A remarkable little report appeared over the weekend, one that should have been on the desks of every member in the Legislature come Monday morning, but one which I suspect wasn't. In fact, I don't think it even made any of the papers, relegated to a sidebar on CapAlert.
California has more men and women locked up in prison than any other state, a new federal report finds, and unlike any other state, the vast majority of those placed behind bars are parole violators.
The report bolsters contentions by critics of the much-overcrowded prison system that state parole officers, who belong to the same union as prison guards, are extraordinarily willing to slap a parole inmate back behind bars, thereby exacerbating a prison overcrowding problem [...]
On average, the nation's state and federal prisons took in almost two new offenders for every parole violator, but in California, the reverse is true. In 2007, California prisons took in 139,608 inmates and 92,628 of them were parole violators, almost a 2-1 ratio. In only one other state, Washington, did parole violators outnumber those being jailed by the courts, and that was only by 126 inmates.
It is a financial and moral disaster that we are throwing men and women back in jail for parole violations at such an accelerated rate, far beyond any other state in the country. This is clearly a factor of the state's parole policy, which is too constrictive and too quick to return people to prison. It surely leads to the high recidivism rate for those who commit crimes multiple times - if they feel they can't escape the system once they're in it, they simply have no incentive to rehabilitate themselves.
Yet instead of reforming parole policy and getting some much-needed sanity into our sentencing laws, the bipartisan Tough on Crime machine squashes an independent sentencing commission and allows the passage of Prop. 9, which would implement an even MORE restrictive parole system, so much so that it violates the state constitution.
A federal judge has blocked enforcement of portions of a ballot measure approved last month by California voters that modify the state's parole revocation system.
The so-called Victims' Bill of Rights of 2008, passed on Nov. 4 as Proposition 9, amends the Penal Code to restrict or eliminate rights gained in a 14-year-old class action lawsuit in Sacramento federal court, parolees' attorneys argue.
Parolees and the state agreed in March 2004 to a permanent injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton mandating an overhaul of parole revocation procedures and guaranteeing due process for ex-convicts accused of parole violations.
Ten days after the election, attorneys for the parolees filed a motion seeking to enforce the 2004 injunction, saying Proposition 9 "purports to eliminate nearly all due process rights of parolees and directly conflicts with the protections put in place by the injunction and established constitutional law."
We are diseased by the prison-industrial complex. Prison construction is good for the CCPOA and supposedly good for the economy but it's based on a flawed notion that all construction spending is valuable. In fact, prison construction, especially of the type so needless that bringing parole policy in line with the other 49 states in the union would practically eliminate the overcrowding crisis and rendering the need for more beds moot, crowds out other, more valuable building projects that have a tangible value to people's lives. We are violating the human rights of inmates and the Constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as stifling innovative public investment, because the parole officers have a powerful lobby and the Tough on Crime dementia has infested the minds of practically every legislator in the state for 30 years.
Fixing parole policy and putting up-front money into drug treatment and prevention programs would save the state billions. It requires leadership. That's a limited resource right now in Sacramento.
The judges are bending over backwards to not do what they'll eventually have to do - cap the prison population because the failed leadership in Sacramento can't and won't arrive at a solution. Today they granted another 30-day extension:
Acceding to pleas for more time, three federal judges agreed to give the state an additional 30 days to reach an agreement for reducing the overcrowded prison population and avoid a trial that could lead to a mass release of inmates.
If no agreement is reached, the judges said, the trial will begin in November.
So, to recap - the state had months and months to settle with the prison advocates seeking to end overcrowding. It didn't happen, their "let's build our way out of it" approach hasn't led to the construction of one more bed, and they begged for time. The federal receiver asked for billions to make the prison health care system up to some sort of reasonable standard beyond what you'd find in a gulag, Senate Republicans killed the bond proposal and now this will either become another expenditure in the general fund or another reason for the judges to mass release. There is a way to admit nonviolent offenders into treatment programs and rehabilitation and work release but nobody wants to pay for it. And so the system is literally imploding on itself, because nobody will lift a finger to fix "ToughOnCrime" sentencing guidelines that are completely unsustainable and counter-productive.
