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.

Here’s the report from the Department of Justice.

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.

Awesome, ain’t it?

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.

In a separate lawsuit, a taxpayer group is suing to block $12 billion in prison construction bonds.

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.

As if the state didn’t have enough problems…  

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 ™ 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 ™ 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.

over..

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration is exploring a settlement of two lawsuits that would require California to dramatically reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prisons — and limit the Legislature’s influence on the issue, according to participants in the discussions.

The settlement discussions in the federal court cases, which have been consolidated, are in an early stage, and the framework of a deal has not been ironed out.

The talks are not formally tied to Schwarzenegger’s proposal last week to release tens of thousands of low-risk prisoners to save the state money. That plan, which essentially reverses the court position he has taken opposing the early release of inmates, is expected to die in the Legislature, where it would need approval from Republicans who adamantly oppose it.

But it could become the basis for a negotiated settlement, prisoners’ lawyers said.

The proposal is “a step in the right direction,” said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office and one of the attorneys for inmates in the case. His group is asking a panel of three federal judges to cap the state’s prison population.

“We would rather settle this case and have the state do this than have the court do it,” Specter said.

Even if lawmakers reject his proposal, Schwarzenegger could implement the inmate releases he envisions as part of a settlement, known as a consent decree, that the judges would approve. That would put extreme pressure on legislators to make the appropriate changes to state law.

This has nothing to do with reforming a broken system, just as the absurd attempt to build our way out of the problem last year did nothing.  It’s the draconian sentencing and parole issues that are leading to overcrowding, a shortage of rehabilitation and treatment services, and the country’s largest recidivism rate.  This is completely obvious.  Here’s a quick statistic: California has 30 times as many children between the ages of 14 and 17 in prison for life without the possibility of parole than THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED.  There’s actually a bill, SB999 (Yee), that would end this horrific practice.  But it’s by no means the only outsized sentence that we have on the books.

You can go back and forth on who should get released and what crimes should be absolved, and politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, can demagogue the issue and scare the bejeebus out of their constituents with lurid tales of “criminals roaming our streets,” but what they won’t tell you is that this is a problem of their own doing.  By sentencing nonviolent offenders to overcrowded jails that become little more than schools on how to commit violent crimes, they are threatening public safety and risking a total collapse of the system.  Only by attacking this crisis at the root will anything be solved.  And in this way, it mirrors the health care debate.  The Governor is seeking a “deal” with a narrow group of interests without looking at the larger problems in the debate.  In health care it was costs; in prison reform it’s sentencing.

The 45 days allowed by Proposition 58 for the legislature to act in this special session and the urgency of the situation may bring about some thoughtful policy in this area or it may prove an impossibility and devolve into a new orgy of demagoguery and what our Governor calls “Kabuki theater”-a stylized and ritualized play on the stage of politics where our elected leaders try to prove they are tougher on crime. Given how we have gotten into this mess, with the constant one-upmanship of over 1000 laws passed ratcheting up sentences for all sorts of crimes since 1977 when California switched to a determinate sentencing law scheme (fixed terms rather than leaving some discretion in sentencing and releasing criminals with an eye towards rehabilitation), I am somewhat dubious. California is now responsible for 1 out of every 5 new inmates in the country in prison. Some Republicans in the legislature still don’t get it. Tomorrow, during the regular session, the Assembly Public Safety Committee will take up at least two proposals to increase sentences and add to that list of 1000.

The failure of leadership in this area is truly sad to see.  And until we actually address these sundry problems in a comprehensive way that looks at root causes instead of playing to what we think citizens want to hear, that leadership deficit will widen.

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.

more…

Up to 33,000 prisoners in California may be entitled to release earlier than scheduled because the state has miscalculated their sentences, corrections officials said Wednesday.

For nearly two years, the overburdened state prison agency has failed to recalculate the sentences of those inmates despite a series of court rulings, including one by the California Supreme Court. The judges said the state applied the wrong formula when crediting certain inmates for good behavior behind bars.

Some inmates released in recent months almost certainly stayed longer in prison than they should have, said corrections officials, employees and advocates for prisoners. Some currently in prison most likely should be free, they said. But many whose sentences are too long are not scheduled to be released for months or years.

The inmates in question — 19% of the state prison population — are serving consecutive sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses. The sentencing errors range from a few days to several years.

Corrections officials say they have been unable to calculate the sentences properly because of staffing shortages and outdated computer systems that force analysts to do the complex work by hand.

This directly results from the overcrowding crisis.  An overburdened corrections industry cannot keep up with the processing given the meager resources they have.  This ends up costing the state more – approximately $26 million annually – than what it would cost to put the proper resources in place, particularly if you factor in the possibility of lawsuits from inmates, as we are now seeing in other respects.

Fixing miscalculations is a step.  But until you have the courage and fortitude to address the root causes and meet the same responsibilities that even the federal government has decided to meet, nothing will change.

P.S. There are pending mandatory minimum sentencing bills in the federal government, which would fix the crack/powder sentencing disparity even further.  It won’t surprise you at all that the version of the bill that Dianne Feinstein supports is completely insufficient to deal with the problem.