challenge with no letup.

A cornerstone of the treatment program Layton went through is that, regardless of individual facts of terrible childhoods and despicable circumstances, there are no excuses for breaking the law.

When the stress of work -- he counsels juvenile offenders -- gets heavy, or his boss gets too demanding, he's in danger of falling back, he said. That's what triggered the Taco Bell outburst, and shortly afterward he talked with his wife, with his boss, to ease the stress.

He owns his own home, drives a decent car, has a new motorcycle and has paid taxes long enough to collect Social Security. (He prefers not to reveal his present location to prevent any grief from people from his past.)

How can this possibly be me after the first 40 years of my life?

At a seafood restaurant, the three old friends, Layton, Roach and Bush -- law-abiding citizens all -- gathered for dinner. Everyone except Layton studied the menu and made standard, middle-class small talk. They discussed the entree they might order, talked about dishes they'd eaten in other restaurants in other cities, and appeared in no hurry for the food to arrive.

Layton knows that he never will be quite like them, so easy with life.

He still wages internal mental bouts against criminal thoughts. "If I see an armored car and think about robbing it, I look away," he said. "I've planned robberies in my head, but I didn't do them.

"I still feel like I'm falling short, but I want to be the best person I can be."

Posted by lois at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2008

JPI: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities

Justice Policy Institute: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=73

Jails bulging with people with mental illnesses, the homeless and people detained for immigration offenses; costing counties billions

Washington, D.C.—Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades, according to a new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The research found that jails are now warehousing more people--who have not been found guilty of any crime--for longer periods of time than ever before. The research shows that in part due to the rising costs of bail, people arrested today are much more likely to serve jail time before trial than they would have been twenty years ago, even though crime rates are nearly at the lowest levels in thirty years.

“Crime rates are down, but you’re more likely to serve time in jail today than you would have been twenty years ago,” said the report’s co-author Amanda Petteruti. “Jail bonds have skyrocketed, so that means if you’re poor, you do time. People are being punished before they’re found guilty—justice is undermined.”

The report, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies, found jail population growth (22 percent), is having serious consequences for communities that are now paying tens of billions yearly to sustain jails. Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become the “new asylums,” with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.

The impact of increased jail imprisonment is not borne equally by all members of a community. New data reveal that Latinos are most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are least likely to be able to pay and, by far, the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Further exacerbating jail crowding problems is the increase in the number of people being held in jails for immigration violations—up 500 percent in the last decade.

In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over $19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way