There's a confluence of high-profile laswsuits against the state today, on big topics with far-reaching consequences. First, the medical community is suing over Medi-Cal payments:
Doctors, hospitals and health care providers filed a class-action lawsuit Monday seeking to block the state from cutting payments to them for treating the poor.
The lawsuit argues that an upcoming 10 percent rate cut to Medi-Cal -- the state-run health insurance program serving 6.5 million low-income residents -- will exacerbate a shortage of doctors, dentists and pharmacists willing to treat poor patients because payments are so low.
"Medi-Cal already doesn't cover the cost of providing care," said Dr. Richard Frankenstein, president of the California Medical Association, which led the lawsuit. "If these cuts take effect, Medi-Cal patients will be forced to seek care in already overcrowded hospital emergency rooms, which undermines access to care for all Californians."
The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday, seeks an immediate injunction to block the reduction from taking effect July 1.
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has been at the forefront of criticizing these payment cuts, and when he talked to bloggers at the CDP convention he predicted this lawsuit would be successful. The future of emergency room care and Medi-Cal really hangs in the balance: if the payments are inadequate, hospitals and doctors might turn these patients away, straining the ER system and increasing the crisis in health care access.
Even though the state is facing a $20 billion dollar deficit and our high schools, colleges, universities, health care facilities, and food banks alike are threatened with billions of dollars of reduced funding, the Governor and our Legislative leaders want to build 53,000 new prison and jail beds. We already have 170,000 prisoners in California. We don't need more prison beds -- we need sentencing reform and better support in the community for recovering drug addicts, people with mental illness, and parolees.
That's why we are filing our lawsuit today to stop the Governor from borrowing $7.4 billion in lease revenue bonds to build new prison beds, at a total cost of over $12 billion including interest payments. Operating these new prison beds will cost at least $1.5 billion each year, or a staggering total of $37 billion over the next 25 years. Our lawsuit argues that the $7.4 billion in lease revenue bonds violates the requirement in the California Constitution that all significant long term debts be approved by the voters. The lawsuit aims to force the state to ask its voters whether they want to build the 53,000 prison and jail beds proposed in AB 900. The New York Times has dubbed AB 900 as "the single largest prison construction program in the history of the US." Not only is AB 900 a tremendous waste of government resources, it also threatens the very premise of democracy by shutting voters off from their constitutional rights.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. And considering that a year after passage of AB 900, not one bed has been constructed, I'd say that this is a money pit and taxpayers need to step in to stop the digging. We have better solutions in the way of sentencing reform, and while Democrats in both chambers of the legislature play politics over which sentencing bill will become the primary one (Sen. Romero's clearly should, IMO), the crisis grows. And given that these construction bonds are little more than a boondoggle, California will probably end up following the lead of several states and release a mass of inmates early. There are real solutions to be had here, but pissing away $12 billion dollars is not one of them.
California's prison health care czar is asking for seven billion dollars to improve prison medical care. Before you think this sounds like a luxury, actually it's mandated
As the state faces a chronic budget deficit of at least $8 billion for the fiscal year that begins July 1, paying off both prison bond packages would cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion a year over the next quarter-century.
"This issue is not an elective," said Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer. "It is a directive. We are under a federal court order to bring the level of health care in our correctional system up to a constitutionally acceptable standard after years and years of under-investment. So in a sense, we are having to catch up for years where this was not adequately financed."
The alternative is mass release, which to most legislators in Sacramento is not an alternative. The federal receiver urged some kind of resolution without delay. We just passed AB900, which called for $7.4 billion in prison expansion bonds. Now here's another $7 billion in the same sector. Lawmakers are not pleased.
Legislators gulped hard Monday as the financial toll of future prison construction rang loud and clear.
Add up the interest and principal on two years' worth of prison bonds, and the annual hit on the general fund over the next 25 years would be $1.2 billion.
"It borders on the incredible," said state Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, at a budget hearing on prison bonds.
Actually, what borders on the incredible is that you think you can keep throwing nonviolent offenders in jail and raising sentences for decades and not have that come back to haunt you. Nobody funded the ancillary structures associated with the prisons and they fell into disrepair. If you don't address issues immediately they become more costly. What's so hard to figure?
