Sen. George Runner isn't your typically crazy Republican. No, you have to give credit where credit is due, he goes way beyond that. His voter initiatives (some funded by an indicted meth and coke "wharehouser" Henry Nicholas) are really excellent examples of ToughOnCrimeTM run amok. Last year, he actually had one of his initiatives defeated, Prop 6. Usually that type of poor policy pandering is rewarded, but don't cry for Runner as he was able to get an expensive parole measure passed, Prop 9.
But, Runner is always running some game. And back before he passed "Jessica's Law" he was trying to block parolees from other parts of Los Angeles County from moving to his district in the Antelope Valley. Interestingly, he even got the CA Dept. of Corrections & Rehabilitation to play along:
In what state Sen. George Runner characterized as a "side agreement" with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the prison and parole agency said it would limit assignments of released offenders into the Antelope Valley to those who had "historical ties" to the area. The agreement created an added layer of anti-parolee protection for the fast-growing desert valley communities on the northern fringe of Los Angeles County.
State law mandates only that parolees be returned to the county of their last legal residence. In vast Los Angeles County, for instance, an inmate from South Central Los Angeles could be paroled to Lancaster. (SacBee 6/23/09)
The truly sketchy thing about this whole affair, as Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) pointed out, is that this deal occured a few months before Jessica's Law was approved. If you recall, many inland legislators, like Sen. Florez, were concerned that parolees would not be able to find suitable places under the new law to live except these spread out areas like, say, the Antelope Valley.
Apparently what is good for the goose wasn't really good for Runner's gander. So, while he was running the Jessica's Law initiative, he was also agreeing to "side deals" with CDCR to make sure that parolees wouldn't be shipped to his district. It is some of the most cynical NIMBYism that I've ever seen, and, frankly, that's saying a lot.
If Runner wants to serve his constituents, fine, then do that. But perhaps when he's writing initiatives for the state, he could consider what is the best policy for the state instead of what's best for his political career.
Sen. George Runner is a fan of spending the state's money. No, he won't spend money on educating children or giving Californians opportunities, he's more interested in locking people up and making them into better criminals when they are eventually released. But one of Runner's greatest successes, or failures depending on how you look at it, was the disaster known as Jessica's Law.
In a report released this week(PDF), the California Sex Offender Management Board cited housing as a major source of recidivism amongst sex offenders. Jessica's Law, passed as Prop 83 in 2006, banned registered sex offenders from living within 2000 feet of a school, park, or other children gathering area. This has severely limited housing availability for these paroled offenders. Since the law has been in place, homelessness amongst this population has increased by a factor of 12. The SOMB has found housing for some of the offenders, but the problem has far outstripped their resources. And given the budget crisis, who knows how long we can keep even a modicum of a housing program.
Homeless sex offenders do not make us safer, just the opposite. They are difficult to track, they are likely to live near schools anyway, and there is always the fact that the homeless are far more likely to commit crimes than those with stable housing.
The SOMB is now calling for Jessica's Law to be revised.
Robert Coombs, a spokesman for the board's chairwoman, said the members found it infeasible to call for abolishing the residency restrictions, given the sweeping voter approval of Proposition 83. He said state and local officials have the power to interpret the law to allow more housing for sex offenders, but the board believes that the likelihood of legislators fixing the problems in more comprehensive ways -- at least in the short term -- is slim.
"I can't imagine a policymaker who would put their name on something that says we want to make it easier for sex offenders to find housing," Coombs said. "Even though it's a strong public safety concept," lawmakers would be setting themselves up for political attack.(LAT 1/14/09)
This would require a 2/3 vote, as it was passed by the voters. Good luck getting a Republican to vote based on public policy rather than red meat to his base on this issue. Apparently he is "going with his gut" over actually looking at what is really happening. You see, he thought about this one night, and it seemed like a good idea, and he's going to stick with it. Real world results be damned!
