Judgment Day

The Chicago Sun Times has this story:

The Illinois prison population had been steadily increasing, mostly because of the high recidivism rates of drug offenders.

In 2003, Govenor Blagojevich made crime one of his top priorities by implementing a drug treatment program at the Sheridan Correctional Center and increasing the number of parole officers statewide.

The number of new convictions among parolees has decreased by more than 18 percent from fiscal years 2004 to 2007, with arrests of parolees declining by 23 percent during the same period.

Because of the reduction in repeat crimes, taxpayers have saved an estimated $64 million in prison costs since 2004, officials said.

"It's very uncommon for states to be able to reduce their overall recidivism rates," said Deanne Benos, assistant director of the Department of Corrections.

Benos, is correct, it is very uncommon—most states in the country are struggling with overcrowded prisons and no money to support them. But it really shouldn’t be. For years criminologists have touted the benefits of treatment over prison for drug offenders, particularly non-violent offenders that suffer from immense addiction.

Newsday has this article:

Thirty-five years ago today, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller signed the drug laws that bear his name, setting the state on a course of costly and ineffective mandatory prison time for non-violent drug offenders. Since then, the war on drugs has waxed and waned, the crack epidemic has come and gone, crime has soared and subsided, and through it all Rockefeller's laws have endured. It's time for a change.

With New York facing big deficits and a shaky economy, the folly of spending more than $32,000 a year to imprison each of about 6,000 people sentenced annually for non-violent drug crimes is an indulgence taxpayers can no longer afford. Gov. David Paterson is opposed to the status quo, so the table may finally be set for meaningful reform.

The cost - $430 million all in - would be worth bearing if incarceration were the best way to protect the public and turn drug abusers around. It isn't. Treatment is more effective and costs less - $17,000 to $21,000 per person, per year, for residential programs, and $2,700 to $4,500 for outpatient care, according to the Correctional Association of New York.

Eliminating mandatory sentences wouldn't mean eliminating prison time for all drug offenders. Judges would be able to sentence people based on their individual crimes and circumstances. Costly prison cells could be reserved for serious drug offenders, rather than their girlfriends or gofers.

Rockefeller's laws were tweaked in 2004, resulting in sentence reductions for 364 inmates. And the 13,427 drug offenders in state prisons in 2007 was the lowest number since 1988. But eliminating mandatory time could drop that count significantly and clear the way to close some prisons. Jobs would be lost upstate, making economic development critical. Still, it's time to scrap tough on crime for smart on crime.

The Times Daily, a local newspaper in Alabama, has this story about judges looking beyond either sending a defendant to jail, suspending the sentence, or granting probation.

Alabama judges now have other options for punishing those convicted of or pleading guilty to crimes, including work release, where the person is able to work but spends the remainder of their day in jail, and community corrections, where they might be sentenced to house arrest, being allowed to leave home only for work, church, doctor visits and such.

An option in some counties, including Colbert, Lauderdale and Franklin, is drug court, where drug users are required to complete a rehabilitation program rather than go to prison.

Lauderdale Circuit Court Judge Mike Jones said, “My feeling is that prison almost never rehabilitates someone," … "If you put someone in prison for a long time, they become socialized to the prison environment and can no longer function in society. Some people need to be locked up. But others do not need to be locked up.”

Jones prefers supervised probation, where defendants must report to their probation officer on a regular basis, maintain employment, be screened for drug and alcohol abuse, complete substance abuse prevention programs and comply with court-ordered restrictions.

In work release, inmates pay a portion of the money they earn to help pay for their incarceration, pay restitution to their victims, and pay fines and court costs.

"An alternative sentence does not mean there are not any consequences for someone's bad behavior," Jones said. "It just means a judge has the option of doing something other than putting someone in a cage. If someone murders someone, rapes someone or robs someone, they need to go to prison. But if someone has a drug problem, what have we accomplished by locking them up for many years? Some people stand a better chance of turning their life around if they are punished by something other than sending them to prison."

And, it's saving the state money.

Alternative sentences provide substantial cost savings to the state, according to the sentencing commission. The average daily cost of a community corrections offender for fiscal year 2007 was $12.97 as compared to $39.46 per day for an inmate incarcerated in the penitentiary, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections.

The Department of Corrections estimates that by diverting felony offenders to community corrections programs, there was a cost savings of at least $88 million. This represents savings to the taxpayer of approximately $8 million dollars realized just this year by the reduced costs of housing the offenders in correctional facilities and the estimated $80 million to $120 million in construction costs that would be required to build a new facility to house these offenders.

The Washington Times has this editorial by Sheila Bedi, titled “Anti-crime policies,” asking the presidential candidates to “avoid the perceived political suicide of being ‘“soft on crime.”’ Here are highlights:

Former President Clinton stood watch over the nation's largest prison expansion, and the current administration hasn't changed course. As a result of these policies, the United States, by far, has the highest incarceration rates in the world.