These should not be funded through bond trickery again. It'll cost the state four times as much in the long run to do so. The prudent thing to do is actually bite the bullet and pay it now, or release enough prisoners to comply with the federal magistrate. Your choice. You made the bed, now lie in it. This is a $25 billion dollar deficit now. Deal with it.
I have a post up at Hullabaloo, where I'm proud to be writing, about the disturbing new Pew report which shows that more than 1 in 100 adults in this country are behind bars, and when you add in the parole and probation system it's probably more like 1 in 50. This is fast becoming the biggest problem that state legislatures face, and in California it's magnified by soaring costs, overcrowding, and a continued fealty to "Tough on Crime" solutions.
I highlighted what two red states are doing as a novel solution, something we could certainly try in California instead of our haphazard collection of early release and building more jails and nixing independent sentencing commissions:
Kansas and Texas are well on their way. Facing daunting projections of prison population growth, they have embraced a strategy that blends incentives for reduced recidivism with greater use of community supervision for lower-risk offenders. In addition, the two states increasingly are imposing sanctions other than prison for parole and probation violators whose infractions are considered "technical," such as missing a counseling session. The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens.
The comments over there are, as usual, great, and I wanted to open the discussion here. Plus we haven't had an open thread in a while, so here ya go.
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.
On Sunday, the LA Times reported the results of an investigation which revealed that the Department of Corrections has routinely miscalculated prison sentences, costing state taxpayers as much as $44 million dollars and clogging the worst prisons in the country, which has a cumulative effect.
Records obtained by The Times show that in August, the state sampled some inmate cases and discovered that in more than half -- 354 of 679 -- the offenders were set to remain in prison a combined 104 years too long. Fifty-nine of those prisoners, including (Nicholas) Shearin, had already overstayed and were subsequently released after serving a total of 20 years too many, an average of four months each [...]
The errors could cost the state $44 million through the end of this fiscal year if not corrected and more than $80 million through mid-2010. But California's overburdened prison agency waited more than two years to change its method of awarding credit for good behavior after three court rulings, one as early as May 2005, found it to be illegal.
Officials were giving some inmates 15% good behavior time instead of the 50% to which they were entitled. The state fixed release dates for only those inmates who requested it, according to a spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who said there was no evidence in Shearin's file that he complained.
In addition to having a flawed corrections system, it's just flat-out incompetent as well.
I believe that a fish rots from the head down, and this kind of inattention at the Department of Corrections can reasonably be seen as a direct result of a political leadership in Sacramento that is obsessed with being Tough On Crime (tm) and really doesn't want to see prisoners leave state jails. Aside from the fiscal issues, this is essentially taking away the fundamental rights of citizens of the state. As State Senator Gloria Romero notes:
State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), who chairs the Senate's public safety committee, said inmates have a fundamental right to a timely release. She criticized the prison agency's "arrogance in the face of the law to simply say that these people's lives don't matter, but they can just lock them away and essentially throw away the key."
The more errors like this, the more inmates locked up for more periods of time. This causes overcrowding, which strains treatment and rehabilitation services and creates an environment where the inmates are in more control than the corrections officials. Suddenly nonviolent offenders are in a school for how to commit violent offenses rather than a means to turn around their life. And the recidivism rate soars, as those who actually get to leave prison are not equipped to do anything to go back.
This all feeds on itself. If we want to get serious about prisons, we'll do the work to reverse it.
I've found myself wistful over the demise of health care reform in California, if only because it was so painful to watch. It was fairly glaring from the start that the resources and the budget structure weren't there to manage such a big issue. The lesson learned should be that a broader consensus has to be reached, but also that you have to work within the narrow structures forced by the state's processes, or else work to change them. Such is also the case with prison reform, which is actually a far less insurmountable a goal.
About a week ago we heard about a potential "deal" on solving the prison crisis, where the state would settle the lawsuits that are forcing the possibility of a dramatic release of prisoners. But notice how this is being done. It's a "deal" without reform.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, recognizing that you don't build prisons as quickly as one of his movie sets, understanding that the upcoming 3-judge panel decision on the prison crisis was bound to be punitive, is planning to dismiss 12% of the prison population.
In what may be the largest early release of inmates in U.S. history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year for some 22,000 low-risk offenders.
According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders who are in the final 20 months of their terms.