Meanwhile, Arnold's people seem to be somewhat open to changing the residency restrictions. Former Corrections Secretary Jeanne Woodford has even called for the complete abolition of the residency requirements. And the underlying facts behind Jessica's Law are rarely put better than she put it:
"The bottom line is, this is really what happens when we allow our emotions to get the best of us, as opposed to dealing with the facts," she said. (LAT 1/14/09)
The assumption with Prop. 83, "Jessica's Law," was that it simply perpetuated the "Tough on Crime" myth that reactionaries have always rode to popularity. It turns out that Jessica's Law also made a small group of contract psychologists rich for no discernible reason.
A 2006 law intended to crack down on sex offenders has proved a bonanza for a small group of private psychologists and psychiatrists, 14 of whom billed California taxpayers last year for a half a million dollars or more each, a Times investigation found.
Among the 79 contractors hired by the state to evaluate sex offenders, the top earner was Robert Owen, a Central Coast psychologist who pulled in more than $1.5 million in 2007, according to state records reviewed by The Times.
At issue is a provision in the law that mandated government-funded psychiatric evaluations for sex offenders, to determine whether or not they required hospitalization or instutionalization after their prison terms have been served. If this resulted in actual hospital commitments, perhaps there'd be a return on investment. But the $24 million state taxpayers have sunk into this just in 2007 has yielded nothing:
It's unclear, however, what benefit the investment has yielded. There's been a nearly ninefold increase in evaluations and a threefold increase in recommendations for hospital commitment. But the actual number of commitments has remained essentially the same -- 41 in the 18 months before the law was passed, 42 in the 18 months afterward.
As the state confronts a budget shortfall of $15.2 billion, legislation to fund contractors to evaluate offenders through 2010 is expected to be voted on in the Assembly as soon as this week. Costs from Jessica's Law are expected to rise to several hundred million dollars annually over the next eight years, with further increases thereafter, according to projections by California's legislative analyst.
What a horrible boondoggle this thing has turned out to be, doing nothing to keep anyone safe, costing the state hundreds of millions, and violating all kinds of civil rights leading to ex-offenders sleeping under bridges (which makes them far more difficult to track). Prop. 83 is the poster child for why initiative campaigns have strayed far from their initial purpose as exercises in direct democracy, and why serious reform of the process is needed desperately.
This is the impact of lawmaking by emotion instead of reason. Jessica's Law, the initiative passed by the voters in 2006, could increase the risk of crime. No one could have anticipated that, right? I mean, when you force ex-cons to sleep under bridges and give them no hope of rehabilitation, and you hobble police departments and sap their ability to actually track sex offenders, how could crime go up, right?
In the 15 months since voters approved Jessica's Law, which restricts where paroled offenders may live and requires electronic monitoring of their whereabouts, the state has recorded a 44% increase in those registered as transients, according to a report released by California's Sex Offender Management Board.
The law prohibits ex-offenders from living within 2,000 feet of places where children gather, but it lacks adequate definitions of such places, the report says. And in some counties and cities, the law's residency restrictions make large swaths of housing off-limits.
Unresolved questions about major parts of the law make it impossible to determine whether the state is safer now from sex offenders, panel member said. Some said the law could be making things worse.
Tom Tobin, the board's vice-chairman and a psychologist, said that homelessness removes offenders from their support systems, such as family members, which increases the chances they will commit new crimes.
"I see homelessness as increasing overall risk to public safety, and as a very, very undesirable consequence of probably a well-intended law," he said.
While I don't necessarily agree with the connection between homelessness and public safety, certainly THIS kind of homelessness, of former sex offenders, is not desirable. But it falls along the same stupid, shortsighted, Tough On Crime (tm) policies we've seen in California for 30 years. We extend sentences longer and longer and then try to build our way out of the inevitable overcrowding problem (by the way, that building plan was wildly optimistic; they're now talking about 6,900 less beds and a longer time to get them constructed); we punish sex offenders with an unrealistic law that actually endangers the state's citizens instead of protects them. This is the legacy of a failure of leadership.