Given these facts, if the presidential candidates are serious about addressing crime, they'll reverse the trends of the past and rectify historic missteps by investing in practices proven to advance safety and reduce our bloated prison system.

If tough-on-crime polices worked, the United States would have the lowest crime rates in the world. But as criminologists know, it doesn't work that way. For example, the City of Philadelphia spends nearly $1 billion on public safety — more than half of this budget is spent on policing. The reward is that Philadelphia's incarceration rates are among the highest in the country. Unfortunately, so are its crime rates. The nearly billion-dollar investment in lock 'em up strategies has not made the streets of Philadelphia safer.

“Better to aid mentally ill outside of jail, report says”; Here are snippets from The Denver Post story:

One of every five inmates jailed in the seven- county Denver metro area has a serious mental illness, and housing them takes a $34.4 million annual bite out of the counties' tight budgets, according to a new report by a Metro Area County Commissioners' task force.

Seriously ill inmates spend 5 1/2 times longer in jail than average inmates and cost $8.28 more per day because they receive more services and may be housed in special units, the report found.

Click to read more ...

The Los Angeles Times has this effective opinion about California’s exorbitant prison costs:

Lawmakers are crying foul about the added burden on the budget, even though they have no one but themselves to blame. A prison crisis that combines overcrowding, a negligent healthcare program and a crumbling juvenile justice system has been worseningfor three decades, during which time dozens of studies have chronicled the problems and pointed the way to solving them. The reports are now gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, ignored by lawmakers. Indeed, legislators and the electorate have decisively made matters worse by approving get-tough-on-crime initiatives that further cram prisons and do nothing to address conditions inside.

One of the latest studies, released in January 2007 by the independent state oversight agency known as the Little Hoover Commission, is a model of the form. It practically shrieked at lawmakers to implement the needed reforms, which include creating an independent sentencing commission that could lengthen terms for the most dangerous criminals while creating community-based options for nonviolent offenders, reinventing the state's disastrously inefficient parole system and expanding prison-based drug rehabilitation and job-training programs.

A year later, the Legislature has acted on none of those recommendations. Its sole accomplishment on corrections was to approve $7.9 billion in new prison and jail construction.

Some related posts on the “prison crisis”:

• More talk on the U.S. prison population and its economic impact
• Keep New York prisons open, just in case
• States May Free Inmates to Save Millions
• California's Money Pit: Death Row

Death Row at San Quentin, which currently houses 622 inmates.The Death Penalty Information Center has this short summary of a study recently completed by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) on the relationship between homicide and execution rates. The results are quite interesting, and continue to prove that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent. Here are the highlights:

• States that execute many people and states that execute no one show the biggest decline in homicides (34% and 36% declines, respectively).
• States that execute few people have the least decline (24%) in homicides.
• The data shows that the homicide rates in states such as Texas, which leads the nation in executions, and in non-execution states such as New York, show the biggest declines.

The study looked at the effect of the 1,051 legal executions on the 446,457 homicides in the 50 states and D.C. during the 1984-2006 period.

" Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not"; Marie Gottschalk provides this opinion piece in the Washington Post. Here’s the intro:

Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the 1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two societies: one incarcerated and one not. The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department, 7 million people -- or one in every 32 adults -- are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision.

And Sentencing Law and Policy notes this article, from The Detroit News: “Bulging prisons drain Michigan's budget; State faces hard choices as get-tough laws put more behind bars.” See my prior posts here and here for more about other states grappling with the high costs of prisons.

The New York Times had this article over the weekend about New York’s decision to keep four prisons open despite the state having 9,000 fewer inmates than it did in 1999. Former Governor Elliott Spitzer planned to close the prisons and save the state $33.5 million. But Spitzer’s plan drew harsh criticism from republicans and the Corrections Association of New York. This week, the Legislature and Governor Patterson decided to keep the prisons open. Here are two quotes of note from the article:

From Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, addressing the Public Employees Federation union and the New York State Corrections Officers and Police Benevolence Association: “I am here saying to you, our crime rate is down … because we put people away.”

From Senator Michael F. Nozzolio, chairman of a committee that oversees crime and prisons: “What happens the next time — and there will be a next time — we have a crack epidemic? They’ll be double-bunked, they’ll be stuffed into the medians, and we’ll have another prison riot on our hands.”

I encourage Senator Bruno to have one of his staffers take a long, hard look at recent studies on the correlation between incarceration and lower crime rates. A good place to start would be this short piece recently published by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project. Dr. Alfred Blumstein, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the National Consortium on Violence Research had this to say:

Posted on April 13, 2008 at 10:43AM by Blakely in Incarceration | Post a Comment