The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state an estimated $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. The proposal also calls for a reduction of more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of them involving correctional officers.
This seems to be as much about saving money as resolving the crisis. Still, it's a ballsy move. Except it reveals the distasteful options that result when you let a problem go this long without doing anything.
Instead of releasing 22,000 prisoners who have had rehabilitation and treatment and education and the skills needed to rotate back into civil society, the Governor wants to release 22,000 prisoners who went in for nonviolent offenses, but who got caught up in a crowded system, completely lacking in the treatment services they needed, and who essentially were matriculating in Crime College. A system as bad as California's turns nonviolent offenders violent. It doesn't equip them for the real world. And that can be witnessed by the nation's largest recidivism rate.
This is the problem that has little in the way of good solutions. Skimming off the top is something you can do, but its consequences are real, and the Tough on Crime folks will seize upon every offense made by these prisoners, and demonize Schwarzenegger as "Governor Pardon" (by the way, this is the END of his aspirations for higher office, this proves he's not interested because this is such campaign fodder). The best solution is a long-term one that doesn't scoop out the nonviolent offenders, but fundamentally changes the sentencing guidelines so the clog becomes reduced, and taking advantage of less crowded prisons in the interim to implement real rehabilitation and treatment programs that can reverse this disappointing recidivism trend.
UPDATE: Skittish, afraid-of-their-own-shadow lawmakers predictably stand up in opposition to this plan, because the other option of having the courts mandate an even larger release is such a better idea. I don't think skimming off the top is such a bright idea either, but no legislator dares wrap it in a critique of the failed prison system.
An amazing thing happened this week. The Supreme Court, by a 7-2 margin, ruled that federal judges have the leeway to reduce sentences for possession of crack cocaine relative to powder. The disparity in sentencing, which has significant racial overtones, has long been unconscionably unfair. And get this: the US Sentencing Commission unanimously decided to make the guidelines retroactive which could result in thousands of convicts who were unfairly sentenced to be released.
See, there's a national sentencing commission that reviews information and makes recommendations based on logic and common sense, taking the hot-button issue of sentencing out of the political sphere. Yet here in California, we have been stymied at any effort to create such a sentencing commission, and all sentencing legislation moves in the direction of being more punitive rather than less. This is how our jails have become clogged with so many nonviolent offenders, who in the overcrowded environment without proper treatment and rehabilitation often return to jail more violent than when they got there in the first place. The executive branch of this state knows this, yet they refuse to reveal their documents and communications that would confirm it.
States have the ability to break free from the "tough on crime" box and actually change the tilt in favor of jailing more and more citizens for longer and longer periods. Heck, in New Jersey this week they voted to ban the death penalty. But the only way to see any early prison releases in California is when the state miscalculates their sentences.
I was rendered almost ill by John Edwards' stance in the debate against the decriminalization of marijuana because "it would send the wrong signal to young people." Chris Dodd made a strong response that cut to the heart of our failed prison policy.
DODD: Can I respond, I mean just why I think it ought to be? We're locking up too many people in our system here today. We've got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don't belong there. My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We've gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We've go to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are, and as president, I'd try and achieve that.
This, of course, is most acute in California, where we're waiting for the other shoe to drop on a federal court order that could potentially force the release of thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding. State Sen. Gloria Romero held her ground and didn't allow the usual spate of tougher sentencing bills to pass the Legislature this year. So once again, George and Sharon Runner will go to the ballot with a punitive measure designed to make themselves look tough while further battering a crippled prison system.
A year after bringing to California Jessica's Law, the crackdown on sex offenders, the husband-and-wife team of state Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner announced Monday a new initiative that would target gang members for tougher prosecution and dedicate nearly $1 billion annually to enforcement and intervention.
The Republican legislators from Lancaster hope to collect enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot, and they have the backing of the father of the state's three-strikes law as well as law enforcement officials, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.
The Legislature has already rejected this bill, and it would again constrain the state budget with another walled-off mandate while doing nothing to address the major crisis in overcrowding. It's feel-good nonsense for "tough-on-crime" advocates.