So now we learn that the implementation for Jessica's Law is completely impossible and will likely never happen.
Law enforcement leaders who pushed for a ballot initiative requiring sex offenders in California to be tracked by satellite for life are now saying that the sweeping surveillance program voters endorsed is not feasible and is unlikely to be fully implemented for years, if ever [...]
The difficulties include the impracticality of tracking sex offenders who no longer must report to parole or probation officers, the lack of any penalty for those who refuse to cooperate with monitoring and the question of whether such widespread tracking is effective in protecting the public.
The biggest issue, however, is that the law does not specify which agency or government should monitor felony sex offenders -- and shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars a year in related costs.
That said, these same law enforcement officials claim that the law is worthwhile, mainly because they don't want the egg on their face for the next 20 years, and they can quietly put the whole thing to rest once everyone forgets about it.
In truth, the unworkability of this law, which trades liberty for security and provides neither, making it far more difficult to track sex offenders while beginning a slippery slope toward lifetime surveillance of anyone who commits a crime we collectively decide not to like in the future, was obvious from the beginning. It was written poorly, and maybe some of that can be fixed. But the restrictions on housing have caused ex-cons to live under bridges, which seems to me to set the table for them to commit more crimes so they can get some shelter. The lack of reporting to parole officers, too, just drops these offenders off the map - when the point is supposed to be to FURTHER track them so they don't molest again.
This is also about the dangers of ballot-box budgeting. With the vague nature of the funding in the law, everyone's trying to force payment on somebody else.
I will admit that I'm occasionally a bit of a policy wonk. Not always, but you know, I have a degree in the whole "policy field" and I sometimes like to talk policy (or write as the case may be). One policy that I know reeks of fear-based politics with little to show in return: Jessica's Law. Sure, it won easily, and even Phil Angelides endorsed it. Really, only a very select few spoke out against it. Fear is a bad poliy basis, and there seemed to be little reason for this law other than FEAR. Sen. Jackie Speier's bill had already passed and provided most of the protections of Prop 83. And the provisions that it lacked were just plain bad policy.
But, at this point, the law is on the books. There's still some question about its constitutionality, with the latest court wranglings seeing the law enforced on 850 sex offenders. But, as the AP points out, many have found a loophole: the "transient exemption." AKA being homeless. If a sex offender is homeless, well it's hard to prohibit them from living under a bridge. And as I pointed out in the past, the 2000-foot rule (away from schools, parks, etc.) will keep people away from services they need, and from basically all metropolitan areas. So, you want to live in San Francisco? Sorry, but you're always within 2000 feet of one of those places, so, go try Yreka.
So, into this fray steps SD-03 candidate Joe Alioto-Veronese. He's raising a resolution at today's Police Commission hearing for stronger enforcement of Jessica's Law. He apparently doesn't want to charge all offenders with crimes, he just wants to know where these people are. The problem is that once you know where they are, the city/state is obliged to remove them from their location if it violates the law. Sure, we could just be lax on the enforcement part, I suppose, but that seems a strange study in contrasts. Furthermore, the resolution wants to a) find all these homeless people and demands that they respond or b) face jail time for parole violation if they don't respond.
This, at best, puts a bit of lipstick on a pig. It doesn't substantively address any of the problems that were recently raised, and it punishes the homeless. Mr. Alioto-Veronese recognizes the deficiencies of Jessica's Law, but when I asked him whether he supports the 2000-foot rule, all I got was that he supports "protecting our children from sexuasl predators."
UPDATE: One more thing. I should point out this map (PDF) from the California Senate. Take a look at San Francisco. Or LA, too. What do you see? The only places that offenders would be allowed to live in SF would be primarily minority areas concentrated in the Southeast of the City. Just one more reason why this law was wrong in the first place, and is still wrong.