By the way, let's see how the last initiative the Runners promoted, Jessica's Law, is working out:
I've written a lot about the California prison crisis in the past, and the last 11 posts I've done about it in the last four months have yielded a mere 25 comments. It's clear to me that there's a lot of apathy around the issue, combined with twinges of helplessness and the paralyzing recognition that there are no easy answers. It's the ultimate "out of sight, out of mind" situation, and as a result, we end up warehousing prisoners, "stacking them up like cordwood" and conveniently forgetting about what goes on behind bars.
Well, you no longer have to take my word for it. You can watch Ted Koppel's riveting two-hour documentary for the Discovery Channel, "Breaking Point," an exploration of life inside Solano State Prison in Vacaville, CA. And while you're at it, you can make 121 copies and send one to every member of the California Legislature and the Governor, so they can witness the fruits of their failed leadership. over...
Today the Joint Economic Committee, composed of Senators Webb and Schumer along with New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, held a hearing on certainly the most underappreciated issue facing America - our prison crisis. Here's part of Rep. Maloney's statement:
The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world, with more than 2 million Americans currently in jails or prisons. Clearly, imprisonment benefits society and is an important public safety measure. But faced with an unprecedented increase in incarceration, we must ask ourselves whether we are striking the right balance between the costs and benefits of imprisonment.
Putting more resources into creating economic opportunities that provide alternatives to crime would pay dividends in reducing crime and incarceration, while also strengthening families and communities.
We all know that in the long run crime doesn't pay, but it sure is costly. The average annual cost of incarceration for one federal prisoner exceeds $20,000 - far more than the average annual cost of $3,700 for a youth program, $6,000 for a job training program or the $13,000 for tuition at public universities.
There is no question that crime rates have dropped in the U.S. over the past decade. Researchers agree that the increase in incarceration rates have been driven by tougher sentences for repeat offenders and drug offenders, mandatory minimums, and a more punitive approach to post-release supervision, rather than an increase in crime.
These are precisely the problems that California faces, due to a complete failure of legislative leadership and a panoply of thousands of tougher sentencing laws. Today Dan Weintraub reports on the stirrings of a long-overdue reform of the system, before it's too late.
The Schwarzenegger administration, which has been cautious to a fault when it comes to prison reform, is tiptoeing back toward the idea of loosening restrictions on parolees who are good bets to stay out of trouble.
The program is starting with a trial run in Orange County, where ex-cons who are considered the lowest risks and then meet a series of benchmarks will be cut loose from state super- vision after six months instead of three years.
The idea is to give those parolees an incentive to get their lives back on stable ground shortly after they leave prison, which is when most felons return to a life of crime. Then, by letting them off parole early, the state figures it will be able to concentrate more resources on more-dangerous felons who need the most attention.
Parole reform is to prison reform as S-CHIP is to the broader health care issue. It's a baby step on the road to really making those tough decisions. But it's taken so long to get to this point, and change is being forced only through a crisis and a potential capping of the prison population, that I guess we have to be happy for what we get. There's going to be major pushback on this from the right (it's already happening on the Flush Report) so it's important that this under-the-radar issue gets attention and support.
On Monday, the three-judge panel with the power to cap California's prison population will meet for an organizational meeting. While the prison healthcare system is already in receivership, the panel might want to take into account these grim statistics about the state of health, and how the overcrowding issue impacts everything else in prison life.
As many as one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable, according to a study of medical care in 32 state lockups that will be used to help rebuild the troubled system.
One inmate, who reported extreme chest pains in the middle of the night, died of a heart ailment after waiting eight hours to see a doctor.
Another who complained for days of severe abdominal pain died of acute pancreatitis after medical staff did not believe his pleas were credible.
A third died after a two-year delay in diagnosis of his testicular cancer.
And an asthma patient died after failing to receive steroid medication for two days following transfer from a county jail.
In fact, ASTHMA was the ailment most likely to cause a preventable death. Not a shiv in the shower, not a rumble in the exercise yard. Asthma. This is straight out of the 19th century.
Between delays in diagnosis, failure to treat symptoms properly, and lack of access to doctors, the common thread here is that there aren't enough doctors, aren't enough facilities, and aren't enough overseers to adequately care for inmates. It comes directly out of the overcrowding that is plaguing everything in the corrections process.
Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents prison doctors, said: "We feel that the doctors in [the prisons] have been working in a battlefield situation. They do not have the tools to practice good medicine. The system needs work."
The cost of reorganizing the healthcare system will be enormous and take over a decade. It'd be a lot easier if sentencing reform allowed the jails to have a manageable population, but leadership was not forthcoming in this session. This is the result.
There will be no sentencing and parole reform coming out of Sacramento this year. Do you know what that means? It means that this man will be in our state's corrections system for the next 12-20 years because military doctors addicted him to opiates.
Sargent Binkley is a high school classmate of ours and West Point graduate who is currently facing twenty-odd years in prison for robbing a Walgreens under California's minimum sentencing laws. He used a gun (unloaded) and robbed the drugstores of only Percocet - no money, harming nobody.
Here's the kicker -- he was addicted to the opiates after smashing his hip while serving abroad in the Army -- the military medical system kept misdiagnosing him, and feeding him more of the painkillers. Add in some serious PTSD (he guarded mass graves in Bosnia from desecration at one point) and he spiraled down.
Sargent turned himself in, has been in a rehab program in county jail for over a year and a half while he awaits sentencing, and by all accounts is doing well. The Santa Clara DA wants to chuck the book at him, and he'll be gone.
Because the leadership in Sacramento - Republicans and Democrats - have no sense of how to legitimately deal with the crisis in our jails, and would rather look like tough guys and gals while putting sick people in prison. Sargent Binkley is a sick man. He needs treatment and aid from a nation which has abandoned him. Because of our mandatory minimum sentencing law, an angry DA is going to make him spend the next 20 years in a crowded cell.
Sentencing reform is one of the many bills on the docket today, which looks to be the last day for the California Legislature, though that's subject to change. In my view this is the signature issue the legislature faces: will they step up and respond to an crisis, or will they cower in the face of having to be "tough on crime" and reject anything but building our way out of the prison problem. Frank Russo defines the terms here. Basically there are two bills, each of which has passed their respective chamber. SB 110 (by Sen. Gloria Romero) calls for an independent sentencing commission without restrictions on what sentences they can look at; AB 160 appears to restrict anything passed through the initiative process, which shields three strikes. Apparently there's a third bill in the mix:
• Both SB 110 (Romero), which failed on the Assembly floor 34 to 38 and which can be brought up under reconsideration, and AB 160 (Lieber), which had been holed up in the Senate Rules Committee and has been sprung to the Senate floor, can be voted on. If Romero's bill advances, there is a play with AB 1708 (Swanson) on the Senate floor that could amend SB 110, clean it up, and perhaps make it more acceptable to the Assembly. Both houses of the legislature have passed fairly similar sentencing commission bills, although with heated debates and opposition from Republicans.
Whether it's intra-legislative jealousy between the chambers or a desire to look tough to voters, if nothing moves on sentencing today, our representatives will have a lot to answer for. This is worth a phone call to your Assemblymember and Senator today.
The State Assembly rejected the only sensible reform that would do anything to deal with the root causes of a prison crisis that has been built by 30 years of progressively draconian sentencing laws. SB110 (Romero) would have created an independent sentencing commission with the ability to rewrite sentencing laws outside of a political culture obsessed with "tough on crime" poses. Everybody with even a modicum of understanding of the prison crisis knows that the overcrowding (at a time when crime is down) is a direct result of mandatory minimums and three strikes and the multitudes of nonviolent offenders serving long sentences in our jails, some as a result of the War on (some kinds of) Drugs.
Now, there is a bill, AB160 by Sally Lieber, voted out of the Assembly earlier this year, that is similar to the bill Sen. Romero authored. But, there are some substantive differences, otherwise how do you understand these quotes:
Romero likened the defeat of her bill to the Legislature's throwing up its hands and telling federal judges to take control of the troubled prison system.
Don Specter, an attorney with the inmate advocate group Prison Law Office, said the vote "certainly emphasizes the one-dimensional approach California has to crime, which is to build more prisons."
You can read the Romero bill and the Lieber bill, still pending in the State Senate (It passed the appropriate committee by a 9-7 vote). The Lieber bill can't touch sentences established through the initiative process (so this is probably about saving three strikes from scrutiny). The Romero bill would have made recommendations to amend those types of sentences. Overall the Romero bill is more comprehensive. This could be some kind of petty jealousy between the chambers.