UPDATE 2: Apparently, it seems that some are trying to take some sort of moral high ground, that they are more true defenders of children. But, I'll not yield that to anybody. I believe we must protect children, but we must do it sensibly. We must do it in a manner that actually works. I'll also point out that we require less of released murderers than we do of "sex offenders" (an overly broad category by the way). Prop 83 was bad policy when it passed, and it still is. (Oh, and btw, SF was the only county to reject Prop 83) More from the Chronicle:
But despite its visceral appeal, Prop. 83 is a terrible initiative that does not stand up to close scrutiny. One of its most obvious flaws is the ban on sex offenders living within 2,000 feet of any school or park. What this will mean is that most urban areas in California will be placed off limits to sex offenders. They will instead be forced into living in rural areas -- an unfair burden to those communities and a barrier for those ex-offenders who are making an effort to find employment and straighten out their lives. In addition, understaffed law enforcement and social service agencies in remote parts of the state might not have the resources to adequately monitor these individuals. Public safety may be endangered rather than enhanced.
***
Ideas that are presented as "tough on crime" are not necessarily the most effective against crime -- especially when resources are limited. Vote no on 83.
It would be easy for those of us in blue state California to look at this case from afar and see yet another miscarariage of Southern justice, but that would be a mistake. There is a lesson here for California, and it's a lesson we'll almost certainly ignore.
Before his conviction, Wilson was repeatedly offered plea deals that might have allowed him to avoid prison, but he refused because a plea would have forced him to register as a sex offender. "It might've been lesser time, but then again, I would have nowhere to go because I would have no home," Wilson explained. "I wouldn't be able to stay with my mother because I have a little sister. You know, when you're a sex offender you can't be around kids. Basically, I can't even have kids myself, you know, so what is the point of life?"
On Sunday, The Union-Tribune reported on the simmering issue in San Diego of sex offenders concentrating in the downtown area. Now that Jessica's Law (Proposition 83) has been overwhelmingly approved by Californians, local officials have been given the greenlight to run sex offenders out of downtown. But has anyone given any thought to where they're supposed to go?
Many politicians, especially Republicans, would like all of society to believe that ALL sex offenders are predators lurking in every corner of our communities ready to jump at every opportunity to abduct and assault our children. They try to twist reality by playing on our worst fears as parents by instigating rage in all of us with assistance from the media by sensationalizing child abduction cases as examples why we should banish ALL sex offenders. The truth, however, is that not all sex offenders are like the ones we see on TV. The great majority of them are first offenders who's offenses are misdemeanors. After all, there is a legal basis why our justice system classifies certain offenses as misdemeanors and that is because they are much less serious than felonies. Check the legal dictionary if you don't believe me. Now, don't get me wrong. I hate sexual predators especially those who victimize children. Like most people, I absolutely believe that these sex predators should be monitored closely upon their release from prison or be it as Jessica's Law put it - sent away to a place where they would not be able to harm children. My beef with this law is that it lumps all people in the registry as a predator and subjects them to a one-size-fits-all punishment.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday imposed a temporary restraining order on a key portion of the state's newly approved Proposition 83, the controversial Jessica's Law, blocking enforcement of a provision that would prohibit convicted sex offenders from living near a school or park.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston called the residential restrictions in Proposition 83 "punitive by design and effect" and agreed with registered sex offender "John Doe," who had filed a lawsuit hours earlier Wednesday, a day after voters overwhelmingly passed the proposition passed at the polls.(SacBee 11/8/06)
The Runners' version of Jessica's Law is terribly flawed. Just because you whip 70% of the electorate into voting for something out of fear, doesn't make it a reasonable law. It would seriously endanger children in rural areas and picks on rehabilitated offenders. We have addressed these issues in a piece of legislation signed into law this term. We don't and didn't need this onerous piece of legal crap.
First, my condolences to the family of Assemblywoman Karen Bass (D-LA), who lost her daughter and son-in-law in a car accident on the 405. The family will be in our thoughts. No good segway here, sorry.
Teasers: Arnold Schwarzenegger's staff living large on the lobbyist dime, Prop 90, Jessica's law makes us less safe, Crazy Tom McClintock, the CCPOA, and more!
Jessica's Law has some serious flaws. Few are actually willing to discuss them because they fear being labelled as Soft On CrimeTM. The Modesto Bee points out some of the problems:
Sex offenders who prey on children are every parent's nightmare, and understandably so. But fear and other emotions must be set aside in weighing whether Proposition 83 really will make children substantially safer.
The proposition would increase prison sentences for sex offenders; require lifelong monitoring for some offenders and further restrict where registered sex offenders could live. Those sound appealing, as does the initiative's title — the Sex Offenders, Sexually Violent Predators, Punishment, Residence Restrictions and Monitoring Initiative Statute. ... We have three serious concerns: (ModBee 9/27/06)
The 3 negatives they cite:
This law does nothing for non-stranger molestation
It's expensive without much in the way of proven results.
All of the sex offenders end up getting pushed to rural and suburban areas. In my opinion this is the big one. You are shipping these people off to the Central Valley, the Deserts, and Far Northern California. They are miles from the services they need and are required under law.
There are a ton of reasons to be against this law. We have other laws (including one this year by Sen. Jackie Speier, SB 1178, signed by the governor) and this is mostly duplicative of other laws. What policies it adds are actually bad policy. There is only one reason to support this law, the politicial calculus of not supporting it. It's a shame, but it even swept up Phil into supporting this bad law.
Fear breeds bad law. Kudos to the Modesto Bee, which typically isn't one of my favorite papers/editorial pages, for speaking truth to power on Jessica's Law.
(A repost to fix some formatting. - promoted by SFBrianCL)
I'll start with the good news. Prop 87, the alternative energy and oil tax initiative, is way ahead right now. It leads 52-31 right now, including 58% support from decline to state voters. If that number remains in that ballpark, 87 has a great shot at passing.
Prop 87 is an interesting initiative. I'll be doing a longer post on it in the near future, but as a former Texan, it boggles my mind that the state keeps so little of its mineral revenues. The entire University system in Texas was built off those revenues, but somehow California didn't jump on that train. Personally, I would prefer that those revenues be given to the general fund rather than a specific purpose. Alternative energy is great (and I just posted on that last week), but the state needs all the revenue it can get. It would be the best to let that money into the general fund and then hash out details in the normal budget process (if it really can ever be called normal).
The cigarette tax initiave, Prop 86, is up 63-32. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I like the purposes it goes to, but I'm just concerned over whether this law would violate the terms of the tobacco settlement. I would prefer that the state avoid another bout of massive litigation if possible. The no voters on this ballot seem to be smokers, as they are the only demographic rejecting it right now (72-31).
Unsuprisingly, Jessica's law, Prop 83, is passing overwhelmingly, 76-11. I'm not sure that we really need a ballot initiative on this, mainly because most of the issues in the law were already addressed by Jackie Speier's law on sex offenders. But, you can see why Angelides was almost forced by popular will to support this bill.
The Anti-choice initiative, Prop 85, is currently trailing, but just barely. It looks like there will be another battle. These people will never give up, no matter how many times the people of this state say that we don't want these anti-choice laws here. Phil Angelides has denounced the initiative. I haven't seen anything official from Schwarzenegger, but he supported last year's nearly identical Prop 73.
And finally, Prop 90 has a plurality of support as well. It currently leads 46-31, but right now it has a 42-32 lead amongst Democrats. Once the message goes out about how bad Prop 90 is, the No tally will increase quickly.
Incidentally, it's important to note that the no tally generally increases as the election draws near. Voters are usually drawn towards the status quo (typically No), so expect to see some drift there. Last June's Prop 82 was a good example of this, it started off quite strong, but inertia (and a blitz of advertising) overcame its initial approval.
These numbers will soon appear on the flip and in the Poll HQ.