Hopefully the Senate shows some leadership and passes the Lieber bill, which would at least move things in the right direction. Until then, on the flip I'm going to list those Democrats who would rather hang on to their little fiefdoms of "tough on crime" sentencing than enact the only proper reform to deal with a crisis that now will almost certainly be handled by the courts.
Let me build on Brian's post regarding the decision by two separate US District Court judges to convene three-judge panels to consider capping the California prison population. This should have been completely expected to everyone in the state government.
There is a near-term and a long-term crisis in our state prisons. So the Governor predictably offered a medium-term solution. Prisons don't build themselves overnight, so "adding 53,000 beds" which can only phase in over the course of a couple years does absolutely nothing to address the current situation. Furthermore, the continued overcrowding, which impacts rehabilitation and treatment and the high recidivism rate, means that by the time those new beds are constructed, the problem will be bigger, and any additional capacity (which doesn't even cover the CURRENT overcrowding numbers) will be only a temporary solution. So with root causes unaddressed, there was no way any judge with any sort of conscience could sit idly by and watch as the prison system continues to spiral out of control. A state government that has COMPLETELY FAILED TO LEAD forced his hand.
Grassroots progressives are picking up on my plea to call representatives to publicize what the party has voted to endorse and ensure that state and federal lawmakers will answer the call of their party and support these initiatives. The first resolution I mentioned was net neutrality; now we should push the resolution on sentencing reform, which I've included in the extended entry.
We know that our criminal justice system nationwide is perverse. For violent and nonviolent offenders alike, it has become a crucible which demands MORE violence as a means to survive.
This is what our system of justice does: It takes the unlawful and makes them more violent. It takes criminals and makes them worse, reducing their future options, encouraging them to become more physically brutal, cultivating their marginalization from society. Such is the irony of the politics of crime in this country. We are so afraid of violent criminals that we force our politicians to continually worsen their punishment, condemning them to prisons that have been shown to make inmates more violent.
This is especially true in California, home to the highest recidivism rate in the nation, because all of the overcrowding has for all practical purposes eliminated any treatment or rehabilitation programs and turned the jails into human waste dumps. This is not something we can build our way out from under; it's too far gone. Only some meaningful reform that silences the "tough on crime" crowd and revisits the role of incarceration as an opportunity for redemption and a return to civil society will fix this crisis. AB 900, which enabled the Governor to add 53,000 beds in exchange for token accountability, is already causing concern that even that accountability will be circumvented. Enough. The Governor's plan is overly cautious and seeks to kick the can down the road. We need real reform.
Schwarzenegger's prison managers have begun to implement a program to assess each inmate and give him or her an individual program to follow while in prison. They have also begun a comprehensive re-evaluation of every rehabilitation program to determine which work and which should be abandoned.
But the biggest reductions in overcrowding would come from changes in sentencing laws and parole policies. On those issues, Schwarzenegger must lead the way.
California has the highest recidivism rate in the country, with 70 percent of inmates returning to prison within three years after release. What the state has been doing for a generation is not working. The current policies are draining the treasury and making the streets less safe. It's time to try a new approach.
State Sen. Gloria Romero, a.k.a. the only one in Sacramento who gets the prison problem, is really sticking her neck out to deny the rapacious fearmongers more sentencing laws, and she deserves our support.
Republicans are outraged that more than two dozen bills in the Legislature that would create new crimes or lengthen sentences will languish until next year in a committee controlled by Democrats.
Sen. Gloria Romero, who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee, imposed a one-year moratorium earlier this year on all Senate and Assembly bills that would worsen crowding in California's prisons and jails.
That's what you do when there's a CRISIS. And considering that there have been nearly 1,000 laws in the past 30 years raising sentences for criminal offenders, I would guess that every additional law is completely unnecessary. Of course, that's the bread and butter for those so wedded to the "Tough on Crime" label. So Republicans are miffed:
But Sen. Dave Cogdill, vice chairman of the committee, maintains the panel "shouldn't be holding the safety of the people of California hostage to this situation."
The Modesto Republican concedes prison crowding "is very real, but the reality is any bill that we take action on this year wouldn't become law until January 2008."
Right, because new prison facilities can be conjured in a matter of months. Who's the architect, Merlin